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I’m getting worse, Emil thought. Ada didn’t say it, but he could see it in her eyes.
The walls creaked, paint dimpling, and wrinkled like unironed clothes. He heard people saying his name when he was alone.
They whispered, hummed, and sang.
The marble floors of the asylum seemed to crack and shatter under his every step.
He woke up screaming and grasping for Ada, and saw bugs in the corners of his windowless rooms. Flies crawled along the whitewashed wall, ticks bristled in the corners and along the baseboards, and white damask moths flitted around the candle on his bedside table, flame singeing their wings.
When all the lights were lit there was nothing there.
There never was.
No matter how many times he looked under his cot or pushed aside the nightstand to examine the wall there.
His food turned to dust in his mouth. He chewed and tasted nothing.
When Ada was granted permission to take him outside, the voices became overwhelming. They crowded over themselves, pushed at him, dug furrows into his skin.
Emil! Emil. Emilemilemilemilemil.
He saw black specks in the corners of his eyes and recoiled away from the flies. When he blinked he could see gnats drifting weightlessly through the linen-colored corridors.
His eye twitched; a relentless tick of the lid of his left eye. By now he hardly noticed it.
They did not go outside much for walks anymore. Ada was becoming desperate. Her contract was almost up, and where she was going next, Emil could not follow. So he was treated every day, with shocks and ice and clear, sweet syrup.
They tied him to a wooden chair and poured water over his head. Emil sputtered as Ada hovered just out of splashing distance, pen moving over the pages of the notebook she held.
Today they were in the basement of the asylum, and Emil’s chair was atop a large metal grate in the floor. The grate bars were cold against his bare feet.
“Again,” Ada said.
Emil ducked his head to hide his face from the onslaught, but freezing water stung his eyes anyway and made him gasp in pain as it hit his head and shoulders.
The chair he sat on was sodden and splintery. The wood dug painfully into his bare skin, as did the restraints on his hands and wrists. He wished he knew what was going on in Ada’s mind. In his mind he could hear her saying, as clearly as if she were standing beside him, her lips to his ear: “I just want the best for you.”
The week Ada was set to leave, the approval she had been waiting for was given.
In accordance, Emil had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, and only allowed a small amount of water to drink. He had spent the better part of this lying on his side in bed. The ache of hunger was familiar and easily ignored by now.
Arms over his head to block his ears, Emil squeezed his eyes shut and ignored the prickling sensation of spiders crawling over him, the tiny hairs on their legs raising goosebumps on his skin. If he pushed aside the blanket over his bed, someone would be standing beside it. Watching him.
He could only hope whatever treatment Ada had planned for today would end soon.
Emil lifted his head from the chair as the door swung open. Nurses had been going in and out for the past hour, and none of them, after getting him into the chair and forcing him to drink something with lemon juice and a bitter measure of laudanum, had looked at him once.
Ada’s footsteps echoed on the cold ground of the surgery room. “We will begin on schedule. Please have everything ready.”
There was a chorus of, “Yes, doctor”, and the taps of the nurses’ heels picked up.
Emil turned to Ada as she came around to the side of the chair he was in. He couldn’t help the smile that flickered across his face at the sight of her. She was buttoning a clean white surgical coat, and the mask normally around her neck had been pulled up over her nose and mouth. Her eyes, above the mask, were cold.
“Hello, Emil. Today will be something a little different. And if all goes well, it should put an end to the voices you hear.”
“What…is it?” Emil asked warily.
Then he noticed the syringe glinting innocuously in her hand, half-hidden by the folds of her coat. They only ever sedated patients for—
He grew cold as he realized it. How oblivious he’d been. Thinking only of the moments in which he got to see Ada, the significance of the surgery room had not alarmed him.
“W-wait, Ada, no—” Emil said desperately. She pushed up the sleeve of his cotton hospital gown—another tell, how stupid was he?
The cold tip of the syringe pressed against his upper arm, her thumb worrying the trigger. Her other hand was resting on his shoulder, steadying. “You won’t even feel it,” she promised.
“No!” Emil struggled, thrashing against the restraints, and Ada heard a worrying snap. She depressed the plunger, and the contents of the syringe flooded into the vein that ran indigo under his skin.
