Читать книгу Fragments of Me - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

The reward of suffering is experience.

—Aeschylus

Let your life be a testament to your beliefs.

—me

“She’s from Willow Hills.” Mrs. Foster, the ward head nurse, cannot hide her bitterness as she picks at her wedding ring. “Her grandfather was fat with money, so they used to put her up in style.”

I absently nod as I browse through the long list of drugs fed to the young woman over the past decade. Perphenazine and thioridazine for schizophrenia, lithium for mania, and fluoxetine and electroconvulsive therapy for depression. No rhyme or reason to the diagnosis or to the drug therapies. The end result is a catatonic patient. Amazing how the frustration of a continuing train of psychiatrists and psychologists comes across in their repeated attacks with ever larger doses of powerful chemicals.

“So why is she here now?” I ask.

“Her grandfather died. The will is being disputed. There is no more money for the time being, and of course, the saints at Willow Hills sent her on her way,” Mrs. Foster says. “God, I hate those leeches.”

I look up in surprise. Blasphemy from this sixty-year-old woman is most unusual. “Well, bring her to my office, please, Mrs. Foster.”

“Yes, Dr. Barash.” She turns curtly and marches across the ward. Her given name is Nancy, but I can never address or even think of her other than as Mrs. Foster. She radiates stern authority.

James Barash, M.D. from Johns Hopkins, residency in psychiatry at Mass General in Boston. These are my current name and my current professional credentials. The profession—healing the tormented mind—is one I have followed for millennia. My nature is uniquely suited to helping humans in need.

My physical appearance is average, not tall, not short. What used to be curly brown hair is receding back from a high forehead now that my body is nearing its fifth decade. I exercise regularly, but not excessively, so I look fit, but not like an athlete. I still have no need for glasses.

My small office is spartan: a desk, a locked file cabinet, and three chairs. A couch dominates one wall, its imitation leather cracked from years of patients. The State of Ohio does not spend a lot of money on its state hospitals. In fact, my own time is donated.

Slumping into my chair, I finish reading the file of Joanna Prall. A damned depressing mess. I close the folder, sigh, and swivel the chair. Sunlight streams in from the window behind the desk, bathing the room in a pleasant glow despite the white streaks on the glass left by the pigeons that nest in the third-story eaves. Through the grime I can see the tall trees that surround the grounds of Jenkins State Hospital. Some of the trees are over six decades old, tall and proud with the dignity that comes with age. I remember when they were planted as fresh saplings. Gary, a patient of mine, had helped. Hopelessly insane, he possessed a magical touch with the soil.

“Joanna, this is Dr. Barash.”

Aroused from my reverie, I turn around. Mrs. Foster holds onto the arm of Joanna Prall. Eighteen years old, her blonde hair hangs in strands around her oval face. Her pretty eyes would have been stunning in a movie under soft lighting, but now those eyes are totally vacant. At least one of the diagnoses makes some sense—catatonic.

“Let’s sit in the chair, love,” Mrs. Foster says, guiding the young woman to the chair in front of my desk. Joanna shuffles her feet, responding to the pressure from the nurse. I got the sense that she would never move unless compelled. She shows no affect or awareness of her environment.

Mrs. Foster smiles at me in her sad way as she leaves the room, closing the door. I smile in response, then return my attention to Joanna. The patients may wear whatever they want, leading to a wild splash of colors and styles in the recreation room. Most people find the disorder unpleasant, but I find it exhilarating, a declaration of individual independence. Joanna wears a white loose-fitting hospital gown.

Joanna does not care about her clothes. Without a doubt, Mrs. Foster or one of the orderlies had bathed and dressed her this morning. Did she even use the toilet without help? Reopening the file, my eyes scan down quickly, and find that she wears a diaper because of her inability to perform this basic function. This is a bad sign. At least she can walk if guided and the record indicates that either a nurse or orderly does this twice a day to keep her muscles toned.

“Hello, Joanna. How are you today?”

No reaction.

Coming around the desk, I kneel next to her chair. She does not turn to look at me. I am struck by her beauty and youth. This young woman had so much raw potential.

I touch her arm, skin to skin, and cast a fragmental of myself into her.

* * * *

Her mind is a void.

How discouraging. That which made Joanna into a person is no longer there. I explore further, probing for any hint, and find no consciousness beyond simple animal awareness. Moving from being an observer, I take over a small part of her, testing her mind. My thoughts, whether in my host or within a fragmental, are expressed through the biological mechanism of the brain. I think a few thoughts and find that there is no brain dysfunction.

Unable to help myself, I feel a burst of elation. An unoccupied body, ready for me to take if I need it. A rare find, and even rarer, the brain works. Its neurons fire as they should, fueling the mechanisms of thought with no apparent abnormalities.

Inevitable guilt always replaces my elation at moments like this. A woman has died. Maybe her heart still beats, but her mind is extinct. One should not feel joy at such a discovery. True, I need a body as a host to survive, but I am not a parasite.

