Trafford Publishing: The Drummer's Wife

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The Drummer's Wife

by James S. Gibons; co-published with Fountain Grove Books

418 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #99-0026; ISBN 1-55212-257-3; US$34.00, C$39.00, EUR28.00, £19.50

A neurotic writer who may or may not be living in a scientifically controlled dream searches for a lost love.

Sample Chapter

Chapter Four

But even as I wakened, it was a struggle to reorient myself. I was in a clean hospital room. Several people were standing over my bed. First came their voices, then, after what seemed like an hour, I began to see their silhouettes, and perhaps as long afterwards, I could make out vague colors, the scrambled hues of clothing. One individual seemed to be wearing something bright and silvery, reflective, like chrome. My first concern, of course, was over Julie. While the dream was over, its effects lingered on.

"Where's Julie?" I asked, but it appeared my voice was not projecting very well, as I got no answer. "Where am I? Where's Julie," I demanded. "Is she alive? Is she...?"

"Julie doesn't come on until three," someone said.

"What?"

"You mean the nurse? That Julie?"

"Yes-that Julie. The one that you pulled from the smashed Buick, along with me...didn't you ?"

"He's still a bit delirious," I heard a female voice say.

"I believe the damage must have occurred in the occipital lobe," said a different voice. "And might have triggered the reaction."

"The seizure surely did not help. With his overdosing with phenobarbitol, how could that happen?"

"First occurred the damage. Then the pheno, somehow, perhaps because of the massive dose, began to work against the damaged part of the brain. I have heard of two other cases, but of course it is so rare for someone to take that high a dosage and survive. The only question is whether the damage is permanent."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I demanded.

"Edward. Mister Macadonough?"

"Oh, no. Tamid! What are you doing here. Are we in Sacramento?"

"You have suffered a grand mal seizure, Edward. Yesterday, in my office. You were giving me some riddle about camels leaving Bahrain or something, but I never got the punch line. You hit the wall running, and darn near shook the hospital apart."

"Tamid-you're full of it. Where'd you get that suit? And who are these two quacks?"

"This gentleman is my brother, Mana Rafaggish. He is the new owner here at Monroe Manor. His background is retailing. Vegetables, basketry, household items and other interests. And this is a specialist we have called in. Calil Radg-mannin."

"Mana, Calil. How's your hammers hangin'?"

"Doctor Radg-mannin is a brain surgeon."

"He your brother too?"

"Cousin."

"Yes-I see the family resemblance. In fact, you all look a lot alike to me."

"Please don't be racialist, Edward," Tamid said. "We are trying to help you."

"I know about your help. Like your little dark dungeon with the table straps. Like your nefarious, murderous, clandestine little dealings with...agents of the government. You know-Clique ?"

"We will get to all that in a moment, Edward. We believe the damage from the eighty-seven phenobarbitol is causing brain activity quite out of the ordinary. And there may well have been other damage, disabling other parts. And of course the seizure has only complicated things-a very high electrical voltage in one area, none in the other. Let me ask you, Edward, have you had any dreams?"

"I'll tell you what. If you can answer me this question, we'll talk. Where, Tamid, is my Porsche?"

"Why, right outside, there, just outside the window."

I looked out into the lot. My black Porsche was nowhere. There was a similar red one, but no black one.

"That is not my Porsche," I said. "That Porsche is red, Tamid. My Porsche is black."

The three men, whom I now had pretty clearly in focus, and the single woman, a nurse in starchy white nurse's attire, looked at one another quizzically. "Calil," Tamid said, "What color is that Porsche?"

"Black. Black as midnight."

"It's red, you jerk! That Porsche is red! And therefore is not my Porsche. You're all insane!"

"Note that it has affected his color perception," Calil said. "But that would well be expected with this sort of damage. Possible optic nerve fraying. Or perhaps, frying ."

"Look," I said, "Can't you just give me my freaking medicine and let me out of here? I know damn well what it is you're trying to do."

"We are trying to help you, Edward," Tamid said.

"It's the doings of Clique, isn't it?"

"Motor distortion," said Calil.

"Paranoid anxiety. Delusional. An interesting case."

"I want to know that my bank account is intact, and that the I.R.S. hasn't seized my assets."

"Disjointed thought pattern, paranoid inducement."

"And I want to see Julie!"

"Sexual preoccupation with staff."

"Come on, men, I have to get to River City. To find my Lauren!"

"Who is this Lauren?" Calil asked Tamid. "A loved one?"

"A girl he saw for only a moment twenty years ago."

The comment was acknowledged only by three nodding heads.

