TUNNEL VISION: Chapter 5 "Working"

Chapter Five

Working

At last, Doctor Kinney was working, doing the things he was hired to do. After a month at the institution, he could finally navigate the hallways without getting lost, though he still had Mallie Lynn Peters escort him to the ladies’ ward or followed just behind Biggart to other parts of the facility. Kinney felt as if her were living two lives at the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum. During the day, he donned his white coat and observed patients and dictated to nurses and orderlies what they should do to control and quiet the inmates. At night, he slipped into a suit and joined high-ranking members of the staff for elegant dinners in the dining room with silver service, crystal glasses, and four course meals, all served by female inmates. Inmates who were usually there for reasons of promiscuity. In general, the promiscuous women could function in everyday life as long as you did not look too deeply into their eyes and risk the siren’s call. In this way, Kinney’s days and evenings marched on.

October passed quietly and slipped into November. Kinney’s days began to replicate, so that he was beginning to have trouble discerning one from the next. His days fell into a pattern and it was only because of his schedule that he was able to tell them apart.

Sundays were rest days for him and the staff. On Sundays, inmates were essentially left on their own, locked in their wards. They did not mill the campus, but sat in their beds or in rocking chairs or paced inside their wards. Mondays were difficult days, days in which the inmates had regressed into their illnesses because of the rest of Sundays. Kinney believed, as did the staff, that the diseased mind flourished in solitude. Only through work could demons be quieted. On Mondays then, he spent conducting therapy sessions, namely use of hydrotherapy and colonics. There was a new treatment called insulin shock therapy that state asylums were beginning to use. Large doses of insulin were injected into the inmate to induce a coma. This relaxed the brain and allowed the patient time to rest and heal. Of course, too much insulin could cause death, so while Kinney liked the idea of the therapy, he felt more confident with older, practiced remedies. Hydrotherapy sessions seemed to offer the most benefit as the hours emerged in cold water or shooting water into a patient’s face seemed to shock the mind into lucidity, however brief. As Kinney watched one of the patients thrash in the water, he thought that nearly dying must be a transformative event. To be just on the brink, teetering between existence and blackness…surely that experience would transform you.

Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturday he spent visiting each ward and marking off charts. Thursdays he attended meetings with the board and other staff members. Fridays were for research, and this day was the day he looked forward to beyond all others, the day that seemed to lie just beyond his reach. He had freedom on Fridays. He could walk the grounds then, find solace in the comfort of his own mind. On Fridays, he would read the latest scientific journals and work on his own ideas. He was fascinated with neuro surgery and removing diseased portions of the brain to heal a person. He had, in his previous position, attempted such an operation but the results of the experiment had been, sadly, fatal. Still, Kinney felt as if he’d brought her peace. His mind while no longer existing, was at least free of all conflict and disorder. It was, in essence, free of everything.

Kinney tried not to think of this. Instead, he grabbed his notebook and decided he would visit the men’s ward for his research today. And he would take a shortcut through the Tunnels. The Tunnels seemed to call to him—quite literally. At night he would awaken in his bed, shivering with a cold sweat, and he would swear that he heard Rose calling his name. He resisted walking in the Tunnels because he was afraid what might happen to him. Yes, he thought, he was afraid. On this Friday, though, the Tunnels would be required. It was November now and the grounds were barren and cold, twisted tree limbs seeming to reach out in agony. Outside, an ice storm was brewing and the trees moaned with the weight of their burden. With that, Kinney looked behind him to make sure he was not being followed, and slipped silently belowground.

*

He was deep in the belly of the Tunnels when he heard a great boom aboveground. He heard the tearing of wood that could only be a tree falling, perhaps giving in to the weight of the ice. The lights in the tunnels flickered and went out.

Kinney did not move. He knew if he waited and controlled his breathing his irises would adjust to the new darkness. In moments, the darkness would lighten, turn purple and he would be able to see.

He heard footsteps. Something shuffling. A laugh. Behind him? He turned. No. In front of him. To the side of him. “Who are you?” he called, his voice echoing around him. Whoareyouwhouareyouwhoareyou bounced back to him, but the words were whispered and layered and Kinney was certain it was not just his own voice coming back at him. “I have a gun!” he called and then instantly felt foolish. Yelling at shadows. And of course, he did not have a gun.

After a moment, he realized that the phrase “I have a gun” did not return to him. Indeed there was silence.

He began to see. Just shadows at first. He could make out a dim light in the distance. And then, to his growing horror, he realized those shadows in front of him were moving. One scurried on the ground, a lump, a moving lump the size of a person on their knees. Two to the side, the shadows as tall as Biggart. Kinney spun. Two more shadows moved toward him…one slender and jumping, the next moving fluidly as if gliding on air.

The gliding shadow asked him softly, “Who are you?” and grabbed his face with cold fingers that felt as comforting as talons. “Who are you?” The woman whispered again, for it was a woman, and her voice in the darkness was a lyrical as a lullaby. She leaned in close to him, pressed her nose against his neck and….smelled. When she drew her face back to look at him, Kinney lost his tender hold on panic.

He was looking into the face of his Rose, his wife, dead these three years.

“Kinney,” he managed, barely able to form the words. She looked at him. Cocked her head.

“Kin-ney,” She said, but it was Rose, wasn’t it? It was Rose, his beloved dead wife, risen from the grave, or halfway from the grave and existing in the in-between of the Tunnels. “Meet my family,” with that she gestured to the other shadows and Kinney turned his eyes toward them. He could see them now, see them as four distinct people, two men and two women and he felt his heart stop in his chest. They were inmates, surely, inmates loose in the Tunnels, inmates with bloodied feet and dirty pajamas, with eyes fueled by disease and torment. He recognized one, a man who was lean with muscles sharpened by hard work. His name was Kostic, and he was the man Kinney had performed hours of hydrotherapy on, leaving the man exhausted and certainly just shy of death.

“Kinney!” Kostic hissed. “Kinney!” the others echoed.

And then they were upon him.

TUNNEL VISION--Chapter Four--Discoveries

Chapter Four

Discoveries

Traverse City, Michigan, 1952

Ray wants to know what I am carrying around. What’s in that box you’re always digging through, he asks, and I can hear the irritation heavy in his words.

