We Are Monsters (5 page)

Chapter Nine

What Randall Rothschild missed more than anything was music. He had lost all his friends, had grown distant from his family, had never had a girlfriend, although he had fallen deeply in love with a girl he hardly knew, a freckled redhead who played a central role in his lyrical prose, always smiling, always batting her emerald eyes.

But the only thing he longed for outside the asylum walls was to attend a concert. To stand front row, eyes closed, sweaty head bobbing, basking in the magic of live music, the symbiotic connection occurring between souls melding with the mass of humanity writhing around him. To be fueled by raw, primal energy. To be moved by the ecstatic expression of art.

Dr. Alpert had bought a guitar for Randall to play. An acoustic guitar, but that's what he preferred to play anyway. It had a blonde body blending into an amber frame and he called it Doreen, named after his secret love. Her voice had been just as sweet.

Sometimes Eli would bring it by and ask Randall to play for him, and he'd conjure up the songs from his old lo-fi albums, written in the dank basement of his parents' house. Songs written during the highs and lows of his manic episodes. Some happy, some sad—all the honest feelings of an unvarnished soul.

Once Eli had cried. It was a silly song about the harrowing courtship between two frogs that had caused him to weep. He had seemed happy, though. He had been smiling, at least. And had thanked him when he left.

This time Eli had decided to return the favor. He walked up and placed an iPod with a docking station on the table in front of Randall. “How about some Nirvana from the
Unplugged
show in '94?” he said. He pressed a button and Kurt Cobain began strumming the guitar, a melancholy ghost risen from the grave.

“Ahh,” Randall garbled. He clapped his palsied hands together and smiled around his crooked dentures. His right knee began to jitter, but not in time to the beat. He sang along, his voice mild and melodic.

Eli sat down across from him. He was unfamiliar with Nirvana's music, but knew it was Randall's favorite band. Or had been. He could see why. There was the same plain, unaffected angst in the singer's voice that he heard in Randall's. It was the voice of suffering.

The song ended and Eli hit Pause.

“I thought you'd like that,” Eli said, which was only half-true. He also knew that the singer's suicide had marked a turning point in the progression of Randall's psychosis. It's when he had begun to see the demons.

Randall hugged himself. His smile made him look ten years younger, even with the top denture hanging ajar. It reminded Eli of the teenager who had first been committed many years ago. “It's…it's…awesome,” Randall said, drawing out the last word into a droning
om
.

“What's your favorite song?”

“On this album?” Randall opened his eyes and leaned forward. “It's a cover of “Oh, Me” by the Meat Puppets. Track eleven.”

Eli found the song and pressed Play.

It was slow, melodic, moody, dark. Randall fell into a type of trance listening to it. He dropped his head and rocked back and forth, his shaggy hair hanging over his eyes. One particular lyric stood out to Eli as he listened, something about infinity stored deep inside oneself.

It brought back memories of Rajamadja, the enigmatic monk whom he had met in India. His guru. His savior. Rajamadja's death, in many ways, had made the same impact on Eli as the singer's suicide had on Randall. It was as if his guardian angel had left him to grovel alone among the demons. The ones from his past, adding an eerie ground mist to the graveyard of his mind.

After returning from Vietnam, Eli decided to pursue a career in psychiatry, initially helping treat returning veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A disorder he himself had suffered, even if he'd been unwilling to admit it at the time.

Every so often he'd see a patient get that look in their eyes. The panic-stricken look of impending doom. It would take him right back to the clearing in Xuan Loc, lying nose to nose with the injured soldier while Sergeant Wagner handed him the hot pistol reeking of burnt cordite. He would begin to tremble, just slightly. And he would become Dr. Pussyfoot all over again.

His first staff position was at a state mental hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He was twenty-seven, a credited psychiatrist ready to rid the world of mental illness. It was the midseventies, and America seemed to be pulling out of its collective state of insanity, normalizing itself. Except in the institutions, where the living conditions were approaching historic lows.

