Sylvia introduced Doc Fallon and Father O, and they seemed to size each other up right at first. They did come from opposite sides of a fairly significant fence, and I guess they both wanted to be sure that they weren’t going to lock horns on certain issues.
“Sylvia mentioned the possibility that certain kinds of repetitive behavior might precede Renata’s psychotic episodes,” Fallon began. “I’d like to hear a few more details. This could be very important.”
“Part of it has to do with cryptolalia—what I always called ‘twin-speak’ before Sylvia gave me the scientific term,” I told him. “Since Twink has no memory of her childhood with Regina, that shouldn’t be showing up at all—at least not when she’s functioning as a normie. Mary tells us that there’s always twin-speak involved in the ravings that come pouring out after Renata has those nightmares. If we’re reading this right, the nightmares are a re-creation of the night when Regina was murdered.”
“That might be a slight oversimplification,” Fallon told me, “but let it go for now.”
“The point is that the private language also crops up when Twink goes to confession. Father O’Donnell mentioned it to me quite sometime back, but I guess I spaced it out. I’d gotten so used to hearing the twins lisping at each other when they were kids that it didn’t even occur to me that there was anything peculiar about its reappearance—I mean, if Twink has no memory at all about Regina, who’s she talking to?”
“Then the matter of the two different voices surfaced,” Father O picked it up. “There have been times when I couldn’t be positive how many young ladies were in the confessional with me.”
“That’s been bothering me as well,” Sylvia added. “It shows up very obviously when I’m editing the tapes. I was just about to resurrect my multiple personality theory, but the reappearance of cryptolalia shoots that full of holes, doesn’t it?”
“Let’s not dismiss anything just yet,” Fallon told her.
“Anyway,” I picked it up again, “Father O came up with the idea that the different voices and the reappearance of twin-speak might be something on the order of an early warning. Once those show up, the nightmares and the day of psychotic raving are almost certain to come along again. Does that make sense?”
“What if it’s Ren’s way to cry for help?” Mary suggested. “She might feel the bad day coming, and she’s begging us to step in and stop it—but she’s begging in a language nobody can understand.”
“It’s possible, I suppose,” Fallon conceded. “Does she have any memory of these incidents on the following day?”
“She doesn’t seem to. The first few times they showed up, I’d ask her the next day if she was feeling better, and she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Of course, she’s always a little silly on the day after one of the bad ones.”
“Could we possibly be dealing with a fugue here?” Sylvia asked Fallon. “At least a personal variation of the fugue state? Once she lapses into cryptolalia, she seems to blot everything out.”
“Now we might be getting somewhere,” Fallon said.
“Fugue?” I asked. “Isn’t that a musical term?”
“It has a slightly different meaning in the field of abnormal psychology, Mark,” Sylvia told me. “It’s a reaction to something that’s so terrible that the patient can’t bear even to think about it. It usually involves a loss of personal identity. Sometimes the patient will wander off and seem to be perfectly normal. It can go on for hours—or even for days—and when the patient recovers, he has absolutely no memory of anything that happened during that period.”
“It does sound like it fits what’s going on when Ren flips out,” Mary said.
“And it might just be going on for a lot longer than we’d realized,” I added. “Maybe it starts when her voice keeps changing back and forth and words or phrases from that private language crop up—usually in the confessional. Then she has that nightmare again; then she wakes up talking about wolves and blood and cold until she can’t stand it anymore. At that point, she shuts down and talks exclusively in twin. Then the next day comes along, and she has no memory of anything that happened.” I looked at Fallon. “Does that come anywhere close to what this fugue state is all about?”
“Very close, I think,” he agreed. “Basically, a fugue is a flight from reality, and the patient will even flee from her own identity to get away from a reality she can’t face. In this case, Renata seems to be taking refuge in the private language—in the same way she did during the six months after her sister’s death. Once she starts speaking English again, the incident is over, and everything connected to it has been erased from her memory.”
