The Storm at the Door (17 page)

Frederick knocks lightly at the door, pushes it open the rest of
the way. A step into the room, the floor gives way, depths open. At first he thinks, instinctively,
Burglars!
Two bodies flung into frantic motion at the far corner of the room, skittering in the illegible darkness. Frederick expects a blow or a bullet to come, his flesh tingles to receive the first strike, until one of the bodies speaks with Canon’s voice.

Get out. Get out of here?
Canon’s voice says, more a question than a command.

Sorry, sorry
, Frederick says instinctively, but he does not turn to the door, not immediately. The need to recover his journal is just as urgent as the need to flee. He does not consciously make the decision; his body simply walks the five creaking steps toward the chair in which he chooses to spend his sessions—the divan seems laughably cliché—and he grasps for the journal, which, he is blissful to find, still remains on the side table.

Get out
. Now a command.

Frederick has little time to consider as he obeys, scrambling to the light cast from reception. Still, he is able to think:
his wife? A lover?
Both seem impossible. Frederick is on the door’s other side now, but he turns to pull it shut. And it is there, in the last backward glance, aided by the Sahara-bright fluorescents Canon had installed in the corridor, that Frederick sees her face, rising from behind Canon’s bare back. Her face, which reflects the incredulousness of Frederick’s. Suddenly, a trapdoor can swing open. Rita.

Fire. The white and blue and red of fire. Nothing, now, other than fire. No avid squirrels, no ticking clocks, no history, no Katharine, no daughters, no failure, no aspirations or accomplishments. No demands from history or future; no confusion of the present. Only the obliterating conflagration. For the moment, there is no Frederick.

Electroconvulsive therapy: the last vestige of the post-Victorian half-science of the kind Canon has been so proud to eliminate. Or nearly eliminate. Talk therapy and the social milieu are paramount, but Canon is able to remind himself that a scientist must not let his own preferred approach suppress undeniable data, and the truth is electroshock can yield good numbers. It is hard to know why, precisely, and it is Canon’s belief that it has to do not with an electrical realignment but with trauma. A synthesized, electric version of one’s childhood trauma, which shocks into the consciousness that which has remained deeply subconscious. Not to be used, except in the most severe cases. Only three times has he instructed Higgins, now the only one at the hospital proficient with this primitive device: once a boy in North Webster, once a schizotypal woman in South House who wouldn’t stop bruising herself, and now Frederick Merrill.

After Canon and Rita had scrambled back to their clothes, to their offices, Canon had acted on impulse, without deeper consideration. The important thing, he knew, was containment. As soon as he had collected himself enough to speak, Canon made the call.

Frederick had been back in his room in Ingersoll for less than fifteen minutes when Higgins arrived. The orderly who had escorted Frederick did not know what his patient had seen, but he gleaned from the tremor in Frederick’s gait that something grave had occurred. The boy had already begun to practice the speech to his parents and his girlfriend, explaining why he had lost his first real job.

Higgins, a nervous man who seems never to know quite what to do with his hands, is always grateful for any direct task ordered by Canon. And so Higgins had come, emboldened with delegated purpose, to the worried orderly, and had greatly relieved the boy to inform him Canon had called for an emergency course of ECT, in response to the
deeply disturbing behavior
Frederick had displayed in their session.

The orderly, with the help of the other Crew Crew boy just finishing his shift, pulled Frederick down the corridor just as had the orderlies they had seen in movies, by the elbows to subdue his fight. Frederick, however, had no fight. He wanted, at that moment, only to capitulate, to promise, to be left to silence. When they reached the room, with all its restraints and devices shaped to interface with the human form in those dreadful, inhuman ways, Frederick voided his bladder.

•   •   •

The shock has stopped, carrying memory away with it. When Frederick wakes from the sedatives, an hour later, he feels that something has entered him and scooped him out with brute force, replacing what was him with a fluctuating, mindless static. The internal dislocation overwhelms the external. The questions at first are more of who than where. It is only after Canon enters the door to the little white room, admitting the fluorescents
from the hallway, that Frederick begins to remember himself, and then to understand his place.

