Rabbit Foot Bill

by Helen Humphreys

  “What sort of experiments?” I ask.

  “LSD, in its effects, mirrors the mind of a schizophrenic, so in order to better understand the sensations schizophrenics experience, we are taking the drug ourselves and recording the event.”

  I look at the tape recorder and then over at the record player. The soft, soothing background music, which first sounded so benign, is now beginning to unnerve me. But in the space where I’m listening to the music, the names of the doctors in the room suddenly come flooding in, and the order in which they were introduced.

  “Music helps keep the drug experience a pleasant one,” says Dr. Christiansen, following my gaze.

  “LSD is also helpful with alcoholics,” says Dr. Carter. “It often shows them the cause of their drinking by recreating early emotional states and experiences.”

  “Like time travel,” says Dr. Christiansen.

  “We’re also thinking of using it in psychotherapy sessions,” says Dr. Mortimer. “To be able to probe deeper into the subconscious.”

  “It’s a consciousness-altering drug,” explains Dr. Hepner.

  “It creates an alternate reality,” says Dr. Carter.

  “Really, it’s just a different perspective on this reality,” continues Dr. Christiansen. “Altered perception. Don’t worry, Dr. Flint.”

  My face must betray my nervousness.

  “It’s harmless. Completely harmless. And we take only a moderate amount of the drug ourselves.”

  He leans forward and picks up one of the water glasses from the table.

  “It’s administered as a liquid dose that has been mixed with water. Please, gentlemen.” He gestures towards the table and the other doctors. They each take one of the glasses and I do the same.

  “Bottoms up,” says Dr. Christiansen, and we all drink and then set the empty glasses back down on the table.

  “It will take about twenty minutes for the drug to take effect,” says Dr. Scott to me. “Try to relax.”

  But I find it impossible to relax. I rub my sweaty palms on my thighs. My mouth feels dry, even though I have just drunk a full glass of water. The ticking of the clock on the wall behind Dr. Christiansen’s head suddenly seems unnaturally loud. Is that the LSD taking effect, I wonder? I stare at my shoes, and the light brown carpet beneath them. Why had I agreed to be part of this experiment? Did I agree? When I took this job, I knew that there were medical experiments going on at the Weyburn Mental Hospital. The place had the reputation of being on the leading edge of mental health treatments. This is why I took the job, because it would be an exciting place to work. It hadn’t occurred to me that the experiments weren’t only performed on the patients, but on the doctors as well.

  “What should I do?” I ask, full of panic.

  “Just close your eyes and listen to the music,” says Dr. Christiansen. He leans forward and snaps on the tape recorder.

  “Session eight,” he says. “Friday, August 14, 1959. Ten a.m. Participating doctors: Hepner, Mortimer, Carter, Scott, Flint, and myself.” He stops. The other doctors all have their heads bowed as though they’re in church and Dr. Christiansen is about to deliver the sermon.

  “This is the first experience for Flint,” continues Dr. Christiansen, “the third for Scott, and the fourth for Hepner, Mortimer, and Carter.” He pauses. “For myself, this will be the sixteenth time under the influence of LSD.”

  The music plays cheerfully on in the background.

  There’s a long silence and then Dr. Hepner says, “That music is awfully pretty.”

  “Don’t disappear into the music,” says Dr. Christiansen. “Let it be background only. Try to stay present. Use it to guide you, but don’t let it displace you or your thoughts.”

  There’s another equally long silence, during which the ticking of the clock beats into my brain like a woodpecker hammering into a tree. I watch the minutes circle round and back again, round and back again. They climb up to the twelve, then swing down to the six. Is it my imagination, or does the climbing part seem slower than the falling part? Is the progress of time really this uneven, and why have I never noticed it before? Is the second hand of the clock weighted so that the ascent to noon and midnight is a labour and the drop to dawn and dinner a release?

