THERE IS NO clear border between remembering and imagining. When I listen to a patient, I am not reconstructing the “facts” of a case history but listening for patterns, strains of feeling, and associations that may move us out of painful repetitions and into an articulated understanding. As Inga said, we make our narratives, and those created stories can’t be separated from the culture in which we live. There are times, however, when fantasy, delusion, or outright lies parade as autobiography, and it’s necessary to make some nominal distinction between fact and fiction. Doubt is an uncomfortable feeling that can quickly become suspicion, and under the intimate circumstances of psychotherapy, it may be nothing short of dangerous. I began to feel this uncertainty with Ms. L. in April, and I recognize now that it marked a turn not only in her, but in me.
For almost six months, the pretty, well-dressed Ms. L. had sat tensely in her chair, knees locked together, eyes lowered as she revealed a life of privilege, money, and neglect: her parents’ divorce when she was two, her mother’s serial boyfriends, her mother’s long trips with them to houses and apartments in Aspen, Paris, the south of France, her mother’s breakups, bouts of weeping, drinking, and shopping. Ms. L.’s serial nurses and nannies, her father’s detested second wife and two children, his infrequent calls and sporadic gift-giving, the two hated boarding schools, her suicide attempts, her hospitalizations, her three weeks at a repugnant college, her abandoned lovers, both men and women, all repellent human beings, her abandoned therapists, all incompetent, the classes she started and then quit due to the professors’ stupidity, her lost friends, her lost jobs, her periods of blankness and feelings of unreality, her grandiose daydreaming, her rages. The people in Ms. L.’s life fell into two camps only: angels and devils, and the former could quickly be transformed into the latter. “I came to you,” she had said early on, “because I heard you’re the best.” I had said that words like best and worst aren’t applicable to psychotherapy, that it is a work done together, but Ms. L. wanted a genius, a divine mother/father/doctor/friend. When I pointed this out to her, she smiled and said sweetly, “I think you can help me, that’s all.” Her idealization of me didn’t last. She began to ricochet from one extreme to the other, and as I bounced from hero to villain, I felt increasingly fragile and hurt. It was difficult to keep my balance, but worse, she sometimes had a hard time separating the two of us, and her confusion began to cause me acute discomfort.
Ms. L.’s voice was shrill. “My mother says I should just forgive her and get over it! Can you believe it?”
“I thought you weren’t speaking to your mother.”
“I’m not. Last time we talked, she said that. I asked you if you could believe it. You interrupted me!” Her fury felt like a slap.
“Yes, I can believe that’s what your mother hoped for. I’m interested in the fact that you haven’t spoken to her for over a year but your anger at her is very immediate, as if she were here with us now.”
For several seconds, Ms. L. said nothing. I watched her clench her fists. “So,” she shot back. “What’s next, Mr. Know-It-All?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “because I don’t know it all.”
“What’s the point of all this, then, if I’m in here with an ignoramus?”
“Your anger, perhaps. I think by holding on to your anger at me, you may be holding on to the story between you and your mother. There’s always some hope in anger, I think, hope for things to be different.”
“Hope?” She looked at her knees with trembling lips, and I watched her open her hands. “You’re right, I need to be angry. It’s like a drug. I crave it. When I’m not angry, I feel frozen out.”
I had an image of Ms. L. standing outside the locked door of a house in a snowstorm, shivering on the step. The pain this mental picture brought was sharp as a knife.
We talked about her words frozen out then, and my picture of her locked outside in the snow, about feeling numb, empty, and unreal, about her revenge fantasies, and she grew calmer. I felt like a man who had managed to steer a ship out of a gale.
After the session was over, she walked to the door, turned around, and said calmly, “My mother tried to kill me, you know. I’ve been remembering it. It’s all coming back to me now. I’ll tell you about it next time.”
