Some of Your Blood (11 page)

It was time to go. I collected the papers and hammered on the door for the guard.

April 9.

I have just returned from an hour and a half on Thematic Apperception. And if I found it possible to laugh at the ludicrous defenses a psyche can put up, I’d roar.

George’s alexia, his difficulties with the spoken word, disappeared like magic for the Thematic Apperception, and when I reasoned out why, I marveled.

The test is simply a series of pictures, the kind of thing one sees in magazine illustrations, but carefully chosen to present a number of pivotal and interpersonal situations. For example, one might be a picture of a girl standing in the open door of a cabin. One patient says she is going out; one that she is going in; another that she has been standing there all day waiting for someone. On occasion a tremendous amount of contributory detail comes tumbling out: the girl’s name, the presence or absence of persons in the cabin behind her, and their impending actions; sometimes the comb in her hair or her “new shoes” will be the central factor. Obviously these spur-of-the-moment stories and anecdotes relate to the patient. Frequently they serve as surrogate solutions to a patient’s own problems, solutions the patient dare not face personally, as for example a girl who is in an agony of indecision about leaving home might react to the picture with a tale of a girl who left and was horribly murdered, or a girl who did not leave and got so mad she killed her father.

It came to me, listening to George incredibly chattering on and on over the pictures, that his verbal censor sat upon the subject of himself. As he remarked in his biography, there is always likely to be someone listening who doesn’t hear right and will get you wrong. It would seem that he was afraid to be heard aright; that is, his mouth might give something away when he wasn’t looking. And give away what? Possibly some anecdotes for which he feared he might get punished (though I am morally certain he feels no guilt) but much more likely he wished to conceal feelings and conclusions and observations which would attract the attention and derision of other people. Incapable of evaluating like other people, he was incapable of knowing before he spoke the effect his words might have.

But in the face of Thematic Apperception, his censor gave one relieved sigh and went to sleep. For it was—it must have been—convinced that as long as George talked within the four corners of a picture, he could not talk about himself!

He talked about himself—fluently, boldly, and never knew it. And the peak of the ludicrous (if one could laugh) came when amongst the pictures appeared a white blank card with a border around it—a picture for the patient to make up himself and talk about. And when George came to it his censor awoke and restored to him his soft growling slur: “A blank one? … nothing. It would probably be about myself. No story.”

But the ones about other people? … these are verbatim.

A boy and a woman standing in a room: “The kid used to do a lot of stuff, he got sent away. He was away so long him and his mother don’t hardly know what they look like. He just come back. In a minute she is going to put out her arms and he will run to her and she will squeeze him real hard but the front of her dress is not soft. It’s full of rocks. And it isn’t his mother but somebody dressed up in the mother’s clothes is going to steal the money.”

A boy standing by a window. A shotgun leaning against the wall. “Let’s say a kid is in a shack. A window and shotgun there. He has been reading up on doctor books, operations and all. His father is going to get operated on. He is going to go to the hospital and stand there and tell that doctor if he makes a mistake he will blow his head off. But the gun goes off and kills the father.”

A man bestowing a kiss on the forehead of a silver-haired lady. “A guy is kissing his mother on the forehead. Likes her a lot. Thought about her a lot and did everything she wanted and give her a kiss like that every night or so. I could go on further but—she died. The guy went all to pieces. He wanted to go to the grave and fix it all up with flowers. He always felt better if he was around her grave. That’s why I would like to get out of here. No one takes care of my mother’s grave and father’s grave too. I always did.”

(Interesting wish (guilt?)-fantasy; he has never seen his father’s grave.)

A man lying asleep on a grassy bank. “I’d say probably somebody beat this guy up. Killed him. He’s going to drag his body out of the way so no one would see. Behind some tanks or something. He probably killed to get his money. He cut him too. Then he went off in the woods and I guess he will do it again some time in some other place.”

