The Opposite of Music

by Janet Ruth Young

  More sliding. Then the sound of padded blankets being heaped together. Thwop, thwop, thwop. The workmen walk past us with the second crate. Then they reappear carrying the office door. They attach it to its hinges. One workman tests the motion. Smooth. Mieux closes the door, and we don’t hear any more sounds from his office. The workmen leave, the one carrying his soda bottle. Out in the hall, they wrestle the second crate into the elevator.

  The situation is now exactly the way it was when we first came in, except that the waiting-room furniture is in disarray and crowded into one section of the room. Dad gets up and opens the door to Mieux’s office.

  “No! No!” Mieux cries. He has been arranging objects in the desk drawers. He rushes to the door and presses his body weight against it while Dad still has his hand on the handle. “I’ll call you when I’m ready for you.”

  I cross over to Mom’s seat and whisper, “Why don’t we get out of here?”

  “Shhh.”

  Dad paces around the room while rubbing his hands. He’s trying to get interested in some of the art that hangs on the walls, stark black-and-white photos of shadowy mountaintops and of ice floes settling into abstract shapes. Dad walks up to them one by one. He used to do some photography and painting. He went to art school, on a full scholarship.

  The door opens.

  “I will see you now,” the doctor says, nodding as if he’s meeting us for the first time.

  We take our places opposite Dr. Mieux at his desk. The stylus and screen are ready, but he doesn’t use them. Instead, he folds his hands on the desk.

  “First of all, we need to establish some ground rules if we’re going to work together. You need to know that what just happened in my space was none of your business.” He looks at each of us, but most sharply at me. “The boundaries between doctor and patient are absolutely paramount in this office. Is that clear to everyone?”

  I respond by making my eyes go defunct, which he can interpret any way he likes: that I’m bored, that I hate him, or that I think he’s a fake.

  “Yes, of course,” Mom mutters. Dad nods.

  “Now let’s get back to your situation, Bill.” The doctor examines a few pages of records sent to him by Dr. Fritz. His black, perhaps ebony, desk and chairs have been replaced by another set. The surface of the wood has parallel waves too beautiful to have been painted by a human hand. If I didn’t despise his furniture by association, I would trace one wave with my fingertip. Dad would have loved this.

  The doctor sees me looking. “It’s bubinga,” he says. Then, to Dad, “You’ve tried a couple of antidepressants, with poor results. And there is suicidality?”

  “What?” Dad asks.

  “You sometimes think about killing yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Mieux holds Dad’s records between us. “Look, Bill, if you would like me to authorize this treatment you’re requesting, I’m going to have to have you in my care round the clock—in order to monitor your progress and forestall any problems.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Dad.

  “This type of treatment is generally available on an inpatient basis only. In cases where there is suicidality, it’s best to have the support system in place, trained staff, monitoring…”

  “You mean…a hospital?” Dad asks.

  “Wait a minute,” Mom says. “Why don’t we discuss the options? We haven’t even decided if we want shock treatments yet.”

  I plant my feet one at a time as loudly as possible, as if I am a giant with giant feet in giant boots.

  Okay. Let’s go, Mom. Let’s just go. Thank you for your time and everything blah blah blah.

  “Billy,” Mom says, “would you rather wait outside?”

  The doctor narrows his eyes at me and then continues. “Yes, a hospital. Hospitalization. You would be on my floor, getting the best possible care, under my direct attention. People come from all over the world—some very prominent people, members of royal families, although patient confidentiality constrains me from saying exactly who—from all over the world, to be on my floor.”

  But I’m not hearing this—inpatient, hospitalization. I’m hearing the mental ward. Restraints, barred windows, icy baths, screams at two a.m., disturbed people surrounded by other disturbed people who frighten one another with their delusions. How would Dad survive there?

  And Mom looks like she’s thinking, If I put him in, will I ever get him out again?

