by Nick Wood
“Sibusiso?” It is Father, face creased with concern, hat in hand, dressed in his thin grey suit for the city. A special suit it is, grey like stone, worn at Church too and like the lasting rock beneath us all.
I can only cry like a baby as he supports my wretched body to a chair, although I have six inches over him – tall, just like my mother, he always said. My height means nothing now, for I am a squalling new-born before him, body shaking as I curl-up in the chair, unable to talk. He sits perched on the side of the chair and just holds my shoulders, as my body eventually runs out of tears.
“Your friends are worried, son, as is the college nurse.”
Nurse? I saw no nurse.
“She said you were not responding to her, no matter what she said, so she called the farm and the baas came to tell me.”
I peer up at him in shame, fingers spread across my eyes.
“I have heard you lost a friend. This is sad. But life goes on – and so must we.”
I hear Father’s words, but I cannot move. I tell my legs to move, but they stare at me in stubborn silence. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I have nothing left inside me, my blood cooling again, slowing in my veins like curdling milk. I bend over, wanting to die.
They do not let me. I feel powerful arms gripping me on both sides, lifting me up as if I was sister Thanda’s favourite doll. Big men they are, uniformed in medical blue and they carry me out into the corridor, Father following – and for the second time I have ever known him, his cheeks are wet.
Even in mother’s death, he had still been strong for us all.
Mother!
Faces float in front of me, at me, as I am marched down the corridor. I realise I am in shorts and T-shirt, my night pair that I have no idea how long I have been wearing. I try to remember who the people are, but they float before me like ghosts. I cannot hold onto anything, but feel blood in my elbows freeze beneath the grip of these two strong men.
There is an ambulance parked in the college space, door open, but it looks like a police van, so I dig my heels in, but with no reward. They lift me as if I were made of paper and step in, alongside me. There is a mattress, but I will not lie down. The biggest man holds out his hand and pulls Father in behind me. Father does not look at me anymore and I feel yet another small death inside me, like something has broken – but it is distant and numb.
We drive then, but with no siren; softly, softly through the streets, as if off to a picnic. But I sway against the men on both sides of me, on the seated platform along the side of the ambulance, watching my father sway on the other side, looking backwards through the rear window at the cars and people we leave behind us.
I stare too, for my own father does not seem to see me, but I notice little of anything, with no sense of where we are going.
Nor do I care.
The ambulance swings in through a wide gate and chugs up a hill. There are trees and buildings lining the road but we soon grind to a halt.
The back door of the van rattles open and I see a thickset nurse looking at me, smiling in a way that for the barest of moments, reminds me of my mother.
She gestures to us: “Come on then, Sibusiso, welcome to Fort Napier Hospital.”
I know now why Father will not look at me. He has brought us to the local mental asylum. He has not come to take me home. Surely he will not leave me here?
Surely, surely, surely?
They have to drag me out and I cannot see where Father has gone.
Chapter 4
Martin’s Case
Silence…
Silence shrinks an already small room and I stare at the young man who will not talk, wondering how I reach out across the space between us, how to make his words flow. He stares across to the picture on the wall behind me: his eyes are hooded, his body is slumped. The room is a tight box of peeling institutional yellow, mould-flicking corners of the ceiling, the narrow walls groaning with a history of mad voices . . . or so I’ve been told. The young man’s head is cocked, as if he’s listening. Perhaps the voices in the wall have overwhelmed him. Me, I’ve never heard them, sitting as I am on the right side of this small square desk, panic button comfortably within range on the wall next to me.
“What do you hear, Sibusiso?” I ask, normalising his experiences, just in case.
He flicks a glance to my mouth, as if unsure that’s where the voice has come from, but his eyes scan back behind me.
How indeed to build a link between us? I swivel on my higher chair to look at the picture locking his gaze. It’s an old photograph I’d taken perhaps a decade or so back, at the turn of the new millennium. It’s of a rope bridge with snared base planks, swinging over the Umgeni River. An empty bridge, too treacherous to walk on or cross, with an angled view of the green and distant slope on the other bank. The glass frame keeps the picture from deepening a further yellow and curling at the edges.
