Skull Session (3 page)

"What would
you
know about control? You've never had any. You're a goddamned jellyfish. No wonder you're not in charge."

"Uh-oh: 'Who's in charge here?'" Subconscious did a great job of imitating conscious mind's voice, a parody within a parody. "Of course, Mr. Hierarchy has the answer—me, me, me!"

At one point as he mugged and postured, he caught sight of himself in the mirror and had to laugh as he recognized something familiar in his own image. Without realizing it he had been engaging in another Tourettic oddity: mimesis. He was unconsciously imitating Robin Williams—the same elastic face, the simian gestures, even the rubbery, bouncy body.
Oh my God, Robin Williams,
he knew suddenly,
of course,
he's got Tourette's, he's plugged into his Tourette's, that's where he gets his
juice, his improvisatory genius!

This was fabulous.
Robin Williams, look out.
He'd quit carpentry and get a job as a stand-up comic, he'd move to Hollywood, get into movies and TV. The whole scenario flashed through his head: big-money deals in glitzy producers' offices, movie sets, celebrity galas. Tourette's was a gift. The whiz kid was waking up, breaking free.

But by late afternoon he was beginning to fray. The humor slipped, the intermittent argument in his brain turned scary: "I want to kill you," subconscious said unexpectedly. That stopped him in his tracks. Where the fuck had
that
come from? Still chilled about the implications of it, he had another lightning-fast morbid fantasy that brought out a sweat on his neck: Janet driving, an accident, the baby being hurt. He argued with himself about driving into town and calling her, and only then did he realize that he had some doubt about his ability to handle the car. He was constantly snatching the air and pointing his finger, and now he'd started impulsively clapping his hands, his arms straight out in front of him like the flippers of a trained seal—what if he couldn't control the tics when he was driving?

Plus he'd begun having some compulsions. Harmless at first, they began to wear on him after a few hours. He had put on a Red Sox cap to keep the sun out of his eyes while he worked with the chainsaw. But the cap "needed" to be adjusted, had to be just so: After each cut, he'd tug the visor down, crimp it to get the right arch, pat the dome to make sure it had just so much loft and no more. After he'd repeated the gesture a hundred times, it had begun to exhaust him. The desire to adjust the cap was as powerful and automatic as the need to scratch a mosquito bite, the satisfaction just as short-lived.

It was corning back to him now, the work he had put in with his father, trying to overcome the various tics and compulsions of Tourette's when he was a child. For years he'd resented Ben for getting him on haloperidol so young, but now he could see why a concerned father might do so.

In fact, looking back, he had to concede that Ben had done a remarkable job in more ways than one. Back in 1963, when Paul was seven and had first started to show symptoms, almost nobody knew about the condition. Georges Gilles de la Tourette had described the phenomenon in 1885, but mainstream medicine had virtually forgotten about it since the turn of the century. But Ben had read widely and managed to accurately identify Paul's symptoms, first inventing a practical therapy for his son and by 1965 finding out about the emerging treatment using haloperidol, which reduced the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the Tourettic brain.

Ben's "exercises": Philosophically, Ben was a proud son of the Age of Reason, convinced that the power of thought and conscious will knew no limits. When Paul first began to tic and perform odd ritualistic movements, Ben worked with him to monitor himself, to become aware of the urges that prompted his actions. It was Ben who had explained the idea that thought was always occurring on several levels at once, and that Touretters often acted upon the subthemes. And, he explained, Tourettic impulses were often
contrary,
the opposite of what was socially acceptable—or safe. So he trained Paul to "listen" to his own thoughts, to identify and restrain inappropriate impulses. And it helped. But not without a cost.

Problem: Self-restraint was a double-edged sword. Kids were
supposed
to do wacky stuff. Hell,
adults
should do more wacky stuff A lot of Tourette's behavior was playful, mischievous, based on the sheer satisfaction of movements or sounds. Snatching the air
felt good,
a catchy kinetic tune. Ben may have had good intentions, but Paul saw it as a short step from self-restraint to self-repression. And it was sometimes hard to see where Ben's resistance to Tourette's ended and where his resistance to Paul's identity began.

