Lilith (30 page)

“Yes, a little.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s hard—when you’re faced with the direct question—to explain it. But I feel as if she’s set up an atmosphere of confidence between us, in some way. I’ve had the feeling once or twice, for example, that she might have been offering to bribe me.”

“For what reason?”

“I don’t really know. It seems a little bit silly, now that I actually say it. But I’ve had the impression that she wanted me to conceal her conduct—not only her conduct, but everything that occurs between us. I don’t know whether it’s out of a desire for privacy, or a fear of having her behavior interpreted in some way that she doesn’t want, or perhaps a fear of being penalized, or what. It’s as if she were testing me, in a way—testing my loyalty to her, or something of that sort.”

“Well, if she wants to bribe you, there must be something that she offers as a bribe,” Dr. Lavrier said. He watched me steadily and kindly. “Let me put it quite candidly: do you ever feel that she’s trying to seduce you? It isn’t unknown, you know, for patients to seduce personnel—or vice versa, I’m ashamed to say. No matter how confused they may be mentally, there’s no suspension of their physiological needs; on the contrary, they’re often accelerated. They build up some powerful physical tensions, you know, being isolated as they are. Aside from which, many of them have heightened erotic feelings anyway.”

“No, it isn’t really that simple,” I said. “And yet I suppose you could call it that, although I’m not sure what it is she’s offering me. Not just her body, but far more than that; her mind, perhaps—her spirit. I don’t know.” I stared out of the window, frowning, while I groped for a means of expressing myself. “Does it sound absurd to say this: a kind of glory that she owns, and intimates that she will share with me?”

“No, that doesn’t sound absurd.” Dr. Lavrier dropped his eyes again to the reports and straightened their edges with his finger tips. “Do you ever feel inclined to accept?” he asked.

“Yes. I don’t know what it is, but I do, sometimes.” I returned my eyes to his and began to speak more rapidly, having found a point of departure for my thoughts. “You see, I don’t really think she’s unhappy,” I said. “I suppose many of them are, but not Lilith. She has a kind of . . . rapture about her which is very compelling. Do you know what I mean? A kind of rapture that perhaps I’m jealous of.”

“Yes, I do,” he said, nodding at me and smiling. “It’s a good word. In Shakespeare’s time, you know, it meant madness—as the words ‘ecstasy’ and ‘innocence’ often did. I think all of us here are concerned with rapture in some way—I told you once that I liked to consider psychoanalysis as an art rather than a science—and when a man devotes himself to studying the nature of rapture he may find himself dispossessed, as it were. Categories dissolve, values and verities reverse themselves, things he reaches out to touch for comfort or guidance startle, and sometimes sicken, him with their unfamiliarity. It is a thing we are all aware of in this profession.” He picked up his pipe from the desk and stared at it for a moment. “She talks to you about her delusions, then?”

“Yes, quite often. They’re very detailed, as you know, and often quite beautiful. She described her people to me the other day, and I must say they seemed much more appealing than any I have ever met.” He laughed and rapped the bowl of his pipe into his palm with a pleasant hollow sound. “And yet I detest them,” I said in a moment, with surprising intensity. “There’s really something hideous about their perfection. I think I hate things that rob people of their sorrow; it’s as if they were robbed of their humanity.”

“Still, humanity couldn’t very well exist without its illusions,” he said. “Our fear of truth is as much a part of us as our love of it, I think.” He began to fill his pipe, sprinkling dark tobacco into the bowl from a bright-yellow can. “Has it ever occurred to you that half of human institutions are elaborate artistic disguises or compensations for brutal realities? I don’t think we should be too severe with Lilith for her own private ones. Perhaps what we resent about them
is
their privacy, and their originality—the fact that she refuses to share our own common delusions, rejecting them as being equally as ignoble as the reality they evade—and has invented fresh ones for herself, sometimes more orderly, more dignified and more beautiful than our own. We cherish our illusions so fondly that we can’t help resenting the implication that they’re foolish, archaic or corrupt. No one is innocent of illusions, of course; it would be inhuman not to have them. It is only too great a degree of individuality that we distrust. Our image of the insane seems to alternate between the prophet and the renegade, and neither is a very reassuring one. It makes, on the one hand, for a kind of uneasy reverence, and on the other for contempt, or envy—as you said yourself just now. I think this helps to explain the ambivalence with which they have been regarded for centuries, the mixture of reverence and scorn we’ve always felt for them. Which you appear to feel. You find a ‘kind of glory’ about her, and yet you ‘detest’ her fantasies and find them ‘hideous.’ I don’t think this is an unusual attitude at all—quite an orthodox one, as a matter of fact.”

