Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  Becky however noticed a break in his pattern. She counted on his loquacity but all he could give now was sullen taciturnity. And rather than talking to himself in a serious manner, he made his cell phone open and close like a mouth and spoke through it like a puppet.

  “Hi, my name is Phoney and I’m not fake. Ha! Ha!”

  Becky emitted a patient laugh to which Dane did not respond.

  “I think something is wrong with Daddy,” she told Iris.

  “How can you tell?” Iris replied.

  Becky believed psychiatry was like watch repair. Trusting a stranger to fix something of value was the surest way to break it. She resolved to care for Dane on her own, believing that with proper rest Dane would return to his norm.

  12. COGNITIVE CACOPHONY

  The worst part of Dane’s breakdown Becky could not see and Dane did not confide. When his peculiar reading problem did not improve, he believed he had a bizarre neurological disease that caused words to vanish after he read them. But who would believe him?

  For two weeks Dane was afraid to write or read. Eventually, however, he was bursting with ideas and needed to write them down to relieve the pressure on his brain. He put pen to paper and made letters. In a blink they unwrote themselves. His pen cartridges appeared to be spiked with self-erasing ink.

  Every hour Dane attempted a new sentence. The words stayed briefly, vibrated, then scattered into dots and spilled off the page. He tried writing on the computer but with respect to his words, the monitor was as incontinent as paper. Dane’s fear and desperation mounted. His future must have writing in it. Without it, he was useless. Becky ran into the bedroom and found her husband smacking his head with his blue line journal.

  “What is it?” she demanded, exasperated that he was venting like an overgrown infant.

  “Look!” Dane held the book open to the page he was writing on. “Can you see anything?”

  “Yes. You wrote the same sentence several times and now it looks like a Jackson Pollock. Let me see. I think you wrote ‘I’m a sick raccoon’ seven times.”

  “That’s right but I can’t see it. My own words vanish, too.”

  “Maybe it’s your pen.”

  “It’s not my pen,” He cried. “My eyes are erasers. I used to fill pages with verbosity. Now I make entire pages disappear.”

  When Becky observed him write words, they stayed on the page. “Do you see them, honey?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  A moment after leaving him alone, she heard him yell profanity. She rushed to the bedroom and found him tearing pages from books he had swept from a shelf.

  “The words won’t stay!” he shouted. “I’ve finally done it. I’ve destroyed the best part of myself. Writing is all I can do!”

  Becky wrapped her arms around him as he fell in a heap on the floor, sobbing.

  “We’ll figure this out. But you can’t fall apart.”

  Dane remembered from his teaching syllabus a book by one Dr. Lucien Paley, a world-renown neurologist specializing in disorders that impaired memory, motor skills, sensory organs and other brain functions. One of Dr. Paley’s patients, described in the bestseller, My Name Is Yorick, woke up one morning unable to see or feel his body; he walked around believing he was a floating skull. Another patient recalled nothing of his life but knew everything about bony fish, a subject he never studied. Still another patient had no concept of the color “chartreuse,” yet painted his entire house in it. Perhaps Dr. Paley could help Dane.

  Dr. Paley was now affiliated with a world-class hospital a mile from the Bacchus apartment. When Becky phoned his office she learned that Dr. Paley had recently returned from a book tour. After much pleading, she managed to speak to the great man and explained Dane’s illness.

  “Yes, it sounds quite upsetting,” Dr. Paley said. “Yes, I have seen disorders of this kind. You were right to contact me. When can you bring your husband in so I can have a look?”

  Becky was trembling. “Anytime.”

  “Your husband is a writer,” Dr. Paley remarked. “That raises the stakes, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. Please help him.”

  “I’ll do what I can; you have my word.”

