by Joe Haldeman
“Sit.” Phillips helped him into the straight chair with surprising gentleness. Folsom’s main impression of Phillips lingered from his second day on duty: a patient more than a head taller than the stocky little aide had screamed and jumped him; Phillips took expert hold of his wrist and shoulder and folded him like a piece of origami. He wasn’t respectful, though. “Just give me a call when you need him taken back, Doc.” He called every man “Doc” and every woman “Sweets.”
Folsom nodded and turned his attention to Spider. “Do you remember me, Specialist Speidel?”
Spider raised his head a little bit and looked at him with hooded eyes. “Prison.”
“No, this isn’t prison. This is—”
“You. Prison. Folsom Prison.”
“I see.” He leaned back and puffed. “A play on words.”
“Got a cigarette?”
Folsom carried a pack for patients. He didn’t have to buy them; other patients left them lying around, and he had a drawer full in his office, more or less stale. He flipped the half-pack out on the table between them.
“Newports.” Spider shook one out and carefully tore off the filter. Folsom struck him a light and he inhaled deeply.
“Take the pack. I’ve got more.”
Spider considered that for a moment. “Okay.” He picked up the pack by one corner and dropped it into his large shirt pocket.
Folsom took out one of the cards. “You said something about Bathsheba to the night nurse.”
“Huh uh.” He shook his head several times.
“You don’t remember ‘Bathsheba cheddar cheese’?”
“Bethsheba Cheddar Cheese. You a Baron?”
“Am I barren?”
“Yah, Baron Fon Rick-stoffen, nish var.” He reversed the cigarette and held it between thumb and forefinger, European style. “You haff relatiffs in Chermany.” He French-inhaled and pronounced carefully: “Nicht wahr?”
“Sorry. I don’t get it.”
“The Barons of B-CC. Bethsheba Cheddar Cheese.”
“Hmm. Okay.” He made a note of that on the card. There was something familiar about it. “I saw your parents yesterday.”
Spider stared at the cigarette end and blew gently on it.
“They’re worried about you.”
He started rocking, a short, jerky motion, about two times a second. “I’m worried about me.”
“Would you like to see them?”
“No,” he said quickly. “Not now, not now. Not now, no.”
“What about your girlfriend?”
“Li?”
“Beverly, not Lee. Or is that what you call her?”
Spider broke into a laugh that became a giggle. “Beverly not Li. No way, GI.” He giggled again. “Beverly would never let me cornhole her.”
“Really—”
“Li would, though.” He closed his eyes in ecstasy. “First me, then Li. Around the world, it’s really great, really great.”
“Yes, but, uh …” Folsom puffed so furiously he was burning his tongue. Spider’s growing erection was obvious even in the loose pajamas. Folsom had had patients start masturbating in front of him, and that was difficult enough to deal with when they were heterosexual.
“I thought it was just something guys talked about; I didn’t know you could really do it!” His tongue rubbed along the syphilis chancre on his lip.
“Forget about Lee for just a minute. Please!”
He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Easy for you to say, white man. Me think about Li alla time. Numbah One boom-boom.”
“Boom-boom.” He nodded slowly and looked at the top page on the clipboard, Spider’s high school transcript. “Look, uh, you got straight A’s in English all through high school.”
“College, too, one semester. Read an’ write, big deal.”
“But you didn’t major in English.”
He started rocking even faster. “Astronomy. Ad astra per aspera.”
“Pardon?”
“Up your ass-tra with your aspirin. Latin.” He stopped. “Ooday ooyay eakspay igpay atinlay?”
“Uh, yes, when I was—”
“Önnenkay eesay rechenspay igpay atinlay aufeutschday?”
“Uh, hmm.” Folsom concentrated on tapping the top ash off his pipe and tamping down the dottle. “Yeah, what I meant was, maybe we could communicate better if you expressed yourself in writing. You know, writing in English?”
“Ja, auf englisch.” He reversed the cigarette again and took a huge drag, bringing the ember down to within a fraction of an inch of his fingers. He put it out with exaggerated care. “Meestair Bond. You bring me ze fountain pen and ze stack of papair, and I will write anyzang you want.”
