“As I said.”
“Who spoke against me, Dr. Love?”
There is silence. He’s considering how much to tell me. He says, “Your parents. They want you home. They believe if you have a lobotomy, they can manage you.”
I find myself, in my mind, with my arms around the sea serpent I found so long ago. Her reptilian skin is cool and soothing, like the hand of a mother on the brow of a fevered child. She was a mother; she was giving birth.
Dr. Love sighs. A deep sigh. “There’s a school of thought that says it’s better to forget. Many of our treatments are based on it.”
“Not Dr. Frank’s.”
He gives me a sharp glance. “No, not his.”
I want to ask, but am afraid to, what has happened to the West Wing director? Is he back in power? Is his regime safe? The fact that he was able to help stop the Lobotomy Board from harming me argues that he is not completely out of favour. I hope it’s more than that, that he’s in the ascendant. It’s my turn to sigh.
“Look, Sandy. I’ll see what I can do. It’s a matter of time. Until then, just try to behave…”
“Normally?”
He smiles. “Exactly.
—
The narrow view, the broad view, the short view, the deep view. Which is it to be if I’m to survive? I reject the narrow and the broad as being too dangerous. Only the deep view looks at the pattern that lies behind the obvious and has the potential to open any situation to its past and future.
If I examine everything that has happened to me, as far as I can remember it, I see that it is I, Sandy Grey, at this moment in time, who links what has happened to what may come. In such a way, I am the pattern. But of what especial quality does the pattern consist?
In a story, the main character finds a solution to his problems through his response to obstacles and delays and danger and struggle and waiting. Interruptions and distractions and indecision are also elements that impede his progress. This is the state of things in the middle section. Unbeknownst to him, tension is building; he heads towards a climax. His own especial quality will determine the outcome. I ask myself again, what is mine?
The answer, which I see at once, is nothing new, but it strikes me afresh. The quality of my pattern, the truth behind the details, the essence of my life, is my innocence. Both Dr. Frank and Dr. Love have told me as much and it is the aspect of myself that I believe Georgina values. In a world gone to ruin, where so many have given up, I, Sandy Grey, from the time I was an infant, am and continue to be innocent of all accusations against me. Slowly but surely others are coming to know this. The false accusations of Pete Cooper were not able to stand against it. Its strength directs the efforts of my friends: firstly, Karl, who gave me the tool of writing, with which I am able to work for my own and Alan Macaulay’s salvation—the pen, truly, is mightier than the sword; secondly, Georgina, who has demonstrated unbending faithfulness and loyalty; thirdly, Dr. Frank, who despite his own difficulties has fought for me against the prejudices of his profession; fourthly, Bob, who accepted my help and thus became free and along with poor Tom—an emblem of innocence also—gave me the opportunity to demonstrate my better human qualities; fifthly, Ron Signet and Kosho, supporters who have surely surprised themselves with what they have risked for me; and sixthly, Dr. Love—so aptly named—who has pulled the burning brand of my breakdown out of the fire.
They are the engine of my life and direct the plot within its overall pattern towards an inevitable triumph. There is no other way to look at it! QED!
The Storehouse of Thought and Expression says, “If each human being is a nerve centre in the body of human kind, which are the more important centres? Those that respond only when they are touched directly, or those that respond no matter where the great body is touched?”
My friends are the important centres! They respond to the nuances of the great body of mankind, just as I, as a member of a fellow species on earth, responded to the plight of the sea serpent in her hour of need.
I’m pleased with my thinking. It has reaffirmed what I knew from the beginning (and now can remember). As Sandy Grey goes, so goes the universe. Not that I’m puffed up with pride—it isn’t that, it’s not a matter of my own importance, but of equality, fraternity, liberty. The pillars of civilization. At this moment in history, in this place, I’m a weathervane. Watch me, watch the world.
—
In the afternoon John takes me to see Winchell. He is in a room on his own. John does not tell me so, but I believe he has been ordered by Dr. Love to arrange the meeting. Perhaps it is a test of my equilibrium? Winchell sits on a cot coughing blood into a handkerchief.