  That afternoon, Becky brought Dane to the neurology clinic of The Psychiatric Institute, where they waited in an open room with large glass windows providing river views. Dane felt uneasy among other patients. Unlike a dermatology clinic, where most diseases were hidden under clothes, the neurology clinic revealed a multitude of afflictions. One patient had a facial tic, another flipped through a magazine, cursed, closed the publication and reopened it. A third patient bounced in his chair as if riding a horse, then jumped to his feet and twirled around until he became dizzy and fell back into his seat.

  “I want to go,” Dane whispered.

  “Don’t you want to get better?” Becky asked.

  “I’m not like these people.”

  “Hullo. You must be the Bacchuses!”

  Dr. Paley stood before them, a warm, radiant man with wooly white hair springing from his head. With a clipboard in one hand, he extended the other in salutation and ushered them to his office.

  “It’s a delight to meet you, Mr. Bacchus. Your wife has told me that you are a writer who has become a hyperactive editor, eliminating words as soon as you create them.”

  “Yes, I’m the verbinator,” Dane said and forced a chuckle.

  “Oh, that’s a good one!” Dr. Paley laughed. “May I use it for my next book?”

  Dane winced.

  “Of course, I’m joking,” Dr. Paley slapped Dane gently on the leg. “But perhaps we can collaborate.”

  Dr. Paley drew Dane out in amiable conversation before subjecting him to a battery of tests: an eye chart, simple recognition exercises—pictures on paper—and identification of images flashing on a monitor.

  “So, you say it’s a reading problem,” Dr. Paley said. “Let’s read something close at hand, say, my most recent book. The type is rather large.”

  Dane read a paragraph with ease. However, when he returned to the top, the paragraph was gone.

  “You know, Dane, you are in some ways quite fortunate to have such a poetic disease! A writer for whom words disappear. Of course, the brain is ironic by nature.”

  “Doctor, I don’t feel lucky.”

  “Of course not. I suppose I feel a special affinity with your condition because I—Well, enough about me. First, let me reassure you that it is not unusual for stress to incapacitate us. Powerful chemicals are released in the brain which can create imbalances. Are you able to recall an incident which caused you great pain?”

  “Yes,” Dane said. “My last ten years.”

  “Oh, I see. Can you be more specific?”

  Dane summarized his decade of employment, culminating in the winter night when he passed the Barnes and Noble reading.

  “I bent over and wept,” Dane said.

  “Absolutely! It’s quite normal,” Dr. Paley nodded fervently as his eyes misted behind his Franklin glasses. “I don’t know how I could cope if I were not published from time to time.”

  Dr. Paley put Dane’s head in a new brain-imaging machine, a contraption resembling a hair dryer. After an image was made, the doctor studied it on a monitor. It looked like a tie-dye hallucination of blue, green, red, purple and blue. Dr. Paley gasped. Pointing at certain sectors, he exclaimed, “Yes, we’ve got something! See that!”

  He turned to Dane.

  “Dane, do you see this area right here? It is your prefrontal cortex. Do you see that blue swiggle that looks like toothpaste? Yes. Well, that is precisely what we were looking for…the smoking gun. Those neurotransmitters are not firing. A diagnosis at this time may be premature but this is extraordinary. Dane, you have an acute case of cognitive cacophony. There have been only a few reported cases in the world. How does that make you feel? Hmmm?”

  “Don’t tell me, there is no cure!” Dane cried.

  “Yes, well, buck up! The
exciting part is how it came about. Your cognitive dissonance with your work must have degenerated to an inflammatory stage where you no longer retained what you wrote and read. It was as if your neurotransmitters walked off the job in protest. You had an autoimmune response to language—your psychic defense. Your words had been annihilated so often by others that your short term memory eliminated them in a preemptive strike. This protected your cortex from permanent damage. One disease protects you from a more serious one.”

  “Doctor, I appreciate you’re trying to put a good light on this but tell me honestly: will my words ever hold the page again?”