I AM WALKING across the Martin Luther College campus after leaving my organic chemistry class, lost in thought about the remainder of the semester and all I have to do. It is late autumn and very cold. The memory carries a trace of dry, dun-colored leaves lifted by the wind and a few intermittent snowflakes, tiny and hard against my face. I look up. My father is striding toward me. I smile at him. Do I make a gesture, lift my hand? I don’t know. He looks straight into my face but doesn’t recognize me. It’s as if he doesn’t know me. He keeps on walking. I keep on walking. Why don’t I stop him? Why don’t I run to catch up with him, tap him on the shoulder? Dad, it’s me, Erik. We missed each other back there. Are you on your way to class? Why don’t I walk with you? I don’t because there is something forbidding in that closed face, like a door that’s better left shut. The idea of opening it creates the old dread. Frozen out. Ms. L.’s words come back to me. I’ve remembered the incident before, but without much emotion. I can see the sidewalk, recall my amazement, discomfort, but earlier, I read it differently: my father, the absent-minded professor. A fluke. With my elbows resting on my desk, I clutched the sides of my head with both hands and allowed myself to suffer. I remained in that position for well over a minute. Before I stood up, I understood that my vision of Ms. L. in the cold had also been an image of myself.
ON MY WAY home from work, I boldly rang Miranda’s bell. When she opened the door, she was wearing tight jeans spattered with paint, a small white T-shirt, and a blue scarf, knotted at the top of her head. She said hello and then looked at me expectantly.
“I’m here,” I said, using the phrases I had planned, “to invite you to a dinner my sister’s giving for my mother next week, Friday. She’s in town for a while . . .”
I interrupted myself because Miranda had lowered her eyes and was staring at her hands.
I pressed on. “I’d like to go with someone, that’s all. It’s nothing formal.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
My disappointment must have been obvious. I knew I was clenching my teeth. Nevertheless, I persisted. The words came before I could stop them: “You could think of it as a favor.”
She lifted her face to mine. “Yes,” she said, a smile crossing her face for an instant. “In that case, if I can get a babysitter, someone other than you, that is, I accept.”
I felt a moment of triumph, followed immediately by embarrassment and then guilt. I had stooped to coercion. We both knew it, and I stared at my shoes for several seconds until Eglantine came dancing down the hallway singing, “Skippity skip and jippity jip and liddy doo doo dah.” She swung the piece of paper she was holding up and down, and when she reached me, she held it out proudly. I glanced at Miranda for a moment before turning to Eggy and was relieved to see that she looked amused, not irritated. The picture had been done in charcoal with big swaths of black blur in it. I made out five or six large rectangles, several crosses, and three figures below that appeared to be sleeping. When I asked Eggy to explain the drawing to me, she knelt down and beckoned me to lower myself beside her.
“It’s dead people,” she said, “under the ground in the clemitary. They’re dead, really and truly. This one is my great-grandma, and this one is my great-grandpa.” Eggy moved her pliable lips into a desperate and highly unconvincing pout. Then, to add to this exaggerated emotion, she sniffed a few times and ground her fist under one eye.
“And who’s this very large person with all the hair?” I asked, tracing the lines of an elongated, prone body with my finger.
Eggy looked at me with wide eyes. “That’s Grandy Nanny. She’s the one who can get up and fight and be undead again. She has the science.”
When I lifted my eyes to Mir
anda, she was smiling. “Nanny was a Maroon leader, an obeah woman. She fought the British and negotiated a treaty with them so Maroon territory remained independent. She’s become the Jamaican heroine. My father’s a kind of amateur historian of the Maroons, so Eggy’s heard a lot of stories about her. She was a historical person, but she’s also a legend. It’s impossible to separate the two.”
While Eggy was busy playing dead and then resurrecting herself as a thunderous Grandy Nanny, Miranda pulled me aside and said, “Erik, he’s stopped sending the pictures.” I think it was the first time she’d called me by my name, and it created a small stir in me. When I told her I thought that was a good sign, she said in a lower voice, “Yes, but he doesn’t answer my calls. I’ve thought it over and think we should work out some arrangement for Eggy’s sake, but he’s disappeared. I’ve left messages at his apartment and on his cell, but nothing.”