“Fuck you, Sandy,” he says.
“I’ll just leave you two lovebirds,” John says.
“Fuck you, too,” Winchell says.
John closes the door and we’re alone, although I’m sure that he, or someone like him, is listening.
“I’ve got TB, you bastard,” Winchell says. “They’ve had the Spanish Civil War Veterans Association to see me. Half of us have got it. But what the fuck can they do?”
“If you’re ill, they’ll have to let you out.”
“You’re a kidder, Sandy. That’s what I like about you.” He gazes at the blood spots on the linen, red on white. “You know I wouldn’t have done it if I thought there was another way, Sandy. Cooper fucking lied to me. He said you’d written a letter about me, about the laundry strike; you’d exposed us.”
“I didn’t do that.”
“Yeah, I know that now, but somebody must have. You know what they did to those poor bastards? Put them on a slow boat to China. Can you imagine that, these days? If the Japs didn’t sink them, they’ll have been shot on landing. There’s no safe haven for crazies, Sandy. He said I was next, they’d ship me back to Spain—and guess what, we didn’t win that one. One look at me and I’d join thousands in the barrancos.”
“The what?”
“Fucking ditches.” He raises the cloth to his mouth and spits. “But if I did this one thing, told a little white lie about you, he’d get me out. Said the CCF would look after me. He knew a man, a socialist member of the legislature, who’s always here, poking his nose in, said he’d speak to him….”
“You believed him?”
“I’d heard of this guy he talked about, he got the heat turned on and lights for the cells.”
“I’m truly grateful.”
Winchell finally meets my eyes. “Yeah, I believed him. I’m an asshole.”
“I understand. It’s all right.”
“You know I never had a real job? Just harvesting, and then the war. You know the only thing I ever read?”
“Karl Marx?”
“You’re a kidder all right. You ever read him?” I shake my head. “Don’t bother. Stick to the comics like I do.”
He thwacks himself on the chest and spits up again. When he’s done he says, “Why’d they bring you to see me?”
“They’re going to let me go.”
“They won’t do that, Sandy. Oh, no, no no. Once in, never out. Like they said of the Bishop and the nun…”
“I’ve been promised.”
“Yeah. Talk to me about promises.”
“I’m innocent as charged. They’ll have to let me go.”
“You poor sap,” he says. This time there’s a flood of blood. The handkerchief is soaked.
“I don’t want to be a poor sap.”
“I know, you told me once,” he says, when he can speak. “It doesn’t make any difference.”
We sit quietly in his room. There’s a kind of hum in the walls. I point it out and he nods.
“They do that to you?” he asks.
“What?”
He goes, “Bzzztt bzzztt. You know, that machine.”
“I don’t know.”
He shakes his head sadly. “Who’d have thought it, that it would come to this. We didn’t know when we had it good.”
“What will happen to you?” I
ask him.
“Me? I’m going before the Board.”
“The Board?”
“You know.
“The Lobotomy Board? Why you?”
“About that brain surgery—they say you don’t feel anything afterwards. Maybe that’d be better, eh? What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Christ’s balls, Sandy, you do know. You’ve seen them. They’re fucking Frankenstein’s monsters. Maybe I’ll be one of them.” He stands, sticks his hands in his mouth and pulls back his lips, bulges his eyes, walks stiffly about the room.
“No, Winchell. They won’t do it. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“I organized the laundrymen. I’m a Communist. They’ll never forgive me. You have no fucking idea.” He starts to laugh. “You should have seen it, Sandy, we barricaded the doors with laundry tubs, we threatened them with hot water.”
“Did you raise the red flag? Was it your flag hanging out the window?”
“Eh? Somebody did that? Well, I’ll be…” He is pleased, almost happy. “There’s hope for us yet, Sandy.” A thought crosses his mind. I can see it arrive and linger in the way he shifts his eyes away from mine. The thought—whatever it is—makes him uncomfortable.
