We Can Build You

  “I did hear that,” I admitted. Everyone knew the heroic story of the President’s bout with mental illness in his mid-teens, with his subsequent triumph during his twenties.

  “And now, before we separate,” Doctor Nisea said, “I’d like to tell you a little about the Magna Mater type of schizophrenia.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’d be anxious to hear.”

  “As a matter of fact it has been my special interest,” Doctor Nisea said. “I did several monographs on it. You know the Anderson theory which identifies each subform of schizophrenia with a subform of religion.”

  I nodded. The Anderson view of ‘phrenia had been popularized in almost every slick magazine in America; it was the current fashion.

  “The primary form which ‘phrenia takes is the heliocentric form, the sun-worship form where the sun is deified, is seen in fact as the patient’s father. You have not experienced that. The heliocentric form is the most primitive and fits with the earliest known religion, solar worship, including the great heliocentric cult of the Roman period, Mithraism. Also the earlier Persian solar cult, the worship of Mazda.”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding.

  “Now, the Magma Mater, the form you have, was the great female deity cult of the Mediterranean at the time of the Mycenaean Civilization. Ishtar, Cybele, Attis, then later Athene herself … finally the Virgin Mary. What has happened to you is that your anima, that is, the embodiment of your unconsciousness, its archetype, has been projected outward, onto the cosmos, and there it is perceived and worshiped.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “There, it is experienced as a dangerous, hostile, and incredibly powerful yet attractive being. The embodiment of all the pairs of opposites: it possesses the totality of life, yet is dead; all love, yet is cold; all intelligence, yet is given to a destructive analytical trend which is not creative; yet it is seen as the source of creativity itself. These are the opposites which slumber in the unconscious, which are transcended by gestalts in consciousness. When the opposites are experienced directly, as you are experiencing them, they cannot be fathomed or dealt with; they will eventually disrupt your ego and annihilate it, for as you know, in their original form they are archetypes and cannot be assimilated by the ego.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “So this battle is the great struggle of the conscious mind to come to an understanding with its own collective aspects, its unconsciousness, and is doomed to fail. The archetypes of the unconscious must be experienced indirectly, through the anima, and in a benign form free of their bipolar qualities. For this to come about, you must hold an utterly different relationship to your unconscious; as it stands, you are passive and it possesses all the powers of decision.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Your consciousness has been impoverished so that it no longer can act. It has no authority except that which it derives from unconsciousness, and right now it is split off from unconsciousness. So no rapport can be established by way of the anima.” Doctor Nisea concluded, “You have a relatively mild form of ‘phrenia. But it is still a psychosis and still requires treatment at a Federal clinic. I’d like to see you again, when you get back from Kansas City; I know the improvement in your condition will be phenomenal.” He smiled at me with genuine warmth, and I smiled back at him. Standing, he held out his hand and we shook.

  I was on my way to the Kasanin Clinic at Kansas City.

  In a formal hearing before witnesses Doctor Nisea presented me with a summons, asking if there was any reason why I should not be taken at once to Kansas City. These legal formalities had a chilly quality that made me more anxious to be on my way than ever. Nisea offered me a twenty-four-hour period in which to conclude my business affairs, but I declined it; I wanted to leave at once. In the end, we settled on eight hours. Plane reservations were made for me by Nisea’s staff and I left the Bureau in a taxi, to return to Ontario until it was time for me to take my big trip east.

  I had the taxi take me to Maury’s house, where I had left a good part of my possessions. Soon I was at the door knocking.

  No one was home. I tried the knob; it was unlocked. So I let myself in to the silent, deserted house.

  There in the bathroom was the tile mural which Pris had been working on that first night. It was done, now. For a time I stood staring up at it, marveling at the colors and the design itself, the mermaid and fish, the octopus with shoe-button bright eyes: she had finished him at last.

  One blue tile had become loose. I plucked it entirely off, rubbed the sticky stuff from its back, and put it in my coat pocket.

