Stones

  She had tried drinking coffee, but this had no effect. She detested coffee and her system had a built-in rejection mechanism. She also prescribed herself a week’s worth of Dexedrine to see if that would do the trick. Five mg at bedtime—all to no avail. And even though she put the plastic bottle of small orange hearts beneath her pillow and kept augmenting her intake, she would wake half an hour later with a dreadful start to discover the night was moving on to morning.

  Everett Menlo had not yet declared the source of his problem. His restless condition had begun about ten days ago and had barely raised his interest. Soon, however, the time spent lying awake had increased from one to several hours and then, on Monday last, to all-night sessions. Now he lay in a state of rigid apprehension—eyes wide open, arms above his head, his hands in fists—like a man in pain unable to shut it out. His neck, his back and his shoulders constantly harried him with cramps and spasms. Everett Menlo had become a full-blown insomniac.

  Clearly, Mimi Menlo concluded, her husband was refusing to sleep because he believed something dreadful was going to happen the moment he closed his eyes. She had encountered this sort of fear in one or two of her patients. Everett, on the other hand, would not discuss the subject. If the problem had been hers, he would have said such things cannot occur if you have gained control of yourself.

  Mimi began to watch for the dawn. She would calculate its approach by listening for the increase of traffic down below the bedroom window. The Menlos’ home was across the road from The Manulife Centre—corner of Bloor and Bay streets. Mimi’s first sight of daylight always revealed the high, white shape of its terraced storeys. Their own apartment building was of a modest height and colour—twenty floors of smoky glass and polished brick. The shadow of the Manulife would crawl across the bedroom floor and climb the wall behind her, grey with fatigue and cold.

  The Menlo beds were an arm’s length apart, and lying like a rug between them was the shape of a large, black dog of unknown breed. All night long, in the dark of his well, the dog would dream and he would tell the content of his dreams the way that victims in a trance will tell of being pursued by posses of their nameless fears. He whimpered, he cried and sometimes he howled. His legs and his paws would jerk and flail and his claws would scrabble desperately against the parquet floor. Mimi—who loved this dog—would lay her hand against his side and let her fingers dabble in his coat in vain attempts to soothe him. Sometimes, she had to call his name in order to rouse him from his dreams because his heart would be racing. Other times, she smiled and thought: at least there’s one of us getting some sleep. The dog’s name was Thurber and he dreamed in beige and white.

  Everett and Mimi Menlo were both psychiatrists. His field was schizophrenia; hers was autistic children. Mimi’s venue was the Parkin Institute at the University of Toronto; Everett’s was the Queen Street Mental Health Centre. Early in their marriage they had decided never to work as a team and not—unless it was a matter of financial life and death—to accept employment in the same institution. Both had always worked with the kind of physical intensity that kills, and yet they gave the impression this was the only tolerable way in which to function. It meant there was always a sense of peril in what they did, but the peril—according to Everett—made their lives worth living. This, at least, had been his theory twenty years ago when they were young.

  Now, for whatever unnamed reason, peril had become his enemy and Everett Menlo had begun to look and behave and lose his sleep like a haunted man. But he refused to comment when Mimi asked him what was wrong. Instead, he gave the worst of all possible answers a psychiatrist can hear who seeks an explanation of a patient’s silence: he said there was absolutely nothing wrong.

  “You’re sure you’re not coming down with something?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you wouldn’t like a massage?”

  “I’ve already told you: no.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t want to talk?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, Everett…”

  “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, nothing. I only hope you get some sleep tonight.”

  Everett stood up. “Have you been spying on me, Mimi?”

  “What do you mean by spying?”

  “Watching me all night long.”

  “Well, Everett, I don’t see how I can fail to be aware you aren’t asleep when we share this bedroom. I mean—I can hear you grinding your teeth. I can see you lying there wide awake.”

  “When?”

  “All the time. You’re staring at the ceiling.”

