Shades of Eva (45 page)

Unhappy with the feedback the field was
hearing because of this nickname, practitioners responded by
creating an instrument custom made for the task. By 1950, the ice
pick had been replaced with the leukotome cutter. The name of the
procedure was then changed to transorbital luekotomy.

The preparation for a TOL was 1/150th gram
of Atropine for decreasing oral secretions, and Sodium amytal to
decrease agitation. An anesthetizing procedure followed, which
consisted of two electroshocks. Doctors were advised to place the
head in a side-lying position with a towel beneath the mouth to
catch saliva, vomit, or mucous.

Mom’s procedure was performed by Cranz
Eibolter, and he was assisted by several staff with names
unfamiliar to me, but there was one in attendance, whose name was
all too familiar: Anna Norris.

I read Eibolter’s report with the same
misty-eyed gaze I’d given Mom’s autopsy report just days ago. This
comes directly from Mom’s record. I must caution the reader to
beware here. If you haven’t already put this exposition away
because of the dire nature of its material, you might after you
read this:

Patient was prepped in the usual fashion and
sedated with 1/150th gram atropine for trans-orbital leukotomy.
Comatosing was achieved using Freeman’s protocol of two rounds of
ECT. The patient’s left eye was controlled using the Moniz eyelid
retractor and the puncture was performed using a standard leukotome
cutter. This set easily in patient’s orbital dome at the standard
60-degree angle parallel to the bridge of the nose. Here, the
cranial periosteum was pierced with the tip of the leukotome
superior to the orbital plate approximately five cm. Using the
punctured orbital plate as a fulcrum, the leukotome was lowered to
the standard 45-degrees and back up to 60 degrees creating the
cerebral lesion. At this time, the luekotome was moved laterally
through an arc of about 55-degrees while using the leaded mallet to
tap the leukotome in another 2 cm. The instrument was then moved
medially through an arc of 15-degrees completing the triangulated
lesion. The leukotome was dislodged using a slight twisting motion
and pressure was applied to the orbital surface. At this time, a
third electroshock was administered to maintain anesthesia, and the
same procedures were administered on the right frontal cortex via
the right orbital vault. ~C. Eibolter, MD.

Mom was transferred to convalescence for one
month and welcomed in her fourth personality in the infirmary’s ICU
with an attendant, a catheter, black eyes, and a spittoon.
Convalescence persisted five to six weeks. At age 34, some of Mom’s
issues and obsessions were dissolved, and so was a large part of
that old, retaliatory spirit, the spirit who mustered up the
strength, or energy, or demonic power, call it what you want, that
enabled her to filet Fred Elms.

Dr. Norris noted that Mom was zombified
post-TOL. I thought it a horrible term, zombified, but it fairly
characterized the mental state of these post-surgical patients—and,
indeed, it characterized my mother’s. She slept 22 hours a day for
some time after that. That was before all of those W questions
began to surface in her. A zombie was as good a way as any to
characterize her.

Shortly after Mom’s TOL, her “sleep-drawing”
returned, Anna had noted. It was a side-effect that interested (but
didn’t seem to alarm) Dr. Norris. It was, she wrote, as if Mom were
talking via pictures again.

I didn’t understand what Anna meant by that
at first—talking via pictures again, but then I remembered Van
Husan’s research, and Amelia’s aunt Emily’s trance-induced artwork.
Mom’s drawing behavior even had a name. Dr. Norris called this
trance drawing graphimania.

I flipped a page to try and understand what
it was that Mom was drawing. And there in her file was the face
from my mother’s attic tablets. The Victorian beauty named Emma,
alongside several others: a Native American Indian, and several
pictures of a corner building, a streetscape, that appeared to be a
turn of the century hotel or pharmacy, perhaps.

She drew the Native American with blood
dripping from his nostrils, with a series of numbers scribed into
chest. The numbers resembled the coordinates Amelia observed on the
postcard: two stacked decimals, one of which was a negative.