Reflected lines of hot sunlight spill in through the slats of drawn blinds, making it hard to see the picture clearly. I know it by heart though – that and the similar but different one in my bedroom at home – the Umgeni Bridge: a place of wild voices, a place of beginnings.
So I stand up, hitch the picture off the hanging nail, and turn to hand it to him.
“Do you like it?” I ask.
He holds the picture, studying it for moments and then he cranes his neck back in order to look up at me. I stand waiting.
“Did you take it, Doctor?”
Ah – a personal question; we’re trained to divert those. “What would it mean to you if I did take it?” I ask.
To my surprise, he just chuckles a little to himself. The nurses had said he was responding to the amitriptyline; he’d even managed a supervised weekend out recently.
He leans back to look up at me again.
“I would just like to know whether you’ve been there and seen this, Doctor.”
“Yes,” I say; if in doubt, keep it honest and short.
“Would I be allowed to go there and see this for myself too, Doctor?”
“Um, you’ve only just been home for a weekend, Sibusiso.” I sit down, now that a flow of conversation has opened between us. “Why would you want to go?” Why does he ask what we both know is impossible? And it’s a bloody high bridge too…
Sibusiso Mchunu sits up a little straighter, the creases in his neat green psychiatric overalls twisting into fresh angles across his lean body. “I never said I want to go, just am I allowed to go, if I were well enough, Doctor?”
“I don’t think so, Sibusiso…”
The reason hangs between us like a damp, dark unspoken secret. I get up to switch on the hanging naked bulb overhead so that we can see each other better, the green shades leaking humid heat and light, but keeping the bulk of the sun at bay. I wish the afternoon thunderstorms would gather more quickly.
Perhaps safer verbal territory would help too. “So, tell me something you may have enjoyed doing on your weekend out then, Sibusiso.” I sit down and watch his face; he is alert and watchful in return. Keep it close to home; keep it fun, especially with a young man recovering from psychotic depression.
“I – I went to listen to a band playing music at one of our local shebeens. It, uh, was good stuff, Doctor. They played old covers of Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Gil Scott-Heron and even some old mbaqanga township jazz.”
Sibusiso’s tongue clicks over the last word, leaving me slightly perplexed, slightly distanced. I recognise the first two names and wonder if the third person referred to was also… black. No, the word was still not to be mentioned – here, at least, race and colour would not be an issue.
So, keep playing it safe, encourage his words – for, in the end, all talking should help. That’s the faith of my job. “What did you enjoy most about the music, Sibusiso?”
“That…” Sibusiso sucks in a breath and leans forward slightly: “The fact that black people make such wonderful music and more…”
I smile awkwardly and lean
back in my chair. What to do, how to respond? I am a liberal Afrikaner, non-racialist in my attitude. For me, colour is not an issue, not here, not now.
I weigh him up with my eyes – he is sitting forward, eyes wide but respectfully averted, waiting for an answer with a slight twist to his lips.
He raises this mindfully – still, follow the patient, as they say. “So… What does this mean to you?”
Sibusiso flashes me a fleeting look that takes flight like a cagey springbok, dropping his head into his hands, palms up on the table between us. His head is shaven short, the back of his head scarred with a swollen weal as if he’d been beaten in the recent past. By whom, though?
“Sibusiso?” I chime the name delicately, to emphasise both respect and concern.
He stays bowed, silence pooling onto the table.
Is this a signal indicating a therapeutic rupture, presumably around the question of what it means to be both black and to have (musical) achievements… and perhaps my inadequate response?
I sigh. Shall I call in a Zulu nursing staff member to take him back to the ward?
No, that’ll be a message that I’ve given up… and I don’t give up on anyone, even if they’re just a young Bantu man. I must keep trying to span this experiential chasm that separates us; try and reel him back into this room with words. And, if words do indeed fail, there’s always the machine, my machine, my Bridge of Feelings.
