Tracy never judged him for it, but she
knew that Lars had spent too much time, having dreamed too long, before resigning himself to the
responsibilities of adult life and becoming the reliable human being he secretly and anxiously despised.
Which he did, and he more than made up for his late start by mercilessly driving himself into his work at
the media consultancy firm, sailing steadily and quickly from promotion to promotion, "skittering
across the pond like a stone" being his favoured stock expression when speaking about his career
fortunes.
Tracy could not say exactly when the
problems started, or she was in denial of all the usual symptoms that seemed too obvious to consider.
Perhaps, she justified to herself, it was natural for a husband to lose a little interest in his wife due
to habit or the stresses of work. Lars was not in the danger zone of alcoholism, but he seemed to drink a
bit too much at family functions and insisted on his after-work whiskey. He had spent a bit too long
tarrying with "the boys", coming home on Friday nights a touch sloshed, and though he seemed
affable enough, Tracy knew it was a front. Lars was anxious and depressed.
Four years ago, Tracy had delicately
suggested Lars go on medication. Of course, she didn't want to signal some sort of deficit in him that
would cause him to react defensively, so she gradually introduced the idea in a cushioned way, just enough
to make it seem to Lars as though he had come up with the idea himself. There was no problem in being
diagnosed a little on the depressed side, and his prescription was regularly filled with no more fuss or
attention than paying the water bill every month. If he was showing any signs of improvement, these could
have been illusory - Tracy's hope glossing over reality. In time, it did not seem as though the pills were
having any appreciable effect on his mood or behaviour; in fact, he seemed to be in a perpetual funk. She
felt it most strongly in the bedroom; their lovemaking sessions that were once a nightly storm of the
passions were now reduced to a monthly obligatory servicing of basic need.
The turn occurred one year ago when
Lars was suddenly flush with grand new plans. He started openly musing on a career change, something that
was far from prudent given his age and how well ensconced as he was at the firm. He also fiddled with
other ideas about exotic vacations, a left-field urge to take up rock climbing, and other suggestions that
were entirely out of Lars' staid character. Tracy met these desires with more alarm than welcome, coming
as they were in a steady stream that belied his unhappiness with life. The extremes did not stop there,
for she was beginning to suspect Lars of being attracted to a young, pretty office junior named Annabelle.
All Tracy could do was to helplessly
watch as her marriage was deteriorating, and as Lars was seemingly trying to recapture something he felt
he had lost, which he never had in the first place. Hilda, who was quite astute in detecting misery
in others no matter how well concealed, invited Tracy out for a few drinks after work. Having gone through
similar events herself, Hilda saw all the hallmarks of a woman in that kind of distress. After a few too
many drinks loosened Tracy's tongue, granting her license to break the confidence of her private life, she
confessed her own dissatisfaction with Lars. Hilda, with a matronly sense of care and control, sympathized
with her by a series of understanding nods and sympathetic "hmms", and traded her own story, but
followed this up with a recommendation that would resolve the situation.
"Have you heard of the Midlife
Crisis Response Service?" Hilda asked.
Tracy internally bristled at the
mention of the words "midlife crisis," perhaps far too indicative of mortality, commonality, and
something that happens to other people.
"No. What do they do?"
"When Trevor started acting up,
trying to prove his manliness and being reckless, I had nowhere else to turn. Whenever I tried talking to
him, he just blew me off by saying that I was becoming a nag and that I was trying to stifle him. I knew
he wasn't healthy upstairs, if you know what I mean, and most men go through this. It's what the good
people at the Crisis Centre call 'the denial cycle'. Trevor was having a hard time adjusting to the
reality that his best years were behind him."
"So the Crisis people specialize
in telling men this?"
"Gosh, no! Not in that way. They
have a philosophy. The hardest thing for a man to give up and accept is the loss of his youthful vigour.
The people at the MCRS counsel the man to not think that the best years are gone, but to consider that
different years are coming that have benefits not possible when one is young. Another problem is what they
call 'dream malingering'...That's part of what torments a man in crisis the most...all those foolish
notions of wanting to climb Everest, or all the things he wanted to do and never did suddenly come back to
haunt him with a vengeance. So, the counselling includes 'reality adjustments'."
"What's that?"
"They basically tell him that if
he wanted to, or was capable of achieving those dreams, they would have been done already. Men need to
understand that all that childhood and adolescent feeling of infinite potential are actually an illusion.
The second step is understanding that even if those dreams could somehow now be achieved, they would not
validate his existence beyond a very temporary and fleeting feeling of satisfaction. It really just masks
the real problem. The last step is the acceptance of limitations and that where they are in life at the
moment is exactly where they should be, to derive a little joy from what they have done rather than what
they haven't."
Hilda gave Tracy the number for MCRS,
which Tracy transferred into her cell phone. She waited at least four months before placing the call,
having done some research and a visit first
The central office of the Midlife Crisis Response Service was a converted fire hall. No one had bothered
to take down any of the old road signage that warned drivers that at any moment a screeching fire truck
would be bursting out onto the intersection, rushing to rescue a cat stuck in a tree. The logo of MCRS was
in raspberry lettering on a pistachio back board. The office was a bit too clean to the point of
sterilizing any trace of personality, and the usual women’smagazines were fanned out on a table in
the reception area. A few promotional posters adorned the walls: "Has He Traded in His 40-Year Old
Wife for Two 20s?", "His New Muscle Car is a Cry For Help!", "Time Moves Forward, But
He Refuses."
A bouncy man with bulging fish eyes and
a smile that refused to retreat from his taut face was standing in front of Tracy with his pen nervously
and expectantly tapping a clipboard.
"Tracy?"
"Yes?"
"I'm Dr. Hedley. My receptionist
tells me that your husband is currently facing reality deficit. Has he purchased a motorcycle, ATV, or any
other potentially hazardous vehicle in the last six months?"
He was talking very fast, with extreme
enthusiasm threaded with the comforting care of a concerned doctor.
"Oh, no, no. Nothing like
that."
"Oh, that's good...Sorry for the
rather abrupt question, but it is our regular procedure. We have to assess dangers and respond to those
immediately. Not to say that your husband isn't in danger, but just to see if he is currently in any
immediate danger. Let's go to my office."
Tracy dutifully followed the bobbling
man in his swishing lab coat, his walk that could be described as jaunty. They reached an office in a
series of self-contained offices each with a window facing the corridor with venetian blinds. He stopped,
turned, and gestured with his hand to enter the office first and take a seat. He breezed into the office
and immediately, as if by rote, presented Tracy with a colourful package with the MCRS logo filled with
informative pamphlets. He quickly jiggled the mouse and started clacking at the keyboards, presumably
starting a file.
The package was overwhelming. If Tracy
was not already overcome by her own initiative to seek help on behalf of her husband (and without him
knowing it, which seemed like a betrayal), all of the information arrayed in glossy brochures with their
streaming lingo was enough to make her dizzy. Her first impression was that not only was there seemed to
be a lot of information about this condition, but that these people took it seriously.
"I have to ask a few more
questions that our phone questionnaire did not ask. Do you mind? To your knowledge, is your husband on any
medications? Not just anything for psychological disorders, but any physical health medicines for the
heart, joints, and so forth?"
"No...Oh, wait, he takes a blood
thinner...Lapi...Lasi..."
"Laniplex."
"Yes, that's it!"
"Recreational drugs? Don't worry,
Tracy. This is strictly confidential."
"Not that I know of. Does drinking
count?"
"Yes!" he beamed, almost too
much. "But I was more aiming toward the illicit variety. But you've anticipated my next question. How
much, would you say, he consumes in an average week?"
His face was expectant, but
non-judgemental. There was something of the unnerving kindergarten teacher aspect to him. His desk
nameplate which read "Dr. Maximilian Hedley" was being eclipsed by its surrogate done up in
large, bubbly, child-like blocks, each shock neon cube showing the right letter in sequence to spell
"Dr. Max". There were far too many pictures of children as part of his desktop clutter, but
Tracy noticed the conspicuous absence of any photograph of a wife. Maybe he was unmarried and spent his
free time volunteering in one of those Big Brother-type services. She thought it too rude to inquire,
though Dr. Hedley didn't seem to mind asking her the most probing and intimate questions ranging from her
husband's eating and drinking habits to the mechanical details of their sex life.
At the end, Dr. Hedley beamed another
smile that was perhaps impossibly larger than the perma-grin he always had. "Tracy, you'll be happy
to know that despite your husband's late start, this is a very textbook case. He is the ideal candidate
for being properly reintegrated to reality by our patented methods with a success rate that is very
favourable."
"So, he's...normal?"
"Oh, we don't like the word
normal. It implies standard behaviours and that any difference will count as some sort of deviation. No,
we much prefer 'deficit' in the positive sense. So, with your consent, we can start immediately. There are
some legal forms - waivers and liability type stuff - and then the unpleasant business about your method
of payment."
"Will it cost much?"
"We scale payment on the basis of
treatment activities. There's no way of knowing in advance how long it may take. Some patients experience
a turnaround quickly, and others are more obstinate and require more aggressive methods. I suppose you can
look at it this way: would you put a price on your happiness, your marriage, and your husband's personal
well-being?"
"Aggressive methods?"
"Oh, please, Tracy, don't take
this to mean something...violent. We sometimes have to ramp up our means to induce positive response in
the patient. Nothing to be alarmed about!"
Tracy, in the same dizzying state,
signed all the requisite forms and was given what looked to be a small beeper with a red panic button that
would fit inconspicuously on her keychain. She was instructed to use it in emergency situations when she
felt her husband was a danger to her, himself, or others. To be used in extreme crisis situations, Dr.
Hedley informed her with an uncharacteristic sternness.
Little did Tracy know that she would
have to make use of this device much sooner than anticipated. It was affixed to her car key ring. It was
the very next day that Lars was having something of a breakdown, making a big ruckus in the basement in
search of sporting equipment. Offering to help him, Tracy was barked at and became the target of
misdirected aggression. He flew into a rage that resulted in a great fit of yelling and knocking over of
furniture. He didn't engage her in any physical violence, but she was very frightened. She pushed the
little red button.
Within twenty minutes, the doorbell
rang. She left Lars in the middle of his continued harangue and answered the door to see two very able
looking men in yellow sweatsuit uniforms, bearing the MCRS logo.
"We're responding to a call. Is he
here?"
She nodded and pointed in the direction
of the basement. By this time, Lars had come up to see where his wife had gone. Seeing the two men
advancing, he demanded what they were doing in his house. The two men were quite adept at subduing Lars
who struggled feebly against the well-trained personnel. One of them was able to open Lars' mouth and
force something in, massaging the throat to induce swallowing. After a few minutes of kicking, Lars'
struggling was beginning to lose its passionate force, reduced to a slow animation sequence. The two men
carefully assisted Lars out of the house and placed him inside a waiting van, seemingly modified from an
ambulance, also with the MCRS logo. One of them returned and, with strongly assuring honeyed tone,
informed Tracy that Lars was in very good hands and that they would be treating him immediately, release
expected the next day.
