Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (19 page)

What if one of his diagnostic instruments or his specialist practitioner’s intuition allowed him to see inside my mind’s eye? Shine a light in there, just the way he could shine one into the back of my throat?

“You must not speak to your mother about it,” he said.

About what? He hadn’t named the bad thing I’d done. Hadn’t said what it was that he was seeing that he didn’t like. I didn’t ask him because I was afraid. Maybe he wasn’t saying what it was because it was truly unmentionable and better left unsaid.

“We don’t want to upset your mom again. If you have bad thoughts, you must tell me about them. Don’t tell the other children about them. You can’t talk to them or play with them because you will infect them with your cough. Don’t tell your friend, what’s her name?”

“Madeline?”

“Don’t tell Madeline either. She’s a troublemaker. You don’t want to be like her. ”

“Why? What did I—” I felt about to cry. He sounded so suddenly stern and cold.

Then he saw I was upset, and his voice became a soothing purr again. He patted my head.

“It’s okay to be bad sometimes,” he said. “Nobody is perfect. God made both good
and
bad, and then He made us so we could choose between them. It’s called free will. If He just wanted us to be nothing but good all the time, He wouldn’t have given us a choice. Instead, every day is a brand new day. And every day God lets us choose: Should I be good today, or should I be bad?” He chuckled again. “Or maybe some of both today? For a little variety?”

“I don’t want to be bad,” I said. “Ever.”

“I know,” he said, “but then sometimes you think very bad thoughts, don’t you?”

I saw no point in lying. “Yes,” I said.

“God could have just made everyone good, including you and me,” he said. “And the world could have been full of nothing but good people and good things.”

“Why didn’t He do that?”

“Well, I think He knew that it would get pretty boring, right? If everybody was just good all day long and nothing but good things everywhere, then pretty soon good is just same-old, same-old, right? Good here, good there, good everywhere. Good can be so boring. It’s just doing what you’re told to do. No imagination. No creativity. God wanted things to be—Well, he wanted them to be
interesting.
Like you and me. We’re interesting and surprising because sometimes we do things that are good. And sometimes—”

He smiled at me and moistened his lips in a funny way.

“Sometimes you think about terrible things happening to people you don’t like, even sometimes your mommy and daddy. Yes?”

Maybe. I couldn’t say for sure. I guess he was right.

“These bad thoughts are normal,” he continued. “You shouldn’t worry about them. But your mommy knows about your bad thoughts, and she’s worried about them. So I’ll tell her that we have talked. She doesn’t have to worry anymore. And you can just tell me about any more bad thoughts you have and we will take care of them. If we have to, we can make them go away for good. Would you like that?”

His head was right next to that colored skull again, the one with the big needle going in its empty eye socket. I tried to read the big black letters at the top again:
TRAIN SOURBALL LABORATORY
. For just a second I wondered what would happen if the big needle was going right in his mean old eye socket instead of the skull’s.

That was probably the kind of bad thought he was talking about. I had sneaked, yes, and done some things I was told not to do. I sneaked and read a book about a bad man who killed an old lady with an axe. My mom told me not to read it, but I sneaked and read it anyway. First, I imagined myself getting killed by somebody chopping me up with an axe, and that was horrible and scary. But it was kind of exciting in a strange way, because it was all just pretend. I wasn’t really getting chopped up, it was just scary make-believe. Then I imagined what it would be like to chop up an old lady with an axe. And in the story the old lady was mean and stingy. The kind of old lady who would be dead soon anyway. The kind of old lady who was so mean you didn’t really mind if somebody chopped her up with an axe. The kind of old lady who got what she deserved.

Did my mom find that book? Is that why she was worried? Were these the thoughts the doctor and my mom were worried about? Other people probably don’t even think about being bad, because they are good, of course. They would read two sentences about a bad man coming
after
an old lady with an axe and then fling the book away in disgust. Maybe I was different. Maybe I had to be stopped before my sick imagination got all riled by reading about axe murderers, before my bad thoughts became bad actions, before I turned into Lizzie Borden.

“I don’t want your father to know about them,” said Dr. Gottreich.