“Take a deep breath.”
Emil didn’t relax right away as she had expected—his attempts to shove her away became sloppier, but he was fighting the urge to fall asleep. Ada reached for the second syringe on the cart, and Emil took that opportunity to bite the hand she still had on his shoulder. It was an awkward angle, but his teeth sank in nonetheless. Ada’s vision went white with pain. She picked up the second syringe and stabbed it into the side of his neck, emptying it in that fluttering pulse. Emil went slack.
The teeth that dug into her hand let up, and Ada wrenched her hand away, hissing when she saw beads of blood welling in the indentations Emil’s sharp teeth had left behind. “Get him onto the table,” she ordered.
The nurses worked quickly, lifting Emil from the anesthesia chair to the sterilized metal operating table, a white sheet put down where his head would go. Ada had given him enough anesthetic he wouldn’t wake for hours, but he was restrained anyway, at his wrists and ankles.
She was handed gloves. Mechanically, Ada put them on.
If this went wrong—but—she shook her head slightly—it couldn’t.
It wouldn’t go wrong; she was Ada Mesmer, genius psychologist. The top of her class at university, one of perhaps twenty female doctors in the whole of the country, and a defining mind in the world of psychology.
Regardless of whether or not she had surgical training—the first person to successfully perform a topectomy, after all, had not had formal surgical training either, nor did the man who had perfected the frontal lobotomy. Ada was hardly the first to attempt such a thing.
In addition, she had the perfect candidate. In Burckhardt’s case, the patients that had benefited the most from topectomy had had the most advanced cases of paranoid schizophrenia. Other successful procedures had all been sufferers of night terrors and auditory hallucinations.
Emil’s memory could not be helped with this—if anything, it might repress them further. But Ada had long ago realized his memory loss was no malfunction of the mind—it was Emil’s own wish to forget. His mind had acquiesced, shutting the events of his life into some small dark corner. It wasn’t a perfect solution. The things that tormented Emil found their way out in the shape of nightmares and voices that plagued him.
Her treatments til now had been unsuccessful. It was like pressing gauze to a gunshot wound—all her attempts, up to now, had been effective only for a little while.
This operation would right everything. Emil would know peace, and he’d be able to sleep well at night.
“Doctor, whenever you’re ready.”
Ada turned to the operating table.
Emil lay atop the polished silver of the table, hands at his sides, perfectly still. With his moonlight-pale skin, and his faintly pink lips, parted ever so slightly, he looked like a fairytale princess awaiting a kiss.
He barely breathed. Under the paper gown, his chest rose and fell only the faintest amount. Ada held her breath as she counted his heartbeats.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
They seemed steady enough, and she was satisfied with the amount his chest was rising. It had been more of a risk than she had initially been willing to take, anesthetizing him, but there was no way he would have let her do it.
Even if it was the best thing for him.
“Ready, then.” Ada held out her hand and felt the familiar weight of the chisel drop into it. The nurse who stood beside her was competent, at least.
She took a deep breath. She had done this a hundred times, at least. Only from trial and error could perfection come.
Emil’s hair was in his eyes, strands tangling with the long black lashes dusting his cheeks. Ada swept the soft locks out of his face with a gentle hand and lifted the chisel to his forehead. She pressed it just above his eyebrow. A bead of blood welled, apple-red.
She was conscious of the eyes on her, waiting for her to begin in earnest.
Do it.
Ada slid the chisel in again, and heard the dull thud and scrape as it hit bone and sank in. She felt the nurses press closer, anxious to see.
Emil was still.
She hastily withdrew the chisel and matched the incision with another on his temple. Despite the blood, and the fact that she could clearly see the rosy gray of his brain, he hadn’t moved. Only the flicker of dreams swimming behind his eyelids gave any indication he was still living.
Tap.
Tap.
The sound of the chisel striking off the bone of Emil’s skull, over and over, echoed in the silent surgery room.
More than one of the nurses gagged and rushed out as they watched Ada’s chisel sink deeper and deeper in, til it was only Ada and one other, the one that had been beside her since the very start, handing her instruments in silence. Ada didn’t know her name.
