Mrs. B nods, squares back her shoulders and says, “Der bosse vill bei houm sun—”
“I don’t work for Kroger anymore.”
“Hiz neim ees naht Krueger,” yelling again, and again the yell halting the work on the painting. “Hiz neim ees Meyrink. Der Zensor uf Maisel.”
Then the voice drops and she adds, “Mai houmlaent.”
Wylie looks from Mrs. Bloch up to the mural and then, helplessly, to the artists frozen in place on their roosts. She suddenly realizes that she has no idea what’s going on here but that, once again, she’s in over her head and the thing to do is retreat.
For some reason she touches Mrs. Bloch on the shoulder and says, “I have to get my things.”
But Mrs. B reaches up and grabs the hand, twists it backward into a position that doesn’t cause any pain but warns of a terrible consequence if Wylie moves at all.
“Du ahr leavink der Bahrdu?”
Wylie nods for a moment before answering, “Yes.”
Mrs. B releases the hand and says, “Den pik vun.”
Wylie hesitates and Mrs. B repeats, more loudly, “Pik vun.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Uf der kinder. Pik vun uf der chilten. Tu teik vit du.”
“I can’t—”
“Teik vun. Dei vill giv du der stury. Uf Meyrink der Zensor.”
“I’m sorry but—”
Mrs. Bloch turns away from Wylie and takes a step toward the mural.
“Jiang,” she calls and a small Asian boy immediately puts down his paint can and brush and begins to climb down the staging, careful not to look at his fellow artists.
The old woman turns back toward Wylie and says, “Gou paek der tinks. Jiang vill bie veatink.”
As if a spell has been cast, Wylie takes a final look at the mural and then runs as fast as she can for the entrance to the Bardo, rushing inside and, unable to wait for the freight elevator, taking the fire stairs up to her room. Where she finds the creature Raban stretched out on her bed reading a comic book that he doesn’t understand.
And back outside, Mrs. B, already impatient, squats in place and puts her arms around the little boy, brings her mouth to his ear and begins to whisper her final instructions, maybe a bit too fast, regarding the redemptive methodology of storytelling.
23
The Toth Care Facility is a collection of turn- of-the-century buildings hooked together by a highly imaginative series of eclectically designed additions. It sits on the crest of a hill, originally the bloated estate of Vartan Toth, a notorious local industrialist and land baron whose life story now serves as a kind of archetypal blueprint for success among Quinsigamond’s Turkish community.
Originally from the Taurus Mountains region, descendant of a tent-dwelling family of transhumant goat herders, and, occasionally, opium smugglers, Toth came to the States as a teen and flailed away at the national dream of the limitless wealth and independence available to any and all who would will aspiration into currency and power. He made his first investment stash before he was twenty, working the racetrack circuit up and down the East Coast, buying, selling, and betting on horseflesh until he was able to establish a many-tiered bookmaking franchise. But he parlayed this initial wad into a truly grotesque bounty by devising a more efficient way of transforming slaughtered horse bone and muscle into a tremendously binding industrial adhesive. Almost overnight, Toth was elevated from a rough-and-tumble pony banker into a glue magnate worthy of taking brandy with the stuffy and inbred patrons of the Quinsigamond Men’s Club. And though the legend that still resounds along Arcadian Way tends to delete the fact, it was at the height of his much-blessed life that Toth plummeted into scandal and tragedy.
A gambler and womanizer during his young manhood, Toth felt the synchronistic sting of karma when, at the ripe age of fifty, he took a beautiful, if high-strung, child bride named Cissy, the daughter of a socially prominent Episcopal minister. During the honeymoon, on Toth’s first and last trip back home to his native Turkey, his new wife suffered an irreversible psychotic breakdown and mutilated a ceremonial minstrel in midperformance using the sterling cake knife from her nuptial reception. The herdsmen of the southeastern valleys are well-known for the swiftness and brutality of their justice system and, as the bride-groom watched helplessly, Cissy was torn to shreds by wild boar and rabid jackal.
Unhinged by this tragedy, Toth returned to America and began attempting to reverse a lifetime of avarice and decadence. He devoted himself to funding the burgeoning field of mental health research. Back in Quinsigamond, he moved into a gardener’s cottage on his own estate and turned the main houses over to Dr. Renfield Hulbert, a peer and longtime, if one-sided, correspondent of both Freud and Jung whom fate has seen fit to designate to careless footnotes in dense technical histories of the period. Hulbert may well have been a profit- and ego-driven charlatan, but this does not necessarily negate the fact that he was possessed of a complex and highly flexible intelligence. And if it was later proven that the bulk of his medical credentials were either invented or at some point revoked, nevertheless his papers regarding the connections between schizophrenia (then termed persistent fantasia by Dr. H) and the mechanics of the brain’s language centers (then termed the alphabetical gears by Dr. H) were genuinely ahead of their time.
During the Roaring Twenties, while much of the nation’s upper crust Charlestoned their way toward the lurking Depression of the decade’s end, the hysterical and the delusional and the dangerously unbalanced, the brothers and sisters who roared for less ribald and more torturous reasons, were brought to the Toth Clinic where their concerned but inconvenienced families were given a tour that included the elegantly appointed splendors of the estate but excluded the snake-pit horrors of the basement workrooms, dingy and exceptionally unhygienic laboratories where every manner of fanatical quackery was practiced from hypothermia-producing ice-water therapies to radical and sloppy experimental lobotomies to a veritable smorgasbord of pharmacological remedies not far removed, but likely much deadlier, than those found in medieval witches’ breviaries.
Hulbert’s favorite innovation, however, was very likely trepanning. The doctor drilled a hole in just about every skull he got his hands on and ultimately it was his undoing. When the wife of Quinsigamond’s only impeached mayor sought the help of the Toth Clinic for a series of migraines that coincided with her husband’s political downfall, the woman was sent home, over the protests of Hulbert’s loyal if equally sadistic staff, with a crater in her forehead the size of a Prussian monocle. The ex-mayor seized on the defacement as a diversionary tool, excoriating the local paper for spreading lies about his finances rather than looking into the medical horrors being perpetrated right under our noses. The wags on the city desk responded that, in fact, it appeared the horrors were just under our hairlines, but The Spy’s publisher smelled a good smear story and, with the purchased resources of the accommodating police chief, raided the Toth Clinic pronto.
Some pioneers of the shock school of photojournalism were on hand when a carefully picked team of Q-town’s most roguish street bulls kicked open the doors of the asylum. To this day in the files of the Historical Museum one can view sepia testaments to the kind of heart-crushing torture one mad scientist can single-handedly invent — pictures of medical procedures to make a Nazi jealous, brains split open like melons and subjected to humiliations beyond the scope of Sade himself, close-up portraits of strange metal instruments whose purposes could not include anything in the realm of the benign, representations of human beings whose mental illness was only the starting point for a descent into a bottomless hell devised by a first-class maniac with access to money, manpower, and electricity. When the cellars of the Toth Estate were finally aired out, the city was scandalized and mortified by the dirty but not-so-little secrets that Dr. Hulbert, led away in cuffs and sporting two bloody lips, called “my life’s work.”