  “Carl,” says Dr. Christiansen after a while, and then he says it again, very slowly and stretched out. “C-a-r-l. C-a-r-l. Your name seems to be growling at me. Can you make it stop?”

  “I’m almost through the tunnels,” says Dr. Hepner. “They are all different colours. Beautiful colours. There’s red and purple and orange. I just went through a blue tunnel.” He seems not to have heard what Dr. Christiansen has just said about him being a dog.

  “What colour blue?” asks Dr. Christiansen, but I can still hear him saying, Carl, Carl, under his breath like an incantation.

  “I think I might have achieved weightlessness,” says Dr. Mortimer loudly. He jerks upwards, as though he’s just woken up, or he’s a marionette and someone is pulling on his strings.

  “It’s the same blue that’s in the centre of a teardrop,” continues Dr. Hepner. “Very beautiful. Like a sapphire.”

  “I don’t feel anything at all,” Dr. Scott whispers to me. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  I hesitate for a moment.

  “Although I don’t know what I’m meant to be feeling, so it’s a little confusing.”

  I watch the second hand on the clock strain upwards and fall back down. Then I watch a slit of light from between the curtains make a long mark, like a giant exclamation point, on the wall opposite. The long mark of light bends one way and then another. I think it must be the LSD causing that, until I can see that the window is open behind the curtain and it must be the breeze moving the curtains and altering the sliver of light.

  “I suppose,” says Dr. Scott after a moment, “the question becomes, where does their inner reality intersect with our outer reality?”

  “What?”

  “There’s a border where they meet, but it can’t be crossed over. There might even be a border guard in a little glass hut. And dogs. I’m pretty sure there is a fence with razor wire.”

  “What?” I say again.

  “Have I stopped making sense?”

  “Well, you make a certain kind of sense, but I don’t think you’re making ‘normal’ sense.”

  “Then the drug must be working after all.” Dr. Scott leans back in his chair and closes his eyes.

  The music dances on.

  When I was in medical school, it seemed to me that the psychiatric residents were divided into the scientists and the doctors. The scientists were interested in discovering all the mysterious properties of the human brain. The doctors wanted to improve the lives of their patients. It appears that the doctors at the Weyburn are all scientists. I have mostly considered myself on the doctoring side of things. While I was drawn to an institution like the Weyburn when I graduated from medical school, drawn to the newness of its approach to mental illness, I’m not sure I am comfortable with what that newness might demand of me. I am, while not a cautious person exactly, someone who values routine. I like knowing what to expect from any given situation. The trouble with taking part in an experiment such as this one is that I will be placed into a situation over which I have no control, and that always makes me feel uneasy, and a little panicked.

  Dr. Carter, who has been sitting quietly, watching the back of his hands, suddenly looks up and says, “There must be a million of them.”

  “A million what?” asks Dr. Christiansen.

  Dr. Carter gazes at his hands again, reconsiders, and says, “There must be a million of them.”

  “The drug just seems to make our thoughts further away from us,” I say to William Scott.

  “What are you feeling?” he asks me.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  But when I look down at my shoes again, the carpet is rising on either side of them, lapping at the edges of the leather. The more I stare at the carpe
t, the deeper into it I can see. There are currents and valleys. The individual fibres stand to attention like trees.

  “I didn’t realize the carpet was so alive,” I say, but Dr. Scott no longer seems to be listening to me. He is humming and moving his body from side to side like a metronome.

  “There must be a million of them,” says Dr. Carter sadly, shaking his head. It seems like he might begin to cry.

  From the corner of the room, there’s a hissing as the gramophone needle reaches the end of the record.

  “Can you see to that, Flint?” says Dr. Christiansen.

  I have to move my shoes back through the forest in the carpet, back through the waves that lap at them, back into harbour. It takes enormous effort, but I somehow manage to do this, first one foot and then the other. Then I wobble to a standing position, go over to the gramophone, and put the needle back at the beginning of the record. The strings fill the room, and I feel better when I hear them start to play again.

