The Opposite of Music (18 page)

But the night before Dad's first treatment, I bike back to the library on the pretext of returning some books. The computer carrel I used last time is available. After all these months, is our problem really going to be solved so easily? I get on the Internet and search for the phrase “shock treatments.”

The results that come up are different this time. In addition to pleasant-sounding organizations like Healthy Place, there are many more with worrisome names such as Antipsychiatry.org and Ban Shock, as well as groups such as the Committee for Truth in Psychiatry and the Foundation for Truth in Reality. I click on an article called “ECT and Brain Damage: Psychiatry's Legacy,” posted by a group called Say No to Psychiatry!

The website quotes Ernest Hemingway and claims that the reason he shot himself was that shock treatments destroyed his mind. “Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.”

Antipsychiatry.org has a page called “Psychiatry's Electroconvulsive Shock Treatment: A Crime Against Humanity.” At the top of the page is a photograph of a woman in a hospital gown, strapped down to a table, with some kind of bit in her mouth. Wires on either side of her head lead to a box with switches and dials, where two hands wait, seemingly about to throw the switch. Because the woman's mouth is forced open by the bit, you can't tell if she's trying to shout for help. She might be.

I print out my findings. I take them into the men's room so I can read them in their entirety. I could throw them away, right in this wastebasket under the paper towels, before I leave the library. I could keep quiet about what I know and just watch Dad for signs, hover above Dad's situation like a guardian angel. What would be the point of showing Mom, anyway? We have no other options on the table. We have Plan A but no Plan B.

When I get home, Dad has gone to bed to prepare for an early start in the morning. Mom is drinking tea and staring out the window over the sink. I doubt she can see anything out there, with lights on inside the house. I hand her the printouts. They're crumpled, damp, and probably unsanitary. Mom puts down her mug and begins to read them, with one hand at her throat. For a long time she doesn't react.

“Not Hemingway!” she eventually gasps. I knew that would get to her—Mom's master's was in American studies.

She shakes her head and leans against the counter. She touches the necklace my father gave her when they were poor. We could be poor again.

“You may not show any of this to your father or your sister.”

“You have to cancel the appointment, Mom.”

She rinses the mug and puts it in the dishwasher without saying anything.

“Right? Mom? You have to cancel the appointment, or they'll turn Dad into a zombie.”

“I'm not going to cancel it.”

“But look what happened to Hemingway—and all those other, ordinary people. Their minds got wiped out. Anything that was special about them—pfft. And even anything that wasn't special.”

“Billy—”

“Come on, Mom!
Where's that phone number?
”

“Shush.” She lays her hand on my arm, but I knock it away.

“Don't shush me! I won't be shushed anymore!”

“If you yell and act agitated, you'll just make things worse. Don't you want your father to get some rest before his first appointment?”

“So you're going, then? You're doing this to Dad? You don't even want my opinion.”

“I want your opinion, only in a lower register.”

“I won't let you do it.”

“Oh, really? How will you stop me?” Mom steps backward. A bag of recycled Brooksbie papers blocks her path, and I don't even warn her. She doesn't fall, though.

Mom has no idea that in the last five minutes of my bike ride I developed a secret plan. If she decides to go ahead with this, I'll take Dad away. The nights are getting warmer—we could live in a tent on Plum Island. Any court in the United States would see it my way.

“Billy,” Mom asks me after a while, “what percentage of your father would you say is still there?”

“Maybe thirty,” I answer. “But at least it's something.”

“That's exactly the figure I was going to give.”

My social studies teacher, Mr. Misuraca, distributes a test up the aisle. He moves like a trained bear, and every test, no matter what the alleged subject, ends up being about the nineteen sixties.

Brenda Mason strokes the shoulder of her sweater as she writes her name on the test, almost as if she's patting herself on the back.

I write my name but nothing after that.

They leave the house at dawn.

They stop for coffee at Dunkin' Donuts, but Dad isn't allowed to have anything. Mom puts two honey-dipped Munchkins in a wax bag for later, should Dad choose to accept them.

Uncle Marty drives because Mom and Dad were up most of the night, and Mom's too tired to drive. In the passenger seat, Mom navigates with the map.

The landmarks of Route 1 pass their windows. A lighthouse, a ship, and the tower of Pisa, all of which are really restaurants. An orange Tyrannosaurus rex that guards a miniature golf course. They've seen it a hundred times, but this time it startles them, and they wonder whatever possessed someone to put it there. Questioning, questioning.

The traffic doubles and redoubles. The Boston skyline ascends, gathering memories of family trips around it like a broad gray skirt.

Coolidge Hospital is the size of a town. Marty follows signs for Building G. He drops Mom and Dad in front, then goes to park the car.

