Dr. Rosanoff killed the power and the screen went blank.
“Should we put that to a vote as well?” He sat down.
No one spoke. Eli was utterly still, almost catatonic. Thomas stared at his father in disbelief.
Dr. Rosanoff turned to his son. “Our Eli is a veritable star on the internet. His earlier work has been rediscovered and reappraised.” Then, addressing Eli directly: “They brought you out of retirement, didn’t they? Sure, it’s all video apps and dark web downloads now, but it used to be good old-fashioned VHS.”
The magician slowly got to his feet. “I have enjoyed our time together, Dr. Rosanoff. But I do believe I will be going now.”
Dr. Rosanoff smiled at him. “And I do believe you won’t.”
The orderlies took a step forward, flanking Dr. Rosanoff. He opened a new folder, slid it across the table to the magician. There was a photograph attached, a mug shot.
The magician sat down. Didn’t look at the photograph. Didn’t need to.
Dr. Rosanoff flipped open the file. “Jeffrey A. Keshen, better known as Jeff. That is you, correct? Middle name Alwyn, from your maternal grandfather, Welsh, I believe. You’re thirty-six years old, born in Medford, but raised right here in Boston. You were enrolled at Bay State for two semesters. Started in business administration, and then switched to theology and religious studies at Boston College, dropped out soon after, worked as a children’s entertainer for a while, birthday parties, for the most part. Arrested on possession charges, released. Checked into rehab. Discharged four weeks later. Relapsed. Lost contact with family. You have two sisters, one brother, all older. Your father is a retired shop teacher; your mother ran a bakery down on Camden, which is still there, but under new owners. I understand their sticky buns are to die for. Still using your mother’s original recipes! Your parents are in Wakefield now, in a senior’s residence. Worried sick about their youngest child, I’m sure.” Dr. Rosanoff spread his arms. “And just like that, the magic is gone.”
Thomas felt his throat tighten. The magician—Jeffrey Keshen—was glaring at Dr. Rosanoff with a defiance undermined only by the wetness in his eyes.
“I’ve had enough,” he said. “I’m leaving.”
“No, you’re not. There are several outstanding warrants, Mr. Keshen. Parole violations, mainly. Six months served on narcotics-related charges, released on good behaviour, in and out of rehab. Unfortunately, you’ve stopped checking in with your parole officer. He must be worried sick as well. No doubt he’s been contacting your parents and siblings, harassing them every day, trying to track you down. I’m guessing it was right about then that you decided to shed your old identity and assume the aura of God. Quite the step up from where you were, wasn’t it? Must have been intoxicating.” And then, meeting the magician’s glare head-on, “I can’t let you walk out of here, Mr. Keshen. I would be remiss in my responsibilities were I to do so, and anyway”—he slid a second document across the table to him—“the matter is largely moot. You’ve been assessed as a danger to yourself and others, and I’ve been granted temporary medical custody. I’ve already spoken with your parole board, so for the next four to six weeks of observation and assessment, you’re mine.”
The magician turned to Thomas, but Thomas wouldn’t make eye contact, couldn’t bring himself to look at the man he thought he’d rescued.
“Addiction,” said Dr. Rosanoff, addressing the group as a whole, “is not unlike madness. It’s an alibi. An excuse. And like madness, it is a choice. To someone overwhelmed with pain and suffering, it may seem like the best choice, the only choice—an understandable choice, even—but a choice nonetheless.”
Thomas tried to say something, but Dr. Rosanoff was focused on the defeated magician in front of him.
“Opiates,” said Dr. Rosanoff, “such as morphine, OxyContin, Percocet, or—in your case—heroin, help trigger the brain’s reward centre, flooding it with dopamine. Stimulus and response. It’s the same chemical effect we see with food, sex, love. It’s all very simple. Craving, followed by release, followed by a growing dependency. Junkies, binge eaters, sex addicts, they’re all cut from the same cloth, all craving that extra dose of dopamine, that extra squirt of chemicals.” A sliver of a smile emerged. “But you get your dopamine from religion now, don’t you, Mr. Keshen?”
