The Monarch Papers: Flora & Fauna

Part I

FLORA

July – October

1982

I don’t want to remember what we almost had, what we couldn’t save.

Sel

Ifirst found magic in the charred ruins of a madhouse, or rather that’s where magic, real magic, first found me. I remember the steps of the spiral staircase were blackened and warped from the fire. Yet somehow, the stairs still wound up to the second floor in a single, unbroken structure. The burned railing snaked along the warped metal supports, winding upward in a sickened, misshapen helix.

A shaft of cold morning light shone down the center of the staircase, illuminating the plaster, ash, and scorched paper cluttered on the floor of the five-story rotunda. It felt like I was looking up from the bottom of a well.

I wasn’t eager to test the stairs. The fire that gutted the New York City Lunatic Asylum had happened after decades of neglect and only served to make them more dangerous. But I was going to have to risk it. I needed to get to the second floor.

Only I wasn’t exactly sure why.

I wasn’t even supposed to be there. No one was. The old building on Roosevelt Island, known as the Octagon because of its shape, had been condemned since not long after it closed in 1956. And even though the place was named a Heritage Site in ’76, it was still a maze of post-fire broken glass and tetanus when I found myself there in 1982.

I was offered an assignment for the Times about companies wanting to turn the sliver of island into a paradise of condominiums. I would never have entertained the idea for the story if it hadn’t been for an unseasonably warm day where I’d been forced to open the only openable window in my apartment. I’d been pacing, pouring sweat, waiting for a call back from the paper about an edit I was bristling over, when the wind picked up and a charred piece of paper blew in through the window. I watched it flit across the room and land on the counter of the kitchenette, onto an open page of my notepad. It was a piece of an illegible letter written decades prior; all I could read was the name of the asylum on the letterhead. A wind had picked it up from the corpse of the ruin, carried it down the East River, and dropped it into the apartment of the man assigned to report about it. I was never much for signs or superstitions, but from that moment, the need to see that place stuck with me like a stone in my shoe, always there, digging in, uncomfortable and annoying until I addressed it. And the only way to address it, understand it, was to investigate it. Which is what I do.

I explained my need to see it, the ruin, by reasoning that it would be helpful to get a feel for the place, an angle for the story, to try to see why anyone would want to build a community around an abandoned insane asylum. And I was looking for a corruption slant because, let’s face it, there was always a corruption slant in New York real estate.

When I first got there, something about the place called to me. It’s hard to explain, but I needed to get inside and take a look around. In fairness, I was naturally nosy. It was a trait that made me a halfway decent journalist. Not the best writer, but a good digger. And relentless. But this time, there was something else. Something that I couldn’t quantify; I only knew that if I didn’t explore the second floor, I’d regret it.

Even as I made my way into the building, I knew it was a stupid idea. I was hard pressed to think of any reason for sneaking into a decrepit and abandoned insane asylum other than the thrill of being freaked out coupled with a sheer lack of common sense. I had spent enough time doing research for the crime desk to be well aware of what happened in abandoned buildings. Anyone could have been squatting inside, no matter how hard authorities had tried to keep it boarded up.

And, of course, there were the rumors of it being haunted, not that I believed in such a thing. But there was no denying that, to date, it was the creepiest place I had ever been.

When I put my foot on the bottom stair, it creaked, but held. I inched my way upward, testing one step after another. I held onto the scorched railing, my palm kicking up black bits of burnt wood as it slid along. The flakes of wood and ash fell, glinting in the light that shone down the central column of the staircase. A breeze must have caught them, because they began to flit around like butterflies. It was such a convincing illusion that I stood transfixed, watching the ash butterflies ride on a breeze that, oddly, I couldn’t feel.

It was quite possible that they were real butterflies. Much of the building’s interior was exposed to the elements, after all. But I had never seen butterflies so ashen dark before. I came back to myself, attributing the uncanny sensation that the sight had stirred in me to a lack of morning coffee, my lifeblood, and climbed the rest of the way.

