Psychology and Other Stories (27 page)

Clyde was a bluish swath of fuzz protruding from a chink in his cocoon of blankets.

Barb was at the stove, hunched over a frying pan, with her usual undecided look of attending to everything at once. Devon sat down at the table with an involuntary groan, for he knew the sausages were for him. He resented the assumption that he would be awake, let alone hungry.

“Good morning, sunshine.”

He looked around for cigarettes; that is, without moving his head, he moved his gaze across the portion of tabletop directly in front of him. The thought of chewing and swallowing anything seemed as pointless and alien as the wartime atrocities of savage tribes, but he could imagine a case being made for sucking a cloud of chemicals into his lungs.

He felt as though he had been tricked. The way he felt now was the most forceful and concise refutation imaginable of his earlier optimism. He was being chastised for his meaningless enthusiasm with this meaningless despair.

He had been wrong. He had been wrong about Freud. He had been wrong to be excited. There was nothing exciting about Freud's cocaine use. Until last night he had somehow taken it for granted that Freud was a great man, someone to be admired. He must have formed this opinion twenty years earlier during his undergrad,
when, in preparation for a psychology course, he had read a few of Freud's “classic” works.
Totem and Taboo
and
Civilization and its Discontents
had proved spectacularly useless as background to an introduction to the physiology of the retina and the localization of brain function, but he had nevertheless come away with an impression of Freud as a brilliant and fearlessly independent philosopher of the soul—an impression that had probably only been inflated retroactively by the extent of his disappointment with the psychology course, and its circumvention of philosophy and of the soul.

His erratic reading of the past three nights had at first corroborated this impression. Freud was certainly brilliant (he seemed to have memorized a lot of Goethe and Shakespeare, anyway), and he was undeniably a good writer (his prose, at least, proceeded with a stately grace and polite, almost wheedling formality that obscured the occasional incoherence of his ideas or the faults in his logic), and Devon had been positively delighted to discover passages like this, which seemed to reveal the torment of a genius at loggerheads with the unimaginative fools around him:

I am pretty much alone here in the elucidation of the neuroses. They look upon me as a monomaniac, while I have the distinct feeling that I have touched upon one of the great secrets of nature. I cannot talk about it to anyone, nor can I force myself to work, deliberately and voluntarily as other workers do. I must wait until something stirs in me and I become aware of it. And so I often dream whole days away. Everything in me is very quiet, terribly lonely.

But then there were also passages that Devon simply could not digest, theories of Freud's that were not any less bizarre than those of his friend, Wilhelm Fliess, to whom he wrote things like this:

Now, a child who regularly wets his bed until his seventh year (without being epileptic or the like) must have experienced sexual excitation in his earlier childhood. Spontaneous or by seduction?

Devon could not decide if this was just plain silly nonsense, or evil, irresponsible nonsense.

He had only wasted a few nights on Freud, granted. But he had also wasted a few nights on James Joyce, a few nights on William James, a week of nights on De Quincey. His thesis—that there were great men who had achieved greatness not
despite
the drugs they used but
because
of them—was slipping away from him. What was slipping away, in fact, was the indefensible contention that there had ever been, that there ever could be, such things as “great men.”

He had no thesis. There was no project. There would be no book. It had been a stupid idea anyway. Had he really thought that a polemic against the current drug laws would win back for him the status and respect that he'd lost? Had he really believed that a writing career would make up for the one that had been taken from him? He felt chastened for his delusions, like an ignorant, misbehaving child.

He had been wrong. Depression was not the feeling of being imprisoned. Happiness was not the feeling of freedom. It was exactly the other way around. Happiness was being tucked snugly into a single moment. Happiness was a winding hike through dense woods to who-knows-where. Happiness was blind.

Depression was having all the future spread out before you. Why take a step down any path at all if you could already see where it led? Misery was walking down a long straight hall, driving down a long straight highway. He could see exactly where he was headed; there would be no surprises, and no exits.

Barb put her chin on her shoulder and looked at him.

“Rough night?”

“No,” he said.

She was not discouraged; his first response to most questions in the morning was “No.”

She transferred the spatula from one hand to the other. In her left she held it like a surgical instrument; in her right, like a club.

“Up late working again?”

“No,” he said, this time in the tone that meant “don't ask.”

“Couldn't sleep?”

“No,” he said, and she could tell that he had stopped listening to her.

She looked at him closely, her forehead wrinkled with concern. He was still depressed. She did not know what to do about it. On the phones it was easy: you made sure they were safe, that they were not going to hurt themselves, and then you listened. They wanted to talk—that's why they called. She did not know what to do with someone who did not want to talk.

He had been getting better, too; that was what was so frustrating, so disappointing, about these funks of his in the morning. In the last couple of weeks he had begun to smile again, even to laugh. She didn't claim to understand what he was up to in the garage with his books so late every night, but it was clear anyway that he had an
interest
again. This made her so happy that she was tempted at times to embrace him, or to cry.

