Trip Blue had not always been the Director of a retirement village for elderly Oregonians. Previously he’d occupied, for almost ten years, an unrivaled and exorbitantly paid position as plastic surgeon to Los Angeles’s nouveau riche. Before California there had been a brief, ladder-climbing stint as the prodigious assistant to a controversial New York-based micro-surgeon, and, before this, Vietnam.
Trip Blue had never been to Vietnam himself. He’d seen pictures. The pictures were enough to put him off and the stories sealed the deal. Trip was the kind of young man who could not go without brushing his teeth before bed. He struggled to picture himself dispersing napalm or going hand-to-hand with an angry VC. Neither did he suppose himself capable of lying around for weeks in stagnant paddy fields or, in adherence to the frontline trend, smearing peanut butter on his toes in the hope that some Vietnamese rat might bestow upon him a bite infected enough to guarantee a one-way ticket back to America.
Vietnam, Trip Blue quickly concluded, was not his sort of war. Ideally, he’d prefer something more hygienic, something snappier, with less actual death. Subsequently he’d weathered the war years from the relative comfort of a prestigious east coast academic facility. Asthma, and an entirely fabricated two-week affair with a male lab technician (luridly documented for the benefit of any draft officer skeptical enough to ask questions, in six none too convincing ‘love’ letters and a single blurred Polaroid snapshot), ensured that Trip Blue had ample excuse to avoid the draft.
Trip Blue began his medical training in the Fall of 1971 and, as the Vietnam war dribbled catastrophically into its sixth, seventh and eighth years, he’d shut his ears to the growing American unease, ignored the sea of angry placards sprouting in front of the Student Union, and focused on his education. He’d studied the medical greats for days at a time, pouring over thousand-page manuals in the dusty upper echelons of the university library. When he’d run out of books Trip began paying the more gullible undergraduates to let him practice his doctoring; first on warts and minor abrasions and later, as his confidence grew, on diabetes, eczema, broken bones and various congenital heart conditions. He learned fast. He had few disasters.
Very occasionally one of his experiments went pear-shaped. Patients passed out or went into cardiac failure. Shoulders refused to set, even under extreme manipulation. On one notable occasion, the appendix could not be located, and when, using a cigarette lighter and sterilized salad fork, Trip had finally tracked down the infected organ, it seemed attached to the intestines by a substance as elastic and unyielding as Laffy Taffy. Some situations proved themselves beyond the capability of a DIY medical student.
Trip Blue was not yet a megalomaniac. He knew when to concede defeat and on the rare occasions when he found himself out of his depths during a procedure, simply deferred to the authorities, calling ambulances, making drive-by deposits at the local ER, and silencing his victims with a hefty bursary, siphoned from one of his father’s offshore bank accounts. Many of Trip’s ‘unsuccessful’ patients were marked for life, yet more than happy to trade a kidney or minor burn for the possibility of graduating debt-free. A code of silence settled around Trip Blue’s medical research. It was not so much fear which kept his patients quiet, as an unvoiced belief that the young man was a genius; a Hippocrates or Pasteur destined to discover cures for any number of twentieth-century diseases. In lending one’s armpit or uterus to his experiments, his patients could later claim a footnote in the annals of medical history. By night Trip Blue experimented in his home-constructed operating theatre. By day he played the academic overachiever, drinking in the compulsory lectures and plaguing his professors with the kind of spiraling, sycophantic questions which had them consulting their academic superiors for satisfactory answers. Whilst no one appreciated Trip Blue as a person, students and staff alike envied him his telescopic mind.
In June 1975 Trip Blue graduated top of his class, triumphing over the three hundred scalpel-wielding junior surgeons who stood squinting beside him in their class photo. These stiffnecked men and formidable young women were the cream of the medical crop, destined for a lifetime of unsociable hours, sterile scrubs and miracle-working. Each was, for the most part, obsessed with the gravity and greatness of their vocation; gladly working weekends and holidays without asking for overtime, rarely remembering the birthdays of parents or siblings and, in moments of brave honesty, confessing that people were much easier to approach once anesthetized. Trip Blue could not have cared less about any of them. Trip found the majority of people thoroughly unnecessary. He had, however, in the final term of his final year, met and married Soren James’s mother.
Magda Mulaney first caught his eye in the science library elevator. At the time she’d been carrying an armful of molecular biology textbooks, the rims of her glasses barely visible above the topmost volume. Two days later, ten minutes into their first date in the campus coffee house, he was disappointed to discover Magda a junior librarian and not the teenage genius he’d presumed. Over their first mutual cappuccino, Magda made stilted attempts at small talk whilst Trip glared furiously from the opposite end of the couch, silently battling his own conscience.
Trip Blue did not believe in love. He could not see himself at any point in the future developing a belief in love. There was simply no scientific justification for such atrocious sentimentality. Great wealth and a strong jaw line had conspired to ensure Trip Blue would have no problems, past, present or future, in gratifying his sexual whims. He did not need a wife. However, as he dredged the last frothy drops from his coffee cup, Trip concluded a wife might help to establish his reputation as a respectable professional. He was neither particularly attracted nor repulsed by Magda. On the strength of their first date she seemed ill-inclined to question anything he said. If Trip could not have a genius for a wife, an unassuming simpleton was the next best thing. The years would prove Magda formidable beyond his initial assumptions and Trip would come to realize that libraries were not the natural habitat of docile women.
