by Hugo Wilcken
The doctor blinked. I could see him toying with his answer, wondering whether it was too late to guide our relationship back to safer waters, or whether the spell had been broken for good.
“You were identified by other means. I assure you.”
“How could I have been? Have you looked into what I’ve been telling you? Have you spoken to anyone who knows me?”
“I’ve spoken to the doctor who treated you the last time you were brought in. He came to see you, while you were recovering. I’ve also talked to Dr. Manne’s secretary.”
I was quiet. I let that sink in. My body trembled: it had been since I’d first challenged the doctor. I couldn’t imagine him and my secretary together in the same room, let alone talking to each other. It was as if they were from such different worlds that the encounter would be physically impossible.
“By the way,” he continued, “can you tell me her name?”
“It’s … she’s … dammit!” I shook my head with frustration: in the tension of the moment, I just couldn’t think. The way the doctor had mentioned “Dr. Manne” in the third person had stopped me cold. He was writing something—eyes down. Rarely did he make eye contact, in fact. He didn’t ask me for my secretary’s name again, and an ominous silence descended. Finally, I felt compelled to break it: “Why … what did she say?”
The doctor looked up now. Again, I could see the indecision playing over his face, or I thought I could: perhaps that, too, was a performance.
“She doesn’t remember your name. I’ve been unable to ascertain your connection with Dr. Manne. But my assumption is that you were once a patient of his. Unfortunately I don’t have access to his papers. All the material in his office was impounded.”
“Ask her to come here. She’ll be able to identify me, at least. She’ll be able to confirm that I am who I say I am.”
Even as I said that, I felt an inward shiver. What if she came in, and for whatever bizarre reason, failed to identify me? But why would she? Then again, it was impossible to tell what might now happen. The kaleidoscope had been twisted. I was gazing out into a world that had the same form, but was wholly different.
“I very much doubt that she’d come. I had the greatest difficulty getting her talk with me as it is. She was quite distraught by the whole business of Dr. Manne’s death.”
“His what?”
Another silence, this time for a good long while. Even in my state of profound shock at what he’d just said, I could sense the doctor’s great unease, his not knowing whether to stay put, or bring the meeting to an end. I knew from my time as a psychiatrist the feeling of a session spun out of control, of subjects long avoided suddenly erupting, like a banal conversation between lovers that randomly escalates into a vicious row.
“You say Dr. Manne is dead?”
“That’s right.”
“How can that be? Where’s the body?”
“I only know what Dr. Manne’s secretary was kind enough to tell me. The doctor hadn’t returned to work from a two-week leave, and didn’t answer his phone either. A few days later, his secretary called the police. For some reason, nothing was done for some time. Eventually the police gained entry into Manne’s apartment and found him dead in his bed. There was an autopsy. He’d taken an overdose of barbiturates. Apparently he’d been depressed over the death of his ex-wife.”
“Who was the police officer who found him? What was his name? Who identified the body?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you. I mean, I don’t know.”
It was too dislocating to be talking of a “Dr. Manne” in the third person. I simply couldn’t digest it. I’d been bubbling with confusion and fury, about to lash out, to continue arguing until the doctor saw sense … Suddenly I felt limp again, overwhelmed. I feebly waived my hand in Dr. Peters’s direction. “I need to be alone for a while. Come back later. I need to …”
“Of course.”
Relief spread across his face as he gathered his affairs. I heard the click of the door and swivel of the lock. I stared out the window for a long time, seeking some sort of escape from the claustrophobia of my room, perhaps also hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman. I saw nobody. There were bars on the windows. It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed them before, I just hadn’t paid them any heed. It wasn’t so unusual to see bars on a window in New York. Of course it was a good deal stranger to see them on a window many floors up. Too high for a burglar to get in, or indeed for anyone to climb out. They could only be there to stop patients from jumping to their death.
