by Torey Hayden
Conor moved on to the next box and drew a picture of a man standing up. It wasn’t a particularly unusual picture, just a typical child’s drawing of a man with wide-open eyes and a blank expression, dressed in trousers and a plain shirt.
In the third box Conor drew another man. This time the picture was gruesome. He made blood come out of this man’s mouth and out of wounds over his body. The man was still standing, but there was a knife in his side and a second knife in his neck.
“They shouldn’t be in this order,” Conor said thoughtfully, as he sat back to look at the drawings in their little boxes across the top of the page. “This is going to be one of those tests that doctors give you. You will see the pictures and then you must put them in order to tell a story.”
Leaning back over the paper, he moved to a new box and drew a picture of a bed. He put a child of indistinct gender in it, under the covers. The child wasn’t asleep. Its eyes were staring circles. Conor paused to study the picture a moment, then went back to work, lavishing much more attention to detail on this picture than he had on the others. He drew a rug on the floor and a toy truck and a little horse. He added hair to the child’s head and made stripes on the blanket. Then he began to draw the body. “You and I can’t see this part,” he said as he worked. “It’s hidden under the blanket. But the mechanical cat can. Nothing is hidden from the mechanical cat.” Conor drew pyjamas on the child and beneath the pyjamas, genitals. It was a boy, lying on his side in the bed and James could tell he was urinating.
“Now here, in this one …” Conor had moved to the next square and he began to sketch a man much like in the first box, lying prone on the floor. He drew a line over the man. “That’s the rug. I don’t know how to draw a rug so you can tell what it is looking at it from the side. And the boy came downstairs. Very quietly. Quiet as a mouse. He did pee-pee in his bed. See up there?” He pointed to the other picture.
Conor stopped. A long, pregnant moment followed, as he regarded the series of drawings. Then he lay down the pencil and looked over at James. “This is my dream.”
“You’ve dreamt all this?”
“Yeah. Many times. When I am asleep, I dream it. When I am awake, I dream it too. Even when I am not dreaming, it’s there. But no one knows this. It’s one of the hidden things.”
The next pause lengthened and grew into a full silence, soft and deep
Conor finally looked up at James. “I am listening for the mechanical cat now. He can sing louder than the dream. That’s what he does. Zap-zap. Metal fur. Never cry. Never die.”
James smiled. “He sings to make the dream go away?”
“Yeah.”
Another pause.
“In here, the boy is safe.”
“Yes,” James said
Conor leaned over the paper again and in the next box he began to draw a picture of a child, standing beside a table. “Here is this room here. This is the man’s table. See? Right here. This table.” Conor patted the wood. “The boy is standing beside it. ‘No ghosts here,’ he says. He says that to himself.”
Leaning closer to the drawing, his body going more rigid as he worked, Conor said. “And here inside the boy, here is the mechanical cat. Can you see it? I have drawn it, so now it’s not hidden. Can you see?”
Inside the torso of the child who was standing beside table, Conor had carefully drawn a small cat. It sat upright in the manner of cats, its ears pricked forward, its eyes watching out from the picture. It had a tiny upside-down triangle for a nose and an almost wistful smile on its face.
Conor drew thin lines down through the head, the arms and the legs of the child, all connected to the cat, as if it were a feline puppeteer working its big creation.
“I need to colour this,” Conor said. He rose up and reached across the table to the basket of crayons and marking pens, then coloured the cat black with a white blaze on its face, white socks and bib and a little pink nose. He coloured the eyes green and then made whiskers and very, very neat little claws just showing from the white paws. He didn’t colour the boy at all.
“I want to cut this out. Where’s some cardboard? I want to paste it on cardboard first to keep it good. I need cardboard,” he announced and jumped up from the table. Without waiting for a response from James, he crossed over to the shelves and rummaged through the assortment of art materials. Finding a small piece of poster board, he returned. Taking up scissors, he skilfully cut out the figure of the boy. He glued the picture to the poster board, then endeavoured to cut away the excess to leave just the figure of the boy with his internal cat.
