On a Beam of Light (23 page)

After the service I mingled for a while with some of our former patients, all of whom were doing well. We discussed, with considerable nostalgia, their days at the hospital (it’s strange how even a stay in a mental institution can seem like a happy time in retrospect). Chuck, especially, seemed a changed man, chatting away without the slightest comment on the odor of anyone present. But it wasn’t until everyone was leaving that he said, “It was good to see prot again. ” Confused by his crossed eyes, perhaps, I thought for a moment he meant to say “Russell, ” but Mrs. A and Ernie and Maria all nodded enthusiastically.

“Hasn’t changed a bit, ” Ernie declared.

“Was prot here?” I asked as calmly as possible.

“Didn’t you see him? He was standing at the back of the crowd. “

I said my goodbyes and returned to my examining room. Rob and Betty were still there, busily engaged in the testing process. Thinking that maybe our former patients had generated visions of prot from the rich loam of their imaginations, I went back to my office, where I placed a call to Virginia Goldfarb.

“No, ” she said, “I didn’t see him. Why? Was he supposed to be there?” Same for Beamish and Menninger.

I ran to the lawn and checked with several of the other patients still milling about the gravesite. All of them had seen prot.

I wanted to get away from my desk, from the hospital, from everything. But I didn’t know where to go. I wandered around for a while, ending up in Villers’s office, where I occupied myself with correspondence and budget matters until I got a call from our new administrator, Joe Goodrich, a nice young man and quite competent, despite his limited experience. I could tell he had something he wanted to say to me, but was having a hard time doing it. Finally he blurted, “I just got a call from the New York Times. Klaus Villers killed his wife and then himself. Apparently it happened last night. They want you to fax them his obituary. In fact, Dr. Villers left a note requesting that you take care of it.”

I mumbled something and hung up. Though I hardly knew Klaus and Emma, I was profoundly saddened by this tragic news, and I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because it came so close after Russell’s death and prot’s apparent departure. Too much, too soon. I felt as if I were a spider at the bottom of a sink—no matter how much I struggled, I couldn’t get out. And prot wasn’t there to help me.

On Saturday I drove in and forced myself to spend the day processing those parts of Rob’s tests that Betty hadn’t finished. Chak had also stayed late on Friday to get the blood samples off to the lab for DNA analysis and typing, though we wouldn’t get the results for several weeks. I listened to a tape of La Bohetne while I worked up the data. But I didn’t sing along or even hear much of it.

At first I didn’t believe the results, but I soon remembered that nothing about the case of Robert/prot could ever be routine. Here are the comparisons of some of Rob’s tests with those of prot, examined five years earlier:

IQ 130 154

Short-term memory good Excellent

Reading skill average Very good

Artistic ability above average variable

Musical ability fair below average

General knowledge limited broad and impressive

Hearing, taste, smell,

tactile acuities normal highly sensitive

“Special” senses none questionable

EEG normal (though normal

somewhat different from prot’s)

Vision

1. Light normal marked

sensitivity

2. Range normal can detect

light well into

UV range

Aptitude some affinity for could do

natural sciences almost

anything

In addition to the above, there were also slight differences in skin tone (fairness) and voice timbre. Robert and prot were two completely different people occupying the same body like a pair of Siamese twins.

As I looked over the data something kept flitting around my mind like a trapped butterfly trying to escape. Was it guilt about Klaus’s death? Finally, out flew an old adage with dull brown wings: Be suspicious of the patient who discharges himself, as Robert had begun hinting we should consider for him.

Will came into my office just as I was packing up to leave for what was left of the weekend. He wanted to talk about Dustin’s parents. I reminded him to finish his studies before he began his practice. But suddenly I felt a compelling need to confess my feelings of guilt about Klaus and Emma Villers. If I had tried to cultivate a friendship with him, I told Will, get to know him as well as some of his patients seemed to, maybe I could have done something. He listened intently to the whole thing, and when I was finished he said, “Sometimes you can’t do anything about a problem no matter how hard you try. “

“Son, I think you’ve got the makings of a fine shrink. ” “Thanks, Pop. Now, what about Dustin’s parents?” I sighed, “Don’t worry—I’ll take care of it. ” “I wonder if parents aren’t the cause of half the mental problems in the world, ” he mused.