They’re just notes, I say. I know that if I actively hide it from him, he will tear the room apart searching to find and read every slip of paper inside this box, so instead, I put the secret of my birth right on the kitchen counter, grab a handful of papers, and hand them out to him as if offering a bouquet of flowers. Would you like to read it? I ask.

He looks at me and there is a moment when we are staring at each other. I force myself not to lower my gaze and then, soon enough, he lowers his first and eats his eggs. It is a minor miracle.

I don’t know why I am hiding it, even in the open like this. Beyond the paperwork that says my mother died three years before having me, there is very little in here that Ray would understand. There is very little in here I understand. Some things I look at again and again, like the old postcards of the asylum, making the grounds look so peaceful and inviting that I’d like to go there myself. There are some medical records taken from when I was an infant about my weight and size and length and that I had jaundice. There is a lock of hair tied with a white string. It is a single curl and even though it sits in this box, I can tell that the woman who had curls like this must have been beautiful once. It occurs to me that it is the same dark color as my own, though mine is short now and has no beauty left to it.

There is also a red ball (smaller than my palm, cupped), a candle burned to just a stump, and a list of names. It’s the names I look at now, run my finger over: Liliana Stephenson, Robert Kostic, Timothy Beeler, Lynnie Sherry, and then a single name or phrase written in capital letters AMA.

There are papers attached to this list of names. Each name has its own page and there are terms and boxes checked. Feeble minded, senility, involutional melancholia, dementia praecox followed by other words that are, I know, different kinds of treatment, words involving shock and water and other things I do not understand. And there are phrases that scare me, phrases like “the patient displays episode of extreme violence and rage”. And there are dates circled and stamped, and I do not know if these people were discharged or they left the asylum through a more permanent departure. My father has signed each page. These names then, these people, were patients of his…but why are their names and diagnoses wrapped in my box of secret things and why, no matter how many times I go through the pages, is there no such page for AMA?

I touch the curl of hair with my fingertip. Ray calls for more eggs. I put the lid on the box though even I know that you can lock something away, and it still goes on existing, even in the dark.

*

Northern Michigan Insane Asylum, 1932

He was upside down. Surely he was upside down!

But no. That wasn’t right. He wasn’t floating above the floor, staring at it beneath him. He was staring up at the ceiling…and there was Mallie Lynn Peters dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth. “There, there, now, Doctor Kinney. It’s all right. It’s all right now.”

He felt, rather than saw, the hulking presence of Biggart leave the room. Mallie continued. “You tripped and fell in the tunnels you did. Bumped your head good and deep now, didn’t you. Afraid there are stitches. But don’t you worry. We’ve done them before. They ain’t pretty, but they’ll heal. Now, sit up, Doctor Kinney. It’s time to start your day.” Mallie helped him to a sitting position and then offered her arm to steady him as he rose to his feet.

“But there was someone in the Tunnels…” he began. He remembered it clearly. He’d reached out, felt the tangle of hair, heard his name echoing around him, through him. And hadn’t he…hadn’t he seen Rose? Hadn’t he seen someone who looked like Rose standing next to him, her eyes a flash of wild blue in the darkness, like a flint lighting?

“Course there was someone in the Tunnels. There’s always staff in the Tunnels. It’s how we get around so quietly.” Mallie studied him, wiped the dirt from his knees and then took a step back. “Now, don’t you look a sight. The patients will be pleased as anything, they will, to see them look at you. Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?” he asked, still confused as to how he had ended up in his office and how he had received stitches without any awareness at all as to how that was managed.

“It’s time to work,” Mallie said with more than a hint of authority in her voice. “Follow me.” She turned and exited the room. It took Kinney only a moment to follow her, but before doing so he pulled a single strand of dark hair from his lapel. It was a small thing, indeed, but proof enough that he’d seen someone in the Tunnels, and that someone had worn her hair down, not clasped tightly under a hat the way support staff did. No. That someone was either a patient or perhaps… perhaps…

Kinney shook his head and took after Mallie. He’d had the slightest moment where he’d actually believed the woman he’d seen really had been Rose. She had the same dark hair, the same length, and the same blue eyes that seemed to stare straight into his soul—if, indeed, he still possessed one.

*

They walked a short distance to the women’s ward. At last, Kinney was getting a sense of the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum as it really was: a vast machine for the mentally broken, a place inhabited and thriving with a swarm of lost souls. They passed inmates walking the grounds, inmates obvious in their striped pajamas and slippers. Some exhibited psychoses clearly, while others just stared at him a bit too long, the head cocked a bit too far. Mallie, for once, did not chat too him about bread or Mr. Young. She walked briskly across the courtyard and into the cold, hard building of the women’s ward. “You are to check on patients in Ward B. You’re lucky though, Doctor Kinney, Ward B is a pay ward, not the best one though, but at least you’re not in the other.”

Kinney nodded. There were several areas in the hospital, patients separated first by sex and then by finances. Those with families who could afford to, paid for their keeping. These inmates were treated to a spacious, open ward and meals that ranged from ham with breakfast to a full dinner at night. Their room was open and peaceful. Inmates were allowed to bring elements from home. That was the highest tier. The second tier belonged to inmates whose families could not afford to keep them in comfort, but still paid a minimal fee to at least ensure that they had decent meals and were tended to with respect. Their room, also wide and open, had more beds in it and no elements of the home. They had porridge for breakfast, boiled meat, soup. This would be the ward he would attend to.

And finally there was the Ward of the State. These were patients whose families could not pay, did not want to pay, or for inmates who did not have families at all. These were the inmates picked off from the streets and shipped to the asylum so that society would not have to see the effects of long-term syphilis on the brain, or psychoses where someone existed physically in this world, but spiritually they were somewhere or someone else. Kinney and Mallie passed this ward. He could hear the women inside, crying, laughing, shouting. One glance inside the room told him what he had feared. With the economy free falling, more and more individuals were slipping into madness, and no one could afford to pay. The hundred beds were filled in Ward C, and there were a hundred more women sitting, standing, pacing in the room. They were fed porridge and a watery soup and when they became very sick indeed, they were shipped to another secret room in the hopes that their illness would claim them quickly. The State did not like to pay for their upkeep.

