What It Takes to Be Human

by Marilyn Bowering

  “Miss Cochrane, would you cancel my other appointments?”

  —

  Once more I’m in the East Wing ground-floor room, lying on the bed. A nurse has been summoned. She’s not in uniform. She wears a summer blouse and skirt. Her nose sports the beginning of a sunburn. She looks cross. Grains of beach sand cling to the tender hairs of her forearms. Has she left her lover behind on a blanket? Were her husband and children eating fried chicken from the basket she’d so carefully prepared early in the morning? Don’t do this for me, I’d like to say to her, but with Dr. Frank waiting I only roll up my shirt sleeve so that she can tie the rubber tubing tightly above my elbow. When all is ready, she loosens the tourniquet, opens the valve and the Sodium Pentothal begins to drip into my system.

  “We’ll stay away from numbers this time, Sandy. That’s where we went wrong last time.”

  No guidance then? No ladder of figures to hold on to? Just a fall into my own creation?

  “Relax, Sandy. Allow yourself to drift. You’re on the ocean, fully supported and warm. Nothing can harm you. You allow the current to carry you to a special land. Are you feeling comfortable? What does the word bridal mean to you, Sandy?”

  I’ve fallen gently, as if from one of those rooms where you leave your body, float to the ceiling and can pass effortlessly through walls. The word bridal takes me safely past all dangers, although I’m aware of them, like tigers prowling dark woods, far below me. Where I settle, light as a feather, is sunshine. A stream rustles between grassy banks. I remove my shoes and socks and step into the water, carrying one of my shoes with me. I scoop up water in it and pour it over the head of the small blond girl who waits for me. She laughs, tears of creek water on her eyelashes. “Now I’ll have to take my clothes off and dry them!” she says.

  I take her hand and we wade to shore, wincing from the pinch of stones, minnows darting from the mud that squishes between our toes. She shakes her fingers dry then reaches behind her neck for her blouse button. Between the two of us, we manage and then she’s standing there in her shorts and undershirt. She lays the blouse over a bush, then fumbles with her waistband.

  “You can’t take your clothes off unless we’re married!”

  “Oh!” She stops. Blue eyes like the camas flowers at our feet. I crouch and pick some, thrust a bouquet into her hand. “Well,” she says, “have you got a ring?”

  Many things would do—we could plait grasses, tie a string—but in my heart I know this has to be permanent. I take off my shirt although it is not wet. Sunlight and wind, a chill scrape of air over my chest. I fetch my shoes. Several brass rings hold together the straps of my sandals. I pull at the leather until one breaks free.

  “We have to have some words,” she says. She puts the damp blouse on top of her head for a veil; she gives me one of the blue flowers to hold.

  I pull her down to kneel beside me. “Forever and ever, I do,” I say and put the ring on her finger. She stretches out her neck, lips puckered up, and I kiss her, clean and sweet as a lick of ice. It could brace you for life.

  “Now I can take all my clothes off,” she says. She pulls down the shorts, shrugs out of the undershirt and panties. Watching me. “You too.”

  We gather grasses for a bed, running back and forth to keep warm, then when it’s time, lie down in our nest. Side by side, at first, then I know what I have to do. Lie on top of her, feel the warmth of her. “You have to touch my boobies,” she says. So we sit up and I do.

  “Now I’ll touch you.”

  Back and forth, everything is permitted because we’re wed.

  “What’s the girl’s name, Sandy?” Dr. Frank’s voice makes her step backwards, away from me.

  “Heather?” I reach for her but she runs away laughing.

  “Forever,” I say, hearing myself out loud this time, sounding like I’m drunk. Pathetic. “It’s forever. She can’t go.”

  Dr. Frank again, voice booming in a wasteland as I’m plucked away, flung into a grey room. “You went and told her mother that you were married.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you left with her, took your clothes off once more, reached a crossroads.”

  “So I’ve written.”

