We Can Build You

  When I got back to the bed I found Pris standing up on it; she was unzipping her skirt. She drew her skirt up over her head and tossed it away from her, onto a chair; she was undressing. Now she kicked off her shoes.

  “Who else can teach me, Louis, if not you?” she said. “Pull the covers back.” She began taking off her underwear, but I stopped her. “Why not?”

  “I’m going mad,” I said. “I can’t stand this. I have to go back to Boise and see Doctor Horstowski; this can’t go on, not here with my family in the same room.”

  Pris said gently, “Tomorrow we’ll fly back to Boise. But not now.” She dragged the bedspread and blankets and top sheet back, got in, and, picking up her cigarette again, lay naked, not covering herself up but simply lying there. “I’m so tired, Louis. Stay with me here tonight.”

  “I just can’t,” I said.

  “Then take me back to where you’re staying.”

  “I can’t do that either; the Lincoln is there.”

  “Louis,” she said, “I just want to go to sleep; lie down and cover us up. They won’t bother us. Don’t be afraid of them. I’m sorry the Lincoln had one of its fits. Don’t blame me for that, Louis; it has them anyhow, and I did save its life. It’s my child … isn’t it?”

  “I guess you could put it like that,” I said.

  “I brought it to life, I mothered it. I’m very proud of that. When I saw that filthy Booth object … all I wanted to do was kill it on the spot. As soon as I saw it I knew what it was for. Could I be your mother, too? I wish I had brought you to life like I did it; I wish I had brought all kinds of people into life … everybody. I give life, and tonight I took it, and that’s a good thing, if you can bear to do that. It takes a lot of strength to take someone’s life, don’t you think, Louis?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I seated myself beside her on the bed once more.

  In the darkness she reached up and stroked my hair from my eyes. “I have that power over you, to give you life or take it away from you. Does that scare you? You know it’s true.”

  “It doesn’t scare me now,” I said. “It did once, when I first realized it.”

  “It never scared me,” Pris said. “If it did I’d lose the power; isn’t that so, Louis? And I have to keep it; someone has to have it.”

  I did not answer. Cigar smoke billowed around me, making me sick, making me aware of my father and my brother, both of them intently watching. “Man must cherish some illusions,” my father said, puffing away rapidly, “but this is ridiculous.” Chester nodded to that.

  “Pris,” I said aloud.

  “Listen to that, listen to that,” my father said excitedly, “he’s calling her; he’s talking to her!”

  “Get out of here,” I said to my father and Chester. I waved my arms at them, but it did no good; neither of them stirred.

  “You must understand, Louis,” my father said, “I have sympathy for you, I see what Mr. Barrows doesn’t see, the nobility of your search.”

  Through the darkness and the babble of their voices I once more made out Pris; she had gathered her clothes in a ball and sat on the edge of the bed, hugging them. “Does it matter,” she said, “what anyone says or thinks about us? I wouldn’t worry about it; I wouldn’t let words become so real as that. Everybody on the outside is angry at us, Sam and Maury and all the rest of them. The Lincoln wouldn’t have sent you here if it wasn’t the right thing … don’t you know that?”

  “Pris,” I said, “I know it’ll be all right. We’re going to have a happy future.”

  She smiled at that; in the darkness I saw the flash of her teeth. It was a smile of great suffering and sorrow, and it seemed to me—just for a moment—that what I had seen in the Lincoln simulacrum had come from her. It was here so clearly, now, the pain that Pris felt. She had put it into her creation perhaps without intending to; perhaps without even knowing that it was there.

  “I love you,” I said to her.

  Pris rose to her feet, naked and cool and thin. She put her hands to the sides of my head and drew me down.

  “Mein Sohn,” my father was saying now to Chester, “er schlaft in dem Freiheit der Liebesnacht What I mean, he’s asleep, my boy is, in the freedom of a night of love, if you follow me.”

  “What’ll they say back in Boise?” Chester said irritably. “I mean, how can we go back home with him like this?”