“Damn near, ” I sighed. “Prot would probably say we ought to do away with parenthood altogether. “

The Monday-morning staff meeting began with a moment of silence for our departed colleague. After that I discussed my misgivings about Rob. By now everyone was aware that he was making excellent progress, and that there had been no appearances by prot (except, perhaps, to the patients at Russell’s funeral) for several days. Someone asked whether Robert, who showed no signs of psychosis whatever, wouldn’t do just as well in Ward One. I demurred: “Let’s wait to hear from Virginia and Carl” (Goldfarb and Thorstein were absent for Rosh Hoshanah).

Perhaps I was being overly cautious. I suppose everyone becomes more conservative as he gets older. I had, after all, been wary about Michael, who was doing very well as an EMS trainee, despite the fact that he had attempted suicide as recently as a few months earlier. And, thanks mainly to prot, Rudolph was also gone, Manuel was on the verge of departure, Lou had gotten through a very difficult delivery, and now Bert was making excellent progress as well. Maybe he had worked similar wonders with Rob.

After the brief meeting I went to see Bert, who unburdened himself of the whole story. After his girlfriend’s death, their unborn child kept growing and growing in his head like a kind of mental fetus. The headaches were excruciating. He kept everything bottled up inside for years, until he was well past forty, when his mother’s serendipitous discovery eventually triggered the cascade of events that sent him to us.

This is not unusual. Many nervous or other mental breakdowns result from a sudden eruption, like a geyser, of feelings long repressed. Most of us have something locked up inside, trying to break out. One of my former teachers once remarked that if science could find some way for the brain to let off this steam, a little at a time, there would be far less mental trauma in the world, and certainly in the hospitals. Unfortunately, so little attention is paid to mental health, even as part of a regular medical checkup, that such a goal has yet to be attained.

Bert told me how he had bought dolls and clothes and spent nearly every night of his adult life bathing his “daughter” (he had arbitrarily chosen the sex of the baby), and putting her to bed, taking care of her when she was “sick, ” and all the rest. When he was finished, and the tears were over, I asked him again about adopting Jackie. By this time, the other patients had stopped whatever they were doing and drifted over to listen, and we all waited for the answer.

“It would be the happiest day of my life, ” Bert blubbered, and I had no trouble believing him.

At that moment I heard something I had never heard in over thirty years of practice. The small group of patients that had gathered nearby broke into spontaneous applause. For a second I thought they were thanking me. But of course it was Bert (and prot) they were lauding, and I happily joined them.

Inflated with borrowed success, I headed for 3B. On the way there I thought hard about what prot had said and done to get Jerry to respond to him. It seemed simple enough—he just held his hand and gently stroked it, almost as if it were a bird or some small animal he was trying to calm.

I closed the door and eased over to where Jerry was finishing his replica of the space shuttle, complete with launch pad. Not wishing to disturb him, I crept closer.

I watched for a while, marveling at the detail, the obvious understanding of structure and function, a Michelangelo of the matchstick. At the same time, I remembered prot’s comment to me about the model: “The space shuttle program is like Columbus sailing up and down the coast of Portugal. “

I said, “Hello, Jerry. “

“Hello, Jerry. “

“Jerry, would you come with me for a moment, please?”

He froze, a sculpture in flesh and bone. Even his cowlicks seemed to become more rigid. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I imagined their suspicion and fear.

“I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk to you for a minute. “

I tugged him patiently to a chair. After a little encouragement he sat down, though now he could barely keep still. I pulled up another. Taking his hand in mine I began stroking it and speaking to him gently, as prot had done, or seemed to. I’m not sure precisely what I expected. I hoped he would leap up and shout, “Hiya, doc, how’s it going?” or some such thing. But he never looked in my direction, never made a sound, but continued to fidget and fitfully scan the walls and ceiling.