On the eve of their second date Trip kissed his not-yet-wife perfunctorily by the staff parking lot. ‘You’ll do,’ he said, observing Magda at arm’s length. Magda had laughed drily, imagining this a joke, and, four weeks after their first deeply mediocre kiss, agreed to become his wife. At the time she’d seen no further than a much-needed exodus from her parents’ duplex. Later, when the honeymoon blinkers fell off, Magda Blue wondered what exactly had attracted her to a man more driven, more ruthless and inconsiderate than any of the three hundred egocentric obsessives in his graduating class.
Dr and Mrs Blue began their married life by relocating to the suburbs of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania had never appealed to Magda. Born in Brooklyn and raised in downtown Chicago, she found the state excessively scenic and the people prone to engage in endless, circular contemplation of the weather, the church and, during the warmer months, baseball. She could not understand why her new husband’s galloping intellect had deposited them in the most backward spot on the eastern seaboard. For three years she languished in the Harrisburg lending library, a two-story prefab crouching awkwardly in the shadow of the United Methodist Church. As she stacked and stamped a lifetime’s worth of plastic-backed Mills and Boon novels (the library’s most popular lends, farm manuals and the Holy Bible excepted), she read her way through the complete canon of Russian literature, special-ordered from head office, and grew fat on grilled cheese sandwiches. Though far from a provincial backwater, Harrisburg was the smallest place Magda had ever lived. She felt like Gulliver lumbering over the little people every time she stepped outside. The local women, burnt out on generations of short-loan army personnel, refused to acknowledge her. Magda did not take this personally. There was a line, impassable as the Berlin Wall, separating the locals from the army wives.
However, the wives and girlfriends of the few military men still stationed at the base also kept their distance, withholding dinner party invites and acknowledging her only when they came to borrow the latest arrival from the Romance section. Magda Blue was too mortified to challenge their standoffishness. She said nothing, though her loneliness felt like a freezing fog. Everyone else’s husband had served in Vietnam: a single tour of duty, a second or, in a handful of cases, a soul-destroying third. These men suffered from night sweats and terrifying hallucinations. Their heads were full of horror stories, impossible to share. Many were missing arms, legs and large chunks of skin. They were not the men they had been on their wedding days. Their children adapted, learning to hold their laughter still for fear of a whipping belt. Their wives wore the martyred look of beleaguered patriots even as they ran their errands and emptied their trash cans and collected their buzz-cut progeny from little league. Magda Blue could not claim membership to this club. Each time she walked down Main Street she carried the shame of her draft-dodging husband, the only non-serving civilian stationed in the town’s military hospital. While it hurt to be so universally ignored, Magda refused to confront any of the women. She saw herself a traitor by marriage and could not spite the ladies their patriotic spirit. However, it was not patriotism which kept the army wives from her front door. Each of them had heard rumors of Dr Blue’s ‘experiments’ on H Wing. Gossip traveled fast in a town as tight as Phoenixville and within three months of their arrival, Trip had been branded a latter-day Mengele, and Magda, his evil muse.
The truth was a much lonelier horror. As the months progressed Magda Blue saw less and less of her husband. She ate her meals alone, watching reruns of I Love Lucy on the television set she’d installed at one end of the kitchen table. The freezer was bursting with Tupperware servings of pot roast and spaghetti dinners, lovingly prepared in anticipation of a husband who never came home. After a few months, the freezer refused to swallow any more of her false hopes and Magda quit cooking. She ate grilled cheese for dinner as well as lunch and swelled to twice her normal weight. She gave up on the gloomy Russians and began thieving Mills and Boon novels from the Romance section, silently berating her own stupidity when the racy sections got her hot and bothered in an empty bed. When the loneliness became too much for Magda, she lifted the telephone and cried for hours into the handset, her sobs harmonizing with the dialing tone. The act of pressing a telephone receiver to her ear helped her pretend that someone out there was listening. On good weeks Trip came home once, maybe twice. On bad weeks Magda felt like a widow.
On the rare occasions when her husband appeared on the lawn, squinting at his own front door like an out-of-state visitor, Magda hid her fury from the neighbors, greeting him with arms and eyes and a carefully painted smile. Once she had him over the threshold Magda was a landslide. She could not help herself.
‘Is it another woman?’ she’d ask as Trip threw a duffel bag of laundry at her feet and fell exhausted into bed.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he’d reply.
‘Drugs? Drink? Gambling?’
Labored silence.
‘What then, Trip? I haven’t seen you in days. What have you been doing?’
‘Research,’ he’d reply and immediately fall into a deep, comatose slumber, often drifting in and out of consciousness for thirty-six hours at a time. When he awoke he’d expect her to make love to him, silently and without preamble or afterthought. Whilst Trip would always instigate the physical moments of their marriage, he never seemed entirely present in the act. Squirming under the weight of her husband, Magda felt less a person and more a collection of muscles and organs, straining and constraining in strict obedience to their biological function. Every movement felt like an incision. Even their climaxes were mechanical, like factory parts, forced to release unnecessary pressure. Their exchanges began to resemble a suburban hit and run. It was impossible, she soon realized, for her husband to leave his science in the hospital.