  “Aw,” my father said reprovingly, “shut up, Chester; you don’t understand the depth of his psyche, what he finds. There’s a two-fold side to mental psychosis, it’s also a return to the original source that we’ve all turned away from. You better remember that, Chester, before you shoot off your mouth.”

  “Do you hear them?” I asked Pris.

  Standing there against me, her body arched back for me, Pris laughed a soft, compassionate laugh. She gazed up at me fixedly, without expression. And yet she was fully alert. For her, change and reality, the events of her life, time itself, all had at this moment ceased.

  Wonderingly, she lifted her hand and touched me on the cheek, brushed me with her fingertips.

  Quite close to the door Mrs. Nild said clearly, “We’ll get out of here, Mr. Rosen, and let you have the apartment.”

  From farther off I heard Sam Barrows mutter, “That girl in there is underdeveloped. Everything slides back out. What’s she doing there in the bedroom anyhow? Has she got that skinny body—” His voice faded.

  Neither Pris not I said anything. Presently we heard the front door of the apartment shut.

  “That’s nice of them,” my father said. “Louis, you should at least have thanked them. That Mr. Barrows is a gentleman, in spite of what he says; you can tell more about a person by what he does anyhow.”

  “You ought to be grateful to both of them,” Chester grumbled at me. Both he and my father glowered at me reprovingly, my father chewing on his cigar.

  I held Pris against me. And for me, that was all.

  17

  When my father and Chester got me back to Boise, the next day, they discovered that Doctor Horstowski could not—or did not want to—treat me. He did however give me several psychological tests for the purpose of diagnosis. One I remember involved listening to a tape of voices which mumbled at a distance, only a few phrases now and then being at all distinguishable. The task was to write down what each of their successive conversations was about.

  I think Horstowski made his diagnosis on my results in that test, because I heard each conversation as dealing with me. In detail I heard them outlining my faults, outlining my failings, analyzing me for what I was, diagnosing my behavior…. I heard them insulting both me and Pris and our relationship.

  All Horstowski said was merely, “Louis, each time you heard the word ‘this’ you thought they were saying Tris.’” That seemed to make him despondent. “And what you thought was ‘Louis’ was, generally speaking, the two words ‘do we.’” He glanced at me bleakly, and thereupon washed his hands of me.

  I was not out of the reach of the psychiatric profession, however, because Doctor Horstowski turned me over to the Federal Commissioner of the Bureau of Mental Health in Area Five, the Pacific Northwest. I had heard of him. His name was Doctor Ragland Nisea and it was his job to make final determination on all commitment proceedings originating in his area. Single-handed, since 1980, he had committed many thousands of disturbed people to the Bureau’s clinics scattered around the country; he was considered a brilliant psychiatrist and diagnostician and it had been a joke for years among us that sooner or later we would fall into Nisea’s hands; it was a joke everyone made and which a certain percentage of us lived to see come true.

  “You’ll find Doctor Nisea to be capable and sympathetic,” Horstowski told me as he drove me over to the Bureau’s office in Boise.

  “It’s nice of you to take me over,” I said.

  “I’m in and out of there every day. I’d have to make this trip anyhow. What I’m doing is sparing you the appearance in court and the jury costs …
as you know, Nisea makes final determination anyhow, and you’re better off in his hands than before a lay jury.”

  I nodded; it was so.

  “You’re not feeling hostile about this, are you?” Horstowski asked. “It’s no stigma to be placed in a Bureau clinic … happens every minute of the day—one out of nine people have crippling mental illness which makes it impossible for them …”He droned on; I paid no attention. I had heard it all before, on the countless TV ads, in the infinitely many magazine articles.

  But as a matter of fact I did feel hostile toward him for washing his hands of me and turning me over to the mental health people, even though I knew that by law he was required to if he felt I was psychotic. And I felt hostile toward everyone else, including the two simulacra; as we drove through the sunny, familiar streets of Boise between his office and the Bureau, I felt that everyone was a betrayer and enemy of mine, that I was surrounded by an alien, hating world.

