The Road Narrows As You Go (60 page)

She took up lodgings in a top-floor apartment on Dallas Road, at the very bottom of the island, across from the beach overlooking the sea that separated her home in Canada and her real home, America. And because she was the single mother of an adopted child, Wendy had little time or energy to draw. She was lucky the cheques her syndicate sent twice a year were substantial. She improvised the rest of her income. Plus the added problem, she could not breastfeed. The baby Essa desperately wanted to breastfeed. She mouthed like a fish and swallowed air and scooped her arms through the air looking for Wendy's breasts and when she found one, aimed her head straight for it like a kamikaze pilot and latched there. If Wendy let her suck, the baby groaned and squealed
and flailed her limbs, squeezing the milkless nipples between her gums until Wendy yelped and had to pry the girl off using the extra leverage of a foam swimming paddle. There was nothing pacifying about the baby's suck. She sucked for that one keen nourishment, breastmilk, and Wendy adored the baby for her perseverance. The baby could latch through a sweater, was how desperately she wanted breastmilk. Hang there from the breast, swinging from her latch like a piece of cave art. The more she wanted Wendy's breast, the less she took to her bottle of formula. And it agonized Wendy to see the baby resist formula. When she heard the baby cry, a place in her lower chest ached like an empty crib. One day she went through the whole operation of loading Essa into the carseat screaming and drove to the doctor's office. She told the pediatrician about the ache in her belly when the baby cried and they weighed the baby and saw right away she was not gaining weight. At six weeks old the baby must be
this
heavy, the doctor said and pointed to a chart, and she is only as heavy as
that
. I got no milk, Doc, Wendy said. She won't eat the formula.

You need milk, the doctor said and leaned over his lap and started to scribble on a prescription pad. Here, go to this address and pick up some breastmilk.

The British Columbia Breastmilk Cooperative was an adhoc sort of thing based out of a yellow brick bungalow in Victoria's valley neighbourhood of Fernwood, across the street from a physical rehabilitation clinic and another clinic for hearing loss and speech therapy. The park nearby had a baseball diamond and tennis courts.

On the drive there with baby Essa, Wendy passed by what looked like an old folks' home but that billed itself on a large sign as a Christian walk-in clinic for psychiatric care for the homeless, or something like that, and under that a name caught her eye:
Dr. L. Pazder
.

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The Anawim House was a Siamese twin of Victorian homes conjoined on a double lot. If an apartment had shot up from the rooftop, the resemblance to No Manors would be more obvious. The Anawim was far better maintained. It was the combination of the oversized house and the residents she saw inside that did it: Addicts in rehab, psych-ward halfway patients. Shufflers incapable of so much as lifting their feet off the ground. Time's tragic freeloaders. Luggage under their eyes. Parched brows, cracked as the desert floor in Death Valley.

Here was where Dr. Lawrence Pazder first treated Michelle Smith for satanic ritual abuse repressed-memory syndrome, of which she was the first and only example, and where it appeared he ended up working again, almost a decade later, now in a self-imposed exile from the reputation he'd gained and lost for himself as the leading expert of a false psychiatric diagnosis. The doctor's return to Victoria came after a California journalist published an article in the
SF Bay Guardian
thoroughly debunking Pazder's theories of repressed-memory and satanic abuse.
Is Satanic Abuse a Hoax
? read the headline. The writer found no evidence of anything like what happened in his memoir
Michelle Remembers
ever happening in real life, none of the satanic assaults, the murders, the live burial. Michelle's own family refused to corroborate a single shred of what the memoir recounted. The mainstream news
quickly jumped on the story and the career of Dr. Pazder fell apart in a matter of days.

When calls to appear as an expert witness for the prosecution in child sexual abuse trials came to a dead halt, home awaited Dr. Pazder. News programs ran stories on the reversal of court decisions, of children confessing it was all made up, that doctors and police seeded their questions with the answers they wanted to hear, and former teachers and daycare workers were being exonerated of charges they were satanic pedophiles, being freed from jail with apology, and the entire decade of satanic fears began to fade away.

At last after all these years, welcome, welcome to Anawim, come in. Of course I remember who you are, you're the one … from all your letters, said Dr. Lawrence Pazder, who seemed not at all perturbed by the fact he never replied and instead immediately made her feel special and scheduled. Pazder had a full head of snow-white hair parted to the right, and a clownish nose that made his smile seem more innocent than it probably was. It occurred to her that Punk Anderson in
Dallas
looked a lot like Dr. Pazder, and Punk was a duplicitous old school pawn in larger culture wars.

Wendy was to learn that Pazder spoke in one manner in the hallways of Anawim House and another way during sessions. When he spoke in public, you could see the Catholicism beaming out of his eyes and carrying his every word from his mouth with the spirit of forgiveness, openness, empathy, guileless gullibility, and absolute faith in the literal truth of magical realms. But once the door closed he went neutral and the professional psychiatrist came out. The godly glow faded to a sober, balanced, and empty aesthetic. A confidence took over that relied on systems of notebooks, charts, metrics, research. And also applied with this same objectivity, Pazder employed African spirit bobs, harmonic crystals, and rare earth magnets.