“We’re here,” Mallie said and opened the door to Ward B.

*

He had expected to walk in, sit quietly at a desk, observe and then leave. Kinney should learn, he thought, that life never operates the way you expect. It’s as if as soon as you form an expectation, life hears you and then makes a different choice just to spite you. Kinney walked in, Mallie passed him a file, and the women surged.

He tried to walk forward. Tried to breathe. Tried to keep his gaze firmly in front of him. He was a tall man and because of this, the women reached up to him. He registered the reaching of their hands to touch his shoulders, his neck, his hair not as women individually touching him, but as if he were being accosted by some mythical creature with a hundred arms, a thousand probing tendrils searching to read him.

“Line up!” Mallie Lynn cried, her voice showing more than that hint of steel. “It’s Doctor Kinney to examine you!”

Mallie stomped her foot against the tile and the room fell to a hush. The wave of hands reaching to feel him ebbed, receded, and the women parted. A tiny, old woman stood before him. Her grey hair was not secured and it fell to the middle of her torso, wrapped her small frame as if it were a shawl. “You’ve been in The Tunnels, you have,” she whispered. Her voice was an injection of ice to his veins. “You’ll be back there too. Once The Tunnels bites you, you’re never the same.” She pointed to him, to his face, and he tentatively touched the stitches that now stretched there.

Mallie looked at Kinney and said softly, “Her name is Mrs. Hoogewind, sir. We don’t ever use her first name sir, not ever. She bites.” Mallie placed a file in Kinney’s hands, and with that, he began his work.

*

That night, he did not think of the waves of patients he’d seen and analyzed. He did not replay assigning therapies, addressing issues, discussing treatment plans. He did not look to tomorrow when he would oversee the hydrotherapy sessions. He did not revisit his ideas and plans for new therapies or read any of the journals that were being published discussing experiments with brain tissue and how elimination of key areas of the brain could cure a patient of all psychoses…and perhaps all emotion as well.

No.

He did not think of these things.

As he lay in bed listening to the moans of patients trapped in diseased minds, he thought instead of Rose, singing to him. It seemed if he really focused his mind he could hear her singing even now. Her voice was as far away as memory, and as soft as a promise. As he drifted to sleep he thought, for a moment, that her song seemed to be coming from somewhere beneath him, directly under him. Perhaps straight from the Tunnels.

With this thought, and Rose’s song calling to him, he slept.

*

The woman watched the man sleep. His dark hair fell across his eyes and his chest rose and fell with each breath. He looked sad, even sleeping. She reached her hand out to touch him and gently as a whisper touched his brow. Even sleeping he looked different than the others. She drew her head back and studied him.

“Ama, no!”

The woman heard her name and withdrew, sinking into the night. She was not to touch this man. He was of the upper world. He was not a tunnel person. He would not understand her. She knew this. She felt it as a truth. And even as she followed the woman in the white dress down into the Tunnels, Ama knew without question that she would be back, and next time she would touch his lips.

TUNNEL VISION Chapter 3 "The Tunnels"

Chapter Three

The Tunnels

The Northern Michigan Insane Asylum features a great expanse of tunnels connecting the separate wards, Building 50 and many of the doctors’ residences. This allows for the seamless transportation of goods necessary to the running of the facility, ensuring that your family member will not be aggravated by anything unsightly. Additionally, the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum has separate wards for men, women, and those from higher paying members of our society. There are separate wards for those patients of lower classes who are supported by the estate. The segregation of wards and the underlying tunnel systems ensures that your family member will never be exposed to someone of a different class level or mix with those of more dangerous afflictions.

--Promotional Material for The Northern Michigan Insane Asylum, 1915

We have been notified that there has been a breakdown of the tunneling system. Several patients have gone missing from locked wards and have been located in the caverns of the facility. We assure the board that this matter has been dealt with efficiently and promptly. All escaped inmates have been found and reassigned. The rumors currently circulating in the Traverse City community are without validity. As you know, with the recent influx of patients, we are experiencing a shortage of beds and materials. We graciously request additional support in both remedial staff and in two to four more physicians so that we can ensure all patients are accounted for at all times. The issue of the tunnels has been addressed and is currently being mended.

--A letter to the Board of Trustees dated 1931

The next morning Kinney was up before Mallie Lyn Peters could knock on the door. “I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” she began and then “Why! You’re an early riser, aren’t you? I stopped by the kitchen for some bread for you sir, if you want, and this time I remembered. I told that rascal Charlie—I mean—Mister Young to not disturb me and I had a purpose. Mr. Young said I, I’ve got…” Mallie’s hand went to her mouth again, a look of horror spreading its wings over her face. “Oh, sir. I clean forgot the bread. I went on so much about Mr. Young disturbing me from my purpose that I clean forgot that I meant to get you some bread! Would you like me to go back?”

“What I would like, Miss Peters,” he said, using her formal name to slow her down and draw her attention,

“What I would like is to be taken into the tunnels.”

Mallie did not breathe and the natural rose of her cheeks withered. “I’m not sure I understand, sir. Today you’re to be meeting with the board again.”

“I’ve had enough meetings. It is time for me to get to work. It is time for me to do the job that they brought me here to do and that is to tend to the distorted minds that are brought into this facility. Now if you would kindly take me to the tunnels, please.” He issued the ‘please’ as a command and Mallie Lyn understood it as such.

“The Tunnels,” she said softly. She said the phrase as if it were a name and Kinney understood that here it was. “They’re meant only to take us between buildings sir, when the weather is rough, or someone is very…ill…and needs to be taken swiftly to the infirmary, or of course when... There isn’t anyone down there for you. Your patients are housed in a separate facility and I can walk you across the courtyard if you would like to get there sooner.” Kinney studied Mallie’s face. So there were depths to her too, he thought. She appeared innocent and girlish and yet there was an element of steel to her. He wondered if, like a knife, she also had blade.

“You may take me to my office, but I should like to go via The Tunnels.” This time he called it by its name instead of saying the words as a descriptor.