Two hours after waking, having showered, repacked his duffel bag and consumed an enormous breakfast, Trip Blue would always be gone. Over the years Magda tried everything to make her husband talk. She hung over his breakfast plate, skillet in hand. She crossed her legs and played the miserly lover. She yelled and screamed and cried her eyelids bloody red. Yet she could not force her husband to divulge so much as a cursory overview of what his so-called ‘research’ entailed.
When first enlisted, Trip Blue himself had never heard of H Wing. His career compass was firmly stuck on big time success and as such he fully anticipated a lifetime of cutting-edge neurosurgery. America had other plans for Trip Blue. His futuristic grade average had attracted the attention of a specialized division of the US Army’s Medical Corps. Ignoring the express advice of young Trip’s academic tutor who’d noted in the boy a streak of something cold and opportunistic, this group of highly trained men, and a single, somewhat masculine woman, had summoned Trip to the Pentagon on the morning after his graduation ceremony. Trip Blue had obliged unquestioningly. He’d always known himself to be a genius and had waited years for just such a phone call. Over a three-day period, during which he was only allowed to speak to his interrogators by telephone, Trip was held in a sterile, constantly lit room and grilled mercilessly until his captors – satisfied that he was in fact the bona fide genius his resume suggested – offered him vast amounts of money to relocate to Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Trip Blue accepted on the spot. The money meant nothing to him, the location, less; but the research project had him salivating the second it slid across the table, sandwiched inconspicuously within a manila folder, stamped ‘Classified’. Returning to campus, Trip hired a U-Haul, packed up his wife, his textbooks and the few worldly possessions he’d accumulated over three years of medical school and drove through the night, arriving early the next evening at the crumbling military hospital on the outskirts of Phoenixville.
For the next four years Trip Blue sacrificed himself on the tiled corridors of H Wing. He went days without eating, allowing his hair to go unkempt and uncut for months on end. Whilst no actual infidelity ever occurred, Trip forgot about his wife. He felt like a man adrift, teetering on the edge of something tremendous. The Treatment Room consumed every second of his waking thoughts and, more often than not, left deep indentations on his dream life.
The Treatment Room nestled in the crook of H Wing’s two wards. The left ward housed some twenty-four Terminal cases in four open dorms, each containing six cots arranged to afford the best angle at a solitary television set, wall-mounted. To the right, twenty-four Delusionals were kept in single-cell rooms, locked and bolted for their own safety. Each of H Wing’s forty-eight residents, and the majority of the doctors and nurses, had recently returned from Vietnam. All staff members, save the cleaning staff – daily visitors from the civilian world – knew better than to mention the war. Instead they changed bandages, emptied drains and three times daily positioned a tray of nutritionally balanced gloop upon their patients’ laps.
Only a handful of these trained professionals had been granted access to the Treatment Room. The others, those individuals too inexperienced or untrustworthy to handle classified information, satiated their curiosity with staff room speculation about the constant stream of patients entering and exiting the Treatment Room. An eight digit punch code ensured that all but the highest ranking staff members had no idea what was happening on the other side of the double-thick door. Despite his medical pedigree Trip Blue had been working on H Wing subservient to the whims of a particularly forbidding consultant, known locally as God, for the better part of six months before he was entrusted with the eight precious digits.
God had invented the Treatment Room. The idea had come to him during his fifth tour of duty. God had always been a soldier. Even after four visits to Vietnam he’d been unable to settle back into the civilian world of shopping malls and washing machines and had requested a transfer back to Saigon. Vietnam was no longer the draw it had been five years previously. Less than a week after approaching his commanding officer, God was back on the Ho Chi Minh trail enjoying the atmosphere. The odds were against him. Most soldiers didn’t survive a second visit and God was now contemplating his fifth consecutive summer in the East.
Fate caught up with him when he was least expecting it. One minute he’d been taking a leak behind the burnt-out remains of a Vietnamese hut, the next minute, still shaking the last drops of piss from his rapidly wilting penis, he’d found himself staring into the slanty black eyes of a pair of gun-toting VC. The rest of God’s unit, riddled with bullets and bayonet holes, were in various states of decease as he was dragged, cursing the entire Oriental race, to a rudimentary prisoner of war camp on the jungle’s edge.
God was to spend the next eighteen months locked in a bamboo cage. With barely enough room for a single man to sit comfortably, the addition, two days after his incarceration, of an emaciated young private from Tennessee meant that the two men were forced to take turns standing and sitting. God was further frustrated to find his cellmate entirely ignorant of any conversation subject beyond the sports arena. ‘Jesus, son,’ the older man was often heard yelling, ‘just my goddamn luck to get myself locked up with a halfwit redneck.’ The boy could only shrug limply, for the bamboo roof impeded any sort of dynamic movement and, in lieu of conversation, offer to stand for an extra half hour. When he finally succumbed to the Vietnamese torture techniques and his wild, nocturnal yabberings got him shot right in front of God’s eyes, the older man was somewhat relieved. Lying diagonally, he could now sleep almost fully reclined and was finally able to think, unencumbered by the teenager’s constant commentary on the baseball games of his youth.
God marked the weeks in fingernail slithers and kept this rudimentary calendar in the breast pocket of his army shirt. By the third month he’d grown used to the perpetual itch of disembodied nails scratching at his rib cage. God grew thin. On an in-breath he could distinguish all but the lowest ribs protruding through his skin. He developed a perpetual leg twitch, a grimy, hacking cough, diarrhea, foot rot and an energetic colony of lice in either armpit, but he did not die. As the weeks turned to months, God became more and more convinced that Vietnam would not be his undoing. There was no justification for this belief. God was older, thinner and grumpier by far than any of his fellow prisoners, yet he remained convinced of his own immortality.
