Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (21 page)

“The world is full of wonders, Bobby. Let’s not spoil it by bickering.”

“It’s not bickering, Mum. It just has to stop. I work at the Kingdom, and you are becoming a threat to my continued employment.”

“Nonsense, Bobby, I—”

“And this research of yours is a threat to your health. The doctors told me I should throw away all of those papers of yours so that you’d stop getting all riled up about Madeline Kruger, about who died in the fire, about voices in the elevator, and such.” He rolled one fearful eye my way. “So that’s what I did. I got rid of them.”

He closed his eyes and started in on another two-handed rub.

“Bobby, you didn’t throw away those papers, did you?”

“That was a good hunch about those old records, Mum. Those old records were stored belowground in fireproof rooms, even in the old hospital. Some of them survived the hospital fire, and the research papers obviously got kept. Those Gottreichs apparently were famous for a while there doing pain research, but then I guess nothing came of it. But the records got kept.”

“Yes, they did, Bobby. You didn’t answer my question.”

No eye contact.

“Mum, I took the folders back to medical records, and I gave all of those other papers back to Hilda Kruger. I told the doctors that’s what I was planning to do, and they said it was probably a good plan, given the way you’ve been behaving.”

Still not even a glance from him.

“Bobby?”

Now he managed just a sideways glance, a furtive one, before he went off into another head rub.

“I see the way it is.”

“You do?”

“I do,” I said.

“And you’re not angry?” He brightened at the prospect, but only for a moment.

“I’m not angry, because the papers are still in your locker and you were testing me to see how angry I would get if you actually had given them back to Hilda Kruger. The answer is
very angry,
Bobby. Now please go get me those files. Now!”

He groaned so loud it made the sputum cup reverberate on my nightstand. If he had had three hands, he’d be doing a three-handed rub.

Finally he staggered to his feet and shambled off to get me the papers.

“And the tape, Bobby. I need the tape that I made!”

“There’s nothing on it, Mum. I already listened to it.”

“I need the tape,” I patiently repeated. “There’s nothing
you
can hear on it. I’ve always sensed that whatever frequency the little girl operates on is not within bandwidths normally heard by the ungifted. If that were the case, everybody riding in elevator two would be filing nightly incident reports in Otto’s office about children crying.”

“Yes, Mum.”

Dr. Massingale was making it difficult for me to remain in charge of my own care. It was, of course, out of the question for me to tell her what I knew about the little ghost girl, about Madeline Kruger, about Gottreich’s crypt of horrors called the Pain Room. I’m sure she would thrill to my descriptions of a giant anteater nuzzling the brains of a Nazi lobotomist, but I was not gullible or naive enough to turn over that kind of ammunition to a physician. She was a nice woman, but she was also part of a raiding party from the flatlands of science. At this stage of my life, they were coming into formation on the high ground around me, looking down on me for any evidence of my mental incompetence, which—if it could be proven to a reasonable degree of medical certainty—would give them what they really wanted: control of my medical care.

Even if I could win Dr. Massingale’s trust and confidence, I would be unable to convince her that I had traveled in the land between life and death. It would be easier to describe a Mozart concerto to a profoundly deaf person. Instead, I wisely told her only what I hoped would cause her to order tests, the results of which would help me prove my case.

She was already hellbent on ordering any test likely to show that I had experienced another seizure. (Note that even Stegman and his Boston cronies didn’t actually witness me having any seizures; they had merely interpreted EEG results, which seemed to suggest that I had experienced nonclinical seizures.)

First and foremost, Lona Massingale was a medical scientist, so to win back her trust, I would have to use the old 52-card deck to play her game—science—and systematically approach the phenomenon of the voice and the sensed presence of the little girl. To do that, I needed other tests to be ordered.

Brain scans of schizophrenics show that auditory hallucinations are “heard” or processed in different parts of the brain than real voices. If only I could be scanned while riding in elevator 2. If I could signal the technicians and alert them to snap the photo of my gray matter right when I was hearing the little girl’s voice, a functional brain image could show whether the voice came from within or without.

