Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

Originally from the Taurus Mountains region, descendant of a tent-dwelling family of transhumant goat herders, and, occasionally, opium smugglers, Toth came to the States as a teen and flailed away at the national dream of the limitless wealth and independence available to any and all who would will aspiration into currency and power. He made his first investment stash before he was twenty, working the racetrack circuit up and down the East Coast, buying, selling, and betting on horseflesh until he was able to establish a many-tiered bookmaking franchise. But he parlayed this initial wad into a truly grotesque bounty by devising a more efficient way of transforming slaughtered horse bone and muscle into a tremendously binding industrial adhesive. Almost overnight, Toth was elevated from a rough-and-tumble pony banker into a glue magnate worthy of taking brandy with the stuffy and inbred patrons of the Quinsigamond Men’s Club. And though the legend that still resounds along Arcadian Way tends to delete the fact, it was at the height of his much-blessed life that Toth plummeted into scandal and tragedy.

A gambler and womanizer during his young manhood, Toth felt the synchronistic sting of karma when, at the ripe age of fifty, he took a beautiful, if high-strung, child bride named Cissy, the daughter of a socially prominent Episcopal minister. During the honeymoon, on Toth’s first and last trip back home to his native Turkey, his new wife suffered an irreversible psychotic breakdown and mutilated a ceremonial minstrel in midperformance using the sterling cake knife from her nuptial reception. The herdsmen of the southeastern valleys are well-known for the swiftness and brutality of their justice system and, as the bride-groom watched helplessly, Cissy was torn to shreds by wild boar and rabid jackal.

Unhinged by this tragedy, Toth returned to America and began attempting to reverse a lifetime of avarice and decadence. He devoted himself to funding the burgeoning field of mental health research. Back in Quinsigamond, he moved into a gardener’s cottage on his own estate and turned the main houses over to Dr. Renfield Hulbert, a peer and longtime, if one-sided, correspondent of both Freud and Jung whom fate has seen fit to designate to careless footnotes in dense technical histories of the period. Hulbert may well have been a profit- and ego-driven charlatan, but this does not necessarily negate the fact that he was possessed of a complex and highly flexible intelligence. And if it was later proven that the bulk of his medical credentials were either invented or at some point revoked, nevertheless his papers regarding the connections between schizophrenia (then termed persistent fantasia by Dr. H) and the mechanics of the brain’s language centers (then termed the alphabetical gears by Dr. H) were genuinely ahead of their time.

During the Roaring Twenties, while much of the nation’s upper crust Charlestoned their way toward the lurking Depression of the decade’s end, the hysterical and the delusional and the dangerously unbalanced, the brothers and sisters who roared for less ribald and more torturous reasons, were brought to the Toth Clinic where their concerned but inconvenienced families were given a tour that included the elegantly appointed splendors of the estate but excluded the snake-pit horrors of the basement workrooms, dingy and exceptionally unhygienic laboratories where every manner of fanatical quackery was practiced from hypothermia-producing ice-water therapies to radical and sloppy experimental lobotomies to a veritable smorgasbord of pharmacological remedies not far removed, but likely much deadlier, than those found in medieval witches’ breviaries.

Hulbert’s favorite innovation, however, was very likely trepanning. The doctor drilled a hole in just about every skull he got his hands on and ultimately it was his undoing. When the wife of Quinsigamond’s only impeached mayor sought the help of the Toth Clinic for a series of migraines that coincided with her husband’s political downfall, the woman was sent home, over the protests of Hulbert’s loyal if equally sadistic staff, with a crater in her forehead the size of a Prussian monocle. The ex-mayor seized on the defacement as a diversionary tool, excoriating the local paper for spreading lies about his finances rather than looking into the medical horrors being perpetrated right under our noses. The wags on the city desk responded that, in fact, it appeared the horrors were just under our hairlines, but The Spy’s publisher smelled a good smear story and, with the purchased resources of the accommodating police chief, raided the Toth Clinic pronto.

Some pioneers of the shock school of photojournalism were on hand when a carefully picked team of Q-town’s most roguish street bulls kicked open the doors of the asylum. To this day in the files of the Historical Museum one can view sepia testaments to the kind of heart-crushing torture one mad scientist can single-handedly invent — pictures of medical procedures to make a Nazi jealous, brains split open like melons and subjected to humiliations beyond the scope of Sade himself, close-up portraits of strange metal instruments whose purposes could not include anything in the realm of the benign, representations of human beings whose mental illness was only the starting point for a descent into a bottomless hell devised by a first-class maniac with access to money, manpower, and electricity. When the cellars of the Toth Estate were finally aired out, the city was scandalized and mortified by the dirty but not-so-little secrets that Dr. Hulbert, led away in cuffs and sporting two bloody lips, called “my life’s work.”

The clinic was closed down temporarily. Vartan Toth remained on the estate, a recluse who spent his hours reading the Bible in his shanty home, tending to a garden, lighting icons to his lost but still-beloved Cissy. One rumor proposed that the glue baron himself had been subjected to a few of the doctor’s less than delicate treatments. But it was more likely plain grief and regret that did in the Turk. When he eventually lost all his business interests in the crash of ’29, he either didn’t care or didn’t understand the consequences. The city ended up burdened with the estate-cum-asylum and Toth died a few years later, living in a storefront mission, brokenhearted and unhinged right to the end. They say his last words were “My darling, the beasts have finally turned on me.”

When a private medical co-op from Toronto purchased and reopened the clinic many years later, they decided, for some determinedly wrongheaded reason, to retain the original name. But the Toth facility has, of late, built a fairly respectable reputation as a rehabilitation center for most of the common modern addictions. Another few years of vacation stays by rock stars and movie princesses and the board of directors is convinced they’ll have erased all memory of the hospital’s unfortunate history. And if alumni donations keep rolling in at the current rate, the place may throw itself up on the big board, go public, and break ground for a new wing. Every new jones to hit the street is money in the Keogh plan. As Dr. Raglan said at the most recent management team meeting, “Rest easy, kids. There’s no shortage of monkeys on this horizon.”

But if the compulsive self-destructiveness of the pampered end of the societal spectrum is the mainstay of Toth, the clinic continues to handle a smattering of more complex and severe pathologies, if only to maintain a standing in the field and earn an infrequent mention in the academic journals. Still, as Gilrein parks the Checker in the visitors’ lot and walks the hill to the main hall, he tries to imagine how the Toth’s regime of ardent group therapy sessions and mandatory janitorial service could possibly help Otto Langer.