“Yes, I see that much more clearly when you explain it like this.”

“But it still disturbs you?”

“Well, I don’t feel that I’m sufficiently objective about her,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind a certain amount of confusion in my attitude—”

“If it were not so intense?”

“Perhaps that’s it, yes.”

“Well, if it’s any comfort to you, I often feel much the same way, as her analyst. And not about Lilith only. So many of these people have such extraordinary minds, such extraordinary sensibilities. Too extraordinary, I think sometimes. It may be a romantic conception, but I often compare them to fine crystal which has been shattered by the shock of some intolerable revelation.” He tore a match from a paper folder and struck it, staring for a moment at the flame. “I often have the feeling when I talk with them that they have seen too much, with too fine an instrument; that they have been close to some extreme—to something absolute—and been blasted by it. That they have been destroyed, one might say, by their own excellence—by the exercise of their highest, most godly faculty. It gives one a very great respect for them. One thinks of them as the honorable wounded in man’s mortal struggle to understand. Regarded in this way, they are the heroes of the universe—its finest product and its noblest casualty.”

The match having burned down to his fingers, he shook it violently into an ash tray and blew on his scalded finger tips—a misfortune which appeared to dissipate the “romantic” quality of his thought, as he had called it. He said in a moment, flapping his burned hand and smiling in a deprecatory way, “It isn’t a very scientific theory, of course, because schizophrenia is far from being an exclusive affliction of superior minds. As a matter of fact it has been induced in dogs and spiders as well as men. A most unsettling fact.”

“In spiders?” I said, astonished.

“Yes. By introducing into their bodies a substance from the blood of human schizophrenics. Their mating and hunting habits are affected very strangely, and they weave weird and totally uncharacteristic patterns with their webs. The webs of most spider species are as distinctive and invariable as their coloring, but ‘mad’ ones spin out fantastic, asymmetrical and rather nightmarish designs. I find that extremely interesting.”

“Yes, it is,” I said, finding it oddly horrible as well. Spiders of the most stable variety had little attraction for me; and the thought of an insane one, clinging to its firmament of frail, aberrant gossamer and peering out with little jeweled, demented eyes, was startlingly repulsive.

“Is it possible to consider it infectious, then?”

“Oh, not in an ordinary way,” he said. “It can be artificially induced, apparently; and there is some evidence that prolonged contact with disturbed and influential personalities is predisposing—just as exposure to any disorderly environment may be—but not in the strict medical sense of the word.” He struck another match and lit his pipe, blowing out dense pale clouds of fragrant smoke which he studied musingly. “Lilith is very difficult to analyze,” he said in a moment, “because she lies so expertly. A lie, of course, if it is recognized as such, can sometimes be examined more productively than a direct confession. But in Lilith’s case it is seldom possible to know what is fantasy and what is fact. She has a most astonishing capacity for invention. Has she ever spoken to you about her family?”

“No.”

“She had a brother who was killed accidentally, you know. She’s never mentioned him, I suppose?”

“No, she never talks about anything personal; and I’ve never questioned her.”

“No; well, I wouldn’t. That’s apt to be disastrous. But if she should, voluntarily, don’t fail to let me know about it.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Good. Now, about the tournament. I’m very much in favor of it, so long as you don’t feel any exceptional anxiety. I don’t think she’d go with anyone else; and I’d like very much to know how she behaves. It would be the first time she’s been off the grounds alone since she was readmitted.”

“All right. I think she’ll be delighted to hear that she can go.”

“I suppose Bea has told you that she’s made two previous attempts to escape?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can’t understand that. She seems so happy here. Things irritate her, of course, and I know she takes a high ironic view of most of us; but she’s so absorbed in her work, and has her own little world so well contained up there in her room, that I can’t imagine her wanting to run away.”

Dr. Lavrier picked up his pipe again and after a long reflective pause he said, “Mr. Bruce, in matters of human psychology—and particularly abnormal psychology—you must learn never to accept appearances.”