  “I’ve never stared at the ceiling in my whole life. I sleep on my stomach.”

  “You sleep on your stomach if you sleep. But you have not been sleeping. Period. No argument.”

  Everett Menlo went to his dresser and got out a pair of clean pyjamas. Turning his back on Mimi, he put them on.

  Somewhat amused at the coyness of this gesture, Mimi asked what he was hiding.

  “Nothing!” he shouted at her.

  Mimi’s mouth fell open. Everett never yelled. His anger wasn’t like that; it manifested itself in other ways, in silence and withdrawal, never shouts.

  Everett was staring at her defiantly. He had slammed the bottom drawer of his dresser. Now he was fumbling with the wrapper of a pack of cigarettes.

  Mimi’s stomach tied a knot.

  Everett hadn’t touched a cigarette for weeks.

  “Please don’t smoke those,” she said. “You’ll only be sorry if you do.”

  “And you,” he said, “will be sorry if I don’t.”

  “But, dear…” said Mimi.

  “Leave me for Christ’s sake alone!” Everett yelled.

  Mimi gave up and sighed and then she said: “all right. Thurber and I will go and sleep in the living-room. Goodnight.”

  Everett sat on the edge of his bed. His hands were shaking.

  “Please,” he said—apparently addressing the floor. “Don’t leave me here alone. I couldn’t bear that.”

  This was perhaps the most chilling thing he could have said to her. Mimi was alarmed; her husband was genuinely terrified of something and he would not say what it was. If she had not been who she was—if she had not known what she knew—if her years of training had not prepared her to watch for signs like this, she might have been better off. As it was, she had to face the possibility the strongest, most sensible man on earth was having a nervous breakdown of major proportions. Lots of people have breakdowns, of course; but not, she had thought, the gods of reason.

  “All right,” she said—her voice maintaining the kind of calm she knew a child afraid of the dark would appreciate. “In a minute I’ll get us something to drink. But first, I’ll go and change…”

  Mimi went into the sanctum of the bathroom, where her nightgown waited for her—a portable hiding-place hanging on the back of the door. “You stay there,” she said to Thurber, who had padded after her. “Mama will be out in just a moment.”

  Even in the dark, she could gauge Everett’s tension. His shadow—all she could see of him—twitched from time to time and the twitching took on a kind of lurching rhythm, something like the broken clock in their living-room.

  Mimi lay on her side and tried to close her eyes. But her eyes were tied to a will of their own and would not obey her. Now she, too, was caught in the same irreversible tide of sleeplessness that bore her husband backward through the night. Four or five times she watched him lighting cigarettes—blowing out the matches, courting disaster in the bedclothes—conjuring the worst of deaths for the three of them: a flaming pyre on the twentieth floor.

  All this behaviour was utterly unlike him; foreign to his code of disciplines and ethics; alien to everything he said and believed. Openness, directness, sharing of ideas, encouraging imaginative response to every problem. Never hide troubles. Never allow despair…These were his directives in everything he did. Now, he
had thrown them over.

  One thing was certain. She was not the cause of his sleeplessness. She didn’t have affairs and neither did he. He might be ill—but whenever he’d been ill before, there had been no trauma; never a trauma like this one, at any rate. Perhaps it was something about a patient—one of his tougher cases; a wall in the patient’s condition they could not break through; some circumstance of someone’s lack of progress—a sudden veering towards a catatonic state, no for instance—something that Everett had not foreseen that had stymied him and was slowly…what? Destroying his sense of professional control? His self-esteem? His scientific certainty? If only he would speak.

  Mimi thought about her own worst case: a child whose obstinate refusal to communicate was currently breaking her heart and, thus, her ability to help. If ever she had needed Everett to talk to, it was now. All her fellow doctors were locked in a battle over this child; they wanted to take him away from her. Mimi refused to give him up; he might as well have been her own flesh and blood. Everything had been done—from gentle holding sessions to violent bouts of manufactured anger—in her attempt to make the child react. She was staying with him every day from the moment he was roused to the moment he was induced to sleep with drugs.