  In case I should forget you, I thought to myself. You and your bathroom mural, your mermaid with pink-tiled tits, your many lovely and monstrous creations bobbing and alive beneath the surface of the water. The placid, eternal water … she had done the line above my head, almost eight feet high. Above that, sky. Very little of it; the sky played no role in the scheme of creation, here.

  As I stood there I heard from the front of the house a thumping and banging. Someone was after me, but I remained where I was. What did it matter? I waited, and presently Maury Rock came rushing in, panting; seeing me he stopped short.

  “Louis Rosen,” he said. “And in the bathroom.”

  “I’m just leaving.”

  “A neighbor phoned me at the office; she saw you pull up in a cab and enter and she knew I wasn’t home.”

  “Spying on me.” I was not surprised. “They all are, everywhere I go.” I continued to stand, hands in my pockets, gazing up at the wall of color.

  “She just thought I ought to know. I figured it was you.” He saw, then, my suitcase and the articles I had collected. “You’re really nuts. You barely get back here from Seattle—when did you get in? Couldn’t be before this morning. And now you’re off again somewhere else.”

  I said, “I have to go, Maury. It’s the law.”

  He stared at me, his jaw dropping gradually; then he flushed. “I’m sorry, Louis. I mean, saying you were a nut.”

  “Yes, but I am. I took the Benjamin Proverb Test and the block thing today and couldn’t pass either one. The commitment’s already been served on me.”

  Rubbing his jaw he murmured, “Who turned you in?”

  “My father and Chester.”

  “Hell’s bells. Your own blood.”

  “They saved me from paranoia. Listen, Maury.” I turned to face him. “Do you know where she is?”

  “If I did, honest to god, Louis, I’d tell you. Even if you have been certified.”

  “You know where they’re sending me for therapy?”

  “Kansas City?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe you’ll find her there. Maybe the mental health people caught up with her and sent her back and forgot to let me know about it.”

  “Yeah, maybe so,” I said.

  “Coming up to me he whacked me on the back. “Good luck, you son of a bitch. I know you’ll pull out of it. You got ‘phrenia, I presume; that’s all there is, anymore.”

  “I’ve got Magna Mater ‘phrenia.” Reaching into my coat I got out the tile and showed it to him, saying, “To remember her. I hope you don’t mind; it’s your house and mural, after all.”

  “Take it. Take a whole fish. Take a tit.” He started toward the mermaid. “No kidding, Louis; we’ll pry a pink tit loose and you can carry that around with you, okay?”

  “This is fine.”

  We both stood awkwardly facing each other for a time.

  “How’s it feel to be ‘phrenic?” Maury said at last.

  “Bad, Maury. Very, very bad.”

  “That’s what I thought; that’s what Pris always said. She was glad to get over it.”

  “That going to Seattle, that was it coming on. What they call catatonic excitement, a sense of urgency, that you have to do something. It always turns out to be the wrong thing; it accomplishes nothing. And you realize that and then you have panic and then you get it, the real psychosis. I heard voices
and saw—” I broke off.

  “What did you see?”

  “Pris.”

  “Keerist,” Maury said.

  “Will you drive me to the airport?”

  “Oh sure, buddy. Sure.” He nodded vigorously.

  “I don’t have to go until late tonight. So maybe we could have dinner together. I don’t feel like seeing my family again, after what happened; I’m sort of ashamed.”

  Maury said, “How come you speak so rationally if you’re a ‘phrenic?”

  “I’m not under tension right now, so I’ve been able to focus my attention. That’s what an attack of schizophrenia is, a weakening of attention so that unconscious processes gain mastery and take over the field. They capture awareness, very archaic processes, archetypal, such as nonschizophrenics haven’t had since they were five.”

  “You think crazy things, like everyone’s against you and you’re the center of the universe?”

