Bellevue

Epilogue

Monday, July 8, 11:15 a.m.

“The doctor can see you now,” the secretary said to Benjamin and Clara Fuller. They had come to the office of Dr. Claes Lundström in the NYU Department of Neurology in hopes of getting some good news, but they weren’t optimistic. Since the late-night call on the Fourth of July, their lives had taken a sudden and remarkable turn for the worse. It had been then that they learned that their only son, Michael Fuller, whose life had held so much promise as a surgeon-to-be, had suffered an inexplicable trauma with severe mental ramifications.

Benjamin and Clara got to their feet. Then Benjamin turned to Mitt, who was quietly sitting between them, and took the young man’s hand, urging him to stand as well. Mitt did as he was told and did it agreeably. He’d been shaved, bathed, and dressed in a white shirt, tie, and jacket early that morning and looked entirely presentable, although at that moment the tie was slightly awry. Benjamin adjusted it, gave Mitt a reassuring pat on the shoulder, and then again took his hand to lead him into Dr. Lundström’s inner office. Mitt complied silently without any change of his blank, apathetic expression.

The doctor had gotten up from his desk to come to the door to welcome them. He was tall and thin with a pale, almost sallow complexion. He spoke with a pleasant, slight Swedish accent. “Please,” he said while graciously gesturing toward three chairs he’d arranged to face his desk. His expression was serious and empathetic.

Both parents helped to guide their compliant son to the middle chair, then took the chairs on either side.

When the doctor was certain his guests were comfortably seated, he retreated behind his desk. A large, flat-screen monitor was built into the wall behind him. Currently displayed was a black-and-white, sagittal, cutaway image of a human cranium.

“Thank you for coming in,” Claes said. “And thank you for bringing your son into the hospital this morning to have his MRI.”

“We are here to do whatever needs to be done,” Clara said. Benjamin nodded. “Has the MRI been helpful? Has it provided any explanations?”

“Yes and no,” Claes said. “Let me show you what the MRI tells us.” He picked up a remote from the desk and turned half around so that he could gaze up at the screen. He also picked up a pencil-like laser pointer, which he turned on. It projected a small white arrow. “It’s this area that I’d like you to look at,” he said as he moved the arrow around in a tight circle in the left-hand portion of the image just behind the forehead. “Now, let me run through a number of slices and have you concentrate on this same area of the forebrain.”

The image changed a number of times in succession, and each time Claes indicated the area he wanted his visitors to observe. Unfortunately, to Benjamin and Clara, all the images looked exactly the same. Surreptitiously, as Claes continued speaking, they exchanged a bewildered glance.

“Tell me, are you able to appreciate the murkiness of these areas in the various slices that I’m indicating here in the forebrain?”

“I’m afraid neither of us are able to notice much of a difference,” Benjamin admitted. Clara nodded in agreement.

“Okay, sorry,” Claes said. “Forgive me! I do tend to forget that laypersons are not accustomed to interpreting MRI images. Well, take my word for it. There is definite murkiness in these areas, which confirms for us something rather surprising, even shocking.”

“Oh?” Benjamin murmured. “Exactly what does it confirm?”

“It confirms for me, as well as for the consulting radiologists, that your son has been surgically lobotomized.”

Benjamin and Clara simultaneously sucked in a lungful of air, as both were aware that such a diagnosis meant Mitt’s current troubles weren’t transient, stress-related psychological issues, as they had been vainly hoping, but rather a permanent state. Benjamin was the first to find his voice and it shook with shock and anger: “Lobotomized? But wasn’t that procedure totally discredited decades ago?”

“You are absolutely correct,” Claes said soothingly. “It was discredited more than a half century ago, to be more exact.”

“But then how could this have happened?” Benjamin sputtered.

“That is the question of the hour,” Claes continued. He maintained a calm tone of voice, which tended to emphasize his slight accent. “Everyone is making every effort to find the answer, particularly those people in charge of the NYU Surgical Residency Program and the Bellevue Hospital Security Services. I’m sure we will soon know more than we do now, as there is an active investigation underway.”

While Benjamin, obviously fuming, continued to stare at Dr. Lundström, Clara turned to her son to see if he had responded to this disturbing news. But he hadn’t. Mitt’s blank expression was unchanged, reminding Clara of the saying “the lights are on but no one’s home.” Feeling particularly pained at this new information, Clara couldn’t help herself; she reached out, rested her hand on her child’s motionless knee, and asked him if he was all right.

Mitt’s response was to focus on Clara, at least for a moment, and say he was fine. But the response was so emotionally blunted that it sounded like a recording. In the next instant, his eyes re-clouded over, and he slipped back to wherever he’d been moments before. As blank as his expression was, he seemed to Clara to be in another universe.

“Your saying ‘we’ll soon know more’ implies we know something already,” Benjamin blurted out after a moment of pained silence. He was desperately trying to rein in his emotions and organize his thoughts. The news that his son had been lobotomized was a crushing blow.

“I’m sorry, but what have you been told so far?” Claes questioned.

“Almost nothing,” Benjamin snapped. “When we got here early Friday morning, our boy was an inpatient in the ICU and we were informed only that he was stable and in that sense doing well. Yesterday we got to take him home to his apartment, where we are currently staying with him. We didn’t see any doctors when he was discharged. From the nurses, we’d been told that the consensus was that he’d suffered a severe emotional shock and that he was scheduled for the MRI this morning.”

“I’m sorry,” Claes said sympathetically. “I apologize for the hospital and the university. I suppose everyone assumed someone else had spoken with you, which I, too, have been guilty of. Be that as it may, let me fill you in. Your son was discovered wandering around in the darkness of the locked and deserted Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital. It’s been empty since 1985.

“A call had been made to Bellevue Security by his surgical resident colleague Dr. Andrea Intiso, who’d received a call earlier in the afternoon from your son telling her where he was — supposedly in the closed-up building reading hospital records. Of course, that was entirely fictitious, as the hospital had long since been emptied of all its records. According to her, she’d insisted that he call her the moment he left, which never happened, nor did he respond to her attempts to get in touch with him, ergo her eventual call to Security. What she did tell Security when she called was that your son had been under great psychological stress because a number of his assigned inpatients had passed away unexpectedly, and she thought he was taking it personally.”

Claes paused for a moment to allow Benjamin and Clara time to absorb what he’d told them. “Had you heard any of this?” he questioned after a few beats.

“No,” Benjamin and Clara echoed.

“Then let me continue. When Security did locate your son, which didn’t happen until around ten p.m. since the building is rather large, he was in a stupor with bloodstains on the front of his white doctor’s coat. He was also carrying an outdated surgical instrument called an orbitoclast, which had been used in the old days to do bedside lobotomies and which he had apparently found in the deserted building. At that point he was immediately taken to the emergency room, where the source of the blood was determined to be the upper conjunctival vortexes of each eye, which at least raised the possibility, as unbelievable as it seemed to everyone, that he had had a transorbital lobotomy. At that point he was admitted to the ICU to be stabilized and a non-emergency MRI was scheduled for this morning.”

“How in God’s name could he have suffered a lobotomy in a vacant hospital?” Benjamin demanded, his anger returning in a rush.

“I can appreciate your frustration,” Claes said. “Believe me, we all feel it, as there is only one possible way for it to have happened.”

“I’m listening,” Benjamin snapped.

“Self-inflicted,” Claes stated. “Your son had to have done it to himself.”