  His name was Brian Bassett and he was eight years old. He sat on the floor in the furthest corner he could achieve in one of the observation-isolation rooms where all the autistic children were placed when nothing else in their treatment—nothing of love or expertise—had managed to break their silence. Mostly, this was a signal they were coming to the end of life.

  There in his four-square, glass-box room, surrounded by all that can tempt a child if a child can be tempted—toys and food and story-book companions—Brian Bassett was in the process, now, of fading away. His eyes were never closed and his arms were restrained. He was attached to three machines that nurtured him with all that science can offer. But of course, the spirit and the will to live cannot be fed by force to those who do not want to feed.

  Now, in the light of Brian Bassett’s utter lack of willing contact with the world around him—his utter refusal to communicate—Mimi watched her husband through the night. Everett stared at the ceiling, lit by the Manulife building’s distant lamps, borne on his back further and further out to sea. She had lost him, she was certain.

  When, at last, he saw that Mimi had drifted into her own and welcome sleep, Everett rose from his bed and went out into the hall, past the simulated jungle of the solarium, until he reached the dining-room. There, all the way till dawn, he amused himself with two decks of cards and endless games of Dead Man’s Solitaire.

  Thurber rose and shuffled after him. The dining-room was one of Thurber’s favourite places in all his confined but privileged world, for it was here—as in the kitchen—that from time to time a hand descended filled with the miracle of food. But whatever it was that his master was doing up there above him on the table-top, it wasn’t anything to do with feeding or with being fed. The playing cards had an old and dusty dryness to their scent and they held no appeal for the dog. So he once again lay down and he took up his dreams, which at least gave his paws some exercise. This way, he failed to hear the advent of a new dimension to his master’s problem. This occurred precisely at 5:45 a.m. when the telephone rang and Everett Menlo, having rushed to answer it, waited breathless for a minute while he listened and then said: “yes” in a curious, strangulated fashion. Thurber—had he been awake—would have recognized in his master’s voice the signal for disaster.

  For weeks now, Everett had been working with a patient who was severely and uniquely schizophrenic. This patient’s name was Kenneth Albright, and while he was deeply suspicious, he was also oddly caring. Kenneth Albright loved the detritus of life, such as bits of woolly dust and wads of discarded paper. He loved all dried-up leaves that had drifted from their parent trees and he loved the dead bees that had curled up to die along the window-sills of his ward. He also loved the spider webs seen high up in the corners of the rooms where he sat on plastic chairs and ate with plastic spoons.

  Kenneth Albright talked a lot about his dreams. But his dreams had become, of late, a major stumbling block in the process of his recovery. Back in the days when Kenneth had first become Doctor Menlo’s patient, the dreams had been overburdened with detail: “over-cast,” as he would say, “with characters” and over-produced, again in Kenneth’s phrase, “as if I were dreaming the dreams of Cecil B. de Mille.”

  Then he had said: “but a person can’t really dream someone else’s dreams. Or can they, Doctor Menlo?”

  “No” had been Everett’s answer—definite and certain.

  Everett Menlo had been delighted, at first, with Kenneth Albright’s dreams. They had been immensely entertaining—complex and filled with intriguing detail. Kenneth himself was at a loss to explain the meaning of these dreams, but as Everett had said, it wasn’t Kenneth’s job to explain. That was Everett’s job. His job and his pleasure. For quite a long while, during these early sessions, Everett had written out the dreams, taken them home and recounted them to Mimi.

