Free The Zen Gene by Laurie Mains Page A

ashamed of me when I got sick. After I was released I left Ontario living rough on the coast; it was not until years later that I heard he placed the obituary.” The blue of McLean’s eyes deepened when he said this and hen felt bad about his joke until he realized that was exactly what McLean had intended.
    “Where did you learn to work that emotional capital Jonas in the nut house or bullshitting the dumpster cops?” he said. Jonas shrugged and smiled winningly and said “It worked well on the young nurses, at least for a while, the street cops not so much.”
    “Are you medication compliant?” he said.
    He asked the question not unkindly he simply needed to know who he was talking to. He had some practical experience with the illness. His uncle Dave on his dad’s side was schizophrenic and even as a little kid he knew when Uncle Dave was off his meds the difference in his personality was like night and day. The medication helped to smooth him out but he was never free of the illness until one cold day in January when his uncle rose early, ate a hearty breakfast with his mom, then went down to the basement and put his father’s shotgun in his mouth.
    “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” Jonas said.
    He saw McLean glance at Western when he spoke and he realized their working relationship was probably an uneasy one. Western did not strike him as being tolerant of difference. The Colonel went to the door and opened it.
    ”I’ll leave you to get reacquainted. There will be a team meeting after lunch in my office I’ll see you there Dr. Mann. Jonas, I want you to come to my office for a few minutes before you leave for the day,” he said.
    After the Colonel was gone he said, “What kind of bullshit did you feed them to get them to drag me out here?”
    “I had nothing to do with it. They informed me you were coming. Believe me I had nothing to do with it. I suppose they think you’ve cracked the aggression placement problem. I told them they were out to lunch and you would sooner set yourself on fire than work for them but no one listens to me,” McLean said.
    “Are all military types’ like Western or is he an outlier? This is an interesting problem but he seems way more freaked out than I would expect.” Mann said.
    “Yes military types are an intense bunch but I suspect he is a little more desperate than most,” said McLean as he strolled over to the lab window and gazed out at the same dry docked ships but from a different direction. “Not that I blame him, it must be a daunting prospect to have an army unable to fight, anyway I’m happy to see you again Lee I never had a chance to thank you for having me committed. You saved my life. I know I was out of my mind at U of T and you helped me more than my own family. I would not be alive today if it weren’t for you. Thank you.”
    He joined him at the window and gazed at the navy ships and remembered the good times they had in the lab together before Jonas became ill. He could not imagine what horrible demeaning things he endured since he last saw him. It must have been devastating to go from bright young graduate student with a promising career ahead of him to living on the street as an untreated schizophrenic and the occasional unwilling guest of the judicial/mental health system.
    When they worked together at U of T he never thought of McLean as being particularly unstable until one morning when he came to work and he found him wandering the corridors confused, half dressed, and mostly insensible. At first he thought he was on an epic drunk but he soon figured out he was in a dissociative state. He managed to get him into the university van and drive him to the Emergency room at Toronto General Hospital. When he spoke with McLean’s admitting Doctor in the Emergency room the Doctor said he thought it was probably schizophrenia which, he told him, often strikes people in their early twenties.
    He recalled that McLean was particularly good at