The sounds continued.
I groped in the darkness for the handle to the inner door.
Rusted knob, loose on its bearings. Metallic jingle. I quieted it by grasping with both hands. Turned slowly. Pushed.
An inch of spy-space. I looked through it, heart speeding. What I saw spurred it faster.
My hand pulled the door open . . . in.
• • •
The room was long and narrow and paneled with fake wormwood the color of cigarette ash. Black linoleum floor. Light from two cheap looking swag lamps on opposite ends. Dry, smoke-flavored heat from a wall unit.
A pair of chipped white barber chairs were bolted to the center of the floor, set three feet apart, in semi-recline.
The first chair was empty. The second contained a woman wearing a hospital gown, tethered at ankles, wrists, waist, and chest by broad leather straps. Patches of hair had been shaved from her head, creating a crude checkerboard. Electrodes were fastened to white scalp-patches and to arms and inner thighs. Wires running from each site merged to a central orange cable that snaked across the floor and ended at a gray metal box, high as a refrigerator, twice as wide. The box was faced with dials and glassed meters. Some of the needles on the meters quivered.
The edge of something stuck out from behind the box. Chrome-shiny, wheeled legs.
A second cable connected the box to a device that sat on a gray metal table. Paper drum and mechanical arm. The arm held several mechanical pens. Jagged graph lines peaked and troughed across the drum, which was rotating slowly. Next to the machine were several amber pharmaceutical vials and a white plastic inhalator.
Directly facing the woman was a large-screen television console. A close-up of a female breast, its nipple apple-sized, was frozen on the screen. The image shifted: close-up of a face. A pubic thatch. Back to the nipple.
A man stood next to the set, holding a black remote-control device in one hand, a larger gray one in the other. He was chewing gum. His eyes were hot with triumph that turned to alarm when he saw me.
The woman in the chair was Ursula Cunningham-Gabney. Her eyes were raw and swollen and wide with terror, and her mouth was stuffed with a blue bandana.
The man was sixtyish, with bushy white hair and a small, round face. He wore a black sweatshirt over blue jeans and work boots. His boots were crusted with dried dirt. His eyes widened and blinked.
His wife tried to scream around her gag; what emerged was a thin retch.
He never looked at her.
I moved toward him.
He shook his head and pressed a button on the gray remote. The high-frequency sound I’d heard outside filled the room, shrill as a bird being butchered as the needle on one of the meters jumped. Ursula’s body bucked and pitched against her restraints. She kept quaking as her husband’s finger remained on the button. He didn’t seem to be noticing her at all, was staring at me and inching backward.
The horror made me dizzy. Clearing my head, I took a step.
Gabney’s basso voice said: “Stop, damn you,” as he pressed another button. The high noise became a shriek and another needle arced to the right. The room smelled of burnt toast. Ursula growled around her gag and shook as if being throttled. Fingers and toes convulsed at the end of pinioned limbs. Her torso rose totally off the seat— only the strap seemed to prevent her from flying away. The veins in her neck swelled, her jaws were forced open, and the gag flew out of her mouth, followed by a soundless scream. Her body was as rigid as cordwood, skin silvery white except for the lips, which looked bluish.
I fought down nausea and panic. Gabney had danced farther away from me, half-concealed behind the big gray box, finger still on the gray remote.
I moved toward the barber chair.
Gabney stopped pushing long enough to say, “Go ahead. Flesh is an excellent conductor. I’ll turn up the voltage and cook both of you.”
I stood still. Ursula had sunk like a sack of rocks. Wheezing, whistling sounds came from her open mouth. She moved her head from side to side, throwing off sweat-drizzle, chest heaving, panting gutturally through grotesquely swollen lips. Her legs were the last to relax, parting slightly. The electrode between them was attached to some kind of sanitary napkin.
I snapped my head away, looked for Gabney.
From behind the gray box, his voice said, “Sit down— farther back. Even farther— that’s good. And keep your hands in full view. Exactly.”
He emerged, paler than before, one arm resting on the top corner of the chrome-shiny thing. Took a sidelong glance at the giant breast.
Wondering if he had help, I said, “Quite a setup. A lot for one man to handle.”
“Don’t patronize me, you insolent shit. Everything’s manageable, as long as the proper variables are controlled. No, don’t scoot forward or I’ll have to deliver more aversives.”
“You made your point,” I said.
His fingers danced above the buttons on the gray remote but didn’t touch them.
“Control,” I said. “Is that the primary goal?”
“You call yourself a scientist. Isn’t it yours?”
Before I could answer he shook his head in disgust. “Define, predict, and control. Otherwise, why bother?”
“How does that reconcile with your ideas about free will?”
He smiled. “My little disquisitions? How conscientious of you to read them. But if you were half as smart as you think you are, you’d see there’s plenty of free will in all of this. This is about free will— its restoration.” Glancing at the apparatus. “A person shackled by major personality defect can never be free.”