  “I’m not sure that would work,” Mom says. Her voice wobbles while she twists her necklace of wooden beads. “We haven’t decided if we want shock treatments.”

  “This isn’t cosmetic dentistry, Mrs. Morrison. This isn’t something you choose or don’t choose. You can’t dillydally among the treatments, comparing caps and crowns and whether you should bond or whiten. Your husband is at risk of harming himself.”

  “We can take care of him at home.”

  The doctor refers back to Dad’s record. He speaks to Mom without seeing her. “You’ve had him at home for—how long is it?”

  “Almost four months,” says Mom.

  “And he hasn’t gotten better in all that time….”

  “We’re taking fine care of him at home.” Mom’s nervous, and her voice is up and down all over the place.

  “You want him to get better, don’t you? You don’t want to be negligent.” Mieux is staring at Mom now. “If the worst happens…It’s ten past five, Mrs. Morrison. We have only a few minutes to make a decision here.”

  “I’m not putting him in the hospital,” Mom says. “That’s all there is to it. I’ll see what our choices are. Maybe we’ll leave the country and seek treatment elsewhere. Perhaps we’ll try Canada, or Mexico. But he’s not going into the hospital.”

  Why don’t we just go then, Mom? Why don’t we just up and leave?

  I rise.

  Ignoring me, Mieux writes a few comments with the stylus. He touches up the comments. He frowns.

  “Well, I’m willing to try it this once, to supervise your husband as an outpatient. Keep in mind that I’ll be paying very close attention to this case, to make sure it’s handled correctly.”

  “I appreciate that, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Mom says. “We haven’t decided on anything. I need to know more. How do these treatments work, if they do work? We have no idea what to expect!”

  Mieux sighs. He gets out of the chair and goes to a cabinet with an empty vase on top. He gives Mom a brochure. ECT: A Powerful Tool for Change, by L. F. Mieux.

  Mom hands the brochure to me and tells the doctor she’ll call back after she’s had a chance to review it. I clap my notebook shut with only a few lines filled. Mom and I leave with Dad between us.

  In the parking lot, when Mom searches her purse for her car keys, her hand is shaking. I secure Dad gently in front, but once in the backseat, I slam my door loud enough to echo off pewter walls.

  “Not now, Billy.”

  “You know what I’m going to say then, don’t you?”

  “Nothing, Billy. Not a word until we get home.”

  “I didn’t like him,” Dad says.

  Back at the house, I escort Dad inside while Mom waits in the driveway. She’ll be leaving again to get Linda.

  “I’m not closing off my options, Billy,” she says when I come back out. “We may want to continue with him. I checked with someone I know at the college. He has a very good reputation.”

  “You can’t put Dad in the hands of a nut job!”

  “Don’t be such an alarmist. So he’s a little eccentric. A lot of brilliant people are. He probably puts all his effort into keeping up with research and hasn’t developed good interpersonal skills. In the academic world, at least, that’s fairly typical.”

  “This isn’t the academic world—he’s supposed to be a doctor! You hated him yourself. Why are you making excuses for him? What about being a good consumer, like you always told us to be? What about shopping around?”

  “Sometimes—” The
lady next door is just getting home from work. Mom waves. “Would you keep your voice down, please?”

  “You didn’t think he was any good. You thought he was full of it. You wanted to turn around and walk out, the same as I did.”

  “Maybe, but I restrained myself. He has a very good reputation. We have to put our personal preferences aside. It’s just something that we have to overlook.”

  “He treated Dad like he wasn’t even a person. Like he was a prisoner or something. Like he had no will. He treated us like we were less than human. People like that should never be given any kind of power.”

  “It’s irrelevant.”

  “Irrelevant?”

  “So he’s rude to the patients. So what? Does that really make any difference? It’s like saying he can’t do a good job because he’s bald.”