Boys swimming in an “ole swimmin’ hole.” “Oh, well one of those kids got a bad leg and it starts to bleed, and so one of the other kids comes up to see and the kid that is hurt starts to scream and the other kid can’t stand that so he pushes him under and that ends that. Then the other kid comes out of the water. He was lost before but now he knows where he is.”

Bland and unemphasized, cheerful and inventive, George talked on and on: theft, murder, mayhem, mother-death, father-death, father-murder; drownings, stabbings, operations. No seduction, rape, adultery. No (in the conventional sense) happiness, though George, in most instances, seemed far from sad. The dying mothers sobered him a little.

A letter.

Cackle College                        O-R

Thalamus, Ore.                        April 9

Dear Phil:

You sent your report on your Man in the Iron Mask with your usual deft timing, just when I was about to utter a long-range howl about it.

I will concede that it is all very fascinating, and that you were right in intuiting—if it was intuition—that there was a good deal more to that young man than met the eye. But Phil—I have to tell you, word got back to me about that little occasion you had on your third floor. A violent case should not have been put there where he had to double up with another patient. Even a potentially violent one. Yet you put him there because you had no free solitaries on the fourth floor, right?

Right.

And you were away at the time. Sickleave! Phil—are you all right? … but all the same, you weren’t there.

Nothing came of it this time but there can be others; there will. Now I’m way on your side about your George, and you’ve dredged up a whole mess of internal garbage, and he’s sicker than I thought he was.
But—
get him out of there.

To end on a different note, thanks for sending George’s drawings along with the report. Very interesting, as my dear old mother used to say. (She used to say it at art galleries, every time. It’s something to say, and it hurts no one’s feelings no matter what.) But what interested me even more, my head-shrinking friend, is your identification of all those succulent shapes as pears.

Granted we all have our preoccupations … but to me the little animal on the end is nothing in the world but a titmouse.

Pears indeed. You want the name of a good doctor? Or are you becoming a vegetarian?

Al

And the answer:

Manor Depressive,                  O-R

Dementia, Cal.                        April 11

Dear Al:

It might seem small of me to pull rank on you, and it’s damn rude, I know, to quote a guy’s compliment back at him; but you yourself once said that professionally I outrank you six ways from Sunday, or some such. And, Al, it is my considered opinion that our George is potentially more dangerous than anything else in the place.

I’ll forestall your demand: can I prove it? by conceding that I can’t. I just
know,
that’s all. Nobody could boil off the stuff he does without being loaded and armed, and if he goes bang, I want it to be in top security.

Now it could be that what he’s got is dangerous like a sword and not like a gun or a bomb. Thing is, I don’t know yet what kind of thing it might be. I will, and I think soon; but until I do I’d as soon turn a Bengal tiger loose in the halls.

Leave me commit the further enormity of reminding you that I have been right so far.

They are so pears. But I admit it is subject to spelling changes.

You could be right.

Phil.

P.S. No, damn you, I wasn’t sick. I confess I went to the Big Town and credentialed myself into the cell under the library where they keep the really sensational doity books. Just to irritate you, I enclose my notes.

P.O.

A sheaf of handwritten notes on yellow paper.

… von Krafft-Ebing, the old peeper … walking around the hind end of the nineteenth century, tattling. Had no use for Freud. By him, everything “hereditary taint.” Bore out his fixed idea that there are certain things
nice
people don’t do. But indefatigable researcher all the same so shaddup keep yr prejudices to yrslf.

LUST-MURDER

Lust potentiated as cruelty, murderous lust extending to anthropophagy. Boy what a litry style von K-E had … lookit:

“1827. Leger, vine-dresser, aged twenty-four. From youth moody, silent, shy of people. He started out in search of a situation. Wandering about eight days in the forest he there caught a girl twelve years old, violated her, mutilated her genitals, tore out her heart, ate of it, drank the blood, and buried the remains. Arrested, at first he lied, but finally confessed his crime with cynical cold-bloodedness. He listened to his sentence of death with indifference and was executed. At the post-mortem examination, Esquirol [who he?]* found morbid adhesions between the cerebral membranes and the brain.

