The Shoe on the Roof

  Childhood, Thomas realized now, was like living inside a Grimm’s fairy tale. The milestones and key moments melt away, and you find yourself falling asleep and then waking up in a different place. Sometimes you fall asleep in the backseat of a car on the drive home and then wake up in your room, tucked under your Thomas the Tank Engine blankets. Sometimes you fall asleep in your stroller and then wake to find yourself at the supermarket. Fall asleep again and you wake up at a coffee shop as your mother visits with her friends, and sometimes you fall asleep to the sound of your mother laughing and you wake up to silence. A hospital room, a doctor speaking in hushed tones, your father holding your mother, your mother holding you. . . . And then you fall asleep again, and you wake up and she’s gone, and if you run down the hallway to the hamper, she’s not there. Years can go by between memories. According to the Rosanoff Stages of Development, Thomas’s mother passed away during Thomas’s “pre-concrete early operational stage,” when one’s sense of self is only half formed and still emergent. (It was the worst time to lose a parent, or the best, depending on your point of view.)

  Gothic gingerbread and curled cornices. Wrought-iron gates and latticework verandas. As the convoy of sedans pulled into the circle driveway, Thomas felt a familiar mix of nostalgia and nausea overtake him, what some might call dread (of an unspecified nature; see: SDM:III, Chapter 21). Oak trees and elm. Ivy draped across the windows like hair across an eye. A front stairway of the sweeping variety. The three Christs had been chauffeured to the Rosanoff home in separate vehicles (to avoid “cross-contamination,” as his father put it, referring to the collusive corroboration that often happens among mental patients when psychiatrists are not on hand to monitor and guide them).

  Dr. Rosanoff was waiting to greet them. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Follow me.”

  He led Thomas and the others up the stairway, past looming pillars and dark trim. It was all very familiar: the gravitas of the front doors swinging open like a piece of stagecraft, that final step into the rounded foyer—a foyer larger than his first-year dorm room, he realized—where the evening light filtered in from above through stained glass of a nonreligious nature, and suddenly he was home again.

  “Welcome to Kingsley Hall,” said Dr. Rosanoff.

  Beyond the foyer, a long corridor stretched out in front of them like a first-year art school study in perspective. The three Messiahs looked around, ill at ease. They seemed smaller somehow, less godlike. Eli was clutching his HOME SWEET HOME sign to his chest.

  “It’s a name that came with the building, I’m afraid,” Dr. Rosanoff explained. “It was originally dubbed ‘Kingsley Manor,’ but I changed that to ‘Hall.’ Less pretentious, more down-to-earth. I have a housekeeper and a cook. They will provide you with meals. If you have any dietary restrictions—commandments to avoid shellfish, say—please let them know. As for your day-to-day concerns . . . Ah, here they are now.”

  A pair of orderlies, unintentional twins with close-cropped heads and starched white uniforms, came down the hallway toward them. Their gait was less “medical staff” than nightclub bouncer, but Dr. Rosanoff assured everyone that they were fully qualified. “They’re here to help,” he said, though he didn’t say who they were here to help—or how.

  Eli attempted to roar his usual greeting, “Do I know you?!” but the question got lost somewhere inside his chest.

  The magician bowed slightly, almost gallantly, and said, “It is a pleasure to meet you,” but they were immune to his charms.

  “Come with us,” they said. “We have blood work to do.”

  “And lemonade!” shouted Dr. Rosanoff after them. “Make sure our guests are comfortable! Thomas, you come with me.”

  Thomas and his father walked down the hallway into the converging lines of perspective.

  “You’re concerned about something. I can sense it.”

  “It’s just—this is a private residence.” The patients had been staying at Thomas’s apartment, true, but that hadn’t been set up as a laboratory. This seemed different somehow.

  “Kingsley Hall is a registered psychiatric treatment facility. Limited in scope, of course, but fully registered.”

  “I grew up in a psychiatric facility?”

  “Technically speaking, yes.”

