Rabbit Foot Bill Page 4

  “It was a dumping ground?”

  “To be honest, yes.” Dr. Christiansen runs a hand through his thinning hair. “Probably half of the patients weren’t even mentally ill at all.”

  “So it might not be that hard to introduce them back into their communities?”

  “Hopefully not.”

  My job, if I understand it correctly, is to help facilitate this. I am to be in charge of a hundred men. If they do not have work already in this hospital city, I am to find them some. Those that are working—on the farm, or in the mattress factory, or in the power plant—I am to help make the transition from their jobs at the hospital to equivalent jobs in the towns and villages outside the hospital. I am to be more of an employment counsellor than psychiatrist.

  “I’m not sure how I will be at helping with this,” I say. “It is a bit outside of my limited experience.”

  Dr. Christiansen stops in front of another door. He turns to face me, puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “Leonard,” he says, “why did you want to become a psychiatrist?”

  “I want to help people who can’t help themselves.”

  “Here we are helping people to help themselves.” Dr. Christiansen pats me on the shoulder as one would pat the head of an obedient dog. “Which is actually a whole lot easier. You’ll be fine.” He opens the door of the room and I see forty or fifty grown men in various states of childlike behaviour. Some are on their knees on their beds, rocking, their heads bumping against the bed frames in a rhythmical tattoo, like a heartbeat. Some men are just sitting on the edges of their beds, staring into space or talking to themselves. One of the men is masturbating.

  “This is the little boys’ room,” says Dr. Christiansen. “Nothing to be done for these men, I’m afraid. They won’t be leaving here.” He shuts the door crisply and we continue along the corridor.

  The ward that I am to be in charge of consists of two dormitory rooms separated from each other by a sitting room and a kitchen, where the patients are expected to prepare their own breakfast before heading off to work for the day. Lunch is provided for them at their work stations, and dinner is served back here on the ward in the evening.

  “Here it is,” says Dr. Christiansen. “Your new domain.” We are standing in the kitchen. He waves his arm towards the sitting room. “These men will become your new family. You will be their father.”

  “I will?”

  I feel much too young to be a father, and especially to full-grown men who are all older than I am. I don’t know what I imagined when I was in medical school, but it wasn’t this. I was thinking more of one-to-one psychiatric sessions, of everything being measured and under my control, of grateful patients and my various brilliant diagnoses of their treatable conditions. I had imagined a safe, tidy office, with pictures of flowers or birds on the walls and comfortable chairs to sit in, perhaps a nice view out the window of trees and sky. The patients would enter individually, sit and talk for an hour, and then leave again. Several months, a year, and they would be cured of what had made them seek out treatment. I had not imagined the chaotic situation where I now find myself, but I had been persuaded into applying for this job by one of my teachers, who had convinced me that it would be a remarkable opportunity to work for an institution that was employing such innovative techniques to treat mental illness.

  “I wish I’d had such opportunities when I was a young doctor,” I remember him saying, and I was swayed by this because I know that my father felt regret for some parts of his life, and I don’t want to feel regret for anything in mine.

  But it all feels a bit overwhelming now that I am actually here and expected to do a job. I look around the kitchen and sitting area and try to imagine it filled with a hundred men, all looking to me for advice and guidance. How can I possibly be of assistance to a hundred men, all of whom have so much more life experience and so many more problems? I would have been better served going into dentistry. Looking into mouths all day would be better than this, and there would be regular hours, and perhaps the bright lights in the examination room would be cheering.

  “Now we’ll head to the gymnasium,” says Dr. Christiansen, already back in the hallway. “I am particularly proud of our monthly dances and the patients’ bowling league, and I want to show you where we keep the badminton nets and soccer balls.”

  AMY CALLS ME on Friday afternoon. I’m just about to leave my office to go back to the cottage to shower and shave in preparation for her arrival.

  “I’m not coming,” she says, her voice sounding irritable and close. “In fact, I haven’t even left Montreal.”

  “What’s wrong? Are you ill? Are your parents ill? Did you miss your train? Has it been delayed?”

  “Leonard. Stop.” She sighs into the receiver.

  “Did you get my latest letter?” I ask. “I managed to get tickets to the theatre in Regina on Saturday night. And I booked us into a nice restaurant for dinner there. They have a dish called Steak Diane that is set on fire right at the table. It’s supposed to be very impressive. And delicious.”

  “I’m not coming,” says Amy flatly.

  The phone receiver is slippery in my hand. I’m sweating and I can feel a bubble of nausea rising in my belly.

  “Why not?”

  She sighs again. “You try too hard,” she says. “I can’t keep pace with your letters. I’m always racing to catch up.”

  “But you don’t need to keep pace.”

  “I feel that I do, that it’s expected of me. You write to me every single day with all your thoughts and feelings.”

  “I want to share everything with you.”

  “Well,” says Amy after a pause, “I don’t actually require that much sharing.”

  “It was hard to get those theatre tickets,” I say. “I was on the phone at first, but in the end I had to line up for them, and I was in that line for several hours. It was very hot out.”

  “Leonard, I’m sorry, but I’m breaking up with you.”

  “But why?”

  “I just told you.”

