The Storm at the Door

by Stefan Merrill Block

  The hail, the autumn, the squirrels, everything else continues, and here is Frederick, a balding man in rumpled slacks and shirtsleeves, in a mahogany office filled with Victorian knickknacks, a tacit prisoner held for the crime of attempted truthfulness.

  Would not the world and I suffer immeasurable loss for my capitulation to “sanity”? Canon reads from Frederick’s journal.

  Canon, upon learning that his plan to display Marvin as a dire cautionary example had backfired, upon learning of the reappearance of Mango Diablo and of Lowell’s reading, issued the order he immediately understood he should have issued long before. Yes, he knows that writing therapy can be helpful; it is true that the written word can allow powerful revelations to emerge from the otherwise illegible depths of the subconscious. But, equally, writing can be—as Canon now sees that it is for so many men in Ingersoll—an escape, an indulgence to distract from the truth that therapy seeks to address. And so, the day after Lowell shared his poem, Canon had directed the orderlies to seize all the men’s journals and papers. Canon knew the men would object; he could predict their rage. And, exactly as expected, they had risen in protest, with fists as well as words, when the Crew Crew conducted the literary plunder. But Canon will explain that even this he has done only to achieve his highest aim: for the patients under his care to see the truth clearly. To see the truth with no imaginative act, no metaphor, to obscure it. To see the scarred fact of a burned body, not the abstruse transcendence of Lowell’s poetry.

  And yet it was Frederick, who knew Canon’s secret, whose journal Canon read first, and frantically. As he had feared and also expected, there it was, in plain words: the secret he had done so much, for two years, to conceal. Could Rita actually lust after that flabby blowhard? Could she love Canon? Frederick had written. But then why else would she touch him? Plain words written in a journal that anyone might have read.

  I don’t know, Frederick says. I wrote that a long time ago.

  Our words define us, do they not? By giving words to something, we can make it so.

  Frederick slumps in the sheeny leather chair; he tries to close in on himself once more. He tries to gather around himself his depressive, obliterating blackness, the nihilism that makes Canon’s judgments—and the months and months of imprisonment and ongoing financial burden to his family they promise—bearable, merely another example of the meaningless absurdity of all things. The hail beating at the window, a squirrel slipping from his copulative act and falling to his death, a man indefinitely imprisoned in a madhouse for glimpsing an act of sex—none of it, at its base, explainable. All of it is simply what happens. Frederick feels that it might require the strength of the Crew Crew to restore him to Ingersoll.

  2

  In Lowell, Canon’s theft of the journals stokes hellfire. It is nearly enough finally to drive Lowell from the hospital altogether. Lowell is, after all, one of the voluntaries, who still has that power Canon cannot take away. But Lowell is eager for the fight, to confront the chief’s plain and absolute wrong, to use his eloquence and reputation and rage to earn back for his fellow patients all that has ever made Lowell able to endure his eely electric blackness.

  Schultz surprises the others by seeming to be unmoved by the loss of his journals. But, for Schultz, all he has written amounts merely to study. The journals themselves are unimportant; what is important are the words they have allowed him to acquire. His journals are like a Berlitz language guide, abandoned now that he has arrived in the foreign place to find himself speaking almost fluently. What remains to be learned, he will learn through direct experience. With or without his journals, his work still nears completion.

  • • •

  When Canon appears for the afternoon group therapy session in his standard self-satisfied calm, the protest flares, immediately.

  Where are our books? Lowell asks in a voice straining with mock civility, the fires rising. We have a right to write.

  Write to right! squeals Bobbie in pleasure, either at the protest or at the homophony.

  Then, before the circle of his Mayflower Screwballs—all picking, scratching, muttering at the objects of their psychoses and neuroses—Lowell delivers his protest, occasionally lifting a straight, firm hand before him, striking an image that looks to Frederick like a vaguely demented variation on a Norman Rockwell painting.