“Very well,” Mallie said and curtsied, but the way she said the words made it very clear to Kinney that it was not at all very well. “But if you don’t mind, sir, it won’t be me taking you down there. It’s not…it’s not a place for someone like me.”

Kinney did not hear Harvey Biggart approach, but rather felt his shadow in the doorway. “If you’ll come with me, Doctor Kinney. I will show you the way.” Harvey stretched out his hand, as large (it seemed to Kinney) as a paddle, and Kinney took the first step out of his room and into the sunlight.

*

Elliott, I love you. I love you. I love you. Don’t look at me! Don’t! Take a step back, Elliott or I swear I’ll…

He did not hear Rose’s words as much as feel them radiating throughout his body as he stepped into The Tunnels. The system was accessed through a rather secret door in the lower levels of Building 50. Harvey explained that there were several such entrances (or exits) throughout the property, mostly camouflaged so that they blended in with the environment. He took a rusted key from his shirt pocket and opened the gate.

Kinney stepped into the darkness. It smelled, as he expected, of damp earth. But there was something else too. Something foul. Something beyond the remnants of refuse that they transported through the tunnels. And with that, Kinney thought, again of Rose. How near the end of her illness she had a similar scent. It was the scent of caged animals. A zoo. “I’ll lead the way,” Harvey said and Kinney nodded, following him.

The tunnel was wide and tall, as if a gigantic earthworm burrowed beneath and left a cavern in its wake. The walls were lined with brick and dripped with condensation. With each step Kinney took into the underbelly of the facility, he felt as if he were taking a step back in time, somehow impossibly taking a step closer to Rose. Love me again, she’d cried that final day, pleading, on her knees. And he had said no. Just one word. Just one word and it was as if he had unlocked the final door of her madness.

What was it about being here that brought her so very close to him? Her illness had begun simply enough. She’d always had a dreamy quality to her, but it was that very distance to her, as if she was seeing into another world just beyond his reach, that he had found so desperately attractive. She’d seemed to belong both of his world and a place where everything was brighter and more beautiful. She used to joke that she could hear music playing wherever she went and he had laughed at her, thinking she was talking with poetry. And then she’d begun to hear voices talking to her. Telling her to do things. He’d thought that by studying dementia praecox he’d easily be able to cure her. He had been wrong. There was the day he’d returned from the infirmary to find her standing at the kitchen sink, her hands bloodied and still holding the clumps of brown hair she’d ripped from her own scalp. “It’s the music, Elliott,” she’d said. “I’ve been trying to get it out.” At that moment he knew that she had slipped away from him and he had shut his heart to her. He thought he’d chosen a beauty to love for all eternity; she had transformed into a beast and had to be hidden away.

In this way, the tunnels reminded Kinney of his late wife. Not that they were twisted and dark and scary, though they were that, but he imagined if his wife now existed in another plane, it was not someplace magical, but rather someplace evil like these tunnels.

Harvey Biggart walked briskly in front of him, at first just a pace or two ahead, but soon stretching the space between them that if it were a rope, it could snap in two. Harvey walked deftly around puddles and cracked bricks, while Kinney’s ankle twisted and his feet seemed ill-prepared for this kind of footing. “Watch your step now, Doctor Kinney,” Harvey called to him, his words echoing. “We’re almost to your place.”

“Biggart, slow down!” Kinney called and Harvey paused, allowing him to catch up. He found that he was gulping for air, a waterless fish. “Could you. Explain about. The Tunnels. A bit please. Of the truth.” Kinney looked to him, expecting the man to give another version of the tour he’d already received, but this time he’d tell the truth. Truth that already Kinney suspected. He’d been given the sanitized tour of the facility. They were keeping things from him. Hiding patients from him. They’d cleaned thoroughly anticipating his arrival. Later, after he’d signed away his life to be employed by them, only then would he see the reality of the place. But Harvey did not give him a tour. He moved his head ever so slightly which Kinney deciphered as a ‘no’. And they resumed their walk through the belly of the asylum, Harvey steadily increasing speed until he was a bent shadow just out of reach.

At what point did Kinney begin to hear his name breathed to him from the walls? Surely there was a moment when there was silence, and then his name, but he did not realize when that moment happened. He was nearly running to keep up with the stooped figure ahead of him, listening to water drip, and the echo of their footsteps through the corridor. He was trying to place where exactly they were under the facility. Surely they’d passed Building 50 and the men’s ward. Perhaps they were inching under the women’s ward now. But at what point did the sound of his own desperate breathing change to the awareness that the walls were calling to him. Daahhhhkkkterrrrrrr Kinnnnnnnneeeeeey it breathed, soft, barely audible, as if the earth herself were sighing. And not just once, but his name became a loop upon itself, one syllable followed by its twin by its twin and its twin until his name became a horrible twisted sound of an echo turned against itself. He stopped in the tunnel, his heart beating so hard it seemed to want to careen from his chest. He tried to call out to Harvey, to make him stop, but he found he had no voice. He reached out to steady himself against the wall and touched not the wet, cold surface of stone, but the thick damp mass of a tangle of hair.

Gothic Blovel: Chapter Two -- Exploring

Chapter Two--Exploring

1952

Traverse City, Michigan

I am seven months along now and there is little I can do. My neighbor Katy Peck says I am expecting twin boys, but I just shake my head at her. It’s a girl. I know it is. I know it without even having to ask how.

Until now, my days have been filled with cleaning the house and cooking meals for us. In the summer months I can fresh preserves and pickles. I do not can cherries, of course, not when Ray works at the Traverse City Canning Factory. The palms of his hands are stained red, though we never mention it. He says he’ll never eat another cherry; that you’d have to kill him to get him to eat one. Sometimes in June when the cherries are ripening, I will cut them into little pieces and bake them into a chocolate cake. Ray eats two or more slices in a sitting.

Lately though I find that doing even the simple things is hard. My daughter is heavy. She pulls on the muscles of my stomach. Sometimes she flips around and jabs me. It’s the strangest thing to feel her flutter around, and something that only she and I share. During these times, I go for a walk to the beach. It’s just two blocks away and it seems to calm her. Or maybe it just calms me. At any rate, she quiets and we listen to the waves lap against the shore. I gently pull my dress up to my knees (if no one is looking) and wade in to the cool water.

