Meanwhile, the professor has learned to play a variety of left-hand pieces on the piano, and is said to be as dexterous with his left hand alone as he once was with both. He has also joined a national organization of people who have lost the use of one or more limbs, and is scheduled to speak at its next annual meeting.
7. Doom and Madness
When a local apartment fire claimed the lives of thirty-seven people, I was shocked and appalled. Later, when several residents were discovered to have been out of town, and the number of dead was revised to twenty-nine, I was somewhat relieved. At the same time, I felt faintly betrayed and disappointed, and wished that my grief and sympathy for the eight additional victims and their families had not gone to waste.
Scene
At a party we encountered a local movie critic, whose amusing and insightful column had long been the most noteworthy feature of our otherwise unremarkable daily newspaper. Late into the night, after we had all had several drinks, the critic recalled with stunning clarity a breakup scene between a man and woman which, in the film in question, had resulted in the dissolution of their family and years of financial and emotional strain for all involved. As described, the scene was characterized by high drama and superb acting, and the guests who had listened to the description all wanted to know the name of the movie. But the critic, addled either by drink or by an overabundance of film memories, was unable to remember.
Not long afterward, the critic’s column was discontinued, and he began to review local restaurants instead. But his new column seemed uninspired, the prose flat, the insights into local culture and cuisine shallow and unenlightening.
It was nearly a year before I saw the critic again. He appeared tired and sick, his clothes unwashed, his skin blotchy with age. I greeted him but he did not remember me, nor did he recall the party we both attended.
A mutual acquaintance, however, passed on a rumor that the critic had begun to lose his mind. Evidently he was telling people that he had experienced all manner of implausible adventures or had known and advised certain historical figures, many of them long dead. It appeared that the critic had begun to mistake events from the many films he had seen and reviewed for his own life experiences. When I related our encounter at the party, the acquaintance reported that the dramatic scene the critic described bore a strong resemblance to the man’s breakup with his first wife, and the consequent domestic chaos. It appeared, then, that his madness cut both ways.
It was not long before the restaurant column was canceled as well, and replaced by a syndicated column about home decorating.
Monkeys
Strange dreams recently visited a friend, whose family- and work-related stress had long ago consigned him to regular sessions with a psychologist, which sessions, despite their short-term efficacy, seemed to have done our friend very little lasting good. In his dreams, the friend was hard at work in a familiar setting, such as his office or his home, or conducting business over the phone or via computer in a public place, like an airport or train station. For a while our friend would do this work, with little evidence to suggest the experience was a dream, until he would be startled by a volley of high-pitched cries, and look up to find that he was under attack by monkeys. The monkeys would tear at his clothes and face, inflicting terrible pain, and just as he was about to perish, he would wake from the dream, screaming at the dream-monkeys and frightening his peacefully sleeping wife. From his description the monkeys seemed to be rhesus, or some other small variety.
When our friend related these dreams to his psychologist, the psychologist asked if he had any siblings. In fact, he had: he’d been born into a large family. Were his parents divorced? Sadly, they were. The psychologist nodded. Were you ever, he asked, sexually molested as a child? Our friend replied that of course he hadn’t been, that was a ridiculous suggestion. But the psychologist persisted. He believed that the monkeys represented sexual aggression; they tore at his clothes as might a rapist, and their small size made them resemble sperm. Our friend’s recent anxiety, the psychologist said, had uncovered repressed memories of sexual abuse, which his tender mind had tried to disguise as monkey attacks.
Our friend gave this analysis some thought: weeks of thought, in fact, during which he became nearly incapacitated with sadness and was forced to take extended sick leave from work. What finally broke this depression was a conversation he had one night with his mother. In utter despair at what he should do with his psychologist’s hypothesis, he told his mother about the dreams and asked her if she knew where they might have come from.
To his astonishment, she offered the information that, at a city zoo on his third birthday, he had in fact been attacked by monkeys. An inexperienced zoo worker had left a monkey house access door unlatched, and a pack of tiny monkeys had made a mad dash into our friend’s path, causing him some minor injuries in the process. At first our friend didn’t believe her, so absurd was the story, but she quickly faxed him a newspaper article on the incident, and told him that she and his father never mentioned it because it had been so upsetting for him at the time, and they didn’t want to burden him further. Besides, they had had lots of children, and could spare little emotional energy on a such a (relatively) harmless occurrence, which at any rate had only affected one child among many.
Last we heard, our friend had withdrawn from his therapy and was doing somewhat, if not markedly, better in his personal and professional life. The monkey dreams have not continued.
The Names
There were six students in our school play: Jason, Heather, David, Carol, Matt and me. But in the script, which our teachers had obtained from a catalog, our characters were given other names: Scott, Jenny, Robert, Melissa, Bill and Larry. Since the oldest of us was seven, we had never before been in a play, and the difficulty of memorizing our lines was compounded by the necessity of learning new names for both ourselves and the others. For weeks we struggled through rehearsals, slowly gaining ground. Then, at the last minute, our teachers, fearing a debacle, told us to forget the stage names and simply use our own.
