What It Takes to Be Human

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What It Takes to Be Human Page 2

by Marilyn Bowering


  “You’re my angel, Georgina.”

  “I’m no angel, Sandy. Just ask my father. The son of a bitch has been trying to get rid of me for years.” She lifts and lowers the oars and sets us moving.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To a safe place.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Shush,” she says, but she points and whispers. “My father’s house is just over there. I grew up here—I know the inlet and I had a good idea where you’d be. You can’t always let the bastards win.”

  I’m quiet then. I hear the soft puffs of Georgina’s breath and the hush of the blades as she slips them in and out of the sea. She stops rowing, and I hear a man’s voice call out over the putt-putt of a two-stroke engine. “Oh, shit,” she says quietly.

  She dips the oars carefully into the water and pulls us, almost silently, through gentle swells until, only a few minutes later, I can sense we are nearing land. The bow scrapes on sand. “You get out here. There’s a duck blind just in those trees. I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll figure something out.” She helps me ashore, throws her coat after me, and has rowed out and is rounding the point towards her father’s house before I understand I’m on an island, the little one at the foot of the inlet, where the crow’s claw of the peninsula coastline would be.

  I find the duck blind, struggle out of my soaking trousers and underwear, and wrap the coat around me. I wait, and listen, crouched down, and when I next rise up to look, a searcher’s boat is a stone’s throw from the shoreline.

  I climb some rocks, scramble through a stand of arbutus, jump down, in the dark, onto the beach, and fall over what I take at first to be a log. But it isn’t. It moans and shifts, its skin is cold and rubbery, breath snuffles from its nose and mouth. It has swum itself onto the sand. Small waves cool its tail and lap at its forelimbs, but the head and long neck are sheltered in a cave opening. The body trembles, and it sighs, and as I watch beside it, my skin on fire with mystery, a long slithery wet miniature of itself drops from the vent in its underside into the shallow water. The baby lies grounded, then a wave washes over it and it tries to swim. It—this newborn survivor of the world before the Flood—flails its limbs, opens its eyes, turns its head and sees me. What I cannot explain is how this makes me feel. I’m no longer the last sane person in a mad world. I’m Sandy Grey all right, but I’m happy.

  —

  My father is a preacher, but only on Sundays and holidays. On weekdays, he’s a plasterer. The material he uses in his trade is made of the skeletons and shells of small marine animals—the kind of creatures that thrive below me as I swim, as fast as I can, away from the island; their bones and shells break down and fall to the ocean floor where the weight of the sea crushes them to stone. You have to “burn” limestone—heat the marine animals’ remains to a high temperature—to yield lime. Once, when I was small, and I went too near the bucket when he was working, my father told me that lime dissolves human bones. I lifted the lid and stuck in my fingers. My skin burned, but my bones were fine. I knew then that my father might be a liar, and the things in my life that had started to worry me began to ease their pressure. But I had to be sure, I had to take my time.

  I kick and glide, kick and glide, and when I think I’m far enough away, I stop, let my feet swing down, glance back and see lights begin to approach the spot where the sea serpents rest.

  This is it.

  “Help! Save me!” I scream. Men run, their lanterns swinging, and drag the boat from the beach; other vessels speed my way from up the inlet. An Avro 626 slips out suddenly from behind a cloud; the moon slides out, too. The beam of a pit-lamp strikes me full in the face, a rescuer dives overboard, the hum of the Armstrong-Siddeley Lynx engine reaches my ears through the crest of a wave, and suddenly, although I wasn’t before, I’m drowning.

  TWO

  April 13 and following, 1941

  There are good people everywhere, Georgina says, wringing out a wet hankie and placing it over my bruised eye. I tell her I’ll remember that, and I do. My father stands in the corner of the dank jail cell, his arms folded across his chest, but not so much that I can’t see his watch-chain or hear his watch tick. He wears his good suit. He keeps his hat on to cover the bandages. I can smell my own must, spores itch my crotch and armpits, but I do not scratch. My father speaks several words, Georgina replies, and then a long empty darkness cleaves my life.