Ursula groaned.
The sound made his brow crease.
I said, “Where is Gina?”
He ignored me. Said nothing for what seemed like a long time. Looked at the floor.
Pulled on the chrome thing and brought half of it into view.
Bed on wheels. Pull-up caged sides. Adult-sized crib, the kind they use in nursing homes.
Gina Ramp behind the bars. Lying inert. Eyes closed. Sleeping or unconscious or . . . I saw her chest move. Saw her checkerboard scalp . . . cables attached to her, too.
“Listen carefully, idiot,” Gabney finally said. “I’m going to go over there and retrieve that bandana. But my hand will remain on the highest-voltage button. If you move, I’ll incinerate your precious Gina. Fifteen seconds at this level elicits death. Irreversible brain damage requires much less.”
Lightly tapping a button, making the prone body twitch.
I said, “I’m not moving.”
Keeping his eye on me, he crouched next to his wife’s chair, picked up the gag, stood, wadded it, and inserted it in her mouth. She coughed and made choking sounds but didn’t resist. The seam of her gown read PROPERTY MASS. GENERAL.
“Relax, darling,” he said. Using the black remote, he switched off the TV. Taking a stance in front of the screen, he gave her a look that I couldn’t categorize— domination and contempt, lust and just a bit of affection, which sickened me the most. I looked over at Gina, who still hadn’t stirred.
“Don’t worry about her,” said Gabney. “She’ll be out for a while— chloral hydrate, ye olde Mickey Finn. She responds well to it. Given her history and weak constitution, I’ve treated her with kid gloves.”
“What a guy.”
“Don’t interrupt me again,” he said louder, pressing a button that made the room scream and caused Gina’s body to flop like a cloth doll. No conscious perception of pain was evident on her face, but her lips drew back in a toothy rictus that stretched and puckered the skin on her bad side.
When the noise died, Gabney said, “A bit more of that, and all that lovely plastic surgery will have been for naught.”
“Stop,” I said.
“Quit whining. This is the last time you’ll get a warning. Understood?”
I nodded.
The burnt-toast smell filled my head.
Gabney stared at me, contemplative.
“This is a problem,” he said, and tapped the gray remote.
“What is?”
“Why the hell did you meddle? How did you find out?”
“One thing kind of led to the other.”
“ “Kind of led,’ ” he said. “ “Kind of led.’ Wonderful grammar— who wrote your thesis for you?” Shaking his head. “Kind of led— just a loose chain of events, was it? Knocking around aimlessly, damn near random?”
I looked at the machines.
His face darkened. “Don’t judge me— don’t you damn well dare. This is treatment. You’ve violated confidentiality.”
I said nothing.
“Do you have even the slightest notion of what I’m talking about?”
“Sexual reconditioning,” I said. “You’re trying to rechannel your wife’s sexual orientation.”
“Profound,” he said. “Just brilliant. You’re able to describe what you see. Freshman psych, second part of the first semester.”
He stared at me, tapping one boot.
I said, “What am I missing?”
“Missing?” Dry laughter. “Just all of it. The meat, the raison d’Être, the goddam clinical rationale.”
“The rationale is that you’re helping her become normal.”
“And you don’t think that’s worthwhile?”
Before I could answer he shook his head and cursed, then tightened the arm holding the shock remote. My eyes snapped reflexively to the gray plastic. I realized I’d broken out into a sweat. Waiting for the high-frequency shriek and the pain that was sure to follow.
Gabney lowered his hand, smiling. “Empathetic conditioning. And so rapidly. My, you have a mushy heart— a pity for your patients.” The smile dissolved in a pool of contempt. “Well, what you think doesn’t matter one goddam iota.”
Keeping his eye on me, he inched over toward Ursula. Lifting her gown with the black remote, he exposed her thighs and said, “Flawless.”
“Except for the bruises.”
“Nothing that won’t heal. Sometimes creativity is called for.”
“Creativity?” I said. “Interesting way to think of torture.”
He stepped directly in front of me, just out of arms’ reach. Fingers tapping the buttons lightly. Setting off high-frequency chirps and staccato movements of both women’s bodies.
“Are you being intentionally stupid?” he said.
I shrugged.
“Torture implies intent to cause harm. I’m delivering aversive stimuli in order to enhance the rate of learning. Aversives are potent little buggers— only a mushy-hearted moron would question their usefulness. This is no more torture than a vaccination is, or emergency surgery.”
From around Ursula’s gag came the sound a mouse makes when cornered.
I said, “Just speeding up the old learning curve, Prof?”
Gabney studied me, gave the gray remote a couple of quick jabs, and caused both of the women to convulse.
I forced myself to look casual.
He said, “Something amusing?”
