Babbicam

by Rod Madocks

  Two women? What the hell did Kaiser mean? It surely had to be Lee he was talking about in that article. Miss Keyse we knew about. Had Kaiser remembered it wrong? It seemed unlikely. There was nothing else about Lee’s case in his papers although I searched through them all night. That was it. Two women killed? Yes, Lee had annihilated some people in a metaphorical sense. He had grievously damaged Jessie Bulled and Kate Farmer emotionally for example and he was dead to his kids by Jessie but specifically a killing? And a woman?

  I fell asleep in the early hours among all the litter of documents and awoke as if Kaiser had been my spirit Orphic guide during the night. In a dream it had come to me, the answer about two murders. I realized at once when I woke that it was not just Miss Keyse who had died in those early hours of the 15th November. Something else had happened. I think Lee told us an alternative version of the truth in those wire recordings. That bastard frickin’ Lee, the mendacious shit! Why couldn’t he just level with us?

  Maybe Mrs Sokal was right. It was God’s plan to put all this into my head. I pieced it together on my drive back home. I realized that Lee only wanted to believe in his good avatar. Who doesn’t? That was why he did not tell the whole truth on the wire recordings. Kaiser, my guide, he had been walking beside me all along, giving me clues and trying to lead me to the truth. The good doctor was in mourning for his own lost objects and so was I. I guess we’re all mourning the people we were before the bad stuff happened.

  A Casting Out

  Mulvina sat me down in her consulting rooms. A poster on the wall read, ‘Live life to express not to impress. Don’t strive to get your presence noted just make your absence felt.’ Yeah, John Lee sure took a leaf out of that book. Mulvina looked hot with her dark hair tumbling over a crisp white blouse. I’d asked her to get rid of my bad spirits. She’d sounded a little doubtful over the phone at first but said she could do a “cleansing and a blessing” for $200. When I got there she lit some candles that puffed out an acrid smoke. She said that was sage; apparently, the Native Americans used that for driving off bad spirits. She told me to be open to the experience, said that the ego was arrogant and shut down the voice of spirit. We sat facing each other. I liked looking at the frieze of tiny, cute moles on her neck and the way her dangly earrings glided over her skin. She explained that the spirits that haunt you are immature souls, they get a kick out of scaring you. A negative spirit is a stubborn and controlling one. They want to stay in the earth plane, they are lost but it would be cruel just to kick them out. You need to gently move them on towards the light. Well, I thought, that’s not going to work with a baddass like John Lee. Mulvina asked me about who I thought was haunting me. I had quite a choice but I ended up saying that it was Georgia, a little girl who had died young. Poor Georgia, she sure was lost. Mulvina said that it was not only about getting rid of ghosts. I needed to get my life straight at the same time, be practical, render unto Caesar as it said in the Bible. I asked what ‘render unto Caesar’ meant and she said that it was paying attention to worldly matters as well as tangling with spiritual affairs.

  “Okay, shall we proceed?” asked Mulvina, but she looked puzzled as if she sensed I wasn’t entirely leveling with her about everything. I nodded. She explained that it was important to name the spirits I wanted to leave. That was the best way to get rid of them. She went on to say that you need to help them on their way. All people need to know they are forgiven and loved. Mulvina said life never ends, the dead have folks that are waiting for them. I repeated it was just Georgia who was bugging me. I guess I was afraid of naming anyone else, especially Lee. Maybe I didn’t want to send my family away, that would have been wrong. Besides I’ve not settled my business with them. I asked her to focus on Georgia. What the hell, I thought, one ghost at a time. I watched Mulvina’s cute face in a haze of sage, chanting, inscribed Georgia’s name on a candle and burning it. At the end, she walked me to the door saying that I was free now.

