by WD Clarke
It went like this: people with a normal psychological makeup certainly experience life as if their choices matter. Most have a ‘felt’ conviction that they can freely choose between two widely divergent possibilities, and that the consequences of these choices are real and meaningful. Certain genetic predispositions might tip the balance in one direction slightly more than in another, but on the whole, people with normal psychological makeup do not feel compelled to behave in any manner other than how they would choose to behave. Abnormal psychology, on the other hand, begins with abnormal brain chemistry; abnormal patients experience the world quite differently from their normal counterparts. They ‘feel’ that they lack choices, that they are driven to behave in ways that they would never choose, if given the choice. But that was just it: they do not ‘feel’ that they are given a choice.
Modern psychiatry, on the other hand, was attempting to give them that ‘feeling’, that ‘feeling’ of possessing the capacity to make choices. Drugs such as Alba, Solara, Bicamera, Assuage and Prolepsin (as well as, perhaps, hopefully, this newcomer, Equinox) were doing for those whom nature had deprived of normal neurotransmitter levels what public health and education had done for generations of the economically disadvantaged—giving them a fighting chance on a more level playing field. They really were. And these drugs were only giving these unfortunates something that everyone else already enjoyed: the experience of willpower, the very possibility of choice, the potentiality and actuality of ‘feeling’ that, regardless of external contingencies, one is always ‘choosing’ to ‘choose’.
Dr. Ed did not ‘feel’ that this ‘Weltanschauung’ of his was simplistic or reductionist. On the contrary, for those who would persist, for those who would insist upon continuing to smuggle in such tired, metaphysical shibboleths as ‘the soul’, fairy tales belonging to a more innocent, naive and credulous time, he had only pity and contempt. G-d was long-dead, and the soul had died with Him. All else was at best sentimentality; at worst, cynical (but, as the New Age was proving, profitable) deceit.
To say, then, that Dr. Ed ‘felt’ a ‘force’ that was pushing him back, away from his office, is to say that he ‘felt’ a ‘presence’ in his lower abdomen, the cause of which was most certainly adrenaline, the fight-or-flight hormone whose precursor is dopamine. It was obvious to Dr. Ed why this might be happening: he had just had a very stressful last 16-or-so hours, and (understandably enough) did not ‘feel’ entirely up to the demands of meeting his Thursday morning patients, all of whom were part of the Alba trial. What he was ‘feeling’ (he told himself, to talk himself down from this quite reasonable ‘emotional’ response) was a quite reasonable ‘emotional’ response, and there was nothing to be alarmed about. Max was fine. His wife was fine. Everything, all manner of things were, and would continue to be, fine. He just needed a couple of deep breaths, a belated morning coffee from his thermos, and a few minutes’ peace in order that he might collect wayward ‘thoughts’ such as these, before seeing his patients. Dr. Ed took a deep breath in, exhaled still more deeply, and opened the door to the clinic. It was 09:27.
14
A ‘Switch’ To ‘Flick’
It was 09:27. Sitting at Nurse Sloggett’s desk was not the usual, capable Temp whose services were always engaged on those (thankfully rare) occasions when Nurse Sloggett was unavoidably absent. Sitting at Nurse Sloggett’s desk was his ‘son’, Ted. Dr. Ed went around the glassed-in nursing station, up to the desk, placed both his palms down upon its edge, and leaned over it. Numerous ‘emotions’ had arisen within him, among them: anger (of course), embarrassment (that his ‘son’ might have told someone, anyone, about their … ‘relationship’), fear (ditto, but additionally, the fear that Ted might have screwed something—anything—up, as far as the job was concerned), and, again, anger (obviously).
—Hi, ‘Dad’.
—Don’t call me that, Ted. Especially not here.
—What’s the matter?
—Nothing.
—You’re late, later than your message said you’d be.
—I don’t want to talk about it.
—4 of your first 6 patients have already left. I told them to call back tomorrow to re-schedule.
—Fine. I’ll need a couple of minutes.
—Uh, could we have a talk, at some point, ‘dad’?
—I told you not to call me that. Not here, certainly.
—But you are my dad, you know.
—Only theoretically.
—No, not theoretically, dad. Technically. You did, in fact, sire a son.
—Technically, then. Ok, technically speaking, I’m your father. Now, could you tell me just what the hell you’re doing here?