  From out of it I can recall two winters of the smell of cabbage, the occasional scent of Georgina’s perfume, and the idea that there was a trial, and with this second spring, when I awaken from my season of shock and slumber, my understanding that I’ve been assigned to the asylum at the end of a lane that winds from Victoria towards the inlet.

  Dr. Frank, the director, says when I ask him if this can ever truly be my home, “If not here, where, Sandy?” I sit in his office and look around as I consider the question. A vase of variegated pheasant feathers has been set on a small table next to a silver tea service. On top of a hutch to the left of Dr. Frank’s desk perches a model of a two-masted schooner. Below it, on a shelf, propping up books, are several silver trophies.

  “Are those yours, sir?” I say. Some of the items could belong in a home of mine. I have many books, I’ve built models, I’ve won prizes.

  “What?” He cranes his neck around from where he stands adjusting the cord of the venetian blinds to admit more sunlight. Through the open slats I see lawns and hedges and shapely trees. A soldier carrying an army jacket hung casually over his shoulder swings a croquet mallet loosely in his hand.

  I turn my eyes back to the trophies and read aloud from the engravings: “First Prize, 1935, Pacific National Exhibition” and “Second Prize, 1937, Canadian National Exhibition.”

  “You’ve good eyes if you can read that.” He gazes at me thoughtfully. “The cups aren’t mine, personally. We’ve a herd of prize Holsteins, here on the farm. You’ll see for yourself, once we put you to work.” He lowers himself into his chair. Dr. Frank is a big man, well over six feet tall and, I estimate, three hundred pounds. An oval has been cut from the front of his desk to take his bulk, so that he may reach his inkwell and write. He pulls a notepad towards himself, picks up a pen, dips it in ink, bends his head and writes my name. His hair springs, thick and brown, from his scalp, but at the crown it is thinning. He looks up.

  “Tell me, Grey, what did you want to do before this trouble of yours began?”

  “I wanted to be a pilot in the air force, sir.”

  His gaze softens with pity. “Ah, I see, just like all the other young men.”

  “I’d had some training. I’d joined the flying club.”

  “But you were attending college—Damascus Road, I think your father said—where they teach the Treasures of Truth?”

  “I began at Damascus Road, then the university took me in.”

  “Took you in?”

  “I won scholarships, I made a change.”

  “I’ve spoken to your father. He doesn’t know about the university.”

  I say nothing. What is there to say?

  He leans back and the coils of his chair creak, and the castors roll him backwards an inch or two. Silently I read the titles on the spines of some of the books—Revised Statutes of British Columbia, Emotional Hygiene, Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult—and of a number of journals—Hospital Review, The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, and so on. I am interested to see The War Neuroses and a collection of the works of Sigmund Freud.

  “I’ve noticed the soldiers outside, sir,” I say when I can bear the silence no longer. Several more of these men have passed by the window, accompanied by attendants. “I was just wondering…”

  “You were wondering why they are here?”

  “Yes, sir, I was.”

  “Soldiers, and airmen too, Grey, some of them badly burned. Most suffer from battle fatigue. It happens to the very best.” He sighs. “They come here to recover. During the last war…” He trails off. �
��Well, the less said about the evils of the past the better. Fortunately, young Sandy, we live in more enlightened times.”

  He rolls his chair forward and flips open a file folder on his desk. He reads for several minutes while I watch a fly circle the yellow glass flutes of the light fixture that hangs from the ceiling. Two of the bulbs have burned out. Once more Dr. Frank leans back, this time making a temple of his fingertips and resting them on the bluish pulp of his lips.

  “The monsters lie inside us, Sandy, not outside, but we don’t have to make things hard for ourselves as we work to defeat them. I’m here to help you.” His eyes are a pale sea green. They lounge, kindly lizards, in his long fleshy face and hold my own.