  I have sat by and accepted all of your deluded stratagems, Lowell says. But this, well, it is no simple dumb tyranny like the rest. This, I hope you can see, is simply dangerous. Without our journals, what will we have? The blood will be on your hands.

  Lowell continues, enumerating famous writers (Hemingway, Woolf, Zweig) who have ended their lives when they became unable to write, quoting several poets on the absolute imperative of writing (If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad—Byron). Canon receives all of this like an attentive, purely rational academic, betraying nothing beyond curiosity. Eventually, as Lowell’s voice drops with the gravity of his Puritan patrimony—and all that will happen will be yours to take to the grave. You will see what you have done—Canon interrupts, speaking in the tone of merely a colleague engaged in simple rational discourse.

  Your knowledge of literature is extraordinary, Canon says. It’s no wonder that universities hire you to share your knowledge. But I hope you can understand that I was hired because of my expertise, my knowledge. If you can’t trust my judgments, then I don’t see how you are ever going to make any progress.

  Lowell opens his mouth, but no more words come. Fury silences the poet, and he lunges for the doctor. Two Crew Crew boys intervene, of course, restoring Lowell to his chair, pressing the poet into Canon’s audience with palms on Lowell’s shoulders. The others cry out, in protest, in solidarity, in fear, or in defiance. Canon allows a moment for the welter to untangle. He knows better than to attempt to answer his patients in their tones, knows better than to attempt to speak over them. Eventually, with the assistance of the two additional Crew Crew he has brought to this predictably contentious meeting, order is restored, as is a semblance of quiet—with the exception of the catatonics still bickering with whatever it is within themselves they bicker with.

  Don’t you see, Professor Lowell, Canon says, that it is selfish of you to disrupt the work that all of these men have to do here?

  Canon is proud of himself for this bit of improvisation, the success of which is measured by Lowell’s silence. In the wake of this reprimand, however, is the silence not only of the one problematic patient but of the group. The outrage their silence transmits pushes upon Canon, is hot against his face.

  Canon, determined yet to make a cautionary display of Marvin’s self-imposed injuries, has insisted the burned man’s cot be placed within the therapy circle. Until this moment, Marvin has not spoken; he has been discounted as likely unconscious. But then, from this tensed silence comes a voice, raspy and searing, like the hiss a match makes when extinguished in water.

  Don’t you see, Marvin says from his cot, that escape is all that makes any of this bearable?

  For a beat, Canon is as silent as the rest. Of all the protests and the accusations, it is this, the half-whisper of a burn victim, that at last seems to sway the moment to the patients’ favor. Reframe, Canon tells himself, mentally quoting The Mental Asylum. And if that fails, shift the subject.

  And how are you feeling today, Professor Schultz?

  Schultz, with the serene smile of a bodhisattva contemplating a butterfly, turns his attention to Canon.

  Me?

  I’ve taken a look at your journals, Professor. And frankly there is a lot I don’t understand. A lot that concerns me. But sometimes, I see, you mention your wife who has passed away. Irit?

  Had Canon, Frederick wonders, believed Schultz would react at all differently? Or had this been the point, another of Canon’s dumb displays? At the utterance of her name, Schultz’s face fills with something uncontainable; an irrepressible sound erupts from his mouth.

  Discount Professor Schultz. Be
lieve him psychotic. Believe all of his theories no more than schizophrenia. But, as when Marvin bellowed his anguish the night that the men of Ingersoll came to him, when Schultz now screams in his found, fundamental language, he speaks into collective being what is within him. Stanley begins to weep; even Frederick, obscured in nihilism, perceives the coming of tears. Schultz speaks the true name of mourning, a mourning for not only what Schultz has lost but what all the men of Ingersoll have lost: the old Mayflower, onto which this dystopia has been superimposed; the men’s other lives, from which they have been exiled.

  Schultz is not conscious of the Crew Crew lifting him and pulling him to his room; he is not conscious of the passage of time for over an hour. Time, for the time being, is as fragmented as memory.