No attention has been paid the actual subject of what could be considered a kind of vaudevillian spectacle
(really: two men in bright coloured jumpsuits retrieving a man who is merely a bit angry, tossing him into
some converted ambulance, and whisking him off with lights flashing?). No one has yet to entertain that
figure who had always been content lurking behind the question mark, having that particular ability in
avoiding any detection by the light that would reveal his true nature for all to see.
First of all, Tracy's story did not
square with the truth, cobbled together from stale knowledge and a habitual failure to ask the right
questions. Lars no longer worked for the media consultancy firm, and even "firm" was misleading.
In fact, he worked for a kind of brainy talk-shop, a think-tank involved in the contemporary uses of
social media technology applied to business and political solutions. He was a star researcher with a bevy
of lucrative consultancy contracts, working in an open-concept environment that makes modern chic the
design prerogative of the same people who manufacture Lego. Lars was not only the top media geek, but he
also possessed the preternatural gift of viewing media in its Gestalt through visions of the mediascape -
a kind of a waking dream where he physically floated above and through a physical representation of all
media forms from past to present. He could view the affinity strands on ever-radiating sociometric stars
that depicted online social networks and pluck them like some alien harp. He could watch the pulse of
information flow on a global scale that made the human circulatory system seem hopelessly primitive. But,
it was on account of these visions that Lars eventually had a serious and debilitating breakdown. This
breakdown he managed rather well in disguising from anyone who saw him, including his wife. Masterfully
crafting his external appearance, his decision to leave the think-tank perplexed even his closest
colleagues (and came as a surprise relief to those who envied his talents). He did not leave without
having done some admirable work behind the scenes as a social media engineer for the mayoral campaign of
Tristan Frazer, but the successful conclusion to the campaign meant that Lars' usefulness had diminished
to that of nothing. After the excitement and satisfaction of having spearheaded a virtual media campaign
that would have rivalled the best tactical minds in military history, Lars returned briefly to the
think-tank as though it were a safe nest to indulge a breakdown long in the works. That had all transpired
eight years ago. Since then, Lars had been living exclusively from his savings. With the ruse that he was
still employed intact, his wife never suspected anything awry about his "going to work" every
morning and returning at the same time every evening in a usual state of post-work fatigue. He cultivated
the ruse with a few calculated lies, airy mentions of promotions and the like. His wife never truly
understood what it was that he did, and so it made no difference in not telling her what he did now. Every
morning, he would make his way to the university library and read for the entire day on whatever struck
his intellectual fancy at the moment. It would be tedious to follow that skipping rock of curiosity that
skimmed across a plenitude of subjects he undertook to educate himself on. On Friday nights, he would
drink with the few ex-colleagues he actually cared about in that previous life, which more and more seemed
to him an unfamiliar shadow cast by someone else other than himself. There was something in the works at
this point, alluded to by one of his ex-colleagues who had a habit of spilling potentially lucrative
contracts out of sequence. It appeared that someone was going to run against the now embattled mayor
Tristan Frazer, and that Lars' name had come up somewhat innocuously and thoroughly independent from any
knowledge that he had once worked for Tristan Frazer's camp. This prospect of changing roles to that of
the now vacant spot of campaign manager (the former one had been unceremoniously tossed for ineptness)
appealed to him. The candidate was a dark horse, an ex-journalist by the name of Dr. Jango, who had a
startlingly similar set of affectations and manner to that of the late journalist and icon, Hunter S.
Thompson - and, perhaps, with about as colourful a history. This would present a significant challenge in
the largely staid, inert, and conservative taste of this city of Leamingville.
On the night before his outburst and subsequent removal by the two burly MCRS people, he had been
continuing his research on the lives of eccentrics. He had wanted to understand the psychological
mechanics of those who had led the most eccentric lives in history, and tooled with the idea of engaging
in hands-on experience. Hence his somewhat offhand musings to Tracy about climbing mountains and the like.
He was also agonizing over his cover letter and how best to approach the bizarre Dr. Jango. Lars' research
revealed that Dr. Jango would hardly be interested in a job candidate who was dry, dull, and otherwise
perfect for the position. Dr. Jango seemed to be the type of person who would cleave to those with as much
flash and panache as him, and it was in this department that Lars was obviously in deficit. In order to
woo his potential employer, he had to sample becoming like his employer, to think as he did. The only way
to do that, reasoned Lars to himself, was to engage in some of the eccentric antics Dr. Jango himself had
undertaken.
One should also hasten to mention the
suspicion Tracy had of Lars' infidelity, if only to dispel it. Lars knew that he would, as campaign
manager, need capable assistants he could delegate to various tasks such as press releases and liaison
work. As a favour to an ex-colleague named Robert, he agreed to meet with Robert's daughter. Fortunately,
the usual blindness of a parent to the reality and faults of the child did not apply, for Lars was
pleasantly surprised by Annabelle's eagerness and fleetness of mind. She was well aware that her
employment would be doubly contingent on his acquiring the position and the say-so of Dr. Jango. Annabelle
was pretty, but this did not arouse interest in Lars, who was wholly focused on the task at hand. In
addition, Lars' apparent funk was merely his being preoccupied by his work, and the decrease in their
lovemaking was a direct result of his anti-depressant medication, which had all but chemically cooled his
libido.
And so it must have come as an
understandable shock when he was hauled away by those two men and herded off to the MCRS office. Once he
was pushed into the back of the converted ambulance, the two men quickly put him under restraints on a
gurney. He watched and seethed in both anger and confusion as the wash of street lights reflected off the
ceiling of the vehicle. Lying on his back, he could not fathom what all of this meant. Once they arrived
at the destination, the two men took Lars on his gurney through the back entrance of the facility where he
eventually made facial contact with Dr. Hedley, who had an implacable and mystifying serene smile on his
face as if all was as it should have been.
"You can unstrap him now. I think
he'll behave," Dr. Hedley instructed the men with a becalming tone. They did as requested with no
verbal acknowledgement, turned and left.
"Could you lock the -" Dr.
Hedley's voice chased after them, but was stopped by the closing of the door. "Sigh," he
vocalized resignedly as if this was the perpetual joke of an incorrigible and repetitive comedy. He
bobbled his way to the back door and drove the security bolt home before returning to Lars who was
anxiously awaiting explanation.
"Do you know where you
are?"
Lars shook his head slowly.
"Do you know why you are
here?"
Again, same gesture.
"My name is Dr. Hedley. You might
say that I am the head physician of this experimental institute. My methods may seem unorthodox at first,
but I mean you no harm whatsoever. Completely the opposite."
"Where am I?" Lars asked.
Embarrassed by the oversight, Dr.
Hedley placed a gentle guiding hand on Lars arm. "Midlife Crisis Response Services. We are here to
help. We received a distress call from your wife, Tracy, and our dispatcher sent our boys to fetch you. I
hope you weren't too alarmed, and I certainly hope they weren't too gruff."
"My wife called you?" Lars
queried incredulously.
"Tracy called our emergency
dispatcher. She must have had reason to believe that you were experiencing crisis, and so our policy is to
intervene immediately. Do not bear her any grudge for she is trying to help you. We all are."
"We? Help?...What?"
"There'll be time to answer all
these questions. Please, follow me to the orientation room."
Dr. Hedley delicately guided Lars to a
spacious and calmingly lit room with two oversized armchairs separated by a brushed steel table riveted to
the floor. For some reason, Lars fixed his attention to finding anything in this room that could be lifted
and thrown. He did not find any. The label on the door - a thumbtacked 8 x 11 plastic sheet with a paper
in it - did not say Orientation Room. It read "Safe Room". Dr. Hedley had Lars enter first and
then directed him to be seated on one of the disproportionately large armchairs. Lars felt like a child
sitting in a grownup chair, his entire body swimming in its vastness. Dr. Hedley took the opposing
chair.
"Now, Lars - may I call you that?
- you are here because, as I said, Tracy believes you are in crisis. She has had reason to suspect this
for some time. Now, I know what you are feeling...You are angry and in denial. The unfortunate
constellation of symptoms associated with midlife crisis usually goes undetected until too late, and that
can result in an episode. In extreme cases, where there is no treatment, episodes can be fatal. In the
less extreme cases, they can result in deleterious life changes that are abrupt, harmful, and
psychologically unhealthy. Midlife crisis should be considered under the same conditions as trauma. You
are experiencing trauma."
"I just had an argument with my
wife. That is entirely normal."
"Ye-e-es," Dr. Hedley
quavered in half assent and half skepticism. "It is normal to experience conflict with one's spouse
under regular conditions. However, in your case, your blow-up with your wife is symptomatic of something
larger and has nothing to do with what you perceive she has said or done. It is all about you, Lars. You
are lashing out because you are unhappy. You are unhappy because you have not achieved the proper level of
peaceful acceptance."
"Acceptance of what?"
"I can see we have a lot of work
ahead of us. I don't generally do overnight calls, and we usually keep our patients safely secure in rooms
such as these to 'sleep it off' as they say. What I mean is that you have not accepted your limitations or
your awareness of your own mortality. You fight nobly against it, I am sure, but there are some battles
not worth fighting since they are unwinnable. The road to acceptance is a long one, and it can prove even
more challenging than fighting a battle against the inevitable reality of aging. I was like you, Lars. I,
too, waged war against the encroaching reality of aging. I blamed everyone and everything else for my
unhappiness, for having squandered my youth and not done the things I should have done. We here at MCRS do
not believe in the words 'should have'; what is past is past, and we must orient our present toward the
reality of what is to come. Many of our patients have the same behavioural pathology, so you're not alone.
There is something seemingly unfair about life, the way it gives and takes away."
"I have no idea what my wife
signed me up for, but I haven't given any consent...and I certainly am not interested in being fed all
these platitudes."
"Stop fighting, Lars; now you want
to fight against me and MCRS, but that is just a misdirection of your true unhappiness, your lack of
acceptance. If you want to be technical, the form your wife signed on your behalf does not require the
patient's consent. MCRS and its affiliates are governed under the Mental Health Act of this province,
thereby legally assigning the right to a spouse power of attorney when there is a suspicion that the
patient may be of unsound mind and requiring emergency treatment. According to the testimony provided in
the pre-diagnosis forms your wife has filled out, and by my opinion as a physician and a mental health
practitioner, I would declare you of unsound mind."
There it was: the threat of being
branded unfit, and Lars searched his memory to locate all of the likely testimony Tracy could leverage to
make that label stick.
Lars was asked to bed down for the night and would receive a wake-up call the next morning. When he
protested about work, Dr. Hedley waved off the concern with a claim that Tracy would handle it.
The next morning arrived and a beaming,
chubby woman looking the part of a nurse welded into that of a camp organizer came chirping into the safe
room with a jubilantly shrill ‘good morning.’ He was given a healthy breakfast, and he noted
that on the tray was a familiar set of pills: his prescription antidepressant and the blood-thinner
Laniplex. These were in a small and stout paper cup used in psych wards, ribboned with one of those
minimalist quasi-flowered motifs like a small sneezing florid jetty. Almost as promptly as he spooned the
last of the single-serve yogurt and obediently washed down his two pills, the same woman returned and
herded him out of the safe room and into another room, luridly covered with age-affirmative posters, a
circle of PVC chairs, and a coffee decanter towering over a basket of creams and sugars and diner-style
bone-white coffee cups. He was not alone, for he saw Dr. Hedley and three other men, two of them confused
and perhaps irritated and impatient.
