Flying Crows by Jim Lehrer

Mayfield’s direction, one of the attendants put Josh to sleep with a whack to the head with a small piece of lead pipe and wheeled him away to an isolation room for the night.
    â€œThat’s quite a life you saved him for, isn’t it, Dr. Mitchell?” Mayfield said, once they were alone.
    Will Mitchell, confused and upset, kept his mouth shut.
    But Mayfield was not finished. “I would ask only that you consider one thing, Dr. Mitchell. How do you believe that man, had he been able, would have made the choice between continuing to live the way he is here now or making a contribution, through his death, that might speed up the desperately needed work on how to repair such severely damaged brains as his?”
    Will Mitchell left the treatment room, the response in his head unspoken. He was more determined than ever to save the life of Joshua Alan Lancaster.

    Will had no problem with the punctures in Josh’s chest. He was confident they would heal quickly and completely, leaving only large scars where the holes had been. But handling Josh’s mental illness was another matter. Like every other staff doctor to serve at Somerset Asylum, Will had had no formal training or education in how to treat lunacy, much less cure it. It wasn’t even in his curriculum at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia. He was only at Somerset because a doctor from the state health department happened to come by the St. Louis hospital where Will was finishing a routine general-medicine residency. The doctor was soliciting volunteers to come and “serve your community” for meager pay in one of the state hospitals. There was a particularly critical need in the state’s five insane asylums, he said. Will had been headed since childhood for a comfortable slot in the well-established and prosperous downtown Kansas City practice of his father and three other partners. But Will, still unmarried and without other obligations, signed up to go to Somerset for two years. He figured, What the hell, why not? It might be an interesting experience, if nothing else.
    He decided to treat Josh’s sick mind during rocking time. It was a decision based solely on hunch and instinct rather than on any professional theory or research.
    â€œHere’s what we’re going to do, Josh,” said Will, the first afternoon. He had moved Josh and his rocking chair into a corner of the common room, as far away from the others as possible. “I’m not going to put on the straps and things. You can move, see, and talk. Got it?”
    Josh smiled. He got it.
    He was usually tied to the chair while he rocked back and forth, back and forth:
bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta.
He was also often gagged and blindfolded, with strips of tied or wadded-up white cotton cloth. The restraints on his movements, mouth, and eyes were a treatment designed by one of Will’s predecessors a couple of years before. The idea was to force Josh to deal with the darkness and the fits that ensued without doing harm to himself or disrupting the peace and quiet of the other rockers, his fellow patients. The hope, based on nothing as far as Will could tell, was that eventually something would click in his diseased mind to end the fits.
    Will’s approach was also based on nothing but hope.
    He said to Josh, “I want you to rock and rock while you tell me what you remember. I want you to begin at the beginning and go through every detail of what happened to you that caused you such pain and suffering then and continues to now. Got it?”
    Josh began rocking. His shoulders shook slightly. He got it.
    â€œStay calm, Josh. Start with something small. The weather, maybe. Was the sun shining? Was it raining? Or was it dark—at night. Was there a wind blowing? From what direction? That kind of thing.”
    Nothing.
    â€œGive me one tiny detail, only one. That’s all you have to do. What were you wearing? Tell me