It’s on the day that I find a Petoskey stone as big as my hand that I think of my mother. If you ask me, I will tell you my mother is Mallie Lyn Young and my father is Charlie Young and that I am the oldest of three, Irish girls. My sisters are as red headed as my parents. My hair is dark as a secret.

A Petoskey stone has a story to tell. It’s made of hundreds of tiny hexagons side by side, of coral long dead. Somehow, over the years, it transformed. It started as coral and became something else, something millions of years later I can hold in the palm of my hand. I am like a Petoskey stone: I started as someone else’s child and became Mallie and Charlie Young’s.

My mother did not want me to know, but she gave me the box anyway. You should know this, she said, and I could tell her how much it pained her to tell me the truth. She was afraid I would not love her. It only made me love her more.

Inside I found the papers that haunt me to this day, and it’s this I think of while trying to calm my own growing child.

I was born to parents Rose and Elliott Kinney in September, 1933. This would be enough for me to wonder, but it’s the second piece of paper that troubles me, and I have not been able to say a word of it to Ray. How do I tell him what I know? It is hard enough to say that I was adopted. Somehow it’s a shame on me. So how I could I tell him about the yellowed slip of paper? It’s a death certificate for Rose Margaret Kinney dated December 1930; and yet I hold my birth certificate dated September 1933 and Rose Margaret Kinney is listed as my mother. My real mother died three years before I was born. How is this possible? What does it mean?

Of course it isn’t possible…it isn’t. Who then was my mother?

I smooth my thumb over the surface of the stone and toss it as far as I can. I hope the bay swallows it whole and won’t release it again for another thousand years.

*

1932

Northern Michigan Insane Asylum

My Dearest Elliott,

You loved me once. Love me again. That’s all I ask of you.

Just try and do that and I promise, I promise, a hundred

times I promise that I will do better. I will be a better wife to you.

--A letter to Elliott Kinney, signed Rose

He dreamed of walking through a cherry orchard when in bloom. White blossoms laced with pink clung to the trees. Miles and miles all around him of green hills and cloudlike blossoms. The lake stretching out in front of him just a blue strip across the horizon. He could feel her reaching to him and he went to her, slowly, as if she would disappear like smoke if he approached too quickly. She did not. He wrapped his arms around her, pulled him close to his chest. He could feel her. He could honestly feel her. He unbuttoned the top two buttons of her dress, at the nape of her neck, tilted her head forward and lifted her dark hair so that her spine rose before him. Then, slowly, he lowered his lips and then he kissed the skin that lay exposed and vulnerable before him. “Love me again, Elliott,” she said and before he could stop himself, he said “No” nd let go of her hair.

“Good morning, sir, I do apologize for waking you and coming into your chambers and all, sir.” It was a young girl with curly red hair tucked haphazardly into a white bonnet, nineteen or so, and her hand rested against his shoulder, her bare hand touching the fabric of his shirt, burning with heat to his very skin. “I’m Mallie Lyn Peters, sir," she continued in her pronounced Irish accent. "I help with cleaning and such sir.” She covered her mouth with her hands. “For the doctors, sir, not for the others. There’s nurses and specialists who tend to them and I ain’t…”

Kinney lifted himself in bed, temporarily interrupting the girl. Her face blushed crimson. “Continue,” he said.

“I shouldn’t of woke you up sir, but Doctor Grooms is here and he’s ready to get you started and he said I mustn’t hesitate but to wake you up directly and I did too, only first I stopped in the kitchen to grab you a bit of bread and then I got to talking to one of the attendants and then well, I ate that piece of bread sir what with Charlie…I mean Mr. Young talking on and on and so and then I remembered that I needed to…”

Kinney yawned, none too discreetly. “Thank you, Mallie. If you could…”

“You want something to eat? I could go back to the kitchen.”

“I’d like to get dressed,” he said pointedly. The pink flush to her skin soon deepened to a positive burn.

“Course sir, excuse me sir. I’ll wait outside and then show you the way. It’s awful easy to get lost in here. Why I’ve heard about a woman once who…”

“Thank you, Mallie. That will be all.”

Mallie swallowed hard, curtsied, and then retreated out of his room.

Kinney stepped out of his bed gingerly, as if expecting there to be pain when he walked, the way, he was sure, a mermaid new to legs would expect and anticipate pain. There was none. He walked to the window, drew open the curtains and for the first time he could see the ground of the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum before him. It was beautiful. Simply beautiful. Like a dream itself. He wondered, briefly, what price they paid to keep up such beauty. In Doctor Kinney’s experience beauty was never without its opposite for long.

*

Mallie led Dr. Kinney through a vast network of winding corridors until he arrived, breathless, into a great open room with twenty or so wooden tables.  “We’re in one of the dining rooms, sir,” Mallie said.

Kinney looked around. Each table was set for four or more. There were tall, thin windows that reached from floor to ceiling. Sun didn’t so much as pour through the windows but somehow managed to illuminate the space from within. The floor was tiled and scrubbed clean. The effect was of an efficient hospital-like cafeteria, but it still managed to be somewhat homey. “Is there anything else I can get for you, Dr. Kinney?” Mallie asked, her Irish accent lilting. “If you wouldn’t mind I’d like to be on my way and back to my other duties before Doctor Grooms gets here. He doesn’t like to deal so much with the lesser support staff and I’d just as well like to get about my day, if you don’t mind.”

He studied her face for a moment. He’d begun his career as a medical doctor but had switched to psychiatry when his wife fell ill. He had trained himself to be sensitive to what the body said as well as how a person spoke. So much meaning clung not to what was said but to how it was voiced and sometimes, more importantly, the words held back. Mallie’s cheeks were flushed, which might have been a natural state for her. There was, however, something in the tautness of her smile and her eyes did not shine with humor but were, perhaps, dulled from a lack of it. This was a girl who, for whatever reason, was afraid.

“Certainly, Mallie. You are excused.”

