Pharmakon (32 page)

He worked on the truth far more slowly and painstakingly than the fiction he confabulated to distract Dr. Shanley. It was a strange paradox; the more he lied, the more the truth mattered. It was not long, three to four weeks at most, before Shanley tired of watching Casper write. One of the Pep Boys was assigned to accompany Casper to the library. They quickly tired of paying close attention to Casper’s industry, especially Manny. “You’re not going to climb up on that bookcase and jump off on your head and kill yourself while I go out and have a smoke, are you, Casper?”

Two months after that, Casper’s request for a typewriter was granted. Shanley loaned him the old black Underwood portable he had used as an undergraduate. It was while Manny was sneaking a smoke that Casper removed the Underwood’s least used key, @/¢. He replaced it after he took out the typebar, which in turn he sharpened and bent, then used to pick the lock of the coat closet, where he obtained the lab coat I saw him wearing when he pulled up in front of my lemonade stand.

The second-floor windows of the library were secured with painted metal grills bolted to the outside of the building. A problem until Casper scraped away the paint and discovered they were made of bronze. The window in the northwest corner of the library near the shelf that contained works on behavior modification was only partially visible from the armchair where the Pep Boys lounged while he labored. Casper cut through the bars of the bronze metal grill slowly, micromillimeter by micromillimeter, using the conveniently serrated strip of steel that backed the Underwood’s ribbon guide, speeding the process with the acid of his own urine.

He could have escaped long before he finally did. He had the lab coat for more than a year. Shortly thereafter, on a rainy afternoon he acquired a slightly rumpled blue oxford cloth shirt and gravy-stained necktie. They were still warm. Dr. Shanley had just taken them off to put on a fresh shirt and new tie—he was going to New York to meet his publisher. He was hurrying out of the office, worrying that the rain would make the trains late, when Pep Boy Moe brought Casper to his door, asking for a new typewriter ribbon. Moe leaned out the doorway to eyeball the gluteus maximus of the new nurse pushing a trolley of evening meds down the corridor; Casper snatched shirt and tie off the back of Shanley’s chair and deftly hid them inside the loose top of his ill-fitting, state-issued green pajamas while Shanley turned his back and unlocked his desk drawer.

It was a few weeks after that that Casper found himself staring out the library window at 8:55 on a Saturday morning and noticing a green-and-white Townsend taxicab pull up to the front gate. The backdoor opened slowly; the suspension heaved as a man as big around as the Michelin Man in a brown topcoat unloaded his girth onto the sidewalk. He carried a briefcase and wore a gray fedora.

Casper didn’t know that he was a certified public accountant who came in to do the books. But from the way the guards greeted him Casper could tell that the fat man was a regular, an expected visitor. Casper looked for him every morning after that. When he failed to appear for the next six days, Casper was disappointed. But on the seventh day, the same green-and-white taxi reappeared at exactly 8:57
A.M.
, and the fat man was off-loaded. Rain or shine, even when it snowed, the taxi with the fat man in the back pulled up every Saturday morning a few minutes before nine. Casper didn’t know or care when he went home.

The pair of navy blue gabardine trousers Casper had worn on the day I saw him came into his possession by pure serendipity just before Christmas. Rufus, the black cook in the institution’s kitchen, had lost his grip on a cauldron of boiling turnips. The pants were removed to treat second-degree burns covering his thighs and groin. Rufus’s trousers were put in a brown paper bag and handed to Manny on the way to the library with instructions to hand them over to Rufus’s wife on his way home from work. Manny, not knowing there was a five-dollar bill in the pants’ pocket, forgot all about them. Casper didn’t.

By the time the metal grate on the window to Dr. Friedrich’s world was ready to give way, Casper’s disguise was neatly folded behind the twelve-volume collected works of Dr. Cotton.

Casper lingered in hell six months longer than he had to. The bomb was assembled, the fuse was set, what was he waiting for? He had to finish his case against Dr. Friedrich, 732 pages in all. At 11:30 on the morning of July 4, Casper wrote the last word and went to sleep that night, sure of the fact that he would have it out with my father the next day.

