We Can Build You (28 page)

“Should I leave you, then?”

“I guess so,” I said. “But I’ll see you tonight, here at the house, for dinner. About six; that’ll give us time to make the flight.”

“Can I do anything for you? Get you anything?”

“Naw. Thanks anyhow.”

Maury hung around the house for a little while and then I heard the front door slam. The house became silent once more. I was alone, as before.

Presently I resumed my slow packing.

Maury and I had dinner together and then he drove me to the Boise airfield in his white Jaguar. I watched the streets go by, and every woman that I saw looked—for an instant, at least—like Pris; each time I thought it was but it wasn’t. Maury noticed my absorption but said nothing.

The flight which the mental health people had obtained for me was first-class and on the new Australian rocket, the C-80. The Bureau, I reflected, certainly had plenty of the public’s funds to disburse. It took only half an hour to reach the Kansas City airport, so before nine that night I was stepping from the rocket, looking around me for the mental health people who were supposed to receive me.

At the bottom of the ramp a young man and woman approached me, both of them wearing gay, bright Scotch plaid coats. These were my party; in Boise I had been instructed to watch for the coats.

“Mr. Rosen,” the young man said expectantly.

“Right,” I said, starting across the field toward the building.

One of them fell in on either side of me. “A bit chilly tonight,” the girl said. They were not over twenty, I thought; two clear-eyed youngsters who undoubtedly had joined the FBMH out of idealism and were doing their heroic task right this moment. They walked with brisk, eager steps, moving me toward the baggage window, making low-keyed conversation about nothing in particular…. I would have felt relaxed by it except that in the glare of the beacons which guided the ships in I could already see that the girl looked astonishingly like Pris.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Julie,” she said. “And this is Ralf.”

“Did you—do you remember a patient you had here a few months ago, a young woman from Boise named Pris Frauen-zimmer?”

“I’m sorry,” Julie said, “I just came to the Kasanin Clinic last week; we both did.” She indicated her companion. “We just joined the Mental Health Corps this spring.”

“Do you enjoy it?” I asked. “Did it work out the way you had expected?”

“Oh, it’s terribly rewarding,” the girl said breathlessly. “Isn’t it, Ralf?” He nodded. “We wouldn’t drop out for anything.”

“Do you know anything about me?” I asked, as we stood waiting for the baggage machine to serve up my suitcases.

“Only that Doctor Shedd will be working with you,” Ralf said.

“And he’s superb,” Julie said. “You’ll love him. And he does so much for people; he has performed so many cures!”

My suitcases appeared; Ralf took one and I took the other and we started through the building toward the street entrance.

“This is a nice airport,” I said. “I never saw it before.”

“They just completed it this year,” Ralf said. “It’s the first able to handle both domestic and extra-t flights; you’ll be able to leave for the Moon right from here.”

“Not me,” I said, but Ralf did not hear me.

Soon we were in a ‘copter, the property of the Kasanin Clinic, flying above the rooftops of Kansas City. The air was cool and crisp and below us a million lights glowed in countless patterns and aimless constellations which were not patterns at all, only clusters.

“Do you think,” I said, “that every time someone dies, a new light winks on in Kansas City?”

Both Ralf and Julie smiled at my witticism.

“Do you two know what would have happened to me,” I
said, “if there was no compulsory mental health program? I’d be dead by now. This all saved my life, literally.”

To that the two of them smiled once more.

‘Thank god the McHeston Act passed Congress,” I said.

They both ‘nodded solemnly.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” I said, “to have the catatonic urgency, that craving. It drives you on and on and then all at once you collapse; you know you’re not right in the head, you’re living in a realm of shadows. In front of my father and brother I had intercourse with a girl who didn’t exist except in my mind. I heard people commenting about us, while we were doing it, through the door.”

Ralf asked, “You did it through the door?”

“He heard them commenting, he means,” Julie said. “The voices that took note of what he was doing and expressed disapproval. Isn’t that it, Mr. Rosen?”

