by Steve Toltz
As I dropped my bag on the single bed, Mrs. French said, “You’ll be happy here.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said back. I don’t like people telling me when and where I am to be happy. That’s not even for me to decide.
“So what now? Do I get my one phone call?” I asked.
“This isn’t prison, Kasper.”
“We’ll see.”
I telephoned Eddie to see if I could stay with him. He admitted that he had overstayed his visa and was illegal and therefore unable to make any application to be my legal guardian. I called Anouk’s house to hear her flatmate tell me what I already knew- she was still sunning herself in a Buddhist meditation center in Bali and wasn’t due home until her money ran out. I was stuck. I hung up the phone and went back to my little slab of darkness and cried. I’d never thought negatively about my future until that moment. I think that’s the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your own potential.
There wasn’t a lock on the door, but I managed to wedge the chair under the handle. I sat awake all night, waiting for that ominous rattle. At about three in the morning I fell asleep, so I can only assume they came to sexually abuse me when I was far gone, dreaming of oceans and the horizons I would never reach.
IV
The next day, accompanied by Mrs. French, I went to see Dad. I admit, shamefully, that when we hopped in the car I was excited. I’d never been inside a mental hospital- was it like in the movies, with a symphony of high-pitched inhuman screams? I even went as far as to hope the patients were not too heavily sedated to bang wooden spoons against the back of saucepans.
In the car on the way, I didn’t say anything. Mrs. French kept glancing at me impatiently, irritated that I wasn’t pouring out my heart to her. Silence dogged us all the way to the hospital. She pulled over at the newsagent’s and said, “Why don’t you pick up your father some magazines to read?” and she gave me $10. I went inside and thought: What does a man who’s fallen off the brink want to read? Pornography? Entertainment news? I picked up an equestrian magazine but put it down again. That wasn’t right. In the end I settled for a book of puzzles, mazes, anagrams, and teasers to give his brain a workout.
Inside the hospital we heard the kind of frenzied screams you generally associate with boiling rivers of blood. Stepping out of the elevator, I could see patients walking aimlessly through the corridors, legs twitching, tongues hanging out, mouths open wide as if at the dentist’s. I could see something yellow in their eyes. I could smell a smell unlike any smell I’ve ever smelled. These were people who had been tossed in the darkness, human leftovers starring in their own nightmares, covered in flimsy white gowns, their psyches poking through like ribs. They were the embers of a fire dying out. Where in the world could they go where they made sense?
The doctors walked briskly on the way to strip the patients of their crazy laughter. I studied the faces of the nurses: how could they work here? They must be either sadists or saints. They couldn’t be anything else, but could they be both? They and the doctors looked tired: draining heads of wrong ideas is obviously an exhausting business.
I thought: What human thing could emerge out of this edifice of violent nightmares and say, “OK, now back to work!”?
The nurse at reception sat eerily still with a pained expression, as if bracing herself for a punch in the face.
“Jasper Dean to see Martin Dean,” I said.
“Are you family?”
When I didn’t say anything for a while, she said, “I’ll call Dr. Greg.”
“I hope that’s his last name.”
She picked up a phone and paged Dr. Greg. I searched Mrs. French’s face for some acknowledgment that I hadn’t referred to myself as Kasper. If she had heard me, she wasn’t giving anything away.
A couple of minutes later, Dr. Greg arrived, looking sharp, smiling like someone who thinks he is always well liked, especially at first sight.
“I’m glad you’re here. Your father won’t talk to us,” he announced.
“And?”
“And I was wondering if you could come into the room and help us out.”
“If he doesn’t want to talk to you, it means he doesn’t care what you think. My presence won’t change that.”
“Why doesn’t he care what I think?”
“Well, you probably said things to him like ‘We’re on your side, Mr. Dean,’ and ‘We’re here to help you.’ ”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Look. You’re a psychiatrist, right?”
“And?”
“He’s read books written by your predecessors: Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Fromm, and Becker. Those guys. You need to convince him that you’re cut from the same cloth.”
“Well, I’m not Freud.”
“And there’s your problem right there.”
Mrs. French waited in the reception area while I followed the doctor through the gloomy corridors and the opening and closing of countless locked doors. We got to Dad’s room and he unlocked it with a key. Inside was a single bed, a desk, a chair, and half-chewed morsels of indefinable food mangled on a plate. Dad stood with his back to us, staring out the window. Watching him was like looking at a naked tree in winter.
“Look, Martin. Your son’s here to see you,” Dr. Greg said.
When he turned, I let out a little gasp. It looked as if all the bones and muscles in his face had been taken out.
“How are you?” I asked, as if we were meeting for the first time. He stepped forward with the dazed look of a mother after childbirth.
Any vow of silence Dad had taken he abandoned at the sight of me. “Jasper. Listen. You can never really kill your old selves. They lie there in a mass grave, buried alive, one on top of the other, waiting for the opportunity for resurrection, and then, because they’ve once been dead, they drive you like a zombie, as they themselves are zombies. Do you see what I’m getting at? All your old failures squirming to life!”