“Vincenz Verzeni, born in 1849 in Spain; since Jan. 11, 1872, in prison; was accused (1) of an attempt to strangle his nurse Marianne, four years ago, while she lay sick in bed; (2) of a similar attempt on a married woman, Arsuffi, aged twenty-seven; (3) of an attempt to strangle a married woman, Gala, by grasping her throat while kneeling on her abdomen; (4) on suspicion of the following murders: …”

[Well, most of these don’t matter, but here’s one:]

“In December a fourteen-year-old girl, Johanna Motta, set out for a neighboring village between seven and eight o’clock in the morning. As she did not return, her master set out to find her, and discovered her body near the village, lying in a path in the fields. The corpse was frightfully mutilated with numerous wounds … The nakedness of the body and erosions on the thighs made it seem probable that there had been an attempt at rape; the mouth, filled with earth, pointed to suffocation. In the neighborhood of the body, under a pile of straw, were found a portion of flesh torn from the right calf and pieces of clothing. The perpetrator of the deed remained undiscovered.

“When caught, Verzeni confessed to this and many other murders. He was then twenty-two years old, bull-necked … [Oh-oh. Here we go on the Krafft-Ebing hobby-horse]…as seemed probable, Verzeni had a bad ancestry—two uncles were cretins, a third, microcephalic … The father showed traces of pellagrous degeneration … his family was bigoted and low-minded[!] … there was nothing in his past that pointed to mental disease, but his character was peculiar.”

[He’d probably describe the Marquis de Sade as downright odd.]

“… Verzeni was silent and inclined to be solitary … admitted the murders gave him an indescribably pleasant (lustful) feeling, which was accompanied by erection and ejaculation. As soon as he had grasped his victim by the neck, sexual sensations were experienced. It was entirely the same to him, with reference to these sensations, whether the women were old, young, ugly, or beautiful. Usually simply choking them had satisfied him.

“But in the case of the girl, Johanna Motta, and, it was discovered later, other women, he had done more. The abrasions of the skin on Johanna’s thigh were caused by his teeth whilst sucking her blood in most intense, lustful pleasure.

“These statements of this modern [to Krafft-Ebing, modern, that is] vampire seem to rest on truth. Normal sexual impulses seem to have remained foreign to him. Two sweethearts that he had, he was satisfied to look at; it was very strange to him that he had no inclination to strangle them or press their hands, but he had not had the same pleasure with them as with his victims.

“Verzeni stated in his confession, ‘I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women … It was even a pleasure only to smell female clothing … I took great delight in drinking Motta’s blood. It also gave me the greatest pleasure to pull the hairpins out of the hair of my victims … after the commission of the deeds I was satisfied and felt well. It never occurred to me to touch or look at the genitals or such things. It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood. To this very day I am ignorant of how a woman is formed. During the strangling and after it, I pressed myself on the entire body without thinking of one part more than another.’”

[Backing off from the sheer horror of it, it strikes one how Verzeni’s indifference to his genitals, his failure to think of a woman’s body as having parts and the sucking of blood—all child-like, infantile, like a wildly hungry baby.]

And a response:

Base Hospital HQ

Office of the Administrator    O -R

Portland, Ore.                         April 12

Phil:

All right, I’ll stand by my compliment since I meant it, at least at the time. I’ll give you an indefinite but short extension in the matter; so whatever you plan to do about it you’d better do. Because the next time I mention it there will be no arguments.

A.W.

P. S. Your library notes range all the way from distasteful to disgusting, and fail to make your case.

*Famous nineteenth century psychiatrist.

April 14: Therapy session. Forenoon.

Q. George, you trust me, don’t you?

A. Uh-huh, I guess.

Q. Why do you suppose it’s so hard to talk to you?

A. Is it?

Q. Remember when we were doing the Thematic—you know, the pictures where you made up the stories? You were talking a blue streak.

A. Don’t rightly remember,

Q. If you could talk straight to me like that, we’d get through real fast.

A. Well I could try.

Q. Attaboy! Man, I
like
working with you. Okay, let’s go. George—