So then Ben found haloperidol, Paul took to the drug fairly well, and the Tourette's subsided to a manageable level. And between the drug and the habits of self-discipline Ben had imposed, Paul had from the age of eight laid the foundations of his personality. In 1985, twenty years later, it seemed that all that was left was reliable Paul, good-work-ethic Paul, predictable Paul. A person Paul no longer much liked. Hence this trip to the woods.

But Tourette's was the pits too, Paul thought, adjusting the baseball cap again. In a very different way, it was just as much of a straitjacket.
Point. Clap. Snatch.
Adjust hat. Boiling random energies and urges.

"Hi, honey?'
he said loudly. The verbal tic of the hour—a high, nasal voice like that of a stereotypical TV housewife. Where did
that
come from? Abruptly he decided to drive back home, take some medication, try to think it through from the other side.

He was relieved to find that the tics stopped as soon as he was engaged in driving, as if the sensations of steering and feeling the car's smooth flow satisfied the Tourettic itch for playful movement. He briefly felt a return of the optimism he'd felt earlier. But coming down a hill that turned abruptly left at the bottom, he saw the back end of a pickup truck, jutting up sharply, down off the steep shoulder. Driving closer, he saw that the hood of the truck was crumpled against a tree. Somebody had lost control and driven off the road.

He pulled over, leapt out of the car, adjusted his cap, ran down the embankment. The rusty blue Chevy had been heavily loaded with firewood, which had now spilled forward so that cut sections of log lay on the truck's roof and hood and on the ground on all sides. Judging from the rim of broken glass around the truck's empty rear window, some of it had shot forward into the cab.

He reached the passenger side and saw a smear of blood on the shattered windshield. An elderly man lay slumped forward, face shoved between dashboard and vent window, plump body pressed against the steering wheel, logs piled against his back. Paul could imagine the savage double impact, the head striking the windshield, the logs shooting forward and battering him from behind.

Clap, adjust cap, shoot a forefinger at the sky. "Are you all right?" Paul yelled. The old man didn't move.

"Hi, honey?'
Paul said. It was a difficult situation. He could hardly stand on the steep slope, the truck was at an acute angle, the logs still heaped on the back looked as if they could fall if disturbed. The nearest phone was ten minutes away; rescue services out here would take at least a half hour. Depending on how badly the old man was bleeding, there might not be time to go for help. Paul fought down the rising panic.

The door resisted his first pull, and on his second try he yanked the handle so hard it pulled out of the door. When he used a chunk of wood to smash the window, the logs in the bed shifted and one spun off the roof and struck his face. For an instant he almost blacked out with the pain. Then he reached inside and lifted the inner handle, wrenching at the door with his whole body. The truck rocked on its suspension. The door grated and swung open, then broke off the rusted hinges. Logs fell and bounded down the slope.

He climbed into the steeply canted cab, tossed away some logs, and grabbed the woodcutter's arm. His breath screaming in his throat, he pulled the old man off the steering wheel and out of the cab. The old guy, wearing a checked hunter's shirt and khaki pants held up by suspenders, was as limp as a washcloth. Paul's hands became slimed with blood as he dragged him up the slope.

Paul managed to get him up the embankment by a series of all-out heaves. His lungs were burning by the time he reached the road, laid the old man out, and inspected him. Forehead like hamburger with chunks of glass embedded in it, a flap of scalp hanging down near the base of his skull, heavy bleeding, legs making feeble movements. He'd have to get to a hospital, fast.

The old man stirred and his eyes came open. Paul's hands fluttered around his own head, making the movements of adjusting his hat, which had come off somewhere down the embankment. He clapped his hands in front of him, at arm's length.
"Hi, honey!
Are you all right?"