The second floor wasn’t nearly as dilapidated as the first—most likely due to fewer trespassers being willing to brave the well of stairs. There were holes in the floor, and the soot-smeared stone walls were flaked and chipped. The asylum had been built with the blue-gray stone found on the island, so the fire wasn’t able to consume the bones of the building, only its flesh.

Even though there was plenty of light coming in from the windows and the holes in the ceiling, the shadows were harsher, darker than usual. I began to imagine what the place must have looked like when there had been patients there—what it would have sounded like when it had been full of the mentally ill, tended to by a cadre of doctors and nurses schooled in the barbaric mental health treatments of the nineteenth century. The idea wasn’t exactly a calming one.

I moved into the shadows and found a hallway. At this point, my logical self was telling me there was no reason for me to be inside the building. Nothing here had anything to do with the story I was writing. But it didn’t matter. As soon as I’d pulled up to the building, I’d known there was something inside that I needed to see. Truthfully, even before that. The moment the piece of debris landed on the blank page of my notepad, I knew. There was a story out there on that lonely sliver of island, and it was calling me.

Most of the rooms along the hallway were empty except for a handful of discarded tables and chairs, rusted or rotted through so completely that they were nothing more than skeletons of the furniture they once had been. One room, however, was littered with papers. Waterlogged newspapers, books, and magazines were strewn across the floor like autumn leaves. The fire hadn’t reached this part of the building, only smoke, so the detritus that had collected over the years remained intact, if warped and faded by the elements.

The vast majority of the papers and magazines were from the mid-twentieth century. Most fell apart when I tried to pick them up or were too weathered to read, but on a small wooden stool in the corner of the room stood a stack of books that looked relatively unscathed from years of isolation.

I scanned the spines out of curiosity. It was hard to read many of the titles, since they had faded over the years. (And I should say I committed very little of this to memory, I just keep incredible notes.) But I saw a few volumes of The Universal Library of Music; Robin Hood, illustrated by Frank Goodwin; and Papyrus Leaves, which had a gorgeously illustrated blue and gold spine that had survived the years surprisingly well. But the book that really caught my eye was once black, and now faded gray. Its title was unreadable, but I instantly recognized the image of a hippocampus at the base of the book’s spine. The strange creature, similar to a seahorse, was the mascot for Ackerly Green Publishing.

It took me a moment to remember exactly how I recognized the hippocampus, but then it hit me. Ackerly Green published a book I had desperately loved as a child, though I couldn’t remember its name. I couldn’t remember the characters, or even the story, but the idea of the book, the feeling it triggered in me, came rushing back through the decades. Seeing that little logo brought back vivid feelings of sitting on my bed and reading well into the morning hours—reading a book I’d loved so dearly but somehow couldn’t seem to recall at all.

It was a moment much like when I’d found my old childhood copy of the Berenstain Bears book, Bears in the Night. I had forgotten that book even existed, but when I’d seen the cover at the bottom of a box filled with Little Golden Books, my heart had skipped a beat, and I’d marveled at the idea that a book I’d read dozens of times as a child could have fallen so completely from my mind—but also somehow stayed with me, like a water stain on wood. Even looking at the cover, I couldn’t remember the story—only that I’d loved it, and I was excited to share it with my little boy, Sebastian, hoping he would get as much joy from it as I did.

I was about to examine the Ackerly Green book more closely when I heard crunching footsteps behind me. They were slow, heavy, deliberate. I held my breath, unsure of what to do. I could think of a dozen reasons someone would be lurking around up here and none of them were pleasant.

When the footsteps stopped directly behind me, I turned and winced. Someone clicked a flashlight directly in my eyes.

What are you doing?

Sorry, I was just—

You’re trespassing is what you’re doing.

When my eyes adjusted, I could see the silhouette of a police officer, a good head taller than me (though who isn’t) with one hand on his holstered sidearm.

Yeah, my name’s Martin Rank, I said. "I’m a writer for the New York Times."