She curtsied and said with relief, “Thank you, sir, kindly. If you need anything else, sir, do not hesitate to call for me. You may not always see me about, but I am sir, or someone is who knows where to find me. You have only to call my name.”

And then with a swishing of he skirts, she was gone.

Kinney walked to the window. The curtains were already tied back to allow for the sunlight and so all he had to do was to simply look outside. Funny, he thought, one would never guess that this was the home of the mentally deranged. One would guess, looking at the couples strolling arm in arm that this was some place of respite or a grand park, if it weren’t for the fact that many of the people walking were clothed in striped pajamas, their partners clothed in the white of the medical profession. And the couples, of course, were all of the same gender. There was no mixing of the sexes at the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum. Kinney knew from his research that men and women were housed in entirely separate complexes. There were also several cottages on the premises where doctors could reside if they chose. And except for the communal walking areas, the place was effectively segregated.

He wondered if the criminally insane were as effectively segregated. Surely there must be some place that they resided. It was, after all, for their care the he had been summoned, not for the care of simple depressives and drug addicts. No. Dr. Kinney’s specialty was for psychoses of a higher sort, and which he had dedicated his life and his scientific method into curing by any means possible.

“Good morning to you, Doctor Kinney,” said a deep, melodic voice. “Welcome to your new life.” The man, surely Dr. Grooms, spread his arms open wide and smiled. Kinney noted the smile, here too, did not reach his eyes.

*

In life, as things happen, they happen in a linear fashion. One thing follows the next. One foot goes in front of the other and then is followed again. And so the tour of the facilities and grounds did occur in a linear way. Kinney followed Dr. Grooms and listened to him and nodded, and noticed the way their shoes echoed on the spotless floors, and how sunlight was fierce in its intensity. He nodded to inmates and did his best not to immediately notice they were damaged. He saw the men’s wing and the women’s. The dining hall. The medical ward. He was brought to an office and given a coat to wear and shown how to fill out forms. Everything was precise and orderly.

Why then, when at dinner, did he remember the day not as in one moment after the next, or one thing happening after another, but as an impression? As a whole? It was as if the day and all the moments in between had melded together and formed some kind of painting in his mind. There were the cows the patients milked. And there were the rows of beds they slept in. And there was the sunlight. The unforgiving sunlight and then…there were the shadows and the eyes, and the pale skin and taut faces looking at him, hiding from him. And there was the laughter and the screams in the distance, although he only saw patients who walked and smiled happily. And at dinner time as he sat with the board and tried to cut his steak, it was not the rooms or the grounds or even the patients of the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum that he thought of at all. No. He thought of the tunnels that connected everything and inched beneath the surface.

“No need to tour that area, Dr. Kinney,” Dr. Grooms had said with a hint of ice in his voice. “That is for the unseemly things, as we like to say. The transportation of refuse and occasionally of those patients who finally surrender their lives to an illness we cannot cure.”

“But where are the others?” Kinney asked. “Where are the ones I was brought her to treat? Surely they are not strolling the grounds, whistling or milking cows of all things.”

“It is as I said,” Dr. Grooms said evenly. “The tunnels are for refuse. You will see it in good time, but today, today let us focus on all the pleasantries our facility offers.”

Kinney chewed his beef and thought how he too was guilty of hiding something that had once been beautiful and had become so unseemly.

COMING NEXT WEEK: Dr. Kinney in The Tunnels and a strange vision.

BLOVEL--CH 1 Cont'd

Chapter One Contiued

Dr. Kinney Arrives--Building 50

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected upon his arrival. Perhaps to enter the great facility alone and in solitude. He imagined he would call out for assistance, hear his words echo along the corridors. At after 9PM in the evening on a Tuesday he certainly did not expect to be greeted by two rows of nurses and orderlies, dressed in bright white, men in pants and collared shirts, the women in white dresses with white aprons and white hats. He did not expect to walk through the aisle they made for him and certainly had not anticipated the applause. Two men stood at the end of the line, one dressed in a dark suit, the other in dark working clothes. He expected the gentleman would be one of the board members who had hired him to assist Doctor Christopher Grooms, and Kinney was not disappointed. This, at least, fit with his expectations.

The thin gentleman with spectacles reached out to grab his hand and the applause abruptly quieted. “Doctor Kinney, a pleasure! A pleasure! Do come in.” His handshake was warm, firm, and sustained. “I am Mr. Harrison, Edward Harrison, and this is Mr. Biggart.” Mr. Harrison dropped his hand and it was promptly captured in the meaty embrace of Mr. Biggart.

“Name’s Harvey,” Mr. Biggart said. His palm was cool and moist and once the handshake was over, Kinney discreetly wiped his palm against the fabric of his coat. “I’m in charge of the facility management.”

“And I’m the president of the board,” added Mr. Harrison. “I do apologize that the rest of the board is not here to meet you but that will change in due time. In due time. Come along now. I’ll have someone carry your bags to your room.” He motioned and the precise white lines of nurses and orderlies dispersed, as silently as snow falling.  “We have you stationed in Building Fifty for the time being and then will move you to one of the cottages on our site. Of course, should you choose, you may want to purchase a home near the waters. Traverse City is beautiful. That is, of course, if you stay.” Mr. Harrison looked at Kinney as if expecting a response.

“Ah,” he said.

“Very good then, very good. To your room and then we shall reconvene for dinner and a tour if that is all right with you.”

Kinney hesitated to pull his pocket watch out. The weight of his travelling from Detroit played heavily on him. Mr. Harrison adjusted his spectacles and then winked. “Of course, perhaps you prefer a little solitude tonight. I will show you to your room and we can reconvene for breakfast and a tour. At that point, I can turn you over to Doctor Grooms and the support team. Will that be too your liking?”

Kinney offered a smile thinned by fatigue but heavy with gratitude.

“To your room then!”

Kinney followed Edward Harrison up the ornate staircase and down three or more corridors. “You’ll learn all this in time,” Mr. Harrison said over his shoulder as he quickly navigated the labyrinth. “Ah. And here we are.” He stopped in front of a door labeled DR. E. KINNEY, withdrew a skeleton key and opened the door. The room was expansive, with an ornate bed and his bags already waiting with him, dripping slightly with rain.