Right, and if my uncle were a woman, he’d be my aunt.

I am enough of a scientist to realize that the problem of the little girl’s voice presented several possibilities, some of which I could explain to Dr. Massingale, some I would take to the grave with me. For instance, it could be that I heard the voice directly in some precognitive or clairaudient portion of my brain, because the little girl somehow had direct access to my neural circuitry. Maybe when I heard it, I used the same part of my brain that is active when mystics peer into eternity. Yes. And so what? Medical science would be unimpressed, and I would be diagnosed as having auditory hallucinations, even if they could watch pictures of them on a scan.

How to convince Dr. Massingale that the voice was not an auditory hallucination? A flatlander would ask: Was I really hearing a voice? Or hearing something else? So I needed a hearing test to rule out tinnitus. If the tests were negative for tinnitus, then that would be
some
evidence, at least, that the anguished cries I’d heard so vividly in elevator
2
and on the night Madeline died were not simple ringing in the ears.

Next, I needed a sound professional to examine the tape I’d made. If I could get Dr. Massingale to at least entertain the possibility that my “episodes” consisted of something more than seizures, then the question remained: Was the voice of the little girl a “real” acoustic phenomenon? Could a confused and frightened spirit trapped between life and death somehow generate sound? Perhaps her cries were actual noise, but inaudible to the human ear. Only professional audiologists and sound technicians could answer these questions, and Dr. Massingale was my best bet for getting those tests ordered, certainly with regard to having my own hearing tested.

Give her credit, she played along and ordered the tests I’d wanted done as well, probably because they were covered by insurance. She also agreed that we should systematically approach the phenomenon of the voice. The tape was sent to a sound technician and I was sent upstairs to an audiologist and otologist, Dr. Marcia Limen, who put me in a sound booth with the old earmuffs on and beeped at me for half an hour or so.

Of course I was eager to know the results right then and there, but I was told by an icy Dr. Limen that I would receive the results of the tests and whatever mysteries had been revealed in the sound booth from my primary physician, Dr. Massingale, presumably at the impending Sally Druse summit.

I returned to my room, where I was to await the verdict of the medical industrial complex and its prolix testing. Who pays these bills, anyway? The students at Faust College? The taxpayers? The insurance companies? Who was getting billed for the insatiable lust of these medical scientists to test every molecule in my body and examine it for signs of seizures?

It’s a riddle I assume will be answered long after I’m dead. I’ll leave explicit instructions to Bobby in my will not to pay them. To skip town if he must.

Meanwhile, I seized the day to catch up on my studies. Bobby had left the file on my nightstand. I rummaged through it and found the newspaper articles that had fallen onto my lap in the elevator.

“Two Die In Hospital Fire,” said the headline of the old
Daily Sun,
November 3, 1939, reporting on the fire that occurred on All Souls’ Day, November
2.
Caused by an ether explosion in a basement laboratory. The story told how the renowned Dr. Ebenezer Gottreich, named after his uncle who owned and operated the Gates Falls Textile Mill on the very same site during the Civil War, had perished in the fire, along with one of his research subjects, a juvenile delinquent, Paul Morlock, age fifteen. The Morlock boy had been under Dr. Gottreich’s care for violent antisocial behaviors. He had apparently been receiving sensory deprivation therapy in the hope of curtailing his aggressive impulses and at the time of the fire had been submerged in a saline tank in a room adjoining the laboratory where Dr. Gottreich was working. Dr. Gottreich and his patient were unable to escape.

All the other patients and staff were able to evacuate the hospital well before the fire got out of control, because they had been alerted to the outbreak of fire by loudly ringing bells and a child crying.