The Chief Medical Director of the Tuscaloosa Sanitarium was Dr. Walter Francis, an acclaimed physician who switched to psychiatry in order to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, more than a genuine desire to cure the mentally ill. The hospital was grossly overcrowded and equally underfunded. The staff was comprised mostly of poorly educated security guards with bad attitudes. They lacked compassion. Worse, they lacked understanding. To them, the patients were subhuman, deranged beasts in need of taming.

To Dr. Francis, they were merely test subjects, human curiosities for his medical experiments. He did not pretend to understand the nature of mental illness, as did so many of his contemporaries of the time. Rather, he sought to discover its cause by way of identifying its cure. His thesis was that the cure would inform the cause. Thus, he explored all the various forms of therapy known at the time, including many of his own imagining.

In many ways, the environment inside the asylum was worse than any battlefield Eli had ever experienced. More gruesome and far more traumatic. This was a one-sided war waged against patients who lacked the weapons to fight back. And neither side ever won.

As in Vietnam, Eli began to sympathize with the patients, fighting to protect them from the treatments that were designed to cure them. In one case he got too close.

Her name was Miranda. She had been committed to the hospital by an adulterous husband complaining of excessive excitability and paranoid delusions. She wasn't suffering from delusions; her husband was cheating. The excitability part was true, though. She was pissed.

She was strolling through the gardens when Eli first met her, smoking. It was early August and she was sweating, her frizzy, blonde hair clinging in dampened strings to her face, blanketing her back. When she walked up to Eli, she twisted her hair into a bun and held it on top of her head. Her neck was slender and smooth, blemished only by the fading bruises seen under the jawline. A bead of sweat trickled down her neck in mesmerizing spurts and joined the pool collecting in her clavicle. Eli was struck with a shocking desire to suck it dry.

“What this place needs is a swimming pool,” she said, taking a last, long drag from her cigarette before grinding it into the garden soil with her shoe. “Right over there.” She pointed to an expanse of grass framed by flowerbeds.

It has several,
Eli almost said, thinking of the submersion pools where they held patients underwater until they lost consciousness. Surprisingly, patients experienced a relatively high rate of recovery after submersion therapy. It helped them overcome their fear of death, by showing them its face.

“I'm not sure that would be such a good idea,” Eli said instead.

“And why's that?”

“Well, what if someone drowned?” When he blinked he saw a snapshot of Miranda tied to a submersion gurney, inches below the surface, eyes wide with panic as she thrashed against the straps.

Miranda looked back towards the long brick building and scrunched her nose. “That would be a welcome relief for most of the people here,” she said. Then she shifted her weight and fanned herself with her free hand. “It's just so blazing hot. And boring. I've played about all the bingo I can stand.”

Eli smiled at her, squinting against the sun wavering high overhead. A bead of sweat dripped down his spine and a mosquito squealed in his ear. He couldn't think of anything to say, so he nodded and began to walk away.

“No, wait,” Miranda said. “Please, just talk with me for a minute. Please?”

“It's best if we do that during a therapy session. I'll be happy to talk with your social worker about setting one up.”

“I don't need therapy,” she said. Her eyes glistened wet for a moment, but she fought away the tears. “I just want to talk normally. Not in some structured setting. Not about my nonexistent phobias or my private feelings.

“People come in here. Some of them…” her lips flapped as she blew out air, “…some of them are pretty messed up. But there are plenty of others who have nothing wrong with them at all, as far as I can tell. But then they're put in this place and treated like they're crazy, spending every day with people who really are crazy, removed from everything that's familiar to them, with nothing at all to do but sit and, and…” She held her arms out to her sides in frustration. Her hair tumbled down from her head and framed her face. Her clear-blue eyes were quicksand.

