Authors: Thomas Cater
“Now I’ll be able to get somewhere. I want to get
started right away. Can I read them in my van? I won’t leave the grounds. I
also want to talk to the Alberichs. Can you arrange it?”
She shrugged her shoulders in a defenseless sort of
way. “I don’t see why not. All you have to do is find them.”
“Are they still holed up in the furnace room?”
“I suppose,” she said. “It’s not like they check in
with me.”
I kissed her cheek. “Why don’t you join me for lunch?
I’ve got a can of clam chowder, some chocolate milk and a box of year-old
Christmas cookies in the van.”
She made a sour face. “I’ll come out, but I want to
take you to lunch, if you let me.”
“Second best offer I’ve had since I got here,” I said.
“What was the first?” she asked, and then blushed.
“I’ll be in the van reading, of course,”
“There’s a little French restaurant in town. It takes
them forever to prepare and serve anything, so we’ll have lots of time to
talk.”
Chapter Thirty-One
I took Grier’s journals and locked myself in the back
of the van. It was perfect for creating an environment of total and immediate
isolation. I did get a few peeping Toms on rare occasions, but I suspect it wouldn’t
be a problem here.
According to his personnel record, Dr. Grier arrived
at Vandalia State Hospital on October 1921 at the behest of Samuel Ryder,
administrator and member of the board of directors. A more thorough examination
of his file revealed that he was not only an eminent psychiatrist, but also a
surgeon and an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist. Were they even in the same
category with surgery and psychiatry? Was this his idea of a joke, or was it
all part of the professional window dressing?
I was a little perplexed. In those days, if a man was
a specialist, he let it be known, but it still doesn't make sense. While he was
performing surgery, did he keep busy cleaning out impacted ears, or swabbing
throats? Maybe that was what attracted Samuel. If he knew something about eyes
that no one else knew, he might have been able to restore, or improve Elinore’s
sight.
I began to wonder if Samuel had found Grier on one of
his legendary trips or if Grier had stumbled upon the hospital and applied for
the job. I was also curious to know how difficult it was to forge documents in
the ‘20s. It would have been a travesty if he had been an impostor. I decided
to keep my eyes open for verifiable documentation that might shed light on
Grier’s qualifications. If it became necessary, I could write to one of the
institutions he claimed to have attended.
He must have spent months acquainting himself with the
hospital’s operation. There were no indications that he attempted dangerous surgical
procedures, nothing but conventional practices, whatever they were.
In the spring of 1923 however, things took a different
turn; he began lobotomizing patients. Later in the year, he operated on a
hysterical woman who claimed to be ‘possessed by Klikouchy, or ‘screaming
things.’ The language or spelling was not clear, but I had seen the word before
in Elinore’s diary.
The pages of his journal were for the most part faded.
Some of the comments were about creatures that lived millions of years ago, and
even now survive to ‘
haunt’ or ‘hunt’
the wooded hills of Appalachia.
I found that interesting, but didn’t know what to do,
unless they were still haunting the hillsides.
The operations must have been a momentous occasion. It
may also have been something of a disappointment. He watched over his victim/patients
like a doting mother, but she failed to respond and reportedly said absolutely
nothing.
There were follow-up tests and interviews, but they
were all uneventful. It became apparent to Grier that leucotomy was a simple
and essential procedure for silencing hysterical patients.
The word ‘Klikouchy’ appeared again in the margins of
his journal. It may have been a reference to an ethnic or cultural attribute. There
were many question marks, but only one stab at a definition and that was
‘screaming things.’ In any case, it must have made a startling impression on
him.
A ward was eventually isolated for housing psycho-surgical
patients, which must have been easy to maintain. Staffed with only one nurse,
no chains or restraints were required. Additional aides need only ‘encourage’ patients
to move in one direction or another. The doc said, ‘they were like cattle
preferring to ‘low’ or graze in the pastures of their wards, or waste time in
the dining halls or showers.
Grier was a keen observer and made lots of notes. He was
a man of infinite hope and patience and seemed to envision some kind of useful
existence for his patients beyond leucotomy. There were clues, indications in
his notes that he was always anticipating a miraculous recovery or some medical
breakthrough when he began operating. He often referred to the color of his
patient’s eyes and always conducted an eye examination to determine the acuity
of a patient’s vision. It was a curious prelude to a lobotomy.
In 1923, a surgical patient died: He performed an autopsy
and -- according to his notes -- the brain was
‘abnormal’
. The gray
matter was discolored, but the eyes, the eyes again, were perfect in every
respect. The patient’s name was Raines and there was a coded number referring
to her file in parentheses. I decided to read no further until I had a chance
to examine it. I left the journals and returned to the administrative office.
Connie was up to her neck in red tape and treading reams of paper.
“I need more help,” I pleaded. “How can I find this
file?”
She met me grudgingly halfway, but the scent of her
cologne nearly lifted me off my feet.
“No problem, if you have a number,” she said. “It’s numbered
and lettered, right?” She looked at the number and nodded. “Down in the
archives.”
The numbers were in the right hand corner of every
file and on the front of each cabinet, which I knew from my previous sojourn.
“Find the right cabinet,” she said. “It’s all
numerical.”
Her smile cut through my flesh and impaled my soul. I
suspected I was about to fall hopelessly in love.
