Ondine's Curse

Steven Manners

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781554885862
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura general

Set in contemporary Montreal, Ondine's Curse follows the attempts of Robert Strasser, a television documentary producer, to film the life of Dr. Werther Acheson, the German director of a controversial psychiatric institute. In the course of his journey through Acheson's murky past, Strasser meets Ondine, one of the institute's patients, and soon finds himself increasingly fascinated by the haunted young woman. It is Ondine who is at the heart of this powerful probe of the human psyche. A historian, she is trying to complete her own research into the death of Shawnadithit, a Beothuk Indian woman who was the last survivor of a Newfoundland tribe that was exterminated by settlers in the 1820s. But Ondine's ability to cope in the modern world is crippled by a repressed memory of violence as a witness to the Montreal Massacre in 1989 when fourteen women were slain in Canada's most shocking mass murder. Moody and macabre, Steven Manners's expressionist novel is a literary tour de force that lurches through the dementia of the twentieth century, seeking meaning behind the massacres and mayhem.

III

The shifting of memory patterns is basic to psychotherapy.

—Dr. Helen Noel

…the psychic life in some mental diseases...is constricted to a very small circle of thoughts, which master all others, recurring again and again in the sick brain...

—Dr. Egaz Moniz

ONE

As Mary P. took her nightly pill, she felt a heat, an oceanic surge, as if all of her desires were issuing from her body and warming the room, melting the walls of resistance and reserve, thawing the chilled heart.

Then the doctor would arrive. He would come to her bedside and inquire about her health, her mood, touch her forehead, feel her pulse. “Have you taken your medication this evening, Mary?”

Mary P. would nod. “Yes.”

Perhaps there would be a gift, a piece of fruit, a gramophone on which he would play sad recordings, mostly operas, usually in German. Then he would perch on the edge of her bed and take her hand and together they would listen to the music. Mary was alone for much of the day, and she began to look forward to these nightly visits. On a few occasions Dr. Acheson would try to explain the opera’s story, but she scarcely listened. Even if she did not understand the words, she heard the voices crying, she knew the passion in their hearts.

In the hours they spent together it was perhaps unusual for the doctor to hold her hand, but Mary felt little urge to resist. In the papery dryness of his touch there was something written that she understood. Her sense of empathy was acute; the medication he administered helped her with that.

He questioned her about the drug he had prescribed, if it eased her fatigue, helped her feel less anxious? Yes, and more. She explained the warmth, how even in the faces of strangers she saw nothing to fear. She sensed great strength. She had no appetite. She felt as if she were in love. She wanted to hold the body of the world and press it to her breast. “It’s absurd, I know,” she said. “But don’t say anything, Doctor. Don’t spoil it.”

He kissed her hand then; she felt the light stubble of his lip. “What do you desire? If there’s anything...”

“Home. I want to be with my husband.”

There can be no edifice on a foundation of sand, nothing trusted to the rotten ghosts of memory, the shift of desire. Dr. Acheson was forced to admit that his little experiment was a failure. The environment he created for Mary P. was not enough; it was a vacation spot, a honeymoon. Acheson lifted the needle and slipped the 78 of Wagner into the sleeve. “Just a little while longer, Mary,” he said, “but first you will need rest.”

In his flight from Germany the bar girl Lola-Lola aka Werther Acheson was rumoured to have been accompanied by Adam aka X.

“Was Ondine ever given this drug?” Strasser asks.

“I wish I could tell you,” Kotzwara says, some equivocation there. “But it was just a starting point. There are other compounds, much more powerful.” He shrugs. “You hear so many things. Come, walk with me. I only have a few minutes. We’re about to run an experiment with one of our test subjects.”

“Mind if I watch?”

“Bring your friend,” Kotzwara says, nodding to the camera, “but I don’t know if there’s anything you can use.”

Strasser tracks along the corridor as Kotzwara gives the skinny on Adam, cousin of more famous amphetamines, a poor relation that lacked the kick of crank. At the Darmstadt lab the Merck menschen made a halfhearted attempt to market Adam as an appetite suppressant, but dieting wasn’t a popular fad. Even Dietrich herself was full-figured in her Blaue Engel Apothecke days.