  All this and much more had of course shown up in the tests which Horstowski had given me. In the Rorschach Test, for instance, I had interpreted each blot and picture as full of crashing, banging, jagged machinery designed from the start of time to swing into frantic, lethal motion with the intention of doing me bodily injury. In fact, on the drive over to the Bureau to see Doctor Nisea, I distinctly saw lines of cars following us, due no doubt to my being back in town; the people in the cars had been tipped off the moment I arrived at the Boise airport.

  “Can Doctor Nisea help me?” I asked Horstowski as we slid to the curb by a large, modern office building of many floors and windows. Now I had begun to feel acute panic. “I mean, the mental health people have all those new techniques which even you don’t have, all the latest—”

  “It depends on what you mean by help,” Horstowski said, opening the car door and beckoning me to accompany him into the building.

  So here I stood at last where so many had come before me: the Federal Bureau of Mental Health, in its diagnostic divison, the first step, perhaps, in a new era of my life.

  How right Pris had been when she had told me that I had within me a deeply unstable streak which someday might bring me into trouble. Hallucinated, weary and hopeless, I had at last been taken into tow by the authorities, as she herself had been a few years ago. I had not seen Horstowski’s diagnosis, but I knew without asking that he had found schizophrenic responses in me…. I felt them inside me, too. Why deny what was obvious?

  I was lucky that help, on a vast collective scale, was available for me; god knew I was wretched in such a state, close to suicide or to total collapse from which there might be no recovery. And they had caught it so early—there was a distinct hope for me. Specifically, I realized I was in the early catatonic excitement stage, before any permanent maladjustment pattern such as the dreaded hebephrenia or paranoia had set in. I had the illness in its simple, original form, where it was still accessible to therapy.

  I could thank my father and brother for their timely action.

  And yet, although I knew all this, I accompanied Horstowski into the Bureau’s office in a state of trembling dread, conscious still of my hostility and of the hostility all around me. I had insight and yet I did not; one part of me knew and understood, the rest seethed like a captured animal that yearns to get back to its own environment, its own familiar places.

  At this moment I could speak for only a small portion of my mind, while the remainder went its own way.

  This made clear to me the reasons why the McHeston Act was so necessary. A truly psychotic individual, such as myself, could on his own never seek aid; he had to be coerced by law. That was what it meant to be psychotic.

  Pris, I thought. You were like this, once; they caught you there in school, picked you out and separated you from the others, hauled you off as I’m being hauled off. And they did manage to restore you to your society. Can they succeed with me?

  And, I thought, will I be like you when the therapy is over? What former, more adjusted state in my history will they restore me to?

  How will I feel about you then? Will I remember you?

  And if I do, will I still care about you as I do now?

  Doctor Horstowski deposited me in the public waiting room and I sat for an hour with all the other bewildered, sick people, until at last a nurse came and summoned me. In a small inner office I was introduced to Doctor Nisea. He turned out to be a good-looking man not much older than myself, with soft brown eyes, thick hair that was well-combed, and a cautious, apologetic manner which I had never encountered outside the field of veterinary medicine. The man had a sympathetic interest which he displayed at once, making sure that I was comfortable and that I understood why I was there.

  I said, “lam here because I no longer have any basis by which I can communicate my wants and emotions to other humans.” While waiting I had been able to work it out exactly. “So for me there’s no longer any possibility of satisfying my needs in the world of real people; I have to turn inward to a fantasy life instead.”

  Leaning back in his chair Doctor Nisea studied me reflectively. “And this you want to change.”

  “I want to achieve satisfaction, the real kind.”

  “Have you nothing at all in common with other people?”

  “Nothing. My reality lies entirely outside the world that others experience. You, for instance; to you it would be a fantasy, if I told you about it. About her, I mean.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Pris,” I said.

  He waited, but I did not go on.