As he lay on the floor of his cell, the bamboo slats turning him slowly corrugated, God watched in horror as dozens of young Americans passed through the camp and within a matter of days, sometimes even hours, lost the will to live. Seemingly fit and healthy young bucks, half his age or less, were so terrified by the possibility of VC torture the damage was done long before the ropes or irons came out to play. Whilst God gritted his teeth through terrible beatings and deprivations, many of his fellow soldiers capitulated at the merest mention of tooth pulling. The effect, once noted, was undeniable; the correct words, even when uttered in a barely discernible pidgin English, could suck the life right out of a man. Thick-chested quarterbacks and wrestlers began to disintegrate as soon as the camp’s ‘welcome committee’ uttered their customary speech for newcomers (‘You want to die quick man … you want to die much slow?’) whilst weedy little SOBs from the suburbs seemed impervious to all but the most brutally physical torture techniques. The mind was much more complex than God had ever imagined. Some strange connection existed between the barely perceivable blips inside a man’s brain and the actual bones and muscles which kept him human from one minute to the next.
Though only moderately scientific, God began to hypothesize. The right sentiments, carefully spoken, could catch inside a man, resonating with his deepest subconscious understanding of himself. An apparently healthy man would curl up and die if the desire to admit defeat was lodged somewhere inside his subconscious. It was impossible to spot such a fault line from the outside. Cripples and crazy men appeared no more inclined to give up than the blond-blessed healthy. God began to ask questions. If death words could draw the life right out of a man, might there be other words – healing, healthy, life-rich words – which could stir the spirits up and appeal to those who had not yet made a pact with despair? He tested this theory on the men in the cell directly in front of his. Over a five-week period, all but one of these boys died, victims of the relentless cruelty of the Vietnamese guards. The final kid, a mere slip of a nineteen-year-old, refused to join them. The left side of his body was red-raw and blistering, covered in napalm burns. His left arm hung awkwardly at an angle which suggested permanent dislocation. His eyes were saucers circulating an emaciated face and yet while the VC dragged him out daily for a fresh round of beatings, God watched on in amazement as the kid – subject to his own fledgling experiments – seemed to grow stronger each day.
Each time their captors were out of earshot God would press his face into the space between the bamboo bars of his cage and holler encouraging sentiments across the ten-foot gulf which separated his cell from the next.
‘You’re getting better every day, son.’
‘Your skin is healing. Your bones are setting. You’re growing fat as a Thanksgiving turkey.’
‘You’ll be one hundred percent fighting fit by the weekend.’
And the kid, without ever acknowledging assent, simply got better. His blistered skin smoothed over. His arm slipped back into the socket and began to bend like a regular arm. His cheeks, which had succumbed to the cavernous limitations of a boiled rice diet, began to fill out, exposing a handsome midwestern face, albeit positively filthy. Bolstered by this success, God began experimenting on the cells to left, right and center back. Positive results were few and far between. Three out of every four test cases ended up in the funeral pit at the back of the camp. However, the success stories were so dramatic, so unbelievably astounding, God refused to be discouraged. Blind soldiers had their sight returned. The lame, though far too cramped to leap, experienced a miraculous increase in movement. Lungs unclogged and breathed openly for the first time since they’d arrived in the East.
By the time the boys from home kicked in the gates of the camp, liberating the remaining twenty-five prisoners and allowing God to stand upright for the first time in eighteen months, he’d all but invented the Treatment Room in his head. It would take some six months of convincing to persuade the United States Army to grant research privileges to a man with no previous medical experience, and the project would require Top Secret classification to guard against the possibility of embarrassing mistakes, but the notion of post-conflict treatment which was both successful and virtually cost free was too tempting to pass over. God found himself dispatched to the armpit of Pennsylvania where he built a prototype Treatment Room: a closet-sized compartment (roughly the shape and size of his Vietnamese cell), walled on all four sides and ceiling with thick, shatterproof mirrors. Once completed, God opened the doors of his Treatment Room and welcomed in a steady stream of broken soldiers.
Oftentimes against their will, for the Treatment Room was disturbingly reminiscent of a prison cell, God locked his patients up with a 360-degree revelation of their most honest selves. Whilst they considered themselves from front, back, floor and roof, he spoke gentle yet firm words, carefully prepared. After a few weeks it became clear that the patients did not require personalized encouragements. A simple pre-recorded ‘WISE UP’ piped through a speaker system was enough to pique a man’s deepest subconscious. These two words were bullets for the dying patients, whether they were aware of their own limited mortality or not. At the other end of the spectrum, God recorded incredible advances in the conditions of those patients not yet ready to give up.
‘It’s the truth,’ God explained to a somewhat bewildered Trip Blue on his first day in Phoenixville. ‘It’s not mind control. It’s not hypnotism. We’re just peeling back the layers and letting them see themselves for what they really are. If a man’s ready to give up, the Treatment Room’ll give him the right to do it with dignity. If a man’s fit to fight it out, the Treatment Room’ll give him the balls to keep going.’
