Transorbital Read online

  “That doesn’t really help, doctor.”

  “Columbia University? When was that, ‘51? ‘52?”

  “Well…”

  “I’m Chris Williams. Remember?”

  “Ah, yes. How you doing there, Doctor Williams?”

  “OK,” he said, “all things considered. I’ve only just started here.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Now how is this for serendipity?” he said, smiling brightly and wiping his forearm across his brow.

  “I’m not sure…how is it?”

  “You know, I’m not really one for ‘fate’ or any of that rot, but damn it all…”

  And so there we stood, blocking foot traffic both ways, rubber soles squeaking around us on both sides.

  “Umm, did you need me for something, Dr. Williams?”

  “As a matter of fact…” He looked suspiciously around the hallway, then leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “Yes I do.”

  Though his attention was flattering, he was beginning to creep me out a bit—

  “Food tray?” I asked. “Medicine? Problem with a screamer?”

  —and besides, I had work to do.

  “No no no!” he replied. “Well, yes. But…we’ll get someone else to handle that. Right now, I need YOUR help. And only yours.” He looked around again and then whispered even more quietly than before, “And you mustn’t breathe a word of it. To anyone. Do you understand?”

  “Not a word of it.”

  “Follow me. I need to show you something.”

  We headed up to the third floor to his cramped, drab little office; papers, coffee cups and various brik-a-brak sat stacked on his desk and each of the two available chairs. For a doctor he struck me as tremendously disorganized, and unnervingly distracted. It occurred to me that perhaps this fellow had chosen the wrong line of work.

  “All right…let’s see here…No…no, this isn’t it…”

  He rifled through two separate briefcases, finally pulling out several neatly collated stacks of papers from each.

  Perhaps it was less that he was disorganized…but rather his priorities were oddly focused.

  “Some…uh…secret project you got going there, Doc?”

  “You could say that,” he said, nodding gravely. “Yes. You could indeed put it that way. If…you consider life itself to be merely a project.”

  “As a matter of fact I do.”

  “Mistakes have been made, my friend. Mistakes have been made.”

  “Um. Sure.”

  “We no longer speak of the transorbital lobotomy, you know.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That appears to be the way of things these days.”

  “It really did seem like a break-through at one time,” he said with a sigh. He plopped down on the tan leather couch, the only free sitting area, and indicated that I should sit as well.

  “I know,” I said, sitting on the opposite end of the couch. “It did at that.”

  “Didn’t it? Didn’t it seem that way?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes. We’re only human, after all. The science is not precise.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh at this, and I’m not sure why. “You say so, Doc.”

  “Tell me, friend,” he said, “when have you last seen Dr. Freeman?”

  “Oh…Jesus. Thirteen years? At least that.”

  “Damn,” he said, giving the armrest of the couch a light thump. “I feared as much.”

  “What’s this about, Doctor Williams?”

  “Call me Chris.”

  “OK.”

  “Take a gander at these, will you?”

  He handed me several sheets of loose paper. It was a list of names, last name first, followed by a series of dates. Most of them contained an accompanying MD.

  “Do you recognize them?” he asked. “Any of them?”

  “Maybe,” I said. A few did ring a tiny bell in my head somewhere. “Yeah, maybe. I think they were…protégés of Dr. Freeman? Some of them anyway. Many blue moons ago.”

  “Yes!” he said brightly. “Yes, exactly. But that’s not all they have in common.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “They’re also…all dead now. Every single mother-loving last one of them.”

  “Oh…oh yeah?”

  “You seem…unfazed by this.”

  “Well, you know, eggs in China…”

  “You don’t find anything disturbing about so many doctors turning up dead? And at such relatively young ages to boot?” My blank look continued unabated. “With this common trait binding them together?”

  Been doing a bit of detective work, have we Doc? I don’t know if that’s the proper uniform for a gumshoe.” I laughed. He did not. “I’m just sayin’ is all.”

  He straightened his back and cleared his throat.

  “These cannot be mere coincidence,” he said, emphatically tapping the papers with his index finger. “Someone is out there—!” He lowered his voice, “Someone is out there…killing doctors. But not just doctors. Lobotomists.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh? I say there’s a killer on the loose and you have nothing to say but ‘Oh’?”

  “Well…OK. How’s this…Eighteen thousand.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Eighteen thousand. That’s how many prefrontal lobotomies have been performed over the last 20 years. Mostly through the previous decade. Now, Doc Freeman himself is responsible for nearly four thousand of those. I know, ‘cause I was there for a good chunk of them. But, that still leaves a whole heaping helping of folks working the scene. Laying down that routine. All right? He trained a LOT of people. A lot. And now you’re telling me, over the past two decades or so, that a handful of them, from all over the country, have passed away? Some from…” I flipped to a corresponding page listing causes of death, “accidents around the office…’natural causes’…a couple of suicides…and so on. Is that what’s spooking ya, Doc? That sounds to me like life doing what it does. No need to call out Sam Spade, OK? Or the National Guard or something.”

  He studied me stiff-lipped for a long moment.

  “Oh,” he said in a clipped tone. “I see.”