  “He is bald. And obtuse and—”

  Mom reaches for the handle of the car door. “Listen, Billy. When I was in grad school, there was a professor in the biology department that no one could stand to be in the same room with. He smelled bad, he insulted the other professors, and he distributed fliers saying the women’s studies department should be cut because it wasn’t a real subject. But you know what? He contributed to the discovery of an oncogene. The first step toward a cure for cancer. How many people do you think he helped?”

  “But did any of the people with cancer ever have to meet him? I don’t think so. This guy is a psychiatrist, for Christ’s sake. He’s supposed to know how to act around people.”

  “We can find someone else to be nice to us. We can pay someone to be nice to us. But we can pay him to do what he does.”

  The curtains move and Dad looks out at us. I hold up my finger to say “one minute.”

  “You’d better go in,” Mom says.

  “Well, I’m glad I’m not the one paying the bills. He’s not getting one cent of my money.”

  Mom drops her head and rests both gloves on the car hood, as if she’s watching her reflection, except that the car is really dirty. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you with us,” Mom says. “I thought you might be up to taking notes.”

  Not bring me? If I hadn’t been there, who knows what might have happened? Dad might not have come home. He could be watching the world through iron bars right now.

  “Now everything is getting too complicated,” Mom says as if I’m not there. “I’m the only one who can decide.”

  “How will you decide? Everything we’ve tried so far has been a disaster. The other day I was trying to remember what Dad was like before he got sick, and you know what? I can’t even remember. I can’t remember my own father and he’s not even dead, he’s living right here in the house and sleeping down the hall.”

  “Go in. I’ll decide. I’ll look into it, and I’ll decide.”

  I hold up my notebook. “We got that brochure, right?”

  “That’s right. Where’s the brochure?”

  ECT: A POWERFUL TOOL FOR CHANGE

  The wife of a former governor and onetime presidential hopeful calls the results of her regular ECT program “wonderful.”

  The chairman of psychiatry at a prestigious medical school says, “Most people today in patient surveys say it’s no worse than going to a dentist.”

  For nearly seventy years, electroconvulsive therapy has been used to restore depressed patients to health. What can ECT do for you?

  Restore your zest for life

  Revive your appetite and help you maintain a healthy weight

  Release you from insomnia so you enjoy a good night’s rest

  Return your performance level at school or job, honing your “competitive edge”

  Are you a candidate for ECT? Ask your doctor, and begin to harness the healing power of electroconvulsive therapy now.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Mom says.

  RESERVATION

  Now it’s Mom who paces the house, trying to decide whether to go ahead with the treatments. She has already told Mieux that she will go forward, and Dad has had all the necessary prep work done. But she has misgivings. She carries the appointment card for Dad’s first treatment. She folds and unfolds it so many times that it turns silky.

  “Listen to yourself,” I tell her. “You obviously have doubts. Why do you have doubts? Because you know he’s a quack. He shouldn’t be practicing medicine. He wouldn’t care if Dad died in his office, as long as it didn’t leave a mark on the furniture. You should have told him no in the first place.”

  Linda agrees. “Too risky,” she says. “The things we did before, they didn’t work, but at least they were safe.”

  “It’s just a piece of paper,” Mom says. “We can cancel at any time. We can just fail to show up, the way we did with Fritz. The situation only seems to be out of our control, see? They need to act like they’re in charge, but we’re the ones who are in control. We’re the ones they need to show up.”

  RESOLUTION

  Someone approaches the bike rack behind the library as I’m going in the entrance. He hovers near Triumph.

  “My bike,” I boom in my strongest voice, retracing my steps.

  A middle-aged guy stands up. He’s a little younger than my father, and he’s wearing a peacoat with a plaid muffler.

  “Beautiful bike. English, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.” With the hand holding my keys, I point to a plate on the top tube that says MADE IN ENGLAND.

  “I always wanted one of these. How does it ride?”

  “Three years with no problems. And a lot of decades before that.”

  “They’re a little heavy on the hills, aren’t they? Have you considered putting a larger cog in the back?”