“Good. Good, I’ll get right on it.” He stabbed the intercom. “Phillips. Are you there?”
He was about two seconds away. Again, a single rap on the door, and he slid in. “Trouble, Doc?”
“Oh, no. No, we’re done.” He made a shooing motion with his left hand. Phillips helped Spider stand and move dragging toward the door. “I’ll get you that pen and paper right away.”
Spider stopped in the doorway and looked at him with a haughty air. “Bond papair, if you please.” Then he looked at the floor again and shuffled off.
Folsom watched the door glide shut. “Bethsheba cheddar cheese,” he said under his breath, and sighed. “Queers.”
He stared at the transcript for the tenth time, without the name of the school registering: Bethesda-Chevy Chase, it said. “Home of the Barons.”
Girl talk
Beverly was at the doughnut shop having coffee with her ex-roommate Sherry, who looked deceptively wholesome in a starchy new maternity dress. Beverly had never seen her in anything but faded jeans or skin.
“So Soldier Boy’s in the hospital.” Beverly was clasping and unclasping her hands, staring at the newspaper between them. She nodded. “At least he’s alive.” They both looked at the headlines. Tet was still crackling along, hard fighting in Hue. But the main headlines were about the crippled Paris peace talks—the United States accusing North Vietnam of answering our restraint with a vicious sneak attack—and the Pueblo, with the United States conceding the ship may have strayed into foreign waters; let’s put our nukes away for the time being.
“Yeah, but a mental hospital.”
“Bev, look. He was always kinda weird.”
“Well, he was eccentric.” She sipped thoughtfully. “He might’ve gone to Canada if I’d gone with him.”
“Really? You told me about the Peace Corps. I didn’t know he’d talked about actually dodging.”
“It doesn’t seem like draft-dodging to me anymore. It’s asking another country for political asylum.”
Sherry laughed. “I know who you’ve been hanging around with.” Stage whisper: “You talk politics in bed?”
“No, we talk about you.” She flicked her tongue out. “Spider never seriously suggested it, I guess. I just remember he talked about other guys doing it. His family would’ve disowned him. But he might have gone if I went along. Then my old man would track him down with a shotgun.”
“Your old man is a fucking lunatic, you don’t mind me saying.”
“Tell me about it.” Beverly was cutting her pie into neat pieces, not eating it. “I remember once he did say, Spider, that if he went to Canada or Sweden he’d never know how much of it was principle and how much was fear. Cowardice.”
“Things have changed a lot in the last year or two. I’d go to Canada if I was a boy and got drafted.”
“You really would?”
“No doubt about it. And maybe some of it would be fear, so what? It’s not exactly World War Two. We don’t belong over there.”
“You wouldn’t’ve said that last year.”
“Yeah, well, part of it’s people like Spider. And I got a cousin, step-cousin or whatever, he got shot by a piece of shrapnel and they just patched him up and sent him back out. We got a picture of him with this big fucking ban
dage on his arm, in a sling, out in the jungle looking scared shitless. I mean, really.”
Beverly nodded with a faraway expression. “I think I’d go to jail. If I were a boy.”
“Canada’s nicer.”
“But at least you’d be doing something. If everybody said ‘send me to jail instead,’ the war’d be over in a few months.”
“Dream on. They’d build more jails. Or put ’em in camps—how long do you think it took ’em to build those concentration camps for the Japanese Americans in World War Two? They’d find a place to put everybody.”
Beverly smiled at her friend. “Being pregnant has made you into a radical.”
“Yeah, maybe. In between learning how to puke politely and knitting little booties, I guess you think about the future.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. Every morning I run into the john and hope there’s a stall so I don’t have to barf in the sink. Gross everybody out. Must be nice to have your own bathroom.”
“Sure. Me and six or seven other people and whatever strangers decide to have sex in the bathtub.”
“That happens?” she giggled at the thought.
“Yesterday morning. I’d never seen them before in my life. They didn’t even lock the door.”
“So what were they doing?”
“Having sex.”
