Rob Brown By: Cees Plomp

 
Once upon a time, in a town called Weston, there was a quiet little man called Rob Brown. He was an unassuming man who became an accountant, got married young, and had no children. He was a fairly intelligent person, as such things are reckoned, and he never made any serious mistakes with his life-except one. It was not too horrible a mistake for most people, and in many people’s case it would not be a mistake. What he did was to trust his wife.
 
She was, for six years, trustworthy, but unfortunately never truly happy with the level of comfort he was able to give her on his modest salary. When she met a man she found attractive and wealthy, she started a love affair with him, then managed to convince him it was worth his while to eliminate her husband in order to have her to himself. This new man, who will not be named, was a prestigious doctor from New York. He had some people who owed him favors, and he used them to have Rob Brown pronounced insane and committed to the nearest asylum, which happened to be the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. Rob tried to avoid it, but there was nothing he could do once pronounced mad. This was to be the worst and last part of Rob’s life.
 
In the asylum, he was unable to convince anyone that he was, in fact, sane. Soon, he stopped caring. All that mattered to him was staying away from doctors and orderlies at any time, in order to avoid “treatments”. He found those to be the worst part of living there, and he would often offer almost anything the other patients wanted if they would help him hide from the authorities. One day, this habit became his downfall, as it led to him being marked “antisocial”. While in some places, this would mean that the staff would try to get him to participate more in group activities, this place attempted nothing of the sort-indeed, group activities were seen by most workers as a waste of time. The end result of his antisocial diagnosis was that he was scheduled for the next lobotomy.
 
Lobotomies were the most feared procedure at the asylum, and with good reason. Although most patients did survive, despite the beliefs of the public, it usually ended up with the victim becoming a vegetable, or simply going into a coma. Rob did not know he was to be lobotomized until the day Walter Freeman arrived. Walter was famous for popularizing the new “ice-pick” method of lobotomies, which involved strapping a patient down, placing an ice-pick under their eyelids, and hammering it up into the front their skull with a mallet. Once it was in the brain, the pick would be swept from side to side, then removed.
 
Rob did not know any of this. All he knew was that for no reason he could see, doctors caught him in his room, sedated him, and took him strapped to a gurney to one of the operating rooms. Luckily for him, he was sedated enough not to care where he was taken, not to care when he saw a blood-covered man wheeled out on a gurney of his own, and not to care when he heard a voice (That of Walter Freeman, although he didn’t know it), call out “Bring in number 44!”. All he felt was a slight pressure on his eye when the pick was slipped in, then in his forehead when it was hammered into his brain. After that, he never felt-as we know it- again. Once his operation was done, he was wheeled out, and Walter called out “Bring in number 45!”. He lived a few more months, if you want to call it living, then quietly perished from starvation after he began refusing to eat. His wife, upon hearing the news, felt nothing but mild surprise. In fact, the only one to care about his death was his parents, who ended up bringing his body home to be buried, and attempting to have the lobotomies stopped. Sadly, their efforts were not enough to stop the operations, and Rob Brown was, in time, forgotten as anything but another victim of the Trans-Alleghney Lunatic Asylum.