He is a patient at a mental hospital called Mayflower. He is in the concrete building that holds the most problematic, those who must be separated from the rest. This is his psychiatrist, Canon, who has done something. What? Something that is related to the part of him that has been scooped away, a part of him that is perhaps benign or perhaps malignant, but absolutely crucial.

How are you feeling?
Canon asks.

I don’t feel
—Frederick begins, but can’t complete the sentence: words, too, seem to have been replaced with this dull fizzling of calming electricity. But, then, perhaps this answer is accurate.

There is nothing more to this room than a mattress on the floor and the padding on the walls, and so an orderly follows behind Canon with a chair in which the doctor sits. Frederick, lying on the mattress, does not quite know how to receive Canon perched over him. The doctor’s face seems to ask a question Frederick does not know how to answer. Canon’s expression seems an accusation to which Frederick does not know how to respond. Frederick covers his eyes with his forearm, turns to the wall.

Do you remember
, Canon begins, and begins again.
Do you remember what happened to you?

What happened to me
, Frederick echoes.

You’ve been given electroconvulsive therapy. It’s normal not to remember
.

Electro—

It’s a radical approach, only for the most extreme cases
.

Frederick turns back to the doctor. No, it is not an accusation,
that strange new aspect of Canon’s face, nor is it a question exactly. It is, rather, something Frederick has not seen before. In the expectancy of Canon’s eyes, the fitful stroking of goatee, the sucking of bottom lip, it is uncertainty.

Rita. Frederick remembers now, his muddled awareness clarifying into the memory of her face, caught in the fluorescent hallway light.

Again and again, Frederick will later scrutinize this conversation, will spend days dwelling within it, feeling out its possible alternatives, what he might have said that might have yielded better ends. Uncertainty: was there some way he could have used it against Canon? If Frederick had threatened instead of cowered, could he have blackmailed his way to freedom? But, no. His instincts in this moment, Frederick will later conclude, were immaculately adroit. He had been the only witness, after all; who would believe him?

I remember now
, Frederick says.

You remember
—Canon begins.
You know why I had no choice but this terrible electroshock treatment?

Yes
.

Neither says anything. The moment is pulled flat and taut with opposing tensions, like the surface of a trampoline.

Yes
, Frederick repeats.
I understand
.

Canon scrutinizes Frederick for a long moment. And then, quite suddenly, the architecture of Canon’s face gives way, requiring his hands for buttress.

Things are much more complicated than you think
, Canon says.
Just because people work here does not mean they don’t have problems of their own
.

Frederick wants to rise from his mattress and beat Canon until Canon joins Frederick in his senselessness. He wants to
embrace Canon and say,
Yes, see? We are all flawed. I no more than you. Yes, I have also strayed as you have strayed. Yes, see? We are all subject to forces we cannot entirely explain
. He wants to rage at Canon for the long months Frederick has already lost to Canon’s delusions.

But Frederick knows Canon cannot allow revelations of his own. No. All Frederick can do to restore his progress to freedom is to restore Canon to his simple story of doctor and patient, which Canon insists upon. And so, Frederick will later congratulate himself for what he says next, will later feel it was a significant accomplishment, given his state, drugged and shocked and thrown into solitary. Having lost Rita.

We were making progress
, Frederick manages through the buzz of his emptied mind.
But I think we can make even more
.

Well. I’m glad that we agree
.

Canon has fired one of his new employees for the first time: the orderly who, against protocol, allowed Frederick to come back to his office, a convenient excuse to dismiss the only other (half) witness. But still, Canon tells himself, that kid broke the rules, and in a place like this, rules are everything.

