Eureka

by Jim Lehrer

  Dr. Clyde (Knothole) Norton was the last of the Ashland founders still alive and, at eighty-seven, continued to exercise overall control of the clinic and the foundation that ran it. Legend was that his very private nickname had been given him years ago—as a young man, he had resembled a knothole in a freshly cut cottonwood tree: small, round, woody, grainy.

  Otis thought about putt-putting out to Ashland on his red motor scooter but figured that would be truly throwing a red flag in the face of the bull. So he went instead in his tan Explorer.

  As arranged, Bob Gidney met Otis at the front desk and took him directly to Dr. Russell Tonganoxie, the psychiatrist Bob had touted before. Bob said Tonganoxie was known worldwide for his studies, writings, and travels in pursuit of truths about what he called “The Mature Male in Crisis.”

  Otis’s first impression of the fifty-year-old-or-so Tonganoxie was that he had to look no further than in a mirror if he wanted to see a mature male in crisis. Russell Tonganoxie’s long dark brown hair came down over his ears, and he wore his khaki chinos at least a size too large and barely pressed, as well as a gray sweatshirt with PACKERS on the front.

  “Don’t be put off by the way I look,” he said immediately, as if he had been reading Otis’s mind. “We all have our situations.”

  He pointed at a leather chair for Otis to sit in. The office had probably been a master bedroom in its life with the Gullivers. Lavish moldings framed the room, the ceilings were high, and a huge fireplace and mantel covered most of one wall, tall French windows another. Tonganoxie’s desk was a long pine table covered with books and stacks of stapled-together papers—reports of various kinds, presumably.

  Tonganoxie said, “When I came here from Johns Hopkins six months ago, I negotiated a deal. Not only no white coat but no coat of any kind, no tie. It’s in my contract that I can wear to work anything I want. That was my little Eureka.”

  Otis said nothing.

  “You do know what the name of your—our—town means?”

  “Yes. It’s Greek for ‘I found it,’” said Otis matter-of-factly. “The chamber uses the phrase a lot in its promotion stuff, as do the other ten or so towns in America named Eureka.” Otis was not interested in engaging in small talk with this guy. So he didn’t even mention the idiot city councilman who had tried a few years back—unsuccessfully, thank God—to add an exclamation point to the official name of this Eureka, thus making Eureka!, Kansas, the only city or town in America—maybe the world—with an exclamation point in addition to a comma between its name and its state.

  “What about Archimedes? Do you know a lot about Archimedes?” Tonganoxie asked.

  Otis shook his head. He didn’t know a lot about Archimedes.

  “Well, sir, as an important citizen of this Eureka, you must surely know that Archimedes was a Sicilian-born Greek mathematician who coined that word, ‘eureka,’ in about the year 230 B.C. He said it after discovering for the king how much of the crown was pure gold. ‘Eureka!’ he yelled. ‘Eureka! Eureka! I found it! I found it!’ Meaning he had found the answer—”

  Tonganoxie stopped talking. And when he resumed a few seconds later, he said, “All right, all right. Let’s get on with trying to determine if you’re sick or simply a guy hit by a routine run-of-the-mill bout of Motorcycle Syndrome.”

  “Motor scooter,” Otis said. “I bought a Cushman motor scooter, not a motorcycle.”

  “That’s too bad. There’s a lot in the neurosis literature already on men in their fifties, sixties, and seventies buying motorcycles. It’s quite common. As men slow down in real life, they want to do something that speeds them up. Nothing on scooters, though. Scooters—Cushman or any other kind—aren’t known for their speed, are they? I wouldn’t think running away from home on a scooter would work very well. I hope you’re not thinking about doing anything like that. You’d have to stay off the interstates, that’s for sure. The trucks would blow you off the highway. I’m a Jeep man, myself.”

  Otis almost said, “Jeep?” but caught himself before there was engagement.

  Tonganoxie answered as if he had said it anyhow. “My dad was an army officer, and I grew up with a deep and abiding passion for the Jeep, believing it to be the finest motor vehicle ever made. I own four of them now. They range in age from fifty years to fifty days.”

