The Visible Man (4 page)

2. “Problematic things”: I mentioned that his phone call referred to some sort of criminal or antisocial behavior, but he immediately retracted his initial take. I asked what kind of specific behavior he was referring to. He said, “Surveillance. Invasion of privacy. Home invasion. Prowling. I did some prowling. Deception. A certain kind of intangible theft. Humanity theft.” I asked what “humanity theft” meant. Y____ said, “I’ve consumed people’s lives without their consent.” I pushed him to explain this further. He said (
something along the lines of
), “I reached a point in my life where I became exclusively interested in the unseen reality of human behavior, and I did not think it was possible to study such behavior if the person knew they were being studied.” He went on to say that the traditional means for understanding human psychology was by asking subjects questions about themselves, a process he finds futile. “The act of asking someone a question completely destroys the value of the answer,” he said. He asked if I was familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
³
When I told him I was, he said, “Well, then you already understand why psychology has failed.” Though I wanted to pursue these points further, I realized time was expiring on our session and I needed to move to point 3.

3. “The sensation of guilt”: This, I suspect, was the most important phrase Y____ said in his message (and the root of why Y____ is seeking help). I asked how
guilt
differed from
the sensation of
guilt
, since guilt itself is a feeling (and every feeling is a type of sensation). Y____ vehemently disagreed. “A man is guilty when he subjectively thinks about what he has done and concludes that his actions were objectively wrong. A man feels the
sensation
of guilt when he objectively thinks about what he has done and concludes that his actions were subjectively wrong. My problem is that I conflate those two perspectives.” I was shocked by both the eloquence and the forethought of these words; it was as if he had been waiting all month to make this statement. When I asked him to repeat those thoughts, he did so immediately (and with identical syntax, furthering my suspicion of rehearsal). I asked why he was so concerned with the notion of feeling sensations of guilt. Y____: “Partially because I do not deserve to feel guilt, but mostly because it gets in the way.”

At this point I noted that we’d extended our allotted time by more than five minutes. Having now conducted four sessions, we discussed payment. Due to its abbreviated length (and because it was my fault, though I did not admit this), I waived the fee from session #3. Y____ expressed appreciation for my fairness. After giving him my mailing address, I told him the bill would be $450. He declined my offer of an e-mail receipt.

Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

FROM: [email protected]
SENT: Friday, April 4, 2008, 11:04 PM
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Y____ / Friday (NA)

Strange morning. No call from Y____. Considering the progress of our previous session, my hopes had been high for today’s chat. Mystified.
But
—I am choosing not to overreact. A missed call could be the result of any number of things. Need to stay realistic about this type of case. Don’t want to have more situations like [
redacted
] and [
redacted
].
⁴
Still: disappointed. Was beginning to really relish my discourse with Y____ and remain curious about the authenticity of his persona.

NOTES:

Did receive payment of $450 on Tuesday, sent standard mail as (oddly) cash: twenty-two twenty-dollar bills (plus two fives). The most cash I ever received through the USPS! Pretty dangerous, IMO.

Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

ADDENDUM
⁵

[Received another two voice mails from Y
____,
this time explaining his missed session. Unlike his previous message, he seemed to be speaking off the cuff. Total time of first message: 299 seconds. Total time of second message: 19 seconds.]