I immediately punched these digits into my
GPS, and hit locate. I had the suspicion that some place in South
Dakota was going to appear on screen, because South Dakota was
somewhere Mom seemed obsessed with as a child. And just as I
thought, a South Dakota town appeared, and it was familiar to me:
Wounded Knee Creek—Chankpe Opi Wakpala. It was the same location
that had been inscribed on the medallion Emma wore around her neck
like a broach, a war medallion symbolizing gallantry.

Now, here it was again.

I flipped back to the urban streetscape
drawing and looked at it more closely, thinking that if the other
drawings had coordinates written on them, then maybe this one did,
too. And I was right. The corner building had a very faint set of
numbers written upside down along one side of the building’s
facade. Strangely, they were identical to some numbers I observed
on one of Mom’s Emma drawings. Somehow, Mom was drawing a
connection between Emma and this urban building by writing
identical coordinates on them.

But why?

As I recalled, none of the Emma pictures
Amelia had discovered in the river house attic, and none I had seen
in Mom’s diaries, had any coordinates on them. But this one did.
This struck me as completely strange. Amelia thought Ully or Fred
wrote the coordinates on the postcard to taunt the family. I
wondered if Anna ever noticed the numbers, or had commented on
them.

But why in the heck was Mom writing
coordinates, anyway? And how in the hell did she even know what
they meant? I had to consider Amelia’s dream theory at that
point—the one about genetic memory. Had someone been passing down
information to Mom in the form of geographic coordinates? Was my
recurring dream a message? If I had the ability to draw, would I
have drawn the river home as my mother might have been drawing
these recurring images in her head?

My mind was swimming with new questions, and
my hands seemed to be trembling in anticipation of what was to be
done about them.

If Mom was the one writing these
coordinates, then maybe it was her who wrote those coordinates on
the postcard! Not Ully! And not Fred!

And what in the hell did that mean for her
case? Was that a message to her father? And if so, did she know her
baby was buried there?

I couldn’t even consider the latter. But
then again, if she did know where Elmer was buried, maybe that
knowledge wasn’t something she could deal with. Maybe that’s why
they increased her shock treatments significantly after Elmer was
taken. Maybe she asked to have her memory erased just like she
asked for her own lobotomy!

I leafed through page after page of notes,
but couldn’t find an entry where Mom had asked for her memory to be
erased as a girl.

I typed Emma’s and the urban streetscape
coordinates into the GPS and the numbers came up Engleberg,
Illinois, which I knew to be a suburb of Chicago. I’d ridden the
rails through Engleberg several times. I made a mental note to ask
Amelia about Illinois and the coordinates, and turned another
page.

There was a picture of a caricature
resembling the Tin Man, a character from Baum’s Wizard of Oz book.
The Tin Man had no coordinates on his picture—at least not this
one. It was just there, seemingly in addition to, or to compliment,
the Oz theme Mom seemed taken with.

I couldn’t believe what I was looking at,
nor could I understand it. Grandpa Virgil had an author’s signed
copy of the Wizard of Oz. Mom used to read those Oz books to me
over and over again. What in the hell was Mom trying to communicate
with these drawings? And with these numbers? And how, after all
these years, did she just suddenly, and seemingly spontaneously,
start reproducing them again?

I suppose it would be obvious to the trained
psychiatrist: I was looking at Schizophrenia Beats the Hell Out of
Me!

I flipped a page over. It became clear to me
just why I never remembered Mom drawing. Just prior to coming home,
Mom received one last memory-jarring round of ECT. It was a dose
“…sufficient enough,” Dr. Norris had written, “…to alleviate the
graphimania once and for all.” She’d instructed my father to alert
her if the sleep-drawing resumed, and if it did, they’d order up
one more bolt of electricity.

I began to wonder about the price my
mother’s body must have paid for these so-called treatments. I had
to wonder what effect all of these procedures had on my mother. I
had to wonder how many heartbeats were stolen from her in the name
of healing, when what was actually being done was anything but
healing.

I did the math at that picnic table. I came
up with a number of lost heartbeats. 1.5 billion.

I sat the file down. Tears
were
running down my cheeks and I hadn’t even realized it. It’s an odd
sensation to see a tear fall onto your mother’s asylum documents
before you even realize it’s left your eye, and had barely
recognized the emotion that drove it out.