But our teachers had acted at the very height of our put-upon duality, and their command effected a desperate confusion, which manifested itself onstage that night as complete theatrical anarchy. We addressed one another by whatever names happened to pop into our heads, and forgot almost every scripted line, leaving our audience with only the vaguest notion of the drama’s direction. The performance ended in chaos and tears, with our baffled parents applauding politely and our teachers holding their shocked faces in their hands.
Sadly, the confusion didn’t end there. For weeks, we were distracted during classes, failing to respond to our teachers’ direct inquiries, and were moody and unresponsive at home. When we met in the halls or on the playground, we greeted each other with incorrect names or none at all.
Most of us recovered, but Jason has married seven times, and Heather, from whom no one has heard in twenty years, is rumored to have gone mad. One lonely fall afternoon I called our local mental hospital in search of her, but was told that no patient by that name was in residence.
Crackpots
A local man, lonely and depressed due to his shyness and fear of humiliation, at long last gathered the courage to seek the advice of a psychologist, who, after listening carefully to the man’s complaint, made a drastic suggestion: that the man visit a succession of public places dressed in an outlandish manner, and thus conquer his fear by immersion, much the way an infusion of a virus can inoculate a patient against disease.
The shy man was resistant at first, but in time decided that, since nothing else had worked, he would give this plan a try. First he visited the post office as Napoleon, and then the grocery store as George Washington; he attended a play as a mime, reacting to it with the appropriate exaggerated motions and facial expressions, and boarded a transatlantic airline flight dressed like a circus clown, with a multicolored wig, red nose, painted smile and giant shoes.
Soon these outings
became commonplace, and the shy man was no longer afraid of them. But his day-to-day encounters with others remained strained, until he made a startling discovery: when he dressed like his psychologist—that is, in tweed jacket, round eyeglasses, brown slacks and loose necktie—he could interact freely with others. When, in addition, he grew a beard like his psychologist’s, he discovered himself possessed of a deep empathy, and quickly became known to his co-workers and neighbors as a person who would listen to their problems and give clearheaded advice and sympathy. It wasn’t long before he began to informally offer his services as a counselor, and soon his name and reputation had spread via word of mouth, bringing him countless clients and admirers, and a not inconsiderable amount of money. He quit his job and took on counseling full time.
Eventually the man’s psychologist got wind of his patient’s charade, and visited his home to confront him. Neighbors recall hearing a heated argument erupt in the hallway, and its muffled continuation behind a closed door. Hours later, a passerby reports, a man fitting the psychologist’s description left the building. This man looked haggard, his hair snarled and his face bloodied, and he walked with a pronounced limp.
As it happens, the former shy man claims that it was he who was seen leaving the building, not the psychologist; he had been viciously beaten by the jealous psychologist, he says, and went out to buy first aid supplies. At that time, the former shy man maintains, the psychologist had already been gone for more than an hour. However, the psychologist has not been seen since, and foul play is suspected. Some of us believe the former shy man’s story and think that the psychologist, ashamed of his behavior, did himself in; others believe that the former shy man murdered the psychologist and disposed of the body in some clever way.
There is a third group, who believe that the psychologist killed the former shy man and took his place, and in fact is now posing as the former shy man, which, given their physical similarities, is not entirely out of the question. But there is still the matter of the missing body, not to mention the implausibility of any murderer’s remaining so close to the scene of the crime. This third group are thought by most of us to be crackpots, and their theory is given little credence by the newspapers or police.
New Dead
One of the odd selling points of our property here on the outskirts of town was a small graveyard, long inactive, that stood bordered by a crumbling stone wall at the top of our little hill. It belonged to the county but was surrounded by our land, and could be accessed only by a narrow dirt track, also the county’s, that snaked through our land from the main road. This track was almost completely overgrown, and the cemetery itself was choked with weeds, which we tended to cut once or twice a year, out of respect for the dead, and for our own satisfaction, as we enjoyed sitting in the cemetery from time to time, contemplating the nature of life and death and listening to the sounds of the countryside.
The oldest gravestone was from 1840, and we often wondered about the dozen or so people buried there. Most had the same last name; some were children. We surmised that the dead were a family of farmers who had bravely tried, and failed, to make our rocky land yield food.
One morning the sound of a weedwhacker reached our house, and then the rumble and clank of a backhoe. Alarmed, we walked out into the woods, following the noise. It had come from the graveyard, where workmen were digging a gaping hole in the hallowed ground.
We stopped them and demanded to know what was going on. They told us that somebody new was going to be buried there. Indeed, the weeds had been cut and the road cleared, as if in preparation for a funeral.
A few days later we heard mourners walking in from the main road, and the sounds of sermonizing and grief. Not long after this, we read the dead man’s obituary in the paper. As it happened, he was a member of the long-dead farm family we had imagined. However, the family weren’t farmers: they were actually insane homesteaders who had killed their own children. The dead man, a descendant of a cousin of the murdered children, had for some reason requested burial there, and the county had obliged.