  The Night Visitor

  The condo is empty and lonely without Georgia’s lisping little voice and the sound of her feet in the corridors. I should have known that she wasn’t the problem at all. Maybe I had to get rid of her as a sort of practice run. I’m not saying still that I do believe in all this psychic crud. Let’s proceed as if it could be true. I realize now that that drawing that Mulvina made way back with that figure looming over me did not show Lee as a threatening spirit over me. No, I’ve been clear about him. He has always come face on to me. Mulvina was trying to draw someone else, a big man with a grey forelock to his hair. “Render unto Caesar” is what the medium was trying to say. I know now that meant Caesar or Kaiser, the chieftain. Maybe that’s what Georgia had been warning me about.

  The realization came to me in the early hours; something woke me, a sound. I could see in the bedroom a shape by my bed just to be made out in the ambient light. It was a figure, a male figure standing with one hand cupped under the chin as if contemplating me. I could also make out the edge of his eyeglasses gleaming. Then it was gone. I felt cold but the bedclothes were wringing wet and there was a lousy taste in my mouth. Weirdly, I wasn’t scared and in the morning I was filled with an odd certainty. I guess it was a kind of “walk-in”. My dreaming brain seems to have produced a sort of hyper-remembering. I wrote this next piece straight out as if by dictation like one of those psychic guys who write undiscovered Beethoven sonatas straight from the composer’s invisible hand or like the poet James Merrill and his tea cup receiving messages from the dead. I’m letting Kaiser have a chance. I feel that’s what he wants. It came to me after I had studied Doc Kaiser’s papers. It could have happened like this. I’m not saying it did happen, but I felt Kaiser at my elbow correcting me, messing with his pipe, tapping its mouthpiece against his teeth with a warning click whenever I strayed too far.

  Kaiser’s Story

  “A telegram, chief,” is all the cabbie said. It was signed by Vice Admiral Randall Jacobs, Chief of Naval Personnel. The message number that could be seen through the window of the envelope was circled, indicating a death message. Telegram deliverers were normally coached to look for this signal and to be cautious in handing the telegram over. Judgment was called for—as a minimum, one might at least tell the recipient that it was a death message. In this case, a cab driver hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. He just handed it to me and hurried away.

  The telegram read:

  The Secretary of State for War desires me to express his deep regret that your son Ph. M. 2/c Clyde Kaiser attach. USMC was killed in action on February 19th in the Pacific Theatre of Operations. Letter follows.

  We had been apprehensive because Clyde’s letters had stopped coming, but the blow was sudden and savage. Clyde, Clydie, our only son. We had poured everything into him. He’d turned out smart, lively, humorous and unafraid—everything that I was not. A child of his times, frank and optimistic and given to snappy phrases like, “killer diller” when he was happy and, “’T weren’t me McGee,” when denying some minor infraction. His favorite song was “Little Rock Get Away”.

  I had wanted Clyde to be a better doctor than I was; I had wanted him to find the happiness and success in love and work that had eluded me. But the war had hurried him down a different path, and he came home one night smelling of beer and told us he had enlisted in the navy. He resisted our arguments. He was nineteen that autumn of’43.

  Clyde went through months of training. We had hoped that the war would be finished and it seemed likely, The Nazis were about done and the Japs were being hammered. Surely it would not last much longer and he would be spared. After completing basic training in August 1944, he went to the Naval Hospital at Great Lakes to become a corpsman. He reported his new schedule to us:

  A.M.

  05:00 - Get up and take the three S’s (shave, shower, etc.)

  05:30 - Exercise

  06:30 - Chow

  08:00 - 1st class (Minor Surgery)

  09:00 - Nursing

  10:00 - Hygiene & Sani
tation

  11:00 - Inspection

  11:30 - Chow

  P.M.

  12:30 - Classes - Materia Medica

  13:30 - Bandages

  14:30 - Anatomy & Physiology

  15:30 - Chemical Warfare (study of gases)

  16:30 - Chow

  17:00 - Work in barracks & wash

  19:00 - Hit the sack.

