Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  O‘Kane shrugged. “I’m talking about now, today, tonight. I’m used to having it, you know? Of course, look who I’m talking to—you probably never had a good screw in your life, am I right?”

  Mart protested, but weakly, and O‘Kane saw the truth hit home.

  “It’s like this ham”—and he held up the pink slab of it on the tines of his fork, crisp from the pan and iridescent with smoke-cured grease. “If Elsie didn’t give you any tomorrow, you wouldn’t think much of it. But if two days went by, three, a week—you know what I mean? And sex—well, that’s a real bodily necessity, just like food and water and moving your bowels—”

  “And whiskey,” Mart put in with a sly smile. “Don’t forget whiskey.”

  O‘Kane grinned back. “What do you say we talk Roscoe into going into town tonight?”

  And then it was the morning routine. Say goodnight to Nick and Pat, who were just coming off their shift, and hello to Mr. McCormick, bent up double like a pretzel in his bed; then it was strip off Mr. McCormick’s nightgown and swab up the mess he’d left on the sheets, pack the whole business up for the laundress and give Mr. McCormick his shower bath, and all the while O‘Kane thinking about Robert Ogilvie, director of the Peachtree Asylum in Stone Mountain, Georgia, who suspended all his catatonics on a rack in a big metal tub, day and night, and just changed the water when it got mucked up. No stains, no smells, no laundry—just a plug and a faucet. Now that was progress.

  “He’s not looking real good this morning,” O‘Kane observed when they first walked into the room and stood over the fouled bed and saw the position Mr. McCormick had got himself into.

  Mart was oblivious. He merely bobbed his big head with the hair dried round it in a fringe and stared down at their employer as if he were a piece of furniture. “I’ve seen him worse.”

  Sometime during the night Mr. McCormick had hunched himself up like a fetus in the womb, and he’d managed to lock one foot behind the other in a way that looked uncomfortable, painful even—the sort of thing you’d expect from a swami or contortionist. He was breathing hard, his ribs heaving as if he’d just come back from a ten-mile run, and his eyes were open and staring and his hands locked together in an unbreakable clasp, but he didn’t respond to them at all. They had no choice but to lift him out of bed as he was, a hand each under his armpit and buttock, and haul him over to the shower bath where the water would take some of the crust off him and they could get at the rest of it with a bar of Palm Olive soap and the scrub brushes, and it wasn’t any different from any other day, but for the pose he was in. Still and all, it was a strange sensation to have to drag a man around like that, a grown naked man worth nobody knew how many millions and as lifeless as a side of beef hanging from a meathook. Only his eyes were alive, and they didn’t register much—the quickest jump to the needles of water in the shower bath or the light bulging at the windows and then back to nothing.

  It was eerie. Unsettling. No matter how often O‘Kane experienced it or how many patients he’d seen like this—and he’d bathed them one after another at the Boston Lunatic Asylum, twenty at a time, hosing them down afterward like hogs in a pen—it still affected him. How could anybody live like that? Be like that? And what did it take for the mechanism to break down, for the normal to become abnormal, for a man like Mr. McCormick, who had everything and more, to lose even the faculty of knowing it?

  “I wish he’d come out of it, Mart,” he said after they’d set him down on his side under the spray of the shower bath. “Even if he got violent again—anything.”

  “Are you kidding?” Mart rubbed the spot over his left eye where their employer had slugged him on the train. Steam rose from the floor. Water hissed against the tiles. Mr. McCormick, his skin glistening and the hair a dark skullcap pressed to his temples and creeping up the back of his neck, began to grunt softly.

  “Think about it, Mart—he’s Stanley McCormick, one of the richest men in the world, and he doesn’t even know it. I mean, I’ve been so blind drunk I didn’t know where I was and I’ve slept in an alley once and one time I woke up on the beach with a bunch of crabs scuttling all over me, but I knew right away I was Eddie O‘Kane.”

  Mart didn’t seem to grasp the point. He just stared down at the hunched-up shape on the naked tiles and began to shake his head. “I wish he’d stay like this forever, nice and quiet.” And then he lowered his voice, because you could never tell what Mr. McCormick was thinking or what he might retain. “If he gets well he won’t need us anymore, that’s for sure—and then where would we be?”