The results spoke for themselves. The Delusionals (H Wing slang for the soldiers who believed themselves better than they actually were) managed an average of two to three sessions before they simply closed their eyes and passed away, freeing up valuable hospital beds for the Terminals, a great group of men who, whilst physically scuppered, responded so positively to the Treatment Room they often began a session wheelchair-bound and ten minutes later waltzed out of the room, significantly mended.
‘The mind,’ God was wont to remind his staff at every given opportunity, ‘controls the body,’ and the ever-growing list of soldiers with baby skin where they’d once had burns, with legs and arms sprouting from the roots of hastily executed amputations, and bold, Magic Marker tattoos reminding them to ‘wise up’ scrawled on biceps and forearms, bore witness to this very fact. Trip Blue could not believe his own good fortune. He’d stumbled into the epicenter of cutting-edge medical research.
The Treatment Room did not surprise him. During his first months on H Wing, marking time as he waited on an eight-digit punch code, Trip had spent entire weekends camped out in the laundry closet wading through a Babel tower of medical textbooks and research papers. Psychological manipulation was no new phenomenon. Unscrupulous individuals and organizations had been exposing the minds of their enemies to diabolical torture techniques for centuries. Under pressure the human brain was pliable as unset Jell-O, inclined to conform to any loudly persistent message. Mind control had been around since the birth of humanity. However, the concept of manipulating the psyche to enhance or confound healing was something entirely new. Trip Blue was delighted to find himself tottering on the edge of tomorrow’s world. Within a matter of weeks the Treatment Room and its prodigal patients had come to monopolize his every waking thought.
He worked forty-eight hour shifts, alternating his sleep patterns to complement God’s so the Treatment Room could be manned around the clock. Science offered a framework for their research, war provided justification, and overleaping curiosity, fuel. Yet at the centre of the Treatment Room there remained a tight little miracle, impossible to quantify or explain. Medicine could claim no plausible explanation for the indefinable element which made one man susceptible to healing and the man in the next bed doomed. In the three years Trip Blue spent on H Wing, observing, collating and accumulating lever arch folders full of fastidious notes, he never once came close to understanding this mystery. Trip Blue was a logical man. Science was his religion. Not knowing bothered him dreadfully and it was this insatiable need to know which would drive him, almost twenty years after H Wing, to build his own rudimentary version of the Treatment Room and recommence his experiments on the elderly residents of the Baptist Retirement Village. Trip Blue would tell no one – neither his nursing staff, nor the middle-aged children who’d consigned their aging parents to his care, nor the doddering seniors themselves – what he was orchestrating in the Center’s broom closet.
Christmas 1978 brought Trip Blue’s time on H Wing to a premature halt, severing his relationship with God (whom he was beginning to hold in the sort of familial respect he’d previously assumed himself incapable of engendering) and almost destroying his medical career. The next twenty years would see him traipse from one side of the country to the other dabbling in neurosurgery and plastics, accumulating – and subsequently losing – a teenage daughter and never, not once ever (fearing the combined threats of the Armed Forces, the American Medical Association and FBI) attempting to manipulate the mind of another human being. God was dead to Trip. Post-Christmas 1978, communication between the two men was irrevocably severed and, though Trip Blue was never to hear of it, the older man hit the bottle like a back alley turncoat, pickling his liver in a record nine months and dying an anonymous, vagrant death in a Salvation Army hostel, almost one year to the day after H Wing folded. Despite a last-ditch attempt with a shaving mirror, God was incapable of healing himself. He died like an ordinary man; his final words, a hacking, phlegm-filled ‘wise up’; his last coherent thought, the memory of his mother removing her hair pins in front of the bedroom dresser.
The events of Christmas 1978, consigned as they were to history and a handful of dusty confidential folders buried in the Pentagon’s records department, had marked the beginning of the end for God and his erstwhile assistant. On the day before Christmas Eve, H Wing held its annual Festive Party. On the other side of town, Magda Blue, driven desperate with the loneliness, cried herself into a drunken stupor and forced her husband’s best suit through the garbage disposal. Oblivious to this latest loss, Trip Blue commenced his last night on H Wing and, with little thought for the repercussions, killed a man, by accident with great deliberation.
The evening began without incident. Someone on the terminal ward was blasting The Best of the Shangri-Las from a portable record player whilst a handful of patients in festive party hats danced around with the junior nurses. Some danced in their wheelchairs, jerking forwards and backwards in a disco-like manner. In the far corner by the soft drinks machine two of the younger patients poked limply at a piñata. (A well-meaning orderly had spent the afternoon stuffing the piñata full of unused surgical gloves and Band-Aids. The patients, unaware and optimistic, poked on, hoping for coins, candy or at very least prescription drugs.)
An open bottle of Jack Daniels had been concealed behind the grey sofa in the dayroom. All five on-duty nurses, fully aware of the alcohol stash, had chosen to ignore their patients as they slipped noisily behind the sofa for a surreptitious slug. It was, they reminded each other behind cupped hands, a special occasion. The nurses were professionally superior. All their limbs were still attached and functional, allowing them to dance upright with no balancing aids. They wore party hats and full uniform. They were almost all called Sandra; each and every one popped from the same efficient pod. For one holy night they did not complain when the older men with hands found them on the dance floor. They pretended to love the Shangri-Las. They ate Christmas cake in cardboard dishes and made non-alcoholic punch in a bedpan. It was hilarious to serve punch in a bedpan. Everyone thought this was hilarious.
