Free The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block

oak, apply baby blue paint over Victorian paisley paper. At the end of the corridor, in a room largely unchanged, sits the new psychiatrist in chief, the purveyor of all this modernization, Dr. Albert Canon.
    A file is on Canon’s desk. An old patient, Stanley Fuller, for whom Canon’s subordinate, the meek Dr. Higgins, has suggested a course of shock therapy. Canon, as usual, will recommend other treatments.
    Canon rehearses the speech that he will later enjoy making with a belabored sigh to Dr. Higgins.
I know they seem beyond language sometimes
, Canon will say of Mayflower’s catatonics.
But good old-fashioned words can be miraculous things
.
    Canon, overly caffeinated to the far side of focus, lays the file upon the green cloth ledger and turns to his window to watch Robert Lowell stroll across the Depression, accompanied by one of the new orderlies he has recruited from Boston University. They look so similar, all these Irish boys with their crew haircuts, that even Canon sometimes has trouble differentiating them.
    For the last three decades, Albert Canon has made a close study of the history of success and failure in psychiatric institutions,research that culminated in his publication of the field’s essential text,
The Mental Asylum
. Canon has drawn many conclusions from his data, but none so important as the necessity of uniformity, the absolute imperative that the orderlies, nurses, doctors, and administration act as one. To this end, Canon has gathered a mostly new staff, hired by himself and thus loyal to him. Mostly, he has recruited and continues to train freshly graduated alumni from B.U., boys in need of money, eager to please, seduced by the dark allure of a job in a mental hospital, untainted by the independence of opinion that Canon has observed, time and again, older orderlies and nurses often exhibit.
    Following the horrific suicide of the war hero James Marshall, both the board of directors and Canon’s predecessor—that docile dinosaur Wallace—decided that finally it was time for change, a systemic and dramatic modernization, an assurance that the Mayflower Home would retain its vaunted, preeminent repute. Canon was phoned at his office at Harvard on a Monday; by the following Friday, he had presented the majority of Mayflower’s staff with appreciative letters, which also communicated the end of their employment. A great blow, he knows, to all those families, and yet, for the sake of his patients, it would be only the first of many exorcisms, revisions, demolitions, and clearings.
    Out the window, Robert Lowell, struggling against the autumnal tumult, seems to take the wind as a personal affront, a call to arms. He battles against the wind, feet and arms swinging.
    Resentment of more powerful forces
, Canon will later write in Lowell’s file,
the denied love of a parent?
    Like an MTA train making its scheduled stops, every six minutes, Canon’s thoughts arrive, again, to memories of last night’s sex. It seems to Canon that his particularly exemplary performancecan be credited to the recent surge of wellness that has come with this reformation. It comes back to him in aspects: an insertion, the way her breasts bulged when leaning back. The desk! Come to think of it, his tailbone has felt tender all day. Canon smiles. The buttoned leather chair groans beneath him.
    Canon has been hired to revitalize the nation’s premier mental hospital. It is the greatest psychiatric hospital in the country, maybe in the world, and now he is its leader. He will oversee the mental health of great but troubled minds, his mind guiding theirs, a tremendous honor bestowed upon him through the transitive property, like defeating in arm wrestling someone who has defeated a great many others. The sun shifts; the papers before him are luminous. The intercom buzzes, reminds him of his eleven o’clock with the new class of orderlies. Canon stands, straightens himself in the mirror, exhales, and turns to the