Thomas finally found his voice. “Dr. Rosanoff,” he said. “If I may interject.”
“Hold that thought.”
A worker in splattered coveralls had stuck his head in the door. “Sorry to interrupt, but you asked me to let you know when we were done. We used rubber-based latex, so there’d be less odour. You got pretty good ventilation already, so the fumes and such shouldn’t be too bad.”
Dr. Rosanoff rose, turned to Thomas. “Shall we?”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
IT WAS A WORLD gone white. Every surface—the floor, walls, ceiling, doors—had been painted over. Every surface had been rendered in stark eggshell. Bright lights, but no light switches: those were now covered by screw-on panels, also painted white. The amount of illumination in each room would be controlled elsewhere, as would the temperature and background music. Video cameras still peered down from up high. Each room now contained a single bed only; everything else had been removed: dressers, desks, chairs—gone. Even Eli’s HOME SWEET HOME had been taken away.
Thomas stood in the maze behind the walls, looking through the mirrored windows. An entire childhood painted over, every trace erased. He felt oddly elated. An empty buoyancy filled his chest. Television monitors had been installed inside each of the rooms as well, up high and protected by mesh. Thomas didn’t realize the significance of this until later. The TV monitors had been switched off, for now, the screens reflecting the rooms back on themselves.
“Don’t worry, Tommy. We’ll move everything back in after this is over. Restore things to how they were.” He was trying to reassure Thomas, but it had the opposite effect. He didn’t want his childhood restored.
“There were too many variables,” Dr. Rosanoff explained, as they peered through the mirrors. “Staying in a room designated for music might influence a subject one way, art another. It’s better to simplify, strip it down, reduce any possible outside influence.”
The three Christs were waiting in the hallway outside. Every room had two doors, one leading to the outside hallway, the other into the observatory maze behind the mirrors. Dr. Rosanoff met them in the main hall and led them to their newly renovated quarters. The rooms that had once been labelled Library, Music, Bedroom, were now named A, B, and C.
Even with the ventilation on, the rooms smelled faintly of paint thinner. It reminded Thomas of the antiseptic odour of an operating room. It reminded him of Amy’s studio. It reminded him of Amy. It was the smell of open-heart surgery.
Dr. Rosanoff herded his three patients into the first room.
“Mr. Wasser, this will be yours, but rest assured the other two are essentially the same. You won’t be alone, though. Each room is connected via intercom, so you will be able to hear what is being said in the other rooms, and vice versa. There will be no secrets here, gentlemen. These arrangements are Spartan, I know. But they don’t have to be. Anything you’d like, anything at all, we can provide. Ask, and it’s yours. All you have to do is denounce the other two men.”
Thomas turned, not sure he’d heard correctly.
Dr. Rosanoff continued to a deepening silence. “Deny their claims of divinity, and yours. That’s all you have to do. If you’re hungry and need something to eat, if you’re thirsty and need something to drink, if you’d like the lights dimmer or brighter, if you’d like magazines or a sofa, a Bible or a jigsaw puzzle. All you have to do is say, ‘I am not the Messiah, and neither are my friends.’ Rights are earned, not bestowed. Have trouble sleeping? We can play lullabies over the intercom. Cold? We will give you blankets. A late-night snack? Pancakes or coffee, anything you like, consider it done. Need to use the bathroom? Ask and an orderly will accompany you.
You have only to declare that you are not the Messiah. You don’t have to believe it—not at first—but you do have to say it. Behaviour comes first, beliefs follow. Denounce your claim to divinity and we have staff members waiting to provide you with whatever you desire. Isn’t that right?”
The orderlies standing by the door nodded.
Dr. Rosanoff smiled. “God is a habit of the mind, gentlemen. But we can change that.” He turned to leave, then looked back. “Oh, and don’t try to smash the one-way mirrors. They’re under protective plexiglass. They can’t be broken.” He put a hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Tommy?”
They left Eli to his room and escorted Sebastian and the magician to theirs. The doors clicked shut, locking them in.
Thomas accompanied his father up the staircase. “But—if there’s a fire or, or a . . .”
They walked through Dr. Rosanoff’s study to the control room beyond.