  “I don’t mind working up a sweat on the hills once in a while. I’m trying to keep it as intact as possible. I could use a springier seat, too, with all the potholes, but I just like the looks of this one.” I wait for him to step away, but he doesn’t go.

  “It’s in beautiful condition,” he says, running his hand over the handlebars. “Have you ever thought of selling?”

  “No, I haven’t.” That sounds ruder than I intended. “Sir, this is my primary mode of transportation.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want you to lose your transportation. I would give you enough to get another decent bike. How about three hundred dollars?”

  “It’s not worth that much.”

  “Then why don’t you take the money?”

  “It’s not worth that to anyone else, I mean.”

  “How about four hundred, then?”

  “Are you crazy? You can find five of them for that much on the Internet.”

  “Why is this bike so special to you?”

  “It’s practically my first bike. It feels like that, anyway. I fixed it up myself…. My father and I did.” A light snow is falling, and I want to be inside.

  “Well, it’s really just what I’m looking for. And I have been looking on the Internet. Will you take my card, in case you change your mind?”

  I wave the card away and go upstairs. Once inside the door I check back to see if the guy has his grubby hands on my frame again, but he’s walking to his car. Four hundred dollars! Out of nowhere. It almost seemed like one of those situations they warn you against, when someone pretends to share your enthusiasms or offers to do you a big favor, and they’re really a sexual predator attempting to get somewhere with you. The card and everything. Or perhaps he was the devil incarnate. He did seem to genuinely like the bike, though.

  I go inside and find a computer carrel in the corner of the third floor, where I’m least likely to encounter other students from my school. I pass two guys a year older than me—“It’s all right,” one guy says, “it’s just Bob.”—who seem to be participating in a chat room. “Say you’re a 40DD,” one of them whispers to the other.

  Four hundred dollars. I don’t know whether I should tell Mom and Dad. On the one hand, it’s a lot of money that perhaps we could use (I actually know very little about our financial situation), b
ut on the other hand, I have no intention of selling. We do, after all, need my bike. With Dad out of commission, it’s our second car. It allows me to do important errands like this. With the saddlebags, I could conceivably do grocery runs as well. Maybe I should offer to do something for the Brooksbie once in a while. Yes, I am sure they would not want me to sell the bike.

  Tuning out the guys in the nearby carrel, I do a keyword search on the words “electroconvulsive therapy.” The search brings up several websites with pleasant and soothing names like Personal Wellness, Web MD, Family Doctor, and the National Institutes for Health. I print up a page of questions and answers from Family Doctor.

  What conditions does electroconvulsive therapy treat? Electroconvulsive therapy (also called ECT) may help people who have the following conditions:

  Severe depression with insomnia (trouble sleeping), weight change, feelings of hopelessness or guilt, and thoughts of suicide (hurting or killing yourself) or homicide (hurting or killing someone else).

  Severe depression that does not respond to antidepressants (medicines used to treat depression) or counseling.

  Severe depression in patients who can’t take antidepressants.

  Severe mania that does not respond to medicines. Symptoms of severe mania may include talking too much, insomnia, weight loss or impulsive behavior.

  How does ECT work?

  It is believed that ECT works by using an electrical shock to cause a seizure (a short period of irregular brain activity). This seizure releases many chemicals in the brain. These chemicals, called neurotransmitters, deliver messages from one brain cell to another. The release of these chemicals makes the brain cells work better. A person’s mood will improve when his or her brain cells and chemical messengers work better.

  What steps are taken to prepare a person for ECT treatment?

  First, a doctor will do a physical exam to make sure you’re physically able to handle the treatment. If you are, you will meet with an anesthesiologist, a doctor who specializes in giving anesthesia. Anesthesia is when medicine is used to put you in a sleeplike state. The anesthesiologist will examine your heart and lungs to see if it is safe for you to have anesthesia. You may need to have some blood tests and an electrocardiogram (a test showing the rhythm of your heart) before your first ECT treatment.