The Storm at the Door (13 page)

The truth, Canon knows, is that the complexities of daily
work in a mental hospital can easily become a fog of war. Like the military’s high commanders, the psychiatrist in chief must maintain some clinical distance, the perspicuity of an empiricist. Just today, for example, Dr. Higgins flew into a panic at the staff’s inability to calm Marvin after his outburst in the group session, then, yet again, suggested an extreme course of electroconvulsive therapy.

Electroconvulsive therapy! Marvin needs a lucid mind to address the profoundly advanced defense mechanisms of his major psychotic disorder. The last thing he needs is one hundred fifty volts scrambling his consciousness. But Canon tries to remind himself that no one is blameless; we are all only human. This awareness, in fact, is at the very heart of the research he has conducted and the conclusion he has drawn and now enacts. We all must recognize our own human failings before the patients do; we maintain uniformity and control by recognizing the ways we are different, the things over which we feel we have no power. Canon, for example, knows that he too is flawed. At this very moment, for example, Canon is walking the hallways of Upshire, dim in the twilight, to meet his mistress.

Just a few more times
, Canon thinks.

Does Canon ever feel guilty? Not guilt, exactly. No, that is what has surprised him most about his first affair. What he feels, when slipping into bed with his wife, is instead a kind of repulsion. Not that he is repulsed by his mistress, or his wife, or by himself, exactly. Canon, who has dedicated the twenty years of his professional career to probing the psychodynamic motives behind behavior, tries not to think of this, this obscure repulsion. But he resolves now to end it soon, the affair and the sensation that is always waiting for him just beyond climax, as inevitable as his postcoital slackening. He is in control, he tells himself. This,
Canon often thinks, is his one true gift: his ability always to distinguish truth from delusion and then to plant truth inside of delusion, thus causing delusion to implode.

Not pausing as he often pauses—now certain in resolve—Canon pushes open the office door. Soon, he will end it. It will be bittersweet, he thinks, like a soldier leaving behind a foreign love affair to embark on another war campaign; nothing, not even a woman, will veer or dissuade him from the pull of his duty.

At first, however, he thinks she has not come. As he sits alone in the empty room, something akin to the familiar repulsion rises within him, something birthed by repulsion but redder, a feeling nearly identical to when Jeff Wittgenstein, his doctoral classmate at Yale, was made associate professor just five years after graduation while Canon had remained a lowly lecturer. She hasn’t come. She has decided first.

There is always a power balance to these things. Someone is always in control. And it is always he. But she hasn’t come. The affair is over. Canon wants desperately not to be there in his office, with his failure, his powerlessness. He wants to be in bed with his wife, or even watching television with his children, but he knows that every motion from this moment to that will be cumbersome with his self-recrimination. She hasn’t come. He was going to end it soon anyway. Just a few more times, and he could have set things right; the affair would have ended, delivering the wistful fulfillment he has imagined.

In the dim light, Canon glimpses himself in the antique gilded mirror hung near the bookshelf. In the last five years or so, he has adopted a new strategy with mirrors, approaching them only at close proximity, then casting his gaze only upon details: the part of his hair, the grain of his beard, the spaces between
his teeth, which seem to hold artifacts of food more than do others’. He has learned to observe himself in detail because if he considers himself in his entirety he can feel nearly like one of those rare Cotard’s sufferers, baffled by the stranger who faces him in mirrors.

Within, Canon’s ambitions and energies seem only to grow. Go ahead and fault him, but he sees the world as young men see it: its deficiencies, its hypocrisies, its need for innovation, and he wants to be the one to make the required changes. On the outside, however, age has bloated and warped his features. Each pore of his cheeks is now stretched like a marker dot on an inflated balloon; his jowls are beginning to dangle like fleshy ornamentation from what was once the attractive angular aspect of his jaw. Looking at himself now, in the half-light of his office, Canon deflates with an approximation of his postejaculatory repulsion.

Like what you see?

Canon startles. As he pivots, his belly swings with centrifugal motion. There she is, sitting on the analytic divan. Canon cannot help smiling, delighting in the slow adjustment of his eyes to the dark, she revealed slowly, as in a vaudevillian fan dance.

I thought you didn’t come
.

I shouldn’t have
.

No, probably not
.

Canon is near her now, but not too near, one of the cheeks of his annually widening ass balanced on the divan’s corner. He touches her shoulder, shoves the meat of his fingers into the nearly imperceptible texture of her hair. His decision, he tries to remember, his determination.
She is here and you will have her, but soon you will end it
. The curvature of her back on his palm, his mouth craving with a hunger stronger than hunger.

What good is his determination? For a moment afterward, as
ever, he will mentally perform his ritualistic recitation of this wrongness and how it must stop soon, but his determination will be as false as ever. After all, these things are stronger than reason and determination.
Stronger than logic
. And there, again, is that repulsion.

The television’s volume is now permanently set to somewhere between deafening and stupefying. Even with the door shut to one’s room down the hall, one has no choice but to listen. To Frederick, the television’s volume is another cause for wild irritation. And yet, sometimes alone in his room, when confronted by two equally retardant forms of Ingersoll noise—the television and the screams—he is grateful to be able to focus on the TV’s babbling narratives. And sometimes, such as this evening, Frederick places himself with the catatonics on the couch, simply to receive it.