Setting aside my confused emotions, I consider the cause of her mind’s disappearance. Drugs? Certainly the psychiatrists have confused her brain chemistry enough for the mind to lose its mooring and drift away. But what is a mind? Is it an ethereal entity, a spirit or a soul, superimposed over the biology of the brain? One might think that my ability to fragment gives me an answer to these timeless questions. Ironically, it is not so. I know that the mind is more than the sum of neurons, but whether normal human minds can exist outside of the brain, I do not know. I only know my own nature. I need a body to exist, even though I can flow from body to body.

Since there is no mind to detect my interference and thus be terrified, I manipulate her memories. Her procedural memories seem intact. She still knows how to walk, how to sit, how to feed herself. Her general memory also seems intact. She knows where New York is and how a car works. Now for the most important and intimate form of memory, episodic.

I visualize a white pill in our mind and the memories come forth, activated by this trigger. She is five years old and staring down at her purple vitamin that is shaped like a dinosaur. Like most memories, the edges of the stage of her mind are fuzzy. The pill and her feelings are the core of the memory.

Every morning her Mom made her take one. “It is good for you.” But she hates the bitter taste. When her mother’s back is turned, she grabs the pill and goes to the bathroom to flush it down with her pee. She feels triumphant and guilty. She hates feeling guilty.

Another image comes. This time a paper cup full of pills and capsules of many colors. Total despair rebounds back and forth in her mind. A white-sleeved arm offers her a glass of water. Laboriously, she begins to take the pills one by one, following each with a sip of water. The doctors say that it will make her feel better but she has no hope of that. She has gone beyond depression or paranoia. Both of those emotional complexes require energy to sustain. She had no energy to offer.

I draw back from her brain chemistry, allowing the memory to fade. Still, I can taste the utter lack of the will to live. Rarely is a person so beaten down as this.

But while I have found her despair, the answer to her missing mind proves elusive. It will take days of sifting her memories to find the answer. I am curious and willing to devote the time. One must always continue to learn. Of course, in the end, I might find that her memories do not hold enough clues to arrive at an answer.

Diving back into her mind, I prepare to focus on her hand and the memories that it triggers....

* * * *

While my fragmental trolls through Joanna’s mind, I sit in my chair, gazing out the window at the trees and remembering Gary. A different time, seventy years ago, a different host. I was not James Barash then, but a nurse. Locked within me are all the memories of all the people that I have been and everything that I have experienced. Normally, I avoid those memories and live in the present. My life as a healer has involved so much misery and included so much failure that I try to learn from my mistakes and put them behind. But some memories are pleasant, and this is one of them.

Gary had the misfortune to grow up in a family that savaged its members. A sensitive child, he weathered these buffetings with considerable courage. After escaping, he fell in love. He put his trust in a woman and when he was betrayed he retreated into insanity. By the time that I examined him, all hope was gone. Never again would he be able to view people with anything less than total distrust and paranoia. A man gifted with extraordinary empathy was lost.

One day I took Gary on a walk through the grounds, which were mostly dirt and weeds since the hospital had just been built. We were located far enough away from the city to put the insane out of sight and concern. A thin, wiry man, Gary stopped and bent over a wild violet that was struggling to survive among the wild grasses. I reached out and touched him to find out what he was feeling. He was already pulling the grass up and casting it aside to give the violet the necessary space to flourish. My unique nature was not required to understand the situation.

Over the next couple of months, Gary transferred the empathy he had once had for his fellow humans to an empathy with the fruit of the earth. I arranged for him to tend a garden. So boundless was his energy that he rapidly outgrew the garden and soon was landscaping the entire grounds. From dawn to dusk he moved soil, planted seeds, pulled weeds, and cut grass. The director of the hospital was quite thrilled to have such a talent who would not strain our state allocation of funds.

Gary even began to communicate with others, yet only when he needed something for the grounds. He also found satisfaction when the staff and patients walked among his flower beds and across his grass. When Anthony had a tantrum and destroyed one of the flower beds, Gary handled himself with grace. To him, Anthony was a natural force, like rain or snow, to be suffered through and the resulting damage repaired.

The memory calms and comforts me. Gary was a success. Looking at my wristwatch, I find that it is time to go. It is Thursday and I have an appointment in the city. I turn around to look at Joanna, hoping to see a spark of life in her eyes, hoping that my fragmental had found the key to unlock her vitality. As usual, I am disappointed. She still stares at the floor vacantly.

Most therapy takes considerable time, many days or even years, yet I always yearn for the quick fix. Such speed would allow me to help even more people. I am just one, with so much misery to fight.

I touch Joanna and the fragmental passes through our skin, rejoining me. Instantly I know all that it has learned. I feel a sense of dismay and exhilaration. My current body is still strong, only forty-three, but it is always wise to have an alternative waiting in case of an accident.

Fragmentals is a word that I use to refer to the other parts of me, though perhaps that is not the right word. They are more like copies. Each fragmental contains all that makes me unique, memories and personality. Like a flock of birds, I split apart and come back together. The joining is sweet, like long-lost siblings reuniting. With the fragmental reabsorbed, we are one again and the memories of the fragmental are integrated into the whole.

On my way out to my car I talk briefly to Mrs. Foster. “There is some hope.” I despise the need for deception. There is no hope for Joanna Prall, but someday she might come alive when I animate her, so I need to lay the groundwork for such a dramatic turnaround.