I lean across the table until I am close to his scarred head, recoiling a little at the sharp smell of sweat. Was this a sign of deteriorating personal hygiene, a cultural factor, or poverty? Ashamed at my ignorance, I decide I need to confront this silence.
“I’m sorry, Sibusiso, did I say something wrong?” (I am careful not to touch him.)
Silence continues to drip off him in sick emotional waves.
I lean back to breathe more easily. How can I use words to step across the huge gulf that divides us? He had even initially refused to talk to fellow Zulu nursing staff, perhaps afraid they might be government informers. All reports suggest he may be a ‘comrade’, an anti-apartheid activist, although he had denied that of course in his few, terse words on admission. Here, our task is to make him better, not to vet his political views or activity. I stay neutral; dispassionate, scientific. Psychology is politically impartial in South Africa – even if we have no trained black Zulu psychologists to see Sibusiso either.
There is just me… I stand in frustration. Perhaps he thinks I’m connected with the S.A.P. Special Branch – white man that I am and no matter how much I emphasise confidentiality. My words seem too feeble to convince him otherwise. Just… just perhaps my Feelings Box can heal this rupture, span this gap? It’s almost ready; one final test at home tonight and I can smuggle it in tomorrow… if it works.
I look down at the young man’s hunched body.
“Sibusiso?”
Sibusiso looks up; his face is stained and shiny with tears. “It – it means the world to me, Doctor.”
Ahhh… He’s answered my earlier question. Slowed response though, perhaps indicating psychomotor retardation – does his medication need to be increased, after all?
The Umgeni rope bridge photograph lies face down between us, hidden, just a tan cardboard backing in view.
I touch his shoulder lightly and pick the photograph up, putting it back on my office wall.
I’ll smuggle the Feelings Box in tomorrow then, if I have to, despite Doctor James. I am old enough to make my own choices.
Outside, thunderstorms are clearing and cooling the air, although the sky is also darkening with the storm and the onset of night.
Safe within the comfort of my small house I hold Jacky, my retriever cross, my cheap brak tight, as she struggles in my arms. Wires lace down from our scalps to the Black Box at my feet. I stroke her and murmur in her floppy ears.
This is the warm blue leather couch where we usually sit in peace and watch an evening’s TV, skipping past ongoing news flashes summarising the never-ending State of Emergency; the continuing collapse of the rand. New threatening news for us too, we are told - Obama and Osama to meet the Soviet bloc in Peace Talks above the Berlin Wall, as the Soviet Union tires of thirty years of haemorrhaging men into their Afghan ulcer.
I switch the TV off, wondering if the calming couch associations will reassure Jacky, as she scrabbles and scratches at my chest. I take a deep breath and switch the foot-square box-machine on at my feet. Nothing happens; my brain fails to swing into the space separating our different bodies, our separate brains.
I growl with puzzlement, fear, restriction, even a little cold pain, but warmed by sweaty human smells and image flashes of meaty chunks dropping from pink familiar smells. Chunks not here though, body sore, warm smell is squeezing, fear rising, snarls from outside monster…
Arms let go and I scramble under the couch yelping, ripping the electrode-cap free from my/her head. With short, ragged gasps, I clutch at my ribs and lean forward on the couch. The arms are… mine.
I am… Martin Van Deventer, neuropsychologist. Doctor Van Deventer, one of the co-inventors of the ‘Feelings Box’, the ‘Empathy Enhancer’ – an EE machine and… it works, it sure as hell works! I must tell Dan…
I stroke the leads that trail from my scalp-cap to the machine, vine-feeders of emotional images from another species. Dogs do see colours, despite having only two visual cones… Or does this come from being filtered through my own brain? Dear God, but this machine could change the whole world, let alone this depressing, ravaged, racialist country.