  Otis found that interesting but still resisted a temptation to react, to participate.

  Tonganoxie continued, “Wheels, there’s something about wheels that turns on males. They’re as much a part of our standard equipment as what’s between our legs. They’ve done serious studies about it. UVA did one five years ago with eighty-two kids of all ages—forty-one boys, forty-one girls, of ages two to fourteen. They were put into rooms full of toys and gadgets. The boys, no matter the age, went immediately to the cars and trucks and trains and buses or whatever there was with wheels. The girls didn’t. A follow-up study done at Yale using bikes, cars, and pickups with college-age men and women had the same result. And there is good anecdotal evidence that the wheels thing continues right on through to the end of a man’s life.”

  Otis, again, had no reaction. He knew from his own experience about the importance of wheels to little boys and grown men. He didn’t need a shrink or a study to tell him anything else about it.

  “I have my wheels,” said Tonganoxie, moving on, “but I don’t own a toy fire truck or a BB gun. I used to have a baseball batting helmet, but that’s been a while. You’ve got one of those, too, is that right?”

  “It’s a Kansas City Chiefs football helmet.”

  “I grew up a Green Bay fan,” said Tonganoxie, tapping his Packers sweatshirt. “I can’t imagine ever rooting for any other team than the Packers.”

  Then it was back to business. Tonganoxie asked Otis to describe that first moment—the Crack Moment, he called it— when Otis had seen the toy fire engine at the antiques show.

  Otis did so in a few words, and Tonganoxie asked, “Did you feel something in you go ‘crack!’?”

  “No,” replied Otis.

  “A hot flash, a feeling of well-being, a sweep of nausea, a tear, a chest pain, a wham, a crash—anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Not even a little snap, crackle, or pop?”

  “Not a snap, crackle, or pop.”

  “Had you ever had thoughts before that day about someday— any day ever in your life—buying some of the things you couldn’t have as a child?”

  “No.”

  “So it just happened?”

  “It just happened.”

  Otis was beginning to seriously wonder how this guy ever got to be a psychiatrist, much less known in the world for anything special or important. Talking to him was like talking to the guy in line at the 7-Eleven.

  That wasn’t quite right. There was a lilt and an authority in Tonganoxie’s voice that might have signaled some basic intelligence as well as a good sense of humor. But it was all very well disguised.

  “At least you’re not a Silver Star,” Tonganoxie said. “At least I assume you’re not. You haven’t made up a phony daring bio about being a war hero or a football star, anything like that, have you?”

  Otis shook his head. He had been tempted a time or two, particularly when having to explain to a room of men why a stupid injury in college had kept him out of the military.

  “Silver Star Syndrome, we call it. A psychiatrist who did some work with the military borrowed the term from them. Some guys, as they age, get carried away with wishing they had done more when they were young or been braver or faster or whatever. Before they know it, instead of telling people the truth about how they spent the entire Korean War in a reserve unit at home, say, they’re talking about how they won the Silver Star or some other kind of medal for taking out a Red Chinese machine-gun nest at the Chosin Reservoir. Politicians and other public figures get caught at it all the time. I’ve treated several Silver Stars. They’re everywhere.”

  Otis said that was not his problem, never ha
d been his problem, and never would be his problem.

  “All right, then,” said Tonganoxie. “Another common cause of the so-called Second Childhood Syndrome—no offense—is baldness. You got a problem being bald?”

  Otis felt warmth in his face, which meant Tonganoxie was now seeing red in Otis’s face. “Not anymore,” Otis said.

  “You’re offended—and embarrassed—just by the question. So that tells me you’ve still got a problem with being bald. When did you go bald?”

  “It started in my twenties.”

  “When did it end?”

  “In my thirties.”

  “You’re really pissed about it, aren’t you?”

  Otis said nothing.

  “You wonder why you, huh? You see me with all of this hair, and you see other people all around you—men twice your age— with full heads of hair. Was your dad bald?”

  “No.”

  “Either one or both of your grandfathers?”

  “No.”

  “So, with no warning and no expectations, you were picked out at random to have no hair on your head. Makes you really want to tell the god of hair or whoever to go fuck him- or herself, doesn’t it?”