  THE DOCTORS AND some of the psychiatric nurses at the Weyburn are housed in cottages distant from and out of sight of the main hospital building. The wood-frame single-storey cottages are in a row, each about a hundred feet apart, and facing the river that runs through the hospital grounds. Most of the cottages are one-bedroom units, but there are several larger ones at the end of the row, designed for families. All of the doctors that were taking LSD with me in the meeting room live here on the hospital grounds. There are over 1,800 patients at the hospital at the moment, and staff is needed on site to manage them. The nurses and orderlies and office staff who don’t live on the grounds of the hospital drive in from the nearby town. Dr. Christiansen has a large brick house there. It was pointed out to me on the drive to the Weyburn by the orderly who picked me up at the train station. It was a much grander affair than these modest frame buildings.

  “It pays to be the big cheese,” said the orderly.

  My cottage has a bedroom, small sitting room with an old sofa and two chairs, galley kitchen, bathroom with only a shower stall, no tub, and a screened porch that overlooks the river.

  The LSD experiments are a priority at the Weyburn, and on the mornings that the doctors take LSD, they are not expected to go back to work for the remainder of the day. It was hard enough for me to find the meeting room when I was sober, but reversing the process is even trickier. It takes me what seems like three months to walk back across the compound to my cottage, but when I get there, I find that only half an hour has elapsed. Time is proving to be a very confusing entity today.

  I lie down on my bed, but closing my eyes makes me dizzy, so I stand up again. I pour myself a glass of water and take it out to the porch.

  It’s afternoon and the swallows arc and dive above the river in search of insects. Animal hunger always looks so graceful; human hunger rarely does. I watch the swoop and stall of the birds and drink the water. I feel tired and a bit dislocated, as though I have just completed a long train journey and can’t yet reconcile where I have arrived with where I started. The shift from medical school to a real hospital feels like such a shock. Everything seemed easier in the abstract.

  I concentrate on drinking and on watching the river in front of me. It is a modest river, not that wide, but it moves swiftly along. I can see the ripples of current on the surface, and I can smell the scent of the water—a rich, peaty odour from the sloughed-off bark and organic matter decaying on the riverbed. It is an old river, full of curves, the banks bulging out into small bays and then narrowing over a series of shallow rapids.

  William Scott has the cottage next to mine on the right. He is also sitting out on his porch. I wave, but he doesn’t appear to have seen me, just keeps staring ahead at the river. Probably he is doing the same thing that I am, trying to focus on what is right in front of him in an effort to recover from the lingering effects of the drug. Again, I think that the LSD, although taken in a group setting and meant to be interactive, has made us all more inward-looking.

  I realize that I have gone from medical school, where I was part of a community that accepted me, where I had friends, to this place, where I am completely new and know no one, where I not only have no friends, but I can barely remember the names of my colleagues. It’s a good thing my girlfriend, Amy, is coming here for the weekend. I am suddenly desperately lonely, and then immediately wonder if I am really having this feeling or if it’s a result of taking the LSD.

  Aside from settling into my cabin and having my information processed with the financial department, the drug experiment is the first real thing I have done in my new job at the Weyburn. It seems strange to do that before meeting any of my patients, but I realize that what is being demonstrated is the priority of the institution, or perhaps merely the priority of the leader of the hospital, Dr. Christiansen.

  I sit out on the porch until I can see the first stars above the river. Then I feel hungry and tired, in quick succession, and go back indoors. After the laborious task of buttering a slice of bread, it seems somehow impossible to eat, so I just lie down on my bed and immediately fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  DR. CHRISTIANSEN IS volunteering the better part of a week to show me around the Weyburn. It takes this long to cover all the many, and different, areas of the huge compound.

  I have already seen the administrative offices and the fields that make up the massive farm. Now we are in the basement of the main hospital building, in a series of small, windowless cells with heating and water pipes running through them at head level.