Conor was very pleased with the result. His face lit up brightly. “Look! See? Here it is. My mechanical cat.” He leaped up and ran to the shelves to get the box of cardboard animals. Pulling out the little cardboard tabby, he fitted it into its stand as he came back to the table. “See? My cat and your cat. Here. I’ll get clay, so mine can stand up too. Mine and yours! I can take this home! This one belongs to me.”
“Yes, you’ve made your own mechanical cat now, haven’t you? What a good idea you had.”
“Yeah! I have done it all myself, so I can keep it.” He flashed a brilliant smile at James.
Conor leaned back to admire the cats on the table, but as he did so, his eyes drifted towards the paper he’d been drawing on. “I didn’t finish that,” he said. He picked up the paper with its missing square. “I should have made another picture. I didn’t do the whole dream.” He made no effort to resume.
“Can you tell what has been left out?” James asked.
“I didn’t put her on the stairs. Made a picture of the stairs.” He felt around the hole where he had cut out the drawing of the boy and the cat. “She said, ‘Don’t come down.’” Conor looked at the other drawings. “She said, ‘You’re a bad, bad boy. You must not get out of bed.’ She wanted to play with my finger-paints. She didn’t want to ask first.
“I needed to do pee-pee. I thought, ‘I must get up. I need the potty. I can’t get my pants down by myself.’ But she was crying. She’d used my finger-paints without asking. She said in a scream, ‘You bad, bad boy! You bad, BAD boy! This is for coming downstairs.’ The bad boy came downstairs. So, he ran back up. Quick as could be. Quick as a fox. Quick under the covers. She is screaming. The boy is screaming too. Screaming and crying. Where’s his strong daddy? He wants his daddy, but his daddy isn’t there. The mechanical cat isn’t there. No one is there and the boy pees in his bed.”
Conor ran a finger over the picture of the boy in bed. “Yes, that’s what happened. It was a very bad dream. A dream I kept having.”
“It sounds very scary indeed,” James said. “I can understand how you would feel so frightened.”
Conor put his hands over his eyes. “I don’t talk about it. Keep my mouth zipped shut,” he gestured across his lips. “‘Don’t talk about it,’ she says. ‘It isn’t real. It’s just a dream. It will go away, if you don’t pay attention to it. You make it real with your thoughts. But thoughts aren’t real.’”
He was rocking back and forth, his fingers pressed tight to his eyes.
“Who’s saying this to you?” James asked.
“The mummy. She says it isn’t real. You just heard them in a dream.”
“What about this other picture?” James asked, pointing to the last one of the boy and the man under the rug. “What can you tell me about this?”
Conor lowered the cut-out. “This is in the dream too. They’re all part of the dream. But this is the quiet part. When there is no one but the ghost man. Mummy isn’t here. Daddy isn’t here. The ghost man isn’t running down the hall. The boy is thinking, ‘This room looks different.’ He is thinking, ‘What is that big lump?’ So he goes over and lifts up the rug to see why it’s so lumpy and there is the ghost man! The boy gets very scared. He runs. Like this.” Conor raced two fingers across the tabletop. “He runs very fast because he knows the ghost man is going to get up and come get him like he did before.”
“The ghos
t man ‘got’ you before?” James asked, slipping in the pronoun change from ‘he’ to ‘you’ in hopes of bringing more clarity to what Conor was telling. “When was this?”
“In the hallway,” Conor replied, as if this made sense.
“What happened then?”
“Mummy says, ‘We will go to the moon tonight and the ghost man will come with us. We will take a rocket ship.’”
Confused, James didn’t ask for more clarification.
“There is terria outside the window when the rocket ship lands,” Conor said. “And three trees. One-two-three. He can count. No one has taught him how, but he can do it. He counts the trees.”
Picking up the sheet of paper, Conor studied the series of pictures a moment. Then with no warning, he tore it in half. Then he tore the halves in half again. And again and again until the paper was reduced to little more than confetti.
