by Jan Carson
The truth was a much lonelier horror. As the months progressed Magda Blue saw less and less of her husband. She ate her meals alone, watching reruns of I Love Lucy on the television set she’d installed at one end of the kitchen table. The freezer was bursting with Tupperware servings of pot roast and spaghetti dinners, lovingly prepared in anticipation of a husband who never came home. After a few months, the freezer refused to swallow any more of her false hopes and Magda quit cooking. She ate grilled cheese for dinner as well as lunch and swelled to twice her normal weight. She gave up on the gloomy Russians and began thieving Mills and Boon novels from the Romance section, silently berating her own stupidity when the racy sections got her hot and bothered in an empty bed. When the loneliness became too much for Magda, she lifted the telephone and cried for hours into the handset, her sobs harmonizing with the dialing tone. The act of pressing a telephone receiver to her ear helped her pretend that someone out there was listening. On good weeks Trip came home once, maybe twice. On bad weeks Magda felt like a widow.
On the rare occasions when her husband appeared on the lawn, squinting at his own front door like an out-of-state visitor, Magda hid her fury from the neighbors, greeting him with arms and eyes and a carefully painted smile. Once she had him over the threshold Magda was a landslide. She could not help herself.
‘Is it another woman?’ she’d ask as Trip threw a duffel bag of laundry at her feet and fell exhausted into bed.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he’d reply.
‘Drugs? Drink? Gambling?’
Labored silence.
‘What then, Trip? I haven’t seen you in days. What have you been doing?’
‘Research,’ he’d reply and immediately fall into a deep, comatose slumber, often drifting in and out of consciousness for thirty-six hours at a time. When he awoke he’d expect her to make love to him, silently and without preamble or afterthought. Whilst Trip would always instigate the physical moments of their marriage, he never seemed entirely present in the act. Squirming under the weight of her husband, Magda felt less a person and more a collection of muscles and organs, straining and constraining in strict obedience to their biological function. Every movement felt like an incision. Even their climaxes were mechanical, like factory parts, forced to release unnecessary pressure. Their exchanges began to resemble a suburban hit and run. It was impossible, she soon realized, for her husband to leave his science in the hospital.
Two hours after waking, having showered, repacked his duffel bag and consumed an enormous breakfast, Trip Blue would always be gone. Over the years Magda tried everything to make her husband talk. She hung over his breakfast plate, skillet in hand. She crossed her legs and played the miserly lover. She yelled and screamed and cried her eyelids bloody red. Yet she could not force her husband to divulge so much as a cursory overview of what his so-called ‘research’ entailed.
When first enlisted, Trip Blue himself had never heard of H Wing. His career compass was firmly stuck on big time success and as such he fully anticipated a lifetime of cutting-edge neurosurgery. America had other plans for Trip Blue. His futuristic grade average had attracted the attention of a specialized division of the US Army’s Medical Corps. Ignoring the express advice of young Trip’s academic tutor who’d noted in the boy a streak of something cold and opportunistic, this group of highly trained men, and a single, somewhat masculine woman, had summoned Trip to the Pentagon on the morning after his graduation ceremony. Trip Blue had obliged unquestioningly. He’d always known himself to be a genius and had waited years for just such a phone call. Over a three-day period, during which he was only allowed to speak to his interrogators by telephone, Trip was held in a sterile, constantly lit room and grilled mercilessly until his captors – satisfied that he was in fact the bona fide genius his resume suggested – offered him vast amounts of money to relocate to Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Trip Blue accepted on the spot. The money meant nothing to him, the location, less; but the research project had him salivating the second it slid across the table, sandwiched inconspicuously within a manila folder, stamped ‘Classified’. Returning to campus, Trip hired a U-Haul, packed up his wife, his textbooks and the few worldly possessions he’d accumulated over three years of medical school and drove through the night, arriving early the next evening at the crumbling military hospital on the outskirts of Phoenixville.
