The Soloist (15 page)

Dr. Libertson testified that he had met with Philip Weber on twelve separate occasions since his arrest for murder, and had administered a large number of psychological tests to him, which he named and attempted to explain to us in great detail. I found it difficult to keep track of that part of his testimony. When he finished reviewing the tests for us, Ms. Doppelt asked him, “And were you able to make a conclusive diagnosis?”

Dr. Libertson smiled warily. “Until we can positively identify the chemical and neurobiological components of all thoughts and feelings, no psychiatric diagnosis will ever be
absolutely
conclusive. Fortunately for the purposes of the trial, this was not a difficult case to evaluate. Mr. Weber’s symptoms, behavior and case history are all perfectly consistent with those of a specific mental disorder.”

“And what is that?”

“A progressive illness known as chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia.”

Ms. Doppelt asked the doctor to try to explain, in layman’s terms, what that term meant. He folded his hands eagerly on the railing in front of him and slid up to the edge of his seat. You could tell that the subject excited him.

“Most of us are comfortable with people depending on how predictable they are,” he began. “Schizophrenia is a disease that makes its victims seem unpredictable. If you observe the disease carefully, however, you realize that the symptoms aren’t so unpredictable, after all. But the average person doesn’t know enough about schizophrenia to notice.”

Dr. Libertson said that, first of all, it was significant for Mr. Weber that his mother had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic; apparently the disease has a genetic component. He read aloud from several documents relating to the mother’s medical history, then returned to the disease itself. “Almost all schizophrenics begin to show symptoms in their adolescence,” he explained. “But it’s kind of like what they said when Calvin Coolidge died: ‘How could they tell?’ ” He laughed and seemed to expect a response, but it took a few seconds to figure out the meaning of the punch line, which was that teenagers and lunatics are hard to tell apart.

“For most of us,” Dr. Libertson said, wincing as if he were speaking from experience, “adolescence is a horrible, confusing time. We are trying out new roles, breaking away from our family and attempting to discover our ‘true selves,’ whatever that means. We struggle with the question ‘Who am I?’ and why it is that we can act one way with our friends and another way with our parents. Which way is the real you? It’s terribly stressful. Luckily, most of us settle down and become comfortable with ourselves in our twenties.” He nodded as if relieved to get this part of the testimony over with.

He told us that schizophrenics, sadly enough, don’t get comfortable with themselves as they get older. Their sense of confusion only becomes more intense as they reach adulthood. They observe themselves with such frightening intensity that, in the glare of all this self-awareness, they lose all spontaneity. The doctor told us to imagine having a bad case of stage fright, and having it nearly all the time.

Naturally I found this image absolutely chilling. I had experienced moments like those he was describing in some of my last concerts, where I observed myself with grotesque self-consciousness; my fingers on the strings felt and looked like clumsy sausages, the bow in my hand seemed as heavy as an oar, and I became terrified that I might go blank and lose my place in the music. Panic and anger and despair all mixed together. I could easily believe that someone who felt that way all the time, day after day, would fall apart.

Dr. Libertson told us that as the disease worsens, the patient’s thoughts, feelings and actions get mixed up. He may be thinking of something very positive while at the same time feeling crushed with sadness. Some patients lose control over their thoughts, and actually think they are hearing voices or commands coming from outside them. This, he explained,
is why so many schizophrenics are convinced they are acting upon orders from God, or the Devil, or the CIA. Most of these unfortunate people become withdrawn and terribly shy in order to compensate for what they feel is a lack of self-control. It is also why most of them are far from dangerous, the doctor emphasized; if anything, they tend to be nervous, frightened hermits. Occasionally, however, a schizophrenic will have what psychiatrists call a psychotic episode, an acute phase of psychosis. Then the symptoms become so overwhelming that the patient really does lose control of himself.

Ms. Doppelt asked if Philip Weber had been psychotic when he killed the Zen master.