"Lars!" Dr. Hedley greeted
with warm exaggeration. "I'm sorry, I must check myself. Do you prefer Mr. Purcell? We prefer
informality, so you can call me Max if you like."
The two confused men looked up at Lars
as if somehow his sudden appearance would explain everything. Lars had already looked at them for the same
reason, and came to the same conclusion: they knew as much as he did. The one man, a rather bony affair in
a high-buttoned shirt that seemed to have the creases from being worn right from the cellophane package,
picked at a fluff on his arm and exuded a strange serenity that bordered on snobbishness.
Max. The name went along with the
smarmy tone and appearance of the man. It was a name seemingly wrapped up in one of those itchy, thick
woollen sweaters with some ugly pattern.
"This is Tom, Greg, and
David," Dr. Hedley introduced, each of the men giving some kind of nod when their name was called.
"And this, everybody, is Lars. Now, we have three new members in our Sharing Group. David, would you
like to explain the purpose of the Sharing Group?"
The serene bony man dutifully complied.
"The Sharing Group is part of our cure, if you like, the way we resolve our reality deficit. I've
been attending the group now for six weeks. If I can give you any advice, it would be this...You see, when
I first came to group, I was like you: confused, angry, maybe even a little resistant. But you cannot
resist the process. You really shouldn't. I know it will help each and every one of you as it continues to
help me. It's like a men's group, a getaway from the hustle and bustle, a retreat where we can share what
we feel without ridicule," he said, trailing off now that he had run out of canned feel-goodisms.
As if correcting or adding to what was
said, Dr.. Hedley picked up the thread: "The aim of this group is to isolate the core issues of our
deficit and adDr.ess them in a spirit of non-judgemental exchange."
"It sounds like AA to me,"
sniffed one of the new arrivals, Tom. "If Jesus comes up, I'm out this door."
"No, this is not a traditional
therapy group," Dr. Hedley responded with equanimity. "Unlike groups such as Alcoholics
Anonymous, we don't preach that you are forever helpless, nor do we merely share stories without matching
these with good therapeutic suggestions. This group is one of discovery and healing, but MCRS' program
does not involve mere passive healing. Our mandate is balanced therapy: disclosure and response. But we
will talk more about that once our preliminary sessions are completed. So, Tom, would you like to
start?"
"Start what? Confession? I was
hauled off in the middle of the damn night and ended up in some kind of therapy zoo. If you're asking me
to confess to some sort of problem, you're way off base."
"Resistance," David said
sadly, shaking his head in disappointment. Lars was beginning to see that David was some sort of suck-up
to Dr. Hedley, a kind of therapist's familiar, and he feared that he himself would be brainwashed into
becoming some sort of convert.
"Tom, there is a reason why you
are here, and I can honestly tell you it is because your wife adores you."
"Then she can buy me a chainsaw or
a new drill, not have me manhandled in the middle of the night to be sent to some kind of mental health
spa."
Dr. Hedley, unperturbed and perhaps
immune to the common hostility of new arrivals, turned his attention to Greg, who was far more concerned
than suspicious. "Greg, tell us why you think you are here today."
"I guess because my wife thinks I'm sick. Maybe I am. I know I just can't shake this terrible feeling
- it's hard to describe. It's like anxiety, but I feel tired and joyless all the time. It's like despair,
but not that serious. Sometimes I just want to run out into the woods and scream. Other times I just want
to sleep forever. Sometimes I feel hopeless and think: what's the point of it all? I feel uninspired and I
watch as younger colleagues are coming up with all these fresh ideas that I used to get. I feel like some
kind of automaton."
"What is it that you do for a
living, Greg?" asked the doctor.
"I'm a graphic designer, and a lot
of people don't know that it is a highly competitive profession, and that it favours youth."
"Okay, thank you, Greg. Let's
return to that in a few moments. I think you are coming close to expressing your issue. Lars, tell us why
you think you're here."
"My wife is overreacting. I can
see that quite clearly. I'm sure her intentions are good, but it fails to take the facts into
account."
"Which are?" Dr. Hedley
pressed, wearing a blatant expression of being unconvinced.
"That I live a kind of secret
life...That doesn't sound right. I'm a private person and I just do my own thing. I have a few personal
and professional projects I'm currently pursuing that Tracy doesn't know about. I really don't want to
trouble her in thinking that our security is threatened - which it isn't - but it can be hard to explain
to her that I'm not the type of man she idealistically envisions. You know, the plain nine-to-five type.
I'm more of a free spirit, a nomad who follows his own interests."
"You are what we at MCRS call a
'self-denial expert'. You see, this wanderlust you are feeling, this mania for populating your life with
interesting projects, and the secrecy by which you conduct them indicate very strongly that you are
dissatisfied with responsibility and structure. It is a very common thing, no matter how eloquently you
state it, how you justify it to yourself. It is, in sum, your way of trying to recapture the
tumultuousness of your youth. Rejecting the structure of everyday life is a sign, Lars. I think all of us
here suffer something similar."
"I don't buy your
characterization," Lars said, not meanly.
"Let me continue. Memories are
tricky things. Nothing is terrible that the mind does not make so, say the Stoics, but the same is true of
the good. Memories are a lot like reading a horoscope: you pick out the things you want and conveniently
discard the rest. So, in our case, we may tend to romanticize the past. I mean, who doesn't? The wild and
carefree days of youth, the feelings of invincibility and future promise, the risks we took, the nights of
drinking and debauchery...Of course, it all sounds so idyllic! Who wouldn't choose to relive those days?
However, what we conveniently forget is all that came between those high times, the loneliness, being
broke, the uncertainty, the confusion. All of that is masked by memory. I think what we forget is the only
reason we enjoyed those good times, the only reason they had value, was because we secretly knew one day
they would come to an end. But all those good times must end; eventually, it is closing time at the bar
and time to return home. This doesn't mean that good times do not continue to await us, but they can be
different. They must be different since it would be monotonous to do the same things."
"I sense contradiction here,"
said Tom. "On one hand, when I look at all these silly posters telling me to embrace my structured
life as something good, that there is joy in everyday repetition, I'm supposed to...what?...enjoy the
repetition of it? And then you tell us that variety is the spice of life, that we should seek to do
different things to avoid monotony."
"Modest differences. Manageable
differences. Differences that do not clash with reality. Part of our therapy will be in exploring how we
can still have fulfilling lives by choosing minor differences to satisfy our natural need for
adventure."
"Sounds like a lot of bullshit to
me," said Tom, arms folded across his chest. "What kind of differences? Take another route to
work? Try a different flavour of soda pop? Mismatch my socks?"
"It needs not be so forced and
banal, Tom. There is a world of different things you can do that appeal to the reality of our
circumstances as aging men. Why not volunteer as a peewee softball coach or organize a road trip with your
spouse to visit a small town? You can do anything just so long as you make it conform to the MCRS Ratio.
Every chance you take should be equal to an honest appreciation of your life circumstances with all its
limitations."
After having endured this insufferably
toxic men's group fiasco with all its scudding between skepticism and worn platitudes, Lars began steering
his thoughts to the root cause of all this: his wife. His anxious, wheedling, nervous, overreactive wife.
This would not last, for his attention was biffed back to Dr. Hedley, who was now addressing Lars with a
kind of flocculent, mushy tone one would use to console? a child.
“Lars, I think we can all agree
that we've all been self-denial experts. But, what can we do about it?”
Lars was becoming internally rattled by
what seemed like Dr. Hedley's endless self-congratulatory manner of being some kind of survivor, like he
had somehow pried the crucifixion nails out of his own hands and feet and lived to tell the tale. There
was the hideous stench of intellectual vanity about him mixed with the suffocating loam of padded therapy
better suited to juvenile malcontents. But lurking somewhere behind Dr. Hedley's vinyl-sheen grin was
something of a maniac, a psyche out of balance that secretly enjoyed jiggling the small black pit inside
the rotten fruit of his own penchant for the absurd. Lars had seen this look only once before belonging to
a clinically disturbed woman who claimed that she could launch rainbows out of her own vagina. No, there
was something quite off about Dr. Hedley, something – if not sinister – that threatened a
vicious attack against sanity. Dr. Hedley was about to propel himself into another mushy series of
condescension for the benefit of his wobbly flock.
Tom was a textbook case of resistance
to therapy. It was obvious even in the way his arms were folded across his chest in a defensive posture,
the smug skepticism slathered all over his face, the suspicion-flecked and fixed gaze like an alert cat
anticipating attack, and the smug, snappy tone of his voice. The sad thing was, Lars knew, that as such a
prosaic resistor, he would be the first to fall to the trickery of psychotherapy that had more than ample
experience with resistance – be it from unyielding patients to cleverly defending the legitimacy of
its profession from gangs of nay-sayers.
“I wanted to return to your
secrecy, Lars. This is, after all, a Sharing Group, and I don't want you to think that anything you say
here will drift outside of this room.”
“I don't know if I feel
comfortable calling what I do secretive. I just do things and prefer not to be bothered when I do
them.”
“Ah, but Lars, we can give all
sorts of names and justifications to our secretive behaviour, but it is always indicative of the same
thing: a problem. We hide things from our loved ones because we are essentially embarrassed by what they
would think. We then play the denial game to cover for our own reality deficit.”
“It so quickly fouls up our
life,” chimed the ever-eager David.
“Okay, so how long is this
caring, sharing session?” asked Tom. “I have stuff to do.”
“We meet for one hour,”
said Dr. Hedley. “But new patients are not released for a period of one week for full examination
and what we call Buffering. David here comes voluntarily every week.”
“What?” thundered Tom.
“Are you saying we're stuck in this loony bin for a goddamn week? No bloody way. I'm leaving. This
is against my will, and I never gave my consent. You just try to stop me.”
“I truly think it is in your best
interest to comply, Tom. You have been deemed unfit at the present time, and your spouse assumes power of
attorney if you are in any way deemed a threat to yourself or others. I won't bore you all with the legal
mumbo-jumbo, but I can say that you are not free to come and go as you please – with the exception
of David here.”
Lars suspected as much. Tom was
outraged, Greg was perplexed, but Lars was far from surprised. An operation like this would need legal
assurances to keep patients sequestered. Lars worried more about the effect this therapy would have, and
if the MCRS slogans – buffering, self-denial expert, reality deficit, and the like – would
become the mantras of the brainwashed. Would he, too, come out of this treatment speaking this MCRS
gibberish, perhaps even imposing it on others in an act of insistent conversion?
The pargeted speech of Dr. Hedley
hunted after Lars as he was released from the cultish clutches of the Sharing Group and led to the back of
the facility that seemed now to sprawl in size, a tesseract of some sort where the interior was
paradoxically more capacious than its misleading exterior. There was a series of small dorm-rooms already
fitted with the basic accoutrements and impedimenta of living: a single bed, night table with the kind of
characterless lamp one would overlook in a hotel room, a modernist armchair with no arms and upholstered
in dark forest green canvas-like weave, and a mute and featureless grey industrial grade carpet that
yawned across the entire room ending succinctly at the rolling track of a small closet door and at the
metal lip that divided the room from a small bathroom covered in blank white lino. The room was not
completely bereft of items since there was a thin book on the night table that exasperated Lars:
“Closing the Reality Gap: A Guide for the Middle-Aged Male” authored by none other than Dr.