  “Dane, one can’t be sure, of course, but I feel that you will pull through. You see, your current difficulties have a special meaning for me. When I was in medical school, I too experienced a serious emotional block in my studies. Words and ideas that always frolicked in my fertile mind were cold and dead. I was so frightened that I kept it to myself. But I studied my symptoms and diagnosed the illness. It was severe burnout, what is now called scorched brain syndrome…I cured myself with fish oil supplements and a steady diet of Bach cantatas and Monty Python. I was my first clinical success! And you will be my most recent one.”

  Dane played with a life-size model of the brain on the medicine table while Dr. Paley left the exam room to consult with Becky, the primary caregiver, in his office.

  “So how have you been coping?” the world acclaimed neurologist asked Becky.

  “Doctor, I studied psychology in college and have a mother’s common sense. I’ve done all I can for Dane by reading with him and taking dictation when he wants to write. I know it’s not enough.”

  “On the contrary, you’ve done extraordinarily well given the circumstances,” Dr. Paley replied supportively as he approached her. “Cognitive disorders are tragic. Learning and understanding, which are ordinarily sources of human meaning, identity, and pleasure, are disrupted and become agents of pain and frustration. Your husband has endured a terrible trauma. He believes he is a failure. You can help him in many ways. First, you must administer ‘winner therapy.’ That is, you must continuously tell him that he is a winner. Secondly, you must not permit him to read anything but perhaps Curious George and the Amelia Bedelia books. If he needs to write, you must become his hands. I can see that you have lovely hands. If he feels closed in, take him to the zoo. I have drawn strength from a world-class zoo and we have a fine one in New York. By watching animals, perhaps he will reconnect.”

  On the word “reconnect,” Dr. Paley felt the irresistible impulse to reach for Becky’s shoulders. He drew her to him and attempted to plant numerous kisses on her face. However Becky, a loyal wife and an expert in protecting her makeup from smudging, pulled away from the amorous neurologist.

  “Dr. Paley, what are you doing?”

  “I don’t know,” he gasped. “I can’t know everything. But it felt right.”

  “Doctor, what are you thinking? You just said Dane has been through a trauma—that he feels like a failure. How can this help him?”

  “Technically, it can’t hurt him. You see, he suffers from cognitive cacophony, which is on a different circuit altogether from cuckoldry.”

  “You’re sworn to do no harm and I’m all he has. He would be devastated.”

  “Yes, well…perhaps you are right, but how can we be sure?” Dr. Paley made a second advance on Becky’s position. He lunged for her but she moved nimbly behind a chair and swatted away his groping hands.

  “Doctor, you are a world-class healer, not a two-bit heel,” Becky pleaded.

  “Yes, well I have my dark side,” Dr. Paley replied, stroking his forehead to restore his internal calm. “Now please run along and do as I prescribed. In a fortnight we shall see.”

  For two weeks, Dane was on a regimen of “winner’s therapy,” writing by dictation, having children’s books read to him, and going on outings to the Bronx Zoo. There he reconnected with gorillas, baby lemurs and ancient elephants grabbing gobs of hay with their trunks and dropping turds from their rumps. “If they can be happy, why can’t I?” he mused aloud.

  “Because you’re human—and a winner!” Becky answered.

  “I am?”

  One morning Dane was driving with Becky. He had been on the toilet all night with food poisoning and was exhausted. After dropping off Iris at her art class, they headed to Starbucks. Dane turned to Becky. “I’d like to know more about diarrhea,” he said.

  Becky took her eye off the road for a moment to look at him and nearly hit a curb.

  “What did you say?”

  “I want to understand diarrhea better than I do,” Dane repeated. “I know it’s watery stools…but I want to know more.”

  “Maybe diarrhea is offered in continuing education somewhere. We’ll check online,” Becky said.

  “You think?”

  Becky sensed in Dane’s perverse curiosity a hopeful sign. His morbid interest in diseases, so intrinsic to his medical writing, was stirring again.

  As she read the paper in the café, Dane said, “I think my mental illness is improving.”

  She smiled. “Yes, darling. It is. You’re a winner.”

