Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (17 page)

I had stumbled twice into a node of some kind, a passage to the beyond, or at least to the borderlands between this life and the next: what Swedenborg called the First State after death. This vision charged the visible world with a new energy. Everything from the paint on the walls to the floor tiles seemed to vibrate with color and light.

I barely heard the hubbub going on behind me at the nurses’ station, where Bobby had summoned the elevator repairmen. The doors weren’t supposed to open, obviously, when the cars were not in service. Gee, what could have happened? Like the KH doctors, they were all hopelessly stuck in the flatland world of medical science and engineering, wearing blinders.

Once the powers that be had all the push-pull mechanics of the unspeakably dull sublunary world back in working order, it was time for Bobby to try again. He wheeled me to the elevators and pushed the Down button. We certainly wouldn’t be taking elevator 3, seemed to be the consensus view. Cowards. While we waited, I heard Bobby seething and muttering just above and behind my head. Still peeved about the Peggy Kruger affair, still stuck here off the clock dealing with one foozling fiasco after another. Never mind if he almost dumped his wheelchair-bound mum ten floors down an elevator shaft to her death.

I fished my reading glasses out of my robe, put them on, and craned my old head and arthritic neck for a look at the tabs on the folders. All signs still pointed to the night Madeline died, and I had a feeling the folders were at least related to our shared history, but I couldn’t see the labels on them because of the way Bobby was carrying them. The chime sounded, the light came on over the second car, and I waited, half expecting the doors to open on the lower half of
The Last Judgment
by Hieronymus Bosch.

Instead, the doors parted and a plain old elevator waited. It was empty, giving us a moment of privacy.

Bobby scowled, felt for something in the empty pocket of his shirt, and groaned.

“Ah, Mum. I brought a letter for you from home. It’s from your nurse friend in Boston. ”

“Claudia?”

“There you go. I brought it in and then I left it in my locker downstairs. I’ll bring it up after lunch break.”

“Please do. I love hearing from Claudia. Her husband found work in a computer company.”

“That so, Mum?”

“It’s so. I’m so happy for her. Well?” I said. “Those folders look pretty old.”

“They are, Mum,” he said. “I can’t decide whether to give them to you or not. They have to do with you and Madeline Kruger, and if you call, write, speak to, mention, even so much as
think
about Madeline Kruger or her papers again, Mum, I swear.”

“Bobby, I won’t. Just give me the folders. What are they?”

Ding! The elevator stopped. I looked up just in time to realize that we were not only in car 2—the same elevator with the dislodged ceiling panel where, on the way up, I had just heard a child giving voice to the suffering of the damned—but
9
was lit on the numbers overhead, meaning we were stopping on the ninth-floor Kingdom Hospital psychiatric unit, where I’d seen Dr. Rat and where—

The doors opened, and there stood a middle-aged Teutonic-looking woman, heavyset and big-boned without being fat, like maybe her hobby was weight training, like she belonged in a production of Wagner at the Met wearing a headdress of horns. I recognized the family resemblance immediately. I also couldn’t help noticing that Hilda Kruger seemed way out of sorts, verging on outright rage.

She had a swollen, battered old accordion folder that had been stapled, bound with strings, and patched with tape over the years. I couldn’t read the labels on the tabs, but I could easily read what was written in black capital letters on the side: DR. GOTTREICH FILES.

Dr. Gottreich. The name numbed me, paralyzed me, like a spinal block administered at the back of my neck; it drove every living thought from my brain. I felt cold, heat, nausea erupt inside me and rush through arteries and nerves to my head, where an explosion of light drowned out the sight, sound, and sense of everything but that name: Gottreich.

Inside I was still feeling my way along that black wall in the dark, and now I realized that all I had to do was push—push once against the black wall—and it would swing open on Dr. Gottreich.

Hilda looked like a butcher about to turn her talents on living human flesh for a change. She shook the accordion file in my face.

“You want the papers, you nosy old bitch!”

Bobby stepped between us immediately and took charge, using a manner and tone of voice I’d never seen or heard from him.