After they left I took a moment to get my bearings. The hospital wing of Monroe Manor was to the front of the building, and I could clearly see the blue and white Monroe Manor sign and the shrubbery at the entryway. I looked out once again at the Porsche, and now it appeared still red, but was flecked with black squares, like the checkerboard I'd seen in my aching head when I came to, after taking the overdose. Could that be my car, and could they be correct about my misperceptions? The Porsche turned red again, then checkered again. Maybe it was my Porsche and maybe my brain was mixing up colors, as well as most other things, as the doctors had said. It was certainly mixing up events . I had awakened in hospitals after seizures before on three occasions, and it was indeed possible that I had suffered another and that the crispness and realism of the events of the day before were indeed no more than one big bad dream.

I felt I was thinking clearly, or as clearly as I was capable given these preposterous circumstances. My mind has always been somewhat disjointed-the reason writing and plotting and characterizations were such an awful struggle-but I felt no different now. So, maybe I had just had a very long and clear dream. Of course I had, but it would take time for me to believe it.

What if Clique, instead of getting all dirtied up with my blood, had decided to simply induce a condition in me where I could safely be put away for life? A poor victim of his own suicidal inclinations who only nearly killed himself, but left so little of himself he was made a vegetable, by his own hand, who could no longer distinguish fantasy from reality, who would need lifelong care and monitoring and medicating for the good of himself and of society. If my dalliance with the beautiful Julie was not real, nothing was, including my perceptions of the present moment. I knew full well that the joke about the camels leaving Bahrain and Chicago had indeed reached the punch line, and that several minutes of reality passed after that before Tamid summoned his two big gorillas and let me have it. And I know that I lay there and overheard his conversation with the government men, and also that, some time later, Julie had snuck in and made passionate love to me. That I would never forget. That I knew was real. I took comfort, now, in knowing that if I could only substantiate one of these things I knew to have occurred, all or almost all of them had.

Any dream, I believed, must have begun with Bennet rescuing me. That would never have happened, and due to its lack of verisimilitude (its being so out of character with Bennet), I must have fallen asleep in that dark dungeon after Julie and I had made love, and before Julie and Bennet awakened me. Yes-that was where things started getting wacky. Bennet would not have broken me out of Monroe Manor. I was asleep in Julie's mother's Buick, but that and the successive wrestling for the wheel and crashing into the wall must have simply been a part of the same dream. Now I was going to have to do some digging. Life can be most distressing when a man cannot differentiate reality from fantasy, reality from dreams, reality from anything. It is the one definition of insanity I cannot contest.

There was a clock on my wall, one of those big round institutional types, and I assumed it was properly set at just past three o'clock, although allowed that it may not be. A newspaper, already read by someone, lay on my nightstand. Picking it up I saw that the masthead read Thursday, the twenty-third of June. That fit. The suicide attempt was Sunday. Monday Doctor Blane put me in for tests and then brought me here to Monroe Manor. Tuesday morning was my first session with Tamid Rafaggish. Wednesday, yesterday, was my second, and the day his goons jumped me and put me in the dungeon. If indeed I had been jumped and put in a dungeon by goons. I overheard his conversation with the men from Clique , Julie came in and we made love, then later undertook our escape. The line of continuity seemed too unbroken for me to have dreamed anything.

Still tugged along in the wake of my incredible dream, I decided I had to find Julie. She could set me straight. I knew I was being closely watched, and that it would take some ingenuity to get out and find her. But at three-thirty she simply appeared in my doorway.

Julie did not wear those old traditional white starched uniforms, but always a nice skirt or slacks and a blouse and a name tag that read "Julie Chandler R.N." Today she was in slacks , tannish, with a beige shirt, both of which she filled out nicely, and there she stood tapping innocently on the jamb. "Edward? Edward, are you awake?"

Well, she certainly had not just been pulled from a flaming car crash. No-part of the dream was that whole sequence in the Buick. Thank God. "Julie, my dear, please come in..."

"I understand you had quite an attack," she said.

"Attack?" I responded.

"Yes. The seizure. I should say that you look well for having only yesterday suffered a grand mal seizure."

"Oh-that little thing. Well, thank you for saying..."

"I wish you hadn't taken all those darn pills, Edward."

I motioned for her to come closer. "Shh," I cautioned her. "Do you know if the room is bugged?"

She looked at me with an expression I took for pity. "Bugged? Oh, dear no-you poor dear, Edward. And so fine a mind as yours..."

I drew her closer still. "Julie," I whispered, "You remember yesterday, don't you? Downstairs?"

"Downstairs, Edward? There is no downstairs. This building was built on a slab."

"Well, wherever it was they had me."

"Oh, Edward, why, why with what you have to give the rest of us, give the world, why..." her eyes were beginning to tear.

"Julie, it's all right. Unless you know they're listening. If they are..." I was whispering in a barely audible way..."If they are, blink your left eye quickly four times..."

"Edward," she said, but only winked once, "You were the best ."

Okay, now we were getting somewhere. Of course she could not be too specific. She probably knew we were being monitored. But now I was at least reassured. "It was awfully dark in there, wasn't it?" I whispered.