“Yes,” I said, “and it’s a measure of the collapse of my ability to communicate that you had to translate that. At one time I could easily have phrased that in a clear manner. It wasn’t until Doctor Nisea got to the part about the rolling stone that I saw what a break had come about between my personal language and that of my society. And then I understood all the trouble I had been having up to then.”

“Ah yes,” Julie said, “number six in the Benjamin Proverb Test.”

“I wonder which proverb Pris missed years ago,” I said, “that caused Nisea to single her out.”

“Who is Pris?” Julie asked.

“I would think,” Ralf said, “that she’s the girl with whom he had intercourse.”

“You hit the nail on the head,” I told him. “She was here, once, before either of you. Now she’s well again; they discharged her on parole. She’s my Great Mother, Doctor Nisea says. My life is devoted to worshiping Pris as if she were a goddess. I’ve projected her archetype onto the universe; I
see nothing but her, everything else to me is unreal. This trip we’re taking, you two, Doctor Nisea, the whole Kansas City Clinic—it’s all just shadows.”

There seemed to be no way to continue the conversation after what I had said. So we rode the rest of the distance in silence.

The following day at ten o’clock in the morning I met Doctor Albert Shedd in the steam bath at Kasanin Clinic. The patients lolled in the billowing steam nude, while the members of the staff padded about wearing blue trunks—evidently a status symbol or badge of office; certainly an indication of their difference from us.

Doctor Shedd approached me, looming up from the white clouds of steam, smiling friendlily at me; he was elderly, at least seventy, with wisps of hair sticking up like bent wires from his round, wrinkled head. His skin, at least in the steam bath, was a glistening pink.

“Morning, Rosen,” he said, ducking his head and eyeing me slyly, like a little gnome. “How was your trip?”

‘Tine, Doctor.”

“No other planes followed you here, I take it,” he said, chuckling.

I had to admire his joke, because it implied that he recognized somewhere in me a basically sane element which he was reaching through the medium of humor. He was spoofing my paranoia, and, in doing so, he slightly but subtly de-fanged it.

“Do you feel free to talk in this rather informal atmosphere?” Doctor Shedd asked.

“Oh sure. I used to go to a Finnish steam bath all the time when I was in the Los Angeles area.”

“Let’s see.” He consulted his clipboard. “You’re a piano salesman. Electronic organs, too.”

“Right, the Rosen Electronic Organ—the finest in the world.”

“You were in Seattle on business at the onset of your schizophrenic interlude, seeing a Mr. Barrows. According to this deposition by your family.”

“Exactly so.”

“We have your school psych-test records and you seem to have had no difficulty … they go up to nineteen years and then there’s the military service records; no trouble there either. Nor in subsequent applications for employment. It would appear to be a situational schizophrenia, then, rather than a life-history process. You were under unique stress, there in Seattle, I take it?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding vigorously.

“It might never occur again in your lifetime; however, it constitutes a warning—it is a danger sign and must be dealt with.” He scrutinized me for a long time, through the billowing steam. “Now, it might be that in your case we could equip you to cope successfully with your environment by what is called
controlled fugue
therapy. Have you heard of this?”

“No, Doctor.” But I liked the sound of it.

“You would be given hallucinogenic drugs—drugs which would induce your psychotic break, bring on your hallucinations. For a very limited period each day. This would give your libido fulfillment of its regressive cravings which at present are too strong to be borne. Then very gradually we would diminish the fugal period, hoping eventually to eliminate it. Some of this period would be spent here; we would hope that later on you could return to Boise, to your job, and obtain out-patient therapy there. We are far too overcrowded here at Kasanin, you know.”

“I know that.”

“Would you care to try that?”

“Yes!”

“It would mean further schizophrenic episodes, occurring of course under supervised, controlled conditions.”

“I don’t care, I want to try it.”

“It wouldn’t bother you that I and other staff members were present to witness your behavior during these episodes? In other words, the invasion of your privacy—”

“No,” I broke in, “it wouldn’t bother me; I don’t care who watches.”

“Your paranoiac tendency,” Doctor Shedd said thoughtfully, “cannot be too severe, if watching eyes daunt you no more than this.”

“They don’t daunt me a damn bit.”

