Authors: Jessica Knauss
Now already the lesson is fading from your eyes. I’ll have to come up with more energy to shout at you pretty soon.
If we go for some time without a frustration like this, I tend to forget the exact reasons why I feel so trapped with you. If I persuade myself that I don’t need human company beyond my clients and can survive holed up in my third-floor office for most of any day, I only have to get through an hour or so of TV boredom on the couch with you before surrendering to the oblivion of sleep. And then something like this, where you try to control me with negativity, happens, and I have to act in ways I don’t want to.
Yesterday ran the gamut of emotions I’m capable of feeling—joy, annoyance, depression, fear, exhaustion—and I’ve yet to explain the thing that affected me most. Normally, my favorite part of the John Brown House is the upstairs hallway. Moses is my favorite Brown brother, and they have his room done up like a nursery, with a cradle and little kid’s bed and a hobbyhorse. While John took the reins from their shipping magnate father, Moses was an abolitionist who roused the rabble everywhere he went. There is some evidence he might have been telekinetic. The Talents were only discovered in the late 1800s, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist long before that. The stories go that at slave auctions where Moses was present, the shackles mysteriously lifted off the men and women as they were brought to the display area. His portrait hangs in the hallway outside his room. It’s a juvenile rendition, all thick lines and dead eyes, but nonetheless, the image has a pleasant blue-green aura I could stare at all day.
But yesterday, my mind was traveling to dark places. I thought about the way Moses would have been arrested for agitation, and the way his moneyed family would have bailed him out. Who would I call to bail me out if someone found out I’d been dodging registration all this time? My family is in California. They think we’re close, but none of them even know I’m a psychic.
My dad probably knew before he died, but he was preoccupied with his own predicament. He had dutifully registered as a psychic not long after I was born in the hope that the glasses and whatever other measures the government enforced would release him from the curse of being unable to stop reading people’s minds. But I think having everyone watching him, putting him through all the tests, made it that much worse. When I was old enough to ask, they told me he passed away quietly in his sleep at the institution. Heart failure, they said. The gruesome truth was in my mother’s eyes. He’d bled to death after gouging his own eyes out.
That’s not happening to me. There has to be no risk I will ever be found out.
If you still think I’m going to show this letter to you, dear husband, you’re sadly mistaken. I can’t tell you I’m a psychic, and I can’t tell you how I really feel about you. As I sit staring at these bruises you gave me because you couldn’t let me go, I know I have to let you think I love you. Otherwise, you’ll follow through with the rages and violence I watch percolating under your desperate affection. I have to face my own lovelessness alone.
All my father wanted was to be left alone, to not have the constant barrage of psychic company. He wanted it so much, he destroyed the means by which the thoughts travel, and that destroyed him. I feel utterly alone, in spite of all the babbling coming at me from every direction, in spite of you.
You tell me, “I love you,” but I’m not sure what you mean. I can see your sincerity, but can’t imagine feeling a similar emotion toward you. And I don’t know who the “you” is in that thought. I look at her through your eyes and can’t recognize her as myself.
I opened the door for Emily and she pushed a stack of handwritten pages clipped together at odd angles to me. I said, “Hello,” but she was already leaving. “What about the session?” I said to her back.
She looked over her shoulder to shoot me some low-pitched static. “Let’s not and say we did, shall we?”
She headed down the stairs with a purpose known only to her, totally unsupervised. If the police ever find this, I’m in deep trouble, but it’s unusually hard to argue with her. Maybe because I can’t peek at her cards? If she would only tip her hand a little . . .
I was hoping she would reveal herself more with this little novel she’s given me, but it’s not straightforward by any means. It reads like fiction, and I feel challenged to add up all the clues. Much of her reasoning remains unclear. When I see her again, I think the writing will be an “in” for me, and I’ll be able to ask questions pretty directly. She’ll likely patronize me or disdainfully declare that anyone with brains would need no further explanation and where did I get that PsyD, online? But the authorities are waiting for a diagnosis and treatment options, and they won’t wait much longer.