She took my hand and patted it. "Yes," she said. "Sure it was, Edward. But remember, sometimes it's darkest just before the dawn." With that she turned on her heel and headed out the door. While the conversation had not been very enlightening, I had the feeling she was simply being cautious and that she would fill me in when circumstances were more private and the danger of bugs not so prevalent. As for me, I was going to stay awake and not risk further confusion by dreaming, until I got to the bottom of all this hospital business. But I was sure they were trying to make a good case against my sanity, and my ability to get back to River City and find my Lauren. That was fine-my resolve was only strengthened by their stupid, petty interferences.

As I mentioned, planning anything is always quite a struggle for me, but if I ever needed to put together a plan, it was now. I had begun to wonder whether the pheno I had taken fully four days ago had indeed affected my perception of color, or caused an ultra-vivid dream, and if that truly was my black Porsche parked not fifty feet from where I lay. If it was mine (and the more I peered out at it the more little black checks I saw), there would be a little magnetic key-holder just behind the front left headlight, my trusty spare. Once I got in my Porsche, they didn't have much chance of catching me, because, as I told Julie before the crash in the Buick, dream or no-dream, I'm a pretty good wheel man, having been a white-lightening runner in my younger days. My little roadster baby was capable of speeds in excess of one hundred and sixty miles per hour, not to mention it's maneuverability and the fact that a similar Porsche had come in number one at LeMans that very year. If I could just set that baby down on Highway Eighty heading east, River City was in my near immediate grasp, and with it, God willing, my Lauren. She and she alone, back in the setting of my youth where life was comfortable and not at all complicated or filled with mysterious immigrantry as it was in California, would be my destiny, my final chance at happiness.

The doctors and the new owner came wandering in once again. Tamid, his brother Mana, and Calil, the brain surgeon, or so they claimed. Mana looked more like a Good Humor Man to me, and one you wouldn't want your kids buying ice cream from. He was bald and strode about like an aggravated portrayal of Groucho Marx in a lab coat. All three of them looked prepared for a serious meeting, judging from the patriarchal countenances I saw.

"How are we feeling, Edward?"

"I don't know, Tamid-you don't look well at all to me."

"I mean how are you feeling? You are the patient here."

"I feel like I'm looking at Curly, Larry and Moe," I said as snidely as I was able.

"And these are acquaintances of yours, Edward?"

"Naw-they're more like...part of the culture, you know?"

Calil took a turn with some startling news. "Mr. Mocoadonough, while you wuz ashleeping, we have performed both the CT and MRI scannings."

"What do you net on those babies?"

"We did these full brain scans..."

"Good for you. What did you find?"

"Nothing."

"Well, then, they must have mixed up my results with yours, Curly."

"I don't think you understand, Edward. Something is very wrong here. According to our very sophisticated equipment, you are as close to being brain dead as..." Tamid seemed at a loss to go on.

"Well, you'd better recalibrate them," I said, nonplused. I didn't believe a word this trio of quackery said anyway; now I was positive they were trying to upset my mental balance. Or unbalance whatever balance might be left.

"Doctor Radg-mannin would like to do an exploratory..."

"Well, tell cousin Radg-mannin he ain't comin' anywhere near me with his scalpels and brain saws. No way, Jose. I feel great. Look, I can wiggle my ears and stick out my tongue and give you the finger. See? My toes work fine. I can wiggle my nose. I'm breathing splendidly, although I'd do much better with a pack of cigarettes. Every time I see Julie I get an erection so big it makes this sheet into a tent. I assure you stooges that there is absolutely nothing wrong with me."

"Well, we'll see about that," said Tamid, taking out a hypodermic needle. When I tried to dart out of bed, the three of them held me down. Just as before with Tamid's goons, I landed a punch or two, then felt the sting in my forearm, and, once again, the lights went out.

Review

James S. Gibon's new novel, THE DRUMMER'S WIFE, is a love story on a grand scale, Weaving themes of mental illness, corruption, and the nature of love, Gibons observes the deterioration of a community and its people as he follows one man's quest to find a long-lost love.

THE DRUMMER'S WIFE's protagonist is famous, wealthy novelist Edward MacDonough, a manic-depressive who has failed at three suicuide attempts. MacDonough, desperate after his latest visit to the locked ward of a mental hospital, returns to his home of River City to seek out the one woman he believes can save him - without even knowing her name.

Thirty years ago in the Music Man, James Preston railed in song about inpending doom descending on River City. The River City of Gibons's novel is the community of Preston's dire predictions, where evil has truly taken its hold. MacDonough discovers a once idyllic town that has degenerated into corruption and ruin. It is here that he finds that the woman of his dreams has become what even his wildest imagination could not have fathomed.

THE DRUMMER'S WIFE provides a compelling look at the nature of manic-depression, an illness which affects two million Americans. Gibons's insightful story of a man whose mental illness is not properly controlled is a powerful testinony to the inportance of disgnosing and caring for the many people who suffer from this disease.

--journal of Irreproducible Results, volume 44/number 4

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