“No, I mean, what?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She was blushing. “Just the regular.”
“Was the guy good-looking?”
“Sherry! I didn’t stand around and stare.”
“I would, if it was my bathroom.”
“If it were your bathroom, you’d get in there with them.”
“Maybe I would.” Whispering: “Did he have a really big one?” Beverly looked up at the ceiling and got even redder. “Come on, you looked. How big was it?”
“Oh, I couldn’t see from the door. He had a nice behind, though. Lots of muscles on his back. Want me to get his phone number?”
“Yeah, tell him you’ve got a girlfriend who’s absolutely sure she won’t get knocked up. Doesn’t care if he uses a rubber. Doesn’t want him to.”
“You ought to just put up little cards on all the bulletin boards.”
“Nah, I already did that. You meet a really cruddy class of boys.”
They laughed so hard together the owner of the shop glared and told them to keep it down. Sherry answered with “I can’t,” and a loud belch, and they staggered out the door on the edge of hysteria.
Schizo (2)
If Spider had exhibited symptoms of schizophrenia twenty years after 1968, he probably would have been stabilized with drugs and sent home with a prescription.
Chlorpromazine seemed to be the magic bullet for most schizophrenics. Developed in the 1940s as an antihistamine, French doctors used it in a “lytic cocktail” that swiftly knocked out agitated patients. A French psychiatrist, Pierre Deniker, became curious about the compound and used it by itself on some psychotic patients. It was strikingly effective in reducing the severity of schizophrenic symptoms. Although nobody was sure how it worked, by the 1950s chlorpromazine (usually known by the brand name Thorazine) was the drug of choice for controlling schizophrenia.
Research in the 1960s produced an explanation for chlorpromazine’s action in terms of brain chemistry. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with schizophrenic symptoms. It’s picked up by “dopamine receptors” in the brain. Chlorpromazine and other antipsychotic drugs seem to block off the dopamine receptors selectively; that is, they don’t affect the receptors of other neurotransmitters. Clinical observation showed that the effectiveness of any drug in preventing schizophrenic behavior depended on how effectively it blocked dopamine receptors.
(There was supporting evidence in the behavior of “speed freaks”; abusers of amphetamines. Amphetamine increases the production of dopamine, and people who overdose on it will temporarily show symptoms indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia.)
The almost universal employment of the drug made research difficult. The autopsied brains of schizophrenics did show subtle and more or less consistent differences from normal brains, but there was no way to demonstrate whether the differences were due to schizophrenia itself, or just from years of taking chlorpromazine. In the 1970s and ’80s, jazzy futuristic tools like positron-emission tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and single photon-emission computed tomography allowed researchers to analyze the living brain in action. But they found nothing simple or universal—some schizophrenics had structural or physiologic abnormalities of the brain, but not all of them did.
When the President in 1990 declared the beginning of “The Decade of the Brain” (perhaps tacitly acknowledging a previous decade of brainlessness), the consensus among researchers was that schizophrenia was probably an umbrella term for many different diseases.
Schizophrenia is partially hereditary. The brother or sister of someone with the disorder has a 10-percent chance of getting it—yet an identical twin has less than a 50-percent chance, even with an identical genetic blueprint.
The pattern of symptoms is wildly inconsistent from patient to patient. About half of them show symptoms only intermittently; for the rest, the symptoms start and will continue unabated until drug therapy intervenes, and even then there is a slow constant deterioration.
Some people recover spontaneously and some never do, having to depend on chlorpromazine the way a diabetic depends on insulin. Chlorpromazine has no effect on about 20 percent of schizophrenics, though some respond to other drugs, controversial and expensive.
The onset of schizophrenia is sometimes related to sudden trauma. (Freud originally thought that it was always caused by a specific traumatic event.) Usually it just happens.
One out of a hundred people becomes schizophrenic. No one really knows why, or why the rest of us do not.
The cuckoo’s nest
Spider thanked Phillips for helping him and slumped down onto his bunk. His feet were cold. He thought about getting under the covers, for the warmth, but it had taken him so long to make the bed. And it wasn’t a really great job of bed-making; in Basic it would have gotten him KP. He smiled, recalling that. Everybody was supposed to hate Kitchen Police. As if washing a few hundred dishes were harder than slogging twenty miles through the snow with a pack on your back.