  “Well…good.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, a thin smile barely cracking his angular face. “I hear what you’re saying.”

  “It’s just how things look from where I’m sitting,” I said.

  “I’m glad you mentioned the eighteen hundred.”

  “Thousand.”

  “What?”

  “Eighteen thousand prefrontal lobotomies. In two decades.”

  “Yes. Of course. Eighteen thousand. So have you kept up with any of them?”

  “What? Of course not. I mean, not really. Just a few.”

  “Well,” he said, his cryptic grin now spreading wider. “Walter Freeman has.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “He travels the country in that old…Lobotomobile of yours, the camper van, constantly checking in on former patients. Almost pathological really.”

  “That sounds like Walter all right.”

  “I’ve begun keeping up on them too,” he said. “All of the out-patient prefrontals. Or many of them anyway. The range of reaction from this procedure is…staggering. There is no consistency at all. AT ALL. Some of them are actually what one might charitably call ‘cured.’ No more rage, no more fits, relatively peaceful and productive citizens.”

  “But…” I sighed, as a familiar sinking feeling came over me.

  “But…not very many of them.” He handed me a thicker stack of papers. “Do you recognize these names?”

  I did. And I felt my stomach fall.

  “Yes,” I answered more quietly than I meant to. “Yes I do.”

  “Former patients?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many of them do you guess are all better now?”

  I began to feel the sweat brea
k on my forehead. I felt myself getting shaky and agitated, I began to actually feel, and I had a strong urge to run off to the medicine closet for a moment or two.

  “Um…Most of them?” I said with a weak smile.

  “Nice try,” he said. “If only Rosemary Kennedy had been an unfortunate oddity. If anything, that old girl got off easy, comparatively speaking.”

  The shame and guilt must have begun dripping from my face.

  “Rosemary wasn’t a transorbital,” I said. “And she was before my time…it was Dr. Watt’s, you know. His fault.”

  “Uh huh,” he said, nodding in faux agreement. “Well that’s just super-duper. And so is that what’s going to help you sleep at night?”

  I chuckled. “Get outta my head, you bastard.”

  “Hey, don’t blame yourself,” he said, “I did it too! We all did it. It seemed like the magic bullet. Right?”

  “Yeah…”

  “We could finally close down these wretched institutions. No more shock. No more drugs. We could heal the world, am I right about this? Am I speaking out of school here? Isn’t that what we all thought?”

  “I think so…”

  “But that’s not what happened, friend. No sir. That is not what happened at all. Every cut of the ice pick was like a coin-flip on someone’s life. No…it wasn’t a coin flip. It was a spin of the roulette wheel.” Déjà vu. “For every one true success, we’d have ten fall into a full vegetative state. Or revert to infantilism. Or develop horrific physical and vocal tics. Spasms. Loss of motor control. Loss of bladder and bowel control. Tardive dyskinesia. And some just…went blank. And that’s to say nothing of the massive brain hemorrhaging.”

  “To say nothing at all.”

  “And death. God, so many deaths. It’s amazing we haven’t all been carted away in chains.”

  “Doctors don’t get punished for bad medicine.”

  “Not yet. Or perhaps, not officially.”

  “I really don’t…want to care about any of this,” I said awkwardly. And I really didn’t.

  “But you do care,” he said. “Am I wrong? Tell me if I am.”

  I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. A needle was whispering my name somewhere. Calling me back to the land of oblivion.

  “So…” I said, trying to focus hard on the discussion at hand, “you believe there’s a killer on the loose.”

  “That’s my working hypothesis at the moment.”

  “With a vendetta of some sort.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You think it’s, what, a rogue doctor?” He didn’t answer, but his silence said ‘perhaps.’

  “Suspects?”

  “None yet.”

  “OK,” I said. “OK. So…if someone is really out there knocking off lobotomists…there is kind of a big white gorilla in the room here, wouldn’t you say?”

  He looked at me quizzically.

  “All right?” he said.

  “Why is Doc Freeman still walking around fine and dandy?” He arched his right eyebrow, but didn’t reply. “A bit of a hole in your theory…isn’t it, Chris? Huh? Isn’t it?”

  “There’s more,” he said, leaning in. “And before you ask, yes, I have spoken to the police about this. On several occasions. And they are clearly not making connections for the very reasons you mentioned: all these dead lobotomists, seventeen at last count, from all different parts of the country, and spread over at least a fifteen-year period…if not longer…it just seems random and coincidental. Eh?”

  “It does indeed.”

  “BUT! That just shows what a crafty…!” he stopped short, then redirected. “And the police are incapable of connecting…or unwilling to connect…the obvious dots.”

  I found his intensity more than a bit disconcerting. But, I worried more that he might in fact have been on to something.

  “Uh, Chris—”

  “Thanks to Doctor Freeman’s legendary affinity for self-promotion,” he said, rifling through the papers again in search of the appropriate documents, “it has not been difficult to trace his travel routes going back many years…”

  “And?”

  “And what I’ve discovered is…over the last seven and a half of those years, a number of these so-called ‘random’ and/or accidental deaths have taken place…when Freeman was in the vicinity.”