“Any interruption to the power grid and the doors open automatically. It’s perfectly safe. And anyway, they can leave their rooms anytime they like, stroll around the grounds, the gardens. All they have to do is tell the truth. That’s all we’re asking for. The truth.”
The small control room glowed in the light of the television screens. With Thomas sitting to one side, Dr. Rosanoff rolled his chair up to the monitors: three rooms, stark white, with a patient in each. From up here, they almost seemed interchangeable.
“I’m only interested in what is measurable, Thomas. In what’s observable.” As he spoke, he toggled the framing of the cameras like a parent fussing over a child’s collar on the first day of school. “We can’t observe someone’s mental state, we can’t measure ‘mind.’ What we can observe is behaviour. We can’t weigh a feeling, we can’t weigh an idea. Intangibles—such as emotional states, longings, fears, mental processes—we know that these exist because of the effect they have on our actions. We can quantify behaviour. We can observe it, we can measure it, we can alter it. You say their problems lie in their beliefs? I agree. And their beliefs are revealed through their actions. As I said, if you change the behaviour, the beliefs will follow.” He rolled away from the monitors, stared his son’s doubts into silence. “We are men of science. We do not traffic in intuition; we do not deal in wishful thinking. It’s not our job to pat someone on the hand and say, ‘Poor baby.’ Our job is to make them better. We aren’t here to massage someone’s ego. We are here to execute a surgical operation, to remove the problem, cleanly, precisely—and without wavering.”
Thomas was having trouble breathing. He opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t.
“Our habits define us, Tommy. What is personality? Simply a cluster of habits. Change those habits and you will alter the personality. Parents have been using reward and punishment to shape children’s behaviour since time immemorial. Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, carrot and stick: we’re simply taking a more systematic approach, that’s all.”
“They’ll resist.”
“Of course they will. But we know from the Baumeister studies that willpower is finite, that we can deplete it. ‘Ego depletion,’ I believe he called it. And it might only take something as minor as altering their circadian rhythms.”
“Sleep deprivation?”
“If you want to get emotional about it, yes.” He leaned in, watched Sebastian for a moment. As always, Amy’s brother was rocking back and forth, mouthing something silently to himself. “You want to help Emily’s brother? This is how we do it.”
“Amy,” said Thomas. “Her name is Amy.”
But Dr. Rosanoff wasn’t listening. “We take a four-step approach with Sebastian. First, we break down his resistance, force him to face his reality, confront his falsehoods. Next, we make him admit his behaviour is irrational. Third, we reprogram. We modify what he says, how he acts. If we can do that, his beliefs will change—and his madness will dissolve.”
“And the fourth step?” Thomas had only counted three.
“Repeat, if necessary. What we don’t do is medicate. We will not reduce them to biological functions. To do so would be to rob them of their dignity, their autonomy. We treat them like the free agents they are, as individuals who are capable of change. Human beings have an immense capacity to learn, Tommy. They only need the right conditions. I know, I know. Sleep deprivation, sensory isolation, behaviour modification. It may seem harsh. But it works.”
So does torture.
The air had become stultifying in the confines of the control room, crammed as it was with microphones, camera feeds, and reel-to-reel decks, but Dr. Rosanoff hardly seemed to notice, captivated as he was by the three figures on the TV monitors in front of him. Thomas could feel sweat forming like condensation in his armpits, on his forehead, in his brain.
“But what if—what if it doesn’t work? We can’t hold them like this forever. They aren’t prisoners.”
“Not prisoners, patients. And don’t worry, we’ll cure ’em, son. We’ll cure ’em like a side of ham!” He grinned at his boy.
Thomas’s objections seemed to be growing ever more feeble even as he became ever more concerned. “But I was trying to take a cognitive approach,” he said. “Where thoughts come first and the behaviour follows, voluntarily. I was trying to appeal to their common sense.”
Dr. Rosanoff wheeled around, peered at Tommy as if over a pair of reading glasses. “And how has that worked out for you?”