They sign in at the front desk.

They take the elevator down to the basement.

The basement is a plain, concrete-walled clinic.

Dad is wearing his snappy first-day-of-school clothes.

The other patients are all in pajamas and bathrobes, because they're living here.

A nurse calls “Bill Morrison,” and Dad looks up.

He and Mom are shown into a second room.

In the second room is a new doctor they've never met before.

He and a nurse take Dad into a third room.

Dad lies down on one of three beds.

The nurse straps him in and gives him an injection.

His body relaxes and his eyes close.

The nurse smears something on Dad's head.

She places an oxygen mask over Dad's mouth and nose.

The doctor presses onto Dad's head two circles attached to a wire.

He seems to be asleep now.

The doctor throws a switch.

May God forgive me.

That I would do nothing while a doctor sent fire through my father's body.

A current passed through Dad's brain, producing a seizure that lasted thirty seconds. His arms and legs never moved, but his fists clenched involuntarily and his toes twitched.

Inside Dad's brain, neurons resembling tall, thin trees stood in groves. Their spidery branches were intertwined, almost touching. Lightning shot from tree to tree and from branch to branch, making the bare wood rattle and hiss. This lightning had the power to revive or destroy whatever buds of thought or nests of memory ever lived there. Dad's soul walked at the base of the trees, fearful and wondering. Some branches were cut and fell to the ground like dry kindling. Others crackled, swayed, and absorbed the shock, eventually becoming still.

Is this my inheritance? Red hair, blue eyes, and a dark place in the mind that will call me when my time comes, and I will have to go there?

Like a church bell, a factory bell, or a funeral bell?

I am (after all) Bill Junior.

Dad has completed three sessions of electroconvulsive therapy, each of which has obliterated his memory of the past twenty-four hours and taken with it some of his other mental abilities, too. In other words, he is even more less-smart than he was from not sleeping, although we hope that one day he will become more smart again.

“Sixteen across: patella.”

Dad and I are doing the newspaper crossword on a Saturday afternoon while Mom reads a magazine in her chair in the corner. When he was well, we would time ourselves on the crossword puzzle—usually thirty minutes, once as low as twenty-six minutes, thirteen seconds—but now we're taking all the time we need, not looking at the clock.

I give him a head start before I make my suggestion. “Okay, how about ‘kneecap'?”

Dad begins writing in the squares. N-E-E.

“Wait! There's a
k
in ‘kneecap.'”

“Where?”

“At the beginning.”

He erases what he's done and starts again. The word fits.

“Does ‘needle' also have a
k
?” he asks, trying to find the pattern.

“No, it doesn't. But ‘knead' does, like when you knead dough to make bread. And remember, ‘know' does, as in ‘I know you.'”

He nods. “I'm pretty sure I have that one.”

None of the articles mentioned that the treatments would cause Dad to lose—temporarily, we hope—his ability to spell. But I see it each time we do the crossword puzzle. The first time I noticed it, I felt embarrassed for Dad. Maybe I even pitied him. But now my reaction has changed. For the most part, I feel curious and just basically interested. Because the articles I've read say nothing about this problem, I feel like I've discovered something. I strangely enjoy watching him and looking for trends in what he does and doesn't remember. Still, it seems a little cold. I excuse myself by deciding it's the kind of thing he himself would find interesting, if it weren't happening to him.

A car goes by the picture window, up our hill. Mom lays down her magazine and waves. “The man who stopped in yesterday just went by,” Mom says.

To help Dad with his memory loss, I've developed a technique I call “backgrounding,” and Mom helps me implement it. With this technique, we assume that he remembers nothing, and we fill in for him as much as we can. Normally, Mom might have said just, “There he is again!” about the passing driver. But with my backgrounding program, she beefs up her comment with a short reference to yesterday's meeting.

“Someone stopped in yesterday?” Dad asks.

“Yes,” she answers. “We were just getting out of the car, and he pulled in the driveway. He was thinking of buying the house at the top of the street, and he wanted to know how long we had lived here and what we thought of the highway noise. You were very honest with him and said it bothered you, but we explained that you were a light sleeper and I'm a heavy sleeper.”

“Uh-huh,” Dad says, waiting to see if the information resurfaces in memory. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. But in giving Dad that information, Mom is treating him as if he can step back into the conversation once he has the background. He can still participate. I call that technique “normalizing.”

“He must be serious about buying if he's back again today,” Dad says. “Did he say whether he was a light sleeper?”

“No, he didn't,” Mom says. “He mostly listened to us.”

“He's probably not light then,” Dad continues. “Or he would have mentioned it. Maybe he's in-between.”

If only Hemingway had had someone to background his short-term memory. Would things have turned out differently for the American novel?