What It Takes to Be Human

by Marilyn Bowering

  The nurse quietly arranges a tray. I see an intravenous syringe, various needles, alcohol swabs and a tourniquet. In the corner, partly hidden by a chair, is an oxygen cylinder.

  “Over there, Sandy,” Dr. Frank says, pointing to the bed. “Take a load off.”

  I know he smiles, I can hear it in his voice, but the blood pounds so in my head that I cannot see his face. The nurse puts a cool hand on mine and guides me over.

  “Shoes off,” she says. She kneels, as I sit, and unties my shoes. She plumps the pillows and encourages me to lie down. She undoes the top buttons of my shirt. “Warm enough?” she says. “Want a blanket?” I shake my head and clench my teeth to control my shivering.

  Dr. Frank pulls up a comfortable armchair, specially made to take his bulk. He nods at the nurse and she pops a pill into my mouth and gives me a drink of water.

  “There now. That’s to stop you getting too sleepy. We don’t want that, do we! You can sleep all you want afterwards.”

  “After?” I manage.

  “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Grey. The treatment I’m giving you is the very same I give to the soldiers.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes indeedy.” Dr. Frank leans back, looks around vaguely and the nurse hands him a notebook and pencil. She ties the tourniquet around my arm.

  “The drug you’re getting is called Sodium Pentothal—‘truth serum’ as the press terms it. And that’s what we want, eh, Sandy? The truth.”

  The nurse is swabbing my arm with alcohol.

  “Now, all that will happen is after Nurse establishes the intravenous, you and I will talk. We’re going to try to get to the root of your troubles, Sandy. It’s in there, you know—the human mind is a wonderful mechanism, it wastes nothing—we just have to dig it out. Now, when I tell you, I want you to begin to count backwards from ten.”

  “Ten…nine…eight…” First there’s the taste that is no taste I know except that it’s pink and sweet and sickening; then there’s a fizz, and I’m cold and I hear Dr. Frank say, as I surface through a dark green sea and fight for air, “Tell me where you are, Sandy.”

  “In the water. The tide is taking me…”

  “Yes, yes,” he says impatiently. “We know all about that. Let’s go farther back. Keep counting. Try again.”

  Counting is numbers. What are numbers but forms? I’m thinking about triangles, I have a protractor in my hand. I’m in school. “Five…four…” There’s a gush into my arm, and I’ve lost all thought but the triangle. The dark bush of a young woman’s pelvis. She’s standing in front of me, she steps near and I feel the warmth of her breath in my ear. The gush is at the floor of my penis. I know where I am and when it is. In the barn not far from school.

  “Where now, Sandy?”

  “Three…two…” I say.

  “For God’s sake,” Dr. Frank says to the nurse. “He’s strong as a horse, open the valve again, but not too far….”

  “Sandy, can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you with your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father loves you. A difficult parent is no excuse for attempted murder.”

  “Yes.” I can feel the muscles of my face squeeze and tears come to my eyes. “All of our family have brown eyes, but his are green,” I say. I bite my lips hard so as not to say more.

  “Tell me where you are, Sandy. I want you to go to where you first became angry with your father. You will tell me what happened. Did he harm you in any way?”

  “God will judge.”

  “Does He say this to you?”

  “I speak for myself,” I say.

  “You will tell me everything, Sandy. You must distinguish between your friends and enemies. I am your friend.”

  “War is terrible and truth is stranger than fiction.” I’m not sure why I say this. But if I turn my head slightly, from where I stand in my parents’ kitchen, I can see the horizon. Sunset, I think. It must be warm out, because the window is open. I’m standing on a table. There’s another man there—a man with a black bag. A doctor?

  “We’re not here to play games, Sandy. Where are you exactly? What are you and your father doing?”

  “Washing his hands. I can hear my mother’s sewing machine.”

  “Let’s stay with your father,” he says. “What do you see?”

  “A breadboard,” I manage, although the words tear at me. My fist stuffs itself into my mouth.