“How on earth…” Kinney started.

“Magic,” Mr. Harrison said soberly. “In other words, Harvey Biggart. He’s a master at coming and going as is most of the support staff. They move around like whispers. It’s really quite astounding. All so that we do not disturb the graceful minds of our patients. And on that note, I will leave you to your solitude.” He adjusted his spectacles one more time, turned and was gone.

And with that, Doctor Elliott Kinney entered his room and was alone. Of course, he had been entirely alone for two years now, and though he appreciated the quiet he found no comfort that night in his solitude—not when the presence of Rose was almost so palpable that he could smell the hint of her perfume lingering in the air.

Kinney sat on the bed. He tried not to breathe too deeply. When sleep finally took him, it did not soothe him. Even though this was a new place, a new start, it seemed his wife had followed him again, even into the deepest of shadows; and she was with him still.

Gothic Blovel -- Ch 1--The Doctor Arrives

Northern Michigan Insane Asylum features sprawling green hills and landscaping as relaxing as it is beautiful. Your loved one will be as well tended as our gardens. The asylum follows the Kirkbride Plan in which patients are treated with kindness, comfort and pleasure. Indeed, restraints are considered barbaric. A chaotic mind must have peace and beauty in which to flourish, and a place of safety to do work. Patients at the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum will be comforted by music, gardening, and the great gentle beauty of Nature herself.

--Promotional Material for The Northern Michigan Insane Asylum, 1915

The Board of Directors at the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum request additional funding to support not only its current residents, but also to expand the program. While we follow the Kirkbride Plan of treating all patients with kindness, comfort and pleasure, there are certain minds that are so badly fractured they need additional care. The Northern Michigan Insane Asylum features a system of tunnels connecting the more than 4 acres of facilities. This allows for the transfer of unsightly goods such as refuse, as well as maintenance issues to the facility. Additionally, there is ample space located in the basement of the facility for those members of our society who are too disturbed to participate in the outside world. They receive kindness, understanding and the best scientific practices possible. Please consider our request for additional support…

--Grant request for funding to the State of Michigan, 1920

CHAPTER ONE

THE DOCTOR ARRIVES

1932

Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane

“Course it’s raining, now,” Bill Pepperidge said, nodding to the windshield as the wiper dragged across it. Little good the wiper did in the rain, and Dr. Elliott Kinney hoped the old grounds man knew the way without benefit of being able to actually see through the downpour. The rain came in heavy sheets, bowing maple trees forward. He tried to get a sense of the grounds and the much-heralded flower and vegetable gardens, but everything was rain and dark and shadows. He felt the truck twist and turn on the road and silently assured himself that he would not let his stomach react.

“Sorry about that, Doctor,” Bill said after the truck splashed through a large pothole. Kinney tried to calm his mind. If he didn’t fall through one of the rust holes in the floor, surely the bumping of the Model A pickup would rattle his brain, perhaps so much they he would have to be admitted as a patient instead of its newest doctor. Bill continued, “Now I know you can’t see it now so you’ll have to take my word for it, but when the sun is shining and it’s coming through those maples, you’d swear the trees were on fire or something. In a good way, of course. Like a beautiful kind of…” He paused here and tugged on the brim of his hat. “Magic,” he said with a firm nod, as if he’d decided that were just the word.

He made a sharp turn, the muscles in his thin arms flexing.

The truck shifted and bounced and Dr. Elliott Kinney leaned against the window certain he was going to fall out.  If he had been a praying man, he would have whispered one then. He did not whisper.

“Beauty is important here, you know,” the grounds man continued.

Dr. Kinney nodded though he doubted the old man could see him, and he was not surprised when the old man continued talking. “Course you probably know of Kirkbride’s ideas that insane people need beauty and music and all that sort. You wouldn’t believe how much time I spend pruning bushes and planting blubs. Not complaining of course. Glad to have a job, especially with things they way they are. Beauty though, I don’t know. You one of them kind of doctors? You believe that they can be healed?”

“It’s not a matter of belief,” Kinney said.

“Exactly! I say toss ‘em in the place and lock the doors. Course they let them walk the grounds and pick flowers and such and I guess they do all right. That’s mostly for show though. The real crazy ones are kept elsewheres.” With that, Bill Pepperidge slammed the truck into park. “We’re here,” he said with a grin. “Building Fifty.” He nodded at the expansive building they were parked in front of which had, it seemed, been born from the rain and shadows and would surely fade when morning came. “Hope you’re ready for this.”

Dr. Elliott Kinney nodded once, opened the truck door and then braced himself for the onslaught. There was a hint of ice in the drops and the rain was fierce and cold and cut at his skin and made him feel, briefly, as if somehow he were still alive.

He ran to the doors and though he could hear the grounds man calling after him, the meaning of the words was lost in the rain.

Gothic Blovel: Prologue

PROLOGUE

1952

630 2nd Street

Traverse City, Michigan

Sometimes when Ray is busy working on the car, or pushing the mower across the long blades of grass in our front lawn, I step silently into the bathroom and close the door. I turn on the shower and I sit on the edge of the bath and I cry. It is not only the changes that are happening in me because of the baby, or that I’m hysterical or something. It’s because I have a sense of the way things should be and it’s a kind of ache because my life is not the way I imagined. I imagined my parents coming over with casseroles and Jello molds, and Mother would crochet blankets and booties for the baby, and Dad would try to fix things with Ray only he’d fumble things up, and I would watch from the kitchen, and run my hands along the slope of my abdomen, and sometimes I would laugh at our simple happiness.

Our weekends, though, are much quieter. We live in a two-bedroom house in Traverse City, just blocks away from the bay. It’s a small house, brown, part of a city project of housing for veterans. The houses are close together, so close I can hear the neighbors fighting, and I can hear their gentle moans as they make up. I can also hear the water calling at night, and the wind sometimes smells of rain. Days like this, when it is dark and cloudy, when there is a stillness in the air of something about to happen, that is the time I sneak quietly away.

