T. Boyle - Riven Rock

At nine, after they’d massaged Mr. McCormick’s muscles to loosen him up a bit and got his feet untangled, Mart pried open the patient’s jaws with a wooden dowel and O‘Kane jammed the feeding tube between his teeth. (And Mr. McCormick had good strong teeth, but they’d gone yellow because he wasn’t able to keep them up.) The tube consisted of a hollowed-out piece of bamboo a headhunter might have used to blow darts through and an ordinary kitchen funnel, and for breakfast Mr. McCormick was having the same thing they’d had — ham, eggs, toast and coffee — but it had been painstakingly reduced to a thick black gruel by Sam Wah, the Chinese cook. While O’Kane was thus employed, hovering over the gaping mouth of his patient like some flightless bird with its unfathomable chick, waiting out the tedious drip of the mash, repetitively wiping the patient’s mouth and chin and pinching his nostrils to encourage the swallowing reflex, he couldn’t help reflecting on the lack of progress Mr. McCormick had made over the course of the past two months.

He hadn’t always been like this. When he first came to McLean two years back, he’d just broken down and the prognosis was good. He was very disturbed, of course, particularly the first couple of days, lashing out at anybody who came within three feet of him and raving to beat the band about all sorts of things — Jack London, his father, dentists, the Reaper Company and women, especially women, shouting out “cunt” and “slit” and “whore” till the walls rang and his face was as bleached out as a ream of white bond paper scattered in the snow — but after a week in the sheet restraints he came around. He was calm suddenly, reasonable, a dignified gentleman who dressed himself in the morning without any tics or other nonsense and went around chatting and joking with the other patients and their relatives till people began to take him for one of the doctors. And Mr. McCormick, loving a joke, played along, dispensing advice, walking down the corridors arm-in-arm with the disappointed parent, the cousin from Bayonne, the somber sibling and the grim-faced husband, and he was fine with the women too, the soul of courtesy and with the softest, most genteel and solicitous voice O‘Kane had ever heard.

Within a week he’d singled out O‘Kane — called him “Eddie” and asked for him especially — and together they took long walks on the sanatorium grounds, played golf, croquet, shuffleboard and chess. He insisted there was nothing wrong with him — just nerves and overwork, that was all — and he spoke and dressed so beautifully and had such a smile on his face for everybody, O’Kane almost came to believe him. In the evenings he would hold the ward spellbound with tales of his travels — and he’d been everywhere, all the capitals of Europe, Egypt, way out to Albuquerque, Carson City and San Francisco — and he charmed everybody, doctors, nurses and patients, with his jokes. He was forever joking — not practical jokes, nothing malicious or unbalanced, as you found with so many of the other patients, nothing like that at all. Nothing off-color either. And while the jokes themselves might have been old in his mother’s time (“What did the breeze say to the windowscreen? ”; ‘ ’Don’t mind me, I’m just passing through’ “), he took such obvious delight in them, his face opening up with that gift of a smile he had and his eyes crinkled to slits, they were irresistible, even when you’d heard them ten times already.

Everyone was optimistic. Everyone was pleased. Nerves, that’s all it was. But then one morning, after an extended visit from his wife, he wouldn’t get out of bed. The smile was gone, the jokes dead and buried. He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t use the toilet or clean himself. Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Cowles and Dr. Meyer all tried to reason with him, talking till their throats went dry, pleading, remonstrating, cajoling and threatening — they even brought the august Dr. Emil Kraepelin all the way from Munich to try his hand-but Mr. McCormick just seemed to sink deeper into himself, like a man mired to his chin in quicksand and not a thing in the world anybody could do about it. It wasn’t long after that that he attacked Nurse Doane — Arabella — and had to go back to the sheet restraints.

The hope was that California would bring him around, but as far as O‘Kane could see it was an exercise in futility. At least so far. Mr. McCormick was as blocked now as he’d ever been, so deeply buried beneath his layers of phobias and hallucinations he didn’t even recognize his nurses. And no one seemed to care — he’d been delivered to Riven Rock trussed up like a prize turkey and with no more consciousness than a fat feathered bird and that was the end of it, out of sight, out of mind. No one except Mrs. McCormick, that is. Katherine. She’d stayed on the whole, time, long after Mr. McCormick’s mother and sister and Mr. Harold McCormick had left, coming out to the estate every morning without fail, probing Hamilton and the nurses, quizzing the maids, the butler and even the cook with his deracinated English. What did my husband have for breakfast? Is he eating? How’s his color? O’Kane had twice seen her creeping round the shrubbery with a pair of opera glasses in the hope of catching a glimpse of her husband when he was wheeled out on the sunporch. But Nick and Pat had lost all interest, treating their employer as if he were just another drooler on the violent ward, Mart didn’t seem to trouble himself much one way or the other, and Hamilton was so busy with his apes and finding a house and mollifying his wife over the move from Massachusetts, he’d barely had time to stick his head in the door lately.

And where did that leave O‘Kane? Out here in the wings of Paradise with a bunch of wops and an ache in his groin that was like a fever, waiting for the day when Mr. McCormick would get well again and reward his diligence and loyalty, the day when his own oranges would hang heavy on the limbs and he could finally, at long last, take center stage and let the drama of his own life begin.

In the afternoon he was sitting at the desk in the upper hallway, just inside the barred door to Mr. McCormick’s quarters, playing solitaire and flipping open his watch every thirty seconds to personally record the testudineous advance of time, when Dr. Hamilton came stutter-stepping up the stairs, all out of breath. “Edward,” he cried, “Edward, you’ve got to see this!”

O‘Kane looked up from the cards, glad of the distraction. He gave a glance to Mart and the bundled form of Mr. McCormick in the center of the bed behind him and then got up to unlock the door, ever mindful of the three p’s. “What is it?” he asked, turning the keys in their locks. “Another hominoid?”

In the light of the hallway, illumined by the tireless California sun streaming in through the upper windows, the doctor’s head seemed to glow. He was showing a lot of scalp lately, pale striations against the dun slick of his hair, and O‘Kane saw with a shock that his hairline had begun to recede — and when had that started? His face too — the lines seemed to have deepened and there was something else, something altogether queer about him… but of course, he’d shaved his beard. “You shaved your beard,” O’Kane heard himself saying.

The doctor waved him off, as if it wasn’t worth mentioning — but it was, because that beard was his psychiatric badge, the very twin of the beard that sprouted from the face of Dr. Freud. How could he practice psychiatry without a beard? It was unthinkable. “The wife never cared for it,” Hamilton explained, breathing hard from his exertion, “and besides, with the hominoids it was becoming a liability — Mary was afraid it would attract fleas. Or worse. But enough of the beard — I’ve got something to show you, Edward, something truly astounding, the best find yet. Come on, come on: what are you waiting for?”