I tried to regulate my breathing. I thought of my aunt and uncle, and the solemn silence of the house they’d brought me up in. They’d since retired to Florida, years ago. I wasn’t exactly estranged from them, but I hadn’t seen them for a long time and had made no effort to do so. Might they come up to see me? Probably not. My uncle had been unwell for some time, and it would be a huge undertaking to make the trip. What did it matter? Dozens of other people right here in New York would be able to identify me. Thinking it through, trying to calm myself, I began to regain some of my confidence. There were any number of ways that I could prove who I was, or, failing that, sow just enough doubt into the doctor’s mind that he’d feel obliged to do something about it—let me call D’Angelo, for example—if only to cover his back. After all, I had some unique advantages. I knew how places like this worked. I knew the kind of things doctors liked to hear. I knew and could avoid the recognized behavior patterns of people in the grip of delusion, as I’d seen so many of them. Given time and persistence on my part, the truth was bound to come out.
At the same time, I was working through the implications of what the doctor had revealed. The only way to make sense of it was that Smith/Esterhazy had died in my bed. The body had been discovered weeks later, in a state of putrefaction, and had been mistakenly identified as mine.
There had presumably been a funeral, it occurred to me. Where? Who had attended? Not my aunt and uncle. My secretary perhaps? D’Angelo? Speelman? Former lovers? The dozen or so friends with whom I’d kept in sporadic contact? But who would have told them? They didn’t form a network; they didn’t even know each other. One way or another, it would have been a small affair. Probably an embarrassing one for all concerned: a clutch of people hoping for it to be over as quickly as possible. In my mind’s eye I surveyed the proceedings, as if from on high. Was a funeral any sort of way to mark the end of a life? Even at their best, they seemed such small things, such a feeble means of summing up something as astonishing as a human existence. I thought about the memorial service I’d attended as a boy for the tenth anniversary of the fire that had killed my parents. Afterward, someone had even given me a turn-of-the-century photograph of my father, posed stiffly in a studio, with the luxuriant whiskers and mustache that must have been the fashion back then, but which had looked so otherworldly to me. I’d seen very few pictures of my father, and the effect had been deeply unsettling—all the more so because of the similarities I could detect beneath the facial hair. I remembered people crying at the memorial, consoling themselves, even consoling me. At the time I’d felt a stranger and an impostor among them because I’d never known my parents, and had been sad not because I missed them, but because of the orphan status that their death had bestowed upon me. Now, I felt moved by the memory of this service. My father had been a well-loved figure at the bank that had employed him. My mother, too, had been missed and mourned by the many immigrants to whom she’d given free English lessons at a school in the city. Would anyone have cried at their son’s funeral?
A strange thing had happened. The bizarre conversation with the doctor had conjured up another “Dr. Manne” in my mind. I had this image of a shadowy character, born of me and yet not me, stalking me through my life, if indeed it wasn’t me who was stalking him through his. It was hard to shake off this disorientating image. And no sooner had I learned of the existence of this “Dr. Manne” than I’d also learned of his death … I turned away from the wi
ndow, and for the thousandth time let my eyes run over the white walls and ceiling.
I’d been so involved in my own private struggle here in the hospital that I hadn’t really concerned myself with my disappearance as it would appear to the outside world. I felt a twinge of gratitude toward my secretary for being “distraught” by my “death.” Who else would be? My removal from the fabric of New York would go relatively unremarked. I imagined the desultory conversation in some Manhattan bar: “Remember that guy David Manne?” “You mean at med school, the one who married the actress?” “Yeah. Used to run into him every now and then. His office was a block down from mine. Apparently killed himself the other day.” “You’re joking.” “Nope. Can’t say I’m too surprised though. Moody guy.” How many conversations like that might have taken place? A dozen or so, I guessed. I pictured D’Angelo’s wife, as he broke the news to her. Perhaps she’d felt something, a moment of despair, because after all she’d liked me, had seemed to have been attracted to me, even if she’d hardly known me. And then it would be over. After a while, no more bar conversations breaking the news. My apartment would be cleared out and put on the market again, my few possessions disposed of. The new tenant certainly wouldn’t be told that the previous one had killed himself there. My office too would be let out, to a proper Park Avenue specialist this time, who’d have to spend good money redecorating the premises before moving in, given the general decline over my ten years’ occupancy. Within a matter of months, the city would have smoothed over my death, gotten the wrinkle out; it would be as if it had never happened, as if I had never happened.