At seven o’clock Trip Blue drove into the parking lot, having left his wife sobbing on the kitchen floor, a meat cleaver clasped melodramatically in one hand. As he locked his car and strode purposefully towards H Wing, he realized that his Christmas tie was safely tucked away in the bedroom closet. He felt the lack of it dangling coolly against his shirtfront. Trip Blue did not, as a rule, acknowledge Christmas but it was important to maintain the trust of his patients and the Christmas tie, recently ordered from the Sears, Roebuck catalog, had been a calculated attempt to appear the everyman. As he absentmindedly ran his fingers along his shirtfront, Trip’s eye was drawn to one of the recently admitted patients, fully dressed in civilian clothes and dashing, with suspicious alacrity, towards the camp’s perimeter fence.
Up on the main ward, though someone had stood on The Best of the Shangri-Las, the party had not stopped for lack of music. Patients made their own music, forming whistles from catheter tubes, beating rhythm on their exposed ribs, singing folk songs with their fingers crossed. At one end of the wing a Terminal stood on an office chair shouting loudly, ‘I only have three weeks to live.’ This was a terrible lie. As he screamed, the office chair undulated gently, mocking his hysterical prophesies. God was not interested in joining the festivities. From his office behind the nurses’ station he monitored the drowsy progression of fun and finger-picked at a limp tuna sandwich. Through the slatted blinds he watched a young nurse, hair tucked adamantly behind both ears, as she danced with a male patient. The man was missing both arms. He wore the nurse’s arms draped around his neck, grasping him in an awkward, swaying headlock. Under the Christmas lights the man looked like a giant, flailing anemone. Transparent tubes and wires dripped in and out of his chest, releasing plastic bags of clear liquid and rust-red blood. Around his ankle similar bags of tea-stained liquid drained away his sins, one bladder-full at a time. This man had spent the previous two mornings in the Treatment Room and his spirits, like the gummy scars where his elbows had once been, were beginning to experience significant improvement. Had the Treatment Room lasted into the New Year, he might have greeted 1979 with a pair of perfectly functional replacement arms.
God stared at the man. He had nothing better to do. The Treatment Room was shut down for the holidays. God watched his children like tropical fish in a Chinese restaurant. Half of them would be dead by New Year’s Day. The other half, he presumed, would be waltzing again within weeks. God had come to despise them all. Where Trip Blue’s scientific curiosity kept him keen on the patients, if only from a medical perspective, God had spent one Christmas too many on H Wing. He was beginning to feel the lack of an ordinary life: a wife, a family and a stack of earnest, if somewhat clumsily wrapped, Christmas gifts. The first nervous prickle of a migraine edged across the bridge of his nose. Christmas Eve 1978 would mark God’s four hundred and fiftieth night shift in a row. He had begun to dream of leaving Phoenixville, Pennsylvania and moving to somewhere less miraculous; Texas most likely, or North Dakota. God had just about decided to hand in his notice when the office door was flung open, admitting a middle-aged man (either dead, drunk or unconscious), slumped sideways in a standard issue wheelchair. Milliseconds later the arms, shoulders and furious pink face of Trip Blue appeared at the helm of the wheelchair, a huge wad of classified cardboard folders tucked into his armpit like an unfurled wing.
‘Bastard was running off with our research,’ he puffed, struggling to contain his fury. ‘So I knocked him out.’
‘You hit a patient?’ God asked.
‘Hell no – tranquilizer dart. I keep them in my car, in case of emergencies.’
God wondered – not for the first time – what sort of a person he’d taken on as an assistant. It was not yet obvious that the man, now depositing goopy, transparent drool strands on the office carpet, would prove to be their collective undoing and so God offered Trip Blue a styrofoam cup of coffee and, perching on the edge of his desk, attempted to address the situation. In the corridor outside his window, one of the Terminals, having sacrificed the last of his inhibitions to whiskey and prescription meds, was dancing shirtless to the Rolling Stones. God would have given anything in the world to swap places with this man.
‘Right,’ he said, sipping from his own styrofoam cup, ‘tell me the worst.’
The worst was pretty bad. A short ‘conversation’ in the parking lot – a conversation which God, fully aware of Trip Blue’s ruthless streak, presumed to have included firearms or other ‘conversational aides’ – had revealed that this particular patient was not actually a patient, but rather an undercover agent, planted on H Wing to gather evidence of their research project. Trip Blue suspected Russian involvement. Thankfully the man was still in the assessment stage of Treatment and though he’d managed to seduce one of the orderlies into giving him access to the file room, had yet to see the inside of the Treatment Room.
‘Thank God for that,’ said God. ‘We’ll just hand him over to the powers that be and they can deal with him.’
‘We can’t do that, sir,’ replied Trip. ‘He’s seen the files. He knows what we’re doing here. He could compromise everything … all your research. Plus, well, I might have been a little less than gentle with him in the parking lot.’
God sighed and turned the man’s face gently towards the light, exposing in the unforgiving glare of his desk lamp a pair of perfectly formed boot marks. God was too tired to be furious. He felt every one of his previous four hundred and forty nine night shifts acutely. He wrapped the sodden remains of his tuna sandwich in a square of tinfoil, drained the remnants of his coffee and prepared to wash his hands of the matter. Trip Blue could be reported, the man handed over to the military police and, with a bit of luck, the whole G-D project put on ice for the foreseeable future. Of course there would be mountains of paperwork, most likely a formal warning and a black mark on his otherwise gleaming resume, but God had already begun to see the possibility peeking through the shit. This could be exactly the emergency exit he’d been waiting for.