  “A breadboard?” I hear Dr. Frank pop a pastille into his mouth. He sucks at it, then his teeth crunch through the candy. Humbugs, most likely. A dish of them sits in his office. “Is that all?”

  “The war did not end with the armistice,” I say.

  “Which war is that, Sandy?”

  “The Great War, of course.”

  “You don’t remember that war, Sandy, you’re too young.”

  “I don’t feel too young.”

  Dr. Frank sighs. “Tell me something about your family.”

  “My father rides a bicycle to work. He was a streetcar conductor until the strike.”

  “What strike is that?”

  “My uncle was in the Scottish Regiment and lost his life in France.”

  “We don’t seem to be getting very far this way, Sandy. Let’s start with the facts, just the facts. Your father is a plasterer. Your name is Alexander Grey and you were born in 1920.”

  “My mother told me once that she loves her furniture more than her husband.”

  Another deep sigh. The director crunches the last of the candy. I hear his stomach rumble, then mine joins his. A duet?

  It’s a strange place I’m in, like I’m walking along a road with someone. When I look one way, I see my father and mother, the neighbours, the children at school. When I look the other way, it’s different. As if it’s not my life at all and I’ve stepped across a gully into a different one.

  “Why don’t you want to talk to me, Sandy? You know I want to help you. I want you to tell me about the attack on your father. What did you think you were doing when you struck him? Why did you lift the tire iron? I don’t believe you really meant him harm. Did your feelings about him begin with that breadboard?”

  “I did not attack my father.”

  “There was a witness,” he says testily. “I’ve told you I believe there were mitigating circumstances, what were they?”

  “I did not attack my father,” I say again, because it’s the truth. How can I explain? It’s getting hard to breathe. I can feel my lungs compress, as if I’ve flown too high in an airplane.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Sandy. Whatever you say here is just between us.” I say nothing, but I have an urge to sing “Rain Barrel,” a song my real mother taught me and we used to sing together when I was fearful. I can hear Dr. Frank swear softly under his breath as I begin, and he says to the nurse, “He’s a stubborn SOB. Maybe too bright. Some of them are. It makes the treatment more difficult, not at all what you’d think.”

  I start to choke, I stop singing, my lungs are paralysed, a thick cloth blankets my face. It’s the stink of ether. “Help me! He has a knife!”

  “Where are you, Sandy! Tell me what’s happening!”

  But I’m gone. I’m off the table, down the road, out of the house in which I was born and heading towards the visitors who bend over me grinning, wearing my parents’ clothing, holding out baskets of poison fruit.

  “Get the oxygen,” Dr. Frank says. Footsteps speed across the room. I can smell the director’s sweat, heat beams from him. He holds my arms down on the bed so I can’t move, while the nurse puts something over my face and Dr. Frank says, “Breathe, Sandy, breathe. You’re going to be all right.” Because I know he is a good man, I breathe, and I hear him say, “Next time you will tell me the whole truth.” Then I hear a great sigh, like the noise a balloon makes when it deflates.

  I’ve seen disappointment often enough on people’s faces to know it for what it is.

  But Dr. Fran
k claps me on the shoulder before he leaves and says, “I’m sure you did your best. We’ll try again. The treatment isn’t for everyone. In the meantime, write down everything you remember, whatever comes to you. I want to see it all.”

  He’s gone before I’ve even sat up.

  —

  I don’t like this interruption to my routine. Now the whole morning is gone. There’s nothing to do after the session but to wait in the library until Ron Signet or Pete Cooper can take me to lunch. My job is important. Others rely on me. Our production of rabbit meat is part of the war effort. It is the one thing I can do to help in these times, and I like to do it well. I look through the scrapbook again to pass the hour. This time, considering Pete Cooper’s comments about the ghost in the East Wing, I read all the clippings about the man, Alan Macaulay, who was hanged outside the walls for murder when the building was a jail. I make a note to myself to ask Dr. Frank for Macaulay’s files, if he has them. If I know the facts about Macaulay, I will not fear his ghost, I will not make the connections between myself and the fate of the dead man that Pete Cooper wants me to make. Dr. Frank always says that truth is an antidote to fear.