I cry because crying helps. And then later, I cry some more. I do not want to hold the tears because I do not want them to change my baby. Surely what a mother thinks and feels affects her child? My daughter is kicking now and I imagine that she is happy. I intend to keep her that way for as long as possible.

*

“Do you think a person is fully formed at birth?” I asked Ray one night over dinner.

“Of course he’s formed. Otherwise it’d be like a monster or something.” He scooped mashed potatoes into his mouth. I tried not to think of monster children, of babies misshapen.

“No, I mean the personality. Are you born who you are or do you become who you are? I mean, do your parents matter in the grand scheme of things?”

He chewed awhile, dipped the meatloaf in ketchup, took a chug of milk. “How do I know, Beth? I turned out okay. You turned out okay. Our kid will turn out okay. That’s all that matters.”

I nodded and tried to eat a little. What I did not voice was, “What, exactly, is okay?” There is the surface of things and then there is the truth beneath the surface. There is the city that is beautiful and ornate, and underneath are the tunnels and machines that make it operate.

Of course, all of this is just me, thinking of my mother. And my father of course. Am I who I am because of them, or in spite of them?

It’s my mother I think about the most. Still, all these years later, I haven’t been able to piece together who she was. She was my mother and a stranger. She was beautiful and a monster. She was, I guess, who my father created her to be. So maybe it isn’t our parents who shape us. It’s our spouses.

This, I guess, is why I sit in the bathroom sometimes and let the water run. It’s so that I can cry without being afraid.

Summer blovel is about to begin!

Thanks to everyone who voted on what I should write for my Summer Blovel. It's the 1930's moody gothic suspense, and I've just started writing it. I'm going to post a few pages starting today. You may decide to hold off reading for a bit until there's more, or maybe you want to try it bit by bit. I'm not sure where the piece is going, but I have a couple of guesses. Try to give me a few posts to get it going.

I'll ask for more input later on. You can help me title it, name characters, decide what happens next. Like I said, it'll be like Choose Your Own Adventure...only the adult version.

And, yeah, there's a good chance it'll suck. But I'm going to give it a decent try, and already the characters are starting to form. This week, you'll find the Prologue and then meet Dr. Kinney, a new doctor at the Norethern Michigan Insane Asylum (its original name before becoming the Traverse City State Mental Hospital). Hope you like what's coming. I hope I do too.

Best,

Tanya

Vote 1986 Romantic Comedy--Or 1932 Gothic Suspense

Wow. I didn’t realize that so many of you would actually give me suggestions on what to write for a blovel. I feel very puffed up right now. Not in a way a hot dog puffs up on the grille, because that’s gross…but how a peacock puffs out its chest and is all “Look at my feathers”. Yeah. Like that.

So reading through the suggestions, I’ve come up with two different pitches. I wish I were smart enough to incorporate every single suggestion, but I’m just not. You get two choices. Cast your vote and I’ll start writing…hopefully post something this week. I’ll write a page a day and post a couple of times a week. This is the plan anyway. Oh, and both stories are set in Michigan. I’ve got to Represent, you know. It’s sort of a big deal for me that all my books be set in Michigan.

#1 1986—Backstage Romantic Comedy

Imagine a group of awkward punks hanging out in Monroe Mall by the waterfalls. They’re depressed. Desperate. And just aching to have an artistic outlet. One girl, 21, joins a local theater company. She’s strictly backstage, working on lights and sets. She feels invisible. And when she’s dressed in black and hiding in the shadows, she really is invisible…which is just great, because she can watch the love of her life onstage. He’s a local star, destined for Broadway, and he’s Not Gay. When the leading actress gets mono, our heroine is the only one obsessed enough to have learned all the lines. She’ll have to trade in her Sex Pistols shirt and comb out her dreadlocks and become a leading lady. But it’s not going to be easy. Or smooth. And maybe being a star and onstage isn’t quite what she imagined. Funny. Quirky. Beach read.

#2 Historical Gothic—Suspense/Mystery

This one is set in Traverse City in 1932 (or late 1800's), but it’s an imagined Traverse City. There may be elements of the supernatural. The story begins in the State Mental Hospital where a new doctor on his rounds sees a woman in the tunnels cleaning. There’s something about her. Something familiar. He examines her and after closer inspection is startled to see that she looks just like his dear wife, who died two years earlier. The doctor tries to rescue the patient by bringing him to his home: a gothic, Victorian era mansion. But he has ulterior motives. He’s so desperately in love with the spitting image of his wife that he tries to brainwash the woman into believing she IS his dead wife. And eventually, she is just confused enough to believe him, even confused enough to hear her ghost child calling out to her. Literary-ish. Moody. A little scary.

Cast your vote!

Tell others to cast theirs.

You can tweet me, FB me, or leave me a comment here. Hope you like the ideas, and thanks for playing along.

I'm Going to Write a Blovel and Need Your Help

You know, I’ve been searching for blog topics. I could keep blogging about my life, but I’m a little tired of me and I need a break. So I posted on FaceBook that I was thinking of what to write and Dana H. gave me a great idea.

Two years ago, I posted “Blunder Woman” as a blovel. A blog novel, if you will. I wrote tiny snippets and posted them online…and now that blovel is a honest to god book—or will be on July 11^th. And since it’s summer and I don’t want to blog about myself entirely, I thought, why don’t I blovel again?

Only this time, I’d like a little help from you.

Here’s my idea. I want to create a story written with readers in mind. I don’t know if I can do it, but I’d like to try. I’ll ask questions, you give me input, and I’ll write. Whatever it ends up being, it will probably be funny, or at least have funny elements to it. There will be quirky characters, and maybe a saucy scene every now and then.

So here’s my first question:

What kind of serial book would keep you coming back?

Do you want another romantic comedy, suspense, sci-fi? Do you want a murder mystery? Vampires? Zombies? Quirky every day women? Divorced? Singles? Do you want to read the further misadventures of Blunder Woman, or would you like to meet some new characters? Just, you know, no Westerns. By god, no westerns.

Tell me what you want. The first step is the genre, or type of blovel. Then I’ll come up with some basic ideas and let you choose.

So. Let’s get started. Tell me what you want to read, and I’ll write it.

And tell your friends. The more input, the more possibilities.

Yeah?