American Gothic (18 page)

28

Dr. Glass

T
HE AIR IN the ECT room smelled of disinfectant and alcohol. The room was unusually chilly even for the hospital, which tended to be over-air-conditioned in summer and overheated in winter.

There were three people in the room. Standing and looking over a clipboard with a Montblanc pen was Dr. Lucian Glass. A Filipino nurse named Emerlinda Vicenceo stood beside the ECT machine. She was there to assist Dr. Glass, if need be, though the psychiatrist generally preferred to do things for himself. The last member of the trio was the twenty-two-year-old woman strapped to the treatment table. Candy Priddle wore only a hospital smock. There were goose bumps on her bare legs and arms, and Dr. Glass wondered if they were from cold, from fear, or a combination of the two.

“We’re going to give you an IV that will make you more comfortable. You’re not afraid of needles are you?”

The young woman shook her head. She was skinny and had an overbite. Dr. Glass had first seen the tattoo above her breast when she put on the smock in the emergency room, where she’d been brought in for swallowing a bottle of aspirin. Then she was wearing a dirty “wife-beater” T-shirt and cutoff jeans that rode so high on her legs that her underwear was all that kept her decent as she lolled on the examination table. Dr. Glass had taken one look at the way she was dressed, and her limp, dishwater-blond hair, and guessed that the girl was pure trailer trash. Candy’s manner of speaking—she could barely get a sentence out without using a double negative or committing some other grammatical travesty—proved the case. The psychiatrist thought he had an uncanny ability in a quick glance to judge a patient’s socioeconomic niche. He was a real-life Henry Higgins, he was.

“We’re going to start off with something to make you relaxed,” Dr. Glass said, speaking in his smooth, sonorous voice while he introduced the liquid Valium into the IV drip. “You’re going to like this, Candy. You’re going to say, ‘I want some more of this, Dr. Glass.’ If you’re a good girl, we’ll see what we can do.”

The tranquilizing effect was instantaneous. The frightened-rabbit look went out of Candy’s eyes, replaced with the stupefied expression of compliance. If Nurse Emerlinda hadn’t been present, Dr. Glass could have done whatever he wanted to the girl, even if she wasn’t strapped securely to a rubber-wheeled body cart. Candy Priddle had been hospitalized for the suicide attempt, but Dr. Glass’s larger diagnosis was that she suffered from bipolar disorder. After nearly six months of treating the young woman, he knew that in her manic phases she was prone to aggressive nymphomania. She had undergone more abortions than any patient Dr. Glass had ever treated. He had had her tested several times for AIDS, but to his amazement she had avoided it, though she’d fallen prey to several other sexually transmitted diseases in the time she’d been his patient.

“Some doctors would give you a general anesthetic for this procedure, Candy, but I find the treatments are much more effective if you are in what we call twilight sleep. You’re awake but you’re not awake. Do you understand?”

The girl on the gurney tried to smile.

The door opened and in came a brisk-looking middle-aged woman wearing a crisp navy blue suit.

“Ah, Margeaux.”

“I just want to put you on formal notice, Dr. Glass. I am opposed to this course of treatment for Candy.”

Candy’s head—he hadn’t put on the head restraint yet—fell drunkly to the side so that she could grin up at Margeaux Lloyd.

“I am well aware of your feelings, Margeaux,” Dr. Glass went on in his unctuous voice. He was not in the least threatened by Candy Priddle’s caseworker. “With all due respect, I am the one with an M.D. after my name. As much as I hate to pull rank, I am the psychiatrist, you are the psychiatric social worker.”

“We should discuss this in the hall.”

“She won’t remember a thing, Margeaux. Trust me.”

“My point exactly.”

“Such hostility. It’s not really your style, is it?”

“No.” He noted his antagonist’s inner collapse with secret triumph. He could have her job for this kind of effrontery. He even had a witness: Emerlinda Vicenceo.

It was easy to be magnanimous. Dr. Glass held all the cards, the physician’s authority sacrosanct. “The management of Candy’s case is my responsibility. Once I get her stabilized, you can go back to trying to keep her on a steady keel with weekly counseling sessions.”

“The FDA classifies an ECT as a Type-Three device—the highest-risk category.”