  “This is where they used to put the severely retarded patients,” says Dr. Christiansen. “Back when they were called ‘mental defectives.’ Pitiful, isn’t it?” He doesn’t wait for my reply, strides on ahead through the dimly lit basement tunnels. “It’s an outright travesty, the way some poor unfortunates were treated in the past,” he says.

  I admire his passionate outburst and remember the classifications from some of the older textbooks at medical school—“high-grade moron” for someone fairly functional, “moron” for someone less so, “imbecile” for a retardation level of medium grade, and “idiot” for a severely retarded person. This is how patients were categorized, and not too long ago, in the mental hospitals of the past. Back then they were kept together in one big room—women and men, violent and non-violent—no respect given for them being individuals, and no concern for their safety. One of the medical school doctors talked about these patients from the old hospitals being stripped naked and hosed down weekly, in lieu of being allowed to bathe themselves.

  “Thank god for the reforms, sir,” I say, struggling to keep pace with Dr. Christiansen as he strides ahead of me through the basement corridors.

  “No need for that, Flint,” he says. “We’re both doctors here. You can call me Luke.”

  But I don’t feel I can call him Luke. I am a freshly, barely qualified psychiatrist. He is older, more experienced, and the superintendent of this enormous facility of 1,800 patients and over 800 staff.

  “There were no toilets down here,” says Dr. Christiansen in disgust. “And no utensils for eating. The poor unfortunates had to mouth their food from bowls like dogs.”

  “That’s terrible, sir,” I say.

  I feel lucky to have landed this job so soon out of school. The Weyburn is renowned for its liberal policies and radical treatments—the influence perhaps of the new socialist government of Saskatchewan. This new government is all about reforms. They have instituted the “rural electrification project” to bring electricity to the sixty thousand farms in the region that do without. They are also encouraging the emptying of the mental hospitals, retraining the patients to return to the outside world, reassimilating them back into the communities where they once belonged. The Weyburn might be full to bursting now with patients, but in a few years, it is hoped that it will be completely empty. The tasks that the patients are required to do while at the hospital—working on the hospital farm or in the mattress factory—will hopefully translate into skills t
hey can use when they are reintroduced to the outside world.

  “If you want to know the true history of a building,” says Dr. Christiansen, “you go down or up. Down to the basement, up to the attic. That’s where the secrets are.”

  I know I am supposed to be appalled at the conditions in the basement that the former patients suffered under, but I actually find the close, dark space rather comforting. The mental hospital has overwhelmed me. It is vast. When I came up the drive a few days ago, it felt as though I was entering another country. The driveway was flanked with trees, and it twisted and turned like the river. There is an entire working farm on the grounds with over 650 acres in cultivation and a full dairy herd. All the food for the hospital is produced there. The Weyburn is an entirely self-sustaining community. The hospital itself is the largest building in the entire province of Saskatchewan.

  Dr. Christiansen leads me up a flight of stairs and along a hallway.

  “We’re much too overcrowded at the moment,” he says, flinging open a door to a dormitory.

  I look into the room he has opened. It is a flat field of beds. Each bed has a housecoat slung over the iron bedstead at the foot and a pair of slippers tucked under the middle of the bed, but there is no other personal space available. The beds are jammed together so tightly that to get to a bed on the far side of the room, one would have to walk across the other beds. There must be fifty beds in this room that is designed for perhaps twelve.

  “It’s a bit tight,” I say.

  “Can’t be helped.” Dr. Christiansen snaps the door shut and we continue along the corridor.

  “Why are there so many patients?”

  The Weyburn is the largest mental hospital in the country, but I can’t believe that Saskatchewan has more mentally ill patients than elsewhere.

  “In the ’20s and ’30s people were just sent here,” says Dr. Christiansen. “Those who were mentally retarded or who were suffering from some sort of shock—women who were going through the change of life or who were depressed after childbirth. Anyone who behaved oddly, for any reason, could end up in the mental hospital.”