“Yeah.” He did not want to talk.
“Everybody,” Doreen said, “has at one time or another known a schizophrenic . . . if they’re not one themselves. It was my brother, back Home, my younger brother.”
“I’ll be O.K.,” Jack said. “I’m O.K. now.”
“But you’re not,” Doreen said.
“No,” he admitted, “but what the hell can I do? You said it yourself. Once a schizophrenic, always a schizophrenic.” He was silent, then, concentrating on the gliding, pale fish.
“Arnie thinks a lot of you,” the girl said. “When he says his talent is judging the value of people he’s telling the truth. He can see already that that Glaub is desperately eager to sell himself and get on the staff, here in Lewistown. I guess psychiatry doesn’t pay anymore, as it did once; too many in the business. There are twenty of them here in this settlement already, and none do a genuinely good traffic. Didn’t your– condition cause you trouble when you applied for permission to emigrate?”
He said, “I don’t want to talk about it. Please.”
“Let’s walk,” the girl said.
They walked along the street, past the shops, most of which had closed for the day.
“What was it you saw,” the girl said, “when you looked at Dr. Glaub, there at the table?”
Jack said, “Nothing.”
“You’d rather not say about that, either.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you think if you tell me things will get worse?”
“It’s not things; it’s me.”
“Maybe it is the things,” Doreen said. “Maybe there is something in your vision, however distorted and garbled it’s become. I don’t know. I used to try like hell to comprehend what it was Clay–my brother–saw and heard. He couldn’t say. I know that his world was absolutely different from the rest of ours in the family. He killed himself, like Steiner did.” She had paused at a newsstand, to look over the item, on page one, about Norbert Steiner. “The existential psychiatrists often say to let them go ahead and take their lives; it’s the only way, for some of them. . . the vision becomes too awful to bear.”
Jack said nothing.
“Is it awful?” Doreen asked.
“No. Just–disconcerting.” He struggled to explain. “There’s no way you can work it in with what you’re supposed to see and know; it makes it impossible to go on, in the accustomed way.”
“Don’t you very often try to pretend, and sort of–go along with it, by acting? Like an actor?” When he did not answer, she said, “You tried to do that in there, just now.”
“I’d love to fool everybody,” he conceded. “I’d give anything if I could go on acting it out, playing a role. But that’s a real split–there’s no split up until then; they’re wrong when they say it’s a split in the mind. If I wanted to keep going entire, without a split, I’d have to lean over and say to Dr. Glaub–” He broke off.
“Tell me,” the girl said.
“Well,” he said, taking a deep breath, “I’d say, Doc, I can see you under the aspect of eternity and you’re dead. That’s the substance of the sick, morbid vision. I don’t want it; I didn’t ask for it.”
The girl put her arm within his.
“I never told anybody before,” Jack said, “not even Silvia, my wife, or my son David. You know, I watch him; I look every day to be sure it isn’t showing up in him too. It’s so easy for this stuff to get passed along as with the Steiners. I didn’t know they had a boy at B-G until Glaub said so. And they’re neighbors of ours for years back. Steiner never let it out.”
Doreen said, “We’re supposed to go back to the Willows for dinner. Do you want to? I think it would be a good idea. You know, you don’t have to join Arnie’s staff; you can stay with Mr. Yee. That’s a nice ‘copter you have. You don’t have to give all that up just because Arnie decides he can use you; maybe you can’t use him.”
Shrugging, he said, “It’s an interesting challenge, building a conduit for communication between an autistic child and our world. I think there’s a lot in what Arnie says. I could be the intermediary–I could do a useful job there.” It doesn’t really matter why Arnie wants to bring out the Steiner boy, he realized. Probably he’s got some solid selfish motive, something that will bring him a profit in cold hard cash. I certainly couldn’t care less.
In fact I can have it both ways, he realized. Mr. Yee can lease me to the Water Workers’ Union; I’d be paid by Mr. Yee and he’d be paid by Arnie. Everyone would be happy, and why not? Tinkering with the broken, malfunctioning mind of a child certainly has more to recommend it than tinkering with refrigerators and encoders; if the child is suffering some of the visions that I know–.
He knew of the time-theory which Glaub had trotted out as his own. He had read about it in _Scientific American_; naturally, he read anything on schizophrenia that he could get his hands on. He knew that it had originated with the Swiss, that Glaub hadn’t invented it. What an odd theory it is, he thought to himself. And yet, it rings true.
“Let’s go back to the Willows,” he said. He was very hungry, and it would no doubt be a bang-up meal.
Doreen said, “You’re a brave person, Jack Bohlen.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because you’re going back to the place that troubled you, to the people that brought on your vision of, as you said, eternity. I wouldn’t do that, I’d flee.”
“But,” he said, “that’s the whole point; it’s designed to make you flee–the vision’s for that purpose, to nullify your relations with other people, to isolate you. If it’s successful, your life with human beings is over. That’s what they mean when they say the term schizophrenia isn’t a diagnosis; it’s a prognosis–it doesn’t say anything about what you have, only about how you’ll wind up.” _And I’m not going to wind up like that_, he said to himself. Like Manfred Steiner, mute and in an institution; I intend to keep my job, my wife and son, my friendships–he glanced at the girl holding on to his arm. Yes, and even love affairs, if such there be.
_I intend to keep trying_.
Putting his hands in his pockets as he walked along, he touched something small, cold and hard; lifting it out in surprise, he saw it was a wrinkled little object like a tree root.
“What in the world’s that?” Doreen asked him.
It was the water witch which the Bleekmen had given him that morning, out in the desert; he had forgotten all about it.
“A good luck charm,” Jack said to the girl.
Shivering, she said, “It’s awfully ugly.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “but it’s friendly. And we do have this problem, we schizophrenics; we do pick up other people’s unconscious hostility.”
“I know. The telepathic factor. Clay had it worse and worse until–” She glanced at him. “The paranoid outcome.”
“It’s the worst thing about our condition, this awareness of the buried, repressed sadism and aggression in others around us, even strangers. I wish to hell we didn’t have it; we even pick it up from people in restaurants–” He thought of Glaub. “In buses, in a theater. Crowds.”
Doreen said, “Do you have any idea what Arnie wants to learn from the Steiner boy?”
“Well, this theory about precognition–”
“But what does Arnie want to know about the future? You have no idea, do you? And it would never occur to you to try to find out.”
That was so. He had not even been curious.
“You’re content,” she said slowly, scrutinizing him, “merely to do your technical task of rigging up the essential machinery. That’s not right, Jack Bohlen; that’s not a good sign at all.”
“Oh,” he said. He nodded. “It’s very schizophrenic, I guess . . . to be content with a purely technical relationship.”
“Will you ask Arnie?”
He felt uncomfortable. “It’s his business, not mine. It’s an interesting job, and I like Arnie, I prefer him to Mr. Yee. I just–haven’t got it in me to pry. That’s the way I am.”
“I think you’re afraid. But I don’t see why–you’re brave, and yet in some deep way you’re terribly, terribly frightened.”
“Maybe so,” he said, feeling sad.
Together, they walked on back to the Willows.
That night, after everyone had gone, including Doreen Anderton, Arnie Kott sat alone in his living room gloating. What a day it had been.
He had snared a good repairman who had already repaired his invaluable encoder and who was going to build an electronic wing-ding to tap the precog faculties of an autistic child.
He had milked, for nothing, the information he needed from a psychiatrist, and then managed to get rid of the psychiatrist.