“You think crazy things, like everyone’s against you and you’re the center of the universe?”
“No,” I said. “Doctor Nisea explained to me that it’s the heliocentric schizophrenics who–”
“Nisea? Ragland Nisea? Of course; by law you’d have to see him. He’s the one who sent Pris up back in the beginning; he gave her the Vigotsky-Luria Block Test in his own office, personally. I always wanted to meet him.”
“Brilliant man. And very humane.”
“Are you dangerous?”
“Only if I’m riled.”
“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 Frauenzimmer?”
“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,” Raif 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.
18
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?”
“Fine, 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 defanged 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?”