Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  Strange query, from the father you love. That you dote on. When you’re trying to con him. After all, it wasn’t as if Spot had rabies. I decided to treat the matter as a rather coarse attempt by Papa to protect his pocketbook while pretending at levity: i.e., that by ‘bite’ he was employing the demotic locution for ‘seek undue financial advantage through abuse of personal connections,’

  Coolly, therefore, I told Father, “He has money of his own, these days. His work on the correction of pitting in nuclear power containment vessels has brought us a comfortable stipend from Con Ed and certain other sizeable corporations.” No call to tell Randy every detail. “Rest assured, Daddy. He won’t ‘bite’ you.”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Father said, “perfectly okay. No, pet, it’s just in that case I hope his quark isn’t worse than his bite.” And the terrible man began to shout and shriek with mirth down the line at his own excruciating silliness. Marcia must have told him about quarks, mispronouncing the word to rhyme with ‘bark,’ because I know for certain that Randy is no intellectual giant. His talents lie instead the direction of making money, large amounts of which he expended to make my wedding the happiest day of my life.

  1973: the purloined letter

  MOGADON BLUES The Journal of Pharmacological Remorse

  is published at bleary infrequent intervals by Joe Williams [still here at #11, 1121 Drummond St, Carlton, gang, down the sleazy end where no one has wonderful academic parties, unless it’s me] for “the usual”: trade quipu, locs, a buncha stamps for the postage, and if the worst comes to the worst and inspiration fails you and you need more than Mogadon to chase down dem debbil blues, $2 for five. We have no bananas. This is MB number 6, if you’re counting, and the last stencil was typed on Sunday, 23 September, 1973

  OH GOD, IT WAS IN THE BREAST POCKET OF MY GRAY SUIT ALL ALONG

  I just keep drifting back to Caroline when the Moggy Blues come pounding down the track, or perhaps it’s the other way around. As I write this it’s Wednesday the 19th, which is a sort of horrid anniversary. The usual rationale, friends: why tell you about it? Why not. It purges the soul. I strut my conscience on the mimeo stage and wait for your curses, your applause, or maybe some sage advice, commiserations, or None Of The Above—blank silence at the mailbox, embarrassment in the street if I chance to stumble across you in the Real World (Aargh!). Moggy Blues is a Journal of Record.

  Five years ago, as I say, to the day, I was involved in an atrocious and unseemly fight (no fisticuffs, only bitter words) outside the Casualty entrance of the Royal Melbourne hospital, in Royal Parade, with Caro’s parents. Their daughter lay in a nearly catatonic condition upstairs in the Psychiatric Ward, zonked on Largactil and barbiturates, looking white and dead and mumbling sluggishly when she could be persuaded to recognize anyone outside her own jangled brainpan. The Muirs explained to me that all this was an utter surprise, that the doctors had told them it was like a virus, coming out of nowhere, that Caroline had always been a difficult and fractious child. I was in a completely devastated frame of mind and took this as (a) a pathetic if not wicked denial of the happy-families inferno that had baked Caroline’s soul to a crisp, and (b) a strong implication that I and my scurvy like were that very virus. So I told them a few things about schizophrenogenic mothers and double-binding bullshit of the kind involved in asserting simultaneously that Caro had always been an exemplary child until she met me and that she had always been a difficult loon.

  Tears were shed, and Mr. Muir took his wife away to their Volvo and I got a tram home to Brunswick, where I ate a chop and several sausages which my mother placed before me without a word, and I seethed and bit my tongue and rushed back and forth to my shelf of books, pulling down Penguins by phenomenological existentialists and viciously underlined telling fragments, and finally I went to my room while my parents settled in to view Homicide, and there wrote one of the most astonishingly patronizing letters the world has ever seen.

  Well, the world (until today) has not actually been privileged to witness this object.