For the next four years Trip Blue sacrificed himself on the tiled corridors of H Wing. He went days without eating, allowing his hair to go unkempt and uncut for months on end. Whilst no actual infidelity ever occurred, Trip forgot about his wife. He felt like a man adrift, teetering on the edge of something tremendous. The Treatment Room consumed every second of his waking thoughts and, more often than not, left deep indentations on his dream life.
The Treatment Room nestled in the crook of H Wing’s two wards. The left ward housed some twenty-four Terminal cases in four open dorms, each containing six cots arranged to afford the best angle at a solitary television set, wall-mounted. To the right, twenty-four Delusionals were kept in single-cell rooms, locked and bolted for their own safety. Each of H Wing’s forty-eight residents, and the majority of the doctors and nurses, had recently returned from Vietnam. All staff members, save the cleaning staff – daily visitors from the civilian world – knew better than to mention the war. Instead they changed bandages, emptied drains and three times daily positioned a tray of nutritionally balanced gloop upon their patients’ laps.
Only a handful of these trained professionals had been granted access to the Treatment Room. The others, those individuals too inexperienced or untrustworthy to handle classified information, satiated their curiosity with staff room speculation about the constant stream of patients entering and exiting the Treatment Room. An eight digit punch code ensured that all but the highest ranking staff members had no idea what was happening on the other side of the double-thick door. Despite his medical pedigree Trip Blue had been working on H Wing subservient to the whims of a particularly forbidding consultant, known locally as God, for the better part of six months before he was entrusted with the eight precious digits.
God had invented the Treatment Room. The idea had come to him during his fifth tour of duty. God had always been a soldier. Even after four visits to Vietnam he’d been unable to settle back into the civilian world of shopping malls and washing machines and had requested a transfer back to Saigon. Vietnam was no longer the draw it had been five years previously. Less than a week after approaching his commanding officer, God was back on the Ho Chi Minh trail enjoying the atmosphere. The odds were against him. Most soldiers didn’t survive a second visit and God was now contemplating his fifth consecutive summer in the East.
Fate caught up with him when he was least expecting it. One minute he’d been taking a leak behind the burnt-out remains of a Vietnamese hut, the next minute, still shaking the last drops of piss from his rapidly wilting penis, he’d found himself staring into the slanty black eyes of a pair of gun-toting VC. The rest of God’s unit, riddled with bullets and bayonet holes, were in various states of decease as he was dragged, cursing the entire Oriental race, to a rudimentary prisoner of war camp on the jungle’s edge.
God was to spend the next eighteen months locked in a bamboo cage. With barely enough room for a single man to sit comfortably, the addition, two days after his incarceration, of an emaciated young private from Tennessee meant that the two men were forced to take turns standing and sitting. God was further frustrated to find his cellmate entirely ignorant of any conversation subject beyond the sports arena. ‘Jesus, son,’ the older man was often heard yelling, ‘just my goddamn luck to get myself locked up with a halfwit redneck.’ The boy could only shrug limply, for the bamboo roof impeded any sort of dynamic movement and, in lieu of conversation, offer to stand for an extra half hour. When he finally succumbed to the Vietnamese torture techniques and his wild, nocturnal yabberings got him shot right in front of God’s eyes, the older man was somewhat relieved. Lying
diagonally, he could now sleep almost fully reclined and was finally able to think, unencumbered by the teenager’s constant commentary on the baseball games of his youth.
God marked the weeks in fingernail slithers and kept this rudimentary calendar in the breast pocket of his army shirt. By the third month he’d grown used to the perpetual itch of disembodied nails scratching at his rib cage. God grew thin. On an in-breath he could distinguish all but the lowest ribs protruding through his skin. He developed a perpetual leg twitch, a grimy, hacking cough, diarrhea, foot rot and an energetic colony of lice in either armpit, but he did not die. As the weeks turned to months, God became more and more convinced that Vietnam would not be his undoing. There was no justification for this belief. God was older, thinner and grumpier by far than any of his fellow prisoners, yet he remained convinced of his own immortality.