“All your talk about treatment, yet you keep using the shocks to vent your anger. Doesn’t that break the stimulus-response chain? And why, if you’re retraining Ursula, are you shocking Gina? She’s just the stimulus, isn’t she?”
He said, “Oh, shut up.”
“Sexual reconditioning,” I said. “It was tried years ago— back in the early seventies— and discredited.”
“Primitive crap— methodologically crude. Though it might have developed into something worthwhile if the gay lib agitators hadn’t shoved their point of view down everyone’s throat— so much for free will.”
I shrugged again.
He said, “I don’t imagine your mind is capable of opening sufficiently to snare facts, but here are a few, anyway: I love my wife. She elicits love from me, and for that I’ll always be grateful. She’s a remarkable human being— first in her family to finish high school. I recognized how special she was the first time I met her. The flame within— she was damn near incandescent. So her . . . problem didn’t deter me. On the contrary, it was a challenge. And she agreed with both my assessment and my treatment plan. What we accomplished— together— was totally consensual.”
I said, “Fixing her.”
“Don’t make it sound like something veterinary, you idiot. We worked together to solve her problem. If that’s not therapy, I don’t know what is. And what emerged from our work together could benefit millions of women. The plan itself was simple— positive reinforcement delivered contingent upon heterosexually induced arousal and punishment administered as a consequence of exposure to homoerotic material. But the application posed a huge challenge— adapting the paradigm to female physiology. With a male subject, measurement of arousal is a snap. Using a penile plesmographic cuff, you record degree of tumescence. Females are structurally more . . . secretive. Our initial idea was to develop a sort of minicuff for the clitoris, but it proved impractical. I won’t go into details. It was she who came up with the intravaginal moisture probe that she now wears so handsomely. Given proper base-line analyses of secretions, we’ve been able to correlate bioelectrical changes with perceived sexual arousal. The potential ramifications are fantastic. Compared to what we’ve done, Masters and Johnson are painting on cave walls.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “Too bad it didn’t work.”
“Oh, it worked all right. For years.”
“Not for Eileen Wagner.”
He stroked Ursula again and turned back to me. “Now, that was a mistake— my wife’s mistake. Poor patient selection. Wagner was pathetic— a cow, a mushy-hearted, bovine do-gooder. Psychology and psychiatry are so full of them.”
“If you thought so little of her, why’d you accept her as your fellow at Harvard?”
He shook his head and laughed. “She wasn’t my anything. I would have sent her to nursing school. She rotated for a month on my wife’s service. Rounds and didactic sessions and clinical supervision. My wife learned of her sexual pathology and tried to help her. The way I’d helped my wife. I was against it from the beginning, felt the cow wasn’t suitable for our technique— not enough motivation, no willpower. Her obesity alone should have been enough to disqualify her on that account— she was squalid. But my wife was too kind. And I gave in.”
“Was she your first subject— after Ursula?”
“Our first patient. Unfortunately. And, as I’d predicted, she did very poorly. Which says absolutely nothing about the technique.”
He gave a sharp look over at his wife. I thought I saw a finger tense.
“I’d call suicide a very poor response,” I said.
“Suicide?” His smile was slow, almost lazy. He shook his head. “Bear this in mind: The cow was incapable of doing anything for herself.”
Strangled sounds from Ursula.
Gabney said, “I’m sorry, dear— I never told you, did I?”
“Harvard believed it was suicide,” I said. “Somehow, the med school found out what kind of research you were doing and asked you to leave.”
“Somehow,” he said, the smile gone. “The cow was a scribbler— tear-stained “love’ notes never sent, stuffed in a desk drawer. Disgusting stuff.”
Walking over to his wife again, he stroked her cheek. Kissed a shaved spot on her head. Her eyes were clenched tight; she made no effort to turn away.
“Love notes to you, darling,” he said. “Mushy, incoherent, hardly evidence. But I had enemies in the department and they pounced. I could have fought it. But Harvard had nothing more to offer me— it’s really not what it’s cracked up to be. It was clearly time for a move.”
“California,” I said. “San Labrador. Your wife’s suggestion, wasn’t it? Go west for clinical opportunities.”
Opportunities arising out of Ursula’s supervision of Eileen Wagner. Closed-door sessions that turned into therapy, as supervision often does.
Eileen talking about her past. Her needs. The sexual conflicts that had
caused her to switch from pediatrics to psychiatry.
Recounting her experiences, years before, with a beguiling, wealthy agoraphobic. A ravaged princess ensconced in a peach-colored castle, crippled by fear that had eventually spread to her daughter— a little girl so remarkable she’d called for help, herself . . .
An eleven-year-old conversation came back to me.
Eileen in sensible shoes and a mannish blouse, shifting her Gladstone bag from hand to hand.
Private Eyes Page 52
