by Mary Pilon
They made their way to Rostov-on-Don, a town of a million or so people located in the southern part of the massive country. The city prides itself on being the birthplace of the poet Alexander Pushkin and the heart of Cossack country. Many years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, statues of Vladimir Lenin still spotted the streets. The juxtaposition of economic realities was also odd: one street could be a beautiful paved boulevard that rivaled Europe’s most cosmopolitan thoroughfares, but around the corner could be a dirt road with exposed manholes. Travelers to Russia often compared the country’s psyche to that of the nesting dolls that are a popular tourist gift, one layer opening up onto another, another and yet another, a proverbial cultural onion of complexities.
In the summer of 2011, Amanda and Kevin visited the orphanage where their soon-to-be daughter lived and completed a dossier of paperwork similar to those they’d completed for their sons. Then, once again, they waited.
That November, a little girl, Nina Stevie, came home with them. They had given her the middle name after Amanda’s father—the one who had given her the distinctive watch that she and Kevin had talked about on their first date all those years ago in Providence. Stevie eventually asked to go by that instead of Nina, a desire that was happily granted.
KEVIN
After Sardinia, Kevin went three years without an episode. He sailed on a retainer with Team New Zealand in Auckland for a couple of seasons, then spent two seasons on a TP52, a large carbon fiber boat that could surf with stability in strong downwind breezes well over 20 knots, or 23 miles per hour.51
Sardinia stayed with him, mostly because he had never had an episode of that magnitude on the water before, and the Sardinia one had hit just hours after he had sailed, and well, no less. Miraculously, too, he had returned home safely and avoided hospitalization, his downers having taken effect before the plane landed. The mystery of the triggers and their aftermaths still felt inconsistent, even after years of trying to figure out what sparked the episodes and how to deal with them once they came.
When Kevin was in The Show, he had a sense of “everything happening all at once in the span of an instant,” a description similar to what he later read in David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon.” Wallace, like James Joyce, seemed to be fluent in a secret language, but a language that Kevin connected with deeply. Wallace’s story opens with a declaration of imposter syndrome, which still plagued Kevin in his career as a professional athlete, husband, and father even many successful years into all of it. “My whole life I’ve been a fraud,” wrote Wallace. “I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired.”52 In shattering detail, too, Wallace wrote about what was real and what was a scene. The main character in his story realizes that at “an early age I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself.”
After reading “Good Old Neon,” Kevin started devouring Wallace’s work and also became fascinated with Wallace’s own life, which ended on September 12, 2008, when Wallace died by suicide, a tragic last act after decades of battling depression.
The years without an episode of The Show created moments for Kevin when he felt as if his life was all finally coming together. He and Amanda were forming a family with children he loved. He felt engaged with his work on Team New Zealand. Auckland was enough like California to make him feel at home, but still a new enough adventure for there to be a learning curve as he and Amanda found a home and schools for their children and made friends.
When the phone rang one day with an offer for Kevin to compete in the upcoming 2013 America’s Cup race with the Artemis team, founded by the Swedish businessman Torbjörn Törnqvist,53 Kevin was confident, calm, and thrilled. Although he had enjoyed his time with Team New Zealand, he was worried that he’d been pigeonholed to a certain extent and no longer had ample space in which to grow his skill sets. On the Artemis, his role would involve his running the instruments, load, and performance data department. He would be plugged straight into the boat’s brain, and responsible for telling the other sailors what it was trying to say. It was an opportunity on a par with competing in the London Olympics—a chance at redemption and possibly an America’s Cup title. Finally.
For the Halls, Kevin’s new job meant moving back to the United States, to San Francisco, where all the America’s Cup teams would be based. They rented out their home in Auckland and found a new one in Berkeley, and Amanda secured a post in the emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital. The sense of impermanence that comes with the sailing lifestyle—suitcases, storage units, paper coffee cups—was now something to which the family had grown accustomed.
The 2013 America’s Cup was to be unlike any other. Team Oracle, per America’s Cup tradition, would be staging the event, having won the previous title in 2010, and the new boats were called AC72s,54 a class of 72-foot-long, 46-foot-wide catamarans with 131-foot-tall hard wings instead of soft sails, and each boat weighed fifteen thousand pounds, or seven and a half tons, roughly the heft of three elephants. The Artemis looked like a skyscraper on the water—fragile, fierce, and futuristic—and like a skyscraper, too, it was elegant and inspiring in its ambition. But it and the other three boats lacked the foundation of a building. It gave viewers, perhaps unconsciously, a sense of anxiety about whether the boats would stay afloat, even in the most capable of hands, as they swayed against and away from the wind and waves. If they were to hit the water at those speeds, it would be like smashing into a wall.