Max Hedley. The arrogance and vanity of the conspicuous placement of the book with no other possible
distractions or options such as other books or a television suggested clearly that Lars was expected
– nay, forced – to fill the empty quarry of boredom with the mush of Dr. Hedley's writing. He
was, at first, sleuthing quietly around for something, anything, else to do, but found nothing else. The
bed was firm and without any cushy frills, the pillows hospital grade, and there was the smell of a recent
bleaching emanating from the bathroom imposing upon the room its clinical, sterile perfume. The carpet was
still newly laid, Lars reasoned, for the formaldehyde could still be detected, battling for olfactory
supremacy against the other rivalling chemical scents. There was a small hermetically sealed window from
where he had a view split in half between criss-cross mowed back-lawn and a sparsely populated parking lot
belonging to the kitchen supply store next door. Blocking his view of the skyline was a few heavy branches
from a stubborn common ash that seemed to mimic the stolid order of the MCRS building. No doubt, Tom and
Greg would be housed in similar, if not identical, conditions in this series of featureless dorms.
“Beware of a culture that only
has one book,” the thought came unsolicited in Lars' mind. And there that one book sat, in
menacingly saccharin, near-bubble font upon a cover canvas of jaundice yellow. Was the title font comic
sans? It looked terribly amateurish for a book and he reasoned – rightly – that it was
self-published. He had to resist for as long as possible the urge of boredom to lie on the bed and leaf
through that svelte self-published atrocity, that ego-crime, that propagandistic tool to pulp his
otherwise critical mind to receive the catch-phrase soporific of Dr. Hedley's quasi-religious therapeutic
message.
Why was Lars so suspicious of Dr.
Hedley? Surely there was no real threat, and that this hokey midlife crisis psychological boot camp was
just another kind of support group like AA, albeit a bit more aggressive in its methods. Lars pined to be
given the opportunity to roam from this place, to pick up on his itinerant research at the library rather
than to be a prisoner in this little clinical jail. Prisoner? The thought had not occurred to him that he
was incarcerated – oh, under the best of intentions, yes. Why had he been so passive, whereas Tom
was defending his own liberty?
Lars attempted to retreat to his own
mind to cure his boredom, but there was something so arid about this place that it exerted its vacuous
pressure upon his thoughts, rendering them at a fuzzy distance. Was there something with the ventilation,
he thought, and then put that away as quickly as it came so as not to build up an entire architecture of
useless paranoia.
After a few hours, Dr. Hedley knocked,
then, without waiting to be invited, poked his head inside. “Lars? You must be hungry. Let's all go
to dinner.”
The way he said it sounded as though
they were all going out for a lavish meal at a posh restaurant where waiters would be on hand to refill
glasses with expensive wine served from wicker baskets, rather than some microwavable culinary failure in
a sterile and overly-lit cafeteria. Lars could tell that Dr. Hedley's nonchalant, sweeping glance over the
entire room was designed to see if the book had been touched, which it wasn't.
Despite obvious attempts at office-ware
frugality, Lars was impressed with the financial scope of the operation in hiring a healthy stable of
staff, emergency vehicles, and these lodgings for patients. Simply the taxes, insurance, and commercial
lease of this bulky property must have been formidable. This thought drove Lars to the inevitable
conclusion: that this must be costing Tracy – i.e., indirectly him – a small fortune. It
certainly couldn't have been cheap to sustain a service like this one. Was it subsidized by the
government? He wanted to obtain the answer to this question in the hopes of indirectly answering the more
personal question of how much this was costing him. It was highly unlikely that the government would
subsidize such a niche service any more than it would the homeopathic jungle of chiroquackery,
aromaterrorism, or elective cosmetic surgery for the obsessively narcissistic.
Dinner, as it was called in name alone,
would prove just another machination, another indoctrination session as Dr. Hedley tended to his wary
flock, giving forth in gushing feel-good babble and platitudinous patter. Although “crisis”
figured prominently in both the name of the service and what it purported to cure, the word was entirely
absent and avoided in the expression of the cure itself, and barely anything but the most obligatory
traces of it appeared in any of Dr. Hedley's therapeutic literature. Instead, the usual glossy
generalities, slick optimist and vacuous slogans were carved into the discourse – a fluffy salad of
new age terminology mitigated for the more serious-minded by brash, pro-active, and largely meaningless
strings of corporate-speak designed to inspire courage. The entire recovery road of the discourse was
composed of vast semantic potholes the recipient would dutifully fill in with his own favourable
interpretation. Slogan. The word rankled Lars, remembering as he did reading Elias Canetti's Crowds and
Power. Slogan. Derived from the Scottish highland sluagh-ghairm, or war cry of the dead. Lars was on
familiar terms with the term “slogan,” having worked as a campaign message manager for an
embattled incumbent mayor, smuggling the viper back into his den. The word “slogan” horrified
Lars more than “crisis” ever could. Was this the scene of a therapeutic siege against the
crumbling ramparts of Lars' psyche, a sloganeering war for psychological dominance in a stand-off of
wills? Would Dr. Hedley's slogans of slush finally overwhelm the jagged points of Lars' default critical
reasoning, leaving him swamped in that unbearable miasma of pro-active gobbledygook, boring everyone
within range with endless preaching of his own recovery? Would be become a convert of Dr. Hedley?
The four men – Greg, Tom, Lars,
and the proselytizing doctor – had been joined by a new victim, Viktor, a bitingly witty professor
with an evident air of proudly archaic vaulting homosexuality. With one eyebrow in perpetual half stroke
in the air, Viktor looked to be in constant amused disbelief. Each of the men had the same meal on the
same beige plastic trays: some slab of meat only vaguely resembling in appearance and flavour as belonging
to the bovine family, wilted greens, two globular scoops of what postured as mashed potatoes, and a small
sundae cup of what could have been raspberry or some-other-berry crumble. Standard cafeteria fare.
“Confusion, anger, doubt, and
desire,” Dr. Hedley launched without preamble, holding a gravy-sopped cut of the meat slab on the
end of his fork as if it were a baton, “makes for an unpalatable stew.” He paused to stick the
meat-like portion in his mouth, perhaps completely oblivious to the connection between what was being
eaten and what was being said. “But it also marks what we call the Great Emotional Transition, or
GET. GET is not the end of the road, but the beginning.”
Why was it, thought Lars, that so many
of these hokey, cliché-ridden therapy gurus resorted to acronyms as if it lent them any
credibility? Were we to be impressed by the acronym, or was this just one more of those mnemonic devices
of propaganda?
“O life, O roads, how the
metaphor has been buried so many times only to be exhumed and made to dance its clumsy little number for
us yet again in the mouths of uninspired men,” quipped Viktor.
“Viktor, please,” Dr.
Hedley said, pointing his darkened brow toward Viktor like a warning. “I'm only using a manner of
speech, not writing poetry. Let's absorb the essential message. As I was saying, GET is part of the
natural movement of all men of a certain age, but some of us have a bit more difficulty making the
transition.”
“And if this is so bloody
natural,” interrupted Tom, “D'you think being shut in some psych ward is natural,
too?”
“Tom, don't presume to lecture so
confidently on what is normal and what is not, or is it that you think there is nothing abnormal in your
'appreciation' of scat pornography?”
Lars expected Tom, who looked more than
a capable scrapper, to upend his tray and make for the doctor's throat. But, no. Instead, Tom was frozen
in place by a look between hatred and horror. It was a low blow, for Dr. Hedley had obviously aired a very
confidential detail in Tom's file for all to hear, but it sufficed the purpose: Dr. Hedley would not
endure wayward pupils for too long. Tom's mouth was half open as if he had forgotten how to chew or speak.
Dr. Hedley had won, effectively unmanning perhaps the manliest of the group, sending a silent
shockwave of equal punishments to come in response to any further insubordination.
Without breaking stride, Dr. Hedley
continued: “The way we get through GET is to treat each of these items in our psychological stew
with isolated care. If we are confused, let's ask why we are confused, and about what. If we are angry,
what are we angry about, and is it worthwhile to remain angry about those things we simply cannot change?
If we doubt, is it ourselves we doubt rather than all those others in our lives we have so sadly made the
target of our unresolved selves? If we desire, is what we desire practical and feasible given the
conditions and circumstances of what we really are? I think you will find the way through GET explained in
more detail in the book each of you have in your rooms. I urge you to read chapters one and two tonight,
complete the questionnaire at the end of chapter two and really reflect on your answers. Once we have done
that, we'll be ready to move onto Phase 2 during Sharing Group.”
A mix of stoicism and new-agey bullshit
with the whiff of religion and cobbled first-year psych class. That was what Lars felt was in store if he
dared to sift through that suppurating book, abutted with false solicitude.
The doctor was the first to finish his
meal and lay his paper napkin upon his tray as if this were a candlelit restaurant. There were no further
outbursts, given the almost palpable fear that was generated by Tom being rebuffed by a doctor entirely
willing to brandish confidential details, to twist them in his hands and in turn twist those who would not
bend voluntarily to his will. He had no qualms whatsoever when his purpose was what gave him the ultimate
focus: to retrain and fashion them as proof of his curative powers. Dr. Hedley made polite and
non-committal banter, asking after the condition of their lodgings and so forth. All the patients were
herded back into their rooms, each of them retreating as the silence cocooned each of them in an anxious
solitude. On his way back to the room, Lars glanced at a plastic yellow sandwich board used by the
janitors, announcing caution in three different common languages. The board depicted one of those standard
stick-figures that looked more like a mutated exclamation mark attempting to make a foul line goal than a
man in the midst of slipping. The board was mutely protecting the shame of a floor that had wet itself.
Another night in this well-lit quack shop, Lars thought to himself. He could hear Viktor's rasping cough
soughing through the baseboard vent, the kind of cough that reveals its identity as it carries the voice
with it. It looked like Viktor would be in the neighbouring cell. After an hour, the entire place felt
like a mad vibrating box as Lars stared in dread at the unopened book on the night table. Would he be
forced to peel through each flimsy POD-printed layer of Dr. Hedley's candy-psych self-help book? He dared
not even pick it up for fear that it could sully his mind merely through touch, like an osmotic
liquefaction of the brain. Instead, he pulled aside the heavy drape with its slightly dusty netting.
Looking out at the lot, which was now empty and ineffectually lit by the sad glow of the kitchen supply's
meagre light, and then looking at the now completely black expanse of backyard, and then noticing that the
ash was neither obscured nor well-lit, as if it had quietly absorbed its own illumination and shadow.
Stepping away from the window and going toward the bed, he noticed a stranger among the child-proof orange
pill bottles. A white bottle with high shoulders squatted next to the Laniplex. Temazepam, 20 mg. He
picked the bottle up and stared at it without registering what was printed on it before breaking the
confused trance and pitching it in the tiny waste basket that was nested beneath the night table. He
barely registered this presumptuous attempt by Dr. Hedley to drug him, with an anti-anxiolytic no less, a
soporific that would only render him more compliant to the “treatment.” And why had he, if he
was such a risk, be trusted to have his prescription in his room and not given to him in supervised
dosages? Could he not neck them all and secure his release to a nearby hospital? No, his thoughts were
orbiting a different yet related issue.
