by Brian Kirk
Underneath all of these shared themes was the unifying belief that whatever the test subjects had experienced had been real. As real as the laboratory in which the experiments were being conducted. A belief that persisted in the minds of the test subjects long after the experiments had concluded.
While Alex did not believe that these visions or hidden realms were real, he accepted that the participants believed them to be. Just as a person suffering from a psychotic episode will consider his or her delusions to be actual reality. It was a trick created by the release of chemicals to stimulate our minds during sleep and protect us from existential stress. Why it seemed to be encoded with archetypal images or capable of accessing our subconscious was still a mystery. But controlling its production by the pineal gland was something Alex had learned to do. It was the core function of the experimental compound that he had created and tried to sell to Philax.
“If you don’t want us to see, why don’t you just cut out our eyes?”
Alex opened his mouth then closed it. He scanned the room, observing the patients. Some sitting catatonic before full plates of food. Some rocking back and forth, mumbling incoherently. Some gazing towards the ceiling with agonized expressions, as though watching the Rapture descend.
“What do you see?” Alex asked his brother.
Jerry nodded his head and leaned back. “The source,” he said. “The truth.” He tapped his temple and pointed his finger at Alex. “I see what’s hidden, and that’s why you’ve got me locked up like a chicken in a coop.”
“Jerry, you’re not—”
A hand came down on Alex’s shoulder. “There you are,” Angela said. Her lips were pressed tight, her dark eyes burrowed into his own. Then she looked over at Jerry and smiled. “Hey, Jerry! How are you feeling this morning?”
“I’m fine,” he said robotically, then bent over his tray of food and began poking at his eggs.
“That’s great. Mind if I borrow your brother for a minute?”
Alex reached out and grabbed Jerry’s hand. “Hang in there, big guy. I’ll get you home just as soon as I can.”
Jerry looked up through his curtain of hair. His eyes jittered and he squeezed them shut and shook his head, as if to clear his mind of what he’d just seen.
Chapter Eight
Angela sped away from the table, towards the exit.
Alex had to jog to catch up. But he enjoyed the view from behind. It wasn’t lost on him that most contortionists were of Asian descent. It was something he had to force from his mind anytime he and Angela met.
She pushed through the hydraulic door without holding it open, so it rebounded against him.
He shook his head and followed her through.
Once outside, Angela slowed. She kept her voice low. “I’ve been calling you all morning. Where have you been?”
Alex pointed back towards the cafeteria. “Where you just found me. With Jerry. What the hell happened?”
“It would have been better to have had this conversation before you met with him.”
“Well, that’s too bad. I’m more concerned with his well-being than with sticking to protocol. He’s not a regular patient, you know. And he’s not being treated properly. His dosage is off.”
Angela nodded. “That came from Eli.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
They turned a corner that opened onto a large recreational room with card tables and televisions bolted to the walls. It was empty during breakfast hours but Alex still led them to a back table by the window, near the far wall.
Alex eyed the wall before he sat down. It was covered by a mural painted by a former patient. The mural, with its Picasso-esque abstractions, was a representation of the Garden of Eden with a man and woman scantily covered by leaves. They were surrounded by all forms of smiling wildlife, predators at peace with prey. Lions stood peaceably beside zebra; wolves nuzzled sheep. A diamond-patterned snake presented a red apple to the woman. Carved into the apple’s skin was the pyramid with the all-seeing eye from the dollar bill. The woman was smiling, but a single tear trickled down her cheek. The sky featured the vast cosmos, a tapestry of darkness and stars, distant planets and foreign galaxies. There was no sign of the sun.
They sat and Angela sighed. She scanned the room and then propped her elbow on the table and placed her chin in her hand.
“Look, I’m sorry. It’s been a shitty couple of days. It’s just—”
“Hard when I’m away,” Alex said, smiling.
Angela gave him a mock look of impatience.
“Come on, you can admit it,” he said, teasing. “You missed me.”
“No,” she said. Her legs were crossed and her top foot began to tap the air. “You just always pick the worst time to take off.”
“What a coincidence. It couldn’t be that things just happen to run smoother when I’m here?”
Angela cupped her hand to muffle her voice. “It’s gotten worse,” she said.
Alex leaned forward. “Eli?”
She nodded. A crease formed between her eyes and her brows came together. “The new forensic patient, Crosby Nelson, who you were supposed to meet with, by the way, was admitted this week. Eli met with him instead, and there was some sort of an altercation.”
“Jesus, what happened?”
“Evidently Crosby got down in some sort of a football stance like he was going to charge him. One of the orderlies stepped in, but Eli ordered him off. He played chicken with him, or something. I don’t fully understand.”
Alex barked laughter. “Wait. He did what?”
“I’m telling you, I don’t know. I came in after. He… I guess he pretended to play football with him.”
Alex was all eyes. He shook his head. “That’s crazy. So what happened?”
“Thankfully nothing. Somehow he got Crosby to settle down. The orderly’s pissed, though. He wants to file a complaint.”
“Who is it?”