We walked out to the graveyard once more, to see his stone. It stood straight, gleaming and new, its engraving clear, in contrast to the crooked and worn stones of his ancestors. After that, we no longer went to the graveyard. Sometimes we heard a pickup truck rattling down the country road and leaving a few minutes later, as if someone were visiting the fresh grave. But after a while, even those visits stopped.
We no longer miss our trips to the graveyard, but all too often wonder where on our land the children were killed.
Koan
An old friend disappeared for more than ten years, then resurfaced, thinner and quieter and utterly sapped of her former vitality. She winces when spoken to and wears foam earplugs on the street. I asked her where she had been.
She told me that she had lost her mind, as a result of her graduate studies in literature, which she has permanently abandoned. Her doctoral dissertation was to have been on the “saturation hypothesis,” a theory of her own devising which held that every word in a work of literature, far from having one or two most likely meanings, meant everything that any reader could make of it, and that each supposed meaning was of equal value to all others. This theory, she said, dovetailed with other current literary theories that gave more power to critics and less to writers, who tended to write with finite intentions.
However, the intensity of her study had caused her, unconsciously, to apply her theory to all words, even (and perhaps especially) those she encountered outside the realm of literature: indeed, road signs, personal conversations, song lyrics and even her own thoughts were fair game. The world swelled with meaning, and the more meaning she identified, the more she became convinced existed outside her immediate perception. Soon she had come to believe in plots against her and the presence of otherworldly interlopers in her life, and she checked in to a mental hospital for treatment. After six months, armed with a sack full of pharmaceuticals, she moved in with her sister on a farm outside our town, where she remained for nine years. Only recently has she felt confident enough to take a job downtown, and to re-enter the bustling society she is naturally drawn to.
She lives in a halfway house and relies on government subsidies to fill her prescriptions. She has given up books, music and television and taken up gourmet cooking. The world, she tells me, her eyes filled with the crazed conviction of the recently converted, is meaningless.
I see her often now, though I am neither surprised nor offended on those occasions when, unable or unwilling to admit my existence, she passes me by without saying hello.
Shelter
Our friend, the former historian, brings us this story, from the eastern European nation-state that was his area of expertise. A small city there, he tells us, was terribly besieged in the last war, and when the war was over a young man began to build a bomb shelter beneath what was left of his home. When, years later, the rest of the city was enjoying a renaissance, with great gains in public health, commerce and the arts, the man expanded and strengthened his shelter, and stocked it with all manner of food, weapons and books. Our friend met the man at this time, and asked why he looked inward when everyone else was expanding the horizons of their lives. The young man replied that he believed the current peace was unstable, and that civil unrest would soon visit their small nation.
Gradually the young man withdrew from society, and grew old. His neighbors came to regard him as mad, and as those who knew him died and new people moved to the city, his isolation became total. He was rarely seen, and when he was, adults tended to whisper to one another and children to run in fear.
But it happened that the man was right. Civil conflict did break out, and the city was mercilessly bombed for more than two months. When an uneasy peace was finally achieved, survivors visited the old man’s home to request his assistance in the reconstruction effort. His house had been destroyed, but the heavy door of the shelter still stood, and they knocked loudly on it and called
the man’s name. The old man made no reply.
Our friend’s contacts in the region described to him what happened next. The survivors, believing that the old man was ill, or perhaps that he was greedily hoarding his much-needed provisions, dug away the earth around the door, until at last they were able to pull the doorframe from the foundation. They were surprised to find that the old man was dead. He had shot himself. The shelter, on the other hand, was much as many had imagined. It was set up as a comfortable study. The walls were lined with books, and a huge store of canned food had been stockpiled beside a makeshift kitchen. The dead man sat in an upholstered armchair, a book by Tolstoy open on his lap, and the rotted remains of what must once have been a delicious meal arranged on a small table by his right elbow. A revolver lay on the floor at his feet.
There was some discussion of why the old man would have killed himself, having been so well prepared for a tragedy that had taken most citizens by surprise, but such talk quickly gave way to the work of raiding his pantry. Almost as an afterthought, the townspeople also took some of the densest-looking books, for it was spring and the branches of trees were too green and supple to be used as kindling.
Big Idea
Whether due to some degree of personal recklessness or simply to the vagaries of fortune, our friend frequently found himself in situations that brought financial ruin, emotional distress and physical injury. For some years these recurrent problems prevented him from achieving his life’s goals; indeed, they left him unsure even of what those goals might be. Then, fed up at last, he returned to college to study an obscure and byzantine science he had picked almost at random, immersing himself completely in his research and quickly establishing himself among his advisors as a formidable and unusual intellect. He co-authored several influential papers with his teachers, won many honors, and was fully expected to emerge from school at the very top of his field.
Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Page 11