“Electroconvulsive therapy is safe and effective,” Dr. Glass said. “I have been administering these treatments for years.”

“The Benedict and Saks study found that ninety percent of the patients getting ETC received inappropriate treatments,” Margeaux said. “Death, brain damage, seizures, epilepsy, and memory loss are all possible side effects.”

Emerlinda Vicenceo’s wary eyes went back and forth between them both. She didn’t want to be a part of this. As much as Dr. Glass wanted to put the mere M.S.W. in her place, he knew the better strategy was to remain aloof. Perhaps it had been her intention all along to provoke him into losing his temper in front of the nurse, hoping to use it against him.

“If the surgeon general certifies the treatment as safe and effective, that’s good enough for me,” he said with the same patience. “Now unless you intend to interfere with Miss Priddle’s physician of record—which I don’t have to tell you would be a very serious disciplinary matter for the licensing board to consider—I suggest you disengage. You’re quite welcome to stay if you want. If you observed a few of these procedures, you’d see how harmless they really are.”

But Margeaux was already on her way out of the room.

“I’m going to give you a little succinylcholine chloride,” Dr. Glass said, turning his attention back to his patient. “It will relax your muscles. Back in the days before we learned to give muscle-paralyzing drugs, ECT patients sometimes convulsed so violently that they broke their bones. Some even broke their backs.”

Dr. Glass looked up to see the nurse frowning at him.

“I’m always completely frank with my patients,” he said. “I treat them like adults. Not that Candy has any idea what I’m talking about. How are you doing, my dear? Are you doing okay?”

The young woman blinked, but she probably wasn’t paying any attention to what he was saying.

“I’m going to put a strap over your forehead to keep you from hurting your neck.” Dr. Glass slipped the heavy leather strap through the buckle and cinched it snug. “You can put the salve on now, Nurse.”

Emerlinda applied the conductive graphite compound to both temples of the girl’s head.

“Some doctors only use one electrode, but I prefer the bilateral approach. That way we treat both hemispheres of the brain equally.”

“How many volts, Dr. Glass?”

“Let’s start Candy out with three hundred volts for two-point-five seconds.”

The nurse repeated the formulary as she set the dials, and Dr. Glass nodded confirmation.

“Bite down on this rubber, my dear. It will keep you from swallowing your tongue.” Dr. Glass worked the bit into Candy’s mouth. She resisted a little but was conscious enough to know that she had no choice but to do what he commanded.

Dr. Glass went over to the control and put his finger over the button. “We’re going to give you three treatments today, Candy. There will be about five minutes between treatments, but after the first one, you probably won’t be aware of what’s happening. Are you ready?”

Dr. Glass activated the electrical current without waiting for a sign of readiness from the woman. It was only a rhetorical question, after all. Whether or not she was ready to have a jolt of electricity sent through her brain was of no consequence whatsoever to the psychiatrist. Candy Priddle’s body lurched violently upward against the restraints, her eyes bulging from the fire consuming her brain from within until it seemed they would pop out of their orbits. The shock lasted only a brief moment—far too brief to suit Dr. Glass’s personal tastes. She fell back, limp, unconscious, a heavy sweat soaking her face and making the cotton hospital smock cling to the erect nipples on her breasts. She wouldn’t move again until he turned the electricity back on.

The gown had pushed up over her pelvis during the first treatment, revealing the patch of dirty-blond hair between her thighs. Dr. Glass had a vision of Candy nailed to a cross, which he quickly shook off. The psychiatrist made sure the white doctor’s jacket was arranged to hide his reaction before turning to the nurse.

“Do you have anything fun planned for the weekend, Emerlinda?” he asked. “Some gardening perhaps? The weather has been lovely.”

“My mother is coming over, and we’re going to plan the reception,” she replied. Candy Priddle was forgotten as soon as she began to update Dr. Glass on her wedding plans.

Dr. Glass returned to his office with plenty of time to fix a nice cup of tea before his one o’clock appointment. He was a punctual man and demanded the same of others, including his patients, as a simple matter of courtesy and respect. The exact moment the numbers on his digital clock clicked over at the top of the hour, his receptionist phoned to say his next patient was ready; the clocks in his office were synchronized with the one in the waiting room.