“No!” I shouted. “Please don’t tell Pa Bear!”

“Everything between us is a secret,” he said. “We won’t tell your mother or your father about your bad thoughts. We’ll just fix them and make them go away. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” I said. “You can fix them?”

“Yes, I can, my child.”

“With a pill? With medicine?”

“With a simple procedure,” he said. “It takes only a few minutes.”

“Does it hurt? Does it hurt to fix them?”

“Only a little, and then it’s all better. Pain is a funny thing,” he said. “It only hurts while it’s happening, yes? If it hurts just for a second or two and then goes away, it’s really not so bad, is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If it hurts, it’s bad.”

“And sometimes when there is pain and it goes away, well, that’s a new kind of pleasure, yes? Once pain is gone it makes you happy, even if before it came you were just bored. Does that make sense?”

Not really. I started to get down from the table, as if I could make it be time to go just by starting to go.

“Ho, ho. Where are you off to, missy?”

He sat me back up on the table.

“Something else funny about pain. Suppose something really bad or painful happens, but you can’t remember it? Then sometimes it’s like it never happened.”

“If it was bad or if it hurt, I would remember it,” I said.

“Not always,” he said. “We have medicines, inhalants, that make you forget. And then? Well, it’s like it never happened.”

“I don’t think I want it to happen at all, whether I remember it or not.”

“And what if you and I could solve the problem of pain? Tliink ofthat. What if we found out why pain hurts and found a way to stop it from hurting? Think of all the people that would help.”

I tried to think about helping people, even though all I wanted was to leave.

“We have to cause some pain to study it, but what if we have medicine that makes it so people don’t remember the pain they suffered in the pain experiment? Wouldn’t that be nice?”

I started to get down again, but he sat me back up on the examination table.

“Why don’t you lie down here on the table and I’ll fix those bad thoughts so they don’t happen anymore.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “I think it’s going to hurt.”

He turned his back to me and busied himself at the table. I heard his instruments clanking. I also saw him pick up a brown bottle and another cloth. He poured something on the cloth and it smelled very sweet and oily.

“It won’t hurt,” he said. “Pulling a tooth hurts worse than fixing bad thoughts. Even the little bit of hurt, I promise you won’t remember it.”

I saw him pick up a long sharp thing with a funny handle on the end. He saw me looking at it, so he palmed it in his big bony hand, set it down in front of him, and covered it with a pale green cloth.

I saw the drawing of the empty skull again on the wall with the big needle aimed above it into the bone above the eye. It wasn’t a knitting needle. I could see the drawing now because the light of his head mirror wasn’t blinding me anymore. The big knitting needle looked like an ice pick, and that’s just what I had seen his bony hand cover with the green cloth.

His voice purred again. The soft sweet voice he used when he talked to our parents.

“Lie down, Sally.”

I didn’t want to lie down, but he held me behind the neck with his claw hand and made me.

I looked at that skull drawing again, the gloved hand, the ice pick. With my head lying on the table, I had a new angle on the poster; the shine was all gone from the big black letters. I could read them now, but I didn’t know what they meant:
TRANSORBITAL LOBOTOMY.

I started to cry and cough, and then I realized that there was somebody else crying in the Pain Room with me. Another little girl. At first I thought it was Maddy Kruger, but it wasn’t. This little girl was white as a bone and her grimy old johnny hung on her like calico rags. She had a bell tied around her neck on a piece of silk, and she was ringing it. I could see right through her to the beakers boiling right behind her. She was half not there. She was crying even louder than me. She had black circles around her eyes like Madeline’s. She was clutching a dolly and crying.

I don’t think Dr. Gottreich could see her. He was busy laying his instruments out for whatever he was planning to do.

I saw the sharp instrument again. It looked more like a wood-or metal-working tool, not something a doctor would use on a person or a little girl. Why was an ice pick in a doctor’s tool bag?

“I don’t want to fix my bad thoughts anymore. I just want to go back to the ward.”

“Do you hate your mommy?” he asked me. His eyes were black and cold. “Do you hate her? Do you want to hurt her? Is that why you don’t want to fix your bad thoughts and keep them from happening again?”

