The Visibles (14 page)

A thin, pasty doctor motioned me into the hallway behind a door. His name was Dr. Frum, which I immediately changed to Dr. Frown, due to his humorless expression. “This won’t be too long,” he said. He went through the same thing Dr. North had told me last week. They would give my dad a sedative to put him to sleep, attach electrodes to his head and one to his foot, and then put over a hundred volts of electricity into his brain. They tracked the seizure’s progress by the twitching of his big toe. When the twitching stopped, the seizure was done. Then they just waited for him to wake up from the anesthetic.

“We make a printout of the brain activity during the seizure,” Dr. Frown said.

“Can I have it?” my father asked hopefully. As if it were something he’d hang next to his diploma from the Pennsylvania State University medical school.

Dr. Frown looked alarmed, then said no. He turned back to me. “He’ll be in and out in no time.”

A nurse took my father’s arm. My father pumped a closed fist in the air, like he was pulling on a tugboat horn.
Toot toot, I’m off.

“Can I watch?” I called after them.

Dr. Frown and his nurse exchanged a look.

“I’m serious,” I said. “I’m a biology student.”

The nurse smiled at me. Dr. Frown was already leading my father into a small room. The door shushed shut, and I turned around, temporarily unsure of my bearings. As I retreated back into the waiting room, the receptionist caught my eye. She tilted her head and clucked her tongue. She was short and round, with square fingers. There were
packages of unopened bags of pretzels, cakes, chocolate-covered raisins sitting by her phone. She had one of those soft, lovely faces; people probably noticed her all the time and thought,
You could be so beautiful, if you weren’t so heavy.
I could feel her trying to meet my eye, but I looked away.

I faced a window that looked out onto York. Down seven flights was a Tasti D-Lite, a liquor store, a small hovel that made duplicates of keys but barely had room for anything else. Next to the shops was a park, which consisted of a few benches and a basketball court. Six or seven guys were playing a very loud game of basketball. Even from this high up, I could hear their hip-hop music blaring out of the boom box they’d set up on one of the benches.

I heard a small clicking noise coming from the back of the office and looked up. What were they doing now? Were the electrodes hooked up to his head? Had they given him the anesthetic? How did electrocution erase depression, anyway? Was it like spraying on disinfectant and wiping away the grime?

The basketball players liked to scream at one another, saying things like,
throw it here, you fuckin’ pussy, nice one.
There was one guy with semi-greasy blond hair and a mustache who dominated the ball, springing up to the hoop and sliding it in. I watched as he pranced around with his chest puffed out, guessing he was probably one of those self-assured assholes who harassed women out his car window simply because he could.

“Those basketball players,” the receptionist said, making me jump. “I have to apologize. It’s a new thing, them playing here. We’ve had a lot of complaints.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “They’re not bothering me.”

“No, really, they’re animals.” She rolled her eyes. “Why aren’t they working? Middle of the day.”

“It’s fucking out of
bounds,
” said a voice from the basketball court.

The receptionist pursed her lips. I gripped the seat, her tension suddenly infectious. They
were
annoying. All of a sudden I wanted to shove something through the window to make them shut up. A brick, perhaps, something heavy. I wanted to hurl it at the loudest player down
there—the shirtless guy with the scraggly mustache—and scream,
Have some respect. Do you know what’s
happening
up here?

I pictured the brick hitting his head and cracking it open. I saw him falling awkwardly, a pool of blood running out from his head, his greasy face contorted, the other men flocked around him. My vision narrowed. My thighs trembled and knocked against the arms of the chair. The zigzag designs on the carpet blurred.

When I opened my eyes a few seconds later, the waiting room was still and bright. The receptionist marked something in her book and absentmindedly placed a pretzel on her tongue like it was a pill. The basketball game continued. When the ball hit the hoop’s rim, it made a loud, clattering sound like a piece of the earth splitting open.

And then the nurse was touching my arm. “Miss Davis?”

I shot up.

“Do you want to see your father? He’s done.”

Her expression was bland, almost obtuse. He was done? How long had it been? “Do I?”

“He would like you to, I think.”

She led me through the door to a long, fluorescent-lit hall. Near the window were two people in wheelchairs. I could see my father’s hair poking up over the wheelchair’s back, his hands curled over the arms.