“The big guy, Devon. Which is another thing. He had a run-in with your brother. Jerry bit him.”
“Christ, this week has gone off the rails.” And that doesn’t even account for my failed test trial or my wife’s dead dog.
Angela nodded. She leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms.
From the hallway behind her an orderly pushed a supply cart with a squeaky wheel. From farther down came a deep howling, as if from an angry primate. Alex looked over his shoulder and frowned at the painted wall.
“That’s why I wanted to see you first thing,” Angela said.
“Well, my first priority is Jerry. Have any charges been filed?”
“No. There’re some discrepancies surrounding the story. A groundskeeper, a friend of your brother’s, is apparently saying that Devon used unnecessary force.”
“Yeah, Jerry’s not violent. You know that.”
“I know. But his condition is just so unpredictable.”
“Well, he’s on the wrong medication. I need to talk with Eli about that. And Crosby. I’ll need to visit with him too. What’s his schedule?”
“We have a therapy session later today. Can you make it?”
“Sure.” Alex checked his watch. “Anything else?”
“What about Eli?”
“What about him?”
“The review meeting is coming up. I’m worried.”
The far hall filled with the sounds of shuffling feet. Two female orderlies came bounding around the corner, preceding the patients into the recreation room, with bright smiles fixed to their faces. They turned and began greeting men and women as they walked in, shouting in cheerful tones.
“Come on, y’all! Good morning. Good morning. Y’all want to play some games? Let’s play us some games, y’all! What do you say?”
Alex stood and rapped his fore knuckle against the top of the table. “That’s Eli’s prob
lem,” he said. I’ve got enough of my own, he thought as he walked away.
Chapter Nine
What Randall Rothschild missed more than anything was music. He had lost all his friends, had grown distant from his family, had never had a girlfriend, although he had fallen deeply in love with a girl he hardly knew, a freckled redhead who played a central role in his lyrical prose, always smiling, always batting her emerald eyes.
But the only thing he longed for outside the asylum walls was to attend a concert. To stand front row, eyes closed, sweaty head bobbing, basking in the magic of live music, the symbiotic connection occurring between souls melding with the mass of humanity writhing around him. To be fueled by raw, primal energy. To be moved by the ecstatic expression of art.
Dr. Alpert had bought a guitar for Randall to play. An acoustic guitar, but that’s what he preferred to play anyway. It had a blonde body blending into an amber frame and he called it Doreen, named after his secret love. Her voice had been just as sweet.
Sometimes Eli would bring it by and ask Randall to play for him, and he’d conjure up the songs from his old lo-fi albums, written in the dank basement of his parents’ house. Songs written during the highs and lows of his manic episodes. Some happy, some sad—all the honest feelings of an unvarnished soul.
Once Eli had cried. It was a silly song about the harrowing courtship between two frogs that had caused him to weep. He had seemed happy, though. He had been smiling, at least. And had thanked him when he left.
This time Eli had decided to return the favor. He walked up and placed an iPod with a docking station on the table in front of Randall. “How about some Nirvana from the Unplugged show in ’94?” he said. He pressed a button and Kurt Cobain began strumming the guitar, a melancholy ghost risen from the grave.
“Ahh,” Randall garbled. He clapped his palsied hands together and smiled around his crooked dentures. His right knee began to jitter, but not in time to the beat. He sang along, his voice mild and melodic.
Eli sat down across from him. He was unfamiliar with Nirvana’s music, but knew it was Randall’s favorite band. Or had been. He could see why. There was the same plain, unaffected angst in the singer’s voice that he heard in Randall’s. It was the voice of suffering.
The song ended and Eli hit Pause.
“I thought you’d like that,” Eli said, which was only half-true. He also knew that the singer’s suicide had marked a turning point in the progression of Randall’s psychosis. It’s when he had begun to see the demons.
Randall hugged himself. His smile made him look ten years younger, even with the top denture hanging ajar. It reminded Eli of the teenager who had first been committed many years ago. “It’s…it’s…awesome,” Randall said, drawing out the last word into a droning om.
“What’s your favorite song?”
“On this album?” Randall opened his eyes and leaned forward. “It’s a cover of “Oh, Me” by the Meat Puppets. Track eleven.”
Eli found the song and pressed Play.
It was slow, melodic, moody, dark. Randall fell into a type of trance listening to it. He dropped his head and rocked back and forth, his shaggy hair hanging over his eyes. One particular lyric stood out to Eli as he listened, something about infinity stored deep inside oneself.
It brought back memories of Rajamadja, the enigmatic monk whom he had met in India. His guru. His savior. Rajamadja’s death, in many ways, had made the same impact on Eli as the singer’s suicide had on Randall. It was as if his guardian angel had left him to grovel alone among the demons. The ones from his past, adding an eerie ground mist to the graveyard of his mind.
After returning from Vietnam, Eli decided to pursue a career in psychiatry, initially helping treat returning veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A disorder he himself had suffered, even if he’d been unwilling to admit it at the time.