It was sadness I was feeling. I chose to sit
with it for as long as I could, which wasn’t very long I must
confess. I felt for the Valium bottle in my pocket. I shook it, but
I heard no sound. I shook the Dilaudid bottle, as well. It, too,
made no rattle. My pockets were empty. I threw my Rueben in the
trash and walked away.

***

Segment of taped conversation #2 between Dr.
Anna Norris, chief medical superintendent, Coastal State, and
Ulysses McGinnis

Date: Tuesday, April 23, 1995

Anna: We have some good news, and some bad
news. Your CAT scan is negative.

Ully: Which news is that?

Anna: That would be good news.

Ully: And the bad news?

Anna: The bad news is that in 1953, Eva made
some allegations. As you know those allegations were by in large
disregarded. Rape is a pretty serious crime.

Ully: You did what you had to do. You sent
the police to investigate.

Anna: But I did not treat your sister as a
rape victim. Do you understand that?

Ully: Yes.

Anna: That treatment—or lack thereof—was
based in part on the results of that police investigation…in part
on the things that you said, and didn’t say. Do you also understand
that?

Ully: I understand. That wasn’t your fault,
either; and it wasn’t Eva’s. Look, it’s taken a long time for me to
realize what I have to do. I’m trying to do that.

Anna: Then you need to come clean with me.
You said that Eva wasn’t lying. What did you mean by that?

Ully: I mean she wasn’t lying. She was
telling the truth.

Anna: The truth about what?

Ully: [Silence].

Anna: Eva named her rapist, Ulysses! I need
you to confirm this if this was true. Was this your neighbor, Fred
Levantle?

Ully: [No response.]

Anna: Ully, I can’t help you if you don’t
help me.

Ully: I understand that.

Anna: So answer my question! Did Fred
Levantle rape your sister?

Ully: Yes. Fred raped her.

Anna: And did he break into her room that
night?

Ully: Yes.

Anna: And did he take her baby?

Ully: He took a toolbox.

Anna: Excuse me?

Ully: He took a toolbox—a red one. And he
buried it somewhere out back.

Anna: Ully, there’s something you aren’t
telling me. Were you with Fred that night?

Ully: [No response].

Anna: Did you really injure yourself, or did
someone else do this to you?

Ully: I did this all to myself.

After I left my one-man picnic
on the
west lawn, I installed three video-surveillance cameras in the
vacant rooms of the halfway house as Amelia had ordered. We didn’t
know which room Ully would be rooming in, so we bugged all three.
It was a matter or poking three holes in a corner of each vacant
room’s ceiling and then getting into the attic to install three
pinhole cameras into those holes. From there, I had only to
piggyback the camera transmitters onto the existing electrical
wires.

Installed, I called Amelia to make sure they
were transmitting.

It was roughly 2:40 p.m. Amelia picked up,
but I could barely hear her. She was whispering.

“—
Where are you?”

“I’m in the nuthouse attic. Where are
you?”

“—
I’m collecting some DNA samples from
your shrink.”

“How? No wait. Let me guess. Pubic hairs
from the rim of his toilet bowl? Boogers from his
handkerchief?”

“—
You’re disgusting! Actually, it’s
saliva from his cigar. He leaves them in an ash tray in
here.”

“You’re in his office?”

“—
Haggar Hall, Notre Dame. Cigars are
never just cigars. What are you doing?”

“Just installed the halfway house taps.”

Amelia put me on hold for a minute. In a
moment she came back
“—Good. We have audio and video in all
three. Good job.”

“Listen,” I said, “I’m on my way down to
talk to Ully, and I’m a little nervous.”

Amelia began laughing.
“—Are you afraid
of being spanked again?”

Joke as it was, I didn’t exactly answer her.
It wasn’t funny. Instead I told Amelia that I was out of Valium and
Dilaudid.

She seemed surprised, if not alarmed.
“—You were supposed to take two or three of those a day! Not
ten. There was enough in those bottles to last you five
days.”

“I’m not asking for more drugs,” I
countered. “I’m trying to tell you that I’m done with them.”

“—
Done with them? It sounds like you
needed them!”