As he lay on the floor of his cell, the bamboo slats turning him slowly corrugated, God watched in horror as dozens of young Americans passed through the camp and within a matter of days, sometimes even hours, lost the will to live. Seemingly fit and healthy young bucks, half his age or less, were so terrified by the possibility of VC torture the damage was done long before the ropes or irons came out to play. Whilst God gritted his teeth through terrible beatings and deprivations, many of his fellow soldiers capitulated at the merest mention of tooth pulling. The effect, once noted, was undeniable; the correct words, even when uttered in a barely discernible pidgin English, could suck the life right out of a man. Thick-chested quarterbacks and wrestlers began to disintegrate as soon as the camp’s ‘welcome committee’ uttered their customary speech for newcomers (‘You want to die quick man … you want to die much slow?’) whilst weedy little SOBs from the suburbs seemed impervious to all but the most brutally physical torture techniques. The mind was much more complex than God had ever imagined. Some strange connection existed between the barely perceivable blips inside a man’s brain and the actual bones and muscles which kept him human from one minute to the next.
Though only moderately scientific, God began to hypothesize. The right sentiments, carefully spoken, could catch inside a man, resonating with his deepest subconscious understanding of himself. An apparently healthy man would curl up and die if the desire to admit defeat was lodged somewhere inside his subconscious. It was impossible to spot such a fault line from the outside. Cripples and crazy men appeared no more inclined to give up than the blond-blessed healthy. God began to ask questions. If death words could draw the life right out of a man, might there be other words – healing, healthy, life-rich words – which could stir the spirits up and appeal to those who had not yet made a pact with despair? He tested this theory on the men in the cell directly in front of his. Over a five-week period, all but one of these boys died, victims of the relentless cruelty of the Vietnamese guards. The final kid, a mere slip of a nineteen-year-old, refused to join them. The left side of his body was red-raw and blistering, covered in napalm burns. His left arm hung awkwardly at an angle which suggested permanent dislocation. His eyes were saucers circulating an emaciated face and yet while the VC dragged him out daily for a fresh round of beatings, God watched on in amazement as the kid – subject to his own fledgling experiments – seemed to grow stronger each day.
Each time their captors were out of earshot God would press his face into the space between the bamboo bars of his cage and holler encouraging sentiments across the ten-foot gulf which separated his cell from the next.
‘You’re getting better every day, son.’
‘Your skin is healing. Your bones are setting. You’re growing fat as a Thanksgiving turkey.’
‘You’ll be one hundred percent fighting fit by the weekend.’
And the kid, without ever acknowledging assent, simply got better. His blistered skin smoothed over. His arm slipped back into the socket and began to bend like a regular arm. His cheeks, which had succumbed to the cavernous limitations of a boiled rice diet, began to fill out, exposing a handsome midwestern face, albeit positively filthy. Bolstered by this success, God began experimenting on the cells to left, right and center back. Positive results were few and far between. Three out of every four test cases ended up in the funeral pit at the back of the camp. However, the success stories were so dramatic, so unbelievably astounding, God refused to be discouraged. Blind soldiers had their sight returned. The lame, though far too cramped to leap, experienced a miraculous increase in movement. Lungs unclogged and breathed openly for the first time since they’d arrived in the East.
By the time the boys from home kicked in the gates of the camp, liberating the remaining twenty-five prisoners and allowing God to stand upright for the first time in eighteen months, he’d all but invented the Treatment Room in his head. It would take some six months of convincing to persuade the United States Army to grant research privileges to a man with no previous medical experience, and the project would require Top Secret classification to guard against the possibility of embarrassing mistakes, but the notion of post-conflict treatment which was both successful and virtually cost free was too tempting to pass over. God found himself dispatched to the armpit of Pennsylvania where he built a prototype Treatment Room: a closet-sized compartment (roughly the shape and size of his Vietnamese cell), walled on all four sides and ceiling with thick, shatterproof mirrors. Once completed, God opened the doors of his Treatment Room and welcomed in a steady stream of broken soldiers.