  I said to him, when we were discussing who I should trust to tell me the truth, “What about the attendants? Will they tell me lies?” He said, “Well, Sandy, you know I have personally hired each of them.” Still—everywhere men are in chains, but I am free in my mind and I am not obliged to believe what other people say.

  —

  After lunch, when I’m back in my room to change for the rest of the workday, I tell Karl about my morning with Dr. Frank. He is resting on his bed after injuring his shoulder lifting rocks. He listens to me then says, “You must be careful, if Dr. Frank loses interest in you, you will”—he says vill—“be on your own.”

  “But why would he lose interest? I believe you are right, I could sense it, but what did I do wrong?”

  Karl smiles gently, puts down his book, takes off his glasses, blows on the lenses and polishes them with a corner of his shirt. “The breadboard,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only what I have”—he says haf—“told you before. You must be a success, Sandy. You must show him the causes of your actions in a way that makes sense to him. It must be a logical story so you can be rehabilitated. What (vhat) does breadboard have to do with that? It sounds like nonsense.” I hang my head. For reasons I don’t know, the breadboard is important.

  “I don’t mean to say that it is nonsense—that is between you and your Maker, where it should remain.” Karl sits beside me and puts an arm around my shoulders. “Listen to me, Sandy. If you are a big success, Dr. Frank is a success too. Things do not go so well (vell) for him. So he must defend his treatment, now in particular. His opponents think him unscientific. They want to see results, real cures. Numbers that add up! Society protected from people like us. Not folk tales and fairy stories, like breadboard.”

  “What isn’t going well?” I ask.

  Karl’s expression darkens. “One of the soldiers has killed himself. He was the son of an important man. There will be an inquiry.”

  “What? Killed himself? Here?”

  Karl nods. I think of the handsome men dressed in crisp uniforms I have seen from a distance, led by attendants. I consider my longstanding envy of them.

  “But how can that be the fault of Dr. Frank? Surely he does his best, surely sometimes this happens, it isn’t fair to blame his treatment….”

  “They think he has exaggerated the importance of his views at the expense of those who were sent here to recover. The families of war heroes want their sons home. They want (vant) them to receive different treatment, the latest in science and medicine. They have already managed to have half the facility taken from him.”

  “You mean the East Wing?”

  “Yes, certainly. You don’t think Dr. Frank would approve of what is done there?”

  I shake my head, even though Dr. Frank has indicated to me that that is where I could end up if my treatment with him fails. I had taken it as a threat, but perhaps it was a warning? Certainly, if what Karl says is true, he has compromised himself to keep his job. What is his philosophical position on compromise? “Who are these men who cause problems for Dr. Frank?”

  “Pen-pushers,” he says.

  For the first time I have doubts about Karl. My feelings, as usual, show on my face.

  A wry smile twists his lips. “Don’t worry, my friend. I am not mad. No more mad than the butchers who come once the pen-pushers have prepared the way.”

  “What butchers?”

  “If I frighten you, I am no better than Pete Cooper,” he says and busies himself with mending.

  Karl sews on his own buttons, he turns his shirt cuffs and collars. All his clothing is neat, clean and in good repair. My mending is sent to my mother, but only because I do not know how to do it myself. Everything on Karl’s bedside table is carefully aligned. Winchell’s area is slovenly, sticky with spilled food; his books, papers, handkerchiefs are all frayed, worried, chewed. Bob is a boy. He drops things without thinking, and tears pictures of pretty girls and cars and motorcycles from magazines and tapes them to the walls.

  “You say things I don’t understand, Karl,” I say. He bites off the end of the thread. There are no scissors here.