  “Doctor Horstowski talked to me briefly on the phone about you,” he said presently. “You apparently have the dynamism of difficulty which we call the Magna Mater type of schizophrenia. However, by law, I must administer first the James Benjamin Proverb Test to you and then the Soviet Vigotsky-Luria Block Test.” He nodded and from behind me a nurse appeared with note pad and pencil. “Now, I will give you several proverbs and you are to tell me what they mean. Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “’When the cat’s away the mice will play.’”

  I pondered and then said, “In the absence of authority there will be wrong-doing.”

  In this manner we continued, and I did all right until Doctor Nisea got to what turned out for me to be the fatal number six.

  “’A rolling stone gathers no moss.’”

  Try as I might I could not remember the meaning. At last I hazarded, “Well, it means a person who’s always active and never pauses to reflect—” No, that didn’t sound right. I tried again. “That means a man who is always active and keeps growing in mental and moral stature won’t grow stale.” He was looking at me more intently, so I added by way of clarification, “I mean, a man who’s active and doesn’t let grass grow under his feet, he’ll get ahead in life.”

  Doctor Nisea said, “I see.” And I knew that I had revealed, for the purposes of legal diagnosis, a schizophrenic thinking disorder.

  “What does it mean?” I asked. “Did I get it backward?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. The generally-accepted meaning of the proverb is the opposite of what you’ve given; it is generally taken to mean that a person who—”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I broke in. “I remember—I really knew it. A person who’s unstable will never acquire anything of value.”

  Doctor Nisea nodded and went on to the next proverb. But the stipulation of the statute had been met; I showed a formal thinking impairment.

  After the proverbs I made a stab at classifying the blocks, but without success. Both Doctor Nisea and I were relieved when I gave up and pushed the blocks away.

  “That’s about it, then,” Nisea said. He nodded to the nurse to leave. “We can go ahead and fill out the forms. Do you have a preference clinic-wise? In my opinion, the best of the lot is the Los Angeles one; although perhaps it’s because I know that better than the others. The Kasanin Clinic at Kansas City—”

  “Send me there,” I said eagerly.
>
  “Any special reason?”

  “I’ve had a number of close friends come out of there,” I said evasively.

  He looked at me as if he suspected there was a deeper reason.

  “And it has a good reputation. Almost everyone I know who’s been genuinely helped in their mental illness has been at Kasanin. Not that the other clinics aren’t good, but that’s the best. My aunt Gretchen, who’s at the Harry Stack Sullivan Clinic at San Diego; she was the first mentally ill person I knew, and there’ve been a lot since, naturally, because such a large part of the public has it, as we’re told every day on TV. There was my cousin Leo Roggis. He’s still in one of the clinics somewhere. My English teacher in high school, Mr. Haskins; he died in a clinic. There was an old Italian down the street from me who was on a pension, George Oliveri; he had catatonic excitements and they carted him off. I remember a buddy of mine in the Service, Art Boles; he had ‘phrenia and went to the Fromm-Reichmann Clinic at Rochester, New York. There was Alys Johnson, a girl I went with in college; she’s at Samuel Anderson Clinic in Area Three; that’s at Baton Rouge, La. And a man I worked for, Ed Yeats; he contracted ‘phrenia and that turned into acute paranoia. Waldo Danger field, another buddy of mine. Gloria Milstein, a girl I knew; she’s god knows where, but she was spotted by means of a psych test when she was applying for a typing job. The Federal people picked her up … she was short, dark-haired, very attractive, and no one ever guessed until that test showed up. And John Franklin Mann, a used car salesman I knew; he tested out as a dilapidated ‘phrenic and was carted off, I think to Kasanin, because he’s got relatives in Missouri. And Marge Morrison, another girl I knew. She’s out again; I’m sure she was cured at Kasanin. All of them who went to Kasanin seemed as good as new, to me, if not better; Kasanin didn’t merely meet the requirements of the McHeston Act; it genuinely healed. Or so it seemed to me.”

  Doctor Nisea wrote down Kasanin Clinic at K. C. on the Government forms and I breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes,” he murmured, “Kansas City is said to be good. The President spent two months there, you know.”