  “No,” I said. “Doctor Nisea explained to me that it’s the heliocentric schizophrenics who—”

  “Nisea? Ragland Nisea? Of course; by law you’d have to see him. He’s the one who sent Pris up back in the beginning; he gave her the Vigotsky-Luria Block Test in his own office, personally. I always wanted to meet him.”

  “Brilliant man. And very humane.”

  “Are you dangerous?”

  “Only if I’m riled.”

  “Should I leave you, then?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “But I’ll see you tonight, here at the house, for dinner. About six; that’ll give us time to make the flight.”

  “Can I do anything for you? Get you anything?”

  “Naw. Thanks anyhow.”

  Maury hung around the house for a little while and then I heard the front door slam. The house became silent once more. I was alone, as before.

  Presently I resumed my slow packing.

  Maury and I had dinner together and then he drove me to the Boise airfield in his white Jaguar. I watched the streets go by, and every woman that I saw looked—for an instant, at least—like Pris; each time I thought it was but it wasn’t. Maury noticed my absorption but said nothing.

  The flight which the mental health people had obtained for me was first-class and on the new Australian rocket, the C-80. The Bureau, I reflected, certainly had plenty of the public’s funds to disburse. It took only half an hour to reach the Kansas City airport, so before nine that night I was stepping from the rocket, looking around me for the mental health people who were supposed to receive me.

  At the bottom of the ramp a young man and woman approached me, both of them wearing gay, bright Scotch plaid coats. These were my party; in Boise I had been instructed to watch for the coats.

  “Mr. Rosen,” the young man said expectantly.

  “Right,” I said, starting across the field toward the building.

  One of them fell in on either side of me. “A bit chilly tonight,” the girl said. They were not over twenty, I thought; two clear-eyed youngsters who undoubtedly had joined the FBMH out of idealism and were doing their heroic task right this moment. They walked with brisk, eager steps, moving me toward the baggage window, making low-keyed conversation about nothing in particular…. I would have felt relaxed by it except that in the glare of the beacons which guided the ships in I could already see that the girl looked astonishingly like Pris.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  “Julie,” she said. “And this is Ralf.”

  “Did you—do you remember a patient you had here a few months ago, a young woman from Boise named Pris Frauen-zimmer?”

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said, “I just came to the Kasanin Clinic last week; we both did.” She indicated her companion. “We just joined the Mental Health Corps this spring.”

  “Do you enjoy it?” I asked. “Did it work out the way you had expected?”

  “Oh, it’s terribly rewarding,” the girl said breathlessly. “Isn’t it, Ralf?” He nodded. “We wouldn’t drop out for anything.”

  “Do you know anything about me?” I asked, as we stood waiting for the baggage machine to serve up my suitcases.

  “Only that Doctor Shedd will be working with you,” Ralf said.

  “And he’s superb,” Julie said. “You’ll love him. And he does so much for people; he has performed so many cures!”

  My suitcases appeared; Ralf took one and I took the other and we started through the building toward the street entrance.

  “This is a nice airport,” I said. “I never saw it before.”

  “They just completed it this year,” Ralf said. “It’s the first able to handle both domestic and extra-t flights; you’ll be able to leave for the Moon right from here.”

  “Not me,” I said, but Ralf did not hear me.

  Soon we were in a ‘copter, the property of the Kasanin Clinic, flying above the rooftops of Kansas City. The air was cool and crisp and below us a million lights glowed in countless patterns and aimless constellations which were not patterns at all, only clusters.

  “Do you think,” I said, “that every time someone dies, a new light winks on in Kansas City?”

  Both Ralf and Julie smiled at my witticism.

  “Do you two know what would have happened to me,” I said, “if there was no compulsory mental health program? I’d be dead by now. This all saved my life, literally.”

  To that the two of them smiled once more.

  ‘Thank god the McHeston Act passed Congress,” I said.

  They both ‘nodded solemnly.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” I said, “to have the catatonic urgency, that craving. It drives you on and on and then all at once you collapse; you know you’re not right in the head, you’re living in a realm of shadows. In front of my father and brother I had intercourse with a girl who didn’t exist except in my mind. I heard people commenting about us, while we were doing it, through the door.”