  “What’s going to happen to me, sir?” I say, unable to stop myself from asking. I’d been brought to the asylum by a policeman who had said, as we’d passed between flanking carved lions at the bottom of the steps, “You know you’ll never get out.” I’d glanced up at the face of the stone edifice I was entering. Bars striped every window. After the policeman had rung the bell at the inner steel door and passed me through it, he’d made a show of dusting his hands. I’d looked behind me at the outdoors, for what I feared might be the last time—at a workman cleaning the stone fountain after the long winter.

  “You’ll have heard stories about this place,” Dr. Frank says. “I want to set your fears at rest. Some of the tales may, once upon a time, have been true, but they are true no more. Gone are the ideas of straitjackets and restraining sheets. We would rather have an attendant stand by each man than use archaic methods. You are here to get well, Grey. I accept no other conclusion, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say. I do not tell him what I know, that there is nothing wrong with me. My predicament is due to a misunderstanding, one I will have to work to rectify. Tears of relief, as well as of a natural foreboding, moisten my eyes.

  “You’re a clever boy, Sandy, too clever, perhaps. I’ve read the file, and I can read between the lines as well, you can trust me. Already I have had your parents here, insisting on seeing you”—I look up alarmed but he raises his hand to stop whatever I am about to say—“and, knowing, as I do, what is best for you, I sent them away.”

  I close my eyes in relief. A runnel of tension that I hadn’t known was there leaves my body.

  “You won’t have to see them if you don’t want to, not as long as I’m here.” I sense his body heat and smell Absorbine Jr muscle liniment as he leans closer across the desk. “Do you want to see them?”

  I open my eyes. “No, sir,” I say. “Thank you, sir.”

  He gazes into his palms, where calluses round the base of each finger, and I wonder if he can see the future, then he raises his eyes and begins to outline my treatment.

  “Do you understand what I’ve just said?” he asks when he’s finished.

  “I think so, sir,” I say. “There are two points of view. One is that I have a biological fault; the other, to which you’re more inclined, is that a mental breakdown, such as mine, is the result of external factors, and these can be addressed through a variety of means. Psychoanalysis, group psychotherapy, narcosynthesis.”

  “What I’ve told you, Grey, is that I’m giving you a chance, rather an unusual one, but you’re young, you appear to have had some education and you’ve taken pains to educate yourself, and there are extenuating circumstances in your history. Recent research has shown that in cases like yours, equally good, if not better, results can be obtained by the methods I’ve outlined than by the use of the standard treatments.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not that there’ll be any mollycoddling.”

  “No, sir.”

  “If these don’t produce results, of course, we’ll look to other means.”

  “I understand, sir. I’ll work hard, I’ll do my best.”

  “Good.” He smiles at me. “You will work six days out of seven, just like the other men. You’ll contribute to your upkeep and, as much as you can, to the general war effort. Have you had farm experience?”

  I shake my head.

  “Then you’ll start in the fields, or with the smaller animals, and if you prove yourself capable you can work up to the dairy or stables.” He reaches across the desk and shakes my hand. “It will all become clear enough.”

  He presses a button next to the telephone on his desk. A second later the door swings open and an attendant stands at the ready. I get to my feet.

  “We’ll have to find something to keep that brain of yours busy. You might think about what that could be. We’ll get you settled in the West Wing first.” He nods to the attendant to lead me away. “Keep your chin up, Grey.

  “Oh, yes,” he says, glancing up from the file which he’d been about to close. “There is the matter of the attack on your father. We’ll have to attend to that.”

  —

  The attendant who takes me to my room is Ronald Signet, a neat, clean-shaven, middle-sized man dressed in a blue uniform jacket and with a shirt and tie worn under a grey sweater. As we walk down corridors, pausing as Signet unlocks and relocks doors, he tells me a little of the history of the structure in which I am to live. Originally a jail and a prison farm, it housed prisoners of war and offenders against the Naval Discipline Act during the Great War. There was a hiatus when it became a game and pheasant farm (thus the feathers in Dr. Frank’s office) and then it reopened as a mental home. Its design is after Windsor Castle, with cut-stone window frames, and various details and castellated features. The corners are decorated with turrets, which along with the crenellated parapet—as I saw when I arrived—add to the general military effect, since such features were originally designed with martial and defensive purposes in mind. He says, as we climb the stairs to my floor, “So you see, Sandy, you’ve something in common with King George and Queen Elizabeth.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “You live in a palace.” He opens the door, which is not kept locked, to the room that is to be mine. I see four small beds lined up, with reasonable space between them, against a wall. Signet ambles to the bed at the far end, next to a window. Soft spring light filters through the bars onto my suitcase standing on the floor, already there ahead of me.