  “I don’t need to write you so many letters. I could just send one a week. Sort of a compendium, with all my news condensed.”

  “If it wasn’t letters, you’d be sending me flowers, or calling me on weeknights when I have to study. Or sending little gifts through the mail.”

  It seems absurd that Amy is complaining because I give her too much attention.

  “My apartment is small,” she says, sounding irritated again. “I don’t have room for your little gifts.”

  “But I haven’t sent any!”

  “Goodbye, Leonard,” she says. “I’m very sorry. Truly I am.”

  There’s a click and then the long hum of the dial tone. I hold the receiver to my head and listen to it, hoping that Amy will see the error of her ways and pick up the phone again, reopen the line. But this doesn’t happen.

  DR. SCOTT IS swimming in the river when I return to my cottage. He waves at me.

  “Join me, Leonard. The water is lovely at this time of day.”

  I haven’t brought swim trunks with me to the Weyburn, because I wasn’t really expecting the river, so I strip down to my boxers and jump in. I want to descend to the depths, my terrible sadness making it impossible for me to ever surface again. Amy would have to be devastated if I drowned. But the river isn’t very deep at all. I can touch bottom immediately.

  Dr. Scott and I breaststroke up to the willow tree at the bend in the river and then back again. Despite myself, the water feels good against my skin, and the sensation of weightlessness lifts some of my sorrow. It also makes me think of Dr. Mortimer’s comment during the LSD session last week.

  “Was that really only your third drug experiment?” I ask Dr. Scott.

  “I’ve only been here for four months,” he says. “Next to you, I’m the most recent hire. I had the flu at one of the sessions and opted out.” We breaststroke past a patch of lily pads. “They’re a monthly occurrence.”

&nb
sp; “Every month?”

  “Yes. Mandatory. First Monday of every month.” William Scott looks over at me. “Isn’t that why you took this job? It’s why I took it. I have a personal interest in emancipation—my mother was descended from slaves—and I find the idea of freeing these patients thrilling. Thrilling because we will be able to free them both in body and mind.”

  “Honestly,” I say, “I took the job because I’m from Saskatchewan and I didn’t really like Montreal, where I was living after medical school, so I thought it would be good to come back to my home province.”

  “It wasn’t because of the reforms?”

  “I didn’t give them a second thought.”

  Dr. Scott laughs. “Dr. Christiansen called you a keen new recruit,” he says. “He was very excited to have you on board.”

  “Well, I’m not unkeen,” I say.

  We swim past my cottage. Then past William Scott’s cottage.

  “If you’re worried about the LSD sessions, it’s less odd when you are using the drug alongside the patients,” says Dr. Scott. “Then you can harness it to a purpose and it makes more sense, feels more controllable.”

  We have reached the willow tree. The fronds swing down almost to the water and remind me of Amy’s hair, lifting in the breeze from her apartment window when she sat working at her desk. I remember the phone call and start to feel ill again.

  “My girlfriend broke up with me,” I say. “Today. She was meant to be coming here this weekend. She lives in Montreal.”

  “Ah.” William Scott executes a smooth turn and we begin swimming upriver again. “Because of the distance?”

  I can see that this is the logical answer and that it is best to fasten myself to it going forward.

  “Yes,” I say. “It was because of the distance.”

  The swimming makes me feel better, and also the company of Dr. Scott. But when we climb out of the river and head into our respective cottages, I sink into gloom again. After drying off and donning clothes, I pace around my small living room, but I can’t settle, so I head back to the hospital, into my office there, and dial Amy’s number.

  “Hello,” she says, sounding weary as she answers the phone, which makes me think that she has been waiting for me to call back and this weariness is because I have proved her right in doing so.

  “Is there someone else?”

  “What?” There’s a pause. “Leonard, is that you?”

  “Is there someone else?” I say again. “Are you seeing someone in Montreal? Do you have another boyfriend? Have you been cheating on me?”

  Because it feels better to me if Amy has another lover rather than just ending things because she doesn’t like me enough. Having it be about someone else is not as bad as having it be solely about my being a disappointment to her.

  “No. There isn’t anyone else.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “What kind of question is that? Of course I’m sure.” Amy sighs into the receiver. “Leonard, you are being ridiculous. Why can’t you just accept that I don’t want to be with you?”

  “Because it’s a very hard thing to accept, Amy.”

  “Well, get used to it.”

  She hangs up on me.

  I call back, but she doesn’t pick up. I sit at my desk, holding the phone receiver in my hand, trying to believe that it’s really over, but the sad truth of it is that since Amy broke up with me, I love her more than ever.

  MY FIRST MORNING on my ward, I mean to wake early enough to have breakfast with the men in my charge, but I sleep through my alarm, and by the time I have run across the field between the cottages and the hospital, most of my patients have left already for their day’s work. The ones who are still there, washing dishes and wiping down the tables, eye me suspiciously when I burst through the sitting room doors, out of breath and panic-stricken.

  I had meant to give a little speech to the assembled men, introduce myself, and let them know I will make myself available to them, but there is no point when so few remain on the ward. I will have to wait for dinner, when they’ll be back here again. In the meantime I will busy myself with reading their files, try to learn their names and histories.