When Thomas failed to stammer out an answer, Dr. Rosanoff returned his attention to the monitors. He clicked the intercom to ON, watched the needle bounce on the first crackle of static. Put the mic to MUTE. “I understand what you’re saying, Tommy. But you got it backwards. Talking things through is laborious and rarely works. That type of therapy only begets more therapy. The quicker, more decisive approach is to start with behaviour.”
“But they were making progress,” Thomas said. “If you look through my transcripts—”
“I have,” said Dr. Rosanoff. “And what did I find? Conversations. Chit-chat. It’s little more than a compilation of anecdotes. Where is the quantifiable evidence, Tommy? Where is the science? The plural of anecdote is not data.”
Thomas could feel his face burn, was glad his father was too preoccupied with the recording levels and camera angles to notice.
“There,” said Dr. Rosanoff. “All set. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a dose of reality to inject.”
But, What if . . . “What if they aren’t denying reality?” Thomas asked. “What if they’re trying to cope with it?”
Something the magician had said came back to Thomas with undue clarity. They’d been speaking about Eli and the sadness he seemed to carry within him, even in the midst of rage. “His problem,” the magician had suggested, “is that no one cares about him. Only God.”
And if you take that away?
Dr. Rosanoff brushed Thomas’s concerns aside. “If that’s a ‘coping strategy’ it’s not going particularly well, is it?”
“What did you mean,” Thomas asked, “when you said, ‘God is a habit of the mind’?”
“I was making a point, Tommy. Like I said, we are defined by our habits.”
A conversation with Sebastian returned, a quiet moment of confession on the drive home after they’d visited the pond at Saint Mathurin’s, before the tire had ruptured, before Eli found Connecticut in the Bible, before Thomas had danced naked in the park. Sebastian, looking through the car window reflection at the night-fallen streets, was speaking to the magician as Thomas listened in. He’d only caught fragments of what Sebastian had said: “When my mother fell ill, I prayed and I prayed. But I couldn’t save her, I couldn’t save anyone.” Later, the magician would whisper to Thomas, in reference to the scars along Sebastian’s forearms, “I think he cuts himself as a way to make sure he is still there.”
Take away a person’s scars and what do you have left?
As these voices swirled around Thomas in a tumult, Dr. Rosanoff pressed the interco
m, leaned in, and spoke: “Gentlemen, if you would direct your attention to the TV monitors in your rooms.”
Thomas could see all three men look up, startled.
And with that, Dr. Rosanoff pushed the VHS tape into the deck and hit PLAY. A familiar image filled the screens in each of the three rooms, and with it the audio: a voice reminiscent of a ringside announcer proclaiming it was time to rumble. “Hobo WARRRS: Four! More explosive, more dynamic, more eye-gougingly good than ever before!” Dr. Rosanoff slid the volume louder and louder. Crude camerawork. Shaky visuals. The gleeful goading of an off-camera director. And, in the middle, wading through the carnage, was Eli Wasser, “The Hammer of God,” pummeling one challenger after another into submission.
The timorous restraint Eli had shown earlier now evaporated and he stood, head back, shouting at the ceiling of Room A in an incoherent jumble of rage. “Pharisees! Sadducees!”
On the Room B monitor, Thomas could see Sebastian, eyes clenched, hands over his ears, could hear him repeating a personal catechism, barely audible above the bombast of the Hobo Wars soundtrack: “God be in my eyes and in my looking, God be in my mouth and in my speaking, God be in my hands and in my actions.”
The magician, however, stood perfectly still in Room C, glaring into the camera while the cruelty continued unabated on the TV monitor over his shoulder. An out-of-focus Eli was now pounding a broken fist into the face of a man who was already down.
“Dad . . .” said Thomas, standing up, feeling queasy. “I really must protest. This is—”
Dr. Rosanoff held up a finger. “Just watch. Watch and learn. Consider this a lesson in tough love.”
Eli began throwing himself against one wall and then the other, bellowing like a stuck bull. From the way Sebastian reacted on the adjoining monitor, he must have been able to hear Eli’s assault through the walls. He could probably see it as well, the side of his room rattling with every blow. Sebastian held himself closer, rocked more frantically, repeated the catechism with ever more urgency. “God be in my heart and in my loving, God be in my end and my departure.”