“I’m learning very rapidly to distrust them,” I said.

“Good. She is always quite obedient with you, I gather?”

“Yes.”

“I see. As to your objectivity in dealing with her, I wouldn’t be too worried about it; I’m sure it will improve. Would you like to see her walk out of here some day into a happy, useful, creative and courageous life?”

“Yes, very much,” I said, stirred in a great and sudden manner by the prospect.

“So would I,” Dr. Lavrier said. “For anyone who admired her it would be worth every effort that could be made towards realizing it. Psychotherapy is a long and often exhausting process; but when we consider what it can and has achieved, it more than justifies the patience with which we must pursue it.”

“Yes, I’m sure of that,” I said, and added after a moment’s thought, “Do you think it’s really possible, in Lilith’s case? She speaks of herself, you know, as being ‘incurable.’ I don’t really think she wants to be well.”

“It’s very difficult to say. She was eighteen when she was first hospitalized, and she’s now twenty-three. It isn’t, frankly, a very favorable picture. If there were to have been a permanent spontaneous remission it should have occurred before this. A pernicious, well-entrenched delusional system in an otherwise intact personality is a pretty insidious indication, particularly when it has persisted for more than three years; the classical development is towards a total disintegration of personality, or a permanent paranoid state. Still, you never can tell. She’s been doing very well lately. I’m particularly pleased with the influence you seem to have had on her. I think she’s holding her own, and possibly even making a little progress. We must wait and see.” He swung his body in the chair, staring out of the window and squinting into the sunlight. “I don’t know if I’ve helped to clear things up very much,” he said. “We must both go away and think about it. But if you have any misgivings, don’t hesitate to come and see me.”

“I won’t. I think it’s been a great help,” I said. “Thank you for taking so much time.”

“Not at all. These things are important; they deserve all the time we can give them.”

I felt greatly reassured by this interview and more than ever attracted to Dr. Lavrier.
THURS., MAY 21:

For the last few days I have been enjoying—I was about to say “suffering from”—a kind of heightened sensitivity. All my perceptions seem finer and more penetrating, and not only my actual physical perceptions, but that instantaneous interpretation of the thing perceived which is so large a part of the total act of perception. It is something like the experience of going outdoors after a rain and seeing the world anew, freshly and vividly. All the stones are washed clean, the leaves glitter, even the air has a bright and almost bitter clarity; and with this there comes a quite original and exciting sense of the significance of things. Yesterday, for example, when I stepped out of the elevator, I saw that someone—one of the nurses, apparently, hurrying from the Lodge to Field House with a tray of medicines—had dropped a bottle of some vivid purple fluid (gentian violet, I suppose) which had broken on the paving and spread out in a gorgeous, darkly glittering pool, through which the splinters of stained glass stuck up like shattered peaks of tinted ice in a silent, wine-dark sea. And while I stood staring down at it I experienced Odysseys of emotion; how many delectable images flashed through my mind in those few seconds! The faces and bodies of Sirens, splashed by purple foam, their hair and white limbs streaming with indigo, their eyes stained darkly as stained stones in the cold violet depths from which they had emerged. One with her mouth smashed against the rocks in the surf, moaning and turning her face toward me to be kissed, her lips burst like grapes. And beaches of glinting amethyst sand where their blue bones rolled forever in the lapse of lovely water. I must have crouched there for several minutes in a kind of trance, until Kit came up the drive toward me with a patient, at which intrusion I began to scrape together the splinters of glass in a hasty pretense of busyness.

I find that I can stare into the petals of a flower for ten or fifteen minutes at a time without exhausting its attraction, feeling, on the contrary, a gathering intensity of pleasure which approaches exaltation. The fuchsias on the front veranda are particularly fascinating. They have a vividness of tone which seems to oscillate, to awaken all kinds of thrilling vibrations in the senses, drawing one deeper and deeper into the profundities of color until the universe seems composed exclusively of it; there are no other stimuli, no other modes of being, no reality but color. God, grief, mortality, eternity, all these become shades or aspects of glowing fuchsia. It is a really extraordinary and delightful experience, for which I cannot account; but it has given me an understanding of the pleasure Lilith must derive from the light-games she plays with her prisms.