  3

  The hospital is the same and it is also different. It’s 1962 and it’s also 1945. A friend from Harvard, an anthropologist, has come to take Schultz to the symbolic funeral that Dr. Wallace believes might help bring Schultz a measure of closure. The anthropologist drives him to a dim, incensed room, where his friends have hung what pictures of Irit they have found in Schultz’s office. People try to speak with Schultz, but he cannot hear their voices, not above that other language. He does not try, as he once tried, to ignore the words that speak only to him. Instead, he is searching the other language for her true name, but there is still only her human name. Irit. At a gravestone in Temple Israel’s cemetery in Wakefield, a gravestone on which his wife’s name is written, a gravestone that marks nothing but earth, a rabbi delivers the Mourner’s Kaddish. But Schultz cannot hear the Kaddish. To the chagrin of the rabbi, Schultz cannot recite the Kaddish. All of this death, opening more and more of that other language. Schultz has lost everything, and in its place another language rushes in. His mother, his father. Kokowa, Seekowa. Irit’s parents. Hakenda. Makoola. Their names rise up together, chanting with the name of their lost town of Bolbirosok, Choogama! Choogama!

  It is 1945, but it is also 1962 and 1935. The kittens cry across the Depression; the widow Abrams makes her whistling sound. His roommate’s name resonates from down the hall; the obliterated town of Bolbirosok still chants its name. Choogama! Choogama! The atmosphere above chimes its sharp ah, the stars beyond, Om.

  And then, at this moment, all sounds converge into the voice that spoke on the day of James Marshall’s suicide, on the night of the Phoenix. The death-voice speaks, louder and louder, as if in anticipation, as if a crowd eager for a famous musician’s first song. And then there is silence, and they are there.

  Ookalay. Belooka.

  They are transformed in some way, but it is unmistakably them. Ookalay. Irit. And Belooka. At last, for the first time, Schultz sees his son. His boy is here, with him, in Boston.

  Belooka. His Isaiah.

  Ookalay! Belooka! Here they are, but only for a moment. He speaks their names, and they return for the moment of speaking, but then they fade along with the words’ echoes. Ookalay! Belooka! Schultz’s vocabulary may be near complete, he may now have all the words he requires, but to complete his project, he now knows, will require the leap his Irit made unquestioningly, so simply, at all times. It is not enough to know; he must also believe.

  It’s 1962, but it’s also 1935. Schultz sits with Irit and Reb Mendelsohn in that seemingly indestructible wooden study. Reb Mendelsohn reads to his daughter and his future son-in-law the story of Babel from the Torah. And G-d came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men had built. And G-d said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Schultz is decided.

  4

  Frederick, wanting to give his roommate time to himself, spends the balance of the afternoon in the Quiet Room at the far end of the corridor, a room not unlike the solitary one in which he spent three days, but without cushioning on the walls or a lock on the door. But perhaps he has sequestered himself here not only for his roommate’s sake; perhaps Frederick simply craves the silence and the solitude of these close walls. How, he wonders as he lies on the room’s single mattress, has he ever managed to be all that he once had been? A father, a husband, a businessman. Restoring himself to any of that seems, at this moment, as unlikely as tethering himself to a stone, jumping off a bridge, and expecting not to drown. Even the walls of this asylum and the absurd protocols of Canon and his Crew Crew could never be a prison as absolute, as inescapable, as the airless cell of himself. Maybe it is for the best that Canon took his journal, so he can finally give up the false notion that he might explain himself. For the best that now he is not allowed to write; words too are only false shelters, shoddy lean-tos, blowing apart in the measureless desert.

  Frederick is surprised to find himself waking, twilight in the hallway windows. He must have slept for at least four hours.

  Before the door to his room, Frederick pauses. He hears no sound coming from within, and so he expects to find Schultz either in a rare state of sleep or, more likely, returned to his chipper work, making his notes mentally, now denied his journals.

