Projection (13 page)

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Vernon shook me awake and pulled me to my feet.  His face, never a reassuring sight, seemed to undulate grotesquely now.  The room was spinning.  Warm blood from my cheek had soaked the shoulder of my shirt and started to trickle down my arm.  Yet my heart didn't race.  My breathing was even.  My fear called to me with a faint scream, very far off, nothing to be done about it.  Vernon handed me another paper cup.  I winked and tossed it at him.  The orange liquid splattered his hospital scrub shirt.  Without a word, he turned and walked out of the room.  I collapsed onto the mattress and fell back asleep.

Ten, fifteen minutes or an hour or two passed before I woke up in a panic, short of breath.  Vernon was straddling my chest.  His knees crushed into my biceps, pinning my arms to the mattress.  I struggled with everything I had.  He barely moved.  I threw all my weight to my right side and managed to sink my teeth into his thigh, but he knocked me to the mattress with a backhand to my mouth that made me taste blood.  He reached down to the floor.  I tried frantically to free myself, kicking wildly.  It was hopeless.  I tracked his hand with my eyes, expecting a blade, remembering he had castrated a man, but another paper cup appeared.  I should have made him wrench my jaws apart.  I didn't.  I opened my mouth, still in some measure a willing victim, and he poured more orange bitters into me.  There was less to swallow than the first time; I guessed I was getting another ten milligrams.  As soon as the job was done, he lumbered off me.  "Case conference," he said.  "Now."  He pulled me to a seated position on the mattress.  "Let's go."

We started down the corridor.  I tried to chart a straight course by focusing on the locked door at the end of the unit, but after drifting several feet I slammed into the cinder block wall.  I would have landed face-down on the floor, but Vernon grabbed my arm and held me up.  Firmly, almost kindly, he guided me the rest of the way to the Day Room.

The dozen patients who had been chanting now knelt with their backs against the far wall, silently mouthing their words.  The grated windows behind them cast a collage of checkerboard shadows over an eight-foot table that had been placed in the middle of the room.  Lucas sat at the head of the table, Peter Zweig and Gray Kaminsky to either side.  Craig Bishop was taking his place a few seats down.  An emaciated woman about sixty who I didn't recognize was already seated next to him.  She was holding herself to keep from shivering.  I looked into the nurse's station and saw the pregnant woman slumped forward toward the counter, still bound.  From the movement in her shoulders I could tell she was breathing.  The clock behind her read 3:45.

Lucas stood.  "Dr. Clevenger."  A single nod.  "We've reserved a place of honor for you."  He pointed to a chair at the far end of the table.  He waited for Vernon to help me into my seat, then told him to wait by the door.  His eyes never left me as he sat back down.  "I believe you have met everyone here, with the exception of Ms. Gladstone," he said.

I knew
of
Cecelia Gladstone.  She was a Boston socialite who had poisoned her husband, president of the Beacon Street Bank, two months earlier.  After her arrest she claimed he had beaten her for years, making murder her only recourse.  She had been admitted To Lynn State for a psychiatric evaluation prior to trial.  I squinted to bring her into focus and saw that her pupils were almost dime-sized.  Her skin was clammy gooseflesh.  She was in full-blown opiate withdrawal.

She stared blankly at me.

"Now that we're all acquainted, let me summarize the case at hand," Lucas went on.  He turned to Kaminsky.  "Listen carefully.  You're expected to present Nurse Vawn's case on your own tomorrow."  He looked past me, into the nurses’ station.  "Provided the Lord sustains her through the night."

"Yes, sir."

The notion of a kidnapper and rapist presenting a pregnant woman's ‘case’ made my stomach turn.

"You must pay attention to form," Lucas prodded him.

Kaminsky folded his hands and abruptly leaned forward to listen.  Watching him, I lost my own center of gravity and swayed in my seat.  I grabbed hold of the table.