“It is good to meet you, Miss Warring,” the psychiatrist said, standing up to meet the girl. “I am Dr. Glass.”

The young woman nodded briskly but did not extend her hand. Dr. Glass never made the first move with his patients. Not in the beginning, anyway.

“Please make yourself comfortable.”

The oddly dressed young woman did a quick survey of the office, which was decorated with the same spare modern elegance as a psychiatrist’s office in Copenhagen that Dr. Glass had seen pictures of in
Architectural Digest
.

“Should I sit on the chair or the couch?”

“Whichever makes you feel more comfortable, Miss Warring.”

“Ah.” Her eyes flicked in his direction, the gesture made more dramatic by the almost theatrical use of eye shadow applied in the manner of a princess from ancient Egypt. “The first test.”

Dr. Glass smiled back at her. “The second, actually.” There was no point denying it. The school counselor said she was an exceptionally intelligent young lady.

“And what was the first? Something about the way I walked into the room, or was it that I didn’t offer to shake hands.”

“Very good, Miss Warring. But please do be seated.”

She went to the couch, which was shaped like a lazy
S
perched on four narrow chrome posts. Though she didn’t look in his direction, Dr. Glass was aware that she was monitoring how he was watching her as she lay back and draped her legs—hidden in a long black skirt and spike-heel boots—upon the couch. The many silver bracelets on her wrists clinked softly as she made herself comfortable.

“Do you mind if I call you Mary Beth?”

Dr. Glass heard her suck in the breath between her teeth. “Yes, I would mind. I would mind it very much. My name is Ophelia.”

Dr. Glass nodded pleasantly and leaned back. The chair he was in was larger and more authoritarian looking than the one the patients used, if they were too insecure to indulge in the soft, Freudian comfort of the couch. Dr. Glass adjusted his half-moon reading glasses and read the tab on folder. His receptionist had dutifully labeled it
Warring, Mary Beth.
Which was as it should be. Mary Beth
was
Ophelia’s birth name, and her legal name, as far as that went. But what was a name if not a label that could be changed whenever it suited you? The thought that he could get up one day and simply decide to be someone else had a certain appeal to Dr. Glass. He opened the folder and scanned the school psychologist’s evaluation. The report, which was laughably facile, was also sadly typical.

“Are you waiting for me to explain about my name?”

“Hmm?” Dr. Glass looked up from his reading. The girl was lying there with her eyes closed, her body language telling him that she was perfectly at ease, which was certainly not what he usually encountered with new patients. “No, not particularly.”

“Good. I find it boring to talk about. Most people don’t ask me about it anymore, though it was of obvious interest to the school shrink. I suppose that’s all in the paperwork you’ve been reading.”

Dr. Glass smiled, closed the folder. He leaned back and crossed his legs. A minute went by in silence. Then two. Then three.

“Are you awake, Ophelia?”

“Yes.”

“I was just checking. I thought that maybe you’d drifted off.”

“I’m perfectly content to lie here quietly until my half hour is up, Dr. Glass.”

“My time is rather expensive for that, but if that’s what pleases you.”

A smile flickered over her lips, which were painted in lipstick of such a deep purple that they seemed almost black.

“Why did you decide to call yourself Ophelia?”

The girl sighed.

“You’re a fan of Shakespeare, I suspect, though I doubt you would have been any more happy with Hamlet than the Ophelia in the play.”

“Very good, Dr. Glass. One point for you.”

“Ultimately we all invent ourselves, though most people aren’t as cognizant of the fact as you. Or as bold about the persona they create to inhabit.”

“There is no need to be condescending, Doctor.”

“I meant it. Your manner of dress—it’s very striking, if I may say so.”

“Thank you.”

“What do the others your age at the high school think of it?”

“Who gives a fuck?”

Dr. Glass nodded.

“How long have you been a Goth?”

The question displeased her.
That
got her attention, Dr. Glass noted with satisfaction, seeing her posture stiffen.

“And I would guess that your name, Ophelia, has as much to do with the vampire role-playing game you’re involved in as it does with your interest in Shakespeare and poetry in general.”

“It’s not a game.”

The psychiatrist gave her anger a full minute to subside.

“What is it about vampires that fascinates you most, Ophelia?”