  Instead, Frederick turns in to his room to find the professor in an avid state, bounding toward the door. When Schultz’s eyes meet Frederick’s with urgency, when Schultz’s hands clutch Frederick’s arms, it seems as much of a surprise to Frederick as witnessing a paraplegic simply rise from his chair to go take a leak.

  It is time for me to say what happened. You will listen to me, nu?

  Frederick does not want to risk disrupting the rare moment with any reply. He nods.

  It is true, what he says, of my Irit. It is true she is gone. But there is something he does not know, something no one knows, and I will tell it to you now. A secret, yes?

  Schultz walks to his desk, and removes from the lap drawer a framed sepia photograph of a comely, dusky young woman smiling in Harvard Square.

  This is my Irit, yes? he says, tapping his fissured fingernail against the glass. A beauty.

  Very beautiful, Frederick says earnestly.

  May her name be a blessing, it has been almost twenty years.

  Wow, Frederick says, then chastises himself for this reply, but still can think of nothing sufficient to say. Before, the mere mention of Irit’s name has driven Schultz to maniacal paroxysms; how, now, can he speak of her so simply?

  Schultz, grasping with both hands the image by its frame, locks his elbows and projects the photo toward Frederick’s face.

  You must look very closely at my Irit’s belly, yes? One might mistake it for too many sweets, but I’m telling you, Irit had the body of pencils.

  As Frederick scrutinizes the photograph, he discerns the unmistakable nascent swell. He thinks then of the time, making love to Katharine, he felt the first undeniable fact of their future family, the firm and rising evidence of what their love had made.

  A child?

  My son, Schultz replies, nodding.

  Your son?

  My Isaiah, Schultz says, and then both men fall silent.

  My Isaiah. He survived.

  Isaiah. A third presence seems now to have entered, one larger than either of them, larger than the room. Or maybe not a presence, but a void. Not only the void of Schultz’s lost wife and son, but the void of all that has been lost, a void that also holds Katharine, Jillian, Louise, Susie, Rebecca. All that is necessary but gone.

  I have told no one. When he comes back to Boston, I do not see him, because I am in this place. I am here, and I do not know what to say to him. Years pass. What to say? I was ashamed. I am ashamed.

  Silence.

  My boy, Schultz says. He wants to see me. But never can I let him see me here. In this place.

  Frederick and Schultz share a gaze; their eyes widen with the recklessness of the thought. A possibility, one that Frederick has not allowed himself to consider, suddenly presents itself. Katharine, he thinks. My girls. It is a crazy idea, he knows. Likely it will resolve terribly, with a de facto sentence me
asured in years. But after Canon’s reading of his journals, his time here is now interminable anyway, and this idea, at least, is something other than that nothingness. Really, what choice is there?

  My grandfather nods.

  5

  Do you ever wonder what is behind the locked door? Marvin asks.

  Frederick, in a chair pulled up to his cot, has told Marvin, and only Marvin, of what Schultz and he have begun to discuss.

  It surprises Frederick that Marvin should mention it, that anyone else has considered it, the knobless door near the end of the hall, with its rusting lock.

  A long, long time ago, when I was still a boy, Marvin says, I don’t know why they stopped, but they used to take us down there. Below this whole place there are tunnels. Every building has one, connecting to the others. It was how we used to get from place to place in the winter. It’s funny. I remember that the winters were more severe then. I don’t see how that can be true.

  Tunnels? Frederick asks. Before Canon, Frederick remembers, the older orderlies, among themselves, would sometimes make vaguely mischievous references to the Tunnels. The Tunnels, he had assumed, was either the name of a nearby pub or else some subterranean crawl space, in which the orderlies and nurses sometimes shared a surreptitious cocktail between shifts.

  Tunnels, Marvin repeats. They connect everything. This building to South Webster. My old house to the cafeteria. The cafeteria to a door beyond the front gates.