  Two ways to go, one into a gully and back up to the road, the other across the school grounds. We go into the gully because we can’t think further than that and we have to find a place to live. It’s clear that where we stay must be our secret. Two big girls push their bikes down the path and drop them in a bush. Laugh when they see us naked. One of them takes me with her, and the two big boys who’ve lagged behind them catch up and they’ve got Heather. “I just want to look,” I hear one say. The big girl with me—Dorothy—that’s her name—I’ve seen her before—makes me lie on top of her, but I don’t want to do anything. I run towards Heather, and he has her legs spread as she stands and he is poking between them with a stick. She wails, lost, and then her father’s voice calls across the field, “Heather, Heather!” The boy lets her go, pushes me in the face and they’re gone.

  “I’ve got to find her!” Tugging at the restraints, out of my mind with worry.

  “You’re at home now, Sandy. What’s happening there?”

  Terrible sobs because they won’t let me see her. I’ve been sent to bed without supper. Her parents’ voices, raised voices in the living room. Mother comes into my room wearing an old ugly dress, the sleeves rolled up above her elbows, her hands red from dipping them in hot water. “I don’t want to touch him, you do it,” she says.

  I’m bundled into the bathroom, my father in his shirt sleeves, steam rising from a tub filled with hot water from the kettle. I scream when he lifts me in—it’s too hot!

  “You’ll burn in hell, Sandy, far worse than this!” That’s what I hear, and my mother’s gush of syllables as the eyes roll back in her head and she shouts in tongues, rhythmical as the strap. Lashes of gibberish that frighten me to death. I scream and scream but my father has firm hold of me; he takes the stiff wash brush to my skin and scrapes until there’s blood. “I’ll teach you to be clean!” he says. I put my hands over my penis, but he takes my hands away and there, too, peeling back the foreskin, soap and brush get to work.

  “He had no right to do that, Sandy. You were an innocent child. You did nothing wrong. What happened was natural, most children experiment in that way.” The nurse smoothes a cool cloth over my face. “It doesn’t matter,” I say. She cleanses my hands. Hums a tune, maybe thinking this hasn’t taken long, there’s still time for her picnic. All the straps are undone. I sit up. I’m getting used to the feeling afterwards: I’m a baby bird, damp from the egg, and I step from the shell.

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? Whyever not?”

  “They weren’t my real parents. It really doesn’t matter what they did to me.”

  “You’re not being philosophical with me again, are you, Sandy?” Dr. Frank says. “You haven’t been reading up on Freud?”

  I shake my head.

  “Because if you have, I’ll have your guts for garters. No getting into bed with your mother next time, either, or I won’t believe a word of it.”

  A smile trembles across my lips. He lays a hand on my shoulder: I can hear the rumble of poor digestion from his stomach. “You do know, Sandy, that Freud changed his mind about all that.”

  “All what, sir?”

  “Children and sex. It’s all nonsense. His patients made it up.” I start to protest and he raises a hand to silence me. “Not that I don’t believe you, in essence. The part about your parents, now that makes sense.”

  “Not my parents, sir.”

  A baleful look, and he’s gone.

  —

  I’ve been given the afternoon off from the rabbitry—although I’d prefer to go there—to “collect myself” and “think things over,” which is what Dr. Frank has suggested I do. When I arrive in my room I find the new man, Tom, going through my things. “Hey, stop that!” I say. He’s pulled out my underwear an
d sweaters from their drawers. My shoes are scattered over the floor.

  He doesn’t reply—so far he’s said very little to anyone—and walks past me, out the door, carrying one of Karl’s pens.

  “Hey!” I rush after him and grab his arm. “Give me that!” He plunges on, ignoring me. At the end of the corridor Pete Cooper stands smiling. “Attendant Cooper, that man’s been pawing my belongings and now he’s got my pen!”

  “Is that so?” Cooper says.

  “Yes! Can you stop him, please?”

  Tom doesn’t take notice of either of us. “You there, hold on,” Cooper says.

  Tom opens the fire door at the end of the corridor and descends the stairs. He’s still got Karl’s pen, so I run after him. “Bring that back, thief!” Tears smart my eyes.

  “Been having a session, Sandy, feeling a little sensitive?” If it weren’t Cooper who says this, I’d take it for sympathy. I find myself bawling: baby’s tears gushing. Just then Bob arrives at the bottom of the stairwell and takes in the scene. Tom is about to brush by him too, but Bob snaps to attention and salutes. “Sir!”

