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Reading De Cam’s Disaffection: A Study, on Dr. Nades’s recommendation.

6 SEPTEMBER

In the middle of session (breathing again) I said loudly: “Flores!”

Both psy dimensions whited out but the soma realisation hardly changed. After 4 seconds he responded aloud, drowsily. It is not “trance,” but autohypnosis.

I said, “Your breathing’s monitored by the apparatus. I don’t need to know that you’re still breathing. It’s boring.”

He said, “I like to do my own monitoring, Doctor.”

I came around and took the blindfold off him and looked at him. He has a pleasant face, the kind of man you often see running machinery, sensitive but patient, like a donkey. That is stupid. I will not cross it out. I am supposed to be spontaneous in this diary. Donkeys do have beautiful faces. They are supposed to be stupid and balky but they look wise and calm, as if they had endured a lot but held no grudges, as if they knew some reason why one should not hold grudges. And the white ring around their eyes makes them look defenseless.

“But the more you breathe,” I said, “the less you think. I need your cooperation. I’m trying to find out what it is you’re afraid of.”

“But I know what I’m afraid of,” he said.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“You never asked me.”

“That’s most unreasonable,” I said, which is funny, now I think about it, being indignant with a mental patient because he’s unreasonable. “Well, then, now I’m asking you.”

He said, “I’m afraid of electroshock. Of having my mind destroyed. Being kept here. Or only being let out when I can’t remember anything.” He gasped while he was speaking. I said, “All right, why won’t you think about that while I’m watching the screens?”

“Why should I?”

“Why not? You’ve said it to me, why can’t you think about it? I want to see the color of your thoughts!”

“It’s none of your business, the color of my thoughts,” he said angrily, but I was around to the screen while he spoke, and saw the unguarded activity. Of course it was being taped while we spoke, too, and I have studied it all afternoon. It is fascinating. There are two subverbal levels running aside from the spoken words. All sensory-emotive reactions and distortions are vigorous and complex. He “sees” me, for instance, m at least three different ways, probably more, analysis is impossibly difficult! And the Con-Uncon correspondences are so complicated, and the memory traces and current impressions interweave so rapidly, and yet the whole is unified in its complexity. It is like that machine he was studying, very intricate but all one thing in a mathematical harmony. Like the petals of the rose.

When he realised I was observing he shouted out, “Voyeur! Damned voyeur! Let me alone! Get out!” and he broke down and cried. There was a clear fantasy on the screen for several seconds of himself breaking the arm and head clamps and kicking the apparatus to pieces and rushing out of the building, and there, outside, there was a wide hilltop, covered with short dry grass, under the evening sky, and he stood there all alone. While he sat clamped in the chair sobbing.

I broke session and took off the crown, and asked him if he wanted some tea, and he refused to answer. So I freed his arms, and brought him a cup. There was sugar today, a whole box full. I told him that and told him I’d put in two lumps.

After he had drunk some tea he said, with an elaborate ironical tone, because he was ashamed of crying, “You know I like sugar? I suppose your psychoscope told you I liked sugar?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, “everybody likes sugar if they can get it.”He said, “No, little doctor, they don’t.” He asked in the same tone how old I was and if I was married. He was spiteful. He said, “Don’t want to marry? Wedded to your work? Helping the mentally unsound back to a constructive life of service to the Nation?”

“I like my work,” I said, “because it’s difficult, and interesting. Like yours. You like your work, don’t you?”

“I did,” he said. “Goodbye to all that”

“Why?”

He tapped his head and said, “Zzzzzzt!—All gone. Right?”

“Why are you so convinced you’re going to be prescribed electroshock? I haven’t even diagnosed you yet.”

“Diagnosed me?” he said. “Look, stop the playacting, please. My diagnosis was made. By the learned doctors of the TRTU. Severe case of disaffection. Prognosis: Evil! Therapy: Lock him up with a roomful of screaming thrashing wrecks, and then go through his mind the same way you went through his papers, and then burn it… burn it out. Right, Doctor? Why do you have to go through all this posing, diagnosis, cups of tea? Can’t you just get on with it? Do you have to paw through everything I am before you burn it?”

“Flores,” I said very patiently, “you’re saying ‘Destroy me’—don’t you hear yourself? The psychoscope destroys nothing. And I’m not using it to get evidence, either. This isn’t a court, you’re not on trial. And I’m not a judge. I’m a doctor.”

He interrupted—“If you’re a doctor, can’t you see that I’m not sick?”

“How can I see anything so long as you block me out with your stupid keep out signs?” I shouted. I did shout. My patience was a pose and it just fell to pieces. But I saw that I had reached him, so I went right on. “You look sick, you act sick—two cracked ribs, a temperature, no appetite, crying fits—is that good health? If you’re not sick, then prove it to me! Let me see how you are inside, inside all that!”

He looked down into his cup and gave a kind of laugh and shrugged. “I can’t win,” he said. “Why do I talk to you? You look so honest, damn you!”

I walked away. It is shocking how a patient can hurt one. The trouble is, I am used to the children, whose rejection is absolute, like animals that freeze, or cower, or bite, in their terror. But with this man, intelligent and older than I am, first there is communication and trust and then the blow. It hurts more.

It is painful writing all this down. It hurts again. But it is useful. I do understand some things he said much better now. I think I will not show it to Dr. Nades until I have completed diagnosis. If there is any truth to what he said about being arrested on suspicion of disaffection (and he is certainly careless in the way he talks) Dr. Nades might feel that she should take over the case, due to my inexperience. I should regret that. I need the experience.

7 SEPTEMBER

Stupid! That’s why she gave you De Cam’s book. Of course she knows. As Head of the Section she has access to the TRTU dossier on F.S. She gave me this case deliberately.

It is certainly educational.

Today’s session: F.S. still angry and sulky. Intentionally fantasized a sex scene. It was memory, but when she was heaving around underneath him he suddenly stuck a caricature of my face on her. It was effective. I doubt a woman could have done it, women’s recall of having sex is usually darker and grander and they and the other do not become meat-puppets like that, with switchable heads. After a while he got bored with the performance (for all its vividness there was little somatic participation, not even an erection) and his mind began to wander. For the first time. One of the drawings on the desk came back. He must be a designer, because he changed it, with a pencil. At the same time there was a tune going on the audio, in mental puretone; and in the Uncon lapping over into the interplay area, a large, dark room seen from a child’s height, the windowsills very high, evening outside the windows, tree branches darkening, and inside the room a woman’s voice, soft, maybe reading aloud, sometimes joining with the tune. Meanwhile the whore on the bed kept coming and going in volitional bursts, falling apart a little more each time, till there was nothing left but one nipple. This much I analysed out this afternoon, the first sequence of over 10 sec. that I have analysed clear and entire.