Lars reconstructed what must have been
the scene that transpired, that terribly misguided signature snaking its way across the MCRS contract
form, rushing to push her husband-the-problem into the care of someone else, closing the betrayed loops on
her married name as if somehow they safely lassoed a neurosis that properly belonged to her and her alone.
Just as she dated beside the cursive version of “Purcell” (Lars was deeply suspicious of the
intelligence of those who had elegant handwriting in the era of its decline in necessity), Lars was now
the quarantined property of MCRS and she had effectively abdicated all responsibility. Lars would have
half expected his emotional distance to be answered by a denial-of-sex attack rather than this sangfroid
vengeance meted out with such legal precision. He could have at least countenanced the mock justice of her
usual behavioural tactics, the passive-aggressive sort or the manipulative withholding of sex like her
body was some lolly she could just snatch away for the purposes of teaching him a lesson. Not this. This
was a whole other league of treachery he would never have anticipated. Worst of all, it was a punishment
being exacted allegedly for his own good, for his mental well-being, under the false banner of care. In
Lars' eyes, he wondered if Tracy was just stupid and gullible, or if there was some design in hiring this
psycho-fraud mercenary to punish him on her behalf. This seemed out of her ken, given that Tracy was more
the type to gibber about with no plan but to indulge her own excitable nature.
He would have completed his thought had
a bolt of laughter not rattled the baseboard vent, sending out a tinny vibration in its wake. The laugh
belonged to Viktor who was finding something amusing, but not in a kind way. There was no doubt what the
risible cause was, for every room had the same contents – a coordinated boredom and nothingness that
centered on the only alternative: to read Dr. Hedley's book. Viktor's laugh was streaked with an obvious
tone of derision and disbelief. It was so horrible, it was comical, and for perhaps a more sophisticated
mind like Viktor's that had been well-nourished on a diet of profound metaphysical poetry and all that
great literature and ideas had on offer, Dr. Hedley's own attempts at being equally profound must have
struck Viktor as the grossest of farces. At least he was deriving some humour from his circumstances, Lars
thought to himself, wishing he had the same appreciation for dark humour to cope with this absurd
situation. Perhaps Lars would join Viktor in the amusement – at least from their respective rooms
– in the hopes that they could somehow form a silent pact to combat the brainwashing techniques. The
one way to deflect propagandistic effect was to ridicule the source message. But Lars could barely summon
the urge to open the book. Part of him felt like a student who did not do his homework, which in many ways
was how Dr. Hedley had framed the request as an admission requirement to the next day's Sharing Group.
Whether it was the poor ventilation, the boredom, the bland dinner squatting stone-like in his gut, or a
concatenation of these, he found himself asleep.
The pale and weak throb of sunlight struggled past obstacles near and far: the stuttering motion of the
ash's bough and the varying thickness of passing haze in the sky. This was Lars' weak greeting to the
morning, realizing that he had fallen asleep in his clothes on top of the cheap duvet. As if on cue,
waiting for him to wake up, the same bobbling nurse opened the door with a tray balanced in one hand, and
a clipboard in the other. Upon closer view, she had one of those unfortunate piggish noses with flaring
nostrils that only seemed to add to an unfortunate characterization in the context of her corpulent shape.
She smelled of warm linen and a hint of air freshener.
“Mr. Purcell, breakfast,”
she said, setting the tray down with a rattle on the night table after delicately removing Dr. Hedley's
still unopened book. Lars wondered if she knew. He could already feel a baffling pang of guilt for not
bothering with the printed claptrap.
She moved with swiftness not natural to
her size, going to the other side of the bed and removing a pill from each bottle and checking these
against the clipboard. Without even asking him, and just knowing in the way that some nurses do, she
peered into the wastebasket, pulled out the temazepam, and removed one pill to add to the other prescribed
two. She presented all three to him in a single paper cup matched by a paper cup with warm fountain water.
She did not bother to scold him at all for throwing away the anti-anxiolytic, but decided to dispense with
any foolishness by pretending he hadn't rejected anything at all, conveying to him that order would
prevail over any juvenile resistance.
“I'm sorry, nurse, but I think
there must be a mistake in my medication. I've never been prescribed temazepam.”
“Clipboard don't lie, Mr.
Purcell,” she said, waving it for emphasis as if it were the embodiment of an indisputable truth.
“Well, I know for a fact my
doctor never prescribed this or else I would already have been on it,” he persisted, the clipboard
be damned.
“That may be so, Mr. Purcell, but
it has been prescribed now.”
“By whom?”
She checked the clipboard. “Dr.
Hedley.”
“Is he licensed to prescribe? I
was never consulted. I never consented.”
“My oh my, Mr. Purcell...You sure
want to be difficult today. Wake up on the wrong side of the bed, did you?”
“If it's all the same to you, I'd
like to discuss this with Dr. Hedley.”
“Suit yourself,” she
tutted, making a note on the clipboard with restrained exasperation but unconcealed disappointment.
Sharing Group was still a few hours away, which would have given Lars time to skim through his
“homework assignment”, but first he was called into Dr. Hedley's office to discuss the matter
of the medication. The office was ridiculous, with its bubble letters spelling “Dr. Max” and
other confused impedimenta that made it somewhat uncertain just what Dr. Hedley's profession was.
Dr. Hedley's eyes darted probingly at
Lars with an almost predatory look. “You're resisting again,” he warned. Resisting was quickly
becoming the code word for “disobedience to my will supreme.”
“I was not consulted about this
new medication,” Lars said, comfortably perched on principle.
“Yes, the nurse reported to me
that you were being a bit difficult with her this morning.”
“It is not a matter of me being
difficult, Dr. Hedley, it's -”
“Call me Max,” he
interrupted, putting on the airs of an inappropriate chumminess.
“What I meant to say was that I
was not consulted about taking this medication which I know to be prescribed for people suffering insomnia
or anxiety disorders. I have neither, so I fail to see what the purpose of this is.”
Dr. Hedley looked down at his hands,
put them together and pulled them apart with one of those accompanying sighs that suggests knowing
something troubling the other does not. “You see, Lars, it's all right there in your file. In order
to service you better and maximize your treatment we do a lot of rigorous background research on our
patients which – I am sure someone of your critical and meticulous mind would agree – is the
responsible thing to do. So, apart from what information your spouse supplied us, we took the liberty of
finding out a bit more.”
“That's invasive! Prying into my
private life? Are you quizzing my friends?”
“We're obtaining a better
clinical picture so that we can tailor the treatment regimen to your needs. It isn't as seedy as you might
imagine it. Fairly standard practice. As for friends, well, Lars, to be honest, you're a little light in
that department. You don't seem to be very social, which is not too surprising for your type. You're very
intelligent, well-spoken, and so forth, but it also alienates people. Your people skills are not so
refined – but we're not here to fix any of that, for I believe once we transition you into closing
the reality gap, you'll see all kinds of benefits you'd never expected in every aspect of your
life.”
“It still looks like
spying.”
“Paranoia, Lars: keep that in
check. What's this about a mediascape?”
A cold electric jolt shot through Lars'
body. That was personal. To whom had Lars confided in about his ability to view the entire mediascape in a
kind of mystic trance? He could not recall ever telling anyone else, a fantasy that he alone indulged and
that had proven one of the advantages he held over his colleagues when he worked as a media researcher
before he had quit.
“I think it would be too early to
get out the label-maker and say you're having delusions and hallucinations. I just want to start you off
on this medication and see if it precipitates any changes. I've flagged this 'mediascape' business for
further follow-up, you understand. I thought it best not to delay and prescribe the temazepam now. I may
have reason to believe that your reality deficit may be intertwined with an underlying issue of a
different psychological nature.”
Dr. Hedley knew far too much, and he
certainly wanted Lars to know that. Lars was getting worse than nowhere with the doctor who was now
fingering him as a closet troublemaker, a sleeper-cell insurgent. There was no doubt he suspected Lars all
along and had staged this moment precisely for Lars' benefit, or at least as a means to show what was at
stake and keep him in line with the implications of what could be done with such intimate knowledge.
Lars pictured Dr. Hedley's secret life,
a tossing of articles for insider entrepreneurial magazines with such regrettably foul attempts at clever
titling such as “Crisis is in Business!” and “Crisi$: A Market Leader.” It was
only in that private world where “crisis” was ever invoked, and only as a financially positive
generator, a shrewdly immoral cause and effect relationship between suffering and profit. Did Dr. Hedley
spend his off time in a gated community, rubbing down his modest collection of convertible while his
titivated wife trotted out with a tray of lemonade? Were there an assortment of children, their faces
beaming like miniature lanterns with love and awe at their father whom they physically mirrored in the
diminutive?
Wanting to dig out from being slumped
in this craggy pile of clinical proclamations, Lars asked: “how old are your children?”
As much as it was designed to throw
“Dr. Max” off and shift the power balance just slightly, the volley was returned: “Oh,
no-no-no. Lars. This simply won't do. Don't you think I can see what you're doing? You feel vulnerable
that we know something about you and you think I'm somehow threatening you, so you try to even the score
by pulling private information out of me,” he said with the faint rising uptick of a statement
becoming a question.
Dr. Hedley leaned back and seemed to
balloon in his chair – at least in Lars' perception. A big bag of compressed air. Dr. Hedley stared
directly into Lars' eyes with an unyielding look beside all the quaintly framed photographs of children
that seemed to all direct that same stony gaze at Lars. There were so many of them. Eight? Eleven? They
all seemed different, but it could have been photos snapped at different ages, the protean aspect of
transformation gifted only to children. Lars let the question drop along with his gaze in a cloudy puff of
defeat. The consultation was over.
Lars went back to his solitary
confinement, lay back on the bed, and shook the temazepam bottle as if though its rattle would offer up a
secret. He twisted off the cap and tipped it toward his palm, and with two swift jerks, nudged three pills
out into the palm and donated two of those back. He ran the tip of his finger over the perfect
machine-scored groove, a diameter depression to facilitate the halving of the dosage if need be. His
meeting with Dr. Hedley, a Dr. Hedley short on clinically affable grins, had left him feeling agitated.
Not angry or afraid, but a crossroads between the two pulling him in both directions at once. He didn't
want to give in to Dr. Hedley, but he was admittedly starting to feel the very unnerving symptoms these
pills promised in all the clinical literature and glossy brochures to alleviate. He took one and, in an
apparent but uncalculated act of further surrender, he opened Dr. Hedley's book to page one.