“Jacky,” I call her out from under the couch. She comes reluctantly, trembling, confused. I lift the cap that she’d pulled loose but she gives a brief yelp and retreats under the couch again. Okay then, I’ll just have to keep pairing the cap with meaty treats to reinstate a Pavlovian pleasure association for her. Eventually in the future she should yet again lick her small, brown animal-shelter chops, every time I pick up the electrode-cap.
I stroke the chunky Black Box Dan and I cobbled together over the years with carefully filtered research funds. ‘Our Empathy Enhancer’ up until now had only delivered brief canine flashes of experience; smells that drifted up like vague colours of dried piss from deserted night time telephone poles. I crane down under the couch to tickle Jacky’s throat with the fingers of my right hand – she’ll eventually forgive me as usual, although now I’ll be able to check whether she’s forgiven me for sure.
But is it right to assume such forgiveness? Is it right to coerce such participation?
I check the dials on the machine. I had the settings to my cap on ‘import’ but it is theoretically possible to switch it to an interchange of import and export, an actual swapping of visceral experiences via mutually enhanced and transmitted brain wave responses. (Does this imply there may be neurones that act as experiential mirrors in the mammalian brain? A flaky hypothesis indeed, I know, but some hard evidence is gathering.)
This would still need someone else to independently verify it – and that means another human participant. It might be risky indeed if Dan and I were to try it on each other.
But there is no way I will get permission to use the Empathy Enhancer (EE™) on another person without rafts of peer-reviewed papers to bolster its safe use and our claims. Doctor James remained deeply suspicious of the process, warning me of its dangers during our last session.
“Some boundaries are sacred,” he’d said, before admonishing me for not adequately working my divorce through and unconsciously inflicting my ‘issues’ on patients, especially the white people I saw over weekends in private practice.
But, why does anyone have to know? There’d also be far less fuss if it was a black person… and I know just the man, I think.
But is it right to assume such participation? And can one fairly ask someone, a young Bantu man certified for treatment, within this current psychiatric power structure?
Outside, the storm continues to shout at the house, so I close all the curtains,
finding it hard to control my shivering. Jacky trails behind me, whining.
Sibusiso eyes the machine straddling the table between us with obvious doubt.
“It looks like a box the Security Police would use.”
I look at him with surprised shock; forthright views indeed for an endogenously depressed patient, especially a black one. But the night nurses did report he’d been more talkative this morning, more assertive.
“It’s okay, Sibusiso, I’ve tried it on myself – it doesn’t hurt, it only amplifies your brain waves and enables me to understand your experiences more easily; it works better than any language could.”
“What’s wrong with my English, black man that I am?” Sibusiso slumps in the chair again, his eyes veiling over.
I knew I would have to engage him quickly, before he regressed further into a depressed stupor. “Stand up, let’s move around a bit,” I call. Behavioural activation always helps alleviate mood-based psychomotor retardation.
“Ja baas, have you been in the army, korporaal?” He stands, but sullen, angry and hostile.
This is not going well. I hesitate, unsure of whether his question is seriously meant or a bit of loaded sarcasm. But he continues to stand and stare at me directly, as if in defiance of cultural respect for his elders, waiting…
I smile to break the tension: “We’re here to treat you, not me – your family were worried and brought you here because you’d stopped eating.”
Sibusiso shook his head: “No, it doesn’t work like that. You expect me to share things, hurtful things, dangerous things, yet you say nothing about yourself, nothing about who you really are away from your work? And the white army patrol our streets, shooting and whipping us.”
Is this where his head injury comes from?
Silence…
I sense there is no way forward without a big step of trust, a leap of faith.
“No, Sibusiso, I’ve never been to the army. I’m a secret draft dodger, a good few years back now. I’ve moved addresses many times and they’ve given up chasing me – at least, I hope they have, with all their energies in the… black townships, as you say.” The word ‘black’ sticks to my tongue like glue, but Sibusiso has given me enough cues he wants me to verbalise colour, although I still worry it polarises us…