‘Don’t worry, I have a plan. I’m pretty sure the guy’s a Delusional. I haven’t quite finished his assessment and, as you well know, he hasn’t had his first session in the Treatment Room but I’ve got a nose for them. I can usually spot a Delusional a mile away.’
‘And?’ asked God, hoping to high hell and reason the younger man wasn’t going to suggest what he was thinking.
‘If I’m right and we give him a really strong dose in the Treatment Room, well he’ll probably, you know … react in a way which could really help us out—’
‘You mean, die?’ interjected God, his voice stretching into a supersonic squeak as he watched his long-anticipated emergency exit begin to slide out of view.
‘Exactly. We’ll mark him down with all the other Delusional patients, put the folders back in the file room and no one will be any the wiser. It’s not murder. You know as well as I do that all Delusionals want to die. We’d actually be helping him out.’
‘Definitely not.’
‘It’s my whole career, sir. That guy’ll press charges if he ever wakes up.’
‘I don’t give a flying shit, Trip. You screwed up, you deal with the consequences.’
‘Alright God, you’re going to play it like that? Then I’ll be taking you down too. Matter of fact, I’ll be using you to cushion my fall. It’s not like there aren’t corners cut round here every day of the week. We’re hardly a conventional medical facility and I’ll bet the Pentagon guys start stepping back quick sharp as soon as the shit hits the fan. How’d you like to spend your retirement in Fort Leavenworth?’
God felt like he’d been around since the beginning of time. There was no point in arguing with Trip Blue. He wearily removed his sports jacket, slipped his arms into the white coat which hung like a skinned ghost on the back of his office door and prepared for career suicide.
Outside the office the Christmas Party had descended into a drunken rabble. Two patients and a part-time nurse had come to blows over the last of the nacho cheese dip. They sat in opposite corners of the day room, like soiled featherweights, nursing cut lips and bloody noses as they nibbled shattered tortilla chips straight from the floor. The corridors of H Wing were littered with deflating balloons and fallen comrades, slumped and sliding down the pastel green walls in their standard issue military pajamas. Trip Blue steered the wheelchair expertly past the drunk, the despairing, and the very possibly dead (for it was not unknown for the most delicate Delusionals to pass away suddenly and without warning, in full view of their fellow patients). God shuffled behind, silently cursing the moment he’d turned down a perfectly respectable female oncologist in favor of Trip Blue’s screaming genius. For the first time in his forty-nine years of existence God saw himself capable of failure, of making mistakes like an ordinary, fallible man. On any other day this realization would have been liberating.
When they reached the Treatment Room door Trip Blue reached up and, without looking, finger-punched the code. The door clicked open and with a single stride God crossed the line, dragging the unconscious man behind him. Trip Blue followed, locking the door from the inside so no one, not even curious senior staff members, could invade their privacy. It was pitch black in the Treatment Room, the darkness emphasizing the unconscious man’s shallow breathing and the rubbery clip of Trip Blue’s dress shoes as he fumbled around in pursuit of a light switch.
‘And God said let there be light!’ Trip cried, a running joke, wildly incongruous under present circumstances. The lights came blinkering on, blipping like erratic disco beats until they finally settled into a steady glare. Fully illuminated, God saw them for what they were: two lonely men and a stranger, reflected fifteen different directions of honest in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. God had, over the years, developed a real phobia of reflection. Every reflective surface under his direct authority – H Wing bathrooms, cutlery and internal windows – had been deliberately removed or tarnished, under the fabricated assumption that encountering one’s true self too early in the treatment process might stilt a patient’s recovery. The truth fell closer to home. God had long since lost the ability to look directly at his own shitty self. On the rare occasions when he left the military compound he could barely bring himself to catch his own eye in the rearview mirror of his station wagon. Though he spent the better part of every day trundling patients in and out of the Treatment Room, God had perfected a peculiar way of squinting out of the side of his eyes, so he was at no time forced to deal with the fullness of his own reflection. These optical aerobics had resulted in a semi-permanent migraine and an inability to focus on anything further than six inches beyond the end of his nose.
On Christmas Eve 1978 the headache rested heavily upon God. On another day, a rare cool-headed day, he might have resisted Trip Blue’s plan, but the migraine had turned his resolve to mush. Mutiny was impossible. It was all God could do to remain inside the room, comprehensively reflected and suffering from localized explosions of the skull.
‘Get on with it,’ he said and though he was not directly responsible for the deathblow, these four words stuck to him. In the remaining twelve months of his life God would assiduously deny his culpability, first to himself and then, as the alcohol took hold, to a growing number of down-and-out friends. Each time he proclaimed his innocence the four words would rise like a personal cockcrow to mock the distance he’d placed between himself and the act. Blood, he soon came to realize, stuck, no matter how far away you were standing.