“It was a drug, you see, that didn’t seem to have any useful effect,” Kotzwara says.

“How can you make money from a medicine that doesn’t do anything?” Strasser asks.

“Patent medicines, homeopathy, vitamins. Better stick to media punditry, Mr. Strasser. But I concede that most people wouldn’t have bothered with it. Isn’t that the nature of genius—understanding the significance of something before it can be perceived? Dr. Acheson always had a grasp of the bigger picture. He understood that once an idea has formed it can never die, only get transformed. That’s our curse—genocide, Total War, the Bomb, ideas that come to us like nightmares we can’t forget. They’ll be with us forever.” One of the principles of psychodynamics, the conservation of paranoia.

“There’s another side to it,” Strasser points out.

“There always is,” Kotzwara concedes. He knows that paranoia’s just the B-side of the search for knowledge. “Universal peace, love and understanding. We can dream up utopias. But even if we get there, will it be worth the unhappiness it has already caused?”

Adam dropped out of favour during the war until the 1950s when, like Frank Sinatra, he staged a comeback. Few saw his true potential. He was sold as a lowly cough suppressant in 1958 under a U.S. patent, as a tranquillizer in England, then stateside again as a diet pill. All the while Acheson was conducting his own experiments along radically different lines.

“Ondine said that Adam can stimulate emotions,” Strasser says.

“Stimulate or simulate. Who knows? I’ve heard rumours that Dr. Acheson played the orgone circuit in his younger days. Back in the sixties he even dragged Dr. Baum into it. Frankly the two of them should have given it a rest. But Acheson wouldn’t drop the idea. He was lonely, poor man. It clouds judgement. Of course, it was mad to meddle in this whole business, but there you have it. He didn’t see it that way. I attended a lecture of his once, quite remarkable. Something to do with the chemical libido, Jung’s energy of life.”

There was Adam, ghost of desire, circling the globe like an unclaimed package that Acheson wanted to bring to earth. “Of course, Adam wasn’t perfect, original sin and all that,” Kotzwara says. “Had a bit of a nasty side-effect profile. Not surprisingly, it makes the blood boil—clotting irregularities, kidney problems. Not too bad if you pop the subject into a deep freeze—chill-out rooms I believe they call them now—but it’s not an ideal arrangement. We’re always looking for new compounds. Which is why Dr. Acheson packed one of the lads—Baum, do you know him?—off to the Territories as far back as the fifties. The man was always looking ahead.”

“Why the Territories?”

“Ultima Thule, if you believe the stories. That’s where you’ll find the Other. Think of all the opiates—heroin and the like—clicking into receptors in the brain. You might ask yourself why? Why do our brains have opiate receptors? Why should our brains respond to a chemical that’s fairly uncommon in our environment, doesn’t do a damned bit of good for our survival instinct. The simple answer: the lock opens because we must already have the key. What is that key? It’s a shadow. But it led to the hypothesis that if our brains have opiate receptors, we must manufacture our own opiates. Which is how they discovered endorphins. At the time it was a rather radical notion, that somewhere out there in the laboratory of the world were the keys to unlock the mind.”

For Baum it must have seemed more of a mad quest. Under the cranial sky the flare of the aurora borealis must have looked like an electromagnetic manifestation of unrequited love, the ionosphere sparking with failed romances, unvoiced thoughts, the lonely staccato of Morse code chattering across the barren lands. How was he to know there was no love here only failure, the acid taste of humiliation.

“You make it sound as if emotions are just something you cook up in chemistry class,” Strasser objects.

“Neurochemistry,” Kotzwara says. “Did you think it was more than that?”

TWO

Strasser lugs his gear to an observation room adjoining the paraphilia lab while Kotzwara settles in to read the zero-wave EEG tracings as if they were tea leaves.

“I wanted to ask you about Ondine,” Strasser says. “I saw you coming out of her place.”

An intercom interrupts. “We’re ready, Doctor.”

“I’m needed in the lab,” Kotzwara says. “You can set up in there. Try to be unobtrusive.”

Strasser shoulders the camera and follows the doctor into the lab. In the centre of the room is a man in his mid-twenties: track pants, training shoes, chest bare, one nipple pierced. “I’ll need a waiver,” Strasser says.