“There’s no call for talk like that, Ms. Kruger.”

He sounded like a health care professional when he said it, polite but firm.
I’m in charge here, not you,
was his message. I was so proud of him. That’s my son and I love him!

Hilda snarled at Bobby and me and shook the file of papers again.

“Everybody who reads these goes insane and tries to commit suicide. You want to join them?”

She threw the accordion jacket past Bobby and into my lap.

“Take them, you old sow. I hope they lock you up in a quiet room with them and give you a razor blade!”

Her face erupted in wrath and she wound up for a roundhouse slap at me.

Bobby stepped in and caught her wrist and started backing her up, off the elevator and out into the hallway, where I saw a nurse and a psych tech watching the exchange from behind the wired glass of the nurses’ station. The two folders fell from under Bobby’s arm and the papers within them spilled out and splattered, half on the elevator, half in the hallway just outside.

Several sheets skimmed across the floor and landed faceup in front of my feet.

The nurse in the station picked up a phone and punched in a number.

I watched Bobby try to calm Hilda Kruger. I was stunned, still unable to move. I looked dumbly down at the file: DR. GOTTREICH.

The elevator doors started to close. Bobby reached back to catch them, but then Hilda made another lunge after me, and Bobby had to use both hands to stop her. The two of them staggered off the elevator, leaving me alone inside.

The doors closed.

The elevator began its descent.

I looked down at the papers Bobby had spilled at my feet. The closest one was yellowed, warped, stained, but still legible. It was a printed form with
ADMITTING
in bold across the top. Stamped at an angle, in what many decades ago probably hadbeen red but was now somewhere between brown and rust, it said:
DO NOT DESTROY. RESEARCH SUBJECT. DR. GOTTREICH
.

Bobby’s words from yesterday popped into my head:
They keep medical records for seven years…. After that they burn them, unless they are part of a research study.

My eyes blurred with tears as I stared at that name again. I had to remove my reading glasses and wipe them.

The form itself held the usual particulars of a hospital admission.

I saw more papers, scattered against one wall of the elevator. These had Madeline Kruger’s name on them. They too were stamped
DO NOT DESTROY. RESEARCH SUBJECT. DR. GOTTREICH
in the color of decades-old blood.

The elevator car suddenly lurched to a stop again, so hard my poor teeth rattled in my mouth. I held on to the accordion file in my lap, but I felt papers slithering under my grasp.

An alarm sounded once and cut off, leaving only silence. The lights flickered; then one or two of the fluorescent tubes hummed and struggled back on, casting a gray-green gloaming in the interior of the car.

I looked up and saw the ceiling panel was still ajar, the black triangle still open to the shaft above.

Half the papers had spilled out of the accordion file into my lap. Crumbling old newspaper clippings, medical journal articles, one entitled “Psychosurgical Procedures to Ameliorate Intractable Pain,” by E. Gottreich, M.D., Ph.D. More articles from the popular press, even national coverage: “Psychosurgery Cured Me,” where Dr. Gottreich ‘s name appeared in a sidebar, and “Wizardry of Psychosurgery Restores Sanity to Fifty Inmates.”

Another clipping had the headline “No Worse Than Pulling a Tooth,” about procedures that Dr. Gottreich and many other neurologists and psychologists had popularized. “No General Anesthesia or Sterile Field Required for Miracle Psychosurgery. “ A grainy black-and-white photo of a doctor in a white lab coat, a head mirror swiveled up away from his face. He was leaning over a patient who was awake, surrounded by doctors and nurses in street clothes, and the doctor in the white lab coat held a steel instrument with a handle. “Lewiston’s Own Dr. Eb Gottreich, Psychosurgery Pioneer. ”

My hands shook. I had to settle my elbows on the armrests of the wheelchair to steady them as I peered back through time over sixty-some years and looked into the eyes of Dr. Ebenezer Gottreich.

