by Neely Tucker
“Tell me about what Barry Edmonds did that you had to kill him. Tell me about your mother. Frances. I can help. We got this bond, George. It’s only me. Only you. Tell me about Frances, George. Tell me who killed your mother.”
George Harper stared at him. A single tear, shiny as a diamond, seeped from the inside corner of his right eye. And then, in a sudden flash of movement, he was barking, bellowing, weeping, shouting, and crying all at once, yanking on his chains, stomping on the floor, spittle flecking from his mouth, howling, the sound tremendous in the room, the man losing his balance, nearly falling, careening into the wall.
The door behind Sully burst into his back, the orderly shoving it in, knocking Sully to his side, stepping in over him. Before Sully could roll over, another orderly—larger, beefier—stormed in behind him. Sully seeing them from the floor, the pair of them looking fifteen feet tall, outlined in grotesque proportions against the all-white environment.
“Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!” the second orderly was bellowing, and George was bellowing back at him, spewing obscenities and slurs and now the first orderly was yelling down at Sully, into his face, “What did you do? What did you do to him?”
Hands were on him, pulling him upright. He shuffled his feet, slipped, went down, was pulled back up. “I didn’t do shit,” he shouted above the din, “I didn’t do shit! I didn’t do shit!”
They were dragging him out of the room, his feet sliding. He could see Sly and Uncle Reggie and the rest of them down the hall, staring. Now George, looking straight at him from the back of his cell, bellowing over the shoulders of the orderly, “Ice picks! Ice picks! Freeman! Ice picks!!”
TWENTY-NINE
HE PLAYED THE tape, and replayed it, and replayed it, leaning forward from the backseat in the car so that Sly and Lionel could hear. They were driving out of the place, the gate swinging up, and they were back in the land of the relatively sane, heading down the hill. The sun was too bright. They were merging into midday traffic. Sully’s head was killing him.
“Shit,” said Lionel. Which, for him, constituted a soliloquy.
Sly didn’t even turn around. “I told you. Crazy people. What did I tell you about crazy people.”
“The sound and the fury,” Sully muttered, rewinding the tape yet again, like the man was going to say something different this time.
“Sound of bullshit, you mean.”
“Look, what does he say there? Everybody’s yelling like the place is on fire. ‘Free ice picks’? ‘Free, man, ice picks’? ‘Freeman’s ice picks’? I can’t hear shit. You roll that window up?”
Sly gave a half glare back over the seat, leaned forward to roll his window up and then turned up the AC.
“Can’t hear with that thing blowing, either.”
This time, the full glare, Sly turning in the seat to look back at him, leaving the AC just where it was. “I ain’t one to tell a man how to run his business? But you know how close you came to getting busted up in there? Setting off shit like that?”
“Thought you said you had contacts,” Sully said, still holding the recorder to his ear, squinting, like narrowing his eyes would improve his hearing, “in the plural.”
“Didn’t say I ran the place. Staff. I got contacts on staff, the help. Not with the shrinks and shit. There’s what you call protocols, that ward there in particular. That fucker is celebrity of the week. Jamal had to get back to the booth to keep them from hitting the button to call the medicals. They were halfway to getting Lantigua down there.”
“Who’s Lantigua.”
“The man what runs the place. Him, you do not fuck with. They got protocols, I’m telling you. Anything funky with psycho boy there, anything with any of them in Canan, they get Lantigua on a rope.”
“You didn’t mention that.”
“Didn’t think I needed to.”
The tape. Stop, rewind, pause, play. Again, pressing the tiny speaker to his ear. “Freeman? I think he said Freeman.”
“Lantigua’d come down there, you’d been in deep shit.”
“Me? What about you?”
“You who, Kemo Sabe? I’m a devoted nephew, visiting Unc. You, you’re—”
“The unethical hack who snuck in the place.”
“Exactly.”
Sully sat back in the seat. His shirt was half untucked, his jacket rumpled. He was lucky it didn’t get torn in that clusterfuck. Six, seven orderlies by the end, shoving him against the wall, Jamal yelling at Sly to get him out get him out get him out, the fuck was this even about.