Going strictly from her perspective on the story in this stack of papers she’s given me, I would have to diagnose Emily with erotomania. The rarity of the diagnosis may provoke questions. I’ve never come across anyone with that specific delusion before, and frankly the textbook descriptions sound less likely to occur than any other disorder. I remember reacting in a knee-jerk way in abnormal psych class many years ago: “It’s impossible for anyone to be so deluded about intimacy.” My outburst prompted a review of the course’s non-judgment policy, but the professor and the students all looked at me with nothing but judgment for blurting such a naïve thought.
The story appears to start from the beginning of Emily’s troubles, going a little bit into the way she’s always ignored her little sister Beth precisely because everyone else paid so much attention to her. Emily’s idea to flee to the East Coast and become a brilliant Brown student so she wouldn’t be under her sister’s thumb is a bit histrionic in its own way, but falls within the parameters of a normal reaction to stimulus.
Then things get complicated. She finds Carlos and immediately takes the idea into her head that he is the love of her life and that he loves her back, in spite of his obvious indifference to yet another of his students and his propagation of the species with his wife. I’m confident it’s a delusion because this girl is not really in love with Carlos, no matter how much she may insist. She may be obsessed with the idea of him, though he’s an odd choice. Classic erotomaniacs fixate on someone of a higher status, such that if they were actually with that person, their life would be different in every way. Maybe Carlos is a little bit above Emily’s rank because he’s the TA and she’s feeding off that power dynamic? It’s a feeble line of sustenance for such a strong delusion. Because even in these papers, which you might think would be a complete confession of exactly how she feels and why, I can’t find a scrap of information that makes Carlos interesting from any point of view. Maybe I can’t see it because, as Emily diagnosed so perfectly, I’ve never been in love . . . ?
It further complicates when Emily actually invites Beth to come into her sanctuary: Providence, Brown, and the very building where Carlos lives. Ethiopia was a big step away from California and a chance to be close to Carlos, which the family then invaded, from Emily’s point of view, with an attention-getting, wacky medical crisis.
But asking Beth to come east? Setting her up with everything she needed? Some might leap to the conclusion that Emily was trying to protect Beth from a bad situation: going to a special school for telekinetics. They might think Emily is merely catastrophizing whatever she’s heard about firestarter and psychic schools and come to the conclusion that telekinesis school was no place for her little sister. But it’s evident to me that that is exactly what she wanted her parents to think. (Telekinesis schools are the best. I wish I had telekinesis.)
If I had to hazard a guess, Emily felt that Beth was getting out of control, revealing her telekinesis to the world, so Emily tried to take on a guardianship role so she could keep her eye on Beth and continue to keep her Talent under wraps. She wanted to manipulate Beth into submission by keeping her out of the school and withholding the list of Other-Talented Healers from her. This manipulation is the strongest argument for a personality disorder. I won’t rule out a personality disorder, for sure, but erotomania is at the root of Emily’s most obvious antisocial behavior and needs to be controlled as soon as possible.
What was Emily’s stressor? What pushed her over the edge? The freedom of college? The distance from her family? One reason I’m baffled by her invitation to Beth to live in Providence is that it may have created the ultimate stressor for Emily: with her sister watching at all times, Emily was no longer free to indulge in her obsession with Carlos. And then of course, the accident with Beth’s telekinesis mixed sibling rivalry with a bizarre love triangle: Beth wants to impress Emily and can’t take the competition from Carlos; Emily wants to obsess about Carlos and keep Beth sidelined from her own Talent; and Carlos may still be unaware that he’s at the center of so much strife.
Emily might simply have been trying to break out of the triangle by escaping with Carlos. The attempted kidnapping was an act of desperation and doomed to failure because, where Carlos is concerned, Emily has no grasp on reality. She might benefit from a support group of some kind, because while she’s not allowed to attend Brown, she seems to only interact with her family, who I suspect created the environmental and biological factors that led to her kidnapping Carlos in the first place.
