The Cartoonist Read Free Page B

blood trickled from the loser’s ear; the old man was just in the process of detailing his vanquished body. The pencil moved with remarkable accuracy and speed, and the drawings were of a professional quality. No , Scott thought, it was more than that. They seemed almost alive.
    “Who is he, Dr. Bowman?” one of the students said.
    “Well, no one knows for sure,” Scott said, switching back in his memory to Bateman’s presentation. “A nameless vagrant, found unconscious in the park bordering the QE Parkway. He’s not my patient, but if memory serves he’s shown none of the classic signs of alcoholism, which is the usual case with these unidentified derelicts.”
    Scott glanced at the man in the wheelchair and, for just a second or two, found the scratching of his pencil unnerving.
    “He’s amazing,” the girl who’d discovered him said. “Look at how fast he goes. And he hardly even seems to be looking at the page.”
    “He is not really senile,” said another student, a soft-spoken East Indian. “Is he?”
    Scott opened his mouth to reply when a high, effeminate voice cut in behind him.
    “Well, he pretty much fits the bill, Doctors.”
    Scott and his entourage turned to face Vince Bateman, who’d been passing by in the hall and overheard the question.
    Scott felt a familiar stab of dislike for the man. As a clinical psychiatrist Bateman had few peers. The trouble was that he knew it, and his ego, as huge and ungainly as a grizzly, made him nigh on insufferable to work with. He took over the discussion without so much as a confirming glance at Scott.
    “When this gentleman came to us two weeks ago,” he said, “all he had were his tattered clothes and a knapsack containing that clipboard, a bunch of old drawings, and a bundle of lead pencils.” He adjusted his Gucci tie, then flicked an annoying bit of lint from the sleeve of his herringbone jacket. “Before the medical people could come up with a diagnosis, the old fellow regained consciousness and started producing these drawings. One of my residents saw him in consultation, quite properly tagged him as senile, and had him transferred up here. He’ll remain on the chronic ward until he can be placed in a more appropriate center—Saint Vincent’s or someplace like that.”
    “But what about his drawings?” the East Indian said. “An artist like this cannot be senile...can he?”
    Perplexity crossed Bateman’s face like a swift-moving cloud. He stroked pensively at his mustache before speaking, and when the words came, they seemed to cause him physical pain. It was that hard for Vince Bateman to be indefinite.
    “I have to admit being at a loss to explain the artwork,” he said. “It could be an unconscious carry-over from his past, something he was previously capable of doing with little or no thought. Another possibility, since senility is a cyclical condition, is that he draws only when more or less lucid. The fact that he doesn’t communicate during these periods could be due to some separate form of pathology, such as aphasia secondary to stroke...or he might simply be choosing to ignore his external environment.”
    The perplexity had left Bateman’s face and now it clouded the faces of the students. Typical of Bateman, he was talking way over their novice heads.
    Scott, irked and anxious to leave, decided to elucidate.
    “What Dr. Bateman is saying, group, is that we haven’t got a clue what makes this old boy tick. In some ways he fits neatly into a diagnostic slot, and in other, very fundamental ways, he does not.”
    Bateman flushed. The only thing he hated more avidly than disorder was being paraphrased. Scott had to turn his head to conceal a self-satisfied smirk.
    “There’s a batch of his artwork right here,” Bateman said. “In this satchel.” He indicated a heavy woolen handbag, slung by its strap from the back of the wheelchair. “You might be interested in going through some of it. The majority are quite macabre,