Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely' I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for 1
Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish mee.
My favorite poem of John Donne's; it came up into me, into my mind, as I watched Bill Lundborg feed my worn old cat.
And I laugh at God, I thought; I make no sense out of what Tim teaches and believes, and the torment he feels over these various issues. I am fooling myself; in my own labored way, I do understand. Look at him serve that ignorant cat. He—this child—would have been a veterinarian, if they hadn't maimed him, shredded up his mind. What had Kirsten told me? He is afraid to drive; he stops taking out the garbage; he will not bathe and then he cries. I cry, too, I thought, and sometimes I let the trash pile up, and one time I nearly got sideswiped on Hoffman and had to pull over. Lock me up, I thought; lock up us all. This, then, is Kirsten's affliction, having this boy for her son?
Bill said, "Is there anything else I can feed her? She's still hungry."
"Anything you see in the fridge," I said. "Would you like something to eat?"
"No thanks." Again he stroked the awful old cat—a cat who never gave the time of day to any person. He has made this animal tame, I thought, as he himself is: tame.
"Did you come here on the bus?" I said.
"Yes." He nodded. "I had to surrender my driver's license. I used to drive, but—" He became silent.
"I take the bus," I said.
"I had a real great car," Bill said "A '56 Chevy. A stick shift with an eight, the big eight they made; it was only the second year Chevrolet made an eight; the first year was '55."
"Those are very valuable cars," I said.
"Yes; Chevrolet had changed to that new body-style. After the old higher, shorter body-style they used so long. The difference between a '55 and a '56 Chevy is in the front grille; if the grille includes the turn-signal lights, you can tell it's a '56."
"Where are you living?" I said. "In the City?"
"I'm not living anywhere. I got out of Napa last week. They let me out because Kirsten is sick. I hitched down here. A man gave me a ride in his Stingray." He smiled. "You have to take those 'Vettes out on the freeway every week or they build up carbon deposits in the mill. He was blowing carbon out the whole way. What I don't like about a 'Vette is the fiberglass body; you can't really repair it." He added, "But they certainly are good-looking. His was white. I forget the year, although he told me. We got it up to a hundred, but the cops pace you a lot when you're in a 'Vette, hoping you'll exceed the limit. We had a Highway Patrol after us part of the way but he had to turn his siren on and take off; an emergency of some kind, somewhere. We flipped him off as he went by. He was real disgusted but he couldn't cite us; he was in too much of a hurry."
I asked him, then, as tactfully as I could, why he had come to see me.
"I wanted to ask you something," Bill said. "I met your husband one time. You weren't home; you were working or something. He was here alone. Was his name Jeff?"
"Yes," I said.
"What I wanted to know is—" Bill hesitated. "Could you tell me why he killed himself?"
"There are a lot of factors involved in something like that." I seated myself at the kitchen table, facing him.
"I know he was in love with my mother."
"Oh," I said. "You do know that."
"Yes, Kirsten told me. Was that the main reason?"
"Perhaps," I said.
"What were the other reasons?"
I was silent.
"Would you tell me one thing," Bill said, "one particular thing? Was he mentally disturbed?"
"He had been in therapy. But not intensive therapy."
"I've been thinking about it," Bill said. "He was mad at his father because of Kirsten. A lot of it had to do with that. See, when you're in the hospital—a mental hospital—you know a lot of people who've tried suicide. Their wrists are all sawed on. That's always the way you can tell. The best way, when you do that, is up the arm in the direction the veins run." He showed me his bare arm, pointing. "The mistake most people make is cutting at right angles to the vein, down at the wrist. We had this one guy, he laid open his arm for like about seven inches and—" He paused, calculating. "Maybe as much as a quarter inch wide. But they still were able to sew it up. He had been in for months. He said one time in group therapy that all he wanted to be was a pair of eyes bugging out from the wall, so he could see everyone but no one could see him. Just an observer, not a part of what was going on, ever. Just watching and listening. He would have to be a pair of ears, too, to do that."
