Читать книгу Fragments of Me - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 6

CHAPTER TWO

Over the centuries I knew the Slavs, peasants who toiled in the fields under the heel of their latest conqueror. Whether Hun, Mongol, or Teutonic Knight, they persevered as a people, even if many individuals perished. As with so many peasant folk, unschooled in written lore, they thrived on the spoken story. Their singing and dancing touched me whenever I passed through their homelands. I had visited the Czech, the Pole, and the Jew in the Pale and their urban ghettos. Finally they found an escape from stagnation and misery.

When the Eastern Europeans emigrated to America in the late nineteenth century, they crowded into the industrial centers of the north. It had been a century since I had last visited the New World, and my wanderlust urged me to follow this massive emigration. The Europeans had clustered together with others of the same language and religion and recreated the old ways of life in their ethnic neighborhoods. The singing and dancing continued. Every day they trudged, men, women, and children, to service the smoking behemoths and textile mills. And like their Europe neighborhoods, the sharp points of church spires soon defined their American skyline.

After a while my restlessness had abated and I found myself in Cleveland, which had been booming from the invention of automobiles. For a time I used my talents among these ambitious dispossessed peoples, calming fears and healing their heartaches. I took hope from the promise of their new situation.

I was away when Cleveland begin to rust. In 1969, the Cuyahoga river caught fire when an oil slick engulfed two bridges. During the seventies, the city went bankrupt and acquired a derisive reputation. When I returned, I found that the children of the immigrants had become Americans. The city had become bland; the only ethnics left were those two groups that always survive, the children of Israel and the children of Africa. Now the city was like so many northern industrial cities. The heart of the city was a forest of metal and concrete, where commerce thrived. Sprawling away from this were long streets of ramshackle lumber houses where the Africans lived, having migrated from their slave roots in the South to find work. White suburbs surrounded the city like a necklace of prosperity.

There is a human desire to be at the boundary of different spaces: the seashore, the foothills, or a park. Why else do we have so many suburbs as sanctuaries draped around the necks of so many American cities? Normally I like to live on the verge between city and country, where different types of people mix, but Cleveland did not offer that.

Cleveland did have certain attractions. Nostalgia mostly. Part of the sentiment came from the hospital.

Jenkins State Hospital is south of the city, set among the hills that ring Cleveland and its daughter suburbs. Dairy cows, their udders waiting to be sucked dry by a milking machine, dot the green fields around the hospital. The freeway is not far and soon I am in the city. I turn east to cross to the suburb of Euclid. The setting sun casts long shadows before my moving car. The routine of driving and flicker of deep shadow and light from the passing buildings lulls me into a dreamy contentment.

The city is undergoing its daily conversion from work to play. The nightclubs will soon be seeing the early crowd and in the many working-class homes that line the freeway, people are eating dinner and watching television. Of course, there are undoubtedly many domestic arguments also going on. Humanity is truly a paradoxical species, capable of switching from love to anger in the space of a heartbeat, without the intervention of conscious thought.

The neighborhood where I maintain an office is familiar and comfortable. After parking, I linger to scrutinize a line of trees planted when the medical office building was built twenty years earlier. I remember those trees as saplings and find a great deal of satisfaction in seeing them grow. Most of my life has been spent wandering, interspersed with periods where I try to settle down. Now is such a period, and I am content, or rather, am as content as I can possibly be.

These remembrances are comfortable, unlike so much of my past. I am not one to revel in my memories. It is true that I have an eidetic memory, in that I remember everything that I have experienced in vivid detail. But I do not lose myself in sentiment. I have seen and felt too much. By focusing on the present and what good I can do here and now, I avoid the pain of my failures.

My receptionist has already gone home for the day. A final patient, Senator Handlin, waits for me in my office. In town for a couple of days to visit constituents, he called and asked to visit. This is not uncommon. He had first come to me after the death of his wife. They had enjoyed a relationship that few couples ever experience, then a hidden cancer cut their joy short when she died at the age of thirty-nine. While I have been married before, the experiences were dissatisfying.

I had guided him through the mourning process, and soon came to function as a surrogate for his departed wife, serving as the repository of his fears and joys. Eighteen-hour workdays did not leave him the time to achieve such peace of mind on his own.

Normally I do not waste my precious time on someone not in desperate distress, but he did much good for the people of this country. In my own nonpolitical way, I wanted to help. Every year I am able to count on him defending federal funding for mental health care.

“Hi, Bill,” I say as I drop my briefcase on my desk. The senator remains in his chair, reading from a folder. Even here, where he is supposed to put aside his responsibilities and service only his own inner needs, he has brought work. As always, he is in the overstuffed chair. Many of my patients prefer this chair over the other three that I keep available. The softness of it has a tendency to enfold them, like a womb or a hug. Against one wall is a couch, for those patients who cannot conceive of their care as being anything other than Freudian.

I walk over to shake Bill’s hand. He looks up, his reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose. A handsome man, whose rugged features appeal to the electorate, the senator cracks a grin as our hands meet.

My fragmental collides with another of its own kind and reels back inside me, crazed with terror. The senator’s eyes widen in astonishment and surely my own face must also betray the same emotion. I am unique, I am the only one of my kind, or so I have thought. Yet another just like me is already inside the senator. And the innermost essence of this one is malevolent, a dark lump of lust and cruelty.

These conclusions are arrived at later, since I do not then have the time to process my sensations into thoughts. Only a fraction of a millisecond elapses during the meeting of our fragmentals. The grip of the senator’s hand tightens on my hand, holding me. The other one inside the senator rips at me, trying to tear my defenses aside as if with taloned claws. A miasma of hate and hunger filters into my mind, suffocating my thoughts. I have never fought a battle in the nether world of the mind. But I sense that neither has it, and so as it rakes at me, I push away.

The fear takes control. My other hand sweeps across my desk, desperately fumbling for something, anything. I brush against a bronze statue, about fifteen centimeters tall. One of my grateful patients sculpted the dramatic imagery of me, wearing a lab coat, leaning over to lift a fallen patient to her feet.

I grasp the statue and swing. The heavy base collides with the side of the senator’s face, spraying blood across the room. He collapses. I drop the statue next to him, run to the door, grope for the door handle, find it, twist, and burst free.

Someone is in the hallway. I crash into a tangle of arms and legs, sending whoever it is sprawling. My normal reaction is to stop in concern, appalled at my thoughtlessness. But the fear holds sway. I dash beyond, unaware of whether the person was man or woman, adult or child.

Now in the parking lot. My car? Where’s my car? There. I run over to it and tremble as I pat down my pockets. The thought that I might have left the keys in the office begins to form, but is stalled when I reach my jacket pocket.

I pause a moment to try to calm my racing mind. It is no good. Total concentration is required to just put the key in the door. Then I am in the car, its engine roaring to life as I push too firmly on the gas pedal. Lurching out of the parking lot, I bump over the curb as I take the corner too sharply.