  I reasoned that this training would stand him in good stead after the war when he could pick up a medical career again. The sense of discipline and purpose would help him. But in reality Clyde was becoming a soldier and moving further away from any life we could imagine. That list of his daily activities showed he was being trained to be a combat medic. His training schedule frightened us in its uncompromising purpose. Clyde remained still boyish in his letters home. He went on to the Marines at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, learning field treatment. He sent me a postcard from there which announced: ‘I got 273 out of 340 for rifle practice—that’s good Pa!’ He said also that he was reading Zane Grey westerns. Then they moved him to Camp Pendleton where he was assigned his unit, the 4th Medical Battalion, 4th Marines. Well, surely it’s some sort of hospital behind the lines, I thought. Then Clyde came back on leave. On the surface he was cheerful but he remained solitary and he didn’t want to see his high school buddies. I found him lying in bed on his last day just staring at the wall. He had no sweetheart and never had a girl as far as we knew. That was also a sadness. In the last batch of letters there was no hint, nor premonition. In his final note to us he spoke of changing his war bond allocation. Clyde included some uncharacteristic folksy expressions in the letter and I then worked out that the first letters of the words spelled out ‘Maui Hawaii’. Clyde was letting us know where he was. Then there was silence.

  February 19th 1945 was the first day of the battle for some Godforsaken island of black volcanic sand they called Iwo Jima. So many other young men had died there. Later, there was that photo of those boys with the flag on the scarred peak of the mountain—Suribachi. It was on every billboard. We got our own flag also. It was handed to us by a marine lieutenant at the memorial service that they held two weeks later at First Baptist Church. It was a month after receiving the death notice telegram.

  I still went back into Clyde’s room every day, touching his gaudy high school pennants, the heaps of his civilian clothes, trying to sense him, aware of nothing, a withdrawal. I still called his name although I knew the answer was silence, a silence that grew out and through the house and down the street.

  A little while later, I got a letter that explained more.

  Dear Dr Kaiser,

  This is the hardest letter I have ever written, because I don’t know how to say what I want to. I would have written sooner but have been in the hospital and unable to correspond with anyone.

  First of all - I was a friend of Clyde. We have had many long talks together - I liked him from the first night he came into our outfit and I got acquainted with him. We used to go topside - at night- when aboard our ship and talk. He told me such nice things about his family that I felt at the time, I should like very much to meet you. He told me one time “Bob - I have the best Dad in the world - because he treats me like I was a Pal” He told me many other things that I don’t recall at the moment.

  Clyde and I hit the beach at Iwo together - side by side - I have never seen a fellow with greater courage and more faith than that guy had. About five minutes after we landed, he was hit in the arm and we tried to get him to go back. He just grinned and said it was a scratch and that he had work to do. When I left him he was taking care of some fellows in a big bomb crater and I waved at him. He waved back. When I returned, he was no longer where I had left him and later I learned what had happened. A Japanese mortar shell landed near him and took the life of one of the finest fellows I have ever met. May I share your grief and sorrow. Please accept my most tender sympathy for your loss. I realize and you must also know that it’s guys with guts like Clyde’s had that is winning this war.

  I hope I can meet you and talk with you sometime when I come to the States.

  I am married - two boys - and live in San Angelo, Texas, but plan to visit you some day when possible. If you receive this letter, let me know. Write me and I will answer any questions or be of any assistance I can.

  Sincerely yours,

  Bob Warrell Mills H A 1/C

  I never got to meet Bob Mills after the war. I’m not even sure that Mills survived. I kept on working through that terrible spring. Work has that purpose sometimes, to help with the heartbreak. Lina dealt with it in her own way but we had not been close for years now and what happened to Clyde drove us farther apart. I went back to my practice, and saw the usual dreary trail of cases: scarlet fever, gumboils, whooping cough, influenza, sprains and bleary eyes. I was lucky to have a practice in Bay View that was well paying and with fewer chronic diseases than the poor wards of the city. Patients built me up. I’d always enjoyed that bit of the job. Their obligation and their gratitude filled a void. Maybe all doctors seek that payback. Later an ambition to treat the psychic wounds of war veterans would grow but it had not occurred to me yet.

  Mr Lee did not initially strike me as being that desirable a patient. Firstly, the dying were rarely grateful and could be resentful. There could be no alliance through which healing occurred. Lee was an elderly man, slowly fading out from heart failure. There was little for a doctor to do apart from the palliative. Lee had lived a full life span. At least he had had a chance to have a life. Not like Clyde and all those young boys being consumed.