For the life of me I could think of nothing to say.
"Paranoids have a fear of being looked at," Bill said. "So invisibility would be important to them. There was this one lady, she couldn't eat in front of anyone. She always took her tray off to her room. I guess she thought eating was dirty." He smiled. I managed to smile back.
How strange this is, I thought. An eerie conversation, as if it is not actually taking place.
"Jeff was real hostile," Bill said. "Toward his father and toward Kirsten both, and maybe toward you, but I don't think as much; toward you, I mean. We talked about you that day I came over. I forget when that was. I had a two-day pass. I hitched down then, too. It's not that hard to hitch. A truck picked me up, even though it had a NO RIDERS sign posted. It was carrying some kind of chemicals, but not the toxic kind. If they're carrying flammable material or toxic material they know not to give you a ride, because if there is an accident and you're killed or poisoned then sometimes it voids their insurance."
Again I could think of nothing to say; I nodded.
"The law," Bill said, "in case of an accident where a hitchhiker is injured or killed, is that it's presumed he rode at his own risk. He took the chance. So because of that when you hitch if something happens you can't sue. That's California law. I don't know how it is in other states."
"Yes," I said. "Jeff felt a lot of anger toward Tim."
"Do you feel animosity toward my mother?"
After a pause, after I had thought it over, I said, "Yes. I really do."
"Why? It wasn't her fault. Any time a person kills himself, he has to take full responsibility. We learned that. You learn a lot in the hospital. You know a whole bunch of things that people on the outside never find out. It's a crash course in reality, which is the ultimate—" He gestured. "Paradox. Because the people there are there because, presumably, they don't face reality, and then they wind up in the hospital, the mental hospital, a state hospital like Napa, and have to face a whole lot more reality all of a sudden than other people ever have to do. And they face it very well. I've seen things I have been very proud of, patients helping other patients. One time this lady—she was like about in her fifties—said to me, 'Can I confide in you?' She swore me to secrecy. I promised not to say anything. She said, 'I'm going to kill myself tonight.' She told me how she was going to do it. This was not a locked ward. She had her car parked out in the lot and she had an ignition key they didn't know she had; they—the staff—thought they had all her keys but she kept this one back. So I thought it over, about what I should do. Should I tell Dr. Gutman? He was in charge of the ward. What I did was, I sneaked outside onto the lot—I knew which car was hers—and I removed the coil wire that runs—well, you wouldn't know. It runs between the coil and the distributor
. There's no way you can start an engine with that wire missing. It's easy to do. When you park your car in a really rough neighborhood and you're afraid someone will steal it, you can pull out that wire; it comes out real easy. She cranked it until the battery ran down and then she came back in. She was furious but later on she thanked me." He pondered and then said, half to himself, "She was going to ram an ongoing car on the Bay Bridge. So I saved him, too; the other car. It might have been like a station wagon full of kids."
"My God," I said faintly.
"It was a decision I had to make in a hurry." Bill said. "Once I knew she had that key, I had to do something. It was a big Merc. Silver-colored. Almost new. She had a lot of money. In a situation like that if you don't act, it's the same as helping them."
I said, "It might have been better to tell the doctor."
"No." He shook his head. "Then she would have—well, it's hard to explain. She knew that I did it to save her life, not to get her in trouble. If I had told the staff—especially if I had told Dr. Gutman—she would have interpreted that as me just trying to get her kept there another couple of months. But this way they never knew, so they didn't hold her any longer than they originally intended to. When I got out—she got out before I did—one time she came by my apartment ... I gave her my address; anyhow, she came by—she was driving that same Merc; I recognized it when she pulled up—and she wanted to know how I was getting along."
"How were you getting along?" I said.