"Choppy seas," Lucas said, with a wink.  "Stay with us."  He waited several seconds, then began his presentation.  "Today's patient is Lindsey Simons.  Ms. Simons is a twenty-two-year-old single white female from Brookline.  She is one of two children born to affluent parents — an attorney and an accountant.  She has no children of her own.  She has no known medical illnesses and no known drug allergies.  She has worked previously as a clothing store clerk and as a substitute teacher.  The symptoms of her present illness consist chiefly of compulsive lying.  Without provocation she has attempted to deceive us and our families, promulgating destructive falsehoods about our mental capacities and our characters."  He paused, glanced suspiciously at his left arm — his good arm.  He looked at me, then quickly away.  "Of course we do not hold Ms. Simons directly responsible for her actions.  We know Satan can take any form, even one as seemingly innocent as hers."  He snapped his fingers and immediately had Gabriel Vernon's attention.  "Get the patient," he said flatly.

A minute later Vernon marched a naked woman into the room.  She stood about five-feet-seven.  Her expression was somber.  Her face was pale and angular, with a prominent nose and jaw.  Yet she was by no means ugly.  Her features, framed by curly black hair to her shoulders, balanced each other well enough to create a profile that, even held hostage, suggested strength.  Her nipples were dark and erect.  I found myself thinking who closely fear mimicked excitement at the sexual nerve endings.

Vernon escorted the young woman into the space between the windows and the table, the row of kneeling patients behind her.  I saw that her back and buttocks were covered with red welts.  I had the feeling that Lucas had inflicted the punishment.  I wondered whether he had forced himself on her.  I pictured him doing it.

"Kneel," Lucas shouted.

Simons’ eyes darted around the table, searching, it seemed, for an ally.  They settled on mine.  For a very brief time we anchored each other amidst the chaos.

"Kneel!" Lucas demanded again.

She sunk slowly to her knees and hung her head.

The patients behind her continued mouthing their prayer.

"Does anyone at the table have a question for Ms. Simons?" Lucas asked.

Peter Zweig, the nineteen-year-old who had killed his parents, cleared his throat.  I looked over at him.  His hand was moving up and down over his crotch.  "Does she hear voices?"

"Ask the patient," Lucas said.

Zweig looked shyly at Simons.  "Do you hear voices?"

She looked straight at him and shook her head.

"See visions?" Zweig asked.  He dropped his hand into his scrub pants and started stroking himself.

"No."

"Day, date and time," Gray Kaminsky demanded.

"Wednesday, January 15, 1999," she said, making eye contact with him.  "Four
P.M.
"  She glanced up at the clock.  "4:02."

"Who's the... President of the United States?" Zweig added, his breathing erratic.

I realized the two of them were spewing random questions from the standardized mental status examination.  Psychiatrists use the battery of questions to assess clarity of thought and the presence or absence of hallucinations.  Zweig and Kaminsky had obviously been given the exam enough times to memorize parts of it.

"Clinton," Simons answered.

"Do you think about killing yourself?" Craig Bishop half-shouted.

"I've thought about it in the last day," Simons said.  "Not before."

"How would you do it?" Bishop asked.  "Would you hang yourself?"

"Would you slash your wrists and bleed to death?" Bishop went on.  "Would you jump out the window like Grace Cummings?"

I felt as if I were on a carousel, with the room rushing by in blurry snapshots.  My forehead was damp with sweat.

She hesitated.  "Pills."

Gray Kaminsky started rocking back and forth in his seat.  "You have sex dreams?"

She didn't respond.  Her eyes fell.

"Do you have dreams where you're getting fucked?"

Cecelia Gladstone grimaced and looked out the windows.

"Where you've got a stiff cock in your pussy and a dildo—"

"Enough!" Lucas shouted, holding up his stump.   My whirling consciousness slowed against the force of his voice.  He glared at Zweig.  "Get out.  Now.  Go to your room."

I was amazed to see Zweig rise sheepishly out of his seat and walk slowly out.  Lucas seemed to have achieved complete control of him and the others.

"Do you have any questions for the patient?" he asked Cecelia Gladstone.

She shook her head.  "I need more medicine," she said.  "I'm sick."

"Are you a physician?"

She didn't answer.

"Cecelia?"

"No."

"Correct," Lucas said.  "Trust that you'll get what you need when you need it."  He angled his chair in Simons’ direction.  "Are you willing to get well so that you can leave the unit?" he asked her.

"Yes," she said, looking up at him.

"Never look at me."  He paused as she hung her head, again.  "You feel you can accept treatment?"

She stayed silent.

"Do you want treatment?" Lucas persisted.

She started to cry, then whispered, "Yes."  She began to shake uncontrollably.

"Don't be sad.  The Lord helps those who help themselves."