—Uh, I think I’m working here. I work for the Temp agency, LaborValu. You know what their motto is?
Dr. Ed did not respond. He tried to look as coolly at this young man as he could, but the sang-froid had all leaked out of his corroded radiator, and his temperature light had just come on.
—‘We’re all work and no play.’
Dr. Ed looked at him for a lengthy-seeming 4–5 seconds, and then said, with as much composure as he could muster:
—We’ll talk later, I promise. I need a few minutes, then I’ll let you know when to call the first patient in.
His ‘son’ nodded wordlessly, and then Dr. Ed went into his office. He composed himself, then placed a phone call to LaborValu. In a polite, ‘emotion’-less tone of voice he spoke to a Customer Relations Associate named Eustasia Sculpin, who explained that his usual temp had not called to confirm, and so they had been forced to send Theodore. Dr. Ed made it clear to Ms. Sculpin that he appreciated their efforts on his behalf, and assured her that ‘Theodore’ was both hard working and courteous. He had, however, one request to make: could the agency somehow flag his file, so that, in future, only female Temps be sent to his office? A large number of the clinic’s patients were women, who were, or had been … victims … of sexual and/or ‘emotional’ abuse, and they would ‘feel’ much less threatened by, that is, ‘feel’ more, more at ease in, you understand, in a … clinical environment which was….
Etcetera.
Now Dr. Ed had what he liked to call a ‘switch’. And he had the ability to ‘flick’ this ‘switch’, which was ‘located’ somewhere in his ‘mind’. If he ever overreacted, if something ever got him upset, worked up, ‘emotional’, then, when he realized what was happening, he simply ‘flicked’ this ‘switch’, and the ‘emotions’ were ‘diverted’, through a ‘gate’. The ‘gate’ did not lead to a ‘filter’, where they would be made to simply disappear, no; nor did they lead to an ‘attenuator’. Rather, the ‘switch’ diverted them into a kind of ‘capacitor’ or ccd (charge coupled device), where they could be temporarily ‘stored’, until there was sufficient time & energy to process them, later on.
He’d initially realized that he had a ‘switch’ to ‘flick’ back in his last year of high school, when he’d first met Agnes, Ted’s mother. He didn’t know, at the time, how useful it would soon prove to be, but the idea of it resonated strongly within him, the idea that you could ‘compartmentalize’ certain potentially troublesome aspects of your ‘self’, so as to more effectively deal with the storms and stresses of life. The original idea had come from a Dr. Matthews, his Grade 13 History teacher at St. Aloysius College, an all-male Roman Catholic day school which was ‘semi-private’ in the sense that there was a tuition fee, but it was much less than the private schools—and the fee was waived for families who lacked the means to pay. It was Dr. Matthews who had planted the seed, but it was Dr. Ed himself who had changed the physical basis of the metaphor, from Dr. Matthews’ explanation of the various rooms in a house, to the one that Dr. Ed still employed—that of the switchable electrical circuit.
It was mid-winter. The class was what would now be called an ‘enriched’ one, in that all but the best-and-brightest students had been diverted into their own ‘stream’. Dr. Matthews was pushing them hard, expecting
from the class the maturity, curiosity, perseverance and quality of work which one would normally associate with the 2nd year of university. They were studying Modern British History, from the Hanoverian Succession to the present day, and had reached the second half of the 19th century, deep into the reign of Queen Victoria, and marked by the many pitched battles in Parliament between the Whig leader, William Gladstone, and his Tory counterpart, Benjamin Disraeli. Of the two, Disraeli was clearly Dr. Matthew’s (as well as Queen Victoria’s) favourite, and the class had been able to kill several periods getting Dr. Matthews to regale them with anecdotes about Disraeli’s life and times.
First off, Disraeli’s father was a Jew, and for a Jew—even one who had converted to Christianity—to become Prime Minister of Europe’s leading colonial power was simply unheard of. He was also a writer, and his novels Coningsby and Sybil had become the catalyst for a movement known as Young England. ‘Conservatism, yes’, went his rallying cry, ‘but what shall we conserve?’ The Disraeli anecdote that impressed young Eddy the most, however, was not delivered in class. Rather, Dr. Matthews bequeathed it to him when they met after school one day, to discuss Eddy’s falling grades and overdue assignments. Dr. Matthews wished to know what had happened to cause this sudden turn for the worse, and moreover, what had happened to that essay that Eddy was writing on ‘Victorian Ideas of Poverty and the Poor’?