I don’t care if you’re Woodward and Bernstein put together, you’re not allowed in here.

You’re right, you’re right. Just following up on a story. I’m all done.

The officer followed me down the well of stairs and out to my car. Don’t let me catch you here again, he said.

I thanked him and drove off.

I was so angry with myself for not grabbing the book when I had the chance. It was probably too musty to be legible. Still, I would have liked to have had it, whatever title it was. I hadn’t heard of Ackerly Green since I was a kid, but now I couldn’t stop thinking of that book. The unnamed book I’d loved so much. I had to find a copy.

It was a worm, burrowing through my mind. I knew the feel of the book, the smell, the way I’d liked to pick at the embossed creature on the spine with my fingernail. But, just like with that Berenstain Bears book, I couldn’t remember what the story was. I hadn’t retained any detail of the book’s contents, or even the title. It didn’t matter, though. I’d know soon enough.

At least I thought I would.

There wasn’t a single librarian or bookstore clerk in the city that had any idea what I was going on about. I checked newspaper archives, even called the Library of Congress. As far as the world was concerned, the unnamed book from my memory didn’t exist.

As for Ackerly Green, records showed the company had put out a couple of potboiler titles for adults in the 50s, but had stopped publishing a few years after the asylum was abandoned.

The asylum.

Exactly two days after the officer told me to never step foot inside the Octagon again, I went back. If everything went well, I wouldn’t be there for very long. I’d get in, grab the book, and get out. Five minutes, tops. Maybe it would have some useful detail inside, a further reading list, an address I could write to, something.

It took me no time at all to find my way back up to the second floor and the littered room. The stack of books was still there on the stool—but the Ackerly Green book was missing. Oddly, it didn’t seem like the stack had been disturbed. There was still a heavy layer of dust and dirt on the top book, and when I lifted the stack to go through them one by one, a rectangular discoloration on the seat of the stool indicated just how long the stack had been there. If anyone had moved the books, they’d put them back exactly as they’d been.

I went through each volume, examined each spine, but there was no Ackerly Green book there. Had I imagined it? I couldn’t have. But then why wasn’t it there? And why was I so bothered by it in the first place? And why would I venture alone into an abandoned insane asylum against the orders of the police to find a book?

It made me angry, like a joke had been played on me. A joke I didn’t understand. The book was there somewhere. It had to be. I put the stack back on the stool and started rummaging through the sea of magazines and newspapers strewn on the floor. But after fifteen minutes, the only books I’d found were a few medical texts and a couple of moldering romance novels.

I sat on the floor in disbelief. Maybe I hadn’t seen the book. It was possible that something in this room had simply sparked my childhood memory. A trick of light or synapses misfiring. But it still didn’t explain why I couldn’t remember the story. The missing book was frustrating, but the missing memories?

As I sat, embarrassed and angry, I noticed movement on the stack of books—a play of light and shadow that, for a moment, I mistook for the movement of a person in the doorway. I leaned closer and saw, there on top of the books, a small black butterfly. Its wings moved slowly, the same ashen color as the butterflies I had imagined the other day on the spiral staircase. Or I thought I had imagined. They must have been real butterflies after all.

I stood and crept toward it, not wanting to scare it away, but it took to the air the moment I got too close. Instead of flying toward the door and daylight, it fluttered into the shadows in the corner of the room. I don’t know why, but I chased after it. I didn’t know if I was trying to catch it or simply see where it was going, but it didn’t matter. The butterfly flitted before me for only a few seconds before disappearing into the darkness.

The Times

All ideas are good ideas. Who knows what might come into play later?

Kelsey

In the weeks that followed, I had become so obsessed with Ackerly Green that I spent more time looking for the unnamed book than on the stories I was being paid to research. But there was nothing out there to find. None of it made any sense to me. I remembered reading the book as a boy, I remembered the hippocampus as clear as the logo of any baseball team. Yet it seemed I was the only one.