  “There are many ways of looking at the world, Sandy. Dr. Frank has beliefs about right and wrong. He is a deeply moral man. He thinks we are here because of what has happened to us in the past. He says to himself, ‘If I can change the past of a man like Sandy Grey with my remedy, he will be well.’ ”

  “Well, of course!”

  Karl holds up his hand. “Wait a minute, my friend. The other view is that we are a biology or chemistry problem. What is wrong with us can be cut out with a knife, or altered by drugs. We must be treated in operating theatres and laboratories. Then we are solved into columns. They add us up. We live or we die. These accountants and bureaucrats and butchers. It is exactly what has happened in Germany! But I must not say any more. The walls have ears.”

  He notices my frown and explains, “I’m a foreigner, I speak with an accent. People speak in front of me as if I were an animal, or a servant. I get to know what they really think. You only know what they tell you. But they also listen to what I say: All is reported. One day I will pay for my honesty with you.”

  What is there to say to this? If his view is correct, it is probably true. Not only is there a war on in the outside world, there is one here, too, and we are the battlefield.

  “You told me before to help Dr. Frank, to give him evidence of my innocence. Now you say to tell him a logical story. Which is it?”

  “It is both. You provide him with a cause and with a story. So! You will support his belief in goodness and peace and justice. You will recover and return to society a changed man.”

  “But Karl,” I say, “as I’ve told you, there is nothing wrong with me!”

  “That is the wrong answer, but all the better for what you have to do,” he tells me.

  —

  I wake up in the night. I know it is three in the morning because the laundry truck has just driven in the gate and I can hear the thud of the sacks being unloaded onto a dolly; and I can tell by where the constellations slot into the sky. Recently, because of fears of attacks by the Japanese, we have observed blackout. The perimeter lights are turned off. On a night like tonight, it is so clear that I am sure that if I could climb to the parapet and look out from there, I could see all the way to Georgina’s father’s house on the inlet, and then across the inlet to the Malahat ridge on the far side, and to the lake, and to the roadway around it where I began this long last episode with my father. To my change point.

  As we’d talked further, Karl had helped me see that my life already is a story and it is made of smaller stories, and that these will, in the end, add up, because all the twists and turns will meet at my death. I need not worry about making things up. My childhood is
the story that Dr. Frank wants. Karl explained, by using as illustration the structure of the romance he is writing, that there is always a turning point in the story: After this everything that is before drops away and the story embraces the new. This point exists not only within each life overall, as seen from its end, but within each episode within each life. Although these smaller points cannot be as significant as the larger one. But since we do not know which is which, we treat them all the same. So what I must do for Dr. Frank is choose an incident in my childhood, and find within it a change point, and present this to Dr. Frank, and link it to several other incidents, and place the whole of my childhood into Dr. Frank’s hands so that he can then design the rest of the story. I am to give him that power.

  Karl writes his romances, he says, only because his own story is over. The story he writes is the only power he has left. I dispute this, of course, but the sadness within him makes me wonder.

  So I am to make a gift of the childhood portion of my life to Dr. Frank and write out the little pieces he asks of me with their embedded turning points, so that he will be able to discover the cause and effect links between them and what this has to do with my father. Voila! At once, the predicament posed by childhood will fall away. I will not only be cured, but forgiven.

  All this is utterly clear to me as I gaze out the window at the constellations Ursa Major and Draco—Draco lies, of course, over the inlet where the sea creature continues to nurture its young. Which youngster, following the nature of these things, and encountering its own change points, will grow and change and begat. Ad infinitum. As is above, so it is below! What a moment of transparency!—the stars set in the heavens, their reflection on the water, the creatures below the surface of the sea, and over to one side, me, Sandy Grey, the observer with what Karl says is a point of view.

  My father used to tell me the story of Jesus, but not as a story with events and challenges and decisions that made a pattern, but as if the words themselves were the story. I had to repeat these words until they were memorized. I earned several Sunday-school trophies this way. This is where my father went so wrong! Words, on their own, do not matter: It is the shape they make as they wind their way through the story that counts. Timing within the chain of cause and effect is everything!