“Yeah,” I said. I seated myself beside her on the bed once more.
In the darkness she reached up and stroked my hair from my eyes. “I have that power over you, to give you life or take it away from you. Does that scare you? You know it’s true.”
“It doesn’t scare me now,” I said. “It did once, when I first realized it.”
“It never scared me,” Pris said. “If it did I’d lose the power; isn’t that so, Louis? And I have to keep it; someone has to have it.”
I did not answer. Cigar smoke billowed around me, making me sick, making me aware of my father and my brother, both of them intently watching. “Man must cherish some illusions,” my father said, puffing away rapidly, “but this is ridiculous.” Chester nodded to that.
“Pris,” I said aloud.
“Listen to that, listen to that,” my father said excitedly, “he’s calling her; he’s talking to her!”
“Get out of here,” I said to my father and Chester. I waved my arms at them, but it did no good; neither of them stirred.
“You must understand, Louis,” my father said, “I have sympathy for you. I see what Mr. Barrows doesn’t see, the nobility of your search.”
Through the darkness and the babble of their voices I once more made out Pris; she had gathered her clothes in a ball and sat on the edge of the bed, hugging them. “Does it matter,” she said, “what anyone says or thinks about us? I wouldn’t worry about it; I wouldn’t let words become so real as that. Everybody on the outside is angry at us, Sam and Maury and all the rest of them. The Lincoln wouldn’t have sent you here if it wasn’t the right thing . . . don’t you know that?”
“Pris,” I said, “I know it’ll be all right. We’re going to have a happy future.”
She smiled at that; in the darkness I saw the flash of her teeth. It was a smile of great suffering and sorrow, and it seemed to me–just for a moment–that what I had seen in the Lincoln simulacrum had come from her. It was here so clearly, now, the pain that Pris felt. She had put it into her creation perhaps without intending to; perhaps without even knowing that it was there.
“I love you,” I said to her.
Pris rose to her feet, naked and cool and thin. She put her hands to the sides of my head and drew me down.
“_Mein Sohn_,” my father was saying now to Chester, “_er schiaft in dem Freiheit der Liebesnacht_. What I mean, he’s asleep, my boy is, in the freedom of a night of love, if you follow me.”
“What’ll they say back in Boise?” Chester said irritably. “I mean, how can we go back home with him like this?”
“Aw,” my father said reprovingly, “shut up, Chester; you don’t understand the depth of his psyche, what he finds. There’s a two-fold side to mental psychosis, it’s also a return to the original source that we’ve all turned away from. You better remember that, Chester, before you shoot off your mouth.”
“Do you hear them?” I asked Pris.
Standing there against me, her body arched back for me, Pris laughed a soft, compassionate laugh. She gazed up at me fixedly, without expression. And yet she was fully alert. For her, change and reality, the events of her life, time itself, all had at this moment ceased.
Wonderingly, she lifted her hand and touched me on the cheek, brushed me with her fingertips.
Quite close to the door Mrs. Nild said clearly, “We’ll get out of here, Mr. Rosen, and let you have the apartment.”
From farther off I heard Sam Barrows mutter, “That girl in there is underdeveloped. Everything slides back out. What’s she doing there in the bedroom anyhow? Has she got that skinny body–” His voice faded.
Neither Pris not I said anything. Presently we heard the front door of the apartment shut.
“That’s nice of them,” my father said. “Louis, you should at least have thanked them. That Mr. Barrows is a gentleman, in spite of what he says; you can tell more about a person by what he does anyhow.”
“You ought to be grateful to both of them,” Chester grumbled at me. Both he and my father glowered at me reprovingly, my father chewing on his cigar.
I held Pris against me. And for me, that was all.
17
When my father and Chester got me back to Boise, the next day, they discovered that Doctor Horstowski could not–or did not want to–treat me. He did however give me several psychological tests for the purpose of diagnosis. One I remember involved listening to a tape of voices which mumbled at a distance, only a few phrases now and then being at all distinguishable. The task was to write down what each of their successive conversations was about.
I think Horstowski made his diagnosis on my results in that test, because I heard each conversation as dealing with me. In detail I heard them outlining my faults, outlining my failings, analyzing me for what I was, diagnosing my behavior. . . . I heard them insulting both me and Pris and our relationship.
All Horstowski said was merely, “Louis, each time you heard the word ‘this’ you thought they were saying ‘Pris.’ That seemed to make him despondent. “And what you thought was ‘Louis’ was, generally speaking, the two words ‘do we.’ “He glanced at me bleakly, and thereupon washed his hands of me.
I was not out of the reach of the psychiatric profession, however, because Doctor Horstowski turned me over to the Federal Commissioner of the Bureau of Mental Health in Area Five, the Pacific Northwest. I had heard of him. His name was Doctor Ragland Nisea and it was his job to make final determination on all commitment proceedings originating in his area. Single-handed, since 1980, he had committed many thousands of disturbed people to the Bureau’s clinics scattered around the country; he was considered a brilliant psychiatrist and diagnostician and it had been a joke for years among us that sooner or later we would fall into Nisea’s hands; it was a joke everyone made and which a certain percentage of us lived to see come true.
“You’ll find Doctor Nisea to be capable and sympathetic,” Horstowski told me as he drove me over to the Bureau’s office in Boise.
“It’s nice of you to take me over,” I said.
“I’m in and out of there every day. I’d have to make this trip anyhow. What I’m doing is sparing you the appearance in court and the jury costs . . . as you know, Nisea makes final determination anyhow, and you’re better off in his hands than before a lay jury.”
I nodded; it was so.
“You’re not feeling hostile about this, are you?” Horstowski asked. “It’s no stigma to be placed in a Bureau clinic. . . happens every minute of the day–one out of nine people have crippling mental illness which makes it impossible for them . . .” He droned on; I paid no attention. I had heard it all before, on the countless TV ads, in the infinitely many magazine articles.
But as a matter of fact I did feel hostile toward him for washing his hands of me and turning me over to the mental health people, even though I knew that by law he was required to if he felt I was psychotic. And I felt hostile toward everyone else, including the two simulacra; as we drove through the sunny, familiar streets of Boise between his office and the Bureau, I felt that everyone was a betrayer and enemy of mine, that I was surrounded by an alien, hating world.
All this and much more had of course shown up in the tests which Horstowski had given me. In the Rorschach Test, for instance, I had interpreted each blot and picture as full of crashing, banging, jagged machinery designed from the start of time to swing into frantic, lethal motion with the intention of doing me bodily injury. In fact, on the drive over to the Bureau to see Doctor Nisea, I distinctly saw lines of cars following us, due no doubt to my being back in town; the people in the cars had been tipped off the moment I arrived at the Boise airport.
“Can Doctor Nisea help me?” I asked Horstowski as we slid to the curb by a large, modern office building of many floors and windows. Now I had begun to feel acute panic. “I mean, the mental health people have all those new techniques which even you don’t have, all the latest–”
“It depends on what you mean by help,” Horstowski said, opening the car door and beckoning me to accompany him into the building.
So here I stood at last where so many had come before me: the Federal Bureau of Mental Health, in its diagnostic divison, the first step, perhaps, in a new era of my life.