  When it was done I jammed the pages into an envelope and addressed it to the Muirs and collapsed into bed in a state combining savage catharsis and aggravated guilt, which according to all the best theories should be impossible. In the morning I re-read this denunciatory document over my Weeties and realized that if I ever wanted to see Caroline again I could not conceivably post it. So I didn’t.

  Why publish it now as an “open letter”?

  Obviously it can’t do any harm. The Muirs will never see it. Caroline will never see it. And there’s some small chance, I suppose, that one or two of you who have found yourselves on the edge of this kind of ghastly catastrophe might get a hint of truth or sympathy or comfort in what I tried to tell Caroline’s parents exactly five years ago but finally lacked either the courage or the ruthlessness (I still can’t evaluate it) to do so.

  15 Marks St.

  Brunswick 3056

  Thurs 19 September, 1968

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Muir,

  This is not an easy letter to write, and probably will not be easy to read. Eleven o’clock at night. I have been staring at my typewriter for hours now, wondering how I can possibly express to you what I need to express. I hope you will sense that it is being written in a spirit of sincerity, concern, and, in the deepest sense (to the best of my understanding of this difficult word), love.

  If what I have to say contains pain, anguish and even bitterness, I hope you will find them directed not at you but at the world’s cruelty.

  I must start by facing up to one ugly fact. I know you find certain distasteful characteristics in me (as a visitor in your home, as a companion for Caroline, as a human being, for that matter). Because you are civilized people, your disapproval only becomes evident in moments of utmost crisis—like the awful disagreement we had outside the hospital this afternoon.

  I want to tell you both how sorry I am that my comments and attitude upset you so badly. But finally I think it was unavoidable.

  I do not disagree with your assessment of my deficiencies. I know I am often cold, arrogant, and hostile, an unfinished and perhaps unfinishable person. Yes, and I can see the risks when Caroline is, as she has become, in large degree dependant upon such a person. What is worse, it is undeniable that there exist impulses in my flawed character which attempt to consolidate that dependency.

  Regrettably, now that we are here, there is no simple way out of this impasse. I can only state my hope that (to the degree in which I am inextricably involved) certain other impulses might help compensate. I mean, for example, my demand for uncompromising honesty (which is brought to bear just as hard on me as on you and other people; despite appearances, I certainly don’t consider myself a unique moral superman). I mean, too, a hypertrophied sense of responsibility.

  Of course I realize that you find me the opposite of responsible. But responsibility can only manifest itself by reference to one’s private set of values, one’s general understanding of the world and how it works. I wish now to try to elucidate some of my views that have had a bearing on my relationship with Caroline and with both of you. Wherever feasible, I will borrow the concepts of specialists whose competence and experience can be acknowledged as professional and expert, where my own are (as you have pointed out) clearly amateur, limited by inexperience, and biased by involvement.

  My principal source is Dr. R. D. Laing, of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. He has written a number of influential books on the causes and treatment of mental illness. I emphasize Laing’s authority because I am sensitive to Mrs. Muir’s assertion of my own callowness; that, as she put it, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

  We are, however, morally required to base our decisions on such information as we have to hand. Of course my interpretation of psychologists like Laing may be grievously in error. My actions may derive more from my defects than my understanding. But that is the human condition. The best that can be expe
cted of us is sincerity guided, to the best of our intelligence, by up-to-date information.

  Laing sees madness as a state of disrupted communication occurring in a social context. He lets us see that Caroline’s madness is (quite literally) just another kind of lunacy in a world which is so pervasively disordered that none of us can use words and mean what we say, make plans for the future and have any genuine confidence that they will be realized.

  But mental disorder is always particular. We are not all sedated in hospitals, waiting for the next electric shock treatment. We might all to some extent be deranged, but some (Caroline, sadly, among them) are strikingly so. Why are these people mad?

  Laing’s answer is this:

  “To the best of my knowledge, no schizophrenic has been studied whose disturbed pattern of communication has not been shown to be a reflection of, and reaction to, the disturbed and disturbing pattern characterizing his or her family of origin.”