“Why is he in a wheelchair?” I whispered. “Can’t he walk?”

“No, he’s fine. It’s just for recovery, so he feels more comfortable.”

They’d made him change into a faded, worn hospital gown. I had a foolish thought, although I didn’t realize until later how foolish it really was: my father’s hair wasn’t standing on end. And his ears weren’t bleeding. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but maybe that. When I got a few steps away from him, I coughed, thinking he’d turn, but he continued to look out the frosted-over window, blinking and blinking, his teeth gnawing at the middle portion of his bottom lip. I peeked at the person next to him, a woman in her thirties. Her head lolled to one side, her eyes remaining closed.

“Dad?” I said softly.

He still didn’t turn. I walked around to face him. His face contained no expression whatsoever. His eyes followed me, then landed on me. I
felt him taking me in. He was looking at me like he was watching television: anticipatory, with no idea what would happen next, but not really so concerned either way.

I had no idea what to do. Sit down, continue to stand? Tell him who I was? Wait?

“Summer,” he finally said, his voice dry.

“Yes.” It came out like a gasp, like a release of air. “Dad. Yes. Hi. It’s me. I’m here.”

“Summer.” He swallowed hard.

“How are you doing? Are you okay?”

“I…” His movements were slow, his mouth opened and closed like a goldfish.
It’s just the sedatives,
I told myself.
They haven’t worn off yet.
But there was something else, too: a void. It was like his whole past had been wiped away. Like he had no idea who he
was.

The alarm on his watch started to go off. He looked around, puzzled, then located the sound on his wrist. He stared at his watch, then at me. Desperately. He coughed, moved his neck from side to side and then slowly, so slowly, edged his hand toward the watch. He tapped the face gently, as if he feared he might break it. When that accomplished nothing, he tried pressing a button. When the beeping continued, he looked at me again. I shrugged back at him, just as desperate. We were two different species trying to communicate.

“I don’t…” he said, then looked down and tried another button. The alarm stopped. He stared at it for a while, perhaps wondering if it was going to start again. The woman in the wheelchair next to him still hadn’t moved. The silence was louder and more penetrating than the beeping. My ears rang and rang.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

He put his hands back on the wheelchair’s arms. Every movement seemed tentative. The lines in his forehead were gone.

“My neck hurts, I think,” he said. “And my arms. And my jaw.”

“So it hurt, then?”

“Did what hurt?”

“The…” A nurse walked by a few yards away. She glanced at me.
Is this normal?
I wanted to ask her.
Is any of this normal?

“How do you feel?” I asked my father again.

His eyes moved up toward the ceiling as he tried to think. “Feel? I don’t know.”

“Do you feel sad?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Do you feel…happy?”

“Happy?” He ran his hand over his chin. Was his chin unfamiliar, too? His hands? When we went home, would he look in the mirror and not know himself? “I don’t know,” he said, with a certain amount of fatigue, but also a certain amount of wonderment. “I don’t really feel anything.”

He made a groan and put his head against the wheelchair’s back. “I’m going to close my eyes for a minute.”

“Okay. That’s fine. Take all the time you need.”

While I sat there with him, I composed a commentary in my head, as if this were a documentary about ECT and I was the narrator and I already knew how the story would end.
This was Richard Davis’s first appointment, and by far the toughest. After this, he began to miraculously recover. Says Lawrence Frum, the doctor who administered the treatments: “This is the best outcome from ECT I have ever seen in my practice. This man has a new lease on life. It is simply astounding.”

I changed my high, thin voice to a deep, assured one.
Faith,
I thought. Yet again, I turned everything over to faith. I revised the documentary script a few times to make the outcome better and better. My father would eventually practice medicine again. He would eventually run a hospital. My mother would wash up as something plain and somewhat pitiful, maybe a telemarketer or salesclerk, her drama career hitting a dead end. We would get through this, and he’d come out a hero. It made me feel better. It really did.

T
he computer’s
screensaver drew fractal-like scribbles. Once the image became an impossibly tangled ball of yarn, it dissipated and a new drawing began. I watched it for a while.

I touched the monitor and there was static. The keys on the keyboard felt like teeth.

I stared at the sentences, astounded that my hands had created them. I pulled the cursor over everything and hit delete.