CALL 1

“Good evening, Vicky. This is Y____ speaking. First of all, I want to apologize for failing to call you this morning. I did not forget to call, if that’s what you’re thinking. I chose not to call. But this is only because I thought about some of what you’d said in our previous sessions—really,
really
thought about what you’d said—and I decided that maybe you were more correct than I initially believed. I was watching someone this morning—someone on the TV, one of those variety shows—and it occurred to me that people who don’t talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they’re guarding themselves from some sort of abstract danger, but they’re actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they’re like. This happened to George Harrison. He was the quiet Beatle. Right? But he was also the Beatle people are most able to turn into whatever inaccurate projection they need, and for whatever purposes they arbitrarily decide. And I’m (
inaudible
) to make that (
inaudible
). Not that I’m comparing myself to a Beatle, of course, but I think you (
inaudible
). I probably am a little like a Beatle, within my own field. So here is my proposal: The next time I call you, there’s not going to be any questions, or at least none from you. I need to talk to you about what has happened to me, and I believe it’s important for you to get a full picture of my life. And, by extension, a portrait of my problems. And if this goes well, and I have every expectation that it will, I believe we could actually meet—face-to-face, as it were—and start talking more directly about these issues. So this is what we will do. Agreed? I will call next week, and you will listen. I will talk and you will not. Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t say ‘hello’ or ask follow-up queries to certain points you won’t understand. I’m not a fascist. However, I’d advise you not to ask any more questions than absolutely necessary, even though I realize that’s your nature. Some of what I tell you will just be impossible to understand, so trying to get your head around my condition will not serve our progress. Second, I don’t want to give
you some sort of false confidence that you can latently direct our conversation by asking a bunch of subtle, pointed queries. That’s not what we’re going to do. I know every smart person always believes that he or she can control a conversation without making a single declarative statement, and I know that—”

CALL 2

“Your machine cut me off. You should set it to record for a longer amount of time. But what I was saying, basically, is that I know what a smart person would do if placed in the position I’m putting you in. I realize how this must sound. Still, I’m hoping you will resist the temptation to interfere. You will have enough things to deal with when this process starts to accelerate. Don’t overthink what’s happening here, Vicky. I am not a swamp monster, Vicky. I’m not an invisible man. I’m not a vampire, and I’m not God. I’m just an incredibly interesting person. Good night, Vicky.”

[After consultation with Dr. Jane Dolanagra, my own therapist and academic mentor, I concluded that the conditions Y
____
proposed in his message were not as problematic as my gut reaction indicated. What was the risk? Why not allow Y
____
to freely say whatever it is he wants me to know? Isn’t the entire purpose of therapy to make the client comfortable? To put the client in whatever position makes them most willing to become emotionally vulnerable? To get them to talk on their terms, so that he or she can eventually have those same kinds of conversations inside their own head? That was my thinking at the time. Obviously, I’m less comfortable with that position now. But Dolanagra and I both postulated that—if Y
____
was indeed as intelligent as I believed—he might naturally gravitate toward the same platform I would have pushed him toward
.

Some context: After I opened our April 11 call by saying, “The floor is yours,” Y
____
lectured nonstop for forty-three minutes, at which point I informed him that less than two minutes remained in our session. This manuscript does not contain the entirety of that call (or the totality of any of our subsequent interactions), as those single-spaced transcripts stretch to well over 2,400 pages. What I have done (to the best of my abilities) is excerpt the most critical and illuminating passages from each individual exchange. Parties interested in reading the complete transcripts may do so by visiting the basement of the Univ. of Texas
Psychiatric Library, where the pages have been archived by local sociohistorian Daniel Arellano. They have also been transferred to microfiche and can be accessed through the attorney general’s office in the William P. Clements Building, 300 West 15th Street, Austin, Texas.]

[Note to C. Bumpus: For purposes of simplicity and impact, I have elected to present Y____’s speech in a traditional prose style. Certain decisions—when to break paragraphs, when to include italics or employ unorthodox punctuation, when to encapsulate especially unwieldy stretches of dialogue—were dictated by my own peccadilloes. However, all of those decisions were solely driven by the desire to reflect Y____’s thoughts in a manner that best captured my experience. If this is a problem, we can address it later.]

APRIL 11 (Y____ calls office line, 10:00 a.m.):

Let’s begin. You know, I don’t mind talking like this. I’m sure you think I’m going to be one of those people who hires a therapist and then spends six weeks talking about how they hate talking about themselves, but I’m not that kind of guy. I’ll never understand why people behave like that. Do they feel some kind of social pressure to prove they’re not self-absorbed, even though the basis of this entire process is a critical examination of one’s own self-absorption? In this day and age, no one would ever say, “Therapy is ridiculous.” Right? Only a philistine would say that aloud, because we’ve all been conditioned to accept the value of this process. You’d have to be a jackass to think like that. Right? Yet when faced with the experience itself—whenever someone opens that interior door to the conscious and subconscious, fully aware they’re paying money to talk about themselves in a completely one-way relationship—everyone feels an urge to say, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here” or “I’m not very comfortable talking about myself” or “I don’t even know what
I’m supposed to be figuring out.” It’s childish, really. At this point, who
doesn’t
know what kind of conversation they’re supposed to have with a therapist? You enter therapy in order to confront four-word sentences: Why am I here? Where am I going? What does it mean? It’s not some kind of maze. I understand the expectation. I want to talk about my feelings. That’s what I want. I’ll never fight you on this. I don’t have those prejudices.

