"Yes, but I am. I took the Benjamin Proverb Test and the block thing today and couldn't pass either one. The commitment's already been served on me."
Rubbing his jaw he murmured, "Who turned you in?"
"My father and Chester."
"Hell's bells. Your own blood."
"They saved me from paranoia. Listen, Maury." I turned to face him. "Do you know where she is?"
"If I did, honest to god, Louis, I'd tell you. Even if you have been certified."
"You know where they're sending me for therapy?"
"Kansas City?"
I nodded.
"Maybe you'll find her there. Maybe the mental health people caught up with her and sent her back and forgot to let me know about it."
"Yeah, maybe so," I said.
"Coming up to me he whacked me on the back. "Good luck, you son of a bitch. I know you'll pull out of it. You got 'phrenia, I presume; that's all there is, anymore."
"I've got Magna Mater 'phrenia." Reaching into my coat I got out the tile and showed it to him, saying, "To remember her. I hope you don't mind; it's your house and mural, after all."
"Take it. Take a whole fish. Take a tit." He started toward the mermaid. "No kidding, Louis; we'll pry a pink tit loose and you can carry that around with you, okay?"
"This is fine."
We both stood awkwardly facing each other for a time.
"How's it feel to be 'phrenic?" Maury said at last.
"Bad, Maury. Very, very bad."
"That's what I thought; that's what Pris always said. She was glad to get over it."
"That going to Seattle, that was it coming on. What they call catatonic excitement, a sense of urgency, that you have to do something. It always turns out to be the wrong thing; it accomplishes nothing. And you realize that and then you have panic and then you get it, the real psychosis. I heard voices and saw--" I broke off.
"Whet did you see?"
"Pris."
"Keerist," Maury said.
"Will you drive me to the airport?"
"Oh sure, buddy. Sure." He nodded vigorously.
"I don't have to go until late tonight. So maybe we could have dinner together. I don't feel like seeing my family again, after what happened; I'm sort of ashamed."
Maury said, "How come you speak so rationally if you're a 'phrenic?"
"I'm not under tension right now, so I've been able to focus my attention. That's what an attack of schizophrenia is, a weakening of attention so that unconscious processes gain mastery and take over the field. They capture awareness, very archaic processes, archetypal, such as nonschizophrenics haven't had since they were five."
"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."