  At nine, after they’d massaged Mr. McCormick’s muscles to loosen him up a bit and got his feet untangled, Mart pried open the patient’s jaws with a wooden dowel and O‘Kane jammed the feeding tube between his teeth. (And Mr. McCormick had good strong teeth, but they’d gone yellow because he wasn’t able to keep them up.) The tube consisted of a hollowed-out piece of bamboo a headhunter might have used to blow darts through and an ordinary kitchen funnel, and for breakfast Mr. McCormick was having the same thing they’d had—ham, eggs, toast and coffee—but it had been painstakingly reduced to a thick black gruel by Sam Wah, the Chinese cook. While O’Kane was thus employed, hovering over the gaping mouth of his patient like some flightless bird with its unfathomable chick, waiting out the tedious drip of the mash, repetitively wiping the patient’s mouth and chin and pinching his nostrils to encourage the swallowing reflex, he couldn’t help reflecting on the lack of progress Mr. McCormick had made over the course of the past two months.

  He hadn’t always been like this. When he first came to McLean two years back, he’d just broken down and the prognosis was good. He was very disturbed, of course, particularly the first couple of days, lashing out at anybody who came within three feet of him and raving to beat the band about all sorts of things—Jack London, his father, dentists, the Reaper Company and women, especially women, shouting out “cunt” and “slit” and “whore” till the walls rang and his face was as bleached out as a ream of white bond paper scattered in the snow—but after a week in the sheet restraints he came around. He was calm suddenly, reasonable, a dignified gentleman who dressed himself in the morning without any tics or other nonsense and went around chatting and joking with the other patients and their relatives till people began to take him for one of the doctors. And Mr. McCormick, loving a joke, played along, dispensing advice, walking down the corridors arm-in-arm with the disappointed parent, the cousin from Bayonne, the somber sibling and the grim-faced husband, and he was fine with the women too, the soul of courtesy and with the softest, most genteel and solicitous voice O‘Kane had ever heard.

  Within a week he’d singled out O‘Kane—called him “Eddie” and asked for him especially—and together they took long walks on the sanatorium grounds, played golf, croquet, shuffleboard and chess. He insisted there was nothing wrong with him—just nerves and overwork, that was all—and he spoke and dressed so beautifully and had such a smile on his face for everybody, O’Kane almost came to believe him. In the evenings he would hold the ward spellbound with tales of his travels—and he’d been everywhere, all the capitals of Europe, Egypt, way out to Albuquerque, Carson City and San Francisco—and he charmed everybody, doctors, nurses and patients, with his jokes. He was forever joking—not practical jokes, nothing malicious or unbalanced, as you found with so many of the other patients, nothing like that at all. Nothing off-color either. And while the jokes themselves might have been old in his mother’s time (“What did the breeze say to the windowscreen? ”; ‘ ’Don’t mind me, I’m just passing through’ “), he took such obvious delight in them, his face opening up with that gift of a smile he had and his eyes crinkled to slits, they were irresistible, even when you’d heard them ten times already.

  Everyone was optimistic. Everyone was pleased. Nerves, that’s all it was. But then one morning, after an extended visit from his wife, he wouldn’t get out of bed. The smile was gone, the jokes dead and buried. He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t ea
t, wouldn’t use the toilet or clean himself. Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Cowles and Dr. Meyer all tried to reason with him, talking till their throats went dry, pleading, remonstrating, cajoling and threatening—they even brought the august Dr. Emil Kraepelin all the way from Munich to try his hand-but Mr. McCormick just seemed to sink deeper into himself, like a man mired to his chin in quicksand and not a thing in the world anybody could do about it. It wasn’t long after that that he attacked Nurse Doane—Arabella—and had to go back to the sheet restraints.