“If you see a waver, don’t wave back,” Kotzwara jokes before turning to the young man. “We’re going to tape this session, Terry.”

Terry is unconcerned, nods briefly as he slips his pants down to his ankles and wrestles with a lab assistant for a tub of electrolyte gel.

“This is Justine,” Kotzwara says. “Justine, please try to control your subject.”

Justine seems on the brink of losing her professional cool, this tech day job just a way to pay her way through night training in Shepardian fornicotherapy. “The subject isn’t cooperating.” She straightens up, tucks away the peek of a black brassiere strap, manhandles Terry onto a tilt table, and fixes the restraints. Then she applies a series of electrodes to Terry’s exposed penis, now slick with gel and ready to assume grotesque proportions.

“Get ready,” Kotzwara warns Strasser. “We’re about to initiate the vertical-restraint apparatus.”

“I don’t know if I can use this.”

“As I said…”

“What’s the point of this experiment?”

“Frame it head-and-shoulders,” Kotzwara orders. “I’ll explain it as we go along.”

Strasser watches as Justine lowers a rubber halter and positions it around Terry’s neck, tightening it as the subject squirms and shifts on the table.

Kotzwara smiles. “Today in the noose…”

Strasser turns the camera off. “You aren’t,” he asks, confused, “planning to strangle him, are you?”

“That’s it precisely.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I have been half in love with easeful Death,’” Kotzwara quotes. “A little Keats to set the mood.” He pauses, eyes studying Strasser through a bifocal plane. “You mustn’t be so anxious, Mr. Strasser. You’re looking a little pale. Perhaps you’d like to take something?”

“I’m fine, Doctor,” Strasser says, ducking back behind the camera. “Rolling.”

Kotzwara starts talking in a fusty BBC style he’s acquired from nights listening to the World Service sparking off the ionosphere. “The purpose of the experiment is to re-create the environment of the paraphiliac, one of our many research interests at the Institute. The current study is examining the phenomenon of sexual strangulation—that is, strangulation to achieve or intensify the sexual experience. You may recall certain rumours about a pop star down in Australia? I should emphasize, mind you, that this behaviour isn’t new. There are many examples throughout history, dating back at least as far as the Reverend Manacle…”

Cut away to the Reverend Manacle, who first recorded the phenomenon while tending to his flock in prison. One of his tasks in ministering to the fallen was to serve as witness at executions, a duty he could only bear by assuming a certain clinical mien and the pose of close observation. As the prisoners dangled at the end of the rope, their hands shackled with eponymous restraints, Manacle dryly recorded what had been apparent to many of the spectators of the gentler sex: the men would inevitably display a certain tumescence.

It was an observation that obsessed him, consumed his pitiable sleep and brought unwelcome warmth to his marital bed, cold now these many years. The reverend, it was said, while still a man if not in the spring of youth then in its early autumn, had endured an uncharitable impotence that had persisted like a plague. In that time he had seen his home life decline and converse with his wife, once so gentle and sweet, suffer an unmistakable tartness. “My gentle husband, and soft,” she would say to him. Or amid the passion of argument: “You unhorsed stallion, you soft-finned cod, you knackless knacker.” And so on.

And yet the reverend’s desires, it may be said, were not absent, only mightily bound. In his journal Manacle confessed he imagined a woman of low repute—a slattern, barmaid, slut—who would break his unmanly bonds, unchain his unspeakable desire.

After an especially unquiet row, the reverend resolved to perform an experiment, one that required securing the services of a prostitute. The reverend’s wrists were bound and the woman attached a cord to his neck. Veins bulging, face red and apoplectic, Manacle struggled and gasped for breath. Mistress of the Night! Mercy!

It is unclear if the reverend would have continued this game until death. No matter. For behold: the long-dormant penis arose like a Leviathan from the depths, whereupon the good reverend fucked the young maid ex animalis until her lips turned blue.

“We have reports of the same sorts of things among North and South American Native tribes, ancient Greeks,” Kotzwara says, still in BBC mode. “The Mayans reserved a special place in paradise watched over by Ixtab, goddess of the hanged.” The doctor turns on the EEG; at zero the ink marks like scratches across a naked back. With the signal established, a baseline brai...