  I have long since overstepped the limits of propriety, but it is Caroline, after all, whom my letter is all about. As her psychiatrist has told us, Caroline is psychotic at the moment, probably schizophrenic. If this is not the case, my course of action has been gravely in error.

  We can multiply ‘ifs.’ Perhaps Dr. Laing’s account is wrong. Perhaps it is right, but I have been partly instrumental in bringing about Caroline’s condition (by being, myself, one half of a ‘double-bind,’ an insoluble tussle).

  Since there can be no question that, long before I ever met her, Caroline was well advanced into her particular unhappy state (whatever we decide to call it), at most I can only have aggravated a situation that was already serious. To be quite frank, I feel that the relationship between Caroline and me served to delay her precipitation into psychosis—if that is a true description of what has happened to her, though I hope it is not.

  The first time I met Caroline, I sensed something profoundly wrong. But, as Mrs. Muir insists, I am a pessimist, I over-analyze people. Being aware of this, I did not jump to any immediate conclusion. I came to see Caroline’s feyness as charming. What is more, I’ve noticed that because they are ipso facto ‘different,’ many creative, intelligent and sensitive people at university tend to be prey to prolonged bouts of depression, self-doubt and even ‘suicidal’ moods. However, as Caroline and I got to know one another, she very tentatively revealed more disturbing facts. For instance, that she often had visual illusions which were compelling, seductive and frightening.

  You told me this afternoon that I had no right to offer opinions about Caroline, let alone her relationship with her family, that you know infinitely more about her than I ever could. I don’t deny it. Yet I am quite certain that she never told you of her frequent hallucinations.

  Once I knew about this, being aware of the limitations of my knowledge, I urged Caroline to tell you of her problems, and to seek psychiatric counsel. Up to this point she had been highly articulate and forthcoming about her splendid relationship with both of you and her sister. In fact, this was something that first attracted me to her; as you pointed out this afternoon I have had ambiguous and strained dealings with my own parents. Yet now she began to contradict these glowing assurances, most markedly in her reluctance to tell you candidly about her hallucinations.

  On those nights she stayed with me, she’d go through prolonged episodes of agitation, trying to make up her mind whether to ring you and let you know where she was. All of this was a little peculiar, but only a little. Failing to call you is not obviously different from any thoughtless/wilful girl forgetting/refusing to let her parents know where she was, and thereby admit that they held the right to control her movements.

  Not telling you about the intermittent hallucinations was more worrying, but—to be cruelly blunt about it—I could see that if you love your family very much and they have a high regard for you, then you might well feel reluctant to tell them you frequently see your dead grandfather coming at you out of the wall.

  By the time I decided things were pretty serious with Caroline’s state of mind, it was already (for a variety of reasons) difficult to do anything about it. Her first-year exams were close, and clearly important to Caroline. It may seem obvious now that it would have been better to stop everything, forget the exams, and call in a psychiatrist. At the time it was my considered estimate that I should do nothing beyond offering what support I could, wait until the exams were over, and then urge her to seek medical aid.

  Why didn’t I “do the right thing” and let you know? You raised this question today and I was unable to answer it in any terms that would not have been absolutely offensive in that place at that time. But the question remains: why did I have the audacity and stupidity to take it all into my own hands?

  Perhaps because I wanted to play Svengali.

  Perhaps because my hostility to my own parents transferred itself to you.

  Perhaps because my cold-blooded intellect wants to test its power and theories in a ‘game’ with living people.

  Perhaps because I am mad myself and driven by the peculiar imperatives of my madness.

  Well, perhaps. I cannot and will not deny that some of these ignoble elements are implicated. But there are two fundamental reasons why I “took things into my own hands” or, more precisely, did not pass them on immediately when they appeared there.