“What is it about going to confession that sets her off?” Mary asked.
“It happens more often than you’d think, Mary,” Father O told her. “The act of confession seems to lower certain defenses. We stress the importance of full confession, and it’s not uncommon for things to come out during confession that the penitent has completely forgotten.”
“What this finally boils down to is that Renata’s quite probably working her way toward another breakdown and another stay in the sanitarium,” Fallon told us. “It’s regrettable, but it’s not that uncommon.”
“And then my idiot brother will use that as an excuse to take her home and never let her out of his sight again,” Mary added.
Fallon smiled faintly. “Just leave that to me, Mary,” he said. “I can probably stop him short if it’s necessary.”
Sylvia and I were feeling pretty upbeat after the Twinkie conference at St. Benedict’s Church. We hadn’t quite solved all the problems yet, but we felt we’d definitely made some progress.
Our good feeling lasted all the way through Tuesday, but then Wednesday rolled around, and Twink went bonkers again.
I was attending my Milton seminar when Mary called the boardinghouse. As luck had it, Sylvia hadn’t left yet, so she grabbed her tape recorder and hustled over to Mary’s place.
Twink had already gone through the business of wolves, blood, and cold water, though, so all Sylvia got on tape was an extended oration in twin-speak.
Sylvia wasn’t too happy about that, and she was using some very colorful language when I came home around ten that morning. “If I’d only got there a bit earlier!” she fumed.
“You don’t have to be there in person, Sylvia,” I told her. “I’ve been thinking about that, and a tape recorder that uses standard-sized tapes only costs about twenty-five bucks. I’ll pick one up and show Mary how to use it. She’ll be able to get everything on tape as soon as she walks in and finds Twink climbing the walls. That way, she won’t have to call you and wait around until you get there.”
She glared at me for a moment, then she suddenly looked a little sheepish. “Why didn’t I think of that?” she said.
“You don’t really want me to answer that, do you, Toots?” I asked her. “This does shoot down Father O’s theory about the confessional, though, doesn’t it? Twink hasn’t been to confession for quite some time now, and she went bonkers anyhow.”
“Maybe it’s been percolating in the back of her mind for a few weeks,” she suggested. “I don’t think there’s any kind of time limit, do you?”
“It’s your field, Sylvia. Half the time you and Fallon are talking to each other in a foreign language as far as I can tell. Did Mary zap Twink out with a pill again?”
She nodded. “About a half hour after I got there. Renata dozed off almost immediately.”
“Whatever works, I guess,” I said.
As usual, Twink bounced right back after she’d shaken off the horrors that’d wiped her out on Wednesday—she showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for my class on Thursday. It seemed peculiar to me that Twink was always superhyped on the day following one of her bad ones, but it was obvious that today’s ebullience fit the pattern.
It was a little noisy in the classroom when I entered that afternoon. “All right, people,” I said from the front of the room, “
settle down. We’ve got something to take care of today. Next week’s the last one of the fall quarter, so I guess we’d better start thinking about a final examination. I suppose we could all compose hymns of praise to conjunctions or prepositions, but that might be a little tedious, huh? I don’t know about you, but it’d probably bore my socks off. Why don’t we do something a little more exciting instead?”
I paused—for effect, of course. Then I snapped my fingers. “Why don’t we write another paper?” I said as if the idea had just come at me from out of the blue. “You’ve been college students for twelve whole weeks now, and the reason we come to college is to learn stuff, right? OK, why don’t you tell me about it? This’ll be your last paper, and it’ll be your final exam at the same time. You’ll whip in here next Tuesday, dump your paper on the desk, and then split—unless you’d like some kind of farewell oration from old superteacher!”
“Don’t you mean next Thursday, Mr. Austin?” one of them asked me.
“I’ll need a little time to grade them. Superteacher is not faster than a speeding bullet.”
“What’s the topic supposed to be?” another one asked.