Eddy came clean with his teacher, at least partly because the older man was kind in a grandfatherly way towards his students, helping them out whenever he could, without trying to be ‘pals’ with them, as some teachers are wont to do. Eddy told Dr. Matthews about how his girlfriend, Agnes, had become pregnant, and how, when her parents finally noticed, they had conspired with Eddy’s parents and the parish priest to send her to the Mother House of the Sisters of St. Joseph, where she would have the baby and give it up for adoption. She hadn’t left yet, but things were a bit difficult all around at the moment, and, Eddy wondered, while it was certainly not excusable, could he still possibly hand that assignment in?
Dr. Matthews graciously granted Eddy an open deadline on his essay, adding that he could hand work in over the summer to get the credit, if necessary, and that Eddy should take care not to worry overmuch, that things have their own way of working out, that life must take its own course. That was not a prescription for passivity, or for giving up, however; rather one must always, as Machiavelli once said, know what lies within one’s proper sphere of influence, and what must be left to Fortune, and so act accordingly. Or, as the soldiers’ maxim went, one must ‘trust in G-d, but keep one’s powder dry’. By ‘powder’, Eddy eventually came to understand that Dr. Matthews had meant ‘gunpowder’, by which he had really meant ‘one’s own devices’. Well, Eddy was certainly going to place his trust in those, and not in some ‘G-d’ who never showed his face and who allowed all manner of bad things to happen to not-so-bad people!
Dr. Matthews then let Eddy in on the story that was going to change his life forever. Eddy was aware, was he not, that Disraeli had been a great admirer of Charles Dickens? Eddy was. Dr. Matthews had mentioned this to the class, and had reminded them of it on several occasions. Well, there is a character in Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations, named Wemmick, whom Disraeli would certainly have appreciated very much, Dr. Matthews went on. If you visited Wemmick at the strange, miniature castle that was his home, if you crossed over the moat that he had constructed to separate himself from the modern world, and had proceeded from his drawbridge into his parlour, he would have appeared to you to be the most generous and hospitable man you had ever met, and one full of colour, full of life. However, if you had the misfortune of visiting him at work, at the office of the ultracompetitive and successful lawyer Jaggers, for whom he toiled ceaselessly, you would have encountered an entirely different being. For here was a man who worked in black and white, in a world of instrumental reason, of intellectus, rather than ratio, in the 2-dimensional, parcelled-out world of Utility. It was a world that could be depicted only in terms of the axes of a grid, a world whose Rules of Engagement could be defined only by an algorithm of debits and credits, the outcome of which could be understood only in terms of winners and losers. It was the ‘Real World’, and Wemmick had to at least work, if not live, within its constraints.
At work, Wemmick had what Dickens called a ‘post office’ box opening or slit for a mouth, and all the colour and humanity of the man was entirely absent. If the post office mouth ‘smiled’ it was only the mechanical appearance of a smile and nothing more. Wemmick acted thus because it allowed him to survive the rigours of working for Jaggers. Disraeli, reading Dickens, could only have seen this for what it was—an indictment of, again, what capitalist businessmen call ‘The Real World’, of what ‘The Real World’ does to people, of how people have to deform their humanity in order to survive it. Yet, Disraeli would also have taken another lesson from Dickens as well: while ‘The Real World’ may be nothing more than the collective insanity of a nascent industrial age, it does not just disappear because one can raise one’s drawbridge and shut one’s curtains upon it. Collective or communal insanities can impose themselves upon the individual with very real consequences. Just look at fascism in Germany, or at Cold War paranoia in the U.S. Other people’s madness can unleash havoc upon one’s entire world, and one has to compartmentalize one’s life to survive, just like Wemmick.
And it’s not just society at large that one has to worry about. On a much smaller scale, one’s friends and family can often successfully impede one from accomplishing what one must (if one is to remain true to oneself) accomplish. To take a trivial example, one’s friends might be playing a game of hockey outside one’s window, while one attempts to practice at the piano. If one allows their enthusiasm (or even one’s own desire to be distracted) to become a real distraction, then what will one ever accomplish? Or again, take Disraeli, for instance, who went through terrible agony over his wife’s ill health at one point. When he went in to work, however, by G-d, he went in to work!—and left his troubles at the door.