“You didn’t want to keep the pictures of that dream,” James said quietly.
“No. Now it’s hidden again.” Fiercely, he pushed the bits of paper off the table, letting them flutter to the floor. “You want to keep your mouth shut. You never say.”
Conor put his head down on the table top. “I’m very tired,” he said. “I don’t feel well. I don’t feel like I can talk.”
James nodded. “That’s all right. In here, you can decide.”
“‘In here, you can decide.’ You always say that.” Conor smiled weakly at him. “In here, I have decided. The dream is gone. I have decided that.”
Chapter Forty-Two
James’s original psychiatric training had been strictly Freudian, and the practice in Manhattan had been almost exclusively psychoanalytic. In this cloistered world nothing was ever as it seemed, but was instead an expression of hidden or repressed desires, aversions and anxieties that the client slowly uncovered as he gained self-awareness in the presence of the benign but detached psychiatrist.
James found it hard to cast off some aspects of that decade’s training. He was comfortable in the traditional psychiatric role of passive listener, allowing the client to set the pace without his active interpretation. It was natural for him just to listen, to hold himself in a non-judgemental place that did not draw active conclusions of any sort. Clients could tell that about him – that he did not presume or have a pre-set agenda for uncovering what he believed the problem was – and they responded well to it. It had often made him successful where others had failed.
In addition, James was well aware of how very florid the mind of a disturbed child could be. Children did imagine. Children did dream. Children did misinterpret.
James sighed. He still found it challenging to probe actively for literal meanings in the confusion of dreams, fantasies and misinterpretations that made up childhood. He was determined, however, that there would never be another Adam.
So what was he to make of Conor’s conversations? James was certain there had been an event around age two to three that had impacted Conor deeply. Was it a real event? Did it involve an actual death? Was the red finger-paint blood? Were the ghost man and the man under the rug the same person? Was he a real person? Conor was a very intelligent boy, which would have made him more perceptive than adults would have given him credit for. He was also very young and sensitive. These aspects would have affected the accuracy of his interpretation of any literal events. Everything was being filtered through the limited experience of an anxious toddler.
It all could just as logically be a symbolic event. Based on his psychoanalytic training, James would interpret “the man” as Alan, as an expression of Conor’s Oedipal stage in which, according to Freud, the son harbours strong hidden desires to kill his father and marry his mother. The “ghost under the rug” would then be interpreted as Conor’s guilty conscience. Perhaps Alan’s impregnating Laura at this point, just when Conor was being forced into separation by daycare, proved too much. Perhaps he came in on Alan and Laura having sex, a classic traumatic event in Freudian psychiatry. Perhaps he felt supplanted by Morgana, who distanced him further from his mother.
Of course, Conor’s disturbance could also be a thoroughly confusing mix of the two, of literal events Conor was too young to understand and half-remembered dreams. So much of it, like the rocket ship and the trip to the moon, made no sense to James in any context, such that he remained reluctant to draw conclusions without further information.
In the end, James decided to ask Alan back in yet again and see if he could glean more from an adult perspective.
“I really appreciate your coming in,” James said, as Alan settled himself into the conversation centre.
“Hey, I’m pleased to help,” Alan replied heartily. He pulled off his duck-billed cap and ran a hand through his rumpled hair in an effort to smooth it down. “I can’t tell you how great Conor’s been doing, especially now that his homeschool teacher has started. He comes down to the cabin almost every day now after his teacher leaves. All by himself. If you’d told me in September we could get to a place where we’d actually trust him to walk safely between the house and the cabin on his own, I’d have said, ‘Knock me over with a feather.’”
James smiled. “I’m very pleased with his progress myself. But listen, what I’d like to explore with you once again is that period when Conor’s problems started. The more verbal Conor becomes, the more confused I seem to get. Clearly events affected him when he was two or three, but I’m having a devil of a time piecing together what exactly may have happened,” James said.