“You already said you’re sorry, I forgive you. You can say whatever you want.”
“Fuck it, Sandy. I was wondering…they said you tried to hurt yourself.”
“So I understand.”
“Well, did you, you know…”
“Did I what?”
“Do it, cut your prick off?”
—
It’s nighttime and I’m in a room by myself. I have no proper sheets and not even a blanket this time, only a canvas cover and no window to look out of. Compared to how I started off in the West Wing, it’s a major comedown, but compared to the possibilities in the East Wing, it’s not bad. At least it is quiet and I can think. In this privacy I can do what I want, which is to examine myself as carefully as possible. There are scars low on my belly, and the marks of stitches on my penis. I don’t remember doing it: I remember right up until that point, then nothing.
Does that mean I’m insane after all?
The Bible says, if thy hand offends thee, cut it off. I don’t believe the Bible. It’s just that it’s been sown—planted—in my mind by my parents. I reap what they sowed.
So. Ha ha! So, then. This indeed requires the deep view (the narrow one’s a bitch), the one that sees pattern and its relation.
As I think it through, I am able to summon the events: Bob’s escape. The lack of reply to my letter about Pete Cooper. My truth-serum session with Dr. Frank. The breakdown of order in the institution. My flight from the top of the battlements. My crash. The massacre of the innocents in the rabbitry. Pete Cooper’s lie about Kosho. The telegram announcing the death of Georgina’s son, Brentwood.
What I did might have been crazy—self-inflicted harm is that, of course, since it is an act contrary to the individual’s normal self-interest—but it was logical. What other out did I have?
But why, Sandy Grey, if you’re to be honest you must ask yourself, did it take the form of attempted self-emasculation?
Because what was done to me by others I do to myself. Simple, isn’t it? There, in a nutshell, is the answer to the problems of the world. Christ said, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It may be subtle, but it’s an important difference.
In a story, once the pattern becomes evident, there’s a reversal that marks revelation for the protagonist: The events of the story are seen, suddenly, from a new perspective; they are turned inside out, or there is the arrival of a new character who brings the required revelation; that is, the story interrogates itself. It puts an end to the clutter and tyranny of words and emotion with their endless clatter clatter clatter and reaches for fundamental oneness, beauty, resolution of conflict in perfect chords. This is my reversal.
What exists within my terrible attempt to castrate myself? What lies within the bonds of cause and effect that link my father and me? What is Sandy Grey’s answer to his self-hatred?
The answer is love.
It has been a busy day and I’m tired, but I’m not so fatigued that I cannot will myself back in time to a bed in which I lay with the little girl who loved me, and whom I loved, and to whom I pledged my heart and soul in all its innocence. A promise that I’ve kept. For I have never lost the innocence or the love: They were stored within me, seeds to ensure my survival against all odds, which now that I have found them again, I will nurture.
How? By finding her.
FOURTEEN
April 1 and following, 1942
It’s nighttime in the East Wing. I’m back in the cells, this time on the top tier. No one tells me why I’ve been moved. From up here, the sum of individual existence in the bottom two tiers makes a hum, as if I lived on top of bees. Deep at night, when I lie awake, the hum breaks into episodes of coughs and cries, and I think of a jungle more than a hive. Or of caged animals. I try to pick out from this who I am. The metaphor matters in my search for unity and harmony among my ideas and thoughts. I must keep order in my mental chambers. Bees, I think. Honey and pattern and sweetness.
In the daytime, in the Great Hall where no one dares to talk because those who protest their treatment disappear (I’ve not seen hide nor hair of Winchell since our meeting; what has happened to him? how did it go with the Board?)…in the daytime, I draw the cloak of silence around me and do my best to forget. I’m done with remembering, as here, in these circumstances, it is an evil and not a blessing.
I make myself as useful as I can to John. I wash walls and floors; I carry lunch trays.