The article, and the ensuing coverage in the other clippings Madeline had collected, went on to note that this was the second fire to have occurred on the site. In 1869, on November second, exactly seventy years to the day, the Gates Falls Mill, owned by Ebenezer Gottreich’s uncle and namesake, had burned to the ground.

Two fires! This
was
news to me. We’d all grown up knowing the old Kingdom had burned, but I had never so much as heard about the mill. A sidebar story on the original Gates Falls Mill fire told how the mill had employed two hundred textile workers making uniforms for Yankee soldiers during the Civil War. When the mill burned in 1869, most of the adult workers got out in time. But the child laborers—mostly Irish immigrants—worked on the lower levels underground, where they tended the dyeing and bleaching vats and worked twelve hour shifts during peacetime. Most of the children did not get out.

This was fuel for thought, and I dug out the note Madeline had written me the night she’d died in the hospital.

Which posed a new question:
Which
fire did not kill the little girl?

In addition, Madeline had saved harrowing articles about Gottreich and his sensational development of the procedure that had nearly deprived me of my personality at age eleven. Gottreich had been an ardent disciple of the notorious Dr. Walter Freeman, a passionate advocate of lobotomy, who began experimenting on corpses in 1935 and subsequently developed the elegant procedure known as the transorbital lobotomy. By 1948, Dr. Freeman was performing the procedure on children, professionals, movie stars, including the beautiful and talented Frances Farmer, a radical political activist allegedly in need of the brain-damage cure, along with hundreds of others. By 1955, over 40,000 men, women, and children had undergone “psychosurgery,” the name most often used in the popular press for lobotomy.

Doctors had been intrigued by the possibilities of severing or destroying the frontal lobes of troublesome mental patients since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Gottreich’s father, Klaus, had also done research on prisoners, children, and mental patients, using an early form of the procedure then called a leucotomy.

Early lobotomies required drilling holes in the patient’s skull and inserting instruments or wires into the brain, which sometimes broke off and caused infections or more than the desirable amount of frontal lobe damage. Eventually Freeman and his followers (Gottreich included) found a sturdier tool (an ice pick) and an ingenious new route of entry into the brain (the orbital plate of the skull, directly over the eyeball). The procedure was performed all over the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, most often by psychiatrists and psychologists who had no surgical training whatsoever. The procedure was hailed as “simple, cheap, and miraculous.” The only apparent physical side effect (black eyes) was usually remedied by having the patient wear sunglasses for a week or so after the procedure.

The problematic history of the procedure eventually brought dishonor to the house of Gottreich. This family of physicians, once hailed as pioneers in the field of psychosurgery, are now disgraced, along with the procedure they once advocated. No wonder that the citizens of Lewiston stopped calling the old hospital Gottreich Hospital and instead preferred calling it the old Kingdom.

Nobody wanted to remember what happened down in the infamous Pain Room.

“Don’t worry, Sally. It’s just a name.”

Life seldom presents us with exclusively good news, especially when the bearers are doctors or lawyers.

First the good news: According to the results of my blood gas analysis, I was breathing fine. According to my EKG and blood work, I had not had a heart attack. The big question was, of course, had I suffered another seizure? Nobody even bothered to ask me, but the extended EEG I’d had revealed no seizure activity whatsoever. Dr. Massingale was quick to point out that I still could have had a seizure in the elevator the other day, but the most recent EEG did not detect seizure activity or signs of past seizure activity. It wasn’t conclusive evidence that I was seizure-free, just suggestive.

The bigger news was that the temporal lobe damage, so much in evidence during my stay in Boston and the probable cause of any seizures I might have had, was now completely resolved. The scans were normal, which was consistent with what Dr. Draper expected, as the kind of contusion and hemorrhage I’d suffered in my right temporal lobe should heal within six to twelve weeks.

The older lesion in the left frontal lobe was also no longer in evidence. Dr. Massingale had a rather convoluted explanation about how and why this could be so, including the different resolutions and angles of the devices, all of which made my eyes glaze. Long and short: no pathology evident on the scans.