Meanwhile, Trip Blue had already wired up the Treatment Room and, fearing the man might regain consciousness, making the whole process distinctly more unpleasant, was keen to press on. God found himself drawn elbow-first behind the shatterproof screen which protected staff members from the insidious forces emitted by the Treatment Room. Trip Blue flicked a switch. A series of red, robotic lights bubbled on, and through their protective headphones, God and his erstwhile assistant listened as a sexless voice dripped, disembodied from the wall-mounted speakers: ‘WISE UP. WISE UP. WISE UP.’ The man, slumped sideways in his borrowed wheelchair, drooled on, unaware and very possibly impervious to a generous American helping of the truth. A series of wires, attached at wrist and temple, connected him to the control room where his vital statistics pulsed in a red, monotonous line across a computer screen, proceeding like a symmetrical alpine range from one side of the monitor to the other. God watched the pattern, intent upon discovering an anomaly in the unbroken landscape. The man’s condition remained consistently unchanged.
‘I’m going to crank it up to 120,’ muttered Trip Blue some ten minutes into the monotone liturgy wheedling from the speakers. ‘He doesn’t seem to be responding to a normal dose and we don’t have time to hang around.’
Though no perceivable change in speed, pitch or volume could be noted, both men were aware that the unconscious man was now being exposed to three weeks’ worth of Treatment in a single, condensed dose. And when a further ten minutes showed no sign of deterioration and the dial was cranked all the way up to 200, Trip Blue crossed the line from science into scientific research, experimenting with truth so intense and potentially corrosive it had never before made it beyond the hypothetical stage.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Trip Blue. ‘I know he’s a goddamn Delusional. I’ve never been wrong before. This much should have killed him half an hour ago. Maybe the tranquilizers are interfering with the Treatment.’
God shrugged. ‘There’s not much we can do about that.’
‘Like hell there isn’t. I’m going in there to wake the bastard up. We’ve started this now and damned if I’m leaving it unfinished.’
God watched on with growing horror as Trip Blue entered the Treatment Room and started to slap the unconscious man violently around the head with his open hand. As it became clear that the man was not responding, Trip’s blows turned increasingly vicious. His open palm curled into a fist and he began to pummel the man with pounding blow after blow until his nose broke, and his cheekbones fell flat, and a thin, ketchup-colored trickle of blood began to surge free of his left ear. Behind the glass, God watched passively on, noting the way Trip Blue’s face had contorted into a caricature of rage, splintered and reflected like some circus horror in the Treatment Room’s mirrors. Later, God would convince himself that he’d been too afraid to step in for fear that Trip’s volcanic anger would turn on him. Fear was excusable, while the shrill and illicit pleasure he’d taken in watching one man batter another to death was a little harder to live with.
The man was already dead when God finally snapped out of his stupor. Without stopping to switch the machines off, he yanked the headphones from his ears and, dashing from behind the safe confine of the shatterproof glass, made halfhearted attempts at restraining Trip Blue’s thundering fists. By this stage the young doctor’s rage was blind. He lashed out at God, cracking ribs, lacerating his cheekbones, drawing a sudden rush of blood from his nose. God persevered, pinning Trip’s arms and attempting to halt his progress in a standard issue army headlock. The realist in him knew that Trip had already killed the man but he kept wrestling. In all his Vietnamese days God had never witnessed anything as terrifying as Trip Blue’s unbound fury.
By the time God had managed to drag Trip off the battered corpse and prop him up, exhausted from the act of unleashing a lifetime’s worth of restrained fury, in the corner of the Treatment Room, both men had been exposed to a triple dose of condensed truth. Whilst the words had already spoken into God’s subconscious despair, instigating a process of decline which would see him dead within the year, the very same words fell upon Trip Blue’s stoic soul like fuel for his loudest ambitions. Trip Blue was a survivor. All things, he felt certain, would come to him, if only he had the audacity to persevere.
The next years would prove difficult. Though the Army did their best to make H Wing and all her filthy secrets disappear, Trip Blue left Pennsylvania with a blot on his resume, glaringly obvious to any consultant capable of reading between the lines. Hospitals were wary of employing him. Colleagues, having heard the rumors circulating amongst Vietnam vets, gave him a wide berth in the cafeteria. He moved often and early, quitting neurology and plastics and cardiothoracics before his over-leaping ambition could be discovered. Trip Blue never once doubted his own genius. Christmas 1978 had planted an irrevocable sense of worth deep in the darkest vault of his being. The Treatment Room hung over him like the proverbial ‘one that got away’ and yet Trip Blue did not dare to dust off the mirrors and continue with his research.
Instead he marked time, he saved his money scrupulously, and (though his personality preceded him) did his best to rebuild the shattered remnants of his professional reputation. Whilst most everyone who knew Trip Blue saw his move to the Baptist Retirement Village as the beginning of the end of his career, Trip himself had been planning just such a move for the better part of twenty years. By the early nineties, H Wing was almost forgotten and Trip Blue was ready to resurrect the Treatment Room, choosing a broom closet in a nursing home full of semi-delusional seniors as a perfectly anonymous setting for his latest advance on the Nobel Prize.
He told no one of his plans and, with the brave exception of his own daughter – a vile brat whom he secretly suspected to be Delusional – only permitted the most senile of residents access to this second incarnation of the Treatment Room. Any number of old-people diseases could be utilized to explain away the dead Delusionals. The recovered Terminals often talked but their friends and family, accustomed to the wild gibberings of the senile, never believed a word they said. Had it not been for Soren James Blue – blessed as she was with three parts of her mother’s gumption for every callous spoonful of her father – Trip Blue might well have made the scientific breakthrough of the century.