And life would go on.
4
My relationship with Dr. Peters had moved on. Gone was the relentless questioning and probing of my life story. Now, things were out in the open, the trench lines clearly demarcated. The focus was almost entirely on what in my mind I called the “last days.” We would talk about Smith/Esterhazy, my thoughts about the man following me, why he might have wanted to kill me … the doctor was gently leading me toward the inconsistencies of my narrative, as if I weren’t aware of them. Of course, I knew the strategy from having used it myself, and I played along, taking some sort of pleasure in the duel.
“Tell me,” the doctor asked one afternoon, “do you enjoy the movies?”
I shrugged. “I like to go once in a while. Same as anyone else. It’s not exactly a passion.”
“What kind of movies do you like?”
“I don’t know …” I was trying to think of one I’d seen recently, or indeed any movie, but my mind was blank.
“What about Gone With the Wind?”
“Yes. I’ve seen that.”
“Did you like it?”
“I guess. I don’t really remember.”
“Not really your cup of tea, though.”
“Maybe not.”
“What about Jimmy Cagney movies?”
“I’ve seen a few of those. The Roaring Twenties, The Public Enemy …” Scenes from these came back to me. I could remember them much better than Gone With the Wind.
“They’re more to your taste.”
“Probably.”
“What about books? Do you read them?”
“When I was younger I read a lot. The classics. Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac. These days I don’t have the energy for those kinds of books.”
“You don’t read any more?”
“I do … only now, it’s dime store stuff. Chandler. Hammett. Maybe Agatha Christie. Books that don’t require too much effort.”
“I see.”
The doctor made notes, seemed to ignore me for a minute or two.
“Why ask me about movies and books? What possible relevance can they have?”
“Has it ever struck you how your story might sound to someone else? Like something from a movie, a thriller. Or a crime novel.”
“Maybe. Don’t you think your own version of my story is just as far-fetched? Just as much straight out of the movies?”
The moment I said that, I realized something. Of course, in my doctor’s eyes, I was the perfect patient. The one in a thousand, the case history that could be written up into a true career booster. In which case, it was no longer simply a question of my trying to persuade the doctor of the truth. I’d also have to break down his self-interested resistance. In fact, I’d have to play him like a patient.
“There are two views available to you,” the doctor was now saying. “The first is the one you are obstinate in believing. That you were a stooge for some mysterious ‘scheme for disappearing people,’ to use your own words. That you were tricked into committing a man to a hospital that doesn’t exist. That staff at this hospital then let you walk away with him, despite the fact that he was in a state of sedation. That you put him up in your apartment, that he fell into a coma, and shortly after died in your bed. And that for no good reason you’ve been the victim of a murder attempt. You haven’t come up with any sort of coherent picture as to how all this could be true: it’s just a string of bizarre fragments. Or there’s the other view. That you have suffered something, perhaps a cerebral lesion or some earlier psychic trauma, or a combination of the two, that accounts for your delusional beliefs. Objectively, which do you think the average person would find most likely?”
“If you truly believe I’m deluded, then why on earth are you trying to reason with me? As a psychiatrist, you must know that you can’t reason the deluded out of their delusions. You have to find other means.”
The doctor went back to scribbling in his pad. I was stupidly pleased with my riposte; something in me was keen to rattle the doctor, over and above any desire to leave the hospital. From a certain perspective, it occurred to me, our roles were interchangeable. Both believing the other to be deluded. Both with a personal stake in convincing the other of his unreason.