  I thought of diagnosis as being like a good navigator. You plotted the course and balanced all the factors. You then applied your knowledge to determine where you were and in what direction you wanted to go. You did not need to be a medical genius to determine that the future for the old man looked bleak. Not that he seemed much disconcerted about his fate. Lee was keen to talk, but had little interest in treatment. He seemed to know that he did not have long. He barely listened while I explained to him how to put the TNT pills under the tongue whenever he had chest pain. It was as if he had been waiting to see me on quite another matter.

  I first came to Lee’s house one early February evening after surgery. My patient had a grey complexion in the lamplight with spots of hectic red on the cheeks. He was bald, with prominent ears and eyes that were red-rimmed and puffy but still a startling vivid blue. His oversize oedematous feet stuck out the bottom of the bed sheets. Lee seemed to be watching me, sizing me up. He had a strange accent that was hard to understand, rural English, his attentive wife said, mixed with a touch of Wisconsin. They had a smart home in a good area. At first sight, there didn’t seem much to stand out about him.

  After he had submitted to my initial physical examination, Mr Lee had said, “So, not playing hokum then am I, eh, doctor?”

  “Hokum, sir?” I queried.

  “Ha, that’s prison slang, means fakin’ it, sick on the sly, doctor.”

  Prison, well that explained the old rib injuries—he was an old jail bird and had taken some knocks.

  “No sir, you are indeed quite sick,” I told him.

  I found myself wondering just exactly what the genial old guy could have possibly done to go to jail. Mainly I concentrated on his symptoms. It did no good to be too involved in patients who would not be around for long. I told Lee he could not be cured but he could be alleviated. Lee laughed at that. “Never mind, doctor,” he said, “Brag is a good dog but Holdfast is better.”

  Bit by bit, Mr Lee gradually got worse. I needed to reduce the fluid in order to lighten the load on the heart but I had to bear in mind that the patient was losing weight. The toxic organomercury I used as a diuretic weakened Lee’s kidneys further. Lee couldn’t maintain calorific intake due to the nausea brought about by renal failure and a vicious circle formed. His heart pumped weakly, the body filled with toxins, he could not eat to maintain his strength and all went downhill. Lee kept a sharp mind
though, until the last week.

  My patient began to grow more compelling and I found myself thinking about him in my off-duty hours. As if waking from a long sleep, Mr Lee was wanting to convey something important to me. Early on he’d said, “At Babbicam we had in the gardens the blue lily of the Nile, what Miss Keyse called ‘agepannies’. After a hard winter the pots would be full of roots, all boiling about, but the tops would be quite dead and soft. That’s like me, doctor. The body’s shot and has run out of future though my innards keep on working regardless.” I had no idea what he was talking about. Mrs Lee said, “He’s not soft in the head, doctor. He’s speaking about the past, in the old country. Things that were important to him.” I had little interest in the past, or in horticulture for that matter. I saw Europe as a place where pointless conflicts started. Before the war I had supported Lindberg’s isolationist pitch.

  I did not need to say much to my patient. Mr Lee always seemed real pleased to see me. I tried to speak to him about his disease and the progress of treatment but he just laughed. He came out with a lot of odd expressions and had a strange story to tell. He wanted to confess something. I began to conceive of the idea of recording him using the new Webster I had recently bought. Lee said once as I was applying the stethoscope, “You have an honorable job, helping people. As for me, I have done naught for others. I’ve feared being a naught. Selfish I’ve been. I alles feared it would just go scat, doctor.”

  I said, “You have married, Mr Lee. You have a fine house. You have provided for your family and made your mark in the world.” I was trying to comfort him.

  “Oh, doc. You have no idea, how many I have trampled on to last so long.”

  Once when I asked him if he had eaten, Lee looked me in the eye and said, yes, his appetite had picked up, but his wife contradicted him, “No he hasn’t, doctor, he has turned away everything I have made for him.” When I gently chided him about the untruth later, Lee spread his blue and trembling hands out on the sheet,