  The hope was that California would bring him around, but as far as O‘Kane could see it was an exercise in futility. At least so far. Mr. McCormick was as blocked now as he’d ever been, so deeply buried beneath his layers of phobias and hallucinations he didn’t even recognize his nurses. And no one seemed to care—he’d been delivered to Riven Rock trussed up like a prize turkey and with no more consciousness than a fat feathered bird and that was the end of it, out of sight, out of mind. No one except Mrs. McCormick, that is. Katherine. She’d stayed on the whole, time, long after Mr. McCormick’s mother and sister and Mr. Harold McCormick had left, coming out to the estate every morning without fail, probing Hamilton and the nurses, quizzing the maids, the butler and even the cook with his deracinated English. What did my husband have for breakfast? Is he eating? How’s his color? O’Kane had twice seen her creeping round the shrubbery with a pair of opera glasses in the hope of catching a glimpse of her husband when he was wheeled out on the sunporch. But Nick and Pat had lost all interest, treating their employer as if he were just another drooler on the violent ward, Mart didn’t seem to trouble himself much one way or the other, and Hamilton was so busy with his apes and finding a house and mollifying his wife over the move from Massachusetts, he’d barely had time to stick his head in the door lately.

  And where did that leave O‘Kane? Out here in the wings of Paradise with a bunch of wops and an ache in his groin that was like a fever, waiting for the day when Mr. McCormick would get well again and reward his diligence and loyalty, the day when his own oranges would hang heavy on the limbs and he could finally, at long last, take center stage and let the drama of his own life begin.

  In the afternoon he was sitting at the desk in the upper hallway, just inside the barred door to Mr. McCormick’s quarters, playing solitaire and flipping open his watch every thirty seconds to personally record the testudineous advance of time, when Dr. Hamilton came stutter-stepping up the stairs, all out of breath. “Edward,” he cried, “Edward, you’ve got to see this!”

  O‘Kane looked up from the cards, glad of the distraction. He gave a glance to Mart and the bundled form of Mr. McCormick in the center of the bed behind him and then got up to unlock the door, ever mindful of the three p’s. “What is it?” he asked, turning the keys in their locks. “Another hominoid?”

  In the light of the hallway, illumined by the tireless California sun streaming in through the upper windows, the doctor’s head seemed to glow. He was showing a lot of scalp lately, pale striations against the dun slick of his hair, and O‘Kane saw with a shock that his hairline had begun to recede—and when had that started? His face too—the lines seemed to have deepened and there was something else, something altogether queer about him ... but of course, he’d shaved his beard. “You shaved your beard,” O’Kane heard himself saying.

  The doctor waved him off, as if it wasn’t worth mentioning—but it was, because that beard was his psychiatric badge, the very twin of the beard that sprouted from the face of Dr. Freud. How could he practice psychiatry without a beard? It was unthinkable. “The wife never cared for it,” Hamilton explained, breathing hard from his exertion, “and besides, with the hominoids it was becoming a liability—Mary was afraid it would attract fleas. Or worse. But enough of the beard—I’ve got something to show you, Edward, something truly astounding, the best find yet. Come on, come on: what are you waiting for?”

  And then they were down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door, heading toward the hominoid laboratory, the doctor so worked up it was all he could do to keep from breaking into a trot. O‘Kane could hear the screeching and caterwauling of the monkeys long before they hit the path that wound in under the oaks, and he could smell them too—a ripe festering flyblown reek of hominoid sweat and vomit and the killing stench of monkey fur clotted with excrement. And he could call them monkeys now, outside Hamilton’s hearing anyway, because that’s what they were: nine rhesus monkeys and a pair of olive baboons. Apes, as it turned out, weren’t so easy to come by. The doctor had made application to every exotic animal dealer, circus and zoo up and down the coast, hoping for chimps, but there were none to be had.

  He found monkeys, though, and there were more coming. After the first two ratlike little things died with blood leaching out their ears and anuses, the doctor got lucky and was able to purchase nine more at a single stroke from one of the local millionaires, an eccentric who had a whole menagerie running wild on his property, ostriches, kangaroos, boa constrictors, impala and dik-dik, and he’d tracked down the baboons in a decrepit zoo in Muchas Vacas, Mexico, where a few pesos went a long way. O‘Kane was just happy he didn’t have to look after the things—and they hadn’t been there two weeks when Hamilton began hinting around, but in the end he wound up hiring two scrawny little brown men, one wop and one Mexican, to construct the cages and hose the reeking piles of crap out of them every morning.

