Summary
Sam Hume, chief resident at an institution for the insane, is approached by a distraught patient who is convinced that the world is going to end at midnight. The patient has made a wooden sparrow out of matchsticks as a mysterious talisman that he entrusts to the doctor, unaware that he and Sam are in love with the same woman, an inmate at the asylum. When Sam awakens to find that he is in fact not a doctor at all, but a patient who has been living a delusional life for the past three years, he finds himself swept up in a bizarre and astonishing series of events that leads to a confrontation with his history and guilt over having committed war crimes. What follows is a journey that Sam undertakes to unearth his buried past and retrieve his sanity.
The Matchstick Sparrow is a romantic tale of the dark side of secrets; the relentlessness of a truth denied; the chameleon-like nature of time, history, and consciousness; and the power of love to redeem even the past. A riveting story that will hold the reader to the page from beginning to the end.
Excerpt
It is not that a day is so long. Even the most arduous day, one can get through, knowing that it is only a day, that there is always tomorrow. Still, as I sit here looking out my office window at the November rain innocently pelting the glass—it is nearly eleven, and no doubt my poor wife has gone to bed, resigned and with no idea of what is happening—I cannot reckon that it was only yesterday morning, a single day ago and not a lifetime, that Mr. Poulos came in announcing that his heart—wait, yes, here it is— ”considering the children of the ages, finally let go and shattered into a million shards that flew into the night sky to flicker briefly, sudden stars smothered in black distances, woeful and unseen.” Mr. Poulos is given over to purple sentiments, and I saw no need to draw attention to the prose, but I did point out to him that all of the stars had been up there for eons, long before the alleged shattering of his heart, and asked how then one might explain this, whereupon he proceeded to urinate on the couch—my Italian, black leather couch—all the while looking at me with those stolid, slate eyes and nodding abruptly as though this perverse act somehow was an answer to my question. I immediately ended the session, and the two attendants who had been standing by outside came in, grabbed him up, and hurried him off, back to his quarters. Later, I learned that one of them, a burly prole with red hair and the gaze of a disturbed child—a man I have never cared for much—shoved Mr. Poulos around and called him a crazy bastard, both of which acts are expressly prohibited by asylum regulations, though I doubt that the fool knows it or cares to know. According to the report, filed by the other attendant, Mr. Poulos then tried to collect this barbarian in his arms, but the man was having none of that. Mr. Poulos ended up face down on the floor of his locked room with his nose bleeding, disabused once and for all of the belief that one may physically embrace the attendants. An hour or so later, one of the housekeepers tossed a clean shirt and trousers through what Mr. Poulos refers to as the let-us-pray hole in the door of his room. In a while, he changed into the dry clothes, sending the soiled ones back out through the hole and into the hallway where they sat until dusk reeking of pee, and that was that.
We resumed the session first thing this morning, and it was at this time that Mr. Poulos informed me that we should “prepare ourselves.”
“For?”
“The end.”
“The end of what?”
“The world.”
“I see. And why is the world going to end?”
“One cannot go on living without a heart.”
This would be at the least a private reference to yesterday's remark, and perhaps something more ominous. I made a note.
“Do you have it, Dr. Hume?.”
“Oh—certainly.”
I went to my desk and opened the scrimshaw tinderbox where I kept wooden matchsticks for lighting my briar, removed one, and handed it to Mr. Poulos. He had begun asking for these some months ago, for what purpose I had no idea. As he took the match, suddenly, he began to weep, I could not tell what precipitated this, but didn’t think it prudent to pursue the matter straight off. For one thing, I doubted that the couch would survive a second dousing, and tears, at least, were easily wiped away. Beyond this, however, I felt it best simply to let him grieve whatever this really was about rather than press him with questions that he might hear as challenges. In the past, I had found the Socratic method highly effective in bringing patients around to a realization of the absurdity of the beliefs to which, hounded by pathology, they had given themselves, and this moment of realization usually proved to be the first step on the road to recovery. But Mr. Poulos was different. The illness had him hand and foot. I could find not the slightest chink in the armor of his condition, as he was as relentlessly clever at concocting justifications for his delusions as any fundamentalist, and in this, his paranoia carried the authority of an ideology. Of course, he had no more inkling that he was doing this than does the fundamentalist or ideologue. To the contrary, he was pitiably sincere. His melancholy, which could surface like a cork freed suddenly from some tangle in the depths, was genuine and abject. There was no reasoning with it, and any direct attempt to do so accomplished little more than putting the furniture at risk. For now, it was better just to listen.
After a time, his sobs quieted, and he looked up at me flatly, as though just then having become aware that there was someone else in the room.
“Don’t you care that the world is ending?”
“I think perhaps the world will find a way to go on.”
His eyes softened, as though with forbearance.
“Not this time. I’m afraid we’re out of chances.”
I did not reply. Noting this, Mr. Poulos waved his hand absentmindedly.
“No matter. By midnight, all our suffering will be dust.”
“Is that when the world will end?”
He nodded.
We said nothing further, but sat there listening to the ticking of the large clock on the wall until the hour ran out.
A Novel