  I found myself bristling at what I assumed was his implication here. My reaction surprised me. But I could not help but feel defensive of Doc Freeman.

  “Now come on…surely you don’t mean to—”

  “All I’m saying is,” he said quickly, “that it sounds like a connection to me. And you say, ‘But Chris, somebody’s bumping off lobotomists, then why doesn’t that somebody take out the king fish?’”

  “The ‘king fish?’”

  “The big kahuna, the head cheese…”

  “Right.”

  “Well…I don’t know,” he said with a grand shrug. “I don’t have an answer. I don’t have ANY answers. Yet. But whomever it is, they certainly seem to be following his shadow.”

  “If this person even exits.”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “OK,” I said. “Let’s pause for a moment of perspective, shall we?”

  “Sure.”

  “None of this changes the fact that several of these doctors died of fucking heart attacks, for godsake! And cancer!”

  “And some of them didn’t!”

  “One of them fell down a flight of stairs at his daughter’s birthday party!” I shouted back.

  “Look,” he said, regaining his composure. I did likewise, but I really wanted to leave. I needed to tend to my rounds. “Maybe they’re not all connected…but what if even some of them are?”

  “What difference would it make?” I said.

  “The last two,” he said, “the most recent, they scare me most of all. Dr. Kirk Vollman, April of last year. And Dr. Bruce Haines, three weeks ago. Kirk Vollman was found in an alley outside his office in St. Paul, Minnesota with his head caved in and his wallet stolen.”

  “Sounds like a mugging to me.”

  “Bruce Haines was found dead in his apartment in Washington DC. Stabbed repeatedly in the face. Heavy stab wounds to and around his eyes. Nothing in the apartment stolen.”

  “And you think…what, that this is a message of some sort?”

  “Do you recognize this name?” he asked. “Bruce Haines?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s because Bruce Haines was not a protégé of Freeman’s. He attended exactly one guest lecture. San Diego, 1950. I know, because I was there too. Bruce Haines was a classmate of mine in med school. He was only a practicing physician for four years before quitting and going into business with his brother selling surgical equipment and ER supplies.

  “Now,” he continued, “perhaps I’m just a total loony tune, and I pray that I am. But if I’m not, and Bruce Haines was hunted down and murdered…for his brief time as a lobotomist…then I’m likely being hunted too. And…so are you.”

  All of the sudden, the occasional random attack by muggers and street people didn’t feel so random, or occasional, anymore.

  “But look, man,” I said, still trying to keep the burden of this away from me, “all these people…they’re ALL doctors. Or people who were doctors at one point. I’m not a doctor. And I never have been.”

  “That’s true,” he said with a nod. “And you think that’s going to keep you safe?”

  “I can take care of myself,” I said, almost convincingly. “I’ve seen my share of bad shit out there, Chris, and I’ve made it this far.”

  “Well…” he said, “Suit yourself. You could just walk away. Hope for the best, right? Good luck and godspeed and all of that.”

  “But…you know I won’t do that.”

  “I don’t know that for sure. But I do hope.”

  “You’re really scared, aren’t you,” I said. “I me
an you genuinely are afraid.”

  “That is part of it, I won’t lie,” he replied. “But you have to understand…I didn’t get into this line of work because I craved fortune. Or fame.”

  “Unlike some people we know?” I said.

  “I truly wanted to help people,” he continued. “To heal. I honestly thought, in my own small, personal way, I could do my part to…you know…save the world. That’s sounds stupid to you, I’m sure.”

  “Not as stupid as it should,” I said.

  “Do no harm. That’s the vow we all take. First, do no harm. It’s not official, but it is solemn. At least to me. Not only do I feel that I may have failed as a healer, I may have failed in my vow as well. I can’t stand idly by and allow even more harm to happen without trying to stop it. Does that makes sense to you at all?”

  “Yes. It does.”

  “Freeman is the connection to it all,” he said carefully. “You knew him better than anyone. Better than his own wife, probably. I need your help, my friend. I need your help.”

  Chapter 14

  Dr. Williams and I began to see quite a bit of each other. At work and after. He had apparently tried to talk to others about his fears and theories in the hopes of garnering some interest into an investigation of some sort, but he was soundly rebuffed across the board. Not wanting to look like he had flipped the proverbial lid (a fairly common occurrence with brain doctors, as you might imagine), he generally tried to shut his face about it, and I think he was grateful that I was at least marginally open to what he had to say. So he latched onto me as something of a kindred.

  His wife had recently walked out on him as well, fed up as she apparently was with the twitchy, miserable bastard Riverside had turned him into.

  Dumb luck, that.

  I could certainly empathize with all parties on that front. You’d have to be a ghoulish son of a bitch to not have the wards affect you, and Riverside was actually a pretty decent facility comparatively speaking. But with his wife and their two young daughters gone, he had an inordinate amount of time to stew on this issue.

  “You know,” Chris said one night as we drank malted scotch on the patio of his old Duchess County farmhouse, “I was always very careful. I took great pains to only sever the white fibers connected to the thalamus. This notion of ‘scrambling’ the frontal lobes never made much sense to me. I only severed the white fibers. That’s it.”