A single word is written in my journal for Saturday, October 13, 1979.

"Ted."

Ted is the only person buried in this part of the cemetery that was never a patient at the asylum.  He was an employee.  Ted never asked for a different job title.  He always said with a grin, "I'm a janitor.  Plain and simple.  Call me what I am."

Ted worked here at the asylum long before I arrived.  Everyone knew Ted but no one really knew that much about him.  Whenever he passed someone in the hall, he would stop and ask, "Everythin' all right today?"  If you actually took out the time to tell him, Ted would take out the time to listen.  Everyone liked Ted.

I miss him very much.

After the death of my wife, I "cleaned house" and destroyed the pages I felt were most lethal from each copy of the Libri Verum I had in storage.  Up until that moment, I was strictly against censoring these documents, but the situation had changed.  The only complete copy now rested in a safe in my office.  The safe was old and fairly insecure, mostly used as a cupboard for important information.  I removed the Libri Verum from the top shelf and tugged on one of its more malevolent pages.  I paused.  I tugged again.  Then I stopped.  I couldn't do it.  I stared down at the page as the office spun around me.  Suddenly, none of this seemed real.  Then I heard him.

"Everythin' all right today?"

Ted was in my doorway.  I didn't take out the time to tell him how I was, but simply hearing those words of concern brought me back to reality.  I smiled and Ted nodded.  I quietly closed the book and placed it back in the safe.  Somehow I knew everything would be all right.

Several days later, Ted came by the office to empty my wastebasket.  He was unusually quiet.  I didn't really notice his new found silence until a week had passed.  Then, like a wave of electricity soaring from the center of my brain, I raced to the safe and flung open the door.  The good news was that the Libri Verum was present.  The bad news was that the binder was against the back wall.  I've always had an almost compulsive habit of placing books on shelves binder-side out.

I knew I needed to speak with Ted.

I found him quietly mopping the dark hallway outside of the kitchen.  Our eyes met without words.  He knew why I was there.  Finally, he spoke.  "It's kind of like a book of bad fortune cookie sayings."

I had never heard the Libri Verum described that way before.  He was right.  I couldn't help but laugh.  Maybe Ted would be all right.

Two days later, a nurse walked into my office, dabbing her tear ducts with a Kleenex.  She said another nurse had smelled a bad odor coming from the western storage closet and opened the door to investigate.  She screamed.  The doctor on duty said Ted had been dead for approximately three days.  An empty bottle of ammonia laid among the dried vomit at his feet.

The doctor was wrong.  I had just seen Ted two days earlier so he couldn't have been dead for three.  But I never corrected him.  I would have had to explain that I suspected Ted had read my copy of the Libri Verum.  That he had seen it in my office several days before, returning at some later time when curiosity got the better of him.

If only I'd destroyed those pages.

I returned to my office and looked at the safe.  It hadn't kept anything safe.  I pulled out my journal and wrote next to the date a single word.  "Ted."

Even after all that had just happened, I still never considered tearing out those pages.  It was too late for that.  Instead I moved the book to a safer place where it still sits today.  Binder-side out.

Two things still haunt my memories of Ted.  First, no one missed him for those two - three? - days.  Second, and most importantly, no one, myself included, asked Ted if "everything was all right."  He would have.