by Marin Sardy
Theory of Mind
A term scientists use to refer to the human capacity to imagine oneself into the mind of another—to infer another’s mental states, gleaning thoughts, feelings, and intentions solely through context and actions and gestures. Theory of mind is commonly impaired in those who suffer from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. This seems to suggest that most of us can fairly easily imagine ourselves into others’ experiences, even those of the mentally ill.
* * *
—
This matters to me because when I talk about mental illness I am talking about my mother, about my brother. Terms like schizoaffective and schizophrenia and psychosis bring me into the cosmos of their delusions.
“That cat used to stand outside my door at night and talk to me,” my mother told me. She imitated the voice of the cat—a melodious sort of meowling that at times resembled the sounds of words. “It was prophetic,” she went on. “One time it said, ‘Don’t go outside tomorrow.’ So I stayed in.”
I can’t tell you what she saw, or heard, or felt, that led her to make these statements. When we with less spectacular minds, the so-called neurotypical, attempt to imagine the inner reality of someone like my mother, or anyone whose mind functions in ways dramatically different from our own, we usually fall drastically short. We assume similarity until proven otherwise. And when faced with evidence of difference, we struggle to incorporate it. We often refuse to accept it, clinging to the belief that other minds work more or less like our own.
Impairments in theory of mind, it seems, go both ways.
* * *
· · ·
The work of understanding sometimes requires finding another way in, a back door.
I’ll tell you: I had a dream, a startling dream. It happened while Will was out of town, gone from our house in Tucson for a few days to take his daughter to college. While he was away, the exterminator came, and I was glad. The previous week, plopping down on the sofa and pulling a small throw blanket over my body, I had discovered a slightly crushed, not entirely dead scorpion. I had lain frozen for a second before gingerly carrying the blanket outside, where I quickly snapped it to toss the scorpion over our yard’s back wall. When Will finds scorpions, on the other hand, he speaks to them and carefully scoops them into cups for release outside. A Scorpio himself, he fancies them to be his kin.
Family. Scorpions. Home. My dream fused all of it. The results were awesome and terrible.
I was in a large old building not unlike the mansion my grandparents once owned, a hacienda-style ranch house amid vast lawns. Windows were open, their long white curtains waving. Through those rooms I wandered until, looking down, I saw an enormous scorpion a foot or so before me. I stepped back; it hopped forward. I backed up again, but it pursued me. For a few moments I did a little dance to avoid it, until finally it stood still.
It was much larger than a real scorpion. It even seemed to expand slightly as I examined it. And it was not black or beige, but blue—a soft, cloudy, chalky blue tinged here and there with green and gray and purple. Its back, too, was unusual, consisting of several large chitinous scales like those on the tail of a lobster. Along the sides of its body ran its many legs. Then it unfurled and stood upright, revealing a scaled belly and a head that was not arachnoid at all—more human than arthropod, yet hard, helmeted. It jumped at me again.
* * *
—
Schizophrenic delusions share some features in common with a healthy brain’s nighttime dreams. Research suggests that both arise by way of the same processes—those of the brain’s default-mode network, which is active when the mind is released from the constraints of focusing on specific tasks. Default network activity enables distant regions of the brain to communicate and discern relationships among disparate ideas.
Perhaps this is why, like dreams, schizophrenic delusions seem to be filtered through the emotional preoccupations that color human days. I have read that the extraordinary dangers that can appear in such delusions often originate in smaller, more personal fears. My mother once believed that a comet was about to destroy the earth; she was at the time going through a divorce.
Some researchers hypothesize that random images, mismatched with strong emotions, feed the paranoia that has gripped people like my mother and brother. Perhaps this linkage is how the betrayals of schizophrenia begin. Perhaps it is how all betrayals begin.
* * *
—
“Don’t go on any boats for a while,” my mother said. “You might go through the locks to another colony. You could end up on the wrong planet.” What locks, what colony, what planet. I no longer ask. “Thousands of crabs were swept through the locks recently,” she exclaimed. “A whole migration!”
* * *
· · ·
In my dream, terrified, I searched for some barrier to put between the scorpion and me. I ran, but it pursued me from room to room until we came to an open outer door and it hopped outside. I slammed the door shut behind it. But the door was old weathered wood with no seal at the threshold, and the scorpion came—impossibly, given its size—right through a crack. I bolted to another room and tried the same thing with another outside door, but again, after jumping out, the scorpion slipped back in. Finally I found a door with a solid seal and shut it out for good, thinking: It won’t survive in the cold. Then suddenly the air outside was frigid, as if I had made it so. I looked through the door’s glass window and watched.