  My office is at the end of the ward, a pleasant square cinder-block room with a window that overlooks the laundry building. I have the duty nurse retrieve the relevant documents for me and I fetch myself a cup of coffee from the staff lounge. Then I settle down to a day’s work of perusing the case files of the hundred men in my sudden, and so far hapless, care.

  It is as I thought, in that most of the men in my charge are older than me. Many are alcoholic. Some are schizophrenic, some depressive. There is one pyromaniac, named Henry Tudor, who has been sent to work in the mattress factory. Putting an arsonist in a building full of flammable materials would not be my first choice, but I can also see the strange logic in it. After all, if Henry wants to start a fire, he will start it no matter where he is. Why not put him in the path of temptation? This would be a way to cure him of his fiery impulses.

  Many of the men were sent to the mental hospital by their families, some were former wards of the state, and a few men were actually born in the mental hospital. Their files have the word institutionalized written inside the box for listing the particulars of their disease. These men have never known anything but this place, and even though they are being trained to be functional in the outside world, how will they survive the chaos and unpredictability of normal life? How will they be able to comprehend it? Are people really versatile enough to deal with such radical change in their lives—especially those who have had to cope with such extremes of experience?

  I remember Dr. Christiansen telling me on the hospital tour that babies born at a mental hospital are sent immediately to a regular hospital so as not to have born at the mental hospital written on their birth certificate. Most of these babies will have nothing wrong with them in a psychiatric sense, but growing up on the ward, in the company of mentally ill adults, will force a kind of mental illness on them and they will have difficulty adapting to what we think of as “regular life.” Finding a place for these patients outside of the institution will be a much harder task than finding placements for those men who have some experience of the world outside of the hospital walls, and who remember what it was like to belong to that other life.

  I feel less overwhelmed as I read the case files. The more I learn about the men, the less alarming they seem. I can find commonalities with them as individuals, and they don’t seem as frightening as they were before I knew anything about them. At medical school I excelled at diagnosing, at compressing relevant patient information into a condition with a treatable outcome.

  Several of the alcoholic patients have notes tucked into their files that read, Selected for behavioural modification experiments. The notes bear the signature of Luke Christiansen. This must mean they are targeted to undergo LSD treatment. I remember Dr. Christiansen saying that the therapy worked particularly well on alcoholic patients.

  At lunchtime one of the duty nurses brings me a tray of food—pea soup, cold beef sandwich, dish of custard, another cup of coffee. It’s not bad and I finish all of it, reading the files while I eat, careful not to smear my lunch over the crisp white typewritten pages that summarize each man.

  When I began reading the files, the individuality of the patients stood out for me, but by the end of the day, I have read through so many files that the particulars of the patients swim together into a mass of indistinguishable detail. Which man was sent here with his sister? Which man has uncontrollable rages?

  When I arrive that evening, I find that I don’t need to announce myself to the men. My white coat does this for me.

  “Look, it’s the new doctor,” someone shouts as I enter the kitchen, and everyone seems to turn and stare at me as I walk across the floor and take a seat at one of the long tables by the window.

  “Doc,” says the man opposite me, “I need stronger pain medication for the arthritis in my k
nees.”

  “I’m waiting for a package,” says another man. “I don’t know why it hasn’t come.”

  “My mother hasn’t come,” says someone else.

  The air is full of complaints and requests. In a moment of sudden inspiration, I take my notepad and a pen from the breast pocket of my coat and I pass these to the man on my left.

  “Write down your request,” I say, “and put your name beside it, and I will deal with each man’s problem in turn.”

  DR. CHRISTIANSEN CALLS me into his office as I’m walking past on the way back to my cottage after dinner.

  “Flint!”

  I step inside, fearful he is going to call me out for some mistake I have undoubtedly made at supper.

  “Close the door.” He waves his hand towards the empty chair in front of his desk. “And have a seat.”

  I do as he says.

  “Flint, I would like you to do me a favour.”

  The relief flooding through me is intense.

  “Of course, sir.”

  “I have managed to persuade my wife, Agatha, to help with the dance this Friday. It took some doing to persuade her.” Dr. Christiansen taps a cigarette on the front of his silver case and lights it. “She’s not exactly fitting in here. I mean, she’s not very happy with life in Saskatchewan.” He takes a deep draw on his cigarette and blows the smoke towards me. “Understandable really.”

  “Why?” I move my head to avoid getting asphyxiated.

  “She misses our children.”

  “They didn’t come with you?”

  “No, they’re back in England. At boarding school.”

  Luke Christiansen taps the ash from his cigarette into a crude dish shaped like a palm tree and painted a lurid green. He sees me looking at it.

  “We had a pottery program here once,” he says. “Quite successful for a while, but then there were several instances of patients eating the clay.” He sighs. “The dances are a much better fit. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Agatha isn’t very happy here. She doesn’t seem to like any of the other doctors. But you are younger and, if you don’t mind me saying so, not very doctor-like yet, so she might feel differently.” Dr. Christiansen leans across the desk towards me. I can smell the smoke and spicy cologne on his skin and I can see the little coin of baldness on the top of his head.