I’ll use these musings as a basis for asking her questions in the next session. And I’ll include a prescription with my official diagnosis. Let them worry about getting her to take pills!
If I ever write a book, it will be a psycho-socio-anthropological study of the effect on our culture of the lack of a marked coming of age. I think people of my generation long to be children again, or to remain children, because it was the last time we had a definite identity and role. We were encouraged to play and learn and enjoy being children, and the advantages of being an adult were never laid out for us (if indeed any exist). I definitely never went through any rite or ceremony that established me in society as an adult. There are certain milestones, like learning to drive, going to college, getting an apartment or buying a house, getting married . . . but such a piecemeal approach doesn’t encourage us to take on the mantle of responsibility in any definitive way. It would be interesting to do research and interviews with the oldest people I could find.
This is to explain the undercurrent of nostalgia that caused me to bemoan sometime last month that we never marked Easter any more, and to describe for you, dear husband, the pretty hats we wore and the chock-f-of-chocolate Easter basket I used to wake up to on that holiday morning.
I had unconsciously taken to looking off to the side when I spoke with you, so I didn’t catch you germinating an idea at the time of my silly raptures, and I certainly didn’t expect you to put together a basket and leave it for me on the kitchen table this Easter morning. How did you know to choose a basket with natural-colored weaving and a pink, blue, and green rim? Did I mention before that I love that stupid plastic Easter grass, and that only green would do? Have you really been making mental notes over the years about which chocolate candies I would like best? Because there is not a single piece in there that I don’t want to devour immediately.
My heart melted and I remembered how sweet you used to be and even, almost, how I stumbled into marrying you. And then I looked up and you had already waddled off to sit in front of the TV and twirl a straw while your thoughts cycled in and out of your head, repetitive, inexorable. You didn’t even have the attention span to stick around until I thanked you for such a kind effort. I pity you and your tiny little world. You make a show of reading a lot of books, but I’ve watched you, and the words become such a swarming mess it’s a wonder you can make sense of anything. It all goes through a sieve, admitting only the pieces that support your narrow worldview. Even if you watch the most moving film, you come away attached to some random detail that no one else cares about because it’s not the
point
. I know that if you were aware of your appalling thought patterns, if you could somehow witness them as I do, you could break the cycle and your life would be vastly enriched and more harmonious. But how could I explain it to you convincingly without incriminating myself as an unregistered Talent?
Dear husband, even though I will never show this to you, I still address it to you in my mind. You deserve someone who doesn’t disdain you or pity you. I deserve to find out whether I can ever love someone, and you, as much as any other person, deserve to be loved. I am not the right person for you. But I don’t have the slightest idea how to convince you of that without endangering both of us. You know what I mean: I’ve seen it in your eyes, the desperation. The thought that you must hold on to me at all costs, and that if you “lose” me, you’ll kill yourself.
If you’d said these things to me in words, it would be emotional blackmail, a kind of abuse closely akin to the bruises you’ve been giving me by holding on too tight. But since you haven’t, I have to hang on like this until I figure out what to do.
I’m wrong for you, but sooner or later, I promise, I’ll make it right.
I wish I’d never thought of it.
Before we were married, before Lakshmi had met you, her makeup company debuted a line of men’s products and, being a nice person, she gave you a gift. It was shaving cream. She had no way to know that you wear a beard, untrimmed by razor or scissor until you go for a haircut. You were unfairly miffed by the gift, but since you never throw anything away, I assumed you still had it. My thought was to use it on my legs since it wasn’t going to get used for any other reason.
So I headed into your study for the first time since the demolition of the Victorian pantry. The air was close and in the morning light from the curtained window, I saw dust flying in my wake. I was deeply surprised at the piles of papers and books on the floor and the thick layer of dust on the action figures that cluttered all the available space on the desk. I would’ve thought you would pick them up once in a while to finger while you thought a problem over. On the other hand, the knocked-over Coke bottles and nondescript techno gadgets strewn over the books on the floor were evidence to me that when you pounded your fists on the desk or the wall, you let objects lie where they fell.