A babble arose, cries of alarm, milling, and Jocundra was later to reflect that when psychiatrists lost their cool they did not stoop to half measures. She had intended to wait until the crowd thinned, but Dr Brauer rushed up, poked his face into Donnell’s, bleated ‘Harrison!’ then shouted at Jocundra to move it. There were more shouts of ‘Move it!’ and ‘Let her through!’ A hefty red-haired woman tried to get out of her path, snapped a high heel and tumbled head first over the arm of a sofa; her skirt slid down around her hips, exposing thighs dimpled by cellulite. A doctor and an orderly tugged at Clarice Monroe, contending for the right to escort her; French’s wheelchair sideswiped Ramsburgh’s, and she jabbed at his therapist with a plastic needle. Dodging, swerving, Jocundra pushed Donnell along a tunnel of consternated faces and into the hall. Three doctors had backed the girl whom Richmond had assaulted against the wall; she was straddling a fern, holding the madras jacket together. Tears streaked her face. She nodded in response to a question, but the nod may have had no significance because she continued to bob her head while they scribbled on their clipboards.
Donnell’s room was sunny, a breeze shifted the curtains, leaf shadow jittered on the carpet. Jocundra could not think what to say, what lie would soothe him, so she left him at the writing desk and collected the laundry, watching him out of the corner of her eye. He straightened a stack of paper, picked up a pen, doodled, laid it down.
‘He’s really…’ He picked up the pen again.
‘Pardon?’ She tossed his bathrobe into the hamper.
‘What’s the matter with him? Is he just naturally crazy or is it something to do with the process?’ He kept fidgeting, his hands moving aimlessly from pen to paper to notebook.
‘He’s very, very old.’ Jocundra knelt beside him, happy for the opportunity to comfort him. ‘He was probably senile before the process was applied, and it wasn’t able to restore him fully.’ She rubbed the bunched muscles in his shoulder.
He bent his head, allowing her easier access to his neck. ‘I can’t wait to get out of this place,’ he said.
‘It’ll be sooner than you think,’ she said, wishing it weren’t so harshly true. She had begun to hate herself for lying, but she had no better thing to tell him. ‘Please don’t let it depress you. I want you to get well.’
A poignant sadness rose in her, as if the words ‘I want you to get well’ had been a splash of cold water on the hot stones of her emotions. But the sadness didn’t seem attached to his dying. It seemed instead a product of the way the light slanted down, the temperature, the shadows and sounds: a kind of general sadness attaching to every human involvement, one you only felt when the conditions were just right but was there all the time. She thought the feeling must be showing on her face, and to hide it she pretended to cough.
‘God,’ he said, ‘I wish I was well now.’ He looked over at her, eyes wide, mouth downturned, the same expression he had worn during the drive from Tulane. ‘Ah, Hell. I guess there’s some virtue to having died…’ He trailed off.
She knew he had been about to refer to her as that virtue, to make a joke of it, to address lightly his attraction for her, but he left the punchline unsaid and the last words he had said hung in the air between them, taking on the coloration of all the fear and sickness in the room. Shortly afterward she excused herself and went into the bathroom. She sat on the edge of the sink for almost fifteen minutes, expecting to cry, on the verge of crying, tears brimming, but the sob never built to critical in her chest, just hung there and decayed.
From Conjure Men: My Work With Ezawa at Tulane by Anthony Edman, MD, PhD.
… It was as close as I have ever come to striking a colleague, but Brauer - in his capacity of ambitious underling, thirsting for authority - seemed determined to make a case for my bungling the interaction, allowing the patients too much leeway, and my temper frayed. I forced myself to calm, however, and reminded him that we had achieved exactly the desired result: despite Magnusson’s unexpected outburst, or because of it, we had brought the patients’ fear of one another into the open where it could be treated with and analyzed.
‘Within a week they’ll be forming associations,’ I told him. ‘Monroe and French are obvious, Harrison and Richmond… Now that Richmond’s found someone who’ll face up to him, someone more or less his own age, he’s bound to make friendly overtures. It’s inevitable. Perhaps we’ve suffered a few flesh wounds, but now they’ll have to accept their fear as a side effect of the process and deal with it.’
