The Kevin Show

by Mary Pilon

  At some point, mental health experts had given the Hall family a spreadsheet entitled “Relapse Prevention.” It laid out tips for preventing another episode, including taking pills at the same time every day, doing daily exercises, planning small tasks, and eating meals consistently. Someone in the family had read that each episode could mar Kevin’s brain (a notion that was later dispelled) and they began to worry that if he had another, or multiple episodes, that important parts of what made Kevin Kevin could erode. Kevin, too, shared concerns about the lifelong implications.

  There was the white spiral-bound guidebook entitled “Becoming Your Own Therapist,” in which Kevin drew large swirls across its sterile pages, his spirals akin to those on the poster of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. On one of the worksheets headed THOUGHTS, he jotted down “Being Jesus” and then added, “They’ll never believe me.” That guy said he was the center of the world two thousand years ago, Kevin thought, and he is still praised widely today. Yet when Kevin had his own revelations, why was he institutionalized? On the Fear Form, he said that he was most worried about missing schoolwork and about one of his teammates thinking he was too big for their boat, a reference to the anxiety that sailors have about making weight. Similar to wrestlers and weightlifters, sailors may need to fall within certain weight categories, both as individuals and as a team. A fluctuation of a few pounds could not only impact a single person’s weigh-in, but also carry implications for the entire crew and other members’ weights, as those pounds were divvied up between a total number for the boat. Yet dieting was not enough, as the sport required a grueling amount of muscle strength honed in the weight room to best power the boat.

  As Gordon watched Kevin struggle, he came to the conclusion that his son’s manic break had been caused by the combined pressure of school and sports. Gordon was upbeat about Kevin’s being able to recover and get his life back together soon. As Kevin packed his bags to head back to Providence, Gordon thought that the worst was over.

  He was wrong.

  KRISTINA

  There were good places to do mushrooms and then there were great places to do mushrooms. The Magic Kingdom of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, was the latter, or so Kristina and her friends had been told. They intended to find out for themselves.

  As they entered the amusement park, swirling forms and colors rolled all around them—a spectacle of furry, familiar childhood characters, the pleasing sight of Cinderella’s castle, cakelike storefronts along Main Street USA, and the optimistic air and shine of Tomorrowland. But as the crew of friends made their way toward Frontierland, Kristina could feel her hallucinogenic trip teetering south.

  She passed out. She remembered a white light and the feeling of falling backward through a tunnel. Was this death?

  When she came to a few seconds later, she found herself at the foot of Splash Mountain, her friends furiously fanning her and trying to find help. A fireman who happened to be vacationing nearby came to her aid, as did a nurse. Kristina and her friends lied and said that it was the heat that had made her faint, nor did anyone push them for a backstory. No one mentioned the mushrooms.

  She was escorted to an island of grass in the parking lot outside, beneath a sign that read THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH. And there she and her friends spent eight hours, mushroom time,32 that is, so that she could recover.

  As she lay facing the park’s gates, Kristina thought about all that had happened during the last few weeks—her mother’s aborted birthday visit, her brother’s hospitalization—and wondered when her parents would start treating her like an adult. It felt as if they were always protecting her, always withholding information, even though she was already in college.

  Then, with a flash of clarity, Kristina realized that she couldn’t die, she couldn’t be out of it, she couldn’t be incapable, she had to act like a grownup. Her family needed her.