  Otis said, “I’m a bald-headed man. That’s what I am. Can we go on to something else?”

  “Sure. But you ought to know that there could be reason to believe it’s your baldness that caused you to do the helmet and fire engine and motorcycle—scooter, sorry—bit. All of that stuff takes you back to a time when you had hair. Maybe you’re trying to build yourself a little time capsule. If so, you’re not the first. It’s quite common, in fact, among bald-headed men, particularly those who hate their jobs.”

  Otis wanted out of here. Not in years had he wanted out of any place or situation as much as he wanted out of this one. He did not talk about being bald to anyone. It was something that had happened to him, and that was that. It was like having a terrible accident that had left him terribly scarred or deformed.

  Tonganoxie said, “It’s understandable, because you were robbed of some of your younger years. Being bald made you look older than your actual age. I’ll bet you looked sixty when you were forty. Right?”

  Otis said nothing and did nothing but stare ahead at a framed diploma on the wall.

  “How old are you, by the way?” Tonganoxie asked.

  “Fifty-nine.”

  “When will you be sixty?”

  “In a couple of weeks or so.”

  “Eureka, that’s it. You’re now fifty-nine-year-old Otis Halstead, and soon you’re going to be sixty-year-old Otis Halstead. And you hate that. At Johns Hopkins, I once treated a guy—he was a very famous Pulitzer Prize—winning newspaper editor—who was so upset about turning sixty that he wouldn’t come out from under the covers the morning of his sixtieth birthday. He stayed in his bed and under those covers for forty-seven days. So, if it’s approaching sixty that’s triggered all of this, know for a fact that you’re not the only one. And it’s perfectly normal—almost.”

  Otis shook his head once and kept staring at the wall.

  Tonganoxie let the silence lie for a good thirty seconds. Then he said, “All right, sir. I’m not bald, and I’m not sixty, but I do have my Jeeps. So I have some understanding, on a personal as well as a professional level, about what’s going on—or may be going on. On, then, to something else. I understand you’re big in the insurance business?”

  Otis, desperate and delighted to move on, confessed that to be the fact.

  “I’ll bet you hate it, right, Otis? I’ll call you Otis, you call me Russ.”

  “Okay, Russ. No, I don’t hate it,” said Otis.

  “One of the most common causes of depression and suicide among aging men, particularly the successful ones, is that they hate their jobs. They’ve worked their asses off to get to the top, and once they get there, they hate it. But they can’t say anything about it because it doesn’t sound right. How can somebody be unhappy with being successful? It’s tough, it’s what I’ve spent the last several years studying. Again, I’ve had my own problems in this area, too. Being a shrink—don’t tell Gidney I said that— isn’t all peaches and cream every day, either. How many men your age do you know who are truly happy, Otis?”

  When Otis failed to answer, Tonganoxie said, “I’ll bet it’s damned few. Isn’t that a terrible thing? I sure as hell think it is.”

  Otis still had nothing to say.

  Tonganoxie grabbed from his desk what looked like a clipping out of a magazine. “I assume you know who Anthony Hopkins is? The famous and great and extremely successful British actor? Somebody just sent me this the other day. Quote: ‘I can’t take it anymore … I have wasted my life. To hell with this stupid show business, this ridiculous showbiz, this futile wasteful life. I look back and see a desert wasteland. After thirty-five years I look back and cringe with embarrassment and say to myself: How could you have done that? I’ve done one or two good films and some bad films. It was a complete waste of time.’ End quote. Hopkins is sixty years old. Now, that’s really sad.”

  Otis, who had particularly admired Hopkins in The Remains of the Day, agreed that it was really sad.

  “With you, Otis, it could also be about guilt,” Tonganoxie said. “You feel guilty about being in the insurance business, right?”

  “Guilty? Why in the hell should I feel guilty?”

  “Aren’t insurance companies really bloodsucking vultures who live off the tragedies and fears of the rest of us? Without plane crashes and fires and floods and hurricanes and heart attacks, where would you be? You must feel guilty for getting rich off the fears and tears of others. But you haven’t got the guts to quit, so you’ve gone out and bought a lot of silly little-boy things.”

