The Complete Roderick

countless children’s voices’ now adjusted to harmonious bleats but still innocent because ethereal, ringing from Heaven (hello Central) or against Heaven (vox inhumana) or crying out loud for bodies…

At University Hospital a nurse crunched a piece of candy cane as the phone rang, swallowed sherds as she answered. ‘Who? Mr Sonnenschein? I’ll see if we have him today you know a lot of people went home…’

She rose, biting down on another inch of striped sugar and brushing crumbs from her nylon uniform as she pushed past the Christmas tree and through a door into the ward. Most of the other nurses were, like her, here for the day only; no one knew who Mr Sonnenschein was.

Two doctors were conferring over an elderly bedridden patient, now going blue in the face. One of them, Dr D’Eath, suggested Ward D.

‘Right through that door down there and keep going, you can’t miss it,’ he said, and leaned across his patient to tap the electronic Kardiscope as though it were a brass barometer. ‘Not so terrific here, thanks to that ham- handed… think he’d try reading the contraindications before he starts shoving Euphornyl into an eighty-year-old patient with a history of… could have used Hynosate or Geridorm, Narcadone any damn thing but this! Okay then. What we need here is 50 ccs of Elimindin in the i.v., then start the Eudryl when he comes to, okay? Oh, and Dormevade, five milligrams every three

‘Fine sure fine, great idea, Shel, now if uh you got a minute maybe you could look at my girl here, little chemotherapy problem, Nurse wake her up will you, MINNIE… MORNING MINNIE!’

‘Doctor, I believe her name is Mary, Mary Mendez…’

‘Minnie, Mary, what’s the difference? HEY MARY? WAKE UP!’

The false eyelashes parted on large grey eyes that held no expression. Creaking sounds began in the throat.

‘HOW YOU DOING, MARY?’ Dr Coppola proffered to his senior colleague a chart, with the deference of a wine waiter with a list. Both men and the nurse ignored Mary who, having sat up to adjust the large bow that covered a stainless steel plate in her scalp, was trying to speak. The rusty sounds in her throat became more frantic.

‘How long you had her on Actromine with Ananx? No wonder you got a Parkinsonism situation building here, you ought to… and try switching over to Integryl with Doloban, see how that… or wait, how about Dormistran with Kemised? That should do the trick.’

‘CAN YOU HEAR ME, MARY? HOW’S THE HEADACHE? EH?’

‘…wind me up… wind me up…’

‘You could have tried Solacyl with Promoral, but sooner or later you’d have to feed in Thanagrin and

‘Promoral sure sure sure, Shel, only with the old head injury and the labyrinthitis you don’t think…?’

‘…wind me up… I’m running down…’

‘Okay then Lobanal, play it safe. Lobanal with Doloban, why stick your neck out?’ And as the two doctors passed on, the nurse trailing like a caddy, they talked of Amylpoise and Dexadrone, Disimprine and Equisol, Joviten and Nyctomine…

At the door of Ward D they encountered once more the Christmas substitute nurse, again running on her silent shoes but now looking distressed and holding a hand to her mouth.

‘Probably walked in on the ECT,’ said Dr Coppola as they wheeled past the room where Dan Sonnenschein still arched and twisted on a table, trembling limbs held down by straps and strong assistants as his spine beat like a flagellum, trying to fling his head free of the smoking electrodes. Dr D’Eath paused to watch the body lunge once, twice and lie still, all but the fingers and toes.

‘Well, Jesus, you can’t blame the poor girl. They have to stick this therapy room right out here where anybody can walk by and see it,’ he said. ‘Anyway I hate it myself, it’s so darned crude, like setting fire to a chicken ranch to fry one egg. There has to be a better way.’

‘I know, I know, it’s so medieval — they used to burn the body of a heretic for the good of his soul, and now we’ve kind of turned that around. But what are the real alternatives, drugs? How can you trust them to take the pills once they’re out, eh? The old paradox of freedom, eh? What happens when the depressive gets too depressed to take his anti-depressants?’

His boyish laugh drifted back through the open door to be relayed as a scream of nervous laughter from Mary Mendez. Dr D’Eath said, ‘I like this idea of yours about working on self-images with some of these patients, what I’ve heard of it.’

‘I’d like to try a pilot scheme here, very soon. You gotta admit, Shel, it’s about the cheapest damn therapeutic idea in years, all we have to buy is a couple dozen rubber animal masks. See I was reading Levi-Strauss one day on totems and all at once it hit me, we all need to “be” animals once in a while, to restructure our self- images by new rules… become cats and mice or ducks…’

‘Sure, I see…’

‘…easily recognized signs and codes, I am a pig, to help communicate in a society grown too large and too…’

‘Sure, sure, sure, sure…’

Mary yelped again, the noise just reaching the nurse who was closing a door and pushing past the tree to the phone:

‘Mr Frankstein? Frankline? I’m sorry but he can’t come to the phone right now, he’s urn, he’s urn—’ Her mind filled with movie images of fluttering lights, lightning, the smoking electrodes, the figure on the long table straining, making Galvanic lunges against the straps, the smoking electrodes, hands gripping the arms of the electric chair, tall shadows, the sputtering arch, the baritone hum of electricity, vis vitalis rising on a swell to become a dial tone as she sat, receiver forgotten in her hand, watching the lights on the Christmas tree grow suddenly dim and bright again. Her mouth filled with peppermint bile.

Ben Franklin turned from the phone to his yellow notebook, muttering. ‘No telling what kind of cretins they get to work over there, can’t even work out how to call somebody to the phone.’

‘You said it, buddy,’ said the agent.

Ben twitched the curtain closed and scribbled alone until he slept, waking with a shout in the darkness, soaking wet and shivering as he was again waking in the morning if it was morning, to find himself muttering, ‘Hexcellent, a most hexcellent dancer, your servant ladies and gentlemen…’ And plunged back into that sea of sleep out of which he always seemed to emerge dripping and chilled on the shore of what could hardly be called consciousness.

He was aware of changes: the man with the bandaged head and the self-pitying face in the next bed vanished to be replaced by a salesman of religious novelties who had a noisy TV; he in turn gave way to an old man who kept his teeth in a glass; one morning he was gone but the teeth remained.

An expert on tropical diseases came to look at Ben.

‘Malaria,’ he said. ‘Where have you been travelling?’

‘Only to Taipin.’

‘Try again, there’s no malaria in Taipin. No mosquitoes.’

But they treated him for malaria and he began to improve; one day he sat up and tried to read his notes:

Tolstoi’s ‘Our body is a machine for living’ as a recipe for

French stone. Stones of Deucalion? J. Baptist says God can raise stones up children to Abraham, a pun on children (banim) & stones (abanim) — why always stones or clay in legends as though mineral future reality foreseen, cybern. Kids out of sand?

If we made them would they purge us of the terrible disease of being human?

Can a mind be built from within, by one thought?