Death had changed him hardly at all, for he was none other than Dr. Rat and the same old rawbones who’d come for his drugs at the nurses’ station.
Do you wanna know what love is?
Why had I forgotten him? Why was he lost to me still?

In the 1939 photo of the Lewiston
Daily Sun,
I recognized the old brick building. Gottreich was posing next to the cornerstone, which read “Gottreich Hospital Built 1870
A.D.
” This was the place that had burned to the ground in 1939 on the date Madeline had referenced in her note, the hospital where the two of us were treated for whooping cough in 1939. It was called the old Kingdom only because it stood where the new one stood now, but in the old days it was named after the family of physicians who built it in the nineteenth century: the Gottreichs.

Train Sourball Laboratory.
Sally Druse, you old crazy coot, why do those words keep—

More newspaper articles, with and without Gottreich photos, including accounts of the 1939 hospital fire. “Two Die in Hospital Fire.”

The fluorescent lights flickered again in the stalled car. Silence. Then the little girl’s voice, louder than ever before. Distinct. She sounded as if she were on top of the car, crying out to me, trying to reach me across space and time with her pathetic, inarticulate cry, as if she had forgotten words and was forced to plead by intonation only:
Why must I, a blameless child, suffer so horribly?

Was the child’s voice inside or outside me?

The answer was right there in my lap. The tape recorder Bobby had fetched for me. I was trembling so hard that it was a chore to manipulate the thing, but I had my glasses on, and it had a big red button with
RECORD
printed under it. I pushed it and saw the tiny red light go on and the microcassette’s tumblers and wheels turn.

I looked up and through the gap in the ceiling panels, because it sounded for all the world as if she were directly above me in the shaft. Another part of me knew that the voice was unbound by time or space, or worse, that I was hearing the child’s voice in the same part of my brain that lights up on the PET scans of schizophrenics who hear God talking to them.

The tape would answer that question. If the piteous voice was real—My skin erupted in chilly gooseflesh. It sounded real, distinctly human, yet not of this world, just as it had seemed in my episode the night Madeline had died.

Which prompted the obvious question: If the voice was not of this world, then with what organs of sense was I hearing it now? I caught my breath and froze as the next consideration loomed: What if I was able to hear this poor spirit’s eerie, unearthly lament because…I too had passed into the beyond? What if it’s true what they say: that death is just the side of life that is turned away from us, and for a short time after the spirit takes its leave, it flits back and forth between the two realms?

What if, instead of just an episode, a seizure, an out-of-body experience—what if this time I’d really flown the coop? If I was just stuck again in a stalled elevator, then why hadn’t Otto called me on the radio, the way he’d done before?

I stared straight ahead and listened to the child’s voice fill me with terror and loneliness. What if, instead of just teetering on the brink of that open elevator shaft and suffering a reprisal of my near-death or out-of-body experience, I had plunged right down it to my death? Maybe this cozy, familiar, worldly elevator car was the hallucination of a dead woman still clinging to life, a kind of visual rendition of whistling past the graveyard? Swedenborg says that the fear of death is so great and the human psyche so powerful that for an indefinite period of time after death, the souls of the freshly dead project an illusory image of their usual earthly surroundings and friends.

Others say that the dead don’t realize their condition until they look in the mirror and realize that they have no reflection.

I held my breath and felt the chill of a fresh corpse radiating out to my extremities. The hair on my flesh horripilated into a hundred thousand antennae, all resounding with the little girl’s cries for help.

Had I seen my reflection in the elevator mirror when Bobby wheeled me aboard? I was facing the control panel, of course. Did I dare turn, look into one of the elevator wall mirrors, and learn my fate?

I turned to my right and gazed into the mirror on the wall of the car, half expecting to see nothing but the reflection of the mirror on my left and nothing in between. This is how it ends, a hall of mirrors and no Sally Druse in between, a question mark crushed between two nothings. Instead, there I was. I was never so relieved to see me, warts and all—silvery yellow locks, my mottled hands (I held them up), the faded flesh of my face, age spots, skin tags, hairy moles, and all. Are you a witch now, Sally Druse?