  Otis was furious. He stood up. “I’ve got better things to do with my time that having some long-haired jerk in a Packers sweatshirt mouth off about things he doesn’t know a damned thing about. If I’m a bloodsucker, you’re a brainsucker. Good day and go fuck-er yourself, Russ.”

  “Good day and go fuck-er yourself,” Tonganoxie said with a huge smile. He did not stand up.

  “Maybe it’s only boring,” he said as Otis arrived at the door. “All those numbers and risk analyses—reports to read, financial statements to ponder, meetings to conduct. Boring, boring, boring. You’re bored. That’s all it is. Not hate but boredom. More common among CEOs, even, than motorcycle fetishes.”

  Otis opened the door and screamed back at Tonganoxie, “Motor scooter, asshole!”

  “On second thought, Otis, maybe you’re nothing but a classic No Need Monster—”

  Otis slammed the door hard behind him as he left.

  OUT IN THE main hallway, there stood good Bob Gidney, trying to look like he was supposed to be there.

  “Well, that didn’t take long,” Bob said to Otis.

  “The man’s an idiot,” Otis said, still moving. “Did you know he owned four Jeeps? Nobody owns four Jeeps except the U.S. Army.”

  Bob, walking along with Otis, said, “He insulted you, right?”

  “You’re damned right he did.”

  “He always does that. What did he say?”

  “He said successful people are depressed, and insurance people like me are bloodsucking vultures who feed on the tragedies of humankind. He said I should and do feel guilty about it. Or maybe I’m just bored. Or that I hate being almost sixty and bald. He’s an asshole. He’s the one who needs help.”

  Bob strode alongside Otis out the front door, down the mansion’s steps toward Otis’s Explorer, parked in a small graveled parking lot.

  “That’s Russ’s technique—a form of eyeball-to-eyeball shock treatment, he calls it,” Bob said. “He first pisses off the patient and then waits for him to think about it awhile, to decide he might be right after all, and then to call for another appointment to continue the discussion.”

  “He’d better not hold his breath for my call,” Otis said, jumping into the Explorer and slamming the door with gus
to. Then he rolled down the window and asked Bob, “Do you know a lot about Archimedes? The Greek who first said ‘Eureka’?”

  “All I know is that he was supposedly stepping into his bath with the king’s crown. He put the crown down in the water with him and made a discovery about the weight of gold being lighter than silver. Something like that. Also, late in his life, he helped invent geometry, I think. A Roman soldier killed him. Maybe for inventing geometry, who knows. What brought that up?”

  Otis didn’t answer. He put the Explorer in gear. “What’s a No Need Monster?”

  “It’s a very unprofessional nickname Tonganoxie and his fellow experts have for a particular type of depressed male.”

  Otis rolled up the window and gunned the engine. Bob Gidney waved goodbye.

  The Explorer didn’t move. Otis put the window back down and said, “Give me a thirty-second definition.”

  Bob said, “Ambitious young married man throws himself completely into his job so he can be a huge success, provide for his family. Wife and children are forced to make lives without him because he’s never there. Then, sometime in his late forties or early fifties, the man arrives at the top, turns around to have a family life, and discovers that nobody needs him for anything except as a provider. That turns him into a depressed monster of some kind—there are several different varieties—”

  Otis, without gunning the engine, eased the Explorer away at a very slow speed.

  BACK AT THE clinic, Tonganoxie was still thinking about Otis Halstead.

  Asshole, He called me an asshole. Maybe so—maybe right now I am. Of course, in the world of us shrinks, there is no one definition for asshole.

  Russ Tonganoxie had come to Kansas alone, having left the second of two former wives and three children—two from his first marriage, one from the second—back on the East Coast in Baltimore and a Boston suburb. He had come here to the middle of nowhere mostly for professional reasons, because Ashland had offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse. But on a personal level, there were problems. He had never really lived by himself, and he was already weary of the unsettling silence that greeted him at his Kansas door and at the refrigerator, at the dinner table, in the backyard, in the bathroom—in the bedroom.