THE CHARLATAN

Dr. Apollyon Mendes sat rigid behind his desk. A student in a black leather armchair faced him. On the desktop between stood a glass of milky liquid, which Mendes stirred occasionally with a slender wand to dissolve its powdery contents. When he left off and allowed the glass to rest undisturbed for a time, the powder again congealed, forming soggy globules around the rim. Mendes then dissolved these once more, stirring with evident relish. The crook of a walking cane protruded from his lap, and now and then he jostled it, making a loud scrape on the floor. But this was a ruse. Above all else, the doctor desired to conceal his cloven hoof, which was prone to spasms that had long since worn a deep groove in the tiles. Fortunately, the solid steel desk formed an impenetrable barrier—though Mendes did worry about the faint goatish stench.

“Patient X arrived here in deep distress,” Mendes said at last. “As you saw for yourself this morning, our facility is designed to make an indelible first impression on incoming residents. The remote mountaintop setting, the Gothic gate and onyx spires, the prevailing architectural concept of leaning concrete slabs stacked with a minimum of right angles, the ceremony of admittance, the endless corridors and industrial courtyards, the costumes of the orderlies, the austerity of the cells—each detail, in short, is chosen to create a unified effect, to envelop the patient in the ambiance of a new world. The mad suffer from overheated, chaotic fantasies plus a neurotic compulsion to cancel out manifest reality and substitute their own. We must therefore establish from the first our role as arbiters of truth. Our power is absolute. Once the patient accepts this fact, she has taken the first step on the long road back to reason.

“Patient X proved typical in her initial resistance. I summoned her here to my office, escorted by two orderlies. Her hair pointed in every direction, a frazzled, knotted nest. She stood exactly where you now sit, clad in the flimsiest of lavender gowns—so translucent that the sunlight irradiated her nakedness. I adopted my sternest tone. I told her that I counted it my solemn duty to wear her down, to break her will, to purge her mind of its diseased notions, and then to instruct her in the ways of civility and order. This provoked an eruption of rage, of inarticulate seething. Calmly, I reached beneath my desk and activated the plasma display panels. One by one, they descended from the ceiling, forming a long phalanx against the walls, until at last they encircled the room. I switched them on. Instantly we were surrounded by dozens of images from across the clinic—stairwells, offices, hallways, cells. On the master screen behind my head, I brought up the feed from her own cell, including a shot of her open lavatory. She required no explanation. Staring and trembling with mute fury, she defiantly urinated right onto the floor.

“Of course, we monitored her closely after that. During the day, sorting swatches in the workshop, she maintained a calm demeanor—but at night, back in her cell, the mask dropped, and she unleashed all her pent-up frenzy.” Mendes paused, sipped his drink, then stirred it once more with the wand. “I have some footage if you’d care to see.”

“Please,” said the student.

Mendes lowered the master screen. A long series of numbers scrolled across the display before being replaced by a shot of a white cell—an almost perfect cube—containing only a mattress, a white foam stool, and Patient X. She stalked about in circles, arms flailing.

“What’s she saying?” the student asked.

Mendes switched on the sound, and the office filled with a breathless, jabbering monologue.

“Believe it or not, she’s speaking Greek,” Mendes said. “Like many of the mad, Patient X displayed an insufferable penchant for self-dramatizing romanticism. She’s quoting—frequently misquoting—Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound.” Mendes curled his lip. “Quite apt, don’t you agree? Yes, indeed, most apt.”

On the screen, Patient X lurched suddenly toward the camera and shouted, “Derkou theama! Derkou theama!”

Mendes snapped the sound off again with a grunt of disgust. “That line translates roughly to ‘Feast your eyes on the spectacle.’ ” He chuckled. “I’m afraid her resentment at being under surveillance never fully abated.” Patient X ranted on in silence as Mendes continued. “We should be grateful that our science has advanced so far beyond psychoanalysis, which proceeded as though the patient’s opinion were meant to instruct the doctor. Even more should we celebrate the passing of the superstition that reestablishing knowledge of the soul’s divine origin can magically transform a lunatic to back health. We operate today on the sound observations and accumulated wisdom of experienced specialists. Accordingly, when Patient X proved unwilling to temper her outrageous behavior, I had no choice but to initiate a strict regimen of physical punishment.