The haze of the early morning had been a weak defense against the oncoming scud of storm clouds. The
puffier grey-black billows were being pulled into lines by a derecho, all seemingly to point at
MCRS. A muted rattle and boom said that the storm was approaching, but hadn't made land yet. Inside the
sharing room, the first minute slashes of drizzle appeared on the hermetically sealed window, but the
inside was entirely still and clotted with an atmospheric cotton wool. The air pressure was plummeting
outside in inverse proportion to the rising stuffiness inside. Barometric opposites were to be had as well
in the room itself among the Sharing Group members. David was, much to Tom's and Lars' chagrin, in
attendance well before his usual weekly visit, and Viktor was a new addition, a pursed smug look on his
implacable face. Tom's arms were still folded in defensive posture high up on his chest, but the
protective self-embrace was slacker and his chest sagged. Greg was still confused, but making his way
toward ambiguous concern in a slow series of steps. It was his face that occasionally flashed now with
suspicion. David, still as approval-seeking as ever, had most likely come at the bidding of the father he
would have fancied Dr. Hedley. Lars speculated about Dr. Hedley's strategy: by calling in David, this
would serve both as indoctrination support as well as a shining example of what awaited all the patients
if they were obedient. It seemed to be well beyond Dr. Hedley's comprehension that no one in the room had
any desire to become anything like the clucking sycophant in Dr. Hedley's therapeutic church.
“Have we all filled our
questionnaires?” Dr. Hedley opened, more schoolmarmish than therapist.
It seemed as though David had, but that
would have been long ago; he had brought along a severely dog-eared copy of the book with so many post-it
flags that it looked as though it had over a hundred neon tongues. Despite any lingering resistance to Dr.
Hedley, everyone in attendance had indeed brought their copy of the book and filled in the questionnaire
– in varying degrees of seriousness. Greg's book kept popping open at the page he had bent the
corner to serve as a bookmark, just at the midway point of the book where the binding had already started
to split. Lars was surprised that Greg had made such progress – not that the book was heavy reading:
190 pages in large font. But the dismally written style of this self-help bilge proved difficult to
consume in anything but the most measured of reading doses.
“Why don't we start with you,
Tom?” directed Dr. Hedley, much to the disappointment of David who was impatient to share, or
perhaps afraid that Dr. Hedley would find a better patient to bestow his favour upon. There would be
jealousy, Lars thought, most likely based on nothing but innocuous medical affection and encouragement.
Tom may have been a simple man in many
respects - the stereotype of the blue-collar worker with all the class-based tastes of beer, sports,
obnoxiously loud and dangerously powerful hand tools, and dreams of prosperity that skidded on the cheap
low-pile rug of his subsidized housing – but he was not ignorant of the games authorities play. He
knew he was being tested after last evening when he had been mercilessly yet clinically cut down in front
of everyone.
The questionnaire was one part soft
introspection mixed with a far too obvious ploy to test if the reader was paying attention or had just
skimmed through. For Lars, the questionnaire had been a condescending affair full of poorly posed or
rigged questions, spot-checking on the reader's memory for all the freely redefined definitions (all
bolded in the text). However, some questions were too personal, and their broadcasting even in the
confines of this group was liable to increase vulnerability. It was no doubt a calculated plan to diminish
and weaken the group's defenses so as to further the chance that everyone would seek protection in the
woolen folds of Dr. Hedley's protective sweater. The program was familiar to Lars, who had read about the
methods of brainwashing in POW camps. First would come the feigned camaraderie between the captor and the
captured, then the humiliation, then the sowing of distrust of the other captives, then the openness of
the captor to play the confidant (and rat out the others), and then the steady supply of negative news
from outside that only further isolated the captive and made him cleave that much more to the captor. This
was, according to that model, the second phase: humiliation.
The personal questions ranged from the
pathetic to the probing. A dizzying series of them, in a profusion of one after another, would be enough
to snag even the most attentively guarded to slip up. They just chipped away, kept digging, kept asking
and asking...Are you sad? How long would you say you have felt sad or dissatisfied with your life? Do you
feel unattractive when you look in the mirror? Are you envious of your more successful friends? Do you
spend time reliving the past in fantasies? Do you masturbate more often? Have you wanted to cry? Have you
thought of suicide? How often? Have you been cross with a friend/relative/spouse/pet that did not deserve
it? Does your job fulfill you or does it leave you feeling empty and unchallenged? Do you have an ulcer?
Do you have haemorrhoids? Are you tired all the time? Listless? Insomniac? Do you avoid visiting elderly
relatives?...All of them designed to reduce even the steeliest, unemotional, hardy male into late
autumn mulch.
The nurse bouncy-bouncied into the room
apologetically and deposited a freshly opened tray of tasteless sugar wafers on the static table.
Bouncy-bouncying back out, Lars noticed that there was no clock anywhere to be seen in the room,
everyone's need to know the time at the mercy of their own devices or Dr. Hedley's thick-banded watch
concealed under a ruck of sweater sleeve, its pilling mingling with his tufts of hand hairs like clownfish
in sparse coral. The absence of a visible clock, here or in their individual cloisters, made it feel like
some sort of clinic-version of a casino where the payout was mental health or else.
Tom stammered through all his replies
which seemed to take a very long time. While Tom was murmuring his replies, Dr. Hedley glared admonishment
at Viktor who had dared to sample the coffee and made a too audible “pah!” in revulsion. No
one touched the wafer offerings on the table, each of them in a bland sugary retiform alignment in two
plastic rows. Not exactly portion-controlled packaging, since taking one cookie would make the others
spill out as well.
There was a sense of dread in being
chosen next to share, yet also a strange desire to be the centre of attention, even under these absurd
conditions. Not necessarily for Viktor, who was already in a scoffing mood. Viktor turned his chair around
and sat in it like a horse, raised the book at eye level and spoke as though this were a poetry reading.
All of his answers were either snide, cryptic, or a biting jests against the question itself. Dr. Hedley
remained absolutely composed, allowing these antics to play out, while the occasional responses Viktor
gave elicited a slight chuckle. Viktor loved it: he had an audience, and he felt triumphant for showing up
Dr. Hedley for the fool he was, albeit indirectly. David was obviously not amused, but the others were,
and this act of levity not only raised the estimation of Viktor in each of their minds, but also signalled
that Dr. Hedley was not in as much control as they might have believed.
“'Do I dread seeing my elderly
relatives?'” Viktor gave forth facetiously. “Well, of course I do. The elderly are absolutely
dreadful, unkempt beasts. They smell something horrible. Not to mention just how depressing they can be,
as if they've put all their happier memories to death and filled the void with the works of Schopenhauer
and the life philosophy of Eeyore.
“'Do I have urges to engage in
reckless behaviour?' Defined as...what? A snifter of port on Christmas Eve? O my untameable urges, how
they defile the piety of my mind! How will I ever reconcile myself to be at peace between mind and body,
temptation and salvation? O great therapeutic guru, steer us toward the path of the righteous and spare us
from committing these reckless acts of filling out banal questionnaires!
“I positively squeal at this one:
'Do you have an ulcer?' I wonder if buried under all this dog's breakfast is the physiologist's purely
mechanistic explanation for this artifice of 'mid-life crisis', that it was just an irritable ulcer all
along!”
“That will be enough,
Viktor,” Dr. Hedley said grimly. “I am quite disappointed that you took a very serious and
helpful exercise and turned it into something frivolous. You fail to amuse me, and I hardly doubt that
your comedic attempt is anything more than your fear of vulnerability.”
The smug grin vanished from Viktor's
face as it stormed over. “I am to make myself vulnerable to you? You expect me to cast off my better
sense and confide in a charlatan, be subjected to this dreary psycho-slop, and share my innermost feelings
and personal details so openly as if they were vacuous remarks about the weather? I'll have you know that
due to my lifestyle and my profession that I can scarcely think of anyone more vulnerable than myself,
lest I be a member of the Romanov family at the end of a dark alley thronged with angry revolutionaries.
No, I confide in those I respect, and I simply don't buy any of this ridiculous self-help nonsense you
keep spooning me. In my eyes, you're nothing more than a failed priest with a psychotherapist's lexicon.
This sadly arranged emo-fest is a complete waste of my time, and -”
“Shut up, you aging queer!”
raged David.
Dr. Hedley seemed unfazed. David's
guard dog barking was waved away as unnecessary; Dr. Hedley would meet Viktor's challenge. There was
commotion as Viktor turned his attack against David, but Dr. Hedley put a stop to it all.
“Viktor, all this juvenile
lashing out, these disparaging remarks against my person and a therapeutic process that has more than
proven effective, is merely a cry for help.”
“Oh, don't pull these
table-turning shenanigans on me! Your rhetorical attempts are just cheap tricks. You must think I'm stupid
to fall for any of it.”
“Not stupid, Viktor, but in
denial.”
“Ohhh, here we go! Finally the
biggest sham of them all is trotted out: the old denial card! Every hack psychiatrist uses this when the
patient doesn't confirm the diagnosis. If everything I say will just be considered as a denial, some sort
of auto-deception, then I say let's dissolve this farcical relationship!”
“Viktor, I'd like to speak with
you in private. There are things I must say that I do not think you would want broadcast to the
group.” And then to us: “Please pardon us for a few moments – we will
continue.”
No one in the room could hear what was
being said once the door to the Sharing Group room was closed, but when they both returned, Viktor was
very pale. What was it Dr. Hedley had said to silence Viktor? “We will resume now,” Dr. Hedley
announced calmly.
It had been four days of intensive indoctrination sessions, alleged sharing, and isolation. The temazepam
had begun its process of wrapping its plump and duck-downed fingers around Lars' anxiety, incidentally
also smothering his ability to resist the MCRS patented methods. It would be on this fourth day that
something resembling fortune would occur. His door, usually locked from the outside, had not been closed
properly to drive the bolt of the lock. It was late evening, and all but a skeleton staff remained at the
now dimly lit clinic. It amazed him how his room had been entirely insulated against all the regular
sounds of the rest of the clinic – the susurra of the heating, the buzz of only the most essential
fluorescent lights in the corridor, and...and a muffled sound like a tittering behind a closed door. Lars
proceeded cautiously over the anti-skid vinyl flooring as though in fear of being caught. Curiously, he
had no thoughts on making an escape, for where would he go? Home to Tracy? She would most likely press her
little panic button to alert the gruff orderlies to drag him back and repeat this whole process over
again, or worse. He made his way stealthily, creeping toward the noise, passing a drinking fountain, a
fold-down gurney, and a pile of empty file boxes that were destined for the next week's recycling. The
tittering briefly became a squawk followed by rapid snuffling sounds like an animal rutting. The entire
corridor was straight with no sufficient cover, a single lane extending from the entrance back to where
the cafeteria sat in its eerie gloom with nothing but a single shriek of light beneath the sneeze-guard.
Dr. Hedley's office was a bulwark right in the middle of a warren of offices occupied by lower hierarchy
staff. The rooms were closer to the back near the cafeteria, the only other doors leading off at the
opposite side of the corridor being the nurse's station and a utility closet. Dr. Hedley's office, like
all the others, had a single pane of glass with venetian blinds in that partially open, partially closed
aspect of semi-privacy. Under the darker conditions, the low light of a desk lamp helped Lars to see what
he would never have chosen to see.