A local news special on the new tower downtown recites statistics over footage taken from airplanes. Frederick gives the television the lazy half-attention it wants until he perceives a hovering presence behind him. He turns to find his roommate, seemingly drawn from his room by the television’s sound. Schultz, for one of the few times Frederick has observed, distracted from his work. Lowell, sitting in the corner with a copy of Sylvia Plath’s
The Colossus
, also recognizes the rarity of the moment.

An architecture aficionado, Professor?
Lowell asks.

For this tower, we all should be
, Schultz says.

Schultz’s wonder for the tower puzzles Frederick. Sure, the new tower is an impressive architectural feat. Impressive, like their new psychiatrist in chief, in its arrogance, in its steely confidence of its soaring newness, history be damned. But to Frederick, as he suspects it must be to a great number of New Englanders, it is also a great disrespect of glass and steel to the city of decorative curlicues and Colonial ornamentation that has taken four hundred years of development, and continues to reward one strolling its streets with strange surprises, architectural oddities both miniature and major. The tower, in the new International Style, rises over the town houses, cobblestones, and esplanades like an ascending middle finger, courtesy of the new postwar America. It is the insane vision of academics, dreaming of conceptual cities that bear almost no relation to the cities in which people actually live. Frederick does not see how Schultz could love it.

Making it, by a large margin, the tallest building in New England—
the television says.

Schultz watches, his pen temporarily still over the journal he clutches. Then the segment ends, shifts to weather, and again Schultz’s fountain tip skates with its normal velocity as he ambles back to his room, several times nearly colliding with the wall.

•   •   •

The afternoon rather suddenly gives way to night—fall is here, unmistakably now—and the trees out the window become moody charcoal sketches of themselves; the Colonial grandeur of the other halls reduces to a constellation of tungsten lamps, burning dimly. The lunchtime dosing of Miltown has begun to dissipate, and it feels to Frederick that something in him has suddenly
come uncoiled. In his journal, Frederick manages two paragraphs before he feels himself tripping over language, accelerating in nervous energy. He writes:

The two Crew Crew boys end their shift, switching off with a comically indolent boy—still a part-time philosophy student at Boston University,
The Meaning of Meaning
nearly always clutched in his left hand—and young Rita Weld, the only member of the staff to whom Frederick feels any human form of relation. Why deny it? It helps that she’s beautiful. Maybe not beautiful in a common way, not a photographical beauty, but one that yields and alters to the object of her engagement, her expressions mirroring with youthful empathy feelings you have
become so accustomed to carrying around privately, unspeakably, that you had forgotten they might be known by others.

Well, hello there
, Rita greets Frederick.
You’re looking energetic
.

Frederick realizes that he has been pacing, again and again, the few steps between the corridor walls.

Just feeling a little nervous
, he surprises himself to admit.
I don’t know what it is. Something about the night
.

Unlike the cool, doltish Crew Crew boys, who seem to have taken the job for the simple sake of employment and the power their positions carry, Rita, Frederick suspects, has come to Mayflower for that other reason. She is that other breed of mental health worker, much more common among the old administration, quite common, Frederick remembers from friendships with aspiring psychiatrists when he was in graduate school, to the profession at large. Rita, he thinks, has come here for this proximity to madness. Maybe to learn something from madness but also, and more important, to learn how to keep herself from it. This, he thinks, is why she is the best nurse here, and also why she will not last.

Lucky for you
, Rita says and lays a hand on his shoulder, as if that is simply how the staff touch patients,
soon, you’ll get to swallow the knockout pill
.

The Morlock call, the slop line, a silent and repellent dinner. And then the pills, with their unrefusable soporific demands.

An hour later, my grandfather has returned to his bed. He looks down at the length of his pitiful self. His pajama pants are hospital-issued; his socks poof awkwardly at the toes. A pathetic, moribund sight. A priest ought to be coming by any moment now to administer last rites. These are not the legs, not the feet, of a man in the middle of his life, at the peak of his responsibilities. These are the legs of an invalid.

Out the window, crows call faintly. Above the trees in screaming parabolas, bats arc through the twilight, angry for lack of flies. Condensation pearls on the window, foreshadowing the blinding fog that will claim Boston tomorrow, a prefiguration of winter.

Behind each thing is a demand for his attention, each thing pregnant with dark implications. Faced with the dark implications of everything, down to droplets of condensation, Frederick must think of something else.

He looks to Professor Schultz, muttering to himself, as ever. Frederick has deliberated for days now, even jotted down potential approaches in his notebook, carefully worded questions about linguistics and semiotics with which he might cajole his roommate into revealing something of his possibly deranged, possibly brilliant project, which might, in turn, reveal something of him. But now Frederick forgets his notes and just asks Schultz outright.

Shlomi
, Frederick says,
can I ask you what it is you’re working on?

Oh, just experimentation, mostly
.

Frederick can see Schultz means this as an earnest reply, and wonders whether Schultz would be so forthright if not for Frederick’s intervention on his behalf in group that day. Frederick, proud of his little rebellion against Canon, likes to think that, before that afternoon, Schultz would have remained even more cryptic, flapping his hands and saying,
Oh, work, work
.

Experimentation for what exactly?

Ah, right, well—
Schultz says, turning to Frederick. Frederick scrutinizes Schultz’s face for traces of his earlier despair. Perhaps it is there. Perhaps, but Frederick cannot find it behind his roommate’s sprightly, almost juvenile enthusiasm. Maybe Canon is onto something, at least when it comes to Schultz and his denials.

Soon I will be ready to make a formal explanation for everything, yes?
Schultz says.
For now, I can say it is a combined pursuit of linguistics and anthropology. A sort of verbal excavation, yes?