Practice had made perfect. Her strikes rang true—the chisel filed one perfect hole in Emil’s temple, like the pinhole of a blackbox camera, exposing the filament of nerves that supported his frontal lobe.
“The-” Ada held out her hand and felt the angled handle of the cranial blade hit her palm. “Yes.”
The thin blade, hardly more than an extended needle, slid in easily. Ada flicked the blade upwards, severing the nerve there. Emil’s eyes fluttered wildly behind his lids.
Bright blood was still weeping from the hole in his forehead. Ada felt Emil’s pulse tremble as she pressed the cranial knife in. This part was slightly more difficult—it required her to scrape some tissue gently away before she could remove the nerve.
Gently, she slid the tip of the blade through the incision there, a thin slash across the outside of the lobe. A line of gray followed the point of the blade as the blood wept out of the tissue.
She was handed a minute silver scoop, the shallow bowl of it half the size of her smallest fingernail, with a long handle. She inserted it slowly, til the spoon touched the surface of Emil’s brain. Ada scraped the fine edge of the spoon over a ripple of papery tissue. It wasn’t long before the bowl of the spoon was full of gray bits of tissue, and the silver all the way up to the handle protruding from the incision had been dyed solidly red.
The spoon clattered onto the surgical cart beside the operating table.
Nearly done now.
Ada’s hands had never been steadier. She lifted the thin knife again to cut the other nerve, and this time when she brought the blade down, Emil jerked.
His whole body shuddered, and red darkened his pale lips—he had involuntarily bitten his tongue. The nurse had her hands on his shoulders in a second, pushing him back down to the table as he shook, fingers spasming and twitching.
It would feel like a string being cut. Nothing more. The positive trials of the topectomy had assured her that they felt no pain, only a sensation of sudden freezing cold.
The nurses were crowding him now, and Ada stepped away from the operating table, the knife in her hand falling limply to her side. Drops of the blood Emil had spat out were drying on the front of her smock.
She watched as they pressed plaster to Emil’s head and wrapped bandages around it, stemming the flow of blood. The marks of Ada’s betrayal disappeared under snowy white gauze.
Emil was still.
When she saw him again it was the next day.
“A perfect operation,” the director of the asylum praised her. Ada would return to Switzerland for the next stage of her studies with a new, sparkling recommendation.
She could wrap this entire chapter of her life up and pack it away.
The creaking of wheels echoed in the quiet of Emil’s room. Ada looked up from her notebook as Emil was wheeled in, head bowed, hands clasped together on his lap.
“Well done, Doctor,” said the nurse pushing Emil’s chair. Her sweet voice was like a saw on Ada’s brain. Scrape scrape scrape. “He’ll be a perfect lamb now, I’m sure. Won’t you, dear?”
The bandages were still wrapped around his head, and there was a new one on his wrist.
“What happened to him?” Ada was on her feet in a second, her voice sharp. She was gratified to see the nurse startle slightly.
“W-we…had a slight accident, didn’t we?” She smiled at Emil tremblingly. “Bumped into a dinner knife one of the others left out. I—“
“Get out,” Ada snapped.
The nurse fled.
Ada dropped to her knees in front of Emil’s chair, turning his wrist over in her hand to examine the bandage. As she did, her eyes caught on his, staring at her without a flicker of emotion.
Emil’s face was dull and lifeless as a corpse. Ada reached out to touch his cheek gently—his eyes didn’t so much as waver. His skin was icy. His black eyes, ringed with dark circles, were vacant and haunted, and they gazed into hers without comprehension.
Only his hands moved—rested on the arms of the chair, his fingers twitched involuntarily.
“This was meant to be perfect,” Ada said, half to him, half to herself. “Only a small percentage of the participants experienced suicidal ideation post-operation. You were an i-ideal candidate…”
Emil’s empty eyes were like pins, fixing Ada to the spot.
Ada realized then, that this was the first time she had seen him with his hands unbound outside of his room. She blinked. “Emil, I…” There was water in her eyes, making it hard to see. “I’m sorry. You’ll feel better soon.”