When I can, I whisper words of hope and encouragement to Karl. But each time he returns from a session of electrotherapy, there is less of him. He’s a candle guttering out. What could save him now? Even a German victory might not be enough, for the Nazis, as he has told me, have no tolerance for the imperfect. One look at us and they’d put us up against a wall and shoot us.
In the daytime—I’m a dead man if John catches me—I collect the names, addresses and stories of the Russians. When I get out I will contact their families and tell them what has happened. The same goes for Karl’s family. After the war I will visit Germany and tell them about Karl’s writing, and The Romance of Stanley Park. I’ll take them a copy—it will be my own work, but it will contain an essence of Karl, because Karl is my teacher and mentor. While I and The Romance of Stanley Park exist, so does he.
In the daytime, I do what I can: I look to the future.
Georgina visits me when she can free herself from her obligations to her father. She tells me that Singapore and Rangoon have fallen and there are fears of a Japanese invasion here, on the coast. She says that all the Canadian Japs have been moved inland.
“Why?”
“In case they are spies.”
“Any of us could be spies.”
She puffs out her cheeks and gives a small, dismissive blow. “Not me, not you, not the admiral, Sandy!”
“What about Kosho? What’s happened to him?”
“I said I’d look after him.”
“Where is he?”
For answer, she recites the poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W.B. Yeats. I join her for the final two verses. I’m puzzled, but all she’ll say is, “The walls have ears, Sandy.”
I resolve to think about the poem later on. For now I put my fingers to my lips, “Mum’s the word, Georgina.”
When the air-raid siren sounds, Georgina leaves. We, in the cells, don’t go anywhere. They say that only a direct hit would affect us. They say. They say. Like all the alerts so far, it is a false alarm.
In the daytime, when I am in the Great Hall and I’m thinking about the future and not the past, I pass on what Georgina has told me. To Karl I say that the Germans have called off their assault on Moscow: Soon they will be able to return home. To the Russians I say their army is fighting back, regaining
lost territory. They are brave, and although in difficulties at the moment, we are bound to come to their aid by opening a western front. In the silence that I then draw around myself, I try not to think about how I might have been able to help win the war by bombing Germans or taking part in patrols that search for submarines, or even by scanning the skies for enemy airplanes. When doors close, Sandy, I tell myself—the cell door, the Great Hall door, the door of the truth-serum room, door after door—another door opens. I am looking for that door.
But at nighttime like this, the small world I have contracts further into the sighs of the others, and the voices of the dead and those worse off than dead. It narrows into a tunnel to the past. In the tunnel I find poor Tom. Karl whispered to me, weeks ago, when he could still talk, that Tom was gone. “Gone?” I’d whispered back. Karl pressed his index fingers to his temples, by which I knew they’d done the brain thing to him. John has told me how it’s done. They drill holes in either side of the head, insert a tube to make a path for the knife, introduce the knife and swing its blade in arcs. “It goes through just like soft butter,” John said. I close the door on Tom.
Next in the tunnel I find Misha. After arriving in New York from Russia, he travelled to Prince Rupert to work on the railroad. One night he was drinking heavily and with several others of his countrymen robbed a bank of a thousand dollars. He was shot in the back, arrested and sentenced. While in jail, in his natural despair, he tried to cut his throat. He has been here ever since. Misha says that sometimes his bed is burning. Why not? Is he not in hell? He is married with three children. He has never attended school.
But, but, but! The tunnel itself has a door, and so I shut it firmly, and try, as I do every night, to clear my mind of all but sanity, health, sociability, cheerfulness and tolerance. Dr. Love has told me that soon, within days, I will go before the Board. That I am not guilty of the crime that brought me here to the East Wing matters somewhat, but only to the extent the Board allows. What counts is the here and now. Sandy Grey, his state of mind.
I do my exercises: sit-ups, squat jumps, push-ups, jumping jacks until I’m sweating. After this, I splash my face and torso with cold water from the metal bowl of water I’m allowed. Although I have no soap I’m clean enough, my circulation sings, my skin stings pleasantly.
What It Takes to Be Human Page 18