Michael Rowe - Enter, Night

Turning to the driver, who had obviously been summoned to wait by the front door in case Jeremy put up too much resistance, she pointed a manicured index finger towards the drawing room off the main hallway and said, “His bags are in the other room. Please see to it that they’re loaded immediately. Tell Dr. Gionet at the clinic to telephone me if there’s anything else.”

And with that, she’d turned away, her high heels clicking on the black-and-white marble entryway, without ever turning back.

At the Doucette Institute, the psychiatrists set about attempting to cure him of his affliction. For six months, Jeremy endured icy baths, and electric shocks applied to his hands and genitals while being forced to watch black-and-white films of naked, oiled, muscular men. He was strapped to chairs in darkened rooms for hours, and injected with apomorphine, after which he was forced to drink two-ounce shots of brandy to induce nausea. When the nausea became nearly unendurable, the room was heated and bright lights were shone on large photographs of male nudes, and he was told to select the one he desired the most. At that point, Dr. Gionet played a tape describing his “illness” in graphic, sickening detail until Jeremy vomited out the drugs, and was given more. The tape was played every hour. After thirty hours, detecting dangerous levels of acetone in Jeremy’s urine, he was sent back to his room to recover.

But the treatments always began again. Other nights, he was awakened every two hours by congratulatory messages about how different his life would be once he’d conquered his “inversion” and been rendered “normal.” Every morning he was injected with testosterone propionate and made to listen to records of women’s voices, lush and frankly sexual voices that, to Jeremy, merely sounded whorish and insectile through the scratchy speakers of a turntable.

In sessions, his psychiatrist, Dr. Gionet-who, Jeremy noted with fresh disgust at every session, had terrible pitted acne scars on his face, and eyes that were even colder and more censorious than his mother’s, and breath that made Jeremy think of an open grave-forced him, over and over again, to repeat every graphic aspect of every sexual fantasy he’d ever had. In the end, Elliot made them up, which seemed to satisfy Dr. Gionet, who seemed unable to distinguish between fact and fantasy when it came to what Jeremy told him.

Worse still, he forced Jeremy to reveal every intimate detail of his discovered friendship with Elliot McKitrick. He made him describe Elliot’s body-every part of it, what he’d done with it, and what Elliot had done to him by way of reciprocation.

That implacable, dry voice, impatient, professorial and peremptory:

What did you do with that boy, Jeremy? Tell me again.

Weeping in reply: He’s just a friend. We’re friends. It only happened once. We didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I’m sorry. It only happened once. I’ll never do it again. I’m cured now. Please, please, please let me go home. I want my mother. No more tests. They hurt too much.

And, coming full circle, Dr. Gionet’s oily, coercive compassion again: How are you going to be better, Jeremy, if you don’t trust me? You do want to be normal, don’t you? Don’t you want to be cured?

At night, locked in his cell-like room, he’d cry himself to sleep, wondering what he’d ever done to be sent to this place.

On the nights he was allowed to sleep through till dawn instead of being woken every two hours by the recording, he dreamed a mosaic of familiar images-Parr’s Landing itself, swimming with Jack in the cold black water of Bradley Lake beneath the centuries-old Indian paintings of the legendary Wendigo of the St. Barthélemy settlement etched into the granite cliffs that stood sentinel around the lake. He dreamed of his mother’s house. In those dreams, he explored the vast dim rooms on the upper floors of the house. They were dreams of secrecy, as though he were hiding, though in the dreams it was unclear what he might be hiding from. He dreamed of his mother-dreams of guilt and chastisement and shame, dreams from which he sometimes awoke gasping for breath, feeling as though he’d been caught in flagrante delicto committing some terrible crime for which the punishment was being sent away forever.

The worst dreams were those of Elliot McKitrick, because Elliot berated him as Jeremy wept, telling him that Jeremy had ruined Elliot’s life forever by being so weak and sick and such an invert and leading him astray, destroying Elliot’s chances for a respectable life among decent people. And in those dreams, Elliot’s voice wasn’t Elliot’s voice at all-it was the voice on the tape.

After six months, Jeremy lost twenty-five pounds he could barely afford to lose. He had dark circles under his eyes and almost-healed burns on the most private parts of his body. But Dr. Gionet had pronounced him cured and he’d been allowed to return home.

Adeline welcomed him home as though he’d been away visiting relatives which, as it turned out, was what she’d told everyone in Parr’s Landing who’d asked where Jeremy was.

On his first night home, Jeremy and Adeline ate dinner in the mahogany-panelled dining room at Parr House. Although it was just the two of them, Adeline ordered the table to be set formally with Viennese damask and Georgian silver, as though Jeremy were a visiting dignitary instead of her seventeen-year-old son who had just returned under the cover of darkness from a private psychiatric hospital.

“I expect things to be different now, Jeremy,” Adeline said. “With the boys, and your… incident. They will be, won’t they? I missed you so much while you were away. It was hard enough when your brother got that slut in the family way and ran off without a word. The detectives said he was in Toronto, living openly with her. Openly. Can you imagine?”

This line of lament-her abandonment by Jack five years before; the “slut”; Morgan, the “bastard granddaughter,” whose existence Adeline had discovered when she hired a private detective in Toronto to find Jack- was one Jeremy had heard many times before from his mother. He’d long since learned to let his mother’s invective run its course, especially on this one topic of family betrayal.

“And apparently they have a five-year-old. My only granddaughter, born illegitimate . But still, never even a photograph!” Adeline looked pained. “Can you imagine? Your old mother hates to be left alone, darling.” Adeline paused delicately as though she were waiting for him to hold a door open for her, or pull her chair out. She laid the sterling silver fork in her hand elegantly against the gold rim of the plate. “You won’t disappoint me, will you, Jeremy? You are cured, aren’t you? Dr. Gionet assures me that you are, and that we won’t have any more trouble. Because if we do,” she added, “he has also assured me that there will always be a place waiting for you at the Doucette.”

Jeremy ran away that night.

He hitched a ride with the driver of a supply truck returning to Wawa from a round-trip delivery. From Wawa, he’d hitchhiked to Toronto over the course of four days of near-starvation and beneath a thick coating of accumulated highway grime. Most of his rides assumed he was a runaway of some kind, but because he was frail and small, his rides took pity on him, especially those men who were travelling with their wives.

After two days, he became aware of a solidarity of sorts among night drivers. Night drivers seemed more inclined to understand, even sympathize, with the notion of escape, or flight, or adventure in a way that those who travelled openly and respectably in the propriety of daylight might question. Jeremy answered as few questions as he possibly could without being rude-easier at night, somehow-though he willingly participated, as best he could, in any conversations his benefactors chose to initiate, seeing it as the least he could do under the circumstances.