“And, well,” she continued, “it starts to make you feel a bit like you are going crazy. You start thinking, ‘Why am I here? What happened? How did this become my life?' And then you think of the life going on outside these walls. Real life. And it's going on without you. And every day that you're stuck in this place is one more day you'll never get back. And you think, ‘What's wrong with this world if a normal, sane person can be plucked out of it and placed in this pocket of insanity? What kind of world could allow that?'

“Only a world that is in itself insane. So, that makes us all insane. And if that's the case, then who determines who's sick and who's well? Why do you get to wear the doctor costume and I have to wear the patient one? What's the point of this game and who sets the rules?”

Eli frowned down at his feet. The grass growing between them had ragged edges from a dull mower. Below it, microscopic bugs burrowed and built subterranean cities. Several surely lay dead under his shoes.

He lifted his head and looked at Miranda. The sun reflected off her sweaty face. “Real life happens here too,” he said. “Life happens wherever you are. It's all in what you make of it. What you do with the opportunities you're given.”

“That's easy to say when you have the luxury of choice. You have the opportunity to leave whenever you like. I don't. You have the opportunity to eat whatever you want. I don't. You…you choose to be here. I don't. I feel like I'm some shadow version of myself, stuck in this nightmare world while the real me is still outside, enjoying her life. And I feel that I'll never make it back to that other version of myself.” The tears returned, and this time she couldn't stave them off. “And I'm scared.”

Eli felt an urge to rush forward and take her in his arms. “Look...I...I…” he stammered. He was sweating freely now and he wiped the back of his hand across his wet brow. “So a pool would make things better?”

Miranda sniffled and flipped a strand of hair over her shoulder. She looked at Eli from below arched brows. Then she laughed, her slender shoulders beginning to bounce up and down. She leaned her head back and her laughter rose up towards the sun. It was pretty and musical, like a snippet of birdsong.

Eli snorted then began laughing himself.

Miranda composed herself. “Yes, it would make things slightly better, I think.”

Eli looked around. An elderly man was lurching their way, mumbling obscenities to himself.

“Well, I'll see what I can do.” He reached out a stiff arm and patted Miranda on the shoulder.

She grinned and looked away. She began therapy under Dr. Francis the following day and never was the same.

The refrain of the cover song came around again—infinity stored deep inside—and Eli rubbed his arms to dampen the gooseflesh prickling his skin. He turned off the iPod and began packing it away.

Randall continued to nod his head as the beat lingered in his ears. “That's heaven,” Randall said.

Eli smiled. “I'm glad you liked it.”

“No, I mean, that's like a real connection to heaven. The afterlife exists inside that song.”

Eli leaned back, inhaled through his nose and held it. His eyes landed on the mural painted against the far wall, the beasts living harmoniously in the garden of original sin. “You mean, this musician lives on through the recording, making him eternal?”

Randall shook his head. He combed the hair out of his eyes, but it fell right back in place. He looked at Eli through jagged strands. “The song we just heard is a second-or third-generation recording of a live performance by a band of men blessed with special talents granted by God. That song is not eternal because it was recorded. It is eternal because it was written before time began. It precedes the stars. Trace it back to its origin and you find God. It was composed in heaven. To hear it is to experience the divine.”

Eli was encouraged by the clarity of Randall's words. Music always elevated him to a higher level. A place of articulate intensity.
Music and laughter,
he thought,
are among the most effective forms of therapy.

“That's a beautiful way to think of it,” Eli said. “Do your songs come from the same place?”

“Not all of them,” he said. “Some are just sounds I make with my mouth. Some, though…” Randall began to drum his hands against his leg, “…some come from something beyond me. I just share it. The Creator speaks through all of us in various ways.” He smiled and pointed to his head. “Not all of the voices we hear are imaginary.”

A flash of heat seared Eli's chest, and he had the sudden urge to grasp Randall by the hand and escort him out of the hospital. To free him like some rare and beautiful bird that had been confined to a cage.
What if this whole time,
he thought for the thousandth time, the tremors beginning to seize his hands,
we've been working to fix people who aren't broken? And if that's so, then what have I done? What am I doing? What am I to do?