  When they returned home, Dane eased a medical encyclopedia from a bookcase and flipped through it without a moment of perturbation. Becky squeezed his shoulder and whispered, “You’re back!”

  One day, only weeks after the appointment with Dr. Paley, they were shopping for clothes on a busy commercial street when they passed a large bookstore. Dane stopped to stare in the window.

  “Are you sure you should be doing this?” Becky asked with alarm. She thought he would have an attack of cognitive cacophony on the spot as the book titles vanished in his sight.

  “Can we just go in?”

  “You want to go into a bookstore?” Becky asked.

  “I miss it. I want to look at books.”

  When they returned home, Dane started writing on his computer. He finished a page without stopping, then closed his eyes, counted to sixty and opened them. The words were all there, round and solid.

  “Oh that is good news. I’m so pleased,” Dr. Paley said during Dane’s follow-up, “It may be too early to make a rash prognosis, but I think, Dane, that you have turned a corner. This is a superb outcome.”

  Although similar cases had been documented, Dane’s specific condition was never diagnosed or named.

  “I am writing a paper about this. And with your permission, I would like to name it Dane Syndrome.”

  Dane was pleased. If his name and achievements did not stand the test of time, his pain would live on forever.

  “And now you must promise me, you must see this as a wonderful gift, an opportunity to enjoy your writing to its fullest. See this as a second chance, Dane. Never let yourself become so dissonant with your talents that they become a source of pain.”

  Case 7-D

  DANGERS OF SELF-PROMOTION

  13. SELF PROMOTION AND PERSECUTION

  Dane emerged from his eponymous disease with fundamental questions about his life: where was he and what could be salvaged from what was left? He started his advertising career late in his life and it lasted for ten years. He was experienced, perhaps too experienced and expensive to hire. He might seem more rigid and less compliant than a younger person. A fearful thought occurred to him: was his advertising career over?

  Despite his uncertain situation, Dane followed Dr. Paley’s advice. For four hours a day he wrote stories and revised drafts of books to which he never thought he would return. When he had been writing inane copy he chided himself, “Is this how you want to be remembered—or forgotten? Face your destiny like a man!” He saw himself as a prodigal writer who had betrayed his life’s purpose and longed to return to it. Now he was back and enjoying the homecoming. To a point.

  That point was his bank account. His lack of income perforated his confidence. Creative writing might be his life’s work but he could not earn his living at it, and writing without income made him f
eel like a parasite.

  Freelancing regularly had provided balance but he received no calls. Business was slow. At first, he ascribed it to the general economy but came around to blaming himself. Agencies had merged into super-agencies with oceanic databanks filled with résumés of former employees. Dane had worked everywhere and was in every databank as a bottom-feeder with good copy and bad attitude.

  Undaunted, he sent his résumé to 25 agencies with warm and friendly notes outlining his availability—and received no response. He went on job search engines and found that the same agencies that ignored his emails were listing jobs. Did human resource people keep busy by posting empty job descriptions or did they prefer any unknown to him?

  Dane contacted people in the industry, although such queries seemed futile. If agencies were busy they would phone him; if they were not, no amount of calling them would induce them to hire him.

  After two months, he was sufficiently desperate to resort to temp agencies, which took a 35% cut of Dane’s paycheck and added layers of bureaucracy. The recruiters asked if he had a website. Dane had always shown his book at interviews, but he was informed that hiring wasn’t done like that anymore. Clients perused a website, and if interested, met the candidate.

  Dane designed his website. He scanned and uploaded ads he had worked on and organized the site according to every form of advertising he had done. He also hyperlinked samples of his longer work so recruiters would know that he did not inflate his experience.

  In a week, his website was complete. Dane had evolved from hard copy to the digital age. His self-promotion now matched his expertise. Potential employers could experience his work without experiencing him. It no longer mattered if he was “hard sell” or “soft sell,” or resembled an employer’s despised relative or colleague. He would no longer get in the way of his own excellence. If recruiters failed to find him assignments, it was now officially their fault.