“No,” I cried. “I don’t hate my mommy. I love my mommy!”

“Love?” He laughed harshly. “Do you wanna know what love is?”

I started coughing and I could not stop.
Whoop, whoop, whoop.

He poured more fluid from the brown bottle onto the rag. Sweet oily fluid.

Whoop, whoop.
I could not stop. I couldn’t breathe.

“Cover,” he said, and handed me the cloth.

“Cover,” he said, and pressed the rag against my nose and mouth.

It smelled like turpentine, and just the one breath made me woozy. I closed my eyes to stop the room spinning. I felt him pull open my left eyelid. I saw him holding that instrument, holding it just like the rubber-gloved hand in the drawing on the wall. Aiming it at me. I felt pressure above my left eye, a tap. A blow. A red explosion inside my head. I pushed him away. The sweet smell made me dizzy.

The girl with the bell started screaming, and her tears streamed out of her eyes in black rivulets, as if she were crying black ink or venous blood. She screamed so loud I felt the vibrations in the examination table. The hard mattress under me started shuddering and bouncing. Then I saw that the walls and cabinets were shaking and bottles and jars and instruments were falling off the shelves and shattering.

An earthquake.

The little girl walked toward the door, and she waved for me to follow her. She was still screaming, and it seemed for all the world that her screams reverberated in the foundations of the place and caused the earthquakes.

She waved at me again. Hurry!

I hopped down from the table, ducked under Gottreich’s arm, and ran to the door. When I looked back, the whole room was shaking and cracks appeared under our feet in the cement floor.

“Wait!” said Dr. Gottreich. “You will return to the procedure table
now,
young lady!”

He staggered toward us, still holding that sharp thing in his hand.

Against the far wall, I saw the gas jets under the boiling beakers and the lab equipment. The tubing to the gas burnerruptured and the flame got brighter, rubber blistering, hissing, and dribbling over the lip of the table. The flames spread along the tubing and tabletop and caught a box of glassware on fire, which instantly went up in flames.

I turned to run, but then I saw the glass case with the hose spooled inside of it.
IN CASE OF FIRE, BREAK GLASS.
And next to it—

I grabbed the red axe with the big shiny sharp head. I swung it back over my shoulder to smash the glass with it.
IN CASE OF FIRE
…Then a bony claw-hand gripped my other shoulder and spun me around, hard.

It was Gottreich. His face was a snarly mess of rage. He looked like he was going to blame the fire on me.

He held the ice pick in his hand, and it was tipped with blood. My blood. He planted his foot to lunge at me, but right then the little girl rang her bell. She was standing off to my left, and with her was a monster, a creature the likes of which I had never seen—a jackal, a giant anteater?—but it stood on two legs like a man. Its eyes seemed human, but its teeth flashed like white razors. It was a hideously fearsome-looking thing, but it behaved like the girl’s pet.

I don’t think Gottreich could see them, but I know he heard the bell, because he was almost on me when he suddenly looked toward them and the sound of the ringing bell.

Too bad for him.

I saw his white-knuckled fist close around the handle of that bloody ice pick; the sweet stink of that turpentine stuff he’d pushed in my face still made me unsteady and thickheaded. Gottreich looked back at me one second too late. I didn’t have time to think, I just swung for the fence. Ask any of the boys at the South Lewis ton Little League, major Softball division, Sally Druse can hit when she has to, and that’s just the way it felt. I aimed for the side of his head, because I didn’t want that ice pick poked at my eyeball ever again. I saw the axe blade reflected in his head mirror, then shut my eyes so I wouldn’t see it hit. I heard it instead, a sound like my mom dropping a melon on the flagstones in the kitchen.

When I opened my eyes, the old buzzard was down, and the fire was spreading along the tabletop, more boxes, cloths, and stacks of papers combusting as the fire crawled along them like a living thing.

The creature leaned forward on its furry legs and claws and poked its snout around the caved-in hole I’d made in Gottreich’s head, sniffing the wound like a dog appraising tainted meat.

I wiped my left eye and my fingers came back with trickles of blood on them. I looked down at Gottreich’s stoved-in skull.