Oftentimes against their will, for the Treatment Room was disturbingly reminiscent of a prison cell, God locked his patients up with a 360-degree revelation of their most honest selves. Whilst they considered themselves from front, back, floor and roof, he spoke gentle yet firm words, carefully prepared. After a few weeks it became clear that the patients did not require personalized encouragements. A simple pre-recorded ‘WISE UP’ piped through a speaker system was enough to pique a man’s deepest subconscious. These two words were bullets for the dying patients, whether they were aware of their own limited mortality or not. At the other end of the spectrum, God recorded incredible advances in the conditions of those patients not yet ready to give up.
‘It’s the truth,’ God explained to a somewhat bewildered Trip Blue on his first day in Phoenixville. ‘It’s not mind control. It’s not hypnotism. We’re just peeling back the layers and letting them see themselves for what they really are. If a man’s ready to give up, the Treatment Room’ll give him the right to do it with dignity. If a man’s fit to fight it out, the Treatment Room’ll give him the balls to keep going.’
The results spoke for themselves. The Delusionals (H Wing slang for the soldiers who believed themselves better than they actually were) managed an average of two to three sessions before they simply closed their eyes and passed away, freeing up valuable hospital beds for the Terminals, a great group of men who, whilst physically scuppered, responded so positively to the Treatment Room they often began a session wheelchair-bound and ten minutes later waltzed out of the room, significantly mended.
‘The mind,’ God was wont to remind his staff at every given opportunity, ‘controls the body,’ and the ever-growing list of soldiers with baby skin where they’d once had burns, with legs and arms sprouting from the roots of hastily executed amputations, and bold, Magic Marker tattoos reminding them to ‘wise up’ scrawled on biceps and forearms, bore witness to this very fact. Trip Blue could not believe his own good fortune. He’d stumbled into the epicenter of cutting-edge medical research.
The Treatment Room did not surprise him. During his first months on H Wing, marking time as he waited on an eight-digit punch code, Trip had spent entire weekends camped out in the laundry closet wading through a Babel tower of medical textbooks and research papers. Psychological manipulation was no new phenomenon. Unscrupulous individuals and organizations had been exposing the minds of their enemies to diabolical torture techniques for centuries. Under pressure the human brain was pliable as unset Jell-O, inclined to conform to any loudly persistent message. Mind con
trol had been around since the birth of humanity. However, the concept of manipulating the psyche to enhance or confound healing was something entirely new. Trip Blue was delighted to find himself tottering on the edge of tomorrow’s world. Within a matter of weeks the Treatment Room and its prodigal patients had come to monopolize his every waking thought.
He worked forty-eight hour shifts, alternating his sleep patterns to complement God’s so the Treatment Room could be manned around the clock. Science offered a framework for their research, war provided justification, and overleaping curiosity, fuel. Yet at the centre of the Treatment Room there remained a tight little miracle, impossible to quantify or explain. Medicine could claim no plausible explanation for the indefinable element which made one man susceptible to healing and the man in the next bed doomed. In the three years Trip Blue spent on H Wing, observing, collating and accumulating lever arch folders full of fastidious notes, he never once came close to understanding this mystery. Trip Blue was a logical man. Science was his religion. Not knowing bothered him dreadfully and it was this insatiable need to know which would drive him, almost twenty years after H Wing, to build his own rudimentary version of the Treatment Room and recommence his experiments on the elderly residents of the Baptist Retirement Village. Trip Blue would tell no one – neither his nursing staff, nor the middle-aged children who’d consigned their aging parents to his care, nor the doddering seniors themselves – what he was orchestrating in the Center’s broom closet.