As I dropped my bag on the single bed, Mrs. French said, “You’ll be happy here.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said back. I don’t like people telling me when and where I am to be happy. That’s not even for me to decide.
“So what now? Do I get my one phone call?” I asked.
“This isn’t prison, Kasper.”
“We’ll see.”
I telephoned Eddie to see if I could stay with him. He admitted that he had overstayed his visa and was illegal and therefore unable to make any application to be my legal guardian. I called Anouk’s house to hear her flatmate tell me what I already knew- she was still sunning herself in a Buddhist meditation center in Bali and wasn’t due home until her money ran out. I was stuck. I hung up the phone and went back to my little slab of darkness and cried. I’d never thought negatively about my future until that moment. I think that’s the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your own potential.
There wasn’t a lock on the door, but I managed to wedge the chair under the handle. I sat awake all night, waiting for that ominous rattle. At about three in the morning I fell asleep, so I can only assume they came to sexually abuse me when I was far gone, dreaming of oceans and the horizons I would never reach.
IV
The next day, accompanied by Mrs. French, I went to see Dad. I admit, shamefully, that when we hopped in the car I was excited. I’d never been inside a mental hospital- was it like in the movies, with a symphony of high-pitched inhuman screams? I even went as far as to hope the patients were not too heavily sedated to bang wooden spoons against the back of saucepans.
In the car on the way, I didn’t say anything. Mrs. French kept glancing at me impatiently, irritated that I wasn’t pouring out my heart to her. Silence dogged us all the way to the hospital. She pulled over at the newsagent’s and said, “Why don’t you pick up your father some magazines to read?” and she gave me $10. I went inside and thought: What does a man who’s fallen off the brink want to read? Pornography? Entertainment news? I picked up an equestrian magazine but put it down again. That wasn’t right. In the end I settled for a book of puzzles, mazes, anagrams, and teasers to give his brain a workout.
Inside the hospital we heard the kind of frenzied screams you generally associate with boiling rivers of blood. Stepping out of the elevator, I could see patients walking aimlessly through the corridors, legs twitching, tongues hanging out, mouths open wide as if at the dentist’s. I could see something yellow in their eyes. I could smell a smell unlike any smell I’ve ever smelled. These were people who had been tossed in the darkness, human leftovers starring in their own nightmares, covered in flimsy white gowns, their psyches poking through like ribs. They were the embers of a fire dying out. Where in the world could they go where they made sense?
The doctors walked briskly on the way to strip the patients of their crazy laughter. I studied the faces of the nurses: how could they work here? They must be either sadists or saints. They couldn’t be anything else, but could they be both? They and the doctors looked tired: draining heads of wrong ideas is obviously an exhausting business.
I thought: What human thing could emerge out of this edifice of violent nightmares and say, “OK, now back to work!”?
The nurse at reception sat eerily still with a pained expression, as if bracing herself for a punch in the face.
“Jasper Dean to see Martin Dean,” I said.
“Are you family?”
When I didn’t say anything for a while, she said, “I’ll call Dr. Greg.”
“I hope that’s his last name.”
She picked up a phone and paged Dr. Greg. I searched Mrs. French’s face for some acknowledgment that I hadn’t referred to myself as Kasper. If she had heard me, she wasn’t giving anything away.
A couple of minutes later, Dr. Greg arrived, looking sharp, smiling like someone who thinks he is always well liked, especially at first sight.
“I’m glad you’re here. Your father won’t talk to us,” he announced.
“And?”
“And I was wondering if you could come into the room and help us out.”
“If he doesn’t want to talk to you, it means he doesn’t care what you think. My presence won’t change that.”
“Why doesn’t he care what I think?”
“Well, you probably said things to him like ‘We’re on your side, Mr. Dean,’ and ‘We’re here to help you.’ ”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Look. You’re a psychiatrist, right?”
“And?”
“He’s read books written by your predecessors: Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Fromm, and Becker. Those guys. You need to convince him that you’re cut from the same cloth.”
“Well, I’m not Freud.”
“And there’s your problem right there.”
Mrs. French waited in the reception area while I followed the doctor through the gloomy corridors and the opening and closing of countless locked doors. We got to Dad’s room and he unlocked it with a key. Inside was a single bed, a desk, a chair, and half-chewed morsels of indefinable food mangled on a plate. Dad stood with his back to us, staring out the window. Watching him was like looking at a naked tree in winter.
“Look, Martin. Your son’s here to see you,” Dr. Greg said.
When he turned, I let out a little gasp. It looked as if all the bones and muscles in his face had been taken out.
“How are you?” I asked, as if we were meeting for the first time. He stepped forward with the dazed look of a mother after childbirth.
Any vow of silence Dad had taken he abandoned at the sight of me. “Jasper. Listen. You can never really kill your old selves. They lie there in a mass grave, buried alive, one on top of the other, waiting for the opportunity for resurrection, and then, because they’ve once been dead, they drive you like a zombie, as they themselves are zombies. Do you see what I’m getting at? All your old failures squirming to life!”
I looked over at Dr. Greg and said, “You wanted him talking. Well, he’s talking.”
Dad sucked in his lip as a sign of defiance. I went over to him and whispered, “Dad, you have to get out of here. They’ve got me in a state-run home. It’s horrible.”
He didn’t say anything. Dr. Greg didn’t say anything either. I looked around the room and thought it was the worst possible environment for a collapsed mind, as it would give him more time to reflect, and if his disease had a cause, it was excessive reflection; too much thinking had broken his brain. I looked back at Dr. Greg: he was leaning against the desk, as if watching a play where none of the actors knew whose turn it was to speak.
“Here. I brought you something,” I said, handing Dad the book of puzzles. He gave me a sad glance as he took it and then began studying the book and making little “hmm” sounds.
“A pencil,” he said in a scratchy whisper, holding out his hand without looking up.
I stared at Dr. Greg until he reluctantly fished in his shirt pocket and handed me a pencil as delicately as if it were a machete. I gave it to Dad. He opened the book and started going through the first maze. I tried to think of something to say, but I didn’t come up with anything other than “You’re welcome,” even though he hadn’t said thank you.
“Done,” he said to himself when he finished.
“Martin,” Dr. Greg said. Dad flinched, turned the page, and started on the second maze. From where I sat the book was upside down, and I got dizzy watching him.
After a minute he said, “Too easy,” turned the page, and began to tackle the third maze. “They get progressively harder as you go through the book,” he said to no one.
He was now attacking the puzzles compulsively. Dr. Greg gave me a look as if to say, “What made you give a mentally confused man a compendium of conundrums?” and I had to agree I would’ve done much better with my first instinct, to buy porn.
“Eddie says you can come back to work when you’re ready,” I said.