Seclusion
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
It was dark in the big dormitory, except for a beam of light that slid along the ceiling. Sometimes this light would pause, round and steady; other times it would flatten into a dim oval or, expanding, seem to lose its shape. It had many shapes and meanings, though, for the men who lay, opened-eyed, in the beds beneath it. In a vision one man reached for it and palmed and squeezed it into a fiery snowball that always melted and poured on his head. Another saw a woman’s breast, full and motherly but always beyond his reach, while an epic hunger threw him, wailing and snapping, at the light. For another the ridges in the plaster became green mountains and shady valleys through which he ran, with bare feet caressed by the bubbles of a friendly stream. For some, however, the light had no meaning at all. Awake or asleep, they continued to dream. They spoke in the darkness, laughed and cursed; were berated by voices they did not hear, and answered voices heard by nobody else. They annoyed, frightened, or enraged others on the ward, who awoke, cold or sweating, in their grimy beds; who stared or scowled, unseeing, at the next bed, furious at the raw sounds and voicings, repulsed by the weighted stench. One man, though, lay in a wrinkled bed and watched the light calmly. He was Gridley Sloane. He seemed pulseless to himself, prizing this fleeting calmness and thus afraid to think about it. It was like trying to see the cobwebs at the edge of your vision, he thought, the wisps of crystal that slip to the side and out of view when you try to examine them more directly. And so this calmness too would go. Still he was thankful for its coming – just thankful – even now, with the jabbering and cursing around him in the darkness. If only this calmness would last. . . But – take it while it’s here, he told himself. . . If only it had come in the past. . . But it had come and many times in the past, he reminded himself, and never to stay. It came always afterwards. . . He saw another danger in this thought and turned on his side, as though away from an unwanted touch, feeling the bed sag and creak with his 260 pounds. Now it was easier to see the beam and he wondered which attendant was holding the flashlight. Many attendants, he had learned, aimed the light in your face, and there was meanness or stupidity and maybe fear too in the way their lights would dart around the dorm from bed to bed, leaping at the sound of a sleepy movement or fixing relentlessly on anyone out of bed and on his way to the latrine. Still he didn’t blame them for their fear; in this place you could understand it. He remembered when his nightmares had come only in his sleep – before they had kicked their way out of the stable (he grinned). He remembered the fear, the flight through a world as familiar as the objects in his own home and yet panting and ferocious with a strange form and rhythm, a monstrous pattern that he saw as his own but could escape only by becoming it more completely. And so he had raged through his sleep, terrified and destructive; and in the daytime he was thankful – not to anything or Anyone – just thankful for his escape.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Confined to a mental hospital, Professor Sloane helps Wakeman, a young attendant, save a boy who hanged himself in a seclusion room. Sloane then tells Wakeman of his concern that his daughter, Valery, a student nurse, will take her psychiatric training where he’s a patient. To reassure him, Wakeman meets with Valery. She has tried to visit her beloved father - blocked by Dr. Beaumont, who’s chosen Sloane for a lobotomy, opposed by Dr. Wainwright, the clinical director and Dr. Clement, the superintendent, who favor less intrusive and irrevocable therapies. Clement has suffered a paralyzing stroke. He’s treated in a service for personnel ruled by Beaumont, who fails to note that his superintendent can blink at will, which Wakeman discovers and enables Clement to communicate. Wakeman repeats the alphabet, so Clement can blink on the letters forming words that tell Wainwright to fire Beaumont. But Wainwright does not heed the order. He’s addicted to Demoral for his war-wounded leg for which he’s treated by his former classmate, Beaumont. Frustrated, Clement dies of another stroke. Now there’s nobody in power to save Sloane from the brain surgery he fears will impair his thinking and caring for others.
About the Author
During World War II, Morris Breakstone served with the First Special Service Force, an elite American-Canadian brigade, the forerunner of U.S. Special Forces, known as the Green Berets. His military background serves, he believes, to keep within plausible bounds, the surprising twists and reversals of Company Punishment, his previous novel of World War II. Under the GI Bill he attended the City College of New York, majoring in psychology and earning a Master’s degree. He worked as an intern, an attendant, and a psychologist in mental hospitals like the one depicted in his novel, Seclusion. He had essays accepted for publication in Mental Health, Michigan College Personnel Association Journal, and Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry. His research exposed patient abuse and racism against African American patients at a mental hospital. Witnessed by newspapers and radio reporters at the Adrian YMCA, he performed 709 pushups in thirty-four minutes at the age of seventy – an achievement cited in Ripley’s Believe It or Not and for which he got a standing ovation at the Michigan Senate. He has a son and daughter in Ann Arbor. Morris Breakstone lives in Adrian, Michigan with his wife, Angela, a special education teacher. He relies very much on her help. So do their two cats.