“But really. Do I look or act in any way like a drifter from Ohio? Do I talk like one? Do you even think I have an Ohio accent?”
“Things are learned, unlearned. You’ve been in New York a decade now. You claim you grew up on Long Island. You don’t have a Long Island accent either.”
Even as I was speaking, even as I’d brought up the question of accent, I could hear a Midwestern twang creeping into my voice. Similar to the way a wrongly accused man can’t help acting guilty, it seemed that if you were treated as a mental patient, you’d ultimately end up behaving like one. Once, in an earlier session, I’d switched off and was in the middle of a daydream when the doctor had suddenly asked me something. Momentarily disoriented, I’d said: “Where am I?” before immediately recognizing it as the kind of thing disturbed patients were always saying out of the blue.
After the doctor had left that day, I felt more unsettled than usual. With this talk of brain lesions and psychic trauma, he’d been blunter than ever before. As if he’d found himself at the end of one strategy, giving it a last shot before embarking on another. It was true that we’d reached some sort of stalemate. By now, I had a reply to just about anything the doctor could throw at me. I had begun to resemble long-term patients I’d known, who’d had all the time in the world to consider and construct an argument against every possible objection to their delusion. It was the irony of mental wards: remove a troubled person from the world, isolate him in a room, and the tendency will always be to go deeper into the delusion, not to pull out of it. Mental asylums bred insanity, just as hospitals bred infection, and prisons criminals.
The stalemate didn’t mean that Dr. Peters and I were on an equal footing. Because of the power relation, it actually meant that I was losing. That I would remain incarcerated in the hospital, while the doctor would gain kudos from writing up my case. How could I ever win, when the psychiatric consensus was that denial of the illness was part of the illness? I believed this myself, it was demonstrable, I’d hammered the point home to countless patients. And yet here I was, facing its essential contradiction.
If, as I suspected, the doctor was preparing a new treatment strateg
y for me, then I could only fear what that might be. Over the years that I’d been practicing psychiatry, I’d found my respect for it slowly ebbing away. Other medical disciplines had grown steadily more empirically based, but psychiatry still seemed like guesswork. It was riddled with invented maladies, with gurus peddling therapies that would become the rage for a while only to prove in time to exacerbate the very conditions they were meant to cure. But these particular gurus were hospital department heads, and if they decided on a certain procedure, then the patient had little to no chance of dodging it.
Some of these pointless therapies I felt I could survive easily enough—the “sleep cure” for instance, or even electrotherapy. But a recently popular one filled me with a peculiar horror. It consisted of first knocking the patient out with an electric shock, then inserting an icepick-like instrument above the patient’s eye and scraping it into the frontal lobes. Over the past couple of years I’d seen several of these so-called leucotomized patients. Some had become totally incapacitated, unable to feed or look after themselves. Others were much less badly affected, but they had all possessed the eerie quality of a brain living on as a series of set responses. I’d tried to find out whether these procedures were carried out in the hospital I was in. I’d pressed my ear to the door when I heard doctors and nurses in conversation as they walked by my room; while I was accompanied to the bathroom, I’d scan other patients I passed, on the lookout for the characteristic shuffle of the leucotomized.
The white walls were the polished interior of my own skull—any escape, even if only to a communal room within the hospital, seemed far-fetched. Why couldn’t they at least give me books or magazines to read? With so little stimulus, I’d spent inordinate amounts of time staring into the little mirror the nurse had given me. For the first few minutes I’d just accustom myself to my face again. I could still see the ghost of the old one, but that would soon fade and, after a while, I would look relatively normal and natural to myself. That sensation could last quite some time. But always at some point, it would turn. The face would start to seem strange again. It might flicker elusively between normal and alien, but then in the final stage it would cease to look either. It would lose all signification. It wouldn’t be a face at all. Just a collection of lines, curves, colors, contours.