She turned back to the stove and herded the sausages to one side of the pan to make room for the eggs. There was one thing at least she could do for Devon, and that was make sure he ate. A body could do nothing if it was not well-nourished.

“What about those bookshelves?” she asked.

He scowled up at her, as though she had used one of his own arguments against him. “What about them?”

“Should we get them this morning? The Do-It will be open by eight. I'm sure Clyde would come along.”

“No,” he said, his tone close to “don't ask.”

“The early bird gets the worm …?”

“They'll still be open later,” he said, though he didn't sound as if he believed it.

McNarry couldn't understand how any psychiatrist could bring himself to testify for the prosecution: The entire aim of psychiatry was to unravel the causes of behavior. And if all behavior had a cause, where was guilt
?

Meyer Levin

The psychologist must himself be psychologized.

L.S. Hearnshaw

ON JULY
9
TH
, 1980
, Mike Burger was having dinner with his wife, Roz, and four friends at a restaurant in West Hollywood.

Q. Now, can you tell us, Doctor, what the defendant was thinking and experiencing at the time of, and leading up to the time of the instant offense?

Their friends were waving their wineglasses around and talking loudly, as if to make up for Mike and Roz's silence.

A. I can tell you that, following the perceived insult in the foyer, that his thought processes are disordered. His mental state is predominantly one of confusion and disorientation. The sights and sounds, and smells of the restaurant are reaching him as if from afar. He is experiencing a profound depersonalization—

Roz's gaze briefly met Mike's as she left the table. Mike was breathing heavily.

Q. Can you define that last word for us, Doctor? I'm sorry to interrupt.

“This shit has got to fucking stop,” Mike said. The others looked at him. Mike stood and strode across the room.

*

A. A sense of not being himself. A sort of feeling of detachment from reality, you might say. A sort of feeling of being on autopilot, or being in a dream.

He pulled a man out of his chair and threw him to the floor and began kicking him in the face, muttering the word “motherfucker” repeatedly.

Q. Was he angry? Was he … “enraged,” as the newspapers put it?

Someone screamed. Two men tried to pull Mike away. He thrashed free, elbowing one of them in the face, breaking his nose with a crunch, and the other backed away.

Mike kicked the man on the floor in the stomach. “Get up, motherfucker.” A thick sob emerged from the man's bloody, shattered mouth; he did not get up. “Have it your own way.” Mike began stomping on the man's back, neck, and head.

A. He was not angry. On the contrary. He was dissociated from his feelings. It was like he was in someone else's body, watching someone else do these things. Like watching a movie.

Abruptly he stopped. The room had half emptied out, and those who remained stood staring at him, aghast. He spat on the man's crushed skull and returned to his table.

He picked up his fork, put a piece of broccoli in his mouth, then made a face. He threw down his fork; everyone in the room jumped. “Well?” he shouted. Aside from some stifled whimpering and the dripping of spilled wine, the restaurant was silent.

He sighed and slumped in his chair. “Where's Roz?” he asked.

*

Eight months later, Joseph Massick, counsel for the defense, took his hands out of his trouser pockets and folded them behind his back.

Q. Doctor, I would like to thank you for your time and for your testimony. This has been a difficult, a most thorny case, and I would like to thank you for lending us your expert assistance in disentangling the truth from the many falsehoods that surround this matter. And now, I would like to ask you one final question if I may, and that is this. Doctor, did you, as a result of reading about this case, reviewing the reports of eyewitnesses and police officials, and most importantly interviewing the defendant for many hours on several occasions over the course of the last two months, did you arrive at a conclusion as to whether Mr. Burger was, at the time of this lamentable incident, able to appreciate the criminality of his conduct, or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law?

Daniel Strickland leaned into the microphone.

A. Yes, I did.

Q. And what was the conclusion you arrived at, Doctor?

Strickland glanced at his notebook, but only for a moment.

A. I concluded that the defendant at the time of the crime was suffering from a psychological disorder which made him unable to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.

He paused, as if waiting to be asked more. But Massick, who had been moving his lips almost imperceptibly as the psychologist gave this answer, sat down.

Q. Thank you, Doctor.

THE COURT: Doctor, would this be a good time for a recess?

Strickland looked at Mike Burger, who was looking out the window.

A. Thank you, Your Honor, but I'm all right to continue. I don't mind.

THE COURT: All right. Ms. Lattimann, you may begin your cross-examination.

Q. Good afternoon, sir.

A. Good afternoon, Ms. Lattimann.

Q. Can you tell us again, Professor—I'm sorry, I can't help but think of you, in looking at you and listening to you, as a professor. Do you have any objection to me calling you Professor?

A. It's very unusual. Not even my students call me Professor. But I will try to get used to it.

Q. All right, sir. Thank you, sir. It's your image you present and your background that makes me—I mean it very respectfully.

A. Thank you.

Q. Can you tell us, Professor, when you first met with the defendant.

A. Certainly. It was January first.