Manny took him to the library that morning. As always, they arrived just after 8:30. As usual, fifteen minutes later, Manny inquired, “You’re not going to break my heart and kill yourself if I go for a smoke?”

They both laughed when Casper said, “One day I’ll be gone and you’ll miss me.”

Manny locked him in. Casper waited until he could no longer hear the Pep Boy’s half-soled shoes echoing down the hallway before he wedged a chair against the oak door and changed his clothes. Dr. Shanley’s blue shirt was a perfect fit. It took Casper several minutes to remember how to tie a necktie. The scalded cook’s trousers were too big, but there was no time to worry about that. He used the heft of Wilhelm Reich’s classic
The Mass
Psychology of Fascism
to knock out the corroded grate.

The drop from the second-floor library to the ground was more intimidating once his head was out the window. He had fallen so far, what difference would another fifteen feet make? Clutching a pair of oversized manila envelopes bulging with his 732 pages of the truth tight to his chest, Casper jumped—the long awaited leap from thought to deed had finally begun.

Casper landed in a bed of blue hydrangeas. The flowers were wet with dew. Angry bumblebees buzzed round his head. As he tumbled forward, he lost his grip on his secret life. He had forgotten to close the metal clasp on one of the envelopes. Pages—two, three, no more than that—fluttered across the lawn. Scrambling to his feet, snatching up the envelopes, Casper watched the wind steal the opening of his prologue. Fighting the urge to run after them, Casper walked slowly to the concrete path that snaked its way across the lawn and out the front gate.

A guard was waving an ambulance through the gates. The nurse whose ass had distracted Moe was walking toward Casper. As she approached, her eyes squinted in recognition, her mouth opened, he waited for her to shout to the guard, not sure what he would do then. But as the gap between them narrowed, her mouth closed. Pulling lipstick and a compact out of her pocket, she pursed her lips as if she were kissing him good-bye.

He was close now, less than thirty feet. Ten, fifteen steps at most. Casper straightened his tie and thought of how surprised Dr. Friedrich would be when . . .

“Hey, you.” A voice Casper recognized shouted at him from behind. Casper looked down at the ground; the voice must have spotted the hospital slippers on his feet. He was just about to run when a hand, as meaty and firm and hairy as Socrates’s, clamped down on his right shoulder. No running now. It was Fred, the red-haired guard who worked the recreation area when one of the Pep Boys was sick or had to straitjacket a patient who didn’t want to go to shock therapy.

Casper turned round slowly. He wondered what it would take to finally accept the inevitability of disappointment. The bomb was armed. If he had to detonate it before he reached his target, so be it. Murder can be an act of suicide, after all. That is, if you believe in justice—he had cultivated his rage for too long not to reach some semblance of that. Casper fingered the ballpoint pen in the breast pocket of his lab coat. Where would he puncture Fred’s face first?

The eye would be the easiest point of entry. If I got lucky, I
might be able to . . .
Casper corrected himself.
I’m not lucky, but
there’s a possibility I might penetrate the lacrimal gland . . . a
lobotomy performed with a pen would make a point.
Casper almost smiled at his joke.

“Is there a problem?” Casper gripped the pen in his clenched fist.

“I found this on the walk. Is it yours?”

The red-haired guard handed him a stethoscope, unaware of just how close he’d come to being turned into a vegetable.

“Thanks. I knew I was missing something.”

Stethoscope in hand, lab coat billowing behind him, Casper walked tall out the front gate of the Connecticut State Hospital for the Criminally Insane without incident. It was 8:54
A.M.
The green-and-white taxi was just pulling up. Casper opened the door for the fat man with the briefcase. One man got out, another man got in.

As the taxi pulled away, Casper considered the possibility that he might be lucky after all.