Every so often he’d see a patient get that look in their eyes. The panic-stricken look of impending doom. It would take him right back to the clearing in Xuan Loc, lying nose to nose with the injured soldier while Sergeant Wagner handed him the hot pistol reeking of burnt cordite. He would begin to tremble, just slightly. And he would become Dr. Pussyfoot all over again.
His first staff position was at a state mental hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He was twenty-seven, a credited psychiatrist ready to rid the world of mental illness. It was the midseventies, and America seemed to be pulling out of its collective state of insanity, normalizing itself. Except in the institutions, where the living conditions were approaching historic lows.
The Chief Medical Director of the Tuscaloosa Sanitarium was Dr. Walter Francis, an acclaimed physician who switched to psychiatry in order to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, more than a genuine desire to cure the mentally ill. The hospital was grossly overcrowded and equally underfunded. The staff was comprised mostly of poorly educated security guards with bad attitudes. They lacked compassion. Worse, they lacked understanding. To them, the patients were subhuman, deranged beasts in need of taming.
To Dr. Francis, they were merely test subjects, human curiosities for his medical experiments. He did not pretend to understand the nature of mental illness, as did so many of his contemporaries of the time. Rather, he sought to discover its cause by way of identifying its cure. His thesis was that the cure would inform the cause. Thus, he explored all the various forms of therapy known at the time, including many of his own imagining.
In many ways, the environment inside the asylum was worse than any battlefield Eli had ever experienced. More gruesome and far more traumatic. This was a one-sided war waged against patients who lacked the weapons to fight back. And neither side ever won.
As in Vietnam, Eli began to sympathize with the patients, fighting to protect them from the treatments that were designed to cure them. In one case he got too close.
Her name was Miranda. She had been committed to the hospital by an adulterous husband complaining of excessive excitability and paranoid delusions. She wasn’t suffering from delusions; her husband was cheating. The excitability part was true, though. She was pissed.
She was strolling through the gardens when Eli first met her, smoking. It was early August and she was sweating, her frizzy, blonde hair clinging in dampened strings to her face, blanketing her back. When she walked up to Eli, she twisted her hair into a bun and held it on top of her head. Her neck was slender and smooth, blemished only by the fading bruises seen under the jawline. A bead of sweat trickled down her neck in mesmerizing spurts and joined the pool collecting in her clavicle. Eli was struck with a shocking desire to suck it dry.
“What this place needs is a swimming pool,” she said, taking a last, long drag from her cigarette before grinding it into the garden soil with her shoe. “Right over there.” She pointed to an expanse of grass framed by flowerbeds.
It has several, Eli almost said, thinking of the submersion pools where they held patients underwater until they lost consciousness. Surprisingly, patients experienced a relatively high rate of recovery after submersion therapy. It helped them overcome their fear of death, by showing them its face.
“I’m not sure that would be such a good idea,” Eli said instead.
“And why’s that?”
“Well, what if someone drowned?” When he blinked he saw a snapshot of Miranda tied to a submersion gurney, inches below the surface, eyes wide with panic as she thrashed against the straps.
Miranda looked back towards the long brick building and scrunched her nose. “That would be a welcome relief for most of the people here,” she said. Then she shifted her weight and fanned herself with her free hand. “It’s just so blazing hot. And boring. I’ve played about all the bingo I can stand.”
Eli smiled at her, squinting against the sun wavering high overhead. A bead of sweat dripped down his spine and a mosquito squealed in his ear. He couldn’t think of anything to s
ay, so he nodded and began to walk away.
“No, wait,” Miranda said. “Please, just talk with me for a minute. Please?”
“It’s best if we do that during a therapy session. I’ll be happy to talk with your social worker about setting one up.”
“I don’t need therapy,” she said. Her eyes glistened wet for a moment, but she fought away the tears. “I just want to talk normally. Not in some structured setting. Not about my nonexistent phobias or my private feelings.
“People come in here. Some of them…” her lips flapped as she blew out air, “…some of them are pretty messed up. But there are plenty of others who have nothing wrong with them at all, as far as I can tell. But then they’re put in this place and treated like they’re crazy, spending every day with people who really are crazy, removed from everything that’s familiar to them, with nothing at all to do but sit and, and…” She held her arms out to her sides in frustration. Her hair tumbled down from her head and framed her face. Her clear-blue eyes were quicksand.
“And, well,” she continued, “it starts to make you feel a bit like you are going crazy. You start thinking, ‘Why am I here? What happened? How did this become my life?’ And then you think of the life going on outside these walls. Real life. And it’s going on without you. And every day that you’re stuck in this place is one more day you’ll never get back. And you think, ‘What’s wrong with this world if a normal, sane person can be plucked out of it and placed in this pocket of insanity? What kind of world could allow that?’
“Only a world that is in itself insane. So, that makes us all insane. And if that’s the case, then who determines who’s sick and who’s well? Why do you get to wear the doctor costume and I have to wear the patient one? What’s the point of this game and who sets the rules?”
Eli frowned down at his feet. The grass growing between them had ragged edges from a dull mower. Below it, microscopic bugs burrowed and built subterranean cities. Several surely lay dead under his shoes.