Traditionalists deemed them monstrous, and they would require a level of athleticism and engineering unlike that of any previous regatta.55 The Oracle chief and impassioned sailor Larry Ellison wanted to transform the event from being one which had historically inspired relatively little spectator interest among Americans, into a popular international sporting brand, akin to Formula One auto racing. It was clear to Kevin and his teammates that no matter what happened, Oracle was going to be there to the end, having the will—and finances—to get there at any cost (and the defender was always in the final). Ellison’s personal drive to push the boundaries of the sport was all the more fascinating considering that he had nearly been killed in the deadly 1998 Sydney to Hobart race.56
“There are two aspects of speed,” Ellison told the journalist G. Bruce Knecht. “One is the absolute notion of speed. Then there’s the relative notion—trying to go faster than the next guy. I think it’s the latter that’s much more interesting. It’s an expression of our primal being. Ever since we were living in villages as hunter gatherers, great rewards went to people who were stronger, faster.”57
What Kevin didn’t know then was that his assignment with the team would pose the most difficult challenge in his life, in and out of The Show.
•
The exterior of the Artemis compound where Kevin worked in Alameda, California, showed no outward signs of the panic within its walls. However, on the first day of work there, one of the tasks was to peel all of the blackout paper off the walls, as Kevin had heard that parts of one of the Matrix movies had been filmed there in years prior, a Show-like coincidence he held off on remarking to his teammates about. One of many beige boxes in a row of buildings on the bay, it was on a street far from Alameda’s main thoroughfares—one traversed only by dock and factory workers. The Artemis team was directly across the water from their competitors in a neighborhood that offered stunning views of the San Francisco skyline but maintained the blue-collar audio of buzzing machinery from nearby factories and the clanks and booms of cargo ships depositing and picking up their freight. The tidy layout of the symmetrical buildings and their wide concrete façades evoked the feel of an army base, framed with chain-link fencing and barbed wire.58
For several months, it had been clear to Kevin and his teammates that this would be the most expensive America’s Cup yet. Unlike Kevin’s first campaign with AmericaOne,
the four teams for the 2013 cycle were each made up of a mixture of nationalities, making it common for the sailors to be teammates with the same people they had competed against in the Olympics or previous America’s Cup cycles. The rosters had been reshuffled, and the teams earned their spots through a series of selection races. The bill for the four teams would total more than $400 million for the 2013 cycle,59 which, adjusting for inflation, approached the entire amount that 123 teams had spent on the Cup from 1870 to 1980. Higher payrolls, larger and more sophisticated boats, and more time and money spent on research and development were among the reasons for the increased expense. Nor were the boats’ costs remotely equal. Luna Rossa Challenge 2013 spent $65 million on its boat, compared with $156 million spent by Ellison’s Oracle Team USA. Kevin’s Team Artemis spent $115 million, not far above Emirates Team New Zealand’s $105 million.
More teams with bigger budgets was good news for sailors like Kevin, as they provided more well-paying jobs and opportunities to keep careers active. Kevin continued to thrive under the strict schedule of an America’s Cup cycle, and joining the team seemed like a win for everyone, especially with a third child under the Hall roof. Now seen as a veteran of the Cup, Kevin felt mentally strong and solid about his ability to handle the pressure of competition, excited about it, even. The athletes and team owners held press conferences and posted updates to Twitter and Facebook to build anticipation. But behind the scenes, the teams were continually spying, eager for even the slightest tidbit of information about the others, the cliché “loose lips sink ships” taking on a literal meaning.
The sailors had varying levels of understanding about the dimensions of risk in the old sport. Kevin and his teammates wore helmets and impact-resistant clothing more akin to that of motorcycle racing than yachting, and it made them look more like comic book heroes than sailors. With the ever-present danger of capsizing, now at a faster speed than ever, all the men on the boat carried oxygen canisters and knew how to employ them should the boat bend, break, flip, or succumb to some combination of all three.60 In the 2013 boats, the two hulls, or bodies, of the boat were separated by a platform that was about the size of a tennis court and made up of webbing similar to that of a trampoline. Because they had two hulls, the boats did not need heavy keels underwater to counteract the wind’s resistance on the sails. Less weight and less resistance meant greater speed. With the increased girth of the new boats, communication between sailors on board was a greater challenge; even the speakers and headsets built into the sailors’ helmets were often a futile match against the deafening roar of the wind. The conflict between speed and safety that had been under way for more than 150 years was amplified; the two-hulled bodies made for a faster regatta, but with an unknown risk to the men on board.
For the first time in recent history, the America’s Cup would be visible to fans on the shoreline, part of Ellison’s vision of “stadium sailing.” Ellison and the event’s organizers also felt that sailing had an unrealized potential for television (and hopefully the lucrative broadcast deals that come with it), especially since sports remained one of the few pockets of television where being live on-air still mattered.
As yet another nod to the highest-tech sailing bout ever, Kevin received a pair of Google Glass from a subcontractor he had done work with. A tool that at the time was lampooned by many in Silicon Valley and still not fully available to the public, the device could be used as a hands-free computer, able to capture video and photos and share the thrilling experience of what it was like to be on board. No one was aware of his experiences61 with The Show and the Director.
Even Kevin didn’t think much about Google Glass being a potential trigger for his mania. He enjoyed the half day he spent learning how to use the device, fiddling and asking questions. He thought the mapping and texting functions were nifty, and he could see how the camera could be useful for taking videos and photos, both while sailing and when on family vacations. Google Glass married data and film, it was wearable, and its fit with professional sailing seemed natural to Kevin.