  KEVIN

  As he walked the pathways of Brown’s campus, now lined with the skeletal trees and slush of winter, Kevin still felt unsettled. Without sailing, what, if anything, was he? How was he going to spend the seemingly vast sprawl of years that would unfold after he tossed his mortarboard into the air? His fellow math major students still intimidated him to no end, and how could he tell his parents that he had a promising future with a degree in … French literature?33

  As he grudgingly and reluctantly processed his diagnosis, he still wasn’t sure where the other Kevin, the one from The Show, had come from or whether or not he was coming back. A handful of his close friends knew about his hospitalization, but they rarely mentioned it and Kevin wasn’t too eager to discuss it, either. Kevin was back, and that’s all that seemed to matter.34

  His other teammates didn’t know the specifics of his bipolar diagnosis, or even that it was psychiatric in nature, but they did know that something was off and they were curious, more in an academic sense than in a gossipy one. Kevin had carved out a reputation as the teammate who was the first one to arrive, the last one to leave, and as a focused, driven student. He had been protective of, and behaved like an older brother to, his younger teammates, and they felt a deep sense of wanting to return the favor. They had eagerly helped him out however they could while he was away—favors like moving his parked car and helping him get information about homework assignments so that he would feel welcome and calm upon his return.

  Kevin’s journal

  He appreciated these gestures and made a point of telling his friends so, trying to create an outward sense of having returned to his pre-Boston routine. Privately, Kevin was trying to reconcile his new, manic identity with the version of him that was back on campus. In a mix of French and English,35 he wrote in his journal:

  … l’évidence that I am crazy, that I need help, that I must be ripped away from my friends at Pine St. Inn Shelter. Taken where? To the station. I think it was the police station. I know it was room 102. No, it was room 101 and me and my worst fears. 1989. The song remained the same in my head since Orwell wrote his warnings on the WALL and on the black and blue board of my mind … Perhaps I have waited all my life for this day. Perhaps I have waited all of many lives.

  AMANDA

  During her freshman year at Brown University, Amanda Rosenberg stared at the back of Kevin’s neck in physics class. She knew in that instant, based on his neck alone, that she wanted to date him.

  Watching the way he carried himself in the lab, Amanda suspected that he was an upperclassman, and perhaps an athlete. He looked fit, blue-eyed, freckled, West Coast, all-American—a contrast to the Upper East Side New York Jewish culture she had grown up in. Tall, with long blonde hair, Amanda had thrived in her environment but was eager to break with it. She was more of a daddy’s girl than her mother’s daughter; unlike her mother, an actress before she married a doctor, Amanda was deeply interested in physics. Quantum mechanics, in particular, drew her interest,36 the idea that even the smallest things—atoms, subatomic particles, things we can’t see with our naked eyes—could help explain how the universe worked. The details of photons, relativity, and electromagnetic fields intoxicated her, as did the work of the quantum physicist Richard Feynman, whom Amanda viewed as a rock star. Feynman posited that “nature as She is—absurd” and Amanda studied how quantum mechanics rested on something of a seesaw. The closer someone got to nailing down one measurement, he said, the less precise another measurement tied to the same particle must become.

  Some version of that uncertainty principle may have been in play in her physics class, Amanda thought as she watched the man with the strong neck.

  Despite gender norms dictating that men typically make the first move, Amanda decided that she would be bold. She stood up from the stool and walked over, a woman on a mission to ask a guy to be her lab partner.

  KEVIN

  Having recently been dumped by Meg in the aftermath of the Boston episode, Kevin saw no need for having a partner, romantic or otherwise. When the rest of the class had quickly paired off to work toget
her, leaving him on his own, it had seemed to him a fitting symbol of his loneliness and heartbreak, reinforcing his suspicion that he was not meant for collaboration.37 It all felt so pointless. Why bother to find a partner in the first place? Kevin could work solo.

  By this time, Kevin had somehow set aside some of the heavy disappointment he had felt every day in Big Bear: that he hadn’t been saving the world at all, that he’d done nothing but create confusion and stress and medical bills38 for his family. Nonetheless, part of him still wondered if the Director was going to come back for another episode, even if Kevin was taking one Haldol (an antipsychotic) and lithium dose after another. Part of him now wondered how he could ever bring it up without getting locked up again. By comparison, everyday life, even on a good day, felt humdrum and void of meaning.