  Firstly, Caroline was plainly reluctant to broach her problems with either of you. Nor with any of her girl friends, except very cautiously and peripherally. It seemed important that she should tell someone. Trust depends on trustworthiness. If Caroline wanted to tell me things she felt incapable of revealing to you, I could not then reveal them to you. (Unless it became unquestionably imperative to do so.)

  Caroline’s trust enabled me to arrange for her to see a psychiatrist. That was a crucial decision in more than one way. It meant that she and I would learn if her state was as serious as I feared. It also meant (since going to a doctor was itself an objective transaction requiring the payment of fees, medical benefits and so on) that sooner or later you would learn about it without any betrayal of trust by me. If the family situation was as open and responsive as everyone except Caroline kept insisting, everything would be sorted out without too much difficulty, though, of course, not without a measure of surprise, shock, pain, resentment perhaps, and concern.

  And here we are at the most disagreeable point in what I have to tell you.

  My small knowledge of clinical and theoretical psychology (a mere smattering, true, as Mrs. Muir told me today; but twenty or thirty books’ worth more, I have now to insist, than the great well of wisdom open to most middle-aged housewives) left me with a dilemma:

  A strong materialist school of psychology maintains that mental disorder is a product of biochemical abnormalities and specific injurious learning experiences such as those Caroline suffered at times at school, say.

  The main alternative school of thought derives from Freud and is less impressed by studies on rats and pigeons. It may be represented by Dr. Laing, who is uncompromising in his belief that the collapse of the experience of a human being into madness cannot be understood outside that person’s crucial human context: her family, principally.

  If the first school was correct, Caroline was a machine that had broken down and needed a mechanic. If the second was right, she was a person trapped in a horrid unconscious tangle. My prejudice is clear enough. I could not bring any of this out while Caroline depended on my silence.

  Naturally, all these rules of thumb were abandoned at the moment Caroline broke down into psychosis. I immediately rang the psychiatrist she’d been to see on one occasion, and then I rang you. It was a ghastly situation, but I attempted to place you in possession of the facts as I saw them. You felt that I was accusing you, trying to make you feel guilt. No. I wasn’t. I’m still not.

  But if it has been difficult for you to pay any attention to me, an upstart youth without manners, who sponges off the government and writes for pretentious magazines, I hope
you will see that I do not find it agreeable or easy to say and write things that can only reinforce your bad opinions of me.

  Perhaps also I have been living too long with this tragedy as an unfolding experience to grasp the shock it must have been for you—to understand that I could hardly begin a cool and involved analysis in the unprepared moment of that shock. In the meantime, unhappily, the opportunities for understanding each other have rather diminished.

  Does all this sound no better than an attempt to justify myself? It is less that than an oblique attempt to let you see in some detail through my eyes. In isolation you might consider that point of view to have little to recommend it; but we are not in isolation.

  Mrs. Muir assured me that the Ward psychiatrist says the family has nothing to do with Caroline’s condition, that such illnesses come utterly out of the blue. It is a tenable viewpoint, though our everyday practice denies that we believe it. I’ve always supposed that one of the fundamentals of our way of life is the parents’ right and duty to choose the pattern of their children’s education, upbringing, associates…Why, if not because these factors are deemed of critical importance in shaping the future character of the child? Can we abdicate from that realistic expectation if the results are not to our liking?

  I urge this line of thought, despite the fact that its implications in the present situation are far from happy, not from some absurd pretention to dispense blame and guilt. I do so because if it is true we can all do something for Caroline.

  If mental disorder appears in a flash from nowhere, or from the buried infantile past, then we are helpless; nothing can be done. But if it is a state of mind sustained by identifiable relationships in the present, if it is the outcome of patterns of action that have prevailed for years unnoticed and prevail still, then everything can be done, when we uncover and change those patterns.

  Can you truly believe you’re doing Caroline a service when you deftly steer conversations away from “depressing” topics? Or are you afraid to listen?