Lionel took them down 295, across the river, bringing them the back way onto Capitol Hill on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Capitol lay up ahead, the neighborhood around them sagging two- and three-story town houses, gloomy child-care centers, check-cashing joints, a thrift store. They were, he realized dully, taking him back to his house. Josh would be there. Or would he? Didn’t he say they had some sort of field trip? National Cathedral?
But home, no, he didn’t want to be there. The office, no, you got to be kidding, sit in there and look at people looking at him. Alexis? And tell her what, he’d just snuck into the city’s hellhole of an insane asylum with a drug dealer and killer? No, no, no. Big boys held their water.
Restless, he punched numbers into the phone, the paper’s Research desk. Susan, picking it up, sounding jumpy when he said hey. She said she was all over the family research, okay, and he jumped in, knowing he was just going to make it worse.
“Look, I hear you. I hear you. Do me a solid, though, one more? You in front of your computer? Great, that’s great. Okay, look up the name Freeman, like free man, and ice picks. You get any hits on that?” She went on for a minute until he said, “Yes, I mean, for real.”
He waited, looking out at the city, until she picked the phone back up and said, “Jesus, Sully, what is wrong with you?”
“Lots. What do you mean?”
“The pictures.”
He waited, but she didn’t elaborate. He could hear the keyboard clacking somewhere in the background, pictured her at her desk, the far back right of the newsroom, lost in a corner, a shot glass with Hershey’s kisses in them, pictures of her dog, Frank.
Finally, he said, “What pictures we talking about here?”
“I don’t even . . . okay, I can’t look at this.”
“Susan, hey? I got no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Lobotomies. Walter Jackson Freeman II, M.D., pioneer of.”
“I don’t get this.”
Clicking on the keyboard, silence. “He was the research director at St. E’s.”
Sully rocked forward in his backseat, leaning forward from the hips, his forearms coming down on his knees, forehead nearly hitting the back of Lionel’s bucket seat. “You’re saying some lobotomy lunatic worked in Washington?”
“Yeah,” she said, still reading. “Look at this. His papers are at George Washington University, just up the street.”
THIRTY
“YOU WANT TO see the pictures?”
He was halfway sitting down in the chair and Jerry, the grad student manning the special collections library in the G.W. archives, was setting out the brown boxes of Walter J. Freeman’s catalogued papers on a table in front of him.
He’d had to convince Lionel and Sly to bring him across town, Sly bitching the whole way that if he had wanted to get over to Foggy Bottom, he shoulda said so. They could have taken 395 around to Maine Avenue, come up past the monuments, by the Watergate, like that. But now, Sully being disorganized as shit, now they were slogging through town, red light, red light, red light, and Lionel going hey, where exactly is the G.W. Library.
“Just, like, Twenty-first or Twenty-second, I’ll find it from there.”
“Twenty-first or Twenty-second and what?” Lionel said
“I don’t know. H, I, somewhere. Just go up Pennsy
lvania.”
“Did you see a taxi sign on the top of my car?” Sly said.
“You don’t want me to cut down Constitution?” Lionel said.
Like that, the whole way.
Then, it turned out, the Freeman stuff wasn’t in the library. It was in the medical archives, which was upstairs, which you needed a pass for, which he had to stand in line to get. His headache was a good solid throb by then. Once upstairs, an August afternoon, school not started, he was the only customer in the shoe-box-sized reception area.
Now he sat at his small wooden table, like he was back in fourth grade. The instructions for handling archival material and the rate sheet for copies were at his right. His notebook on the left. Good God. He just needed a lunch box and a cubby.
Standing in front of him was Jerry, the only employee in sight, sporting a playful smile, hamming it up, still on about pictures this, pictures that. Sully guessed Jerry here was probably giddy just to have another living humanoid to yammer at. Stuck in here all day in a windowless reception room on the eleventh floor, nothing but rows of shelves with medical records behind you.