  They came to a small, unassuming side door. Dr. Rosanoff turned the key and they slipped in, behind the walls of the manor. They’d entered a narrow maze, a parallel world. Thomas and his father turned down one corner, then another, passing what appeared to be windows but were actually the obverse sides of one-way mirrors that looked into various rooms. A playroom, filled with oversized blocks. A library of children’s books, the walls brightly painted. A music room, more subdued, with an upright piano and cartoon treble clefs adorning the wallpaper. Each one, frozen in time. They looked like dioramas.

  “We’ll put Eli in the library,” said Dr. Rosanoff. “Sebastian in the music room. And—I’ll have some beds brought in for them—we’ll put our third guest in here.”

  They stopped in front of a boy’s bedroom, circa 1992. A time capsule complete with a racing car bed and spaceship blankets. The walls were painted soft blue, with stars.

  “Your old room,” said Dr. Rosanoff. “Brings back memories, no?”

  Thomas peered across oceans, across decades, to the bedroom on the other side of the glass. He could hear the muffled sound of music even though he knew none was playing. As a child, he’d had the run of the main floor, and the garden and the yard beyond, but his bedroom was windowless, almost soundproof. Only the sirens got through. At night, when he lay in bed, Thomas could hear the faint sound of ambulances and police vehicles in the city below, and he would feel comforted by it. A siren is not a sad sound. It meant help was on its way. Right now, somebody somewhere is falling down the stairs, drowning in a bathtub, clutching at their chest, stepping off a balcony. A siren means someone cares. It’s a lack of sirens that’s unsettling.

  “We’ll separate our test subjects,” said Dr. Rosanoff. “Set up three discrete case studies. We’ll need to manage their interactions with each other carefully, make sure the confrontational aspects are arranged in an appropriate fashion—anything less would be unethical. And of course, we’ll have to watch out for the cohort effect.”

  “But,” said Thomas, “isn’t that exactly what we’re doing here? Using the cohort effect to help them.” He looked over at his father. “I don’t think feelings of solidarity among patients are necessarily a bad thing.”

  “Yes, but it has to be done in a properly controlled manner. We’ll set up spreadsheets for data analysis, cross-reference their responses.”

  “But—but we won’t be observing them in a naturalistic environment. It seems sort of . . . contrived.”

  “Not contrived, controlled. We are removing any outside variables that might undermine the data.”

  “We’re manipulating events.”

  “That’s what an experiment is, Tommy. It’s life, but controlled.”

  “But—I didn’t think of this as an experiment. I thought of it as therapy.”

  “Same thing. Come along, there’s a lot to do.”

  Thomas stayed back, looked through the mirror into his old room. He could hear children laughing, music building, a voice asking, “We’ll still be friends, right?”

  Tommy, as a child: staring at himself in the mirror, shifting back and forth on his feet ever so slightly, mesmerized. His father would write: “Possible narcissistic tendencies?” But Tommy wasn’t looking at himself, he was looking through himself, or trying to. He thought he could see movement on the other side of the mirror. Was someone there?

  He still didn’t know the answer to that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  SISTER FRANCES BEDFORD PULLED slowly on the suture. It caught on the flesh for a moment, then came out, leaving a pink seam above the woman’s mouth. These were emergency room stitchings, quickly done and without the aid of self-dissolving threads. Triage always leaves a
scar.

  “Pass me a bit of gauze and some rubbing alcohol.”

  Thomas rummaged around in the tray, grabbed a handful of moist towelettes. “Close enough?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Hang in there, Helen. Almost done.”

  The woman’s face had been split from lip to nose. It was healing, more or less, but still . . .

  “Shouldn’t she have gone to a hospital to have those taken out?”

  “With no medical coverage?” asked Frances. “To sit for six hours, clogging up an already overextended community health centre when we can do it ourselves right here?”

  “I’m assuming those questions are rhetorical.”

  As Frances cleaned up, Thomas checked Helen’s blood pressure—arms so thin, the band went around twice and almost ran out of Velcro. He listened to her chest. A rattle in her upper airways, but not pneumonic. Not yet, anyway. “Expectorant and antibiotics ought to do the trick.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she croaked.

  “Oh, I’m not a doctor,” he said.

  “No?”

  “I’m just helping out.”

