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just become the thirty-eighth patient on the ward.
    â€œHelp us keep an eye on your young friend over there,” said Amos, knowing Josh would do that without having to be asked. From head to head, counting the twelve-foot aisle, Josh was barely twenty-five feet away from Birdie.
    Josh didn’t really know what to make of what the doctor and the bushwhackers were saying about Birdie. He had heard rumors that sometimes sane people were sent here for personal, family, or political reasons, but he had never come across one. Josh did think the new boy, this Birdie from Kansas City, seemed pretty normal until he saw what happened when the kid closed his eyes during that first rocking time. Only lunatics screamed when they closed their eyes.
    Josh kept his own eyes wide open now while he braced for the worst from Birdie. But after a few minutes of silence from across the way, Josh’s own lids began to droop and he launched the nightly ritual that he and Dr. Mitchell had invented years ago. Moving his lips but with no sound, Josh said, “I have to say now, dear listener, as I approach a description of the final horrors of the massacre, my voice grows weak, my sight is dimmed, and my heart sickens with the recollection. . . .”
    Now his eyes were closed, and the threat of his own screaming eruption had passed. He moved his mind to thinking about his annoyance about where they had put Birdie. He was in a bed that, for Josh, was still warm with the body heat and juices as well as the soul of Jesus of Chillicothe, who had died in his sleep just nine days ago. There were two other vacant beds down at the other end of the room. Too bad they couldn’t put Birdie in one of them. But that would have made it impossible for Josh to keep watch on him.
    Josh thought about Jesus of Chillicothe. They never said why he died. He just didn’t wake up one morning, after complaining for two days about feeling as if a wagon of dirt were being pulled back and forth over his chest by twelve horses and experiencing wild tingling in both of his arms. Josh was one of four patients who were allowed to attend a brief burial service down at the Unknowns Cemetery under the trees alongside the Kansas City Southern tracks. The Methodist minister from town who presided spoke only of “the deceased”; he never mentioned a name, either a real one or Jesus of Chillicothe, as the dead man had called himself for the twenty-four years he had been a Somerset patient. Josh once asked Jesus, a gaunt figure in his late fifties when he died, where he was from and why he was sent to Somerset. Jesus said he was working for the Livingston County agricultural agent in Chillicothe, counting the number of acres growing wheat, when God ordered him, his son Jesus of Chillicothe, to quit counting the acres and set them all on fire. “Unfortunately, God the Father chose to take the lives of two farm families along with the wheat,” he said. That led to Jesus of Chillicothe being ajudged a lunatic and committed here in lieu of being hanged for murder. The headstone they put over the grave had only a number on it:
371.
The administration office usually didn’t pay attention to names after a patient had been in the asylum for twenty years or more without a visitor or an inquiry. Jesus of Chillicothe, who could recite most every word of the New Testament from memory, never had either. Neither had Josh.
    For the first half hour now, the only noise in the ward came from the usual farts, belches, giggles, and whispered conversations and the continual barely audible orders from Streamliner for everyone to have their tickets ready before he went off into his go-to-sleep ritual of reciting the opening lines of Josh’s Centralia massacre story. Then, like the beginning rolls of a coming storm, the other noises, including Streamliner’s, ended and the snoring began as, one by one, the men fell asleep.
    Josh wanted to read, to move his mind far