“We’re talking about the transorbital things? The transorbital lobotomy?” Sully said, cocking an eyebrow. “I think I’m good just—”
“No, no. Man, not those. Those, you can see on the Internet. I’m talking about the pictures.”
“Okay, okay,” Sully said.
“The autopsy ones,” Jerry said brightly. Kid was all but bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Everybody always does.”
“Everybody?”
“Look here,” and Jerry was standing beside him, Mr. Super Helpful, pulling open a file box, knowing right where to look. “Freeman, he was sort of a genius, kind of P. T. Barnum. Absolutely into studying the insane. Research director at St. E’s back in the twenties. He was thinking phrenology at the time, like measuring people’s heads, bumps on them, and it would tell you about their mentality.”
“Is this going to involve bleeding people with leeches?”
Jerry, ignoring him. “But you don’t know how he measured them.”
“I’m guessing this is the point in the story where you show me.”
Jerry pulled out a folder, flipped through it and then slipped a glossy in front of him. At first Sully thought he’d handed him the wrong picture. These were not corpses because they were standing upright. Then his eyes focused and saw they were dead. Naked. Dangling from what appeared to be meat hooks.
“What—”
“Freeman wanted to measure them, but you don’t get violently insane people to sit still, right? So, autopsies. For whatever reason, he wanted to do it with them standing up. So he would get an assistant and they’d put clamps in their ears, like ice tongs? Then they hooked the tongs to a steel cable. That ran on a hydraulic lift to the top of the room. Then they’d turn on the crank and haul them up in the air, like carcasses at the slaughterhouse. They’d swing them over to the wall, see here, where they had this grid, for measurement.”
Sully blinked and looked at the picture again. He took the folder from Jerry, spreading the photographs, dozens of them, across the table. Men and women, white and black. The bodies were misshapen, bloated, twisted from sclerosis, nearly skeletal, arms limp. They hung like puppets. Greasy hair and long beards, thick body hair, sagging breasts, floating penises, spines hunched or legs splayed. But it was the faces that drew him in. Mouths open, eyes finally closed to a lifetime of mental agony, jaws pulled to one side or another as if trying to speak some lost syllable from the land of beyond, gaps in the teeth or missing altogether, the cheeks hollow, tongues lolling. Their ears flattened and pulled up to grotesque angles by the metal clamps.
“I don’t even, what, are all these lobotomies?”
Jerry perched on the edge of the table, already looking in another box, pulling out more files. “No, no. Lobotomies were later. But Freeman? He still loved him some pictures. Here.”
These were eight-by-ten portraits of men and women looking into the camera. Black-and-white images, some of them smiling, some not, some blank and seemingly unaware they were being photographed.
“These, now, are the before and after lobotomy portraits. The man did his documentation.”
“He worked here, that’s how you guys wound up with his stuff?”
“Yes. No. He had his own clinic in town. He was a researcher at St. E’s. Later on, he was an adjunct or an associate here at G.W. I never can remember. Freeman and his partner, a surgeon, did the first lobotomy in the United States, right here at G.W. Then everybody did. Yale. Johns Hopkins.”
“Yale did lobotomies?”
“Sure. This was cutting-edge stuff, man. This was the nineteen forties, the early fifties. Before Thorazine? The best you could do with paranoid schizophrenics, the catatonically depressed—and I mean, for, like, all of recorded history—was warehouse them. This was a big step up from demonic possession. Doctors back then, they fell over themselves, congratulating each other on being so humane. St. Elizabeths was its own village. People stayed for twenty years, forty. Hydrotherapy, wrap them in warm towels, let ’em play in the dirt. Then, shazam, the lobotomy! Schizophrenics calmed down. The violent became manageable. Well, some of them. A lot went home as drooling vegetables. A lot of them died.”
“This, this is . . . I don’t even know.” He was still looking at the portraits.