  Ralf asked, “You did it through the door?”

  “He heard them commenting, he means,” Julie said. “The voices that took note of what he was doing and expressed disapproval. Isn’t that it, Mr. Rosen?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and it’s a measure of the collapse of my ability to communicate that you had to translate that. At one time I could easily have phrased that in a clear manner. It wasn’t until Doctor Nisea got to the part about the rolling stone that I saw what a break had come about between my personal language and that of my society. And then I understood all the trouble I had been having up to then.”

  “Ah yes,” Julie said, “number six in the Benjamin Proverb Test.”

  “I wonder which proverb Pris missed years ago,” I said, “that caused Nisea to single her out.”

  “Who is Pris?” Julie asked.

  “I would think,” Ralf said, “that she’s the girl with whom he had intercourse.”

  “You hit the nail on the head,” I told him. “She was here, once, before either of you. Now she’s well again; they discharged her on parole. She’s my Great Mother, Doctor Nisea says. My life is devoted to worshiping Pris as if she were a goddess. I’ve projected her archetype onto the universe; I see nothing but her, everything else to me is unreal. This trip we’re taking, you two, Doctor Nisea, the whole Kansas City Clinic—it’s all just shadows.”

  There seemed to be no way to continue the conversation after what I had said. So we rode the rest of the distance in silence.

  18

  The following day at ten o’clock in the morning I met Doctor Albert Shedd in the steam bath at Kasanin Clinic. The patients lolled in the billowing steam nude, while the members of the staff padded about wearing blue trunks—evidently a status symbol or badge of office; certainly an indication of their difference from us.

  Doctor Shedd approached me, looming up from the white clouds of steam, smiling friendlily at me; he was elderly, at least seventy, with wisps of hair sticking up like bent wires from his round, wrinkled head. His skin, at least in the steam bath, was a glistening
pink.

  “Morning, Rosen,” he said, ducking his head and eyeing me slyly, like a little gnome. “How was your trip?”

  ‘Tine, Doctor.”

  “No other planes followed you here, I take it,” he said, chuckling.

  I had to admire his joke, because it implied that he recognized somewhere in me a basically sane element which he was reaching through the medium of humor. He was spoofing my paranoia, and, in doing so, he slightly but subtly de-fanged it.

  “Do you feel free to talk in this rather informal atmosphere?” Doctor Shedd asked.

  “Oh sure. I used to go to a Finnish steam bath all the time when I was in the Los Angeles area.”

  “Let’s see.” He consulted his clipboard. “You’re a piano salesman. Electronic organs, too.”

  “Right, the Rosen Electronic Organ—the finest in the world.”

  “You were in Seattle on business at the onset of your schizophrenic interlude, seeing a Mr. Barrows. According to this deposition by your family.”

  “Exactly so.”

  “We have your school psych-test records and you seem to have had no difficulty … they go up to nineteen years and then there’s the military service records; no trouble there either. Nor in subsequent applications for employment. It would appear to be a situational schizophrenia, then, rather than a life-history process. You were under unique stress, there in Seattle, I take it?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding vigorously.

  “It might never occur again in your lifetime; however, it constitutes a warning—it is a danger sign and must be dealt with.” He scrutinized me for a long time, through the billowing steam. “Now, it might be that in your case we could equip you to cope successfully with your environment by what is called controlled fugue therapy. Have you heard of this?”

  “No, Doctor.” But I liked the sound of it.

  “You would be given hallucinogenic drugs—drugs which would induce your psychotic break, bring on your hallucinations. For a very limited period each day. This would give your libido fulfillment of its regressive cravings which at present are too strong to be borne. Then very gradually we would diminish the fugal period, hoping eventually to eliminate it. Some of this period would be spent here; we would hope that later on you could return to Boise, to your job, and obtain out-patient therapy there. We are far too overcrowded here at Kasanin, you know.”