Pharmakon (26 page)

My own mother, suddenly unable to put down the tray of iced tea, stared through me. “Jack . . .” She wanted to say more but that was the only word that came out of her mouth. Even though he wasn’t in the room, it sounded to me as if she was talking to him, not me.

The dogs began to bark. Fiona hit false notes on the piano as she tried to drown us out. Lucy was still trying to show me a picture of happier times. We struggled over the album. Homer was the only one who heard the page rip. “Once you rip the page, it stays ripped.” My memory of what was said was corroborated decades later by Lucy. She has total recall when it comes to sadness.

My father knelt down next to me and spoke to me in a voice I would later discover he used on patients; as smooth and flat as an oil spill, it could make anything sound bearable. “Jack had an accident.” Officially, that’s what Jack’s death was. According to the state of Connecticut, only Dr. Winton was murdered, but I was years away from finding out about that.

“What happened to him?” I asked. My mother stared through my father now as she and the rest of us waited for his answer. How much do you tell a four-and-a-half-year-old? How much was he willing to admit to himself—then, now, ever? As a psychologist, he believed the worst thing a parent can do is lie. But when the psychologist is the parent . . . like everyone says, you do the best you can.

“Jack drowned.” That’s what the autopsy said.

“Is he going to come home when he gets better?” My mother put down the tray and left the room. Lucy had tears in her eyes. Fiona closed the lid on the piano keys.

“Jack can’t get better. He’s dead.”

“Is he in the ground?”

“Yes, he was buried before you were born.”

“Is he still there?”

“His body’s there, Zach.”

“What else is there?”

Ida couldn’t resist. “His spirit is with us. Right here in this room . . .” The idea wasn’t nearly as scary as my grandmother.

“Shut up, Ida.”

“Was he nice?”

“Very nice.”

“Nicer than me?”

I don’t know how Jack would have looked if he’d had a chance to grow up. Perhaps there would have been no resemblance. As an adult I’ve been told I have a profile nearly identical to that of my great-uncle Clyde, a tall, hollow-eyed Scotsman who suffered from curvature of the spine, came to America to build bridges, and had a weakness for laudanum. Whether you believe it all comes down to DNA or bad luck, the fact is, as a child I was a dead ringer for Jack. Ida wasn’t wrong about my dead brother being in the room. Whenever my parents looked at me, they saw Jack. Sometimes Dad saw Dr. Winton, too. And, oh yes, let’s not forget Casper. Ghosts, living and dead. They were all in the room.

Casper had told his attorney he did not want his mother to come to court, explaining obliquely, “I’m not who she knows.” The attorney relayed these wishes to Mrs. Gedsic by phone. She came to New Haven anyway. Sat next to him in court. The newspapers described her as “small and foreign” and gave her age as forty-three. She wept softly as evidence was presented and whispered to Casper in Latvian. He looked away and did not answer. The photograph of her arriving in the courthouse that appeared in the paper showed her to be missing two teeth and in need of an overcoat. She had the look of a sparrow caught in a blizzard.

When the judge gave his ruling, she gasped, “It’s not true” in Latvian. Casper said nothing, and did not return her embrace when she kissed him. All he had to say vis-à-vis good-bye was, “Don’t come and see me, please.”

“You know what’s best for you.” She had never understood how his brain worked. “If you change your mind, I am always your mother.”

Casper spent that night in the New Haven jail. The next morning he was transferred by ambulance to the Connecticut State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in the town of Townsend. His ankles and wrists were shackled. Which was hardly necessary, due to the 2 ccs of amobarbital that had been injected into his right arm shortly before he left the city jail.

The ambulance ride took a little more than an hour. He had driven by the mental hospital once on Whitney’s motorcycle, considered for a few hundred feet of pavement what it would be like to be locked inside.

When it was founded in 1868, it was called a lunatic asylum. Then and now it was a prison without the privacy of cells. It had grown by virtue of state money and bequests from families happy to have a place to warehouse embarrassing relatives; locals and those in the insanity business referred to it simply as Townsend.

When Casper arrived, there were seven buildings. Red brick, overlooking a New England college town and the valley beyond, it was a deceptively pretty place—rolling lawns, curving drives, stately elms. The grounds were surrounded by an iron fence. Those like Casper, the criminally insane, were housed in the original building, which was separated from the rest of the mental facility by eight feet of chain-link fence.

Casper was a limp and groggy chemical drunk when he was removed from the ambulance by a trio of beefy orderlies he would come to know as the Pep Boys. They were called that because their names were Manny, Moe, and Jack, just like the guys that advertised the auto parts stores on the radio. The shackles were not removed until he was inside and the steel doors were locked behind him. Stripped naked, head shaved, he was showered with a hose, dressed in vomit-green pajamas, and taken to Ward B.