  Monkeys didn’t have a whole lot of appeal for O‘Kane—they reminded him too much of the droolers and shit-flingers he’d been wedded to for the past seven years, and that was an era he wanted to put behind him, permanently. He was head nurse to Stanley McCormick now, and before long he’d be an orange rancher or an oil man, strutting around the lobby of the Potter Hotel in a Panama hat while his own motorcar stood out front at the curb. Of course, as long as he was under the thumb of Hamilton he’d at least have to feign interest in hominoids, but he really didn’t see the point—a whole wagonload of monkeys wouldn’t cure what ailed Mr. McCormick. And as far as he could tell, Katherine wasn’t much for hominoids either, though she was willing to go along in the hope that Hamilton’s experiments would lead to a cure for her husband, and she spent a good part of each visit out there under the trees listening to Hamilton go on about hominoid micturition, auto-eroticism and frequency of copulation. The doctor had given the monkeys names like Maud, Gertie and Jocko, and the way he talked about them you’d have thought he’d personally fathered them all. (“Jocko achieved coitus with Bridget six times yesterday, and twice with Gertie,” he would say, or, “The minute I let Jimmy into Maud’s cage she assumed the sexually submissive posture and exposed her genitalia.”) To O’Kane’s way of thinking, the whole business was a bit, well, excessive. Not to mention dirty-minded.

  But there was Hamilton, standing between the grinning wop and the grinning spic, ready to flick a filthy checkered tablecloth off what looked to be a cage behind him. He was beaming like a magician. The monkeys screeched and stank. Sunlight filtered softly through the trees. “Ready, Edward? Voilà!”

  The tablecloth fluttered to the ground and the cage stood revealed. Inside was a pale orange aggregation of limbs and hair that looked like nothing so much as a heap of palm husks until it began to stir. O‘Kane saw two liquid eyes, nostrils like gouges in a rubber tire, the naked simian face. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said, “what is it?”

  “Orang-utan,” the doctor pronounced. “Literally, ‘man of the forest.’ His name is Julius, and he comes to us all the way from Borneo, courtesy of one of Captain Piroscz’s colleagues, Benjamin Butler, of the Siam.” The doctor’s grin ate up his face. “Our first ape.”

  O‘Kane took a step back when Hamilton reached down to unlatch the mesh door of the cage. He was thinking of the one-eyed chimp in Donnelly’s and the way it had taken hold of Frank Leary’s hand—and wasn’t that a fine thing for an ape to do?

  “It’s all right,” the doctor reassured him, “he’s quite tame. A former pet. Come o
n, Julius,” he cooed, his voice sweetened to the hypnotic whisper he used on his ravers and lunatics, “come on out now.” A pair of oranges, held seductively aloft, was the inducement.

  “Are you sure—?” O‘Kane began.

  “Oh, yes, there’s nothing to worry about,” Hamilton said over his shoulder. “They’ve had him on shipboard since he was a baby and they all loved him, the whole crew, and they hated to give him up, but of course now that he’s full-grown it became too dangerous, what with the rigging and pots of hot tar and whatnot.... Come on, that’s a boy.”

  Soundlessly, the shabby orange creature unfolded itself from the cage, crouching over its bristling arms like a giant spider. O‘Kane took another step back and the two keepers exchanged a nervous glance—the thing was nearly as big as they were, and it certainly outweighed them. And, of course, like all the rest of the hominoids, it stank like a boatload of drowned men.

  Julius didn’t seem much interested in the oranges, but he folded them into the slot in the middle of his plastic face as if they were horse pills and shambled through the dust to where the monkeys and baboons were affixed to the doors of the cages and shrieking themselves breathless. He exchanged various fluids with them, his face drooping and impassive even as they clawed at the mesh and bared their teeth, then sat in the dirt sniffing luxuriously at his fingers and toes before lazily hoisting himself into the nearest tree like a big dangling bug, where he promptly fell asleep. Or died. It was hard to tell which—he was so utterly inanimate and featureless, it was as if someone had tossed a wad of wet carpeting up into the crotch of the tree.

  O‘Kane could feel Hamilton’s eyes on him. “Well?” the doctor demanded. “What do you think? Magnificent, isn’t he?”

  The two keepers had moved off into the big central enclosure Hamilton had designed as a communal area where his hominoids could “interact,” as he called it, busying themselves with setting up the apparatus for one or another of the doctor’s arcane experiments. The monkeys, locked up in their individual cages, watched them with shining eyes. They knew what the doctor’s experiments meant: eating, fighting and fucking, and not necessarily in that order. O‘Kane was at a loss for words.