Eventually, I knew I had to push the book to the back of my mind and focus on the work I was supposed to be doing. I was incredibly lucky to have the gig with the Times, and I wasn’t going to throw it away because of a curiosity. I was meant to be a reporter. It was the one thing I knew for certain in this world, the one driving constant in my life.

I could trace the origins of that certainty back to my very first memory. My mother sat at the kitchen table, a puke green ashtray overflowing with smoldering cigarette butts in front of her as she chain-smoked through her wet, snotty sobs. My father yelled into the phone receiver, his every guttural curse punctuated by a wild gesture toward the black-and-white images of confused and frightened people flitting across the screen of our tiny television set. President Kennedy had just been shot. I was only three years old, but that moment remains vivid in my mind.

I was too young to understand what was happening, but as the years went by and the turbulence of the 60s singed the edges of my childhood, I came to understand that the world wasn’t a good and just place for most people. Instead, the world was cause for heartache—particularly for those without the power or resources to stand up to the moneyed elite. The injustice left a bad taste in my mouth, and though I toyed with the idea of donning a cape or finding a way to be bitten by a radioactive spider, some part of me knew journalism was the only real way I could fight it.

I started by writing for my high school newspaper, the Newtonian. My assigned columns were on the topics one would expect from a benign and impotent rag led by a gaggle of nerdy teenagers and a journalism teacher only three inches away from tenure: the football team, the basketball team, the swimming team. Whenever I asked to write about something with a bit more substance, more relevance, I was told not to rock the boat.

I didn’t listen. It was 1974 and the president of the United States had just been brought low by Woodward and Bernstein, showing me firsthand the power and responsibility of quality journalism. Their example spurred me on.

Every day I followed leads on real stories: the favoritism shown toward athletes, how select students cheated on the SAT with the help of the head of the math department, even an ugly end to an affair between the vice principal and a school board member that resulted in a substantial cut to the school’s fine arts program (back when public schools actually had fine arts programs). And every time I presented a story to Mr. Loughmiller, he grew apoplectic.

In those heady days before bike helmets and play dates, students had complete control over the content published in the paper. But Mr. Loughmiller was so scared of losing his chance at tenure that he threatened to fail me if I dared to try and print such a thing. Loughmiller even spoke to my editor, a senior and Ivy League hopeful, named Harold Spinx, and warned him that if such a story ever graced the pages of the Newtonian, he’d fail him, too. Any story about anything other than sports or an academic club was to go straight in the trash. And there went any chance of getting my stories into the school paper.

So, I took them to the city papers instead.

At first, no one was interested. I was sixteen, after all. But one young reporter, Howard Doshen, humored me after I ambushed him on a cigarette break outside the Times building. He gave me the time it took him to smoke a Camel to convince him I had anything interesting. By his third drag, Howard was ready to kick me to the curb as some angry teen looking to embarrass his teachers. But by drag number seven, I had him convinced of my tenacity, and curious to test my talent.

I learned more from Howard Doshen in the following week than I did in my entire high school career. He ended up rewriting most of my article (I really was a shit writer at sixteen), but it was published in the Business section, page C-3 above the fold. Howard gave me a co-byline.

Loughmiller gave me an F.

I didn’t care. Howard was on a fast track to becoming an editor and was more than willing to put in a good word for me with any college I wanted to attend.

I chose NYU, and despite Mr. Loughmiller’s petty protests to the dean, I was accepted into their journalism program. I devoted myself wholly to my studies, never once doubting the path I was taking, though I wasn’t so focused as to miss out on getting to know a beautiful co-ed.

I met Isabella when I was a college junior, and by the time we were both ready to graduate, we were married with our first child on the way. Howard had been sitting at an editor’s desk for the better part of a year and hired me before my graduation cap hit the ground. All at once I had a new family, a new job, and a new world of possibilities open in front of me. For the first and only time in my life, I felt invincible.