  “So, you’re more of an avid hobbyist?” she said in a quavering voice.

  “Something like that.”

  They came to the next cot: an emaciated woman, looking older than her age, sleeping fitfully. She was hooked up to a portable oxygen tank. Shallow breathing, pallid complexion.

  “Obstructive pulmonary?” Thomas asked.

  Frances nodded. “Chronic.”

  After they’d checked the woman’s vitals, Frances wheeled the cart back to her office as Thomas explained his latest venture.

  “Three of them under one roof? Interesting idea,” she said. “Not sure if it’ll work.”

  “My dad’s convinced it will.”

  “Your father’s involved?”

  “He’s kind of taken over. Moved the entire operation to Kingsley Hall, so that Sebastian and the others can be observed as unobtrusively as possible. The patients”—he almost said “test subjects”—“are settling in nicely, though. Their beds arrived this morning. Well, cots, really. We start in earnest tomorrow morning.”

  Her desk was buried beneath the usual drunken stacks of paperwork. “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Good Lord, no.”

  Frances turned her attention to the cold Nescafé in her cup. “Can you microwave styrofoam? If it’s on low? Probably not. Anyway . . .” She plugged in her kettle, waited for it to boil. “What are you going to do if none of your subjects concedes defeat? How long will you let this go on for?”

  “Good question. If we get stuck, maybe you could come down, pick Him out for us. It’s more your area of expertise anyway. It would be like a police lineup. Spot the Messiah. ‘That’s him! That’s the guy who ruined my perfectly good water, turned it into wine!’ ”

  Frances had the uncomfortable habit of staring into Thomas’s eyes when she asked a hard question. She did that now, as though studying his face for poker tells, looking for telltale slips of the mien. “How does it feel,” she asked, “being back in that house again? Stressful?”

  “More surreal than stressful. Like I’ve returned to the scene of a crime. Which is silly, because it’s just a home. My home.” And yet . . .

  “Don’t be too hard on your father,” she said. “He took your mother’s death badly. It was how he handled his grief: he was going to raise a son without sadness.” She poured the water into her cup without waiting for it to boil, stirred in some more powder. “It always bothered your father that he finally made it big with— What was the title again? Not The Good Son. The other one.”

  “My dad wrote a lot of books.”

  “You know the one. The pop psychology book.”

  “Be OK, Do OK?”

  Dr. Rosanoff’s earlier work had been promoted in the hyperbolic manner of book publicists everywhere as “a transformative new plan to alter human behaviour!” and it lived on even now in drugstore pocketbook format. Thomas liked Be OK, Do OK! the most of all his father’s books if for no other reason than that he wasn’t in it.

  “That’s right,” said Frances. “ ‘Change your actions, change your Self’—with a capital ‘S,’ as I recall. How we could stop smoking, find love, empower our inner child, and so forth, through the power of behavioural modification. What was it he said? ‘Give me a dozen healthy infants with the right conditioning, and I can turn them into whatever you like: a doctor, lawyer, beggar, thief.’ He wrote that book on a card table in a one-bedroom apartment by the campus while you crawled over him like a pet ferret.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “It broke his heart how your mother wasn’t there to enjoy the success that followed, after all those years of scrimping. I’m not so sure, though. I think their days together in that crappy little apartment on Parker Street were the happiest of her life.” Frances sipped her coffee, winced at the taste. “Do you remember that apartment?”

  “I do. Snippets, mainly. I remember the bathtub had daisy stickers on the bottom and rust rings around the drain. I remember playing hide-and-seek with my mom. Wrestling with my dad. I think I had a hamster at one point. It’s all sort of vague and cloudy.”

  “I used to babysit you. Do you remember that? No? Just as well. I wasn’t one for changing diapers. It’s a good thing Freud’s been debunked. You’d have had some serious anal-retentive issues by now with the saggy diapers you had to drag around while I was allegedly taking care of you.”

  “Frances, did my mother ever take me to church?”

  “Probably. I know she wanted to have you baptized at one point. That was a bone of contention with your father, I can assure you.” She looked at Thomas, tilted her head as though trying to bring him into focus. “Why?”