  Kenneth Albright was a paranoid schizophrenic. Four times now, he had attempted suicide. He was a fiercely angry man at times—and at other times as gentle and as pleasant as a docile child. He had suffered so greatly, in the very worst moments of his disease, that he could no longer work. His job—it was almost an incidental detail in his life and had no importance for him, so it seemed—was returning reference books, in the Metro Library, to their places in the stacks. Sometimes—mostly late of an afternoon—he might begin a psychotic episode of such profound dimensions that he would attempt his suicide right behind the counter and even once, in the full view of everyone, while riding in the glass-walled elevator. It was after this last occasion that he was brought, in restraints, to be a resident patient at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre. He had slashed his wrists with a razor—but not before he had also slashed and destroyed an antique copy of Don Quixote, the pages of which he pasted to the walls with blood.

  For a week thereafter, Kenneth Albright—just like Brian Bassett—had refused to speak or to move. Everett had him kept in an isolation cell, force-fed and drugged. Slowly, by dint of patience, encouragement and caring even Kenneth could recognize as genuine, Everett Menlo had broken through the barrier. Kenneth was removed from isolation, pampered with food and cigarettes, and he began relating his dreams.

  At first there seemed to be only the dreams and nothing else in Kenneth’s memory. Broken pencils, discarded toys and the telephone directory all had roles to play in these dreams but there were never any people. All the weather was bleak and all the landscapes were empty. Houses, motor cars and office buildings never made an appearance. Sounds and smells had some importance; the wind would blow, the scent of unseen fires was often described. Stairwells were plentiful, leading nowhere, all of them rising from a subterranean world that Kenneth either did not dare to visit or would not describe.

  The dreams had little variation, one from another. The themes had mostly to do with loss and with being lost. The broken pencils were all given names and the discarded toys were given to one another as companions. The telephone books were the sources of recitations—hours and hours of repeated names and numbers, some of which—Everett had noted with surprise—were absolutely accurate.

  All of this held fast until an incident occurred one morning that changed the face of Kenneth Albright’s schizophrenia forever; an incident that stemmed—so it seemed—from something he had dreamed the night before.

  Bearing in mind his previous attempts at suicide, it will be obvious that Kenneth Albright was never far from sight at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre. He was, in fact, under constant observation; constant, that is, as human beings and modern technology can manage. In the ward to which he was ultimately consigned, for instance, the toilet cabinets had no doors and the shower-rooms had no locks. Therefore, a person could not ever be alone with water, glass or shaving utensils. (All th
e razors were cordless automatics.) Scissors and knives were banned, as were pieces of string and rubber bands. A person could not even kill his feet and hands by binding up his wrists or ankles. Nothing poisonous was anywhere available. All the windows were barred. All the double doors between this ward and the corridors beyond were doors with triple locks and a guard was always near at hand.

  Still, if people want to die, they will find a way. Mimi Menlo would discover this to her everlasting sorrow with Brian Bassett. Everett Menlo would discover this to his everlasting horror with Kenneth Albright.

  On the morning of April 19th, a Tuesday, Everett Menlo, in the best of health, had welcomed a brand-new patient into his office. This was Anne Marie Wilson, a young and brilliant pianist whose promising career had been halted mid-flight by a schizophrenic incident involving her ambition. She was, it seemed, no longer able to play and all her dreams were shattered. The cause was simple, to all appearances: Anne Marie had a sense of how, precisely, the music should be and she had not been able to master it accordingly. “Everything I attempt is terrible,” she had said—in spite of all her critical accolades and all her professional success. Other doctors had tried and failed to break the barriers in Anne Marie, whose hands had taken on a life of their own, refusing altogether to work for her. Now it was Menlo’s turn and hope was high.

  Everett had been looking forward to his session with this prodigy. He loved all music and had thought to find some means within its discipline to reach her. She seemed so fragile, sitting there in the sunlight, and he had just begun to take his first notes when the door flew open and Louise, his secretary, had said: “I’m sorry, Doctor Menlo. There’s a problem. Can you come with me at once?”

  Everett excused himself.

  Anne Marie was left in the sunlight to bide her time. Her fingers were moving around in her lap and she put them in her mouth to make them quiet.