Page 1 Page 2
an After-Christmas Chronicle
It was mid-afternoon on Christmas Eve in Jericho,Pennsylvania, when the brawny policeman forcibly escorted a sad-looking man in a tattered green coat into the lobby of the Konestoga County Mental Health Agency.
The receptionist hardly looked up until the blue-suited lawman sternly and loudly demanded that a psychiatrist conduct an emergency evaluation of the shabby stranger, who was bald, tall and very, very thin.
The outburst of the ruddy-faced policeman and the stranger’s odd appearance — there were multiple patches on his coat — startled the receptionist, a middle-aged woman who wore black slacks and a red-and-green holiday sweater with a large poinsettia on the front. She pressed an alarm button on her desk, and this brought a security man and the agency’s intake officer into the lobby in a rush.
The policeman declared that the stranger should be committed.
“You can tell just by looking at him that he ought to be put away somewhere,” he said in a rasping voice.
“No, I can’t tell that,” the intake officer said indignantly. He quizzed the policeman about the events that led to the man’s presence at the agency, and the officer reluctantly conceded that the stranger hadn’t broken any laws or made any threats.
“But there’s something about him,” the policeman said. “I can sense it.”
The intake man sighed.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll order a drug screen and ask a psychiatrist to interview the gentleman this afternoon.”
Satisfied, the policeman signed some papers, then left.
For the next hour, the stranger sat on a gray metal chair ever so quietly awaiting his turn for processing. The intake officer studied the stranger and after a while decided that, for a prospective involuntary, the man seemed passive enough.
Although downcast, the stranger’s demeanor was hardly threatening. Black bushy eyebrows and a black moustache dominated a pinched face. Watery brown eyes sat alongside the top of a nose shaped like a ski-slope. Sunken, pale cheeks accompanied long, thin lips that lined a very large mouth. The combined features created a look of extreme sorrow.
“If anything,” the intake officer thought, “the stranger’s problem is that he’s both ugly and sad.”
A technician wearing white pants and white shirt eventually arrived to administer the drug test. He sent the sad man to the restroom down the hall, took the specimen he produced and hurried off to his laboratory down the corridor. Half an hour later, the results came back negative. Not long after that, the intake officer escorted the man down a long hall to an interview room austerely furnished with a battered wood desk and some painted wood chairs.
A psychiatrist, who wore a dark necktie, white shirt, and black-and-white tweed sports jacket, rose to greet the man. As he did so, he introduced himself as Dr. Young and offered him a seat.
“My name is Atnas,” the prospective involuntary said, still standing. “Salk Atnas.” Then he sat down. Truth be told, he perched rather than sat on one of the chairs that faced Dr. Young, and then, to the psychiatrist’s surprise, immediately launched into the telling of a long and convoluted story.
At first, Mr. Atnas spoke rapidly, but in a monotone and accent so odd that Dr. Young found it difficult to follow the course of the man’s narrative. To Dr. Young’s ear, the accent sounded like a strange English dialect, a crude cross between the Cockney of England, the Brooklynese spoken in certain neighborhoods of New York City, and the very rare dialect occasionally encountered in the Appalachian mountains of Western Pennsylvania.
Whatever it was, the man’s speech was hard for Dr. Young to comprehend. The psychiatrist thought he heard Mr. Atnas say “South Pole” and “sailor” but couldn’t understand the context in which these words were spoken.
“Please speak more slowly,” Dr. Young said patiently. “Did I hear you say, ‘take toys?’ Is that what you said? Did you say you take toys?”
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Atnas said, speaking at a much slower pace. “I do take toys, sir. I take them. And break them. And toss them in the ocean.”
The psychiatrist thought that he hadn’t seen a patient with such pale, white skin in many years. He wondered whether the man had been confined in a room with little or no sunlight. He wanted to ask about this, but instead he said, “Toss the toys in the ocean, do you?”
“Yes, sir. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what I do.”
The psychiatrist admired the pencil-thin black moustache that Mr. Atnas clearly waxed and twirled. It extended a full inch beyond each of Atnas’s cheeks, and made Mr. Atnas look like a villain in the old silent movies.
Dr. Young wanted to ask about that, but instead he said, “Which ocean? The Atlantic or the Pacific?”
“Neither, sir. ”
“Well, then, which one?
“The Antarctic.”
“But the Antarctic is always frozen.”
“I toss them under the ice.”
“How do you get under the ice, Mr. Atnas?”
“In my submarine, sir.”
“Oh, you have a submarine, do you?”
“Yes, sir. I do, sir.”
“And you steal toys from the homes of children in North America, and sail them to the South Pole in a submarine and dump them in the Antarctic Ocean. Under the ice. Let’s not forget, under the ice. Is that what you do?”
“Something like that, sir. I drop them onto a reef I call Toy Mountain.”
“Toy Mountain?”
“Yes, Toy Mountain. It’s really a reef, but I call it Toy Mountain. It gets bigger every year.”
“Hmmm,” the psychiatrist said. “What color is your submarine?”
“It’s purple, sir. Purple with faded orange stripes.”
“And you wear a green coat and olive green slacks. You’re bald, and except for your moustache and the thinnest of eyebrows, you have no facial hair.”
“That’s correct.”
So you’re a sort of reverse Santa Claus. Is that it?”
“You could say that, sir. That’s hardly incorrect.”
Mr. Atnas was speaking much more slowly. He seemed more relaxed, but the psychiatrist thought he saw the feelings of sadness deepen in the man’s long, gaunt face.
“Hmmm,” the psychiatrist said again and allowed the man to continue.
“I can’t really offer any proof. Except to point out that I spend so much time inside the submarine I rarely see the sun. That’s why my skin is so pale.”
Without rambling, Salk Atnas described in great detail a life spent sailing all around the world — not only to North America, but all the other continents as well — and confiscating the toys that children refused to put in their toy boxes.
“I never take a toy that’s been properly put away,” he said. “Not ever.”
Page 1 Page 2
Pages: 1 2
About John L. Moore