•
As soon as Kevin heard the term “The ‘Truman Show’ delusion,” he plugged it into Google, where he learned that it was a term used to describe a type of bipolar disorder in which, during manic highs, one felt as if he or she was the star of a reality TV show. “The ‘Truman Show’ delusion” was a term coined by brothers Drs. Joel Gold and Ian Gold to describe what others were now discussing on online forums like Reddit. Dr. Joel Gold was a psychiatrist at Bellevue in New York City, and Dr. Ian Gold was a philosopher of psychiatry and neuroscience. More and more, Dr. Joel Gold had observed, patients were coming in for treatment with technology as the focus of their delusions. Many felt that their lives were being filmed, but in a city where the streets were being monitored by cameras, and everyone had access to live streaming via smartphones, Dr. Gold was finding it more and more challenging to convince his patients that they were delusional. From a factual standpoint, they made a compelling case. “How do you address someone who can point to the internet and say, ‘They did write about me’?”62 Dr. Joel Gold said.
For years, Kevin had thought he was crazy in, well, a particularly eccentric way, but now he wondered if he wasn’t alone after all.63 Strangely, the thought made him feel cheapened. It sounded absurd, but he had thought his experience with The Show was special. Now not even his mental illness was remarkable anymore.
The Gold brothers believed that biology alone didn’t account for mental illness, including bipolar disorder; rather, there seemed to be environmental factors that helped push people over the edge, or at least informed how they got there. They had found, for example, that for some reason delusions of jealousy were more prevalent in Germany than in Japan, that a wealthy Pakistani man was more likely to have delusions of grandeur than his poor female cousin, who in turn was more likely to suffer from erotomania,64 a delusion in which one person believes that another person is in love with them. Delusions involving biblical or religious figures had waned over the last couple of centuries as the influence of organized religion had diminished.65 This backdrop posed challenging questions for the “Truman Show” delusion. What role was the typical American media diet playing in modern mental illness?
Having read up on the subject, Kevin learned that there were many different kinds, some more obscure than others. There was the Cotard delusion,66 in which a person believed that he or she was already dead, either figuratively or literally, or that he or she didn’t really exist. There was Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a self-mutilation disorder in which one may consume his or her own body parts—until, that is, one’s teeth are removed, which is often seen as the “cure.” There was Alice in Wonderland syndrome, in which people see objects in real life as being distorted compared to what they really are, as if they were viewing the world “through the wrong end of a telescope.”67 Boanthropy referred to people who felt that they were a cow, ox, or other bovine creature—some falling on all fours and eating grass. Reports also surfaced of Foreign Accent syndrome, in which a British woman, after she woke up from surgery for a migraine, inexplicably found that she had a Chinese accent. Critics may decry some of these labels, like Truman Show Disorder, as boutique diagnoses, ways for doctors to garner attention or funding, but whatever the branding, their circumstances continue to befuddle and fascinate those in the field.
Underlying the doctors’ descriptions was a deeper belief, one that resisted turning those suffering from mental illness into the “other.” The Drs. Gold believed that all human beings had parts of their brain that could be manic, depressive, delusional, or psychotic. It was just a matter of keeping those potentially disruptive parts at peace.
Kevin sent an email to the Gold brothers inquiring about their research, partly because he thought he could be helpful to them as a case study, partly because he wanted to know more. The doctors’ descriptions of the delusion seemed uncannily similar to Kevin’s experience in The Show, and the way they had described it, the
“Truman Show” delusion could exist in people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or just about any psychotic illness.68
Kevin’s case posed a new dimension for the doctors: What were they to do when the patient actually had been on television, written about extensively, and competed at an international sporting event that many treat like the most important thing in the world? In fact, Kevin was the first case the doctors had ever encountered of a quasi-public figure with “Truman Show” delusion. Dr. Gold was not Kevin’s official psychiatrist, but he and Kevin developed a friendship, mutually fascinated and informed by each other’s experiences from opposing sides of the proverbial couch.
When emailing back and forth, Kevin and Dr. Joel Gold got on the topic of their educational backgrounds. It turned out that not only was Dr. Gold a fellow Brown University alum, but he had graduated in Kevin’s year, and in revisiting the cartography of their dorm room assignments, the two realized that they had lived close to each other for years.
Kevin had to tell himself this couldn’t be the work of the Director, but rather just an uncanny coincidence.
•
Across the Bay from Artemis headquarters, at Piers 30 and 32 in San Francisco, the sailors of Team New Zealand knew they had a weapon in hand that was going to forever alter America’s Cup sailing: foils, or wing-like structures added to the bottom of a boat that make the entire vessel fly above the water. When the team first took its foiling catamaran out on a warm July day in 2012, spectators thought the sight looked Photoshopped, or involved some sort of visual trickery, everyone recognizing that in that moment, the sport had been forever changed. How could a boat that large seemingly fly above the water? And how could it move so fast? At the command of the sailors on board, the boat could suddenly lift its left or right side, or both, out of the water. It also created a different crash risk. Not only could a boat sink, but it could hit the wall of the water’s surface at a speed of 50 miles per hour or more.