“How about ‘What I Have Learned This Quarter’?”
“About English, you mean?”
“Why limit it to something that pedestrian? If the biggest thing you’ve picked up here this quarter is how long it takes the signal light at Forty-third and University to change, write a paper about it. I hope that some of you’ve picked up a few things a bit more interesting, but that’s up to you. I’m looking for thought content, gang. You’re supposed to be here to learn how to think, and I’m supposed to teach you how to think on paper. Let’s find out if we’ve all done what we’re here for.”
“That’s awfully unspecific, Mr. Austin,” a girl near the front objected.
“I know,” I agreed. “I’m leaving it wide-open on purpose. That puts the ball in your court. Go for it, and give it your best shot—and about five hundred of your best words. You might want to think it over before ten-thirty next Monday evening. I don’t want to spoil any of your plans, but you should probably know that a half hour paper’s likely to get you a half hour grade—if you get my drift? Take a little time with this one. Let’s bump up the old grade-point average, shall we?”
Twink lingered after class. “You’re a mean person, Markie,” she accused.
“I try,” I said smugly. “Did you ride your bike today?”
“No, one of the sorority girls picked me up.”
“Are they trying to recruit you?”
“They might be. I’ve kept my stay at the bughouse a deep, dark secret.”
“You’ll need a lift back to Mary’s place, then.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
“Let’s split, then.”
We strolled out to the parking garage and climbed into my old, trusty Dodge.
“I think I’ll drop another free one on you, Markie,” she told me as we headed back toward Wallingford. “I haven’t written a paper for you for a long time now.”
“Are we feeling creative, Twink?”
She shrugged. “I just feel like writing a paper, and this might be a good time to try another one. I like the topic, and I’ve learned whole bunches of stuff this quarter.”
“I’m sure you have. Are you going to do another barn burner like that first one?”
“I’m not sure, Mark,” she said in a throaty voice. “It’s more fun to write without too much planning sometimes.” She coughed then. “Frog in my throat,” she said absently. “I must be coming down with something.”
The little group get-together at St. Benedict’s Church had made a big thing about our voice-change theory, and now it seemed that it might be collapsing around my ears. Twink’s offhand “frog in my throat” shot it full of holes.
Now that I’d finished the bookshelves, I didn’t have any fix-up chores scheduled for Saturday that week, and that bothered me for some reason. I found myself wandering around the house with my tape measure looking for something to do.
Finally, I rapped on the door to Trish’s room. “Have you got a minute?” I asked her.
“Sure,” she replied. “Is there a problem?”
“I can’t find anything to do.”
“Are you feeling all right, Mark?” she asked, laughing.
“It bugs me, that’s all. I’ve gotten used to working on Saturday, and goofing off makes me feel guilty. What about those kitchen cabinets and drawers? They’re pretty beat-up, and I could refinish all that exterior woodwork—spiff things up to match the new flooring.”
“Whatever turns you on,” she said with a shrug. “When you get right down to it, though, I think your bookshelves more than paid your dues in this place.”
“I’m a creature of habit, Trish,” I explained. “I’m supposed to do honest work on Saturday, and not having anything to do makes me antsy.”
“Do doors and drawers then, Mark,” she told me in a tone that was almost maternal.
“Yes, Mama Cat,” I replied with some relief.
On Tuesday of the last week of the quarter, my freshmen turned in their final paper. Once I’d thinned out the herd with my terror tactics during the first couple of weeks, I’d actually grown almost fond of the survivors. They’d turned into a moderately competent group, and some of them even showed a few sparkles of genuine talent.
After I’d collected their papers and stowed them in my briefcase, I looked at the class. “That’s pretty much it, fun-seekers,” I told them. “I’m going to give you a break. Since you’re all probably busy boning up for your exams, why don’t we scratch tomorrow’s class? How you spend the time is up to you, but my advice is not to waste it. Concentrate on whichever course is giving you the most trouble and bear down on it. Let’s bump up those grades. Life is fleeting, but your academic record is permanent. A D-minus grade in some Mickey Mouse course that doesn’t mean a damn thing can haunt you for the rest of your life. Pop by for the Thursday class to pick up your papers, and we’ll part friends, OK? Class dismissed.”