I looked over at Dr. Greg and said, “You wanted him talking. Well, he’s talking.”
Dad sucked in his lip as a sign of defiance. I went over to him and whispered, “Dad, you have to get out of here. They’ve got me in a state-run home. It’s horrible.”
He didn’t say anything. Dr. Greg didn’t say anything either. I looked around the room and thought it was the worst possible environment for a collapsed mind, as it would give him more time to reflect, and if his disease had a cause, it was excessive reflection; too much thinking had broken his brain. I looked back at Dr. Greg: he was leaning against the desk, as if watching a play where none of the actors knew whose turn it was to speak.
“Here. I brought you something,” I said, handing Dad the book of puzzles. He gave me a sad glance as he took it and then began studying the book and making little “hmm” sounds.
“A pencil,” he said in a scratchy whisper, holding out his hand without looking up.
I stared at Dr. Greg until he reluctantly fished in his shirt pocket and handed me a pencil as delicately as if it were a machete. I gave it to Dad. He opened the book and started going through the first maze. I tried to think of something to say, but I didn’t come up with anything other than “You’re welcome,” even though he hadn’t said thank you.
“Done,” he said to himself when he finished.
“Martin,” Dr. Greg said. Dad flinched, turned the page, and started on the second maze. From where I sat the book was upside down, and I got dizzy watching him.
After a minute he said, “Too easy,” turned the page, and began to tackle the third maze. “They get progressively harder as you go through the book,” he said to no one.
He was now attacking the puzzles compulsively. Dr. Greg gave me a look as if to say, “What made you give a mentally confused man a compendium of conundrums?” and I had to agree I would’ve done much better with my first instinct, to buy porn.
“Eddie says you can come back to work when you’re ready,�
�� I said.
Without looking up, Dad said, “Son of a bitch.”
“He’s being pretty good to you, I think, considering you smashed up his club.”
“The first day I met him in Paris he offered me money, then he offered me a job. Then he found me a job. Then later he followed me here to Australia and gave me money to feed you. Not much, a hundred here, a hundred there, but he keeps helping me out.”
“Sounds like you have a very good friend,” Dr. Greg said.
“What do you know about it?” Dad snapped.
Enough of this small talk, I thought. I walked close to Dad and tried whispering in his ear again. “Dad, I need you to get out of here. They’ve put me in a home.” He didn’t say anything, and turned to the last maze in the book and started working through it. “It’s dangerous. Some guy made a pass at me,” I lied.
He still didn’t say anything, only scrunched up his face in annoyance, not at my distasteful lie but at the puzzle he was failing to solve.
“Martin,” Dr. Greg chimed in, “don’t you want to look at your son?”
“I know what he looks like,” Dad said.
It was clear that Dr. Greg’s lacerating mediocrity was suffocating Dad. The doctor was treading the unlit terrain of Dad’s mind with muddy boots, trampling over everything, understanding nothing. As I said, Dad wanted to be prodded by a Freud or a Jung, and if there was no further evidence of his unhinged mind, expecting that an undiscovered genius would be languishing here in this state-run hovel was proof enough.
He was still having trouble with the last maze. His pencil worked through it, but he kept hitting dead ends. “What the fuck?” he said. He was grinding his teeth so loudly we could hear it.
“Martin, why don’t you put the book away and talk to your son?”
“Shut up!”
Suddenly Dad jumped up and stamped his foot. He grabbed a chair and held it above his head, breathing so deeply his whole body heaved. “Get me out of here now!” he screamed, waving the chair in the air.
“Put it down!” Dr. Greg shouted. “Jasper, don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said, although I was a little afraid. “Dad,” I said, “don’t be a dickhead.”
Then the reinforcements arrived, like they do in the movies. An orderly ran in and grabbed Dad and pushed him onto the table. Another grabbed me and pushed me out of the room. I could still see Dad through the little window in the door. The orderlies had him pinned to the table and were sticking a needle in his arm. He was kicking and screaming; whatever was in that needle was taking its time. Dad’s stubborn hyped-up metabolism was slow to react, his agitation far too electric. Then I couldn’t see his face because one of the orderlies was in the way, and I thought how when the apocalypse comes there’s bound to be someone with big hair standing in front of me. Finally the orderly moved to the side, and I saw that Dad was all slobbery and drowsy and medicated into ambivalence. When, a couple of spasms later, he was blissfully at peace, Dr. Greg came out to talk to me. His face was red and sweaty, and I detected a subtle look of exhilaration behind his eyes, as if he were saying to himself, “This is what it’s all about!”
“You can’t keep him here!” I shouted.
“Actually, we can.”
He showed me some paperwork. There was plenty of technical mumbo jumbo. I couldn’t understand it. It was all pretty dull. Even the font was boring.
“Listen. What will it take to get him out of here?”
“He needs to be better than he is now.”
“Well, fuck, can you be more specific?”
“More balanced. We need to be confident he’s not going to do any harm to himself, or to you, or to others.”
“And how do you intend to do that? Be specific, now.”
“By getting him to talk to me. And by medicating him to maintain his stability.”