I suggested giving it some time. Before I left them, I took Miranda’s hand in mine to say good-bye and suddenly remembered her bloody finger. “I’ve always wondered how you cut your finger that night,” I said, realizing that it gave me a chance to continue to hold her hand. I examined the finger, which had a small scar.
Miranda didn’t withdraw from me, and I felt a shudder of sexual feeling move between us. Not wanting to lose her touch, I squeezed her hand firmly and then pulled it to my chest. Miranda, who was clearly not expecting my impetuous tug, gasped, stumbled forward, and then started laughing. Reeling with embarrassment, I let her go.
She looked up at me with kind eyes and a small smile still on her lips. Then it vanished abruptly. She spoke slowly. “Jeff picked up a knife and said he’d slice his arm if I didn’t let him see Eggy. I grabbed it away from him and accidentally cut myself.”
Each story about Lane brought the man further into focus, but this last one, with its histrionic threat, magnified my unease. I knew perfectly well that any number of reasonably healthy people “fly off the handle,” a phrase that never fails to bring to my mind the blade of an ax hurtling through the air. In a fit of rage, Genie had once flung a toothbrush in my face, a moment that might have been comic if she hadn’t thrown the little weapon with considerable force. Lane hadn’t waved the knife at his ex-lover, but I was beginning to fear that he was far more unstable than Miranda knew.
BY THE TIME my father left the Philippines, the boy who had joined the army at age nineteen as a private had been promoted to first sergeant and, during a late-night poker game, gained the nickname Lou. One of his comrades had decided my father resembled the actor Lew Ayres. Lew was transcribed as Lou. The name stuck, and his men called him nothing else. After the war ended, he served in Japan, and then after four years his service finally ended. The night before he left for the States, the company gathered to bid him good-bye in a ceremony that my father wrote, mixed sincerity with levity. In his memoir, however, he reported on the evening’s levity.
Like most military units we had a small group that took up precision close order drill, tricky choreographed maneuvers as a hobby. The more sophisticated performers used rifles. Our team of five, geared to the comic, shouldered mops and brooms, which were more suited to the manual of arms than were our carbines. These drills were often done silently by counting a predetermined number of steps before a turn is made. That evening, however, four did the marching and one shouted the commands with a Minnesota Scandinavian flavor. They had developed a pattern where two obeyed the sequence and two did the reverse, or so it seemed, but through a chain of successive commands they somehow came back together. They could sing a bit as well. As a finale they marched to a snappy and well-known marching song which lent itself to name insertion. I recall the first stanza:
We’re Sergeant Lou’s troopers.
We’re raiders of the night.
We’re fightin’ sons of bitches
Who’d rather run than fight.
My father had been told that as a farewell gesture at the evening formation the following day he would be asked to review the troops. The squads would march by as individual units and then later merge with their platoons to form a company formation. The appropriate noncoms would report to my replacement who in turn would report to me and I to the company commander or the officer of the day, a simple ceremony that marked my final official function in the 569th. It turned out to be more than that.
A crude bench that served as a platform for three to four oil drums in the motor pool had been set up as my reviewing stand. It was a full dress parade. Then came what I had not been told—a change in the chain of command. The corporals reported to the platoon sergeants, the platoon sergeants reported to the new first sergeant, who in turn reported to Lt. Noel. He reported to Col. Bass, and Col. Bass, like the reporters before him, made an about-face, saluted, and reported to me. No Olympic gold medal winner standing on his or her polished podium can have felt a greater rush of feelings than I did in that moment on my oil-bespattered stand. I have on occasion later in life been extended recognition from high places, but none somehow has been more satisfying than this one.