In
The Mental Asylum
, his near-canonical textbook, Canon writes at length of how strong leadership demands earnest contemplation of the worst possible outcomes. And so Canon now thinks,
He will tell
. Despite what he says, he will tell. Will people
believe him? Likely, even the other men on Ingersoll will not. They will hear his story, spread his gossip, but everyone will know how Frederick enjoys undermining Canon. Still, even the rumor could be damaging, even an accusation like that could grant entropy traction, and then—as Canon has observed time and again in other institutions—chaos could spread with its own mad determination.

Canon returns to the office, which is still shameful with the memory of Frederick in the doorway, looking upon Canon with Rita.
He will tell
, Canon thinks. Or maybe not. And, anyway, no one here would believe him. Not entirely believe him, at least. The only people he could convince are well beyond the walls of Mayflower. In the two conversations Canon has had with Mrs. Merrill, he senses that she remains nearly as doubtful as her husband of Frederick’s need for hospitalization.

One of the sturdiest precepts in guiding delusional patients to reason is never to allow the delusion to be considered seriously by another. Any notion, given enough time and disregard, withers.

It is for the sake of the hospital, for all Canon hopes for his patients, but also for Merrill’s sake. His therapy, Canon now thinks, is not going as well as he has believed. In truth, he still senses a placating disingenuousness in Merrill’s confessions, senses that perhaps Frederick Merrill does not yet truly believe in this, the only way back to sanity, his family, his life.

Canon, the Freudian, the talker, has shot electricity through his patient. But is it not true that, when therapy is stalemated, as theirs has clearly become, the research suggests that electroconvulsive therapy can be profoundly helpful? Yes. There is still much work to be done. Merrill must continue here, until his delusions have withered.

And then there is Rita. The administrative maneuver is simple and obvious: he will transfer her to South Webster, a women’s hall. It was strange of him, perhaps a lapse of proper judgment, to allow her to remain the only woman assigned to Ingersoll. That is where she had wanted to be, Ingersoll housing her literary hero, Robert Lowell, and once the math genius John Nash as well. But Canon can no longer accommodate her fascination with poetry and genius; he has far greater concerns.

She did not look back
, Canon thinks. When she fled Canon’s office, she did not turn back to read Canon’s face. Was this finality? She did not look back. She only, like Eve cast from the Garden, covered herself, worried with her own shame.

Two more rounds of ECT, another night in solitary. All a smeared perception of vague pain, the ECT performing a kind consideration, obliterating the memory of nearly all of it. It is two days later and, to his gratitude, Frederick has been restored to Ingersoll.

Whatever Canon’s intentions, an unintended consequence: the jolt has proved clarifying. Whereas, just days before, Frederick had calmed into the psychic fog that often precedes the boundless dark plains of his depression, he is energetic once more. His body is exhausted from the discomforts, from the dosages and the anxiety, but back in his room, he perceives his heightened sensitivities returning. An evening bird coos out the
window; the breeze of the ceiling fan touches his flesh; his roommate scribbles his strange notions. The soft cries of Marvin Foulds, four doors down, are no ignorable madhouse ambience now; the cries transfer through the night, enter Frederick as agony. He is returning to his energy, but now it is tainted. It is like the lights in Times Square: electric and luminous, but also smeared and tarnished. The filthy streaks more prominent by contrast.

Frederick is grateful for the familiar chemical veil of the evening’s postprandial dosage settling over his awareness, is happy to surrender the lights and the tarnish, both growing more vivid. He is grateful that after his mind has been flushed with one hundred fifty volts, after he has spent forty-two hours in solitude, after he has spent two days considering that his time at Mayflower has again become interminable, that there in the Miltown and the darkness is his Katharine’s face, saying something to him.

What?
he tries to ask.
What’s that?
She is muffled, but he knows what she has to say is urgent.

Louder
, he says.
It’s too noisy in here. I said it’s too loud! It’s too loud!

Schultz’s roommate has turned off the lights. Again, Schultz finds himself not tired, not in the slightest. How could he be? He is so close now.

•   •   •