Dr. Herbert Shanley, a thirty-seven-year-old staff psychiatrist prone to outbreaks of eczema and garish neckties, examined Casper. Having never gotten over the fact that he had not been accepted to Yale, he took a certain pleasure in processing the ex-undergraduate. He was familiar with Casper’s case, besides what he had read in the paper and the gossip and idle talk among his fellow mental health practitioners. Dr. Friedrich had written him a seven-page typed single-spaced letter about Casper Gedsic, his IQ of 173, his death list, the threat he posed to the living. Shanley took all this into account and decided to play it safe and start Casper off with the first of what would be his daily dose of 100 mg of chlorpromazine, aka Thorazine.

With Thorazine on top of the amobarbital that he had been given that morning, by the time Casper was strapped in his bed that night, he was the living dead. The meds clamped a chemical governor on the magnificent engine of his mind. His brain slowed until there were no longer thoughts, just pictures. As he closed his eyes he saw himself as an insect trapped in amber. He could not remember how he knew of or where he had seen such a thing. It was just there, inside his head.

On his second night in Ward B, after the lights were dimmed— they were never turned off entirely—a patient from the next bed crawled in next to him. His name was Socrates. Casper would later learn he was a Greek short-order cook, former Greco-Roman wrestler, and ex-YMCA boy rapist. The restraints made it easy for the wrestler to manhandle Casper’s genitalia and rectum. Casper was so medicated that he could not even muster the thought
I’m being raped.
The concept of outrage, injustice, was beyond his comprehension. He did not understand where the image of someone bobbing for apples came from, or what it meant. It was just there inside his head, flickering like a broken neon sign.

Compared to other hospitals for the criminally insane, Townsend was considered a beacon of enlightenment. Patients were not left to fester in their own feces. There were no Dr. Cottons roaming the ward, extracting teeth and lengths of bowel. Occasionally there were beatings, but never prescribed by a physician. And though the Pep Boys could have and should have kept a closer eye on Socrates at night, in comparison to the orderlies Casper would have encountered at other mental institutions for the criminally insane, they were positively benign.

Penologists and psychiatrists would have concurred: Casper was not being punished, he was being treated. There was no arguing that 100 mg of a tranquilizer like Thorazine made a patient who had killed a woman and crippled a man in a homicidal rage, a patient who had a history of violence, less likely to become violent. In his years at Townsend Casper never, not once, inflicted bodily harm on anyone. But the commonly held belief that tranquilizing the criminally insane reduces their anxiety and therefore makes them more receptive to the benefits of psychiatric therapies was at best dubious. As Homer would have put it, If you can’t think straight, how are you gonna learn to think straight?

Perhaps because Casper’s brain was such a finely tuned instrument, such a complex mechanism of wonder, it was acutely affected by the changes Thorazine inflicted on its chemistry. In the right dose chlorpromazine will kill you. Perhaps his mind shut down to keep the poison from spreading any farther than it already had. Whatever, in the months that followed, Casper shuffled through the routine of life in Ward B—like a somnambulist.

He could remember to urinate, empty his bowels, eat when food was placed in front of him; he could even answer questions. But he had no understanding of the words that were coming out of his mouth.

“How are you today, Casper?” There was a soft rasp to Dr. Shanley’s voice, like the nap on a flannel sheet.

“Okay, I guess.” Casper had gained fifteen pounds. His gait was hobbled to a slow shuffle, and he had a tendency to drool. But that was to be expected with Thorazine.

“You don’t sound sure of that.”

“I know.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I can’t think.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Can I go home?”

“Where’s home?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, that’s something we’ll have to work on.”

Dr. Shanley noted after this early interview: “Gedsic’s breakdown due to his inability to accept what he’s done. Fitting in well—acceptance of ward routine, ability to follow instructions— meds seem to be helping, continue 100 mg Thorazine daily.”

As spring heated up into summer, Casper’s mind stayed in hibernation. Only he didn’t think of it that way. He knew he wasn’t asleep, and yet he was sure he wasn’t awake. His brain had shut itself so far down, he could not make the connection between the meds and the slug he had become.

He could recall going to Dr. Winton’s house, the gun, the blood, but he couldn’t recall them as a chain of events. They were petrified out of time like the insect trapped in amber (it was in fact a moth) that floated in his imagination. His mind refused to send the messages necessary for him to comprehend how they belonged to him. His past was a series of hieroglyphs he did not know how to decipher.

There were glimmers that someone else was lurking beneath the chemical permafrost. That next summer, on the afternoon of June 18, 1953, the Pep Boys brought in a radio so they could listen to the Red Sox play the Tigers. In the seventh inning, the Sox scored seventeen runs. And when Gene Stephens, the Sox’s left fielder, got his third hit of the inning, the announcer said, “You’re listening to the first time in the history of the great game of baseball a player has had three hits in one inning. Somebody, tell me, what are the chances of that happening?”

“One in one hundred sixty-three thousand four hundred and fifty-two.” Casper said it matter-of-factly, as he slowly worried the spot on his temple with his forefinger.

“How do you figure that, Casper?” Moe laughed.

“I don’t know.”

Casper remembered that he had once been smart. He just no longer knew what that meant. Irrational numbers still bubbled up and exploded inside his skull. But they no longer added up.