I HAD MEANT to return to Brooklyn, change my clothes, and escort Miranda to Inga’s, but just before I was about to leave my office, the phone rang, and I heard a familiar voice talking at me: “The old bad brain came back, Doc, infra-red techtonic foibles up there under the cranium. The jabberdose chip, yak, yak, yak, wacked out, hijacked, multilingual, glottal, fricative genius gab.”
“Mr.T.?” I said. “Is that you?”
“The river, Heraclitus, man. Death-rattle tattlers. I,” he mumbled, “don’t want to go.”
After learning that my old patient was just outside the building, I flew down the stairs, rather than wait for the elevator, and shot out the door. I hardly recognized him. The slender young graduate student in comparative literature I had treated at Payne Whitney ten years earlier had grown immensely fat. His clothes were filthy, and he had an oozing scab on one bulbous cheek. He kneeled on the sidewalk, his grimy black-and-white notebook pressed to his chest, his chin raised as if he were summoning the heavens. I also noticed that his eyes flicked back and forth. The voices were probably coming fast and furious. I offered him my hand, and he managed to pull his vast body into a standing position. “They’re not happy about you,” he said. “Watch out.”
“I’m going to take you to the E.R. at New York Hospital. We’ll get a cab together. Is that all right?”
Mr. T. looked at me, nodded, and kept talking. “Chip planters from the other side, channeling me, man, the great dead heads (not grateful, ungrateful), Goethe, Goering, God, Buddha, Bach, Bruno, Houdini, Himmler, Spinoza, St. Theresa. Rasputin. Elvis. Talkin’ graves. Chosen from the other side. Nondimensional spaces, texts coming through, beating me hard up there. Mingus. Fear and trembling, fear and trembling. Repetition. Killer words. They want me over there.” Mr. T. held the notebook close to his face. “The whole of life,” he muttered. “Void and empty noise, boys.”
After I had managed to hail a cab, get my hallucinating companion in beside me, and give the address to the driver, I watched Mr. T. open his notebook, take out his pen, and begin to write. Mr. T. wasn’t composing. He was taking dictation from the dead. Poets, philosophers, prophets, tyrants, and sundry others spoke through him to produce a jumble of references, neologisms, and garbled quotations in at least three languages. I had treated him at Payne Whitney for five months and watched him slowly improve. Early on, he had jealously guarded his notebook from thieves who were after its “revelations.” If understood correctly, these universal truths had the power to extend the reader’s life. Mr. T. was a master of clanging. The vowels and consonants in his speech were generating machines that created such memorable sentences as “Lavinia in Slovenia is slipping into schizophrenia,” a line that came from what Mr. T. had once described to me as a “meisterwerk en suite, Iggy’s Insignia Divinia.” But the voices had also nearly torn him to pieces. After his admission, he had stood rigidly beside his bed, a tortured but alert expression on hi
s face, and moaned for hours.
As we walked together toward the psych E.R., Mr. T. continued his monologue. “Multi-vox.” He closed his eyes. “Vox et praeterea nihil, non, no, nein, nicht, nada.”
“Did you stop your medication?” I asked him.
“Couldn’t stand the meds, Doc. Poison berries. Made me so fat and slow, so slow, bro.”
Mr. T. lumbered forward. I hoped he wouldn’t refuse the berries now. He had the notebook open. Then he paused. I felt a rush of anxiety that he would turn around. He was looking down at a smudged, crossed-out, barely legible passage written in lines, a poem:
Where’s the bar, Mr. Farr?
Où est le scar, Désespoir?
Wo ist mein Schade Star
Mit la lumière bizarre
Ich will etwas sagen,
Monsieur Fragen.
Krankheit. Blindsight.
Strut Stage. Rage Page.
Mr. T. went willingly. I made sure he could keep his notebook. The last thing I said to the attending physician was “No Haldol. He doesn’t tolerate it.”
“I’LL MEET YOU there,” Miranda said after I told her about my emergency. “No problem.”
The Sorrows of an American Page 10