Spider looked around the government-green room. Twenty beds, seven of them currently empty. Most of the men were sitting or lying down, asleep or half-asleep, many of them staring blankly ahead. Some rocked or nodded. Two were mumbling and one was crying. Two were carrying on an intense discussion of baseball.
“What was that all about?” The guy on the next bunk; Spider had said hello to him but couldn’t remember his name. Serious-looking blond man in his late twenties.
“Prison, um, Fulsom. Captain Fulsom.”
“‘Fole.’ Captain Folsom. Is he a dickhead, or what?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s afraid of us, you know. You can really fuck with him.”
“Yeah.” Spider laughed. “I started talking to him in German, in pig Latin. He looked at me like I was crazy.”
“Really.” He lit up a cigarette. “If you aren’t crazy, though, what the fuck are you? In the wrong ward?”
“Don’t put it out.” Spider shook out a Newport and used his match. “Is this really Walter Reed?”
“Yeah, trust me, flew into Edwards. Where do you think you are?” He leaned forward. “Are you really crazy?”
“Huh uh, no. Yeah. I don’t know. I was in the jungle, we got the shit kicked out of us. I guess maybe I did go a little crazy. Is that why I’m here?”
The guy shrugged. “You’re the doctor. You come from the Nam?”
“Around Pleiku, yeah. We got in this firefight and, I don’t know. I got knocked out, some weird shit happened. Maybe it didn’t happen. I do remember the helicopter and some hospital, I guess in Pleiku, really crowded. I was on a cot in the hall, all tied up. They’d let m
e take a shit and then they’d shoot me up with some shit, tie me up again. It’s all just a big blur. I wound up here, in some other ward. My ears hurt and kept popping so I figured I’d been on a plane; that’s one thing I do remember. Then they stopped giving me shots and I stopped sleeping all the time. When I could walk, they moved me in here. Then last night the nurse says this is Walter Reed.
“Trust me. We landed at Edwards Air Force Base. It’s Walter Reed.”
“But I live here.”
The guy squinted at him. “We all live here.”
“I mean I really live here. Out in Bethesda.”
“Maryland?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded. “They say I tried to kill my wife. That’s not true. You speak German?”
“Just a few words. One semester.”
“We were stationed in Germany, but I never got the lingo, you know? Like I hardly ever got off the base.”
“Yeah, like I never learned any Vietnamese. Chieu hoi. Di di mao. Stuff like that.”
“What, ‘don’t shoot; I voted for Mao’?” They both laughed. “No way I was gonna kill her. She come at me with a fryin’ pan, man, a fuckin’ cast-iron skillet.”
“Shit. She’s the one ought to be in here.” Spider made a face at the cigarette and twisted the filter off. “So you hit her?”
“Huh uh.” He didn’t change expression, but tears started to run down his cheeks. “We were in the kitchen, I poked her.”
“Poked?”
“Yeah, I picked up a steak knife and poked her.”
“Where?”
“In the kitchen.”
“Oh.”
“That’s how I got this.” He raised his foot, encased in plaster. “She dropped the fuckin’ frying pan on my bare foot. Broke two toes.”
“Was that before you poked her, or after?”
“After. Well, just barely. About the same time. It only went in a couple inches. Maybe four inches. Then I did it again, after she dropped the skillet.”
“Where?”
“Oh, I poked her in the stomach. Abdomen, if you want to get technical.”
“She okay now?”
“She’s a fuckin’ bitch, man, I don’t know. She’s still in Bremerhaven, far as I know.” He wiped his face with his hands. “I even took her to the infirmary, drove her there. I told her what to say. But I’m waitin’ for her out in the waitin’ room and in comes these three MPs with guns. I go quietly, you know? But when they started to put me in the lockup, I don’t know, I freaked out.” He laughed and smacked his fist into his palm. “Decked one of them. One shot, fuckin’ decked ’im.”