Free The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block Page A

corridor. Dr. Albert Canon, newly ordained chief of Mayflower, walks the halls of his mansion. Birnam Wood has come to high Dunsinane Hill. Things are different now.

2
    Two hundred yards away in Ingersoll House my grandfather lies propped up in his bed. The light angles through the caged windows to illuminate the journal in which he wants to write. But Frederick still feels the breakfast’s tranquilizer in his hand, as if the tranquilizer has oppositely magnetized pen from paper. He pulls at what remains of his hairline. Hour by hour, momentby moment, he feels himself breaking the promise he perpetually makes to himself: to transform his incarceration into a creative exercise, to take each meaninglessly passing moment and find the art within it.
    The shame we have brought we have brought. The injury we have caused, we have caused
, Lowell once told him.
Why not try to turn that history to art? Why not say what happened?
    At this moment, the bedside clock ticks with its grumpy persistence, the fluorescent tubes above buzz, his left foot itches between the toes, a squirrel makes some devious sounds on the opposite side of the wall. How to find a story in this, the moments, which just continue to pass? How to make all of these meaningless facts add up to something meaningful?
    Frederick stretches his six feet, six inches, shifts on the bed, his pajamas sticking to him with their unpleasant dampness, a result of how warm they now insist upon keeping it at night. At the far corner of the room, just beyond the foot of the second bed—empty, until Canon—his new roommate experiences none of Frederick’s writerly frustration. As he sits curled over his steel-legged desk, Professor Schultz’s concentration is unremitting, his output ceaseless. Whereas the sound of a pigeon cooing at the windowsill can throw Frederick into an entirely other mode of consideration, Schultz, apparently, does not mind any distraction. He responds to Frederick’s occasional questions, or the inquiries and demands of the staff, and then returns, immediately, to writing. Even the change in location, from his ornate room in the Harvard Club to his present Spartan dwelling, seems to impose no discernible stress upon Schultz, no distraction to his attention.
    When Dr. Higgins informed the Ingersoll men that most would now be forced to have roommates, Frederick had risen ina fit of indignation, had almost talked the other men into something close to mutiny. But when Schultz first came to the door, escorted by two of the new orderlies, Frederick’s animosity instantly dissolved in the professor’s affability.
    Shlomi Schultz
, he said, extending a hand.
Might I say what a marvelous skull you have
.
    Frederick laughed then, and so did Schultz.
    You should see Jones, ’fifty-six, on the correlation of the frontal region with intelligence
, Schultz continued, his Yiddish childhood giving each syllable a phlegmy consistency.
That slight, might I say, bulge, not to mention the wide plane of your brow, yes? I can see you are a man who understands things. It will be a pleasure to share this office
.
    Frederick knew better, from his months in Mayflower, than to correct the professor
(office?)
. Instead, Frederick shook his new roommate’s hand and left the room for Schultz to make himself comfortable.
    Frederick couldn’t help but feel a bit flattered that the doctors had decided Professor Schultz and he would be fitting roommates, these two men of fierce intelligence. For the first few days, Frederick had devised and rehearsed clever observations, pithy witticisms about the ineptitude of the staff, the logical fallacies of the new protocols, with which he later tried to charm Schultz.
    But Schultz has hardly said a word to Frederick. He has responded to simple questions of whether he is hungry (always in the negative), and he has congenially replied to Frederick’s rehearsed insights by meeting his eyes, nodding amenably, and saying,
Quite right, yes, yes
.