“One night, without warning, I sent a team of orderlies into her cell after she’d exhausted herself and passed out on the floor. While I kept watch here at my desk, the team stood her upright, pinned her arms behind her back, slapped her awake, caught her legs when she kicked, then applied a series of steady blows with a rubber club while I spoke to her through the intercom. Quite calmly, I explained that I served not only as her doctor but also as the representative of the society into which she must be reintegrated. I asked her to consider the situation from my point of view. As a professional psychiatrist, I couldn’t very well release a patient into the world who so stubbornly refused to behave rationally, who persisted in spewing offensive ideas in the most disturbing possible terms. Society, after all, demands conformity to a basic set of established rules. Therefore, by clinging so fiercely to her unreason, wasn’t she really only harming herself? The team then flung her onto the mattress and left. I forbade her to go to workshop the next day, hoping to give her adequate time to consider what I’d said. The following night, she responded with the most astonishing mixture of exalted Biblical quotation and nauseating obscenity I’ve heard in my long career.

“At that point, I unsheathed my diagnosis—chemical imbalance. The following day, our druggist and I devised a rotating series of cocktails involving more than a dozen medications and began a kind of impromptu research experiment. Of course, as disciplinary measures go, it’s hard to beat pharmaceuticals.” Mendes grinned. “But we also wanted to learn something useful. So we drew up a table of the various drugs—arranged on a grid according to type, cross-indexed by side effect—and tracked the results for each combination. Over the course of sixteen weeks, we effectively ran the gamut, covering the full spectrum of induced behavior from catatonic to chatterbox, sobbing to euphoria, tantrums to drooling lethargy and everything in between—while simultaneously negotiating tremors, vomiting, constipation, hives. The amount of data we collected was simply enormous. Then, when it was all over—after we’d flushed from her system the last traces of her final dose—she woke up, rolled over, looked into the camera, and sneered, ‘You’re blind. Blind fools. You understand nothing!’

“I don’t mind confessing that my temper flared. Nevertheless, I remained cognizant of my professional responsibilities and arranged immediately for Patient X to receive a session of electroconvulsive therapy. I watched the process here at my desk. It’s a difficult thing to witness—but of course that’s part of our duty as medical men—and, in this case, it afforded me no small measure of satisfaction.” Mendes fell silent. He switched off the master screen and retracted it into the ceiling. He took a deep breath, paused—then scraped the floor with his cane. “Do you have any experience with ECT?” he asked.

“No,” said the student.

“Unfortunately, the practice remains controversial, even in our enlightened, scientific age. I’m sure you’ve heard the objections—that it’s barbaric, and so on. But I can tell you that those who so cavalierly hurl such accusations remain hopelessly ignorant of the true nature of madness. Furthermore, the technique is effective, pure and simple. Not even the most recalcitrant lunatic will fail to be rendered docile. So it was with Patient X. Her memory, destructive behavior, subversive ideas—all erased! We reduced her to a tabula rasa, and I eagerly awaited the opportunity to rebuild her from the ground up.

“Tragically, as you know, I never got that chance.

“It seems that during the earlier medication experiment she’d managed with each dose to hide a pill or two beneath her tongue, which she then squirreled away secretly inside her mattress. Under the circumstances, I must say it was an impressive feat—which also, parenthetically, invalidated all of our precious data. But it’s inconceivable that she remembered the ploy after electroshock. Probably she just found the stash by accident. In any case, to swallow nearly a hundred such pills in a single night can have only one result.” Mendes shrugged. “Of course, I wish there had been more we could have done. But in this line of work, one must learn not to take such setbacks personally. They are, I’m afraid, simply the nature of the beast.”

The student nodded.

“Have I answered your question?” Mendes asked.

“Yes,” said the student. “But I have one thing more to add.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not really a student.”

Mendes sat motionless, then slowly gulped down the last of his drink and pushed the empty glass forward across the desk. “Oh?” he said.

“Patient X, as you call her, was my wife. I loved her.”

Mendes involuntarily kicked with his cloven hoof, striking the underside of the desk, lifting it briefly off the floor before it came crashing down again.

The patient’s husband didn’t flinch. He reached into his coat and pulled out a pistol loaded with a full magazine of silver bullets. He cocked the piece—then aimed it right between the doctor’s eyes.