The scorpion stood fully upright, shocked by the icy air, and froze into something perfectly crystalline and still. Its head bore even more of a face now and it was nearly a foot tall. Its blue skeleton turned clear as glass while its body widened and flattened, so that all its inner organs were on display. Now it was almost a little man shaped like a spade, reminding me of those glass figurines you find in trinket shops. It was masterfully sculpted. Each glass organ hung suspended in its own glass cage and was colored through, bright and translucent. I noticed the heart, its reds and violets and blues.
* * *
—
When I awoke, my heart raced. I pulsed with the panic of a prey animal. Then, as the fear eased, I lay in astonishment. That I could have invented this. That I still saw the details as clearly as in life.
Later I wondered: What if I saw my scorpion while awake? In this room, at my feet. As if it were real, really there before me. Don’t go outside tomorrow. Don’t go on any boats. The thought nearly choked me, nearly wrung me to tears.
Winter
Still sometimes late at night it slides in—what it felt like to think of Tom outside. In the coldest seasons of his years of homelessness, it would rise up late in the day if I was alone in the hour in which darkness descended.
* * *
—
Each year as the seasons shifted, as leaves fell and the frosts came to Santa Fe or New York, I would grow tired and short-tempered, my body aching. The small muscles along my spine would seize up and I would get tight headaches. A knot would form at the base of my skull as my shoulders lifted and pinched, causing a tingling pain to come on along the backs of my arms. I would have to distract myself, get my mind off Tom—have a beer, talk about movies, pop a Valium left over from a prescription for back spasms.
* * *
—
I came to rely on certain facts about his relationship to winter. That he had been a skier, a camper, a mountain climber. That Alaska was, aside from a few years in Boulder, the only home he had ever known. He knew how to survive outside. He had the skills to stay warm, to make a camp in the woods. As long as he could keep track of his gear. Find enough food. That was my biggest worry at first—that he was always hungry.
* * *
—
Nights, I tried not to imagine the worst possibilities of where he might be. Instead I placed him in the safest, warmest camp I could conjure. I led him into t
he thickets beside the Coastal Trail, built him a snow cave, stuffed him into a fat sleeping bag on a thick foam pad, filled his pack with dry gloves and long underwear, placed new socks on his feet. What else was there to do.
* * *
—
If it gets really bad, I thought, he can always go trespass somewhere and get arrested. I knew he knew that. I knew he wouldn’t forget that.
* * *
—
A kind of long, jagged breath became habitual. A quick, sharp intake and a slow, unsteady exhale. When roommates noticed, inevitably, I felt the strangeness of the question Are you okay? How could I know? By what measure? Usually I seemed fine. And maybe I was. But sometimes I went sideways, unexpectedly, for no obvious reason. Sometimes I would lie on the sofa as if inside a shell, a hard stillness, trying to will myself to move.
* * *
—
Dad kept spare clothes at the house, shirts and boots and hats in Tom’s size, offering them when he could. Any clothes or winter gear Tom might need. Extras of everything, since Tom never kept things for very long. Since they’d be given away or dropped or forgotten or stolen.
* * *
—
Part of me was glad I didn’t know too many details. What I already knew of Anchorage winters was enough. Biting cold and obsidian skies folding down over him, the bright sharp darkness of nineteen-hour nights. The air crisp as if shot through with ice. It made your eyes water and then froze the tears against your lashes. And then there was the thick, dull feeling of body parts slowly going numb. That wooden sensation all around your thighs, and your earlobes and toes too, if you weren’t careful.
* * *
—
I dreamed of being the one to hand Tom a wool cap, a thick coat, some flannel-lined carpenter pants. Sturdy leather hiking boots, weatherproofed, solid—or fat Sorels, rubber-and-leather snow boots lined with sheepskin.
* * *
—
During cold snaps, Dad would drive around looking for him, stopping if he saw him on the sidewalk, inviting him back to the house for dinner and a shower. Tom often said yes, just for a while. Sometimes Dad would give him a haircut, do his laundry. Always he gave him some cash. And then Tom would want to leave again, go back outside.
* * *
—
In the background, memories. Dark evenings when, home from college, I’d been in the habit of putting on long johns under my jeans and a down coat and a fleece hat and going out walking. Alone in the streets of Turnagain neighborhood, between the intermittent streetlights, trudging through the layer of scraped, compressed snow. As I roamed past the houses we had always lived among, hugging the edges of the plowed roads, I communed with the split-level homes—their wooden siding, their mailboxes and garage doors and driveways. I was looking for ghosts, I think, and trying to unravel the secret of what my life was.
* * *
—
Maybe there were flashes of former selves. Friends, crushes, my atmospheric solitude. Our mother there but gone. And more—the potential of youth, its fullness. Did I find those ghosts or let them go? I wonder, still, who was the self I had expected Tom to help me become.