I looked out onto the Promenade. There was the typical lineup of nannies with strollers, old people leaning over the railing, the resident homeless woman with her shopping cart of junk. She was splayed out on one of the benches, her head rested on a carefully tied garbage bag of empty Coke cans. There was a little smile on her lined, dirty face, as if she were terribly pleased with her makeshift pillow. It jolted things into perspective—it was unclear when this woman had last slept in a real bed or eaten a real meal, and yet she seemed more grateful and content than I was.

It was the day after my father’s first treatment. We had come home from the appointment in a cab—I didn’t want to subject him to the subway. At home, he lay on the couch, staring at the wall. After a while, he started crying. “I can’t
think,
” he kept saying. “This is horrible, I can’t
think.
What the hell happened to me?”

I tried to tell him what happened. He’d signed the papers, I said over and over. He’d agreed to this. “But I can’t
think,
” he kept repeating. “I can’t
feel.
” In the end, I called Dr. North; he prescribed a sleeping pill. I begged the pharmacy to send someone to deliver it; I was afraid of leaving my father out of my sight, but also knew he wasn’t capable of leaving the house.

If I went to Ireland, I could study genetics with Dr. John Shea. He was working on finding genetic markers for all the important things in the world, or at least was linked to those who were. He was looking for links to certain cancers, multiple sclerosis, ALS. He was associated with those who were looking for a link between our genes and depression. I could study that. I could study whatever I wanted.

But if I went to Ireland, my father would be alone.

I didn’t know if he was supposed to be left alone; doctors hadn’t told me one way or the other. Perhaps there were terrible side effects of ECT that hadn’t shown up yet—other than, of course, the memory thing. Something else I’d learned: doctors were often loath to mention the staggering side effects of medications. They said,
Just take this, it might help,
but they so rarely explained that you might not sleep or you might see things or that it might make you more depressed or gain weight or lose weight or stop eating or not be able to produce natural tears.
There were no instructions that came with ECT, just a pamphlet,
What Is ECT?
featuring a smiling blond woman in a pink sweater, proffering a teapot to the camera.
Just do it!
her smile said, but it seemed coerced, like someone was pushing a gun to her back.
Your life will be as carefree as mine, really, honestly! Would you like some tea?

I picked up the phone and called the number I’d written on the little slip of paper last week, the number from the flyer in the East Village. It rang a few times, and a woman answered. “Learning Annex.”

I cleared my throat. “Hi, I was calling about the talk that’s in two weeks, the one with Meredith Heller at the Mayflower Hotel? Acting for Beginners?”

“Yeah. And?”

I gripped the phone. I hadn’t rehearsed past this point; I’d expected them to say,
Meredith Heller? Who?
“What will Miss Heller be speaking about?”

She flipped some pages. Sighed. “Um, acting?”

“Right. And…is she around forty?”

“I don’t know. Harold?” She moved her mouth away from the phone. “Do you know anything about Meredith Heller?…I don’t know, she’s speaking next week, or…Yeah. That’s her. Yes. How old is she, roughly?”

There was mumbling. “Harold says she’s fortyish, yeah. If you want to buy tickets, though, you should call back tomorrow. I’m just manning the phones because the regular person is sick.”

“Okay,” I said weakly.

“You can buy them at the door, too, Harold says. The day of.”

She hung up without saying goodbye. I held the phone at arm’s length, worried for a moment that it had recorded the conversation in its little plastic fiber-optic parts, storing it for a later time when my father could rewind it and hear everything. Did my mother have any idea what things were like with us? Surely she assumed we might find out about this lecture and come to see her. It was possible—it was very possible—that she had no idea what had happened to my father. Perhaps she thought we would show up, happy and well adjusted and completely forgiving, ready to hum or pantomime or pretend we were
dead or whatever it was people did in acting classes. But all this was waiting for her. She didn’t even know it.

It was late afternoon; the sky had faded from gold to lavender. I sat on the back of the couch, rubbing one foot against the other. After a while I looked up the Mayflower Hotel on a map of Manhattan. I imagined us walking into the lobby and seeing my mother. I imagined my father healthy and my mother dumpy and silly, teaching a Learning Annex class to make ends meet. We wouldn’t want her. We’d laugh. We’d leave the lobby without taking the class, without paying the twenty bucks.