[I attempt to interject in order to mention that there is no expectation. Y
____
immediately cuts me off.]

Stop. Just stop, please. You’re already blowing it. What did we agree to do? Isn’t that kind of interjection the exact opposite of what we agreed? We agreed that this would not be a back-and-forth fabrication. This is not an episode of
In Treatment
. You’re not Bob Newhart. I don’t need your reassurances. I suppose some of the burnouts who pay your rent need a weekly litany of reassurances, but I don’t. Did I not make that clear? Let me clarify again: If certain questions arise and you feel the need to ask them, either for clarity or because you’re lost, go ahead and ask them. Our conversation will be impossible if you don’t have that option, and I don’t want to confuse you. But we agreed this was not going to be some kind of Nora Ephron chitchat that toggles back and forth while you sit there and nod on the other end of the telephone. That was not our agreement. We agreed on something else. If I misinterpreted our agreement, tell me now. Because that’s the only kind of interaction I’m willing to have. I decide how this will go. I decide.

If this is acceptable, say nothing. If not, tell me now.

[Ten seconds of silence]

Okay then. Thank you, Vicky. I appreciate your cooperation, Vicky.

Where do I begin? I suppose I’ll begin by saying that my goal in life, pretty much from infancy, has been to understand the truth about human nature. And—yes—I did say
infancy
. This is not hubris, and I don’t care if it sounds pompous or unrealistic. It’s the way that it was, and it’s the way that I am. My earliest memories all involve staring at people and wondering who they actually were. Staring at my mom, for example, and wondering who she was and what she really felt, and how her mother-centric worldview compared to mine. I didn’t know the definition of the word
worldview
, but I still had one. My mom was a different person around my brother and a different person around my dad and a different person on the telephone—why would I be the one exception who saw the real her? I would play by myself, alone in my bedroom, aligning my little green army men on the floor or throwing a Nerf ball against the window, doing childish things in a childish way. I wasn’t abnormal. But I’d inevitably find myself thinking difficult thoughts. I’d think, “You know, this is really who I am. Right now, right here.
This is me
. And this is the
only
time I’m me.” With my parents, around other kids, sitting in a pew at church, sitting in my desk at school—in all of those situations, I was someone else. I was a
version
of myself, but not the actual me. I understood this separation before I understood anything else. I understood this before I had the language to explain it to other people, or even to my own consciousness. The question was always there, whenever I went out in public:
Who are these people?
I knew this was central to everything. I knew I was looking at a world that wasn’t there. I knew I was looking at a simulacrum of life, despite the fact that I had never been introduced to the word
simulacrum
and wouldn’t be able to define it for more than a decade. This has been the only thing I’ve ever thought about, for as long as I can remember. Everything I did, everything I accomplished … it was all in the service of this one question. So this is where we start: We start with the recognition that the things I have done were done in order to understand the truth about people. If I’ve done bad things, or if
we agree that these things could be
viewed
as bad, or if someone was hurt collaterally because my actions created a domino effect, we always have to weigh those consequences against what was learned. Or—in some cases—what I
hoped
would be learned, even if that ultimately proved fruitless. I say this only because I want you to feel comfortable judging me, Vicky. Most people hate being judged, but I am not most people. You can judge me all you want. However, I do insist that you judge me
accurately
, and—in order to do that—you need to be aware that nothing I’ve done was committed without cause. My motives have always been one hundred percent good. Now, sometimes, an individual can have totally pure motives and still do terrible things. I’m not discounting that. But keep my words in mind. We’ll both be better off if you do. I will absolutely accept any judgments of my character at face value, but only if those judgments are fair and balanced.