I wouldn’t give up. Like a paramedic who works over a dying patient for an hour or more, I continued to stroke Jerry’s hand and arm and speak softly to him. I varied the pressure, the cadence, switched from one hand to the other—nothing worked. After that hour I was exhausted, sweating as though we had been arm wrestling the whole time. “Okay, Jerry, you can go back to work. “

Without so much as a glance he jumped up and returned to his model. I could hear him muttering, “Back to work, back to work, back to work…. “

I decided, before lunch, to find and inform all of Klaus’s patients of his death and to tell them who their new therapist would be. There was no need. All of them had heard about the tragedy and knew about the changes. What surprised me was the depth of feeling they expressed for their former counselor. In fact, they loved my longtime colleague, obviously much more than had I or the rest of the staff.

But, of course, I never had a session with Klaus. The bonds between a patient and his psychiatrist are strong, often resembling, as I have said, that of a parent and child. In Villers’s case it appeared to be even stronger than that. From what I gathered he spent as much time telling them about his problems as vice versa. In so doing, he broke the first rule of psychiatry. But what he lost in effectiveness, if anything, he made up for in the affection his patients held for him, and their willingness to try to please him. I wished I had made a greater effort to get to know him better myself.

As long as I was in Ward Two I decided to have lunch there. The patients, even those who had little contact with Villers, seemed strangely quiet during the meal. I noticed that they kept staring at Rob, who looked like prot but wasn’t exactly him. They still came to him for help on occasion and he was perfectly willing to give it. Whether he was as effective as prot in some of his advice remained to be determined.

All of this might have been moot, however. I had nearly decided to transfer him to Ward One to see how he would deal with the change. But, assuming he did well, what would the other patients think about both of them leaving the hospital for good? One of the favorite terms now being bandied about the hospital was “anal orifice. ” Would they think I was a first-class orifice for letting Robert/prot go?

While I was in Two, my temporary administrative secretary had taken a message, which she later passed on to me, from Klaus’s lawyer. There was to be no formal burial service for him and his wife, only a simple cremation. They had requested that I scatter the ashes around Emma’s flower garden. I was touched by this entreaty and, of course, agreed to it.

It was with a certain amount of wistfulness that I welcomed Rob to his last regularly scheduled session with me. I knew I would miss him, and I most certainly would miss prot, with whom I had spent even more time, and from whom I had learned a great deal. But of course I was nonetheless happy with the way things had turned out.

“Well, Rob, how are you feeling today?” I began.

“Fine, Doctor B. How about yourself?”

“A little dragged out, I’m afraid. “

“You’ve been working too hard lately. You should slow down. “

“Easy for you to say. “

“I suppose so. ” He looked around. “Got any fruit? I seem to have developed a taste for it. “

“Sorry. I forgot. “

“That’s okay. Maybe next time. “

“Rob, at this moment you seem perfectly fine to me. Do you think you are well?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same question. I’m a lot better, that’s for sure. “

“Hear anything from prot?”

“No. I really think he’s gone. “

“Does that bother you?”

“Not really. I don’t think we need him anymore. “

“Rob?”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to hypnotize you one last time. Do you mind?”

He seemed studiously unperturbed. “I suppose not. But why?”

“I’d just like to see whether I can call up prot. It won’t take long. “

“Okay. Sure. Let’s get it over with. “

“Fine. Just focus your attention on the little dot…. “

He did so without the usual struggle. When he was in a deep trance I said, abruptly, “Hello, prot. I haven’t seen you in a while. “

There was no response except, perhaps, for a barely perceptible grin. I tried again. And again. I knew he had to be in there somewhere. But, if so, he wasn’t about to come out.

After I had awakened Rob I said, “I think you’re right. For all practical purposes, he’s gone. “

“I think so, too. “

I studied him carefully. “How do you feel about my transferring you to Ward One?”