The pages Casper lost when he hit the ground read as follows:

T
HE
C
ONNECTICUT
S
TATE
H
OSPITAL FOR THE
CR
IMINALLY
I
NSANE
GODDARD STREET. P.O. BOX 264
.
T
OWNSEND
, C
ONNECTICUT

1951 wasn’t a good year to be crazy. Mental hospitals were overbooked with deranged World War II vets and the wives, sweethearts, and children they infected and depressed with their patriotic gore. Doctor Egas Moniz had recently been awarded the Nobel Prize for calming an agitated Portuguese woman by severing the front of her brain from the rest of her gray matter. She later stabbed him. Doctor Freeman, the goateed, Nembutal-addicted president of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, had been crisscrossing the United States in a snow-white Lincoln convertible, curing thousands of every variety of mental misfortune—schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, paranoia, from the barking-dog mad to the front-porch masturbator—simply by lifting up an eyelid, inserting a sterilized, gold-plated ice pick through the tear duct two inches into the brain, and giving it a sharp twist. The procedure was performed under local anaesthesia. Patients left Freeman’s office with blackened eyes and a pair of dark glasses. Zombified into silence, they were cured because they no longer had the mental faculties to know they weren’t. They ate, they talked, they slept; they were as easy to care for as a household pet. His lobotomies were performed before live audiences, lauded in the
New York Times
and the
Ladies Home Journal,
and, on one occasion, broadcast on national television.
   In these enlightened days, the argument is often made that it used to be worse for those with troublesome minds. The great naturalist Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had invented a mechanical antidepressant called the “spinning chair.” Not surprisingly, it spun one. Once a patient was strapped into the chair, patient and chair were rotated on both north-south and east-west axes, until the patient vomited, bowels were voided, hair stood on end, and patient swears he or she is well. About that same time, the French had an equally ingenious nautical remedy, the “drowning machine,” a metal cabinet they’d lock the patient in and then drop into the water. Those who stayed with the treatment long enough were cured of life, if not schizophrenia.
   The spinning chair, the drowning cabinet are positively humane compared to what I have seen and heard. There’s a doctor down in Baltimore who’s working on cyanide treatments. And there’s a professor at Harvard who’s become famous for strapping you down to refrigerator coils that cool you out to eighty degrees Fahrenheit—coma therapy. If you don’t trust me to be impartial, look it up for yourself.
   Physicians who shared Freeman’s ambitions but were too sque when patients are more plentiful than guinea pigs, consent forms unnecessary, and malpractice suits impossible to lose when the person testifying against you has already been diagnosed as crazy. Up at the Verdun Hospital in Montreal, Dr. Lehmann’s lust for a cure inspired him to inject the lost souls in his care with a hellishly painful concoction of sulfur suspended in oil in the hope that the fever it induced might make them les The hypo-happy doctor administered hot shots of turpentine straight into the abdominal muscles, postulating that the huge sterile abscesses these injections produced in their stomach muscles might raise the white blood cell count. Which just might possibly make them feel less crazy for reasons other than that he stopped. It wasn’t just in Canada but here in the States.
   No question, madness was in the air.
   In 1939, there were a half million Americans being treated for mental health problems. By 1951, by my calculations, the number had more than tripled. Anxiety of the atomic age? Failure of religion? Photographs of the ovens at Auschwitz published in
Life
magazine (I, for one, found those particularly disturbing)? The corrupting influence of comic books whose heroes wore tights and shared domiciles with devoted younger male acolytes, also in tights? Negro rhythms? Too much sex? Not enough sex? Was there something toxic in the atmosphere? In the milk? Radioactive fallout? Televi sion, fluoride, UFOs? Prosperity? Or was it simply that we finally had enough leisure time to realize just how miserable we always were? Whatever, the problem was epidemic. Something had to be done, and whoever did it first, found a magic bullet for schizophrenia or depression, or better yet, just plain old-fashioned inconvenient eccentricity was going to be as famous as Pasteur.
   Dr. William T. Friedrich’s ambitions were more modest. He just wanted to find a way to prescribe happiness.
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