  “This is where you’ll sleep,” he says, then he turns to look out the window, the keys at his waist clinking on the bars.

  I pick up a printed sheet that gives the daily schedule. Rise 5:40 A.M., Drill and so on, all the way to Lights Out 10:30 P.M. I suppose I must have sighed aloud, for Signet glances over at me. “Come have a look, Sandy,” he says.

  I stand beside him and examine a view of green fields. I watch two lambs stagger behind a ewe as she grazes. The farmer’s dog next door is shut away behind a high wire fence: It barks at the helpless sheep family but cannot get to them. Is this not how it should be—that the weak be protected from the strong?

  Signet tells me, after he has checked off the contents of my suitcase on a list and I have signed for them, that when the main asylum building was being built, a robin and her eggs were discovered in one of the supporting pillars. Building was suspended until the robin’s eggs hatched and the birds were old enough to fly. A stone carving of the robin and her nest was made to mark the incident, and the carving could be found in the very spot between two columns to this day. I say to him, “When I have grounds privileges I’d like to see that for myself!”

  When he has left, I take off my shoes and lie down on my bed for a rest. The other men, my roommates, are at work. I won’t meet them until later. I consider my position: I have clean sheets and clean clothes, a shelf for my books, a lamp to read by at night. On Thursdays there are concerts, on Fridays, films; I can say yea or nay to visitors…. Who could ask for more?

  —

  Before beginning work in the rabbitry, I am to spend as much time as I like in the library. Dr. Frank wants me to keep my mind occupied until we commence the first stages of my treatment. “But what exactly do you want from me?” I ask him as w
e talk the next day.

  “What do I want? The truth, Grey.” He writes the word in capital letters in his notebook, then turns it round so I can read it: TRUTH.

  “I want facts, not speculations, Sandy. Speculations are what get you into trouble, eh? You’ll tell me what you know—not guess, but know—to be the truth. Investigate, examine, think!” He gathers up his papers and leaves, locking the library door behind him.

  While I wait to be let out, I peruse the library shelves. They contain popular novels, dictionaries in various languages—Russian, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, French—and texts of many kinds: elementary physics and mathematics, history, botany, animal husbandry. I find, tucked at the end of one shelf, a scrapbook with a picture of my new home glued to the front cover. Inside are clippings and photographs, all to do with the history of the institution from the time when it was a jail. Some of the first inmates, apparently, had been transferred from other jails; then there were the naval prisoners, mostly from British armed merchantmen, including the famous Kent.

  I look up at the sound of a key in the lock. Attendant Cooper has come for me. I say to him, “Why would they take sailors fresh from a naval victory like the Falkland Islands and put them in jail?”

  “What’s that?” Cooper comes to peer over my shoulder. He points at, then reads, the line that says, “Charged with breach of the Naval Discipline Act.”

  “Yes, but this was 1917 when Kent sank the Nurnberg! They were heroes! What could ‘breach of the Naval Discipline Act’ mean?”

  “A handsome boy like you should know,” he says. He grins and slips a finger back and forth in his fist.

  I look at him. “What do you mean?”

  “ ‘Buggery,’ you fool,” he says. “Don’t play the innocent with me.” For some reason he is angry. I wonder about this, as I know that Dr. Frank has asked the attendants to answer my questions politely. Ron Signet has told me that the director is writing a book and I am to be a case history in it. He wants to show that his form of treatment is superior to insulin shock and Metrazol. Insulin, in particular, is an expensive therapy. He’ll save money and get results. I asked Ron to tell me about these other treatments, but he refused.

 

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