Jerry bounced a pencil on the desk, off the eraser, and caught it. “Is it? What do we do with brain cancer patients today? Targeted radiation. Destroy part of the brain in the hope of saving the rest of it. Patients know that radiation, chemo, is going to make their hair fall out and make them spew vomit like Linda Blair, and they’ll pay for the privilege. It’s the best thing money can buy. It’s the best science can offer. And if you don’t? You die right now. So it’s not that much different, you think about it.”
Sully shook his head. “I guess. I mean—”
“The prefrontal lobotomy, the guy who thought of that? Awarded the Nobel Prize. It was very dramatic, very invasive. They partially shaved the head, drilled the skull open in several places. That’s your prefrontal lobotomy. But Freeman, our boy Walter? He knew that the skull was weakest right at the top of the eye socket. You could get through that by hitting an ice pick with a hammer, then—don’t look at me like that—then waggle it back and forth, and cut the nerves. He could do in ten minutes, in his office. Knocked you out with a jolt of electroshock, wham wham, and you were done. No more shaved head, full anesthesia, power drills.”
Sully sat up, tapping the desk. “Wait wait—you said ‘ice pick.’”
“Sure. That was the transorbital. His big contribution to science. It was like a fad. You know, like when Prozac first came out and everybody you knew started taking it?”
“Ice picks.”
“Look, no disrespect, you don’t seem to be getting this. Some lobotomized patients left the asylum, went back to work, their families. A little diminished, a little flat, but they were home. This hadn’t happened before. Like, in recorded history. Astounding. The miracle cure. It was on the cover of magazines, of science journals. Even JFK’s sister was lobotomized.”
“The ice pick is—”
“Rosemary. I thought everybody knew this story. She had some mild mental disability. It got worse when she was at a convent school, here in Washington. She was sneaking out, as I recall, and there was some concern she’d wind up pregnant. Joe, the old man, thought Freeman was a genius. Lots of people did. So Joe sent her over to Freeman for a transorbital, there in his Connecticut Avenue office. It went bad. Rosemary was mentally destroyed.”
“You’re saying the sister of a sitting president of the United States had a doctor drive an ice pick into her brain and people were surprised it didn’t turn out well.”
“John, he wasn’t president then. This was in the early 1940s. I think. But yes. Freeman
went in above the eyeball, under the eyelid. See?” He leaned forward, pushing his eyelid up to display the fleshy strip above it, then let go, blinking. “He was trying to sever the connections between the medial thalamus and the ventromedial part of the frontal lobes. Cut the cords and voilà! No more crazy emotions! Just a quick tap up through the eye sockets. That was how you could recognize the recently lobotomized—they had huge black eyes. The way people with chemo now go bald, like that. He would give them sunglasses. A parting gift.”
“I got this headache, man. I think I’m going to throw up.”
“People often did, watching the procedure.”
“You seem to know a lot about this.”
“If one is interested in mental illness in America, one does. Freeman made lobotomy trips across the country. He’d show up at a state’s mental hospital and do twenty in an afternoon. He’d do the nervous housewives of the well-to-do.”
Sully, looking up now. “Oklahoma? He go through Oklahoma?”
Jerry shrugged. “Possibly. In the summers—by then, he was teaching here at G.W.—he’d barnstorm from here to California. A real evangelist. People would be stuck out there in small-town America with their depressed relatives—and then the great Dr. Freeman would come to town! He was a big name. People would bring their spouses, kids.”
“You are not going to sit there and tell me he drove an ice pick into the brains of children.”
“As young as eight. But see these pictures? No, the other ones. Those. They’re from South Dakota. That’s from the state hospital. He wasn’t happy with what the superintendents brought him.”
The photographs spread in front of him were grim. Faces of men, bent, gnarly as a tree root, pale, near hairless, twisted into a state so severe that Sully suddenly saw them on their own death tables, the undertaker having to break the legs to make them fit in the coffin.
“The superintendents would tend to bring him wards of the state, over sixty-five, all of them lifers, so if it was a disaster, who, really, was going to complain? Freeman wanted younger patients. Those on whom he could demonstrate improvement. So he took their portrait before the lobotomy and, when he caught up with them later, on his trip the next year or whatever, he’d take it again.”