“Fine.” He looked pleased. “That’s an a-okay prognostic sign.” And with that he strolled off into the white steam clouds, wearing his blue trunks and holding his clipboard under his arm. My first interview with my psychiatrist at Kasanin Clinic was over with.

At one that afternoon I was taken to a large clean room in which several nurses and two doctors waited for me. They strapped me down to a leather-covered table and I was given an intravenous injection of the hallucinogenic drug. The doctors and nurses, all overworked but friendly, stood back and waited. I waited, too, strapped to my table and wearing a hospital type frock, my bare feet sticking up, arms at my sides.

Several minutes later the drug took effect. I found myself in downtown Oakland, California, sitting on a park bench in Jack London Square. Beside me, feeding bread crumbs to a flock of blue-gray pigeons, sat Pris. She wore capri pants and a green turtle-neck sweater; her hair was tied back with a red checkered bandana and she was totally absorbed in what she was doing, apparently oblivious to me.

“Hey,” I said.

Turning her head she said calmly, “Damn you; I said be quiet. If you talk you’ll scare them away and then that old man down there’ll be feeding them instead of me.”

On a bench a short distance down the path sat Doctor Shedd smiling at us, holding his own packet of bread crumbs. In that manner my psyche had dealt with his presence, had incorporated him into the scene in this fashion.

“Pris,” I said in a low voice, “I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Why?” She faced me with her cold, remote expression. “It’s important to you, but is it to me? Or do you care?”

“I care,” I said, feeling hopeless.

“Show it instead of saying it—be quiet. I’m quite happy doing what I’m doing.” She returned to feeding the birds.

“Do you love me?” I asked.

“Christ no!”

And yet I felt that she did.

We sat together on the bench for some time and then the park, the bench and Pris herself faded out and I once more found myself on the flat table, strapped down and observed by Doctor Shedd and the overworked nurses of Kasanin Clinic.

“That went much better,” Doctor Shedd said, as they released me.

“Better than what?”

“Than the two previous times.”

I had no memory of previous times and I told him so.

“Of course you don’t; they were not successful. No fantasy life was activated; you simply went to sleep. But now we can expect results each time.”

They returned me to my room. The next morning I once more appeared in the therapy chamber to receive my allotment of fugal fantasy life, my hour with Pris.

As I was being strapped down Doctor Shedd entered and greeted me. “Rosen, I’m going to have you entered in group therapy; that will augment this that we’re doing here. Do you understand what group therapy is? You’ll bring your problems before a group of your fellow patients, for their
comments … you’ll sit with them while they discuss you and where you seem to have gone astray in your thinking. You’ll find that it all takes place in an atmosphere of friendliness and informality. And generally it’s quite helpful.”

“Fine.” I had become lonely, here at the clinic.

“You have no objection to the material from your fugues being made available to your group?”

“Gosh no. Why should I?”

“It will be oxide-tape printed and distributed to them in advance of each group therapy session … you’re aware that we’re recording each of these fugues of yours for analytical purposes, and, with your permission, use with the group.”

“You certainly have my permission,” I said. “I don’t object to a group of my fellow patients knowing the contents of my fantasies, especially if they can help explain to me where I’ve gone wrong.”

“You’ll find there’s no body of people in the world more anxious to help you than your fellow patients,” Doctor Shedd said.

The injection of hallucinogenic drugs was given me and once more I lapsed into my controlled fugue.

I was behind the wheel of my Magic Fire Chevrolet, in heavy freeway traffic, returning home at the end of the day. On the radio a commuter club announcer was telling me of a traffic jam somewhere ahead.

“Confusion, construction or chaos,” he was saying. “I’ll guide you through, dear friend.”

“Thanks,” I said aloud.

Beside me on the seat Pris stirred and said irritably, “Have you always talked back to the radio? It’s not a good sign; I always knew your mental health wasn’t the best.”

“Pris,” I said, “in spite of what you say I know you love me. Don’t you remember us together at Collie Nild’s apartment in Seattle?”

“No.”

“Don’t you remember how we made love?”

“Awk,” she said, with revulsion.