My keepers isolated me again while my sanity solidified, for lack of a better term, while the gargoyles of my mind returned to their perches and stiffened back into stone. Meanwhile, that false feeling I’d had that my old life hadn’t left me vanished.

The psychic birth of my new life proceeded, wracking and writhing me, mind and body, blurring my vision with tears, burning my tonsils with screams. In this new life, after all, I’d killed a man. An innocent man. A man I’d been charged to protect.

I lost all interest in living.

But I won’t say more about that. The rest stays between myself and God.

My story picks up again at the point where I decided I had to go on living, at least until I’d determined which would be better for my daughter, Ellie, and my unborn child: a father imprisoned for murder, or a father who’d taken his own life as a penance for murder.

“It’s a court-ordered psychiatric assessment,” Doctor Woods said to me one day as we sat on opposite sides of the metal desk in her office. “It’s to help the judge classify you as competent or incompetent to stand trial.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I’ll be asking you a series of questions. Please answer thoughtfully and truthfully.”

“Uh-huh.” I was in no mood for questions, of course, or anything but nothingness, empty, black and numb—a sedative-laced, dreamless sleep.

Doctor Woods locked eyes with me. A tiny image of myself appeared in her pupils, and I felt her repulsion. She said, “Do you know the difference between right and wrong?”

“No.”

“No?” She scribbled on her clipboard.

“I know what I personally think is right and wrong, and I know what society officially thinks is right and wrong, but neither my notion nor society’s should be taken as the last word on the subject. For example, many great philosophers throughout history have presented their own, sometimes radical, notions of right and wrong—Nietzsche, Kierkegaard—and today’s post modern philosophers would, I think, say that what is now considered right or wrong is the result of those in power exerting their will upon the rest of us, and that, in fact, what is truly right or wrong is unknowable in absolute terms.”

The scowl on Doctor Woods reached into her retinas. Clearly, I hadn’t forgotten how to jack with shrinks who ask condescending questions. It’s like riding a bicycle.

A timid rap at the door broke a long silence. “Enter!” Doctor Woods said. A young Hispanic woman in a white lab coat and dark slacks appeared.

“The blood work you wanted,” she said to the doctor, handing off a computer print-out. The woman departed.

“It’s your blood work,” Doctor Woods said, “from the night you arrived here.” She scrutinized the results only briefly before looking up at me. “Mister Ward, I thought you’d told me you’d been taking your Risperdal.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Religiously. Until the very day of . . . of the incident with John Helms.”

“There isn’t a trace of it in your system,” she said, shaking the print-out at me. “You hadn’t been taking it. Not at all. Not for weeks at least.”

“That’s impossible!” I said, snatching the print-out from her hand to see for myself. “Impossible!”

“Mister Ward,” she said. “Do you know the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie?”

Next Chapter: Chapter Fourteen