A large, round, white sphere occupied
most of what could be seen. It was wriggling and Lars identified it as the nurse's hyperbolic ass. He
could also make out Dr. Hedley's hand, fumbling and groping over mounds and mounds of the nurse. There was
no mistaking what was transpiring, and Lars had no interest in peeping any further. But there was
something quite wrong about it, something that went well beyond unprofessional. In fact, with the lights
so low, this comically depraved scene of nocturnal grappling, the throbbing pulse of the cafeteria's
gloom, the doors bolted from the outside, and the concert of industrial noise, the whole place
seemed...seedy, a kind of sketchy operation. This was a bedlam that barely disguised its own rotting
liquefaction, its own rusting and peeling away to reveal the turpitude within. Everything took on a grisly
aspect, as if the removal of light had illuminated the real nature of this place and the man who ran it.
Lars debated whether to share this view
with the others, to free them as well to roam around and observe this ramshackle for what it was, what it
tried to hide. Everything during the day seemed sterile and orderly one would expect of a well-funded
hospital, but at night it was a decrepit place ruled by chaos and neglect. Although he had not formed
anything like close friendship with any of the other prisoners of wellness, he did feel pity that they
were caged here, gradually disempowered by a steady hypnotism. One by one, Lars unlocked the doors,
bidding each of them with his finger on his lips to be quiet. They formed a mass and Lars pointed toward
the cafeteria so that they could whisper conspiratorially. Tom was insistent on leaving and made his
desire known in an effort to kibosh any further planning.
“Let's not be typical,”
Viktor said, placing a friendly hand on Tom's shoulder. Tom recoiled, his reflex standard evidence of a
long cultivated homophobia.
Greg was terribly uncertain if this was
the right thing to do. He seemed to be suffering some kind of inner torment since he arrived here, and it
was getting worse.
“Viktor is right,” Lars
added his whisper to the mix. “This is a typical brainwashing experiment that requires a shrewd and
aggressive atypical response. I -”
A sudden gurgling sound caused them all
to hush. It was just a pipe finally digesting what had been lodged there earlier in the day, a plug of
accumulated hair or other matter finally giving way to the fluoridated water that nibbled patiently away
at it. As the pipe cleared its metallic throat, each of the men found themselves viscerally aware of their
own blockages, their own knotted fear in being caught out of their rooms without leave colluding so openly
in this cafeteria. What if Dr. Hedley or the nurse found them?
“I'm just going to fuckin'
go,” said Tom, standing still and not making good on his own declaration.
“I'd advise against it,”
counselled Lars. “The same people that sentenced us here to receive the gospel of Saint Max will
just have us put back in here again.”
“Who? My wife?” Sneered
Tom. “She's pulled some stupid shit in her time, but this takes the fuckin' cake. I ain't coming
back, and she's going to really understand that when I get through with her.”
The imminent vague threat of spousal
abuse was left ignored.
“We could feign obedience,”
offered Viktor. “Let on to Dr. Hedley that the remedy has worked and secure our early release. At
least we'd be released and pronounced cured rather than be fugitives.”
“The price seems too high,”
Lars said. “Where Dr. Hedley's hypnotic suggestions won't work, being drugged up will. I'd really
not want to take the chance. But, Tom, I don't think being escapees is going to work either. In my mind,
this place has to be shut down.”
“Every man for himself's what I
think,” Tom insisted. Everyone else quite suddenly became rigid and wide-eyed. “What? Does
that offend your liberal minds or something?”
What Tom did not see, his back to the
entrance to the cafeteria, was what was now occulting the sparse light of the corridor. That shadow had a
voice: “What have we here? A little seance?” It was Dr. Hedley. Tom yelped despite himself,
belying his own bravado and devil-may-care posture.
“If you can't sleep,”
continued the even tones of a now menacing Dr. Hedley, “may I suggest that you catch up on your
reading. Shall we return to bed now?”
Caught in flagrante delicto, the men
fell into lock-step, faces down-turned refusing to make eye contact with the doctor on account of some
curious shame. Filing in line, they deposited themselves one at a time into their rooms, Dr. Hedley
securing the locks on each door. They were made to feel that they were little boys who had done bad.
Lars shivered on his bed. There was no
telling how much was overheard. Viktor and Lars had applied the finishing touches to reveal that they were
in fact Dr. Hedley's adversaries. This oppositional rift would come with consequences, of that Lars was
invariably certain.
“Given last night's...event, I am sad to say that you've left me no choice but to be a bit more
aggressive in my treatment methods. I fail to see to what purpose your little act of mutiny serves since
you only defeat yourselves. From now on, you will have to earn the privilege of coming to the Sharing
Group. None of you are ready yet, so I will consult with each of you independently. All meals will be
taken in the same fashion to prevent further development of this toxic conspiracy theory you all seem to
indulge. You are all very ill, and it may be best to keep you quarantined from each other to prevent any
more incidents like we had last night.”
Dr. Hedley sat weightily upon his
chair, bringing his fingertips together into a steeple and then pulling them apart. This isolation would
serve as the first round of punishment. What was merely implied as mandatory completion of the
end-of-chapter questionnaires became explicit obligation, and it served Dr. Hedley's purposes quite well
since the more the patients offered up their privacy to the probing of Dr. Hedley, the more control Dr.
Hedley had over them.
The second round of punishment,
announced to each of them individually at the end of that same day, was that their stay at MCRS was
necessarily extended by another week for reasons of ensuring successful treatment. It would mean, thought
Lars, that Tracy – and indirectly him via his shared savings – would be billed for another
week.
Dr. Hedley made his rounds, but he had
lost much of his feigned affability in his visits, instead becoming more of a stern schoolmaster. If he
was dissatisfied with the level of disclosure and commitment to the questionnaire exercise, he would
declare it insufficient and demand that it be done over again properly. What Lars would not learn until
much later was that, on the eighth day, Tom had attempted suicide and failed miserably. A prescription was
soon enforced that made any such further ideation a fuzzy and distant thing, a widening and impassable
chemical sea between thought and action. Greg, who seemed to Lars the most likely candidate for a suicide
attempt, was ever more receding from all certainty. His initially confused state had progressed to a
violently introspective torment resolving itself in the non-resolution state of catatonic stasis. Of
course, none of this was knowledge to Lars who, like the others, had been sequestered from all human
contact save the remedial therapist and the perfunctory nurse. If there was a reality deficit, this place
was widening rather than closing it, lodged as each of them were in this nightmarish fantasy plucked from
all sense and reason. Lars felt his will ebbing from him, which was a combined effect of the isolation,
medication, and sloganeering repetition. Cognizant of the small lump of his remaining will, Lars resolved
to think of a new strategy. And then he hit upon it.
If anyone knew that the old saw
“knowledge is power” was a useless heirloom, it was Lars who had worked long enough as a media
researcher to understand that the value of knowledge was worth less than nil in the popular mind.
Knowledge and information are too frequently conflated terms, but they constituted very distinct and
antipodal continents. There was nothing synonymous about them at all since knowledge took effort to
process while information is merely a passive flow of data, much of it trivial and easy to digest.
Information required no real action on the part of the recipient: it was merely part of a mechanism that
performed its rote functions to absorb and discharge indiscriminately. The cyberneticists of yesteryear
enjoyed fooling with the idea of the speed of information, especially compared to the speed of light. But
it was not solely speed that was of importance in the dissemination of information, for though the rate of
transmission is important to the 24-hour news cycle and the mania for constant status updates that have
merely proved just how banal life and its information can be, the real importance lies in the perceived
value of that information to the recipient. There is no standard currency for the value of information for
it, like how beauty and all the other relativist myths, was in the eye of the beholder. The value of
information could be separated into two types for every individual: advantage and disadvantage, generally
linked to how the information stands in relation to the goal of the ego. Information itself was entirely
innocuous, inert, and largely fiat.
Information is a threat if it presents
the possibility of disadvantaging the ego that receives it. At times, even the suggestion of information
is enough to throw the receiver into a tizzy if it becomes a virally open and free-flowing thing that
cannot be controlled. With this in mind, Lars would try a different tack with the clever Dr. Hedley: he
would answer his questionnaires in such a way as to provoke Dr. Hedley's ego into disclosure. Gradually,
Dr. Hedley would oppose some of the views Lars would inscribe in his answers, causing Dr. Hedley to defend
his own views, thereby increasing the possibility that he would slip up and offer personal anecdotes.
Those anecdotes would be leverage, a wealth of raw information that could be used to the eventual
disadvantage of Dr. Hedley.
Lars had already made note how
carefully guarded Dr. Hedley was about personal information, evading even the most mundane family
questions. This was more than just the professional's divide between public and private life as if these
could be impenetrable to one another. No, it spoke of something else, a maniacal need to control, and the
obvious secret that must at all costs stay concealed. There was no doubt that Dr. Hedley knew the cost and
importance of information, for he deftly wielded it to ensure obedience, always the airy threat that a
patient's confidential information might slip out, and that dissent would mean a lapse in protection. The
bloody info-mafioso. He was selling protection over the patient's vitally personal information from the
very protector at the cost of compliance. Servitude. Sycophancy. Dr. Hedley was little more, in this
light, than a trumped up clinical bully.
Lars' speculations would turn out to be
truer than he realized, for there was a suspicious supplement to Dr. Hedley's finances that allowed him to
lead the lavish lifestyle he had thus far enjoyed, and it did not come solely from the overpriced
therapeutic service he was providing. The equation was clear: information-power-money. The trick was how
to turn that information by some modern day alchemy into riches. Dr. Hedley was partially using MCRS as a
front to pilfer more information that he would subsequently sell to partners in various industries. So, if
it turned out that one of the patients had a predilection for sports vehicles, it would only be a matter
of acquiring a bit more information that would assist a company to market directly and personally to that
patient upon release. Dr. Hedley cured no one of mid-life crisis: he amplified it to such a pitch that his
“cured” patients would gladly turn over their money if some product or service would alleviate
anxiety: unresolved crisis and the installed guilt of rendering time at MCRS a meaningless expenditure.
The final bill for treatment would be incentive enough for most men to make the “treatment”
count, to justify the price tag. Dr. Hedley carefully wove such a potent fear of relapse in these patients
that they would spend everything they could to indulge their crisis without admitting defeat.
There was also another source of
revenue for the shrewd doctor. His first book was a “freebie,” albeit specifically designed to
make his patients dependent upon his teachings. His second and third books on the subject, both of which
made vaulting promises to delve deeper into the matter, became obligatory purchases for released patients
in order to complete and not nullify their treatment. He had been precocious enough to discover the
spending power of the male in mid-life crisis, and he had developed an expert method for channelling that
spending power for his own benefit by transforming men of deep pockets into emotional cripples for life.
It was an information war. Lars busied
himself answering the questionnaires with meticulous care to reverse the roles, to undo the brainwashing
attempt. And, just as Lars had predicted, Dr. Hedley felt compelled to argue with Lars by appealing to the
thinnest thread of personal anecdote to lend credibility to his reasoning. Individually, the tiny shreds
of personal information amounted to very little, but Lars was compiling them, stitching them together into
a quilt of complete disclosure. He collected these fragments and was better able in time to fill in
various missing pieces. For instance, he learned of a previous failed business venture when Dr. Hedley
spoke broadly on persistence toward success as a proper analogy to the process of treatment. Dr. Hedley
unwittingly volunteered that there had been infidelity in his marriage simply by the slight clues he
offered. Other bits of information Dr. Hedley exposed were arrived at by inference: Dr. Hedley did not
factor for Lars' knowledge on particular schools, but Lars had recalled such details of what some
institutions offered and what they did not purely from conversation with others. Dr. Hedley had
scandalously, though unsurprisingly, made reference to where he obtained his medical degree, and even gave
the year: 1985. The university he cited did not have an accredited medical school program until 1998. But
Lars did not risk challenging Dr. Hedley prematurely, and instead went about hoarding more information
until it was reaching critical mass. There was no sense alerting Dr. Hedley so soon for fear that he would
clam up. But he continued confiding ever more scraps for Lars' collection.