  Kevin continued not to tell most of his friends or acquaintances much about what had happened in Boston or the reason for his hiatus in Big Bear. If they did inquire, “I was out sick,” or something to that effect, usually satisfied what little curiosity they had. When Kevin had gone out for ice cream with one cute girl from his math class, he had felt comfortable enough to tell her that he’d needed a break following a big mental breakdown. She replied that the experience sounded like the acid trip she’d recently taken. Kevin couldn’t argue with her about that.

  Deflated on the inside, Kevin was surprised when a tall, blonde, and assertive classmate approached his table during physics class. With a pretty face and confident demeanor, she introduced herself as Amanda and seemed as functional and calm as Kevin wasn’t, his insecurity magnified by her presence.

  She asked if he had a partner.

  No.

  Did he want to pair off with her?

  Kevin mumbled something about working alone.

  She didn’t push him and she set about doing the assignment on her own.39

  He couldn’t blame her. He had manic tendencies, which in his eyes didn’t exactly make him the most dateable man on campus.

  Amanda was undeterred. She returned to physics class the next day with a new weapon: denim short-shorts. Her low-cut shirt and red lipstick probably didn’t hurt, either. She walked over to his table and asked him once again if he wanted to be her lab partner.

  This time, he was more receptive.40

  Later, Kevin would describe this second coming of Amanda in the physics lab in ecstatic terms. “Something clicked, the ahhooogah! horn sounded and my eyes launched out of their sockets, as my feet started winding up with the ‘Yabba Dabba Do’ sound to run after the only one of us in the room who wasn’t a cartoon of a physics student.”41 Through the oxytocin cloud, Kevin was wary of becoming involved, plagued by questions about where their relationship could possibly go. Kevin figured that things between the two of them could end in one of two ways: (1) eventual breakup and subsequent grief, or (2) a serious relationship with him, a bipolar guy. He felt like he had more baggage than an airport, even at his young age, and the idea of their becoming a couple felt pointless in a way that had nothing to do with his attraction for her.

  “Sad as it seems, human beings have always been unhappy with who they are,” writes the naturalist Diane Ackerman. “Even the most comely of us feel like eternally ugly ducklings who yearn to be transformed into swans. One of the bad jokes of evolution is that we have evolved brains, which can imagine a state of perfection we cannot achieve.”42

  Not long after meeting his new lab partner, Kevin felt a pain in his testicle and a lump,43 no larger than a marble.

  He went to a doctor to get it checked out, but didn’t think much of it.

  GORDON

  Gordon was reeling. First, the news that his son had bipolar disorder. And now he had an acute pain in his testicle? As a doctor, he thought of the symptoms and wondered if it could be cancer. How was that possible? In 1990, the testicular cancer rate was 5.1 cases per every 100,000, or roughly 0.0051 percent. Although it was also a young man’s disease, most common among those age twenty to thirty-nine, awareness of it was low and the taboos around it were high.44 Where on earth had this come from? Gordon couldn’t think of any members of his family who had testicular cancer, or even a scare of it. It made no sense that his healthy, champion athlete of a son could have not one, but two significant ways in which his body was at war with itself.

  Gordon took comfort in the numbers. If it was testicular cancer, the survival rates were high—90 percent or more. He checked around at his hospital and found a urology surgeon with an open slot for operating the morning after Kevin was due to return home.

  Gordon knew that when Kevin awoke from surgery, he would look down and find a four-inch incision below his stomach and a prosthetic left testicle where his old one had been. His ability to produce biological children would be impaired, but not erased, as the remaining testicle typically still produces sperm. Banking sperm was relatively affordable and easy, not nearly as invasive as freezing and storing eggs. It seemed like a no-brainer that Kevin would want to do it, just in case.

  But banking sperm was far from Kevin’s twenty-one-year-old mind. He didn’t even seem to be very concerned to learn that the growth in his testicle had been malignant. The doctors had removed it and all traces of the cancer.