  Tom cracks a salute back and the pen falls to the ground. Bob says, “Carry on!” and Tom does. Pete Cooper watches in amazement. Bob calls up in a cheery voice, “He’ll be fine now. You just have to give him a direct order.” He glances at me. Both he and I know that Tom pays no attention to Cooper, orders or not. I happen to think it’s the way Bob does it: He’s playing a role that Tom recognizes. At some point in his life, Tom’s encountered the military, though why Bob should know this escapes me.

  “How’d you figure that out, Bob?” I ask him.

  “Observation.” Bob taps his forehead to show how smart he is. “Saw him watch the soldiers. Figured it was something like that.” I follow Attendant Cooper down the stairs.

  “Like what?” Pete Cooper says. Pete’s hands are trembling. I know the signs and so I begin to edge away.

  “Tom, over there…” We watch as Tom reaches a locked door, pauses, makes a brisk reversal and heads towards us. “You got to keep it simple for him.”

  “Is that a fact?” Pete Cooper says.

  “Got anything for me?” Bob says. Pete Cooper generally saves magazines from the staff room for Bob who clips out pictures from them. Now that I think of it, I’ve seen Pete go out of his way a number of times to help out Bob, but this time Pete isn’t listening to the younger man.

  “Keep it simple, eh?” Pete says.

  Tom trudges forward, empty-faced. At the point where he dropped the pen, he crouches and begins searching on hands and knees like a blind man.

  “Stop it,” Pete says. “You, come here.”

  Tom ignores him. Pete shoots a venomous glance at me as Bob slips the pen from his hand into mine. “I’ll keep it simple, all right,” Pete says. He opens a cleaning cupboard and takes out a broom and starts poking the end at Tom’s side as he crawls, still searching. “Up on your feet, get up.” Pete mimes a poke with the broom at Tom’s rear end.

  Bob drops his hand from my shoulder and plants his shoes in Tom’s path. “Reveille, soldier, everyone up.” Tom springs to his feet. Bob salutes him and says, “Return to quarters.”

  I don’t see the blow coming. It’s there, a crack on the side of his head, then another and another. Tom immobile, cuts in his scalp, eyes swelling. Cooper swings like an automaton. Automatons the both of them.

  It takes me oddly, my knees weaken and I’m blubbering. “Ma ma ma.” No revelations, nothing new, it’s that sliced-open feeling, that’s all. Tom’s buffeting by Pete Cooper finishes the job on my underpinnings that Dr. Frank’s truth serum began. “Ma ma ma,” I wail.

  A distant door clicks open. Attendant Cooper replaces the broom in the closet. Bob has his arms around me, his hands on my hair, quieting. “There, there.”

  Tom has carried on up the stairs to “quarters” and, perhaps, to continue his rummage of my belongings.

  “BMW, Harley Davidson, Indian, BSA,” Bob murmurs in my ear, words that must have meaning for him, words that at another time I would understand.

  He’s younger than me, I remember. Only a boy. Mothering me. I take a breath for self-control and open my eyes to meet a ray of hatred beamed my way by Pete Cooper before he follows after Tom to clean up.

  NINE

  July 11 and following, 1941

  I sit down to write, but I find I can’t begin. Everything Attendant Cooper has ever done to bother me is what comes to mind. More and more of the world is at war, but with Karl’s pen in my hand, I write down Cooper’s sins:

  1. beating Karl near half to death

  2. attack on Tom

  3. threats against my person

  4. numerous insults to just about everyone.

  It doesn’t sound like much when it’s put in black and white.

  Taking Georgina’s advice that when you’re mentally stuck, you should go in the other direction, I start a list of all the nice things Cooper has done for young Bob:

  1. brings him magazines

  2. gives him the easiest jobs

  3. expresses himself in a kindly fashion towards him.