When our boy, Sebastian, was born, that invincibility shattered. He was tiny and perfect and, thankfully, blessed with his mother’s Mediterranean beauty. Sebastian was also fragile. Every time I looked at him a gallery of horrors paraded before my mind’s eye. There was so much danger in the world, and I was nearly paralyzed at the idea of how to protect him from it all. How could I keep him safe from disease, war, muggers, skinned knees, broken hearts, and the discovery of his father’s fallibility?

Eventually, I did fail him. I failed my boy in ways I couldn’t have imagined in even my worst nightmares. In ways I still struggle to understand. But in the end, I knew what had happened to my son. What I had done to my son.

I had exposed him to magic.

City Hall Station

You fall asleep and wake up in a forest made of glass.

Grim

In 1981, I had a new wife, a new baby, and had just started at the Times . Howard had me cut my teeth by writing for the city desk. I hated it. I was eager to root out corruption and graft and all the injustices that were strangling an already suffocating city, to save the world by writing real stories, but the Times had plenty of writers with more experience, more seniority, and more talent. Howard may have taken me under his wing, but there was no way he was going to throw me into the mix fresh out of college.

You want to take on the Machine? he had said. Then you need to become a mechanic. You can’t take on the Machine if you don’t know how it works. And the city desk, he insisted, was the best place for me to learn.

He was right, of course, though it took me a while to come around to the idea. But after two years of research and shared by-lines, I knew the Machine inside and out. There was a web that connected every single aspect of the city. And whenever a strand of that web started to vibrate, I usually knew which spider was responsible.

While I wrote stories about municipal elections and the finer points of local fiscal legislation, Isabella worked from home. She had a monthly column in L’Officiel, which she wrote in between diaper changes and breast feedings. I did my best to help with Sebastian, reading to him and giving him baths while Bella napped on the couch beneath a blanket of lookbooks and clothing sketches.

By no means was I going to win father of the year (or husband of the year for that matter), but I was a decent father. Though I should have been around more. I wanted to be, but more than that, I wanted to write. Every chance I had to camp out at the records office or stalk lawyers down at the courthouse, I was there. Still, Bella humored me. She loved being a mom and liked that I was passionate about something.

By the time Sebastian was five, I was working closely with the city police on a number of stories. Most involved reports of missing children. 98% were runaways, and the police never looked much further into their whereabouts than that (a worthwhile story in and of itself), but after Etan Patz disappeared in 1979, the city was in a panic over missing kids. Their faces had begun showing up on milk cartons, and parents all over America were on edge over stranger danger.

The last thing a grieving parent wants is to answer a reporter’s questions, and I had several fathers and one truly terrifying mother blacken my eye for my trouble. One man even broke my nose so that I spent a miserable afternoon in the ER scribbling into my blood-stained notepad. When one of the paper’s lawyers insisted I press charges against the father and sue him for medical expenses, I politely told him to pound sand. How could I fault this man, teetering at the edge of sanity because his son had disappeared? The lawyer grew agitated with me, so he went to my editor. Harold wasn’t nearly as polite as I had been, and the matter was dropped and never discussed again.

My work on these stories made me overly protective of Sebastian. I called home or his school several times a day, wanting to know exactly where he was, what he was doing. I had seen the pain on these parents’ faces, and I knew I would die of heartache if I ever saw that look on Bella.

After a dozen cases, I understood the true horror of what these parents were going through. Up until then I had thought the worst pain for a parent would be the death of a child. But I was wrong. The death of a child, while truly horrible, is a finite tragedy. There is no ambiguity, no uncertainty in its finality. But when a child goes missing, parents must consider both sides of a terrible coin. On one side of the coin lies fear, the terrible fear that the child is dead—or the fear that the child is alive and enduring unimaginable suffering. But on the flipside to that coin there exists a second and, I believe, even more torturous countenance: hope. Hope that the child will be found alive and unharmed.

The longer a child remained missing, the less likely such an outcome existed but the harder parents clung to that possibility. Hope was a cruelty that lingered for years, a dark thing whose tentacles wrapped so tightly around one’s heart that it made every beat an