Boy, did that empty the classroom in a hurry. Twink and her sorority-girl chum were among the first ones out the door. I’d never really had much use for the Greek Group—those assorted Phi Delta Whatevers and Sigma Who Gives a Damns—but Twink’s little friend seemed to be a cut above the average sorority fluffhead whose main goal at the university was finding a suitable husband. It was just as well that Twink hadn’t gotten around to mentioning the time she’d spent at Fallon’s bughouse. It may be fashionable for sorority girls to be broad-minded, but probably not that broad-minded.
Back at the boardinghouse, I parked myself at my desk and pawed through the papers until I found Twink’s gratuitous essay. I pushed the others aside and prepared to get my socks blown off.
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED THIS QUARTER
By Twinkie
The very first thing I learned is that normies are even more strange than bugsies are. You normies take yourselves much too seriously. Don’t you know how to laugh at yourselves? That’s the very first thing we bugsies pick up.
You ought to try it sometime. It makes life so much more fun.
Then I learned that clocks and calendars are terribly important to normies. Haven’t you ever heard of ‘close enough’? Will the world really come to an end if you’re a minute and a half late?
Do you actually believe that the world cares that much?
The next thing I noticed about normies was that you all seem to believe that there’s a difference between right and wrong. We bugsies all know that they’re really the same thing if you look at them in the proper way. They aren’t separate, you know. There’s lots of right mixed in with wrong and oodles of wrong dripping off the corners of right. It all depends on how you look at things.
Lighten up, Normies.
Then I learned that normies seem to bunch up, and they’re terrified that they might be just a teeny bit different from all the other normies in the world. If e
verybody wears a blue ribbon, you’d rather die than wear a red one.
Do you really think that anybody cares, or that it makes the slightest difference?
When Dockie-poo Fallon finally released me from his fancy nuthouse, I knew that I shouldn’t tell the normies where I’d been. Normies are scared to death of us bugsies—probably because we do things normies would never think of doing. We have very good reasons to do the things we do, and just because you don’t understand those reasons, it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong.
Does it?
The most important thing I’ve learned this quarter is that I have to hide what I’m thinking, because if the normies find out about it, they’ll send me right back to the bughouse, and I’m not ready to go there yet.
I’m very tired now, but soon—very, very soon—I’ll sleep, and when I sleep, my dreams will be all right, and nothing will ever go wrong again.
“What the hell?” I muttered. This paper started out like the first one Twink had written, but somewhere along the line, the cutesy-poo ran out and things got very strange and very serious.
The mention of ribbons really got my attention. It seemed merely puzzling at first glance, but it set off some bells when I read through the paper again. Twink could have said “green and pink,” but she didn’t. “Red and blue” came through loud and clear, as in the red and blue ribbons the twins had always traded off as kids. That connection back to her forgotten childhood carried some strong hints that our Twink was gearing up for a return engagement at Fallon’s bughouse.
I ran several copies off on my klutzy, secondhand copy machine. I knew Sylvia would want one, another for Dr. Conrad, and Doc Fallon would scream bloody murder if he didn’t get one, too.
I finished grading about half of the papers before supper, and I figured that I’d pretty much earned my pay this quarter. The surviving members of my freshman class had turned in papers that were quite a bit above average. The Dr. Conrad approach—“I won’t accept crap”—seemed to be valid. Students will usually do what you expect them to do. If you don’t expect much, you won’t get much. If you expect the moon, you might not get it, but you’ll probably get quite a few tries at it. That made me feel pretty good. I was turning a bunch of above-average students loose on the rest of the faculty, and that’s what teaching is all about, isn’t it?
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