"Not good at all. I didn't have money to pay my rent; they were going to evict me. She had a whole lot of money; her husband was rich. They owned a bunch of apartment buildings up and down California, as far down as San Diego. She went back to her car and came back and handed me a roll of what I thought were nickels. You know; a roll of coins. After she left, I opened the roll at one end and they were gold coins. She told me later she kept a lot of her money in the form of gold. It was from some British colony. She told me when I sold them to a coin dealer to specify that they were 'B.U.' That stands for 'bright uncirculated.' It's a dealers' term. A bright uncirculated coin is worth more than whatever the opposite would be. I got about twelve dollars a coin, when I sold them. I kept one, but I lost it. I got something like six hundred dollars for the roll, with that one coin missing." Turning, he scrutinized the stove. "Your water's boiling."
I poured the water into the Silex coffee pot.
"Unboiled coffee," Bill said, "filtered coffee, is a lot better for you than the percolated kind, where it shoots back up to the top and starts all over again."
"That's true," I said.
Bill said, "I've been thinking a lot about your husband's death. He seemed like a really nice person. Sometimes that's a problem."
"Why?" I said.
"Much mental illness stems from people repressing their hostility and trying to be nice, too nice. The hostility can't be repressed forever. Everybody has it; it has to come out."
"Jeff was very calm," I said. "It was hard to get him to fight. Marital quarrels; I was usually the one who got mad."
"Kirsten says he had been dropping acid."
"I don't think that's true," I said. "That he dropped acid."
"A lot of people who get messed up get messed up from drugs. You see a lot of them in the hospital. They don't always stay that way, contrary to what you hear. Most of it is due to malnutrition; people on drugs forget to eat and, when they do eat, they eat junk food. The munchies. Everyone who does drugs gets the munchies, unless, of course, they're taking amphetamines, in which case they don't eat at all. Much of what looks like toxic brain psychosis in speed freaks is in fact a deficiency in their galvanic electrolytes. Which are easily replaced."
"What sort of work do you do?" I said. He seemed less ill at ease, now. More confident in what he was saying.
"I'm a painter," Bill said.
"What artist is your work—"
"Car painting." He smiled gently. "Spray painting. At Leo Shine's. In San Mateo. 'I'll spray your car any color you want it for forty-nine-fifty and give you a written six-month guarantee.'" He laughed and I laughed, too; I had seen Leo Shine's commercials on TV.
"I loved my husband very much," I said.
"Was he going to be a minister?"
"No. I don't know what he was going to be."
"Maybe he wasn't going to be anything. I'm taking a course in computer programming. Right now I'm studying algorithms. An algorithm is nothing but a recipe, like when you bake a cake. It is a sequence of incremental steps sometimes utilizing built-in repeats; certain steps have to be reiterated. One primary aspect of an algorithm is that it be meaningful; it's very easy to unintentionally ask a computer a question it can't answer, not because it's dumb but because the question really has no answer."
"I see," I said.
"Would you consider this a meaningful question," Bill said. "Give me the highest number short of two."
"Yes," I said. "That's meaningful."
"It's not." He shook his head. "There is no such number."
"I know the number," I said. "It's one-point-nine-plus—" I broke off.
"You would have to carry the sequence of digits into infinity. The question is not intelligible. So the algorithm is faulty. You're asking the computer to do something that can't be done. Unless your algorithm is intelligible, the computer can't respond, but it will attempt to respond, by and large."
"Garbage in," I said, "garbage out."
"Right." He nodded.
"I'm going to ask you a question," I said. "In return. I'm going to give you a proverb, a common proverb. If you are not familiar with the proverb—"
"How much time will I have?"
"This isn't timed. Just tell me what the proverb means. 'A new broom sweeps clean.' What does that mean?"
After a pause, Bill said, "It means that old brooms wear out and you have to throw them away."
I said, "'The burnt child is afraid of fire.'"
Again he was silent a moment, his forehead wrinkling. "Children easily get hurt, especially around a stove. Like this stove here." He indicated my kitchen stove.