It wasn’t that he learned to forget his troubles, Eddy, it was that he found a way to put them into … into storage for the time being. He learned to separate his two lives, so that they did not bleed into one another, and I am telling you this now because these troubles that you are trying to endure at the moment, make no mistake, they are a test of your character. How you come through in the end, Eddy, well it’s up to you. But I suspect that you will overcome them. Perhaps you and Agnes will one day marry, perhaps not. Who’s to say? And while I’m not sure that the right decision is being made by your parents on your behalf, well, what can you do? You’ve got to soldier on.
And so soldier on he did. The very night that Agnes was parcelled off on the train to Petropolis, young Eddy made the crucial discovery; he found the ‘switch’. He was lying on his bed reading The Fountainhead when he discovered it, when he discovered that he could ‘flick’ it. Then he ‘flicked’ it ‘off’, and it pretty much stayed ‘off’. And from that night on, whenever he ‘thought’ of Agnes on the cinema screen of his ‘mind’, where the image of her beatific face used to be he would now draw a blank, by just ‘flicking’ the ‘switch’. Moreover, her name, which had heretofore borne such unbearable, almost-mystical, lexical weight, now resumed its proper station, and revealed itself for what it truly was: a mere word, two syllables, Ag-nes.
And so thereafter Agnes gradually became no more than a part of his past, and he, well, he looked forward, forward, forward into the future—into his own future. It’s not that he never looked back. He did. Just not all that often. And never very far.
15
Jumping To Conclusions
Dr. Ed ‘Flicked’ his ‘switch’. It worked. It usually did. True, the ‘switch’ had malfunctioned the previous evening, when Dr. Ed had become aware of Max’s and his wife’s … unexplained absence. Yet (though he was still at a loss to explain precisely why this had happened), he was happy to report
to himself that it had been merely a temporary glitch, and that his ability to ‘flick’ the ‘switch’ had definitely returned to him. He ‘flicked’ the ‘switch’, put the telephone handset back into its cradle, and, engaging the intercom, directed his ‘son’ to send the first patient in. It was 09:42.
That morning, Dr. Ed attended to the hardy 2 who had stuck it out in the waiting room, plus a further 10, all in a record 1 hour and 2 minutes, all before breaking early for lunch at 11:00, as he always did on Thursdays. He averaged just under 6 minutes per patient instead of the usual 12.5, getting them out of the office by giving each exactly what they wanted—what each said they wanted, at any rate, or what they would say that they wanted, Dr. Ed was certain, if they could ever just get around to getting around to saying it. And if he couldn’t give each&every one of them exactly what they asked for—if that lay beyond his scope and ken—well, then Dr. Ed made sure they got the next best thing.
09:44 got more Imipramine, as did 09:49, while 09:54 coaxed out of him a doctor’s note to cover 4 half-credit final exams at the university. 10:01 got switched from lorazapam to diazepam, and 10:06 got the promise of a letter to the Canada Pension Plan’s Disability Appeal Tribunal. 10:14 proved a bit sticky, for a minute or 2, but was eventually guided to the door with vague but reassuring assurances. 10:22 was also mollified by the (eventual and abrupt) bestowal of a promise, a promise instantly regretted by its bestower, to interview 10:22’s husband, whose antics were the ‘actual’ source of 10:22’s ‘issues’—as 10:22 termed her numerous recent persecutory delusions. 10:29’s ill-defined symptoms of neurasthenia were to be taken seriously from here on in, as were 10:35’s, with whom, Dr. Ed suspected, 10:29 was becoming intimately involved. Going against the grain of Dr. Ed’s preliminary diagnosis of acute connubial infarction, 10:40’s wife’s artful, disingenuous portrayal of ingenuousness got 10:40 into the Alba trial. 10:48 came and went without saying a word, this for the 3rd time in a row. Finally, in came 10:52, Dr. Ed’s final patient before lunch, which was very much a relief for Dr. Ed, for the last patient before lunch on Thursday’s had always been, since the beginning of the Alba trials anyway, Buddy. And this is how it always went with him: the nurse would take some blood, they’d shoot the breeze a bit about his ‘feelings’, and then they’d walk over to the Lite Bite together, Thursday being the day Buddy sagaciously kept himself out of the kitchen and let his apprentice take over. Today, however, Dr. Ed ‘felt’ like keeping to himself, and ‘felt’ he had to break it to Buddy right off the top, to clear the air.