The woodcutter put an arm across his face, flailed it away. "Oh, God," he moaned. He lay, watching Paul with blood-rimmed, frightened eyes.

"We've got to get you into my car," Paul told him. "Okay?" His hands flew around his head, adjusting the nonexistent cap.
Clap! "Hi,
honey!"
Paul bent toward the old man to help him to the car. He wished the tic voice wasn't so screechingly high.

The man fought off his hands, terrified.

Shock,
Paul thought. What were you supposed to do? Subdue him somehow, but how? Paul's hands went to his head, made all the quick motions as if they were creatures with wills of their own.
"Hi, honey?'
he said, trying to think.

Still on his back, the old man started dragging himself away from Paul, pushing with his heels and elbows. Paul clapped and went after him. They pawed at each other for a moment until one of the woodcutter's flailing hands caught Paul on the bridge of his nose. The pain blinded him and made him sit down hard. Something the matter with his nose. Part of the nose hanging down, onto his upper lip.

Even the light touch of his exploring fingers was too much to take. The log from the truck must have cut him. A lot of the blood on his hands and shirt must be his own.

That's what the situation was when the second pickup truck came around the downhill curve. It was a new red Dodge Ram, and it looked beautiful to Paul, the perfect embodiment of civilization, of order itself.

Still sitting, Paul waved feeling a flood of relief. They'd be able to get the old man to the hospital.

The woodcutter saw the truck and began scrambling toward it on his hands and knees. When it stopped and the driver leaned over to open the passenger-side door, the old man knelt, clutching the door, looking back fearfully at Paul. "Help me!" he said to the driver. "Please, help me!"

The driver looked wide-eyed at Paul. Then he leaned and hauled the woodcutter into the cab. Door flapping, the truck roared backward, made a three-point turn, took off in the direction of town.

Paul sat down with his back against his car, feet in the road, and pitched pebbles into the dust.

Then after a while the sirens, the explanations. Reflected in the State Police cruiser's window, he caught sight of the bloodied, twitching thing that he was, and he couldn't blame the woodcutter. He labored to contain the verbal tics around the cops, but the pressure built inside him and he was too tired to fight it. Not knowing what else to do with him, they nailed him for drunk and disorderly. When he'd finally talked himself out of the lockup in Hardwick and had gotten his nose worked on at the hospital, he went home to Janet and more explanations that dragged on until morning.

So much for finding the whiz kid within. He had gone back to haloperidol.

Paul pulled back from the memory. The saxophone was a golden icicle, the sun was gone and the blue hour was upon the sky. He had never been able to convey to Lia how that episode had stayed with him. Ten years later, the story seemed a hell of a lot funnier than it had been at the time. He got stiffly off the boulder and started toward the house, fingers working the sax keys. "Who Do You Think You Are?" he decided, 1974, Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods.

Who indeed? In the short term, the experiment had sent him scurrying back to the security and predictability of Haloperidol Paul. He'd learned a basic truth:
It was dangerous to let go too much.
The memory of those two days stayed with him like a vivid nightmare. He wished he could really convey to Lia that, unlike her, he was already perpetually at risk—from within.

But the joy of letting go had stayed with him too, just as convincing as the risk of it. Along with the exhausting tics and compulsions had come a creativity, a spontaneity that he liked. So after a few years he had begun to trim back the haloperidol dosage, give himself more room to be Tourette's Paul, or Playful Paul, whichever. Ultimately, this was one of the big factors in his separation from Janet: Her rules didn't include the asocial and unpredictable behavior that came with the condition.

He'd also learned that his symptoms were suspended whenever he did something that satisfied his body's—his mind's?—craving for an interesting kinetic melody. One result was that he bought himself an alto saxophone, which had been a great source of pleasure and respite in the years since.

Another positive end result was the permanent scar on his nose, which he found to be an improvement, lending a little dash to a face that he otherwise found too sincere and wholesome. Lia claimed it was one of the things that made him irresistibly attractive to her. Definitely worth it.