  “Nothing. It’s just—I’ve got this piece of music stuck in my brain. Religious music of some sort. A choral arrangement, weirdly familiar. I thought maybe it was a memory of my mother.”

  “You’re hearing music?”

  He nodded. Music—and voices.

  She stared, unblinking, into Thomas’s eyes. “Are we talking full-blown auditory hallucinations?”

  “What? No. More like a tune I can’t get out of my head.” Then, quickly changing the topic, “I’ll let you know how it goes with my three Messiahs.”

  “My Messiahs? Interesting choice of words.”

  “A figure of speech.”

  She pushed her chair back. “I have to say, there’s something disconcerting about the program you’ve set up. We’re all of us crazy in some way, Tommy. We all have our delusions about who we are. We’re all living under assumed identities. These three patients you described, they took on these identities for a reason. Assuming the role of a suffering saviour: it’s part of who they are. Ripping that away from them might do more harm than you realize. Patients are more than a sum of their symptoms.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Our problems are as much cultural as they are chemical. The question is not only who you are, but where you are and when you are. Soil and seed, Tommy. Soil and seed. You want to understand why a plant grew the way it did? You need to understand the seed and the soil it grew in.” She sighed. “Working here, I often feel overwhelmed. Look around, Thomas. I know that what I do is a stopgap measure, cleaning wounds and combing out nits. The bedsores are the least of the problems these people face. So much of the anguish I see here comes out of loneliness, out of feelings of isolation. And labelling mental disorders doesn’t fix any of that. It can even make it worse. We end up treating the label, not the person. There are immediate health concerns, of course—the bedsores I mentioned, substance abuse, bronchial infections—but what these people really need are better life skills, vocational training, coping strategies. They need a sense of purpose. Isn’t that what we’re all striving for? A slightly better version of ourselves? Maybe that’s the best any of us can hope for. That, and the basic human need to love and be loved. There’s no pill on earth that can replace that.”


  Thus ended the Soliloquy of Frances Mary Bedford, patron saint of lost causes, caretaker of the wounded heart, cartographer of the stopgap soul.

  Thomas laughed out loud. “That’s such a nun answer! ‘To love and be loved.’ Listen. There are four lobes and a billion synaptic connections in the brain, and none of them are labelled ‘meaning of life,’ or ‘God’ for that matter. Is that why you joined the Holy Order of . . .”

  “The Carmelites.”

  “Is that why you joined, to traffic in homilies? At least my mom came to her senses. But you kept going. Why?”

  “Why? I was greedy, I guess.”

  “Greedy?”

  “I couldn’t see myself getting married, limiting myself to only one person. I wanted to embrace as much of humanity as I could.”

  “Ah! You were promiscuous.”

  “Spiritually, I suppose I was. Rivers will always find the sea, Tommy. They aren’t looking for the sea: it just happens. It’s inevitable. It’s the interplay of gravity, geography, and time, but the fact remains: if there is a sea out there, a river will find it. Put a droplet of water anywhere on this world and it will eventually reach the sea.”

  “You and your metaphors,” he complained.

  “You and your numbers,” she replied.

  Frances smiled at him with a faint glint of malice (always unnerving when it comes from a nun). “Speaking of bedpans . . .”

  “Oh for chrissake.” But there was no point arguing with her. He rose to his feet, reluctant and truculent and grumbling in opposition. “You’re a mean old woman,” he said. “Anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Only you, all the time.”

  And so he went, herded along by Sister Frances, to do good in as begrudging a manner as possible.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  IN THE GUEST ROOM at Kingsley Hall, Thomas lay awake under the covers staring at the ceiling. The faint sound of church melodies bled in from a far-off room. He was now actively ignoring the music, if such a thing is possible. Tomorrow morning, they would start with Session One. (He’d tried to explain to his father that he and the Messiahs had already had three full sessions, but Dr. Rosanoff reset the clock to zero anyway. “A fresh start, a clean slate.”) As Thomas stared at the ceiling, details emerged like messages in a Magic 8-ball. Memories of mice and mazes and earlier experiments.