  Kevin wanted to know what day it was. And how many days he had until his next race.45

  AMANDA

  Soft candlelight, exposed brick, and white linen tablecloths—such was the ambiance of 3 Steeple Street, a restaurant nestled along the Moshassuck River near campus. The warm interior was a welcome contrast to the New England November unfolding outside the window around them and finally, after a couple of months of flirtation in physics class, her lab partner had asked her out on a date. Amanda tried not to look impressed when Kevin showed the waitress an authentic ID and ordered white wine. As he slipped the glass surreptitiously to her across the table, the newness of the moment, of each other, astounded them both.46

  Amanda’s crush on Kevin was so overpowering that she struggled to remember the name of anyone else in their physics class, or even their faces. They simply didn’t seem relevant and Kevin drew so much of her attention that there didn’t seem to be much room for anything else.47 For his part, Kevin noticed that Amanda was wearing a heavy stainless steel watch, a distinctive accessory that was hard to miss. Amanda explained that it was her father’s, and that he was a doctor in New York, and that in many ways she had felt closer to him growing up than to her mother. Talking about doctors seemed a bit strange to her as she tried to reconcile the youthful athlete sitting across from her with a patient who had just gone through cancer treatment.48 He had volunteered some information to her about his ordeal, but she held off on asking him more questions about it.

  The wine kept flowing, as did the conversation. After dinner, Kevin invited Amanda to his place to listen to a recording of Peter and the Wolf, the Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev’s children’s story narrated and told with the instruments of an orchestra: the flute bird, the oboe duck, the bassoon grandfather, the French horn wolf.49 “What kind of bird are you if you can’t fly?” the little bird argues with a duck. “What kind of bird are you if you can’t swim?” answers the duck. Even if by outward appearances many of Kevin’s Brown classmates viewed him as an academically successful student-athlete, he connected with the existential identity themes.

  It was there, with the strings of Peter struggling with the wolf dancing around their ears, that Amanda began to see the physical implications of Kevin’s recent cancer surgery—scars that were fresh and would be with him for the rest of his life. So much of Amanda’s experience up to that time with her family, in the pressure cooker of a private all-girls school, during her first few weeks at college, had felt dull compared to the feeling she now experienced with Kevin. Yet as they held each other on his flannel sheets, she felt a remarkable sense of optimism.

  Not to mention the strange, new thrill of being in the presence of a man in crisis.50

  KEVIN

  Three weeks a
fter surgery, Kevin was back on the water, much to the amazement of his teammates.51 They were in awe, viewing Kevin as a superb, fiercely determined athlete who was being tested in ways they couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  With his junior year sailing with the Olympic coaches over, Kevin had returned to Brown’s team roster as a senior. His goal now was to make a bid at the Singlehanded Nationals at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships—big talk, everyone thought, despite their admiration for him. In his freshman and sophomore years, he had come in second place in the championships. Having taken his junior year off to train with the Olympians, this year was his final shot at the title.

  Kevin took comfort in returning to his team and training regimen, but was still behind his normal routine after surgery and before Nationals and facing an incredible time crunch. Most sailing injuries were bruises, sprains, or occurred in the lower back, with maybe a knee injury here or there. But coming back from cancer was unheard of. Kevin’s coaches and doctors were the first to admit that preparing a cancer survivor for a shot at an NCAA title was a new experience for them, too. Nobody was expecting him to compete at all, let alone perform well. What was worse for Kevin was the specter of failure to win the title, one he felt he should have already won.

  Privately, Kevin grappled with the repercussions of having had cancer, including wondering if he had made a mistake by not banking sperm. He still had a hard time seeing the point of it. He had one testicle left, after all, and plenty of time, as he confronted questions of fatherhood that most of his teammates barely thought about, if it all. Then there were Kevin’s concerns about whether he should have biological children at all. The more he researched cancer and bipolar disorder, the more he worried about passing either or both along in his genes.