“Yeah, I can imagine,” Alan said.
“Sometimes the events that impact a child can seem quite minor to adults. Because children are very egocentric at this age, they sometimes put a different spin on things and believe they’ve caused an event that was in reality entirely unrelated to them. Occasionally the event hasn’t even happened at all. The child has a false memory, either given to him accidentally by someone around him, who’s talking about something, or created from a dream or a TV program or something similar.”
James paused. “So this is where I’m at right now. To help Conor fully, I need to identify more clearly what was affecting him then, but this is a challenge because at the moment he can’t tell me.”
Alan considered this a while. “I think I’ve pretty much told you everything,” he said finally. “I mean, it was a very disruptive time. The financial troubles and nearly losing the farm. The unexpected pregnancy. Conor being diagnosed as autistic …”
“That’s too far along the timeline,” James replied. “Conor isn’t autistic. I’m absolutely certain of that now and I know other professionals would agree. He withdrew. He stopped talking and began all this magical thinking about cats and mechanical things in response to the traumatizing event or events, so it would have to have happened before he was diagnosed. He was diagnosed at four and up until he was two, you remember him as developing normally. So I think the event had to have happened in that period in between.”
Again, Alan was pensive. Slowly, he shook his head.
“Do you remember anything with blood?” James asked. “Any unusual amount of blood? Any blood where it shouldn’t be? Anything where Laura would be involved?”
Alan lifted one eyebrow. “That’s kind of a scary question.” A pause. “The only thing I can think of is the miscarriage.”
James nodded. “Anything else you remember? What about anything going on with Laura?”
“The truth is, I really feel bad that I left her alone so much,” Alan said. “I can appreciate now how it must have contributed to all of this. Not only because I wasn’t able to stay on top of what was going on at home, but because Laura was vulnerable there by herself. She did tell me that at the time. But I was so worried about losing the ranch that I just didn’t see I had any choice but to keep trying to find extra work to stay afloat.”
“Yes, I can understand,” James said sympathetically.
“The only other thing I can think of during that time was that fan. The obsessed guy who wa
s bothering Laura. I never actually saw him, but if Conor did – well, I suppose that could have been pretty scary for him …”
“Can you remember this guy’s name?” James asked.
A small silence filtered in as Alan sat, lost in memory. James could hear sleet hitting again the large picture windows in the playroom
Finally Alan shook his head. “No. I’m afraid not.”
“Could it have been Fergus somebody? Does that ring any bells?”
Alan again shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Why? Was there a Fergus that I should have known about?”
James shrugged. “It was just a guess. Somebody Laura had mentioned from her time in Boston.”
“Boston?”
“Yes,” James replied. “When she was getting her medical degree.”
Alan’s features drew down in an expression of bewilderment. “Boston? She didn’t get her medical degree in Boston. She got it at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.”
“What?”
“To my knowledge,” Alan said, “Laura’s never even been to Boston.”
After Alan had left, James stood in stunned silence before the office window. Hands in his pockets, he stared out eastward across the vast expanse of plains. The sense of shock kept his mind absolutely blank for several minutes.
How could Boston not be real?
Maybe Alan was wrong. Maybe a mistake had been made. But then James realized that Laura had to have lied to someone. If not him, then Alan. A sense of betrayal began to sink in.
Like Scheherazade charming the king, so too had Laura used the power of storytelling, gently getting the upper hand with her long, gentle, softly spoken monologues. James had simply been following his “in here you decide” creed. He’d never wanted to interrupt her with many questions. Indeed, somewhere along the line questions had largely ceased forming for him. He had wanted her to continue uninterrupted.
The real spell, however, had not been cast by Laura, but by Torgon. James might have been able to stay on even keel if Laura’s monologues had been all there was. Even as the line between personal history and story blurred with Laura’s tales of an altered reality, that still remained within the scope of an ordinary therapy session. What had changed it all was the arrival of the Torgon stories.