  That’s even worse for how little it conveys, but as I stare at the lists I see the problem, and find the page in The Storehouse of Thought and Expression to confirm it. “A writer shows that he observes well when he succeeds in giving vivid pictures.” What’s vivid in my lists? Why, nothing! Vivid would be Karl’s face, the skin waxy yellow on one side, the other streaked with red, the creases around his rolling eyes forming crepe paper. Marbles on crepe paper. No, try again. The hatred I feel for Pete Cooper is like a vine in flower; in each blossom is the tiny grape that will expand into a globe that ripens under the sun. The grape’s sweetness or sourness will be revealed in its taste; its value in the wine. That’s vivid, but perhaps it’s too metaphorical? I’m getting nowhere in this fashion, but I know what I have to do. The fruit comes of the planted seed, so I must sow the seed, attempt, through words, to convey the flavour of what it is like to live under this man’s tyrannical rule.

  Report of the attack by Attendant Peter Cooper on new patient Tom

  At about three in the afternoon, not long after a session of “truth serum” with Dr. Frank, while I was going about my business in the West Wing, the above named patient was struck with a broom handle over the head, shoulders and backside by Attendant Cooper.

  The patient, although confused, had done nothing to deserve this beating; indeed, he had said nothing at all to Attendant Cooper. I observed cuts like vivid roses on the pale whiteness of his skin. [I cross out the “roses” part of the previous sentence.] Since the beating, Tom has had difficulty with his hearing. The attack was also witnessed by patient Bob Smithson.

  Yours very truly,

  Alexander Grey

  I read this over and put it in my pocket to consider again later. I should get Bob to sign it. The testimony of two of us would count for more. But who to give it to when I’m ready? Ron Signet? Georgina? Is there a way to smuggle it into the general mail? I go back to thinking about Bob. The trouble with him is that he is handsome and knows it, and his joking around makes it so you can’t always rely on him to take important matters seriously. Would he, for instance, tell Pete Cooper about the letter? Even as a joke? Remarks made to me by Georgina, when she met Bob, come back: “He looks like the cat that ate the cream,” and “That one knows which side his bread is buttered on.”

  Indeed, sometimes Bob has “that lean and hungry look.”

  I asked Bob, like I ask everyone, what he had done to get himself here. He said he was “just having fun.” I said, “What kind of fun?” He said, “You know, everything.” I said I didn’t know. I asked him what he did for a living. “Worked two weeks in a drugstore,” he said, “learned the business in two weeks.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Then I went on a farm for three months, but it didn’t pay much.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I could be a doctor, if I w
anted, or a professor.”

  “I suppose…”

  “Or a minister. I’d take the religion of the Shriners Order.”

  “The Shriners?”

  “You know, like Omar Khayyám.”

  “Khayyám the poet?”

  Bob laughed. “Yup,” he said, “that religion, same as the Hindus and Egyptians.”

  Bob surprises me, sometimes, by his references, although when I’ve quizzed him as to the books he’s read, he goggles his eyes and plays dumb.

  Sometimes Bob gets up in the middle of the night and strolls around. He doesn’t seem to do anything but look through magazines and fetch himself drinks of water. I asked him, once, what he thought about in his night rambles. He answered, “Yesterday.”

  So you see how difficult it is to pin him down.

  I recall, as I sit here, waiting for inspiration to strike, that Winchell told me that Bob had once eloped—gone into the airing court and climbed the fence. How he managed, I do not know, for the fence is high and topped with barbed wire. What struck me most about Winchell’s tale was that he said that Pete Cooper had brought Bob back, and that although Bob was smiling, Pete Cooper was in tears. Strange. And difficult for me to imagine Bob wanting anything so badly he’d take a risk for it.

  I put pen to paper to try to imagine the scene: The attempt to escape comes after a visit from Bob’s mother. He’s refused to see her. He runs to the fence and, with superhuman strength and total disregard for pain, scales it. He’s over, and scarpering across the field; sheep baa away from him, he reaches a road, cars, people, then what? Pete Cooper in a staff car or the farm truck picks him up from the side of the road and brings him back? It hardly seems worth the effort.

  I’m puzzling over these matters when Winchell enters. Winchell’s looks are brutish. He has a low forehead, thick black hair that curls over his brow, long ears, heavily muscled arms, short legs and a stocky trunk. But I’ve been thinking over another page of The Storehouse where it says that “we look at human beings with our emotions and our prejudices instead of with our eyes. We have an incurable desire to ‘size a man up’ which means judge his soul by the shape of his chin.”