"What treatment?" I managed to ask.  "What is it she wants?"

Lucas regarded me with a mixture of pleasure and contempt.  "To be rid of her lies.  To be free and true.  Ready for discharge."  He reached into the back pocket of his scrubs.  A scalpel appeared in his hand.  "To be rid of that tongue."

My heart fell.  "You can't," was all I could say.

"But I must.  No surgeon worthy of his oath would let disease spread through the body when a clean excision could save it."

I collected the little that was left of my energy and concentration.  "Let me treat her."

Kaminsky and Bishop began to laugh.  "She is a treat," Bishop grinned.  "Simons says, ‘Cut out her tongue.’"  His hand moved to his groin.

Lucas put down the scalpel.  "You want to treat her.  By all means.  That's why you're on the team, doctor."  He slid the scalpel the full length of the table.  It came to rest just within my reach.

"I wouldn't cut her."

"No?  What would you suggest?"

I wanted to harness Lucas’ connection, pathologic or not, to prayer.  "We should pray," I said automatically.  "We should pray for her soul."  I nodded at all the patients kneeling behind Simons.  "Them and us."  I paused, wiped away the sweat running into my eyes.  "That is, if you really believe she's possessed."

Lucas stared at me silently for a few seconds.  "Does the group feel this treatment is an option?"

No one spoke.

"Could we have a show of hands?"

At the door, Gabriel Vernon lifted his hand just past his waist.

Lucas glanced at him.  "We're very democratic here on the unit," he said after a few moments.  "Every one has a voice.  Even Gabriel."  He paused.  "The treatment of choice is the scalpel."

I didn't make a move.

"Use it, and she leaves.  Cured.  Otherwise, I'm inclined to let Mr. Zweig do his best to treat her."

The room fell utterly silent.  I stared at the scalpel.

Simons was the first to speak.  "I want you to do it," she said evenly.

I looked over at her. Tears streamed down her face.

"I don't want to die here."

"Mr. Zweig is perfectly qualified to help you," Lucas said.

"No.  Please," she sobbed.

"Well, doctor?" Lucas said, looking at me.

I didn't respond.

Lucas turned to Gabriel Vernon.  "Bring Ms. Simons to Mr. Zweig's room.  And bring him the scalpel."

"I'm begging you," Simons pleaded with me.

My heart raced, despite the methadone coursing through my bloodstream.  I knew I could inflict the wound more kindly than Lucas, certainly more kindly than Zweig.  But would that not be a devil's bargain?  A capitulation to evil?  I could feel the projection from Lucas’ psyche weighing on mine.  I held fast to a single principle:  I was on the unit to cure him, not become him.  I had to meet his darkness with equally intense light.  It was the only way into his psyche and out of this hell.  My whole body trembled at the thought of what I was about to say.  I barely managed to get the words out.  "Take mine, instead."  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kaminsky and Bishop exchange puzzled glances.

Lucas’ lip curled.  "She's begging you," he said.

"My lies are greater than hers.  Take my tongue and let her go."

Lucas’ face reddened.  His gaze skipped from patient to patient, as if assessing whether I was reaching any of them.  "Trickery!" he spewed.  "You're speaking her evil.  She's infecting you."

I felt like I had cornered a rabid dog, which is very much what it feels like to touch extreme psychopathology.  Showing fear could be the end of me.  I had to press on.  I slid the scalpel back down the table.  It came to rest within inches of Lucas.  "You see Satan everywhere because you can't bear to look into your own darkness."

Lucas snatched up the scalpel and started around the table.

I was resolved to fight if I had to, but I didn't want to make a move until I knew for certain Lucas was going to lash out.  I sat bolt upright and met his wild eyes with a steady gaze.

Three steps from me, he raised the scalpel.

I stood, poised to lunge for his wrist, but he suddenly veered off toward Simons.

The patients behind her began chanting aloud again.  She closed her eyes and opened her mouth.

"No!" I shouted.

A grotesque moan of pain and a chorus of applause filled the room.

Chapter 7

"Satan be damned!" Lucas cried out.

I looked down at Lindsey Simons, lying in the fetal position, holding her mouth as blood poured out of it.

Lucas walked over to me.  He tossed the scalpel on the table.  "Why don't you take her to your room?  Keep her for yourself," he said.  "She certainly won't talk back."