THE MAGIC SHOES: 11) DR. SPIVEY
Monster Monday Madness
I am inside the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Nurse Ratched is walking me into an office where man in a suit behind a large desk looks up at us.
“Doctor Spivey,” says Ratched. “May I introduce Doctor Smith?” She enunciates Doctor Smith with a patronizingly wicked grin. “He is here to inspect our facility.”
Spivey looks puzzled for a moment but quickly interprets the subtext of Ratched’s introduction.
He rises to shake my hand. “What a pleasure to have you here, Doctor Smith. Please, sit down.” He looks up. “Thank you, Nurse Ratched.”
Dismissed, she departs, perhaps a tad disappointed to miss what comes next.
“So.” Spivey folds his arms. “I wasn’t told you would be here today.”
“No,” I say. “This is a surprise inspection.”
Spivey brightens. “Well, I like surprises!” He studies me. “But if you would kindly inform me, who actually sent you?”
I almost tell him what I’d told Nurse Ratched. But then it dawns on me that the National Association of Mental Hospitals could—and would—easily be checked. It would make me seem completely delusional.
“I know you’re going to find this hard to believe,” I start.
Spivey smiles. “I’ve heard it all, trust me on that point.”
I hold up my right leg so he can see my shoe. “See this?” I ask.
“Pretty,” says Spivey.
“More than that,” I say, lowering my voice to a whisper. “These shoes have been walking me through otherworldly portals.”
“No.” He shakes his head, smiling.
“No?”
“No, I haven’t heard that one before.” He leans forward. “Tell me more.”
“So far, these shoes have taken me to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland. I went to Liverpool to meet The Beatles in 1962. These shoes have even put me on a B-24 bomber in the sky over Burma during World War II, no less. That’s where I got shot down with my uncle…”
Spivey puts both hands to shush me down.
“What do you mean, meet beetles?”
“No, The Beatles.”
“The… what?”
“The most famous rock ‘n’ roll band of all time.” I look around. “Wait a sec, what year is this?”
“Nineteen fifty-nine.”
“Ah, that’s why,” I say. “Nobody knows about The Beatles until around 1962. That’s when I met them. In September 1962.”
Spivey regards me with a delighted expression. “So, is it my understanding that you are a time traveler of sorts?”
“I suppose I am,” I say. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“I see. How had you thought of it?”
I pluck the turquoise disk from my watch pocket, hold it up and point to the hole in its center. “Portals. I’m traveling through portals.”
“Portals through time?”
I shrug. “I guess. Portals to various scenarios. But, yes, I suppose I’ve gone back in time because these scenarios are in the past.”
“But September 1962 is in the future.”
I shake my head. “To you, yes. But to me, 1962 is the past.”
Spivey seems riveted. “How so?”
“Because where I come from it’s 2023.”
Spivey stirs. The spinning wheels on his desk chair almost spill him onto the floor. “So,” this good doctor asks, “Why are you here?”
“I traveled through a portal, uh, into a book.”
“A book, you say?”
“A work of fiction, a novel.”
“So… this…” Spivey waves his arms around. “If I’m hearing you correctly, where you are now—right here— is not real, but just make believe?”
“Exactly!” I say, pleased that he figured this out.
Dr. Spivey digests this. “Which means you’re saying I don’t really exist. That I am just a character in a book?”
“Exactly!”
Spivey smiles again. “But I’m sitting here, real as can be. This room is real. Miss Ratched is real…”
“No.” I shake my head vigorously. “None of it is real. It’s all in a book. Fiction.”
“And what book would that be?”
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“One flew over the… what?”
“Cuckoo’s nest. That is what this place is, full of cuckoos.”
“This is all very imaginative,” says Spivey, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “On what do you base this belief of yours?”
“It’s not a belief,” I say. “It’s the truth.”
“How do you do this, this portal traveling?” he asks, changing gears.
“I told you,” I say. “My new shoes.” I pause. “I have no control over where they take me.”
“I see,” says Spivey, studying the multi-colored wingtips. “Have you considered taking them off?”
Until this moment, I really hadn’t considered removing them. But then I realized removing these shoes right now, in this place, could potentially get me stuck here.
Spivey snaps his fingers, as if he’s trying to awaken me from a trance. “Suddenly, you are here. And I—and everyone in this facility—are just characters in your book?”
“Heavens no,” I say. “Not my book. Someone else’s book.”
“So what you are telling me,” says Spivey, “is that I am hallucinating your presence here—hallucinating everything.”
“No, no, no,” I say, “it’s me that’s hallucinating.”
It starts to dawn on me that I am in the exact wrong place for talking about my predicament.
The lights in Spivey’s office dim for a couple of seconds and brighten again.
I shake my head. “Shock treatment for McMurphy?”
“How do you know that?” demands Spivey.
“It’s in the book. And I’ll tell you something else,” I add, with smug satisfaction. “McMurphy, there man you are zapping, is the star of this book.”
“Very interesting.” Spivey folds his arms. “You know what I think?”
It seems like a loaded question so I do not respond.
“I think,” Spivey continues, “that you are suffering from paranoid delusions. I don’t know how you got here, but the good news is, you are in the right place.” He smiles triumphantly.
I shudder.
Says Spivey, “Out of professional curiosity, who, may I ask, is the author of the book you think I’m in?”
“Ken Kesey.”
“Really?”
“Truly.”
Spivey grins. “Mister Kesey happens to be one of our employees. He works the night shift. Perhaps you met him during your, uh, inspection?”
I shake my head “Where are we?”
“Conversationally?”
“No, I mean geographically.”
“Well, didn’t Mister Kesey tell you in his book?”
For a moment, I think Dr. Spivey is starting to believe me. “I’m not sure where it takes place.”
Nurse Ratched enters, whispers into Dr. Spivey’s ear and quickly departs.
“We’re in Menlo Park, California,” says Dr. Spivey. “I just learned that you are not a patient here. But I think we can help you if you would like to stay.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s not that I think they can be of any help to me. But in the absence of committal papers, they are not allowed to keep me here.
“We have a special program, sponsored by the United States Government. Maybe you heard about it from Mister Kesey and that’s why you’re here?”
I remain silent.
“We need volunteers for our program,” Spivey adds. “Might you be interested?”
“Would I get to meet Ken Kesey?”
Dr. Spivey nods. “Aside from working night shift, he is also a volunteer for our special program.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“We call it MKUltra,” says Spivey. “A scientific study into altered mental states.” He winks. “Kind of like what you’re already experiencing. In fact, when you first started talking, I thought maybe you were already one of our volunteers that got lost and ended up in this ward by accident.”
I look Spivey in the eye. “I’d like to speak with Mister Kesey before deciding whether or not to sign up as a volunteer.”