“You won’t have any trouble,” she said, “if you can
remember how to get there.”
I nodded silently, not knowing what to make of these
deep and delightful feelings of affection I was enjoying.
“Good luck,” she said, and bewitched me with a smile.
I pivoted on my worn heels and strode with conviction
and certainty down the hall. It was amazing what a little attention from an
attractive woman could do for a man’s battered ego.
I reached the stairs and descended into the gloom of
that abysmal basement. A single low watt bulb still burned meekly in the hall,
a memento of times passed. The old gurneys and obsolete equipment were
commencing to gather an air of familiarity about them and appeared less
dangerous.
I reached the records room and crept in. It was lit up
like a public library. The filing clerk had been dutiful, but a careless
housekeeper. The home office would have raised hell for this terrible disregard
of efficiency. It took me nearly fifteen minutes to find the Raines file, which
consisted primarily of charts.
The Raines woman had been young, married and twenty-five
years of age and had four kids. She was born in 1899 and died in 1924, with a
brief history of mental illness. Her husband, a coal miner, had committed her
for examination. She complained of
hearing voices
and said that Satan
had
pissed in her face
. She described the ‘demon’ as being
exceedingly
small, less than six inches in height
and looking like a penis
.
She said
he
stood on her stomach while she
was in bed and made lewd gestures and advances. He also succeeded in making her
pregnant.
Her husband said
she was a wicked woman and there
was absolutely no chance of saving her
. She had a few hysterical moments
before he turned her over to the state.
‘Things were getting out of hand’
,
the file quoted him as saying.
One week after her admittance, Doctor Grier drilled
four holes in her skull and started disjuncting white matter. The hysteria and
hallucinations stopped. In fact, a redemptive smile appeared on her hapless
features and never left her face. Several months passed before she delivered her
stillborn child in the hospital. A Madonna-like smile accompanied her to the
grave.
Several days later, Grier began feverishly to investigate
the color and corrugations of brains he lobotomized. He described nearly all of
them as unhealthy. In his examinations, the corrugations and ridges were not
deep enough. For one reason or another, their brains were also dysfunctional.
I was surprised and alarmed to discover a state mental
facility performed so many autopsies in those early years. That was a job for
the state’s medical examiner.
Then he stopped and started again to explore and write
about new experiments related to eyes.
“Human tears are a re-creation of the primordial seas,
which bathed the first eyes,”
he
said, which struck me as almost poetic. Then he continued with, “
According
to the Voynich script, the retina may be described as an outgrowth of the
brain, a special part of the surface that has sent forth a bud that has become sensitive
to light.”
I could almost hear my brain calling for ‘light, more
light!’
“It retains brain cells between the receptors and the optic
nerve, which modify electrical activity. Moving from the center of the human
retina,” he continued. “It may be said that we travel back in evolutionary time
from a highly organized structure to a primitive eye, which does no more than
detect simple movement of shadows. The frog’s retina cannot see objects unless
they are moving …
“The eye is the first line of defense among primates.
The dumber the animal, the smarter the retina. The edge of the human retina
does not even respond when stimulated by movement, it merely initiates a reflex
to direct the eyes to the source of movement so we can see it with our foveal
eyes.”
This subtle outgrowth of the brain was apparently to
be the focal point of his examination. I read on, absorbed.
“All sensory signals first go to a relay station in
the thalamus, a central structure in the brain. The path is not clear. Messages
seem to pass to primary areas in the cortex, where they are modified and sent
to other parts of the brain. Somewhere and somehow along the way, the brain
figures out what the object seen is all about.”
I thought he was saying the brain could get it wrong,
or confused, and assume it was seeing something that did not exist, or make
mistakes in interpreting what it sees, or thinks it sees. My brain was having
trouble trying to figure out what his brain was concocting.
He switched to the simpler and more basic biological
construction:
“Each eyeball is equipped with six intrinsic muscles which
hold it in position in its orbit. Beside the extrinsic eye muscles, there are
also muscles within the eyeball. The iris is an annular muscle forming the
pupil through which light travels to the lens.”
I was profoundly aware that we were in dire need of light
to see, but not intuitively.
“Fish have dense and rigid lenses. The cornea is
immersed in water; light is hardly bent at all (refractive index = density of
surrounding medium).
“Superior oblique: The tendon passes through a pulley
in the skull in front of the suspecions of the eyeball…
“There is a continuous small high frequency tremor
that converts light into electrical impulses…the language of the nervous
system.”
You needed light for concrete images, but not for
those materializing in darkness.
“The visual acuity of the hawk is four times greater than
a man. The size of receptors and density are important, if we consider the
ability of the eye to distinguish details
.
When receptors are abundant, the details are more
distinguishable. Is that why some cannot see the woods for the trees?
“The fovea does not exist in eyes where depth
perception is not important.
Apes, he claimed, have developed fovea and precise
control of eye movement. He said,
“There is an evolutionary distance of 200
million years between the eyes of apes and those of humans.”
I was astonished. The only difference between us is the
evolution of the eye. Is that why we have come to discern that the eyes are the
windows of the soul, and why an ape may or may not possess a soul, despite the
fact the Exodus claims that ‘all things, even animals, possess souls.’
“Insects can see colors, but some are color blind.
Bees see colors that appear only white to us; and compound eyes show an
increase in sensitivity to differences in light intensity.