The doctor nodded vigorously and tapped against the rail with his finger for emphasis. “Absolutely,” he said. “And something to remember is that once he slipped into that state of mind there was nothing he could have done to pull himself out of it. Once a patient becomes psychotic, he or she loses all coherent sense of reality, and therefore of self-control.” He shook his head and looked up at the ceiling, appearing to be searching for words. Then his face lit up and he leaned forward in his chair again. “You know,” he said brightly, “it’s kind of like what physicists say about ‘black holes,’ those collapsed stars floating around out there in space: if you get too close to one and get caught in its field of gravity, you can’t escape. You have nowhere to go but down, nothing to do but fall. Nothing is strong enough or fast enough to get out, not even light. With a schizophrenic, once he becomes psychotic the part of him that you might think should ‘know better’—the nice person his family and friends once knew—that person, that self, can’t resist the forces that are throwing his mind into confusion. He’s being tossed around with nothing to hold on to, and everything around him becomes
a jumbled mess.” The doctor looked at the defendant, who was calmly jotting down notes on one of Ms. Doppelt’s yellow legal pads, then turned to face us in the jury box. “Those of us who are healthy should all be grateful we don’t know what that feels like.”

The “black hole” analogy really struck home with me; I’d finished the astronomy book I bought in Santa Barbara, and black holes were discussed in it at some length. I got distracted from the doctor’s testimony playing with that analogy because there were ways that it could be expanded upon. Physicists say there may be only one way to escape from a black hole, and that is by falling right through it and popping out into a separate universe. You may be the same as before, but everything around you will be changed. Because of what Philip Weber had done during his psychotic phase, I was thinking that even if he could be successfully treated, his life would be forever changed. All of us—the rest of the world, to him—saw him differently after that. He was a killer, someone who had taken another man’s life. He really was living in a parallel universe; with treatment he might even become a reasonably healthy man, but he would certainly never be perceived as one. For the first time I felt a kind of pity for this young man, who was beginning to look more pathetic than evil to me.

When I turned my attention back to Dr. Libertson, he was saying that during his psychotic episode at the church Philip Weber suddenly found himself swept up in a euphoric delirium, and in that delirium imagined that the correct answer to the puzzle “Kill the Buddha in the road” was to attack the Zen master with his staff.

The testimony became particularly interesting, I thought,
when the doctor talked about some of the kinds of situations that can trigger these psychotic episodes. He said that sometimes they occur without any apparent reason, but nine times out of ten they can be traced to an emotionally stressful situation, like a visit to one’s parents’ home, or having to ride a public bus and risk being stared at, or having to take part in any social situation that would make one feel more self-conscious than usual.

Ms. Doppelt asked if the doctor thought that the Zen retreat could have triggered Weber’s psychotic episode, and the psychiatrist actually laughed out loud. He shook his head with an almost bitter expression on his face and said, “Ms. Doppelt, I find it hard to believe that even you or I could participate in an activity like that without some sort of breakdown. As a matter of fact, it is my opinion that this is precisely what most so-called religious experiences are: episodes of nervous exhaustion brought on by sensory deprivation, extreme fervor—”

“Objection,” Mr. Graham interrupted. “The doctor’s opinion concerning normal religious experience isn’t relevant, your Honor. It biases the jury against the religion that Mr. Weber chose to adopt.”

“Sustained.”

Dr. Libertson didn’t seem upset. He shrugged and continued pretty much where he had left off. He said it was quite common for exhausted people to experience mild hallucinations and interpret those hallucinations as evidence of deep insight, visions of God or divine commands. There was no doubt in his mind, he said strongly, that the retreat had triggered Mr. Weber’s psychosis. “Frankly,” he added, “from my point of view the activities of this retreat … Put it this way: it would take an evil genius to create an atmosphere
more likely to produce psychosis in a schizophrenic patient.”

“Could you be specific, Doctor?” Ms. Doppelt asked. “What specifically about this retreat do you think caused Mr. Weber to become psychotic?”