"'It never rains but it pours.'" But I could tell already. Bill Lundborg had a thinking impairment; he could not explain the proverb: instead he repeated it back in concrete terms, the terms in which it itself had been phrased.
"Sometimes," he said haltingly, "there's a lot of rain. Especially when you don't expect it."
"'Vanity, thy name is woman.'"
"Women are vain. That's not a proverb. It's a quotation from something."
"You're right," I said. "You did fine." But in truth, in very truth, as Tim would say, as Jesus used to say, or the Zadokites said, this person was totally schizophrenic, according to the Benjamin Proverb Test. I felt a vague, haunting ache, realizing this, seeing him sit there so young and physically healthy, and so unable to desymbolize, to think abstractly. He had the classic schizophrenic cognitive impairment; his ratiocination was limited to the concrete.
You can forget about being a computer programmer, I said to myself. You will be spray-painting low-rider cars until the Eschatological Judge arrives, and frees us, one and all, from our cares. Frees you and frees me; frees everyone. And then your damaged mind will, presumably, be healed. Cast into a passing pig, to be run over the edge of a cliff, to doom. Where it belongs.
"Excuse me," I said. I walked from the kitchen, through the house, to the farthest point from Bill Lundborg possible, leaned against the wall with my face pressed into my arm. I could feel my tears against my skin—warm tears—but I made no sound.
7
I VIEWED MYSELF AS Jeff, weeping off by myself in the margins of the house, weeping over someone I cared about. Where is this going to end? I wondered. It has to end. And it seems not to have an end; it just goes on: a sequence of explosions, like Bill Lundborg's computer trying to figure out what the highest number less than an integer is, a hopeless task.
Not long thereafter, Kirsten came out of the hospital; she gradual
ly recovered from her digestive ailment, upon which cure having happened, she and Tim returned to England. Before they left the United States, I found out from her that her son Bill had gone to jail. The U.S. Postal Service had hired him and then fired him; his response to being fired had been to smash the plate glass windows of the San Mateo substation. He smashed them with his bare knuckles. Obviously he was crazy again. If it could be said at any time that he was ever not.
So I lost track of everyone: I did not see Bill again after that day he visited me; I saw Kirsten and Tim a number of times—Kirsten more often than Tim—and then I found myself alone, and not very happy, and wondering and speculating about the sense underlying the world, assuming that any sense existed. Like Bill Lundborg's periods of sanity, it was a dubitable thing.
The law office and candle shop, one day, ceased to be in business. My two employers got busted on drug charges. I had foreseen it. More money could be made in the sale of cocaine than in the sale of candles. Cocaine at that time did not enjoy the fad popularity that it enjoys now, but the demand even so amounted to an inducement that my employers could not refuse. The authorities managed to accommodate them in their inability to say no to big bucks: each man got a five-year prison term. I drifted for a few months, drawing unemployment compensation, and then I squeezed in as a retail record clerk at the Musik Shop on Telegraph Avenue near Channing Way, which is where I work now.
Psychosis takes many forms. You can be psychotic about everything or you can concentrate on one particular topic. Bill represented ubiquitous dementia; madness had infiltrated every part of his life, or so I presume.
The fixed idea kind of madness is fascinating, if you are inclined toward viewing with interest something that is palpably impossible and yet nonetheless exists. Over-valence is a notion about possibilities in the human mind, possibilities of something going wrong, that did it not exist it could not be supposed. I mean by this simply that you have to see an over-valent idea at work fully to appreciate it. The older term is idée fixe. Over-valent idea expresses it better, because this is a term derived from mechanics and chemistry and biology; it is a graphic term and it involves the notion of power. The essence of valence is power and that is what I am talking about; I speak of an idea that once it comes into the human mind, the mind, I mean, of a given human being, it not only never goes away, it also consumes everything else in the mind so that, finally, the person is gone, the mind as such is gone, and only the over-valent idea remains.