* * *
—
One year I sent him a gift package of cookies I made every Christmas. But several weeks later Dad said Tom had never come by, so he ended up eating them himself. After that, he told us there was no point in sending anything but cards. Tom could read our notes someday, he said, when he was getting better. Then he would know that we had been thinking of him all along. But my letters were awful—full of platitudes and stilted prose, tight with all I didn’t say.
* * *
—
Mornings, Dad would scan the Daily News for bits about homeless men, reading close when a body was found in Chester Creek or Kincaid Park or somewhere else nearby, looking for the name: not Tom. He stopped taking trips during the winter, wanting always to be home to answer the door if Tom stopped by on a cold night.
* * *
—
Ignorance as a black hole, its event horizon limning every wintry hour.
* * *
—
There could be no Christmases, no Thanksgivings, no New Year’s Eves without that thing. The wondering, the demands it made. Inside or outside, warm or cold, hungry or fed, desperate or content. His own birthday, late December. Family dinners, celebrations. There were no moments at all, really, without his absent body and the absent knowledge it signified.
* * *
—
People helped. His friends, my friends, family friends, neighbors, friends of friends. A teacher from our high school drew Tom indoors with the ruse that he needed someone to read aloud to, picking up Moby-Dick, keeping Tom listening as long as possible. A friend’s parents left the outer door to their front vestibule unlocked when they were not home, so he could warm up in there anytime. A friend of Zach’s, running into Tom on Spenard Road, gave him a pair of expensive fleece pants he happened to have with him.
* * *
—
The tension inside, whatever it was—always about to overtake me. I became a minor paranoiac, fretting over trivialities, my days pervaded by a sense of danger, ruled by panicky indecision. I stopped doing yoga, though I had practiced it off and on for years, finding the releases that came as I stretched and breathed too overwhelming. My heart would pound hard and my face would flush and I would feel dizzy and have to sit down. So instead I hiked, charging hard uphill, or I went out and laughed and drank and danced, or I closed myself in, watching DVDs alone in the dark, hour after hour.
* * *
—
Snow. Its faceted quality, the way it caught light, flashing at random angles as you moved. Frost. Rime. Hoar. Powder. Slush. Hail. Graupel. Névé.
* * *
—
Friends would say he came by their houses. They would say they ran into him at the library, they passed him in their cars. He was standing in the rain. He was in the parking lot beside Westchester Lagoon, staring off into space. They cooked him dinner or gave him a few bucks or let him take a shower. He was seen on C Street, on Fifth Avenue, or at a corner of the lagoon that we called the Ducks. They were worried, they were unsure what to do, they were impressed. I was impressed. Our friend Russell said to me, “In some ways I think of him as the ultimate Alaskan man.”
* * *
—
I thought he was brave. I thought he was stupid. I thought he was smart. I thought he was stubborn. I knew, of course, that he was ill. When friends who saw him out walking asked me what they could do, I said, “Feed him.”
* * *
—
Flake. Crystal. Bank. Drift. Cornice. Field. Glacier. Pack. Blizzard. Storm. Flurry. Shower. Slide. Burst. Avalanche. Crevasse.
* * *
—
Fear conflates the present with the past, makes one forget how to distinguish what has happened from what will happen yet. I have moments when, remembering those days, I feel a sudden pulse through my head and find myself wiping at tears. Then I register that it is a memory and as I catch my breath I hear myself saying, It’s over now. You don’t ever have to feel that way again.
All My Charms
In my fifth and final year in Santa Fe, I began building altars. Wiccan altars. All I can say is that I was feeling acutely aware of the forces that move the world, and of schizophrenia’s role among those forces. Their power, their inevitability.
The altars were about all of that, but more specifically they were about objects—the detritus of lives lived and a planet turning, and the echoes I could catch in them. I found my objects on the ground, in the street, at trinket shops, or in the back corners of drawers and boxes. Forgotten articles I had once used were some of the best: a turquoise necklace I bought from a woman on the Plaza in Santa Fe, for instance, lo
ng before I ever lived there. Many were gifts: an amethyst necklace my brother gave me just as schizophrenia was overtaking him. He believed the stones were vibrating with miraculous energy. It was not the last gift he ever gave me, but like a fool I gave away the red sweater before I realized that was what it was.
SUN ALTAR FOR LITHA
Yellow napkin with scalloped edges
Blue silk scarf with design of a crane in flight
Large pillar candle
Disks: gold, mirrored
Turquoise necklace
Beaded neckband, broken
String of beads, pale green
Swiss Army watch, no band
Goose band stamped with the code ♥K2
Pintail feather
Blue faux-antique chalice, containing water
Bouquet of yellow roses