“Well, just about everything,” the doctor mused, tugging at his compact beard and frowning. “But, yes, I can be more specific. First of all, there are the hours and hours a day of meditating, all the time sitting cross-legged without moving, with no talking or moving about allowed. That’s sensory deprivation, which leads to disorganized thinking and delusions in
anyone
if it goes on long enough, but in a much shorter time with schizophrenics. Then the participants in the retreat are allowed only four or five hours of sleep a night; they are awakened at four in the morning and have to rush around in complete silence to get to the meditation hall, where they must do a series of one hundred full prostrations in front of an image of the Buddha before settling into their meditation. Sleep deprivation and repetitive motor activities also lead to disorganized thinking, along with increased receptivity to hypnotic suggestion. Then there are those puzzles that they’re supposed to be concentrating on all day and night. I’m told that Zen students are led to believe that solving these puzzles will bring them profound insights into the ‘true nature’ of the universe, which presumably contain the answers to all their questions about the meaning of life and so on. These puzzles, I’m told, make no sense whatsoever, and apparently that is their point. As I think I mentioned, disorganized thinking practically defines schizophrenia. What could be more stressful for such a person than to engage in rigorous exercises that were purposely created to short-circuit our conventional notions of reality?”

The doctor told us about a fascinating case in England involving an extremely talented theater student at Oxford who was cast as a schizophrenic in one of the drama company’s plays. One night, in the middle of an exhausting performing tour around England, he got into character and couldn’t get out. He spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. Obviously he was vulnerable to the disease, to begin with, but the exercise of having to pretend to be psychotic clearly pushed him over the edge.

“These Zen exercises,” Dr. Libertson said emphatically, “are carried out in an atmosphere of severe discipline, allowing for no relaxation of one’s will or self-control. What happens to a person who is terrified of losing his self-control, and who knows that he has very little of it in the first place?”

The doctor shook his head and an almost despairing expression came over his face. “Then there’s the fact that the Zen master is considered a spiritual authority, whose clear, spiritual vision allows him to see through all of the illusions we ordinary people live under. Presumably he can see through any false pretenses, and since he claims to understand the nature of the universe, presumably he knows you better than you know yourself. How does someone with a deep fear of seeming shallow or false feel in the presence of such an authority? Terrified, I should think. Terrified of being discovered, of being positively identified as a spiritual and social failure. Add to this the tradition that allows the Zen master to strike students with a huge wooden pole as punishment for making unnecessary noise, and the situation becomes even more frightening. When Philip started to lose control over himself by crying, then laughing, and the master struck him with the pole, he quite simply became hysterical. That blow with the stick was … it was the point of no return
for him. After that he had no sense of what he was doing.”

The doctor inferred that since Zen masters have shaved heads and wear robes, and since Mr. Okakura was Asian like the Buddha, Philip probably thought that the master was some sort of apparition, a ghost of the Buddha, and acted according to the behavior described in the puzzle. This is where hypnotic suggestion plays a part, he said. Philip had repeated the puzzle to himself perhaps thousands of times over the four days of the retreat; in a situation of extreme psychological distress, it would have taken on such resonance in his mind that he felt it was coming from all around him—–from the universe itself, or perhaps from God.

“In any case,” the doctor summed up, “Philip believed at that moment, and still believes, that he did the right thing, the only thing he could do, and that he had the moral force of the entire universe behind him. That is why he seems to have no sense of remorse at all. His sense of reality is utterly inconsistent with our own agreed-upon reality.”

Ms. Doppelt nodded smartly, took a few steps toward the counsel table, then stopped and half turned toward the stand. “Dr. Libertson, was Philip aware that he was killing a man when he swung that pole?”

“N—” the doctor checked himself for an instant, then continued. “Not in any practical sense. To him, what was happening that day had no substance or reality—it was all a kind of dream, or nightmare. He acted the way we might in our nightmares because, in light of his psychosis, he was no more in control of himself than we are in our dreams.”