Their second session, Pazder told her after he blew his nose into a Kleenex that he wanted to put her under hypnosis. How exciting. He
dimmed the lights. Brought out a beaded African charm. He put his hands on his lap and pressed the charm into the leg of his pants. The mind's a
mysterious
organ, Pazder said, sometimes our puppeteer sometimes our protector. Meat capable of keeping its own secrets. Denial, what a strangely human dilemma that animals live with and with no problem but which causes us shame, misery, and ruin. Our problem, we contain multitudes. Sometimes we experience things that are so powerful, so traumatic, the brain works for years to repress the memory. But the memories stay, just hidden. And the power of those repressed memories can still control the conscious self. The blind spot in our sense of our self is this repressed truth. That is the repressed memory of which I study. Hypnosis can disarm the patient, unlock the cellar door, and give you the safety to remember again what's under the stairs of yourself, and identify the pain that's causing the blind spot.

Let's do it, she said.

His pendulous African charm didn't do what she hoped it would swing by swing and put her into a weird cross-eyed zone of the unlit unconsciousness, dripping drool like Jonjay used to, and tapped into the deeper caves of herself. But it wasn't a general anaesthetic of the mind the way she expected it would be, with time missing. She remembered everything lucidly. When Pazder told her she was under, basically she pretended she was.
You are asleep. You are sinking. Sinking into deep. Deep memories. Deep memories. Memories. Memories of your childhood. Of your mom. Mom. Memories of a man. Man. Man. Do you see a Man in your deep memories, Wendy?

Yes. Yes, I do.

What does he look like?

She told him the same stories she'd told herself all her life about a time her mother pointed to the man on the television introducing a story called
The Honest Man
. A deep memory of pressing her hands to the glass of the television. To Father. Cover his face with my hands. Maybe four years
old. Listened to him speak with my ear against the screen.
There are times when the honest man is surrounded by dishonest men, and dishonest women, beautiful dishonest women. Now, how honest can an honest man be? That you shall soon see …

And another deep memory, of a guided tour of a hydroelectric dam. A massive concrete facility not far from the city. Five years old. Maybe six. Four. Reagan gave her a box of chocolates. Image of Reagan pointing to a massive electric generator as she ate the chocolates. Sitting on his lap, definitely Reagan. Wendy provided the story in fragments over a period of a few weeks, to please Pazder's impression that she was hypnotized.

Essa was a dutiful baby and slept through most sessions. Sometimes she giggled at the nasal falsetto of Pazder's voice.

He had a trick, too. He told her that when he counted down to one and snapped his fingers she would wake up, no longer hypnotized, and remember everything of what they talked about. Ten. Nine. She would wake up feeling refreshed and alert. Eight. And when you wake up, Pazder said, you will remember
everything
you told me. Seven. You will remember all the memories you told me under hypnosis. Six. And the memories will not scare you …
One
.

The trick was that once the hypnosis session was in the past, then she had to question the feeling she had
during
the hypnosis that she
wasn't
under hypnosis, because the feeling might just be because Dr. Pazder
told
her to remember, meaning
maybe
he
did
draw out her deep memories, and what she said under hypnosis
was true
and Reagan
was
her father.

You say he
admitted
he was your father when you met him …? said Dr. Pazder as he wrote his notes.

However much he placated his patient with questions that delved into memories of illegitimacy, she noticed he made sure to drop one or two questions every session that probed the story of Hick's death from AIDS and of the wake. Perhaps Dr. Pazder preferred to delve into more popular memories. She struggled under hypnosis not to remember.

He asked her to look closer at that
actual
zone of her repressed memory, the
recent
past. You
don't
remember.
Because
the times were intense, Wendy, Dr. Pazder said. Issue nine, Wendy, issue
nine
, Wendy, Dr. Pazder said in the drone he used. What happened? Do you remember? He wanted carnal truths. What Pazder called
those homosexual comics
featuring Wendy at the flesh-eating ceremony.
Issue nine.

But unlike Michelle, who made up her demonic stories, Wendy flatly denied the events in issue nine.

Why are you here, Wendy? Dr. Pazder asked. What is it you hope to learn about yourself? After all these years begging for therapy, you refuse to open up.

Have you
read
issue nine? Wendy asked in her best attempt at staying hypnotized.

I … no, I haven't, said Pazder. I want you. To tell me. What you. Remember.

Wendy began to feel something awful happening between them. It was palpable how much they both wanted, doctor and patient, for therapy to somehow vindicate the reputations they each had built up in the eighties. It wasn't about Reagan anymore, it was about what this collaboration could do. Through the auspices of a revelatory memory, published as medical breakthrough, they both hoped the poles of public opinion would reverse. Problem was, they sought a different repressed memory. For as much as Wendy loved to believe in the unbelievable when it suited her, and deny the truth when it suited her, so did Pazder, who was attracted to the false promise of Wendy's scandal. Doubt, for the first time shedding light on denial. Doubt about her own self-myth—at last! A doctor had finally succeeded through incompetence in breaking her of the conviction that Reagan was her father. Face to face with her ideal therapist and seeing the complete denial of his desires, she all of a sudden felt embarrassed by hers. Doubt flooded in where her denial was strongest and suddenly she felt this intense pressure to get up and leave the doctor's office and never
return. Pazder could not help but repeat his mistake and try to do for Wendy what he had done for Michelle's fantasies: use her to prove his faulty theories right.

Pazder should have asked her more questions about Jonjay. He should have asked her to remember everything about Jonjay, the artist who knew
The History of the Secret Origins of the Universe
, an art that, at least so far as we could figure, showed you how to dodge death.

42

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