“This all sounds time-consuming.”
“It isn’t going to happen overnight.”
“Well, how long? An estimate.”
“I don’t know, Jasper. Six months? A year? Two years? Look at him- your father’s pretty far gone.”
“Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do? Live in a fucking state-run home?”
“Don’t you have any relatives who can look after you?”
“No.”
“Uncles or aunts?”
“Dead.”
“Grandparents?”
“Dead! Dead! Everyone’s fucking dead!”
“I’m sorry, Jasper. This is just not something that can be moved along quickly.”
“It has to.”
“I don’t see how.”
“That’s because you’re an idiot,” I said, and stormed down the corridors, not stopping to contemplate the loud groaning on either side. At the reception area, Mrs. French was studiously examining her fingernails like someone who doesn’t like to be left alone with her thoughts. Those fingernails were a way out. I left her with them and crept silently to the elevator. On the way down, I thought of all the people I’d heard pompously call themselves crazy and I wished them lots and lots and lots of bad luck.
I caught a bus home. The other passengers looked as tired and worn-out as I felt. I thought about my problem: this hospital, rather than being a road to wellness, would only accelerate the decay of his body, mind, and spirit, and if Dad was going to get well, he had to get out of there, but to get out of there, he needed to be well. To get him well, I needed to discover exactly what had made him sick, the means by which he had rendered himself useless.
***
Back in the apartment I searched for Dad’s more recent notebooks. I needed an idea, and no textbook could better aid me than one he wrote himself. But I couldn’t find them. They weren’t in his wardrobe, or under his bed, or wrapped in plastic bags and hidden in the top of the toilet- none of his usual hiding places. After an hour of general ransacking, I had to admit they weren’t in the apartment at all. What had he done with them? I turned the bedroom upside-down again, which only transformed it from one state of chaos to another. Exhausted, I lay on his bed. The atmosphere reeked of Dad’s collapse, and I did my best to avoid the sticky notion that this was not the beginning of the end but the actual definitive conclusive end, the end of the end.
On Dad’s bedside table was a postcard from Anouk. It had “ Bali ” printed in bold red letters over a picture of rice workers in a field. On the other side she had written “You guys need a holiday,” and that was all. We sure did.
I rolled over. Something in his pillowcase dug into my skull. I shook the pillow- out fell a black notebook! There were 140 pages, all numbered. Okay, I was the only one who could free Dad, and this book was going to tell me how. The problem was, entering my father’s mental state implied a certain danger, because his was the kind of thinking that closed around you, not slowly or surreptitiously but quick like the snap of a rusty bear trap. My defense, then, was to read ironically, and with this in mind, I braced myself and began.
Not surprisingly, it was a profoundly uncomfortable experience, as all journeys into dissolution and madness must be. I read it through twice. There were general frustrations, as on page 88:
I have too much free time. Free time makes people think; thinking makes people morbidly self-absorbed; and unless you are watertight and flawless, excessive self-absorption leads to depression. That’s why depression is the number-two disease in the world, behind Internet porn eyestrain.
and disturbing observations pertaining to me, as on page 21:
Poor Jasper. Watching him sleep while I’m pretending to read, I don’t think he realizes yet that every day his pile of minutes lightens. Maybe he should die when I die?
and observations about himself:
My problem is I can’t sum myself up in one sentence. All I know is who I’m not. And I’ve noticed there is a tacit agreement among most people that they’ll at least try to adjust to their environment. I’ve always felt the urge to rebel against it. That’s why when
I’m in the movies and the screen goes dark I get an irresistible impulse to read a book. Luckily, I carry a pocket torch.
The most recurrent thoughts were Dad’s desire to hide, to be alone, to be isolated, not to be bothered by noise and people. The usual Dad rant. But surprisingly, there were also hints at a megalomania I hadn’t heard him articulate before, passages in his notebook that alluded to a longing to dominate and change the world- this appeared to be an evolution of his obsessive thoughts- which shed new light on his usual longing to be alone. I understood it now as a desire to have an isolated headquarters where he could plan his attack. There was, for instance, this:
No symbolic journey can take place in an apartment. There’s nothing metaphorical about a trip to the kitchen. There’s nothing to ascend! Nothing to descend! No space! No verticality! No cosmicity! We need a roomy, airy house. We need nooks and crannies and corners and hollows and garrets and staircases and cellars and attics. We need a second toilet. The essential important idea that will shift me from Thinking Man to Doing Man is impossible to apply here. The walls are too close to my head, and the distractions too many- the noise of the street, the doorbell, the telephone. Jasper and I need to move to the bush so I can lay the plans for my major task which I have lying in egg form. I am also lying in egg form. I am a halfway man, and I need a place of intense concentration if I am to whisper into a golden ear and change the face of this country.
and this:
Emerson understood! “The moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction,” he said. That’s my problem. I’m ¼ of who I should be! Maybe even 1/8th. Then he said, “The voices which we hear in solitude grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.” This is my problem exactly: I can’t hear myself! He also said, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” I can’t do this!