The summary provided for an ample and
formidable arsenal to use against Dr. Hedley. There was no longer any question that Dr. Hedley was not a
doctor at all, but a misrepresenting fraud. Tax evasion, infidelity, bizarre fetishes, and a long string
of sham enterprises was more than enough to discredit him and irrevocably ruin his reputation. Yet, it was
still too soon to play the hand.
By day twelve, Dr. Hedley presumed it was safe enough to reintroduce the patients to the Sharing Group. He
had felt they all made steady progress, which meant that he had effectively drummed out all remaining
resistance. The same brand of wafers were placed and left untouched on the centre table, the same tepid
coffee percolated, and the same absurd slogan-posters adorned the walls. Dr. Hedley had left the men in
the room while he was busy processing new admits. It was then that Lars confided in Viktor what he had
learned, to which Viktor – who had been having a rough time of things as of late – seemed
nearly to rebound instantly – his verve, wit, and willing defiance returning.
“You pulled all of that out of
him?” Viktor said. “That's quite the damning list. We should move on this now.”
“We're still cut off from the
outside world. Having this information is good, but we need a way to relay it. Even if we confront him
with what we know, he will simply deny it and ensure that we never have the opportunity to transmit it.
Besides, I don't want to give him the opportunity to cover his tracks before we can go to the
authorities.”
“Do we have a plan of
action?”
“I do. I need to get a hold of
some paper.”
Viktor walked over to the recycling
pail and pulled out a scrap of notebook paper that had been crumpled up after writing a single line of
“Mrs. Hathgood – cheque bounced, follow up Wednesday.”
“Here. Not exactly stationery,
but it should do. Plan to list his sordid crimes in a great philippic?”
“Yes. I want to write it so that
it doesn't appear that we're just a bunch of mental patients. I will write to the Medical Board and give
them the address of this place and ask for clarification on Dr. Hedley's credentials. I will add as well
some of the abuses we've suffered here.”
“That could take weeks. I
sincerely doubt they answer their mail promptly. Send it to the newspaper instead. They can make a real
circus out of this. The negative press alone should be enough to make us look the sad victims of fraud and
abuse. But how do we get a letter out of this place? I doubt Max will simply let you pop out to drop a
letter in the mailbox. How can we do this so as not to arouse his suspicion? Do we have an envelope?
Stamps?”
“I've thought this through
already. It's the weekend, so all the staff except for the nurse and Dr. Hedley will have gone home by
dinnertime. Saturday's mail doesn't go out until tomorrow and is just sitting behind the receptionist's
area in a bundle waiting to be picked up and dropped off. I can quickly pull one of the envelopes already
stamped, yank out the contents, jam in my own letter, and replace the address with the
newspapers.”
“And you somehow think Max will
let you saunter over to the receptionist's area?”
“We'll need a distraction. I hate
to ask this of you, but we need a serious commotion. It won't do for one of us to pretend we're violently
ill at dinner since that would only bring the nurse to take the sick man away, leaving Dr. Hedley to
continue supervising the table. We need to keep both of them occupied so I'll have time to slip the letter
into the mail-out.”
“You seem to have something in
mind, perhaps something I would find terribly distasteful. But, you may as well tell me and I'll most
likely cooperate if it means our freedom.”
“At dinner, I want you to make a
blatant pass at Tom.”
“As I thought: terribly
distasteful.”
“You and I both know Tom will
react violently. He may be in a drugged stupor, but I'm sure he still has it in him to respond typically.
Just before the fight breaks out in earnest, you need to dash into the nurse's station, thereby allowing
Tom to give chase. She is usually in there during dinnertime to get the medicine ready for after dinner.
Since the area is so tiny, you and Tom would prevent her from being able to get out. Dr. Hedley will most
likely not directly interfere, but will go immediately into his office to telephone one of his burly
orderlies to help break it up. While both the nurse and the doctor are detained -”
“You take advantage of the
distraction, slip out and do your thing while I'm getting pulped and pulverized by the redneck savage. Got
it,” Viktor said resignedly. “It isn't the most eloquent solution I've heard, but I suppose a
black eye is not a bad price to pay for our liberation. You know that such an incident will make Max crack
down that much harder on us, extending our forced stay here indefinitely. If the newspaper doesn't act on
your letter, it will all have been for naught.”
“I know that. I'm taking a
chance.”
“And if that letter is
intercepted before it leaves here, the jig is up.”
“That I also know. I'll aim for
maximum discretion.”
Dr. Hedley rejoined the group and he
seemed inwardly pleased just how cooperative Lars and Viktor had become in the Sharing Group, almost as if
the method was working its magic.
Just as Tom was about to dip the plastic knife into the unidentifiable meat cutlet, Viktor abandoned all dignity and leaned in to nibble Tom's ear while moving a lecherous hand up his thigh. Viktor had to stop himself from retching; Tom was quite the opposite to his type, and there was no desire in Viktor's sexual repertoire for that cheap thrill of trying to convert the unwilling, that silly conquest over fortified denial. Tom nearly leapt out of his chair and was so livid and in shock, that he could only manage stammering half-words. Viktor started winking and licking his lips, calling Tom his sexy such-and-such, how things have been so lonely without a man to penetrate, and so forth. This threw Tom into a mad rage as he lunged toward Viktor who was already on his feet and dashing toward the nurse's station as planned. Tom gave pursuit, his fists waving after Viktor desperately wanting to land heavy blows for this violation. Viktor was so afraid that he could not help himself from laughing as he burst into the nurse's station with the nurse already distributing pills in paper cups. Dr. Hedley, true to form, knew that he would not be able to physically restrain the rampaging Tom and darted toward his office to make an emergency call. Lars, seeing the way was open, ran halfway up the length of the corridor and stooped below the window of Dr. Hedley's office before resuming his upright rush to the mail-out. Picking a standard sized letter envelope from the middle of the bundle that was already held together with a rubber band, Lars frantically opened it, removed the letter, put his own in its place, and scribbled the address of the local newspaper after scribbling over the previous address. As luck would have it, scotch tape was beside a small dish of paperclips, and he resealed the letter, tucking it into the centre of the bundle. He had just enough time to wrap the rubber band around the bundle and crumple the old letter and shove it in his pocket as Dr. Hedley rounded the corner. Operating on an almost mechanical level of basic survival, Lars reached for the telephone to make it appear as though his whole purpose at the receptionist's area was to call out.
“What are we doing, Lars?”
stormed Dr. Hedley, his face a kaleidoscope of red and white. Lars stood frozen, his hand hovering over
the telephone.
“I asked you a question! What is
the meaning of what you were about to do?”
“I...I, uh...I wanted to call my
wife,” Lars said, kick-starting a fake blubbering jag to convey his innocent intention that he
desperately missed his wife. “I want to go home,” he sobbed, his face scrunching together in
that mixed look of a mourner and a gargoyle. It was convincing. Dr. Hedley softened his tone just slightly
and asked Lars to come away from the telephone. Meanwhile, Viktor was being pummelled by an enraged Tom as
the nurse made feeble attempts to wedge her spherical form between them. Viktor's cries were like that of
a dog being whipped. Dr. Hedley restored what order he could by telling Greg and Lars to go their rooms.
The soundproofing of the room prevented Lars from hearing the rest of the incident, but his mind was more
than capable of conjuring up what may have been transpiring.
Day thirteen. A diaphanous band of cirrus cloud kept the sun behind a porous veil. He had just been
released into the day after spending the better part of the last hour giving his statement to a sergeant
with steel wool for hair and forearms knotted with ganglion cysts. The police officer seemed almost
incredulous upon hearing Lars' testimony, jotting down notes for a green file folder. Tracy had come to
meet him on the concrete apron outside the newly renovated police headquarters that looked more like a
prison built for Buck Rogers. The editor at the local newspaper had taken Lars' plea so seriously that he
barked for any available journalist to confirm the report. The police were called thereafter, and the
office of MCRS was thronged with men armed with cameras and guns. The bust made front page, accompanied by
a picture of the defamed doctor with a coat over his head to conceal his face as he was brought to a
waiting police cruiser. The headline was comical: FRAUD DOCTOR TORTURES MEN IN MID-LIFE CRISIS. The
details of the alleged torture, dramatically spruced up by inventive journalists, made the human interest
angle, while the details of the profiteering seemed thin and tacked on.
Tracy was so choked on guilt that it
seemed too large to assuage. Reading the article and seeing the state Lars was in made it worse. She
attempted the few guilt-tinged offers to make things better, as if cooking his favourite dinner or
volunteering to massage him could in any way function as reciprocal payment for what Lars endured.
As if to underscore her error, while
Lars was effectively incarcerated at MCRS, Tracy learned that Hilda's Trevor had sunk their savings to
lease a yacht, precipitating a row that resulted in Trevor hastily throwing a few clothes and the two new
books by Dr. Hedley he had recently purchased into a duffel bag and beating it to an out of town motel
from where it was presumed that he would launch his divorce. Tracy didn't need to be told, and quietly
removed the MCRS panic keychain and tossed it in the garbage. There was an altogether new crisis that no
existing service could resolve, and which now involved her and Lars.
Lars did not make any attempt to
correspond with his fellow MCRS inmates after the liberation. It would be two full years of legal back and
forth until Lars saw the six thousand dollars it cost for MCRS' treatment plan returned to him. Three
years after that, he thought he recognized Dr. Hedley, albeit in another of his many incarnations, on a
late night infomercial for something called Doc Max's Anti-Balding Ointment.
Kane X. Faucher is an assistant professor at the University of
Western Ontario's Media, Information and Technoculture Program. He is the author of 11 books of fiction, the
most recent being Epigonesia (annotated by Tom Bradley) and The Infinite Library (forthcoming September
2011).
He lives in London, Ontario.
Volunteers for Issue 8
For copy-editing this issue of MTLS thanks:
- Amanda Tripp
- Carmel Purkis
- Rosel Kim
- Julia Cooper
- Lequanne Collins-Bacchus
Acknowledgement
MTLS is grateful to Jean-Pierre Houde for his hard work on web management.
It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Stephen Potts, one of our reviewers.
April 8 to 20, 2011
The Toronto International Film Festival is celebrating the work of Gregg Araki at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
September, 2010
Pius Adesanmi, who is on the Editorial Board of MTLS, wins the inaugural Penguin Prize for African
Writing in the Non-Fiction Category.
© 2011 Maple Tree Literary Supplement on behalf of individual artists, writers & contributors. All
Rights Reserved.
About Editorial Writings Spokenword Film Roundtable Impressions Literary Images Art News
Page Views:
