Because the Night by James Ellroy Page B

the main administration building at Castleford Hospital in Nyack, New York, knowing that something was about to happen. He was right. After six months of counseling dreary low-lifes, he met Thomas Goff.
    At their first counseling session Goff had been hyper-kinetic and witty, even under the stress of a migraine headache. “My goal in life used to be to do nothing exceedingly well; my downfall was the fact that I liked to do it in stolen cars.… I’ll do anything to keep from going back to prison, from skindiving for Roto-rooter to servicing Jewish spinsters in Miami Beach. What do you recommend, Doc? Grow gills or get circumcised? Jesus fucking Christ, these daylight headaches are killing me!”
    Havilland had felt instincts clicking into place, telling him to act now. Obeying those instincts, he gave Goff a large intravenous shot of Demerol. While Goff was off on a painless dope cloud he asked him questions and found out that Goff liked to hurt people and that he never talked about it because they put you in jail for that. He had hurt lots of people, but the Trashbag Man had been his cellie at Attica and the headaches had started about then, and wasn’t that wild psychedelic ceiling beigel Give me back my headaches!
    Havilland had put him completely out, reading his file while he was unconscious. Thomas Lewis Goff, D.O.B. 6/19/49/; light brown and blue, 5ft. 10in., 155. High school dropout, 161 I.Q., car thief, burglar, pimp. Suspect in three aggravated assault cases, cases dismissed when the women victims refused to testify. Convicted of first degree auto theft with two priors, sentenced to five years in state prison, sent to Attica on 11/4/69, considered a model prisoner. Paroled after the recent riots, when psychiatrists at the prison judged that he would go psychotic if he remained incarcerated. Psychosomatic headaches and terror of daylight chief symptoms, dating from the time of the riot, when he was shut in a secluded cell block with one Paul Mandarano, a convicted murderer known as the “Trashbag” killer. Mandarano had committed suicide by hanging himself from the cell bars, and Goff had remained in the cell with his body until the riot was quelled. No presense of neurological damage; judged an excellent parole risk.
    Fate embraced Dr. John Havilland. When Thomas Goff regained consciousness, he said, “It’s going to be all right, Thomas. Please trust me.”
    The Night Tripper stalked Goff’s nightmares, then blunted them with drugs and fantasies until Goff wasn’t sure that Attica and the Trashbag Man had really happened. Under sodium Pentothal and age regression hypnosis, the Doctor took him back to the trauma flux point, learning that Paul Mandarano had hung himself with a beige plastic trashbag and that a blower fan stationed outside the cell block had blown the loose ends of the bag continually over the bars, acting in concert with safety arc lights, turning the cell where Goff had huddled with a rotting body into an alternately brightly lit and pitch-black horror show. Classic symbolism: Light magnified the terror; darkness diminished it. After seven months of therapy sessions in a cool, dim room, Thomas Golf’s fear of daylight abated to the point where it became tolerable. “I’ll always hate oysters, Doc; but somtimes I’ll have to watch other people eat them. Daylight is pretty unavoidable, but as Nietzsche said, ‘What does not destroy me makes me stronger.’ Right, Doc?”
    The Night Tripper felt tremors of love at Goff’s words. It was right for Goff to love him, but the reverse was not tolerable. “Yes, Thomas, Nietzche was right. You’ll find that out even more as we continue our journey together.”
    That journey was interrupted for over ten years.
    Thomas Goff disappeared, gone into mists that would always be at best a witches brew of fantasy and reality. The Doctor grieved for the loss of his would-be right hand