Skull Session (19 page)

Now he couldn't stop thinking about something Kay had said while putting away the dishes that morning. "About Highwood," she'd said, "I probably made it sound like it's some kind of haunted house. But of course it's not—it's a charming, pleasant place. No, it's not like the house is haunted.. . . It's more like that
family
is haunted. Do you know what I mean?"

He'd found himself inexplicably susceptible to the idea: that scary things could live within a clan, a bloodhne, terrors that survived through generations. Kay had gone on with the dishes, blithely unaware of his discomfort.

21

D
AMON KARADWICZ ROLLED HIS HEAD off to the right, face grotesquely contorted, and then snapped upright, his wild eyes taking a second to stabilize when he came out of the tic. "Good to see you, buddy," he told Paul. "What's the rumpus?"

Paul clapped him on the shoulder and took a seat on the stool next to him. Terry's Taproom was quiet, unusual for a Saturday night—they'd have no problem getting one of the pool tables later. A hard-bitten woman Paul hadn't seen before tended bar, washing glasses and staring up at the television, ignoring them. The television screen showed some news program, a SWAT team smashing into an urban building, armed men running and dodging with adrenaline-packed movements. Or maybe it was Chechnya.

"Terrific haircut," Paul told him. "You've traded the Rasputin look for the Nazi skinhead look.
Tres chic."

"Fuck you too." Since they'd last gotten together, Damon's dark hair had been cut so short it was little more than stubble, the same density and length as his beard. From his collar to the top of his head he was five-o'clock shadow. "I've got seborrhea, had to treat my scalp." Damon repeated the neck roll, coming out of it with his face grimacing around his protruding tongue.

"Maybe a Catamount Amber," Paul told the bartender, who had come up to their end of the bar with a look of disinterest on her face. She turned back to the tap.

Damon was ugly: squat, flabby and unkempt, short-necked, with a wide face dominated by a broad, flaring nose. Though he shaved, he had facial hair so heavy that from the eyelids down his skin had a bluish cast.

He had the most difficult and offensive Tourette's imaginable. He was also one of the most intelligent, gentle, perceptive people Paul had ever known. They'd been friends for ten years. Since moving to Norwich, Paul had been driving up to visit Damon at least twice a month, meeting him at one blue-collar bar or another in Burlington's old North End.

"How is Rosie?" Paul asked. Rosie was Damon's daughter, a bone-skinny, precocious twelve-year-old. Maggie, Rosie's mother, had died of lymph cancer six years ago.

"Bitch!
I am well-pleased with her.
Shitfuck!
The Rose is obsessed with Sojourner Truth this month," Damon said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. " 'Ain't I a woman?' I'm getting a feminist, Quaker education from my daughter."

Paul got his beer, and they compared notes on the kids. Damon's explosive vocal tics were offensive not just because of the coprolalia, but because they all seemed calculated to deride, disrupt, or intimidate a conversational partner. Whenever Paul spoke, Damon's tics went wild: swearing, guttural noises in his chest and throat, abdominal contractions that produced strangling sounds, exaggerated facial distortions and hand gestures. The most disruptive was his loud, deep-voiced,
"Yeah? So?"
which he repeated almost continuously as Paul talked. The demon of Tourette's.

By the bartender's tight, disapproving face, Paul could tell that she considered Damon to be about midway between a complete asshole and an escaped maniac. Most people assumed the same.

It was a source of anguish for Damon. "No one can see
me,"
he'd once moaned. "All anyone can see is
it."
This was some years after Maggie's death, when Damon was beginning to think no other woman would have the strength and stamina to look past the tics and the blue face and squat body to love him. "How could anyone? Sometimes even
I'm
not sure who's Damon and who's just fucking Igor, the hunchback in my belfry."

"Everybody's both," Paul said at the time. "It's just that
we
get reminded of the fact every day."

It was an offshoot of this issue that Paul wanted to discuss with Damon now. Last time they'd gotten together, Damon had been talking about a theory he'd developed, based on his reading in Jungian psychology. Since seeing Vivien, fragments of that conversation had been coming back to Paul.

"Damon," he said, switching topics gracelessly, "tell me where you've been going with your ideas about Jung's
shadow."

"Aha. Existential problems looming large?"

"Maybe." Paul told him briefly about the Highwood job, his visit with Vivien, the questions she'd raised.

"Okay," Damon said. "So Jung developed a theory of personality: that we all have two sides, one being our regular self and the other being what he called the
shadow."

"Sounds like the old radio show—'The Shadow knows,' " Paul said.

"Shitfuck!
Actually, that's not a bad paraphrase of Jung's thinking. The shadow
does
know a lot. It's a sort of anti-self, containing all the parts of our personalities that we banish from our conscious minds. The parts we consider undesirable, unworthy, bad, antisocial."

Paul finished his beer and raised his glass to get the bartender's attention. Behind her on the TV screen a pretty blonde brushed her teeth with an excess of glee.

"How do these parts of you get banished?"

"A lot of ways. For example, when you were a kid, your parents told you to share. So to win their approval you acted generous, put away your selfishness and possessiveness. It was still there, but your conscious mind hid it, denied it. Then maybe your parents said, or society said, not to hit your friends. So you had to hide away your anger. Later on, you started choosing your own stuff to hide away, things you didn't feel were worthy. Eventually, you've got a lot of feelings, all hidden away in the same box. That's Jung's shadow self. Still there, still alive, but only able to express itself when the 'good' self slips up."

"And the problem being—?"

"Guh!
The problem being that
Fuck!
one, a lot of
good
things get hidden away there too. If your parents said, 'Don't stare, you'll hurt that paraplegic's feelings!' you probably banished some of your natural curiosity. If you got the idea you weren't supposed to play with your wiener, you hid away some of your sexuality. And so on.
Guck! Guh!"

"So you've locked away some valuable stuff too."

"So the theory goes. Jung said that to be truly empowered we had to be in touch with our shadows."

"You mentioned two problems. What's the second?"

"Suck me?"
Damon came out of a ghastly tic that gripped his whole upper body, his hands mangling the air. "The second is the distortions caused by packing things away. This is where a lot of psychopathologies come from. Repress normal sexual urges, they'll show up later as sexual perversions. Or take anger—lots of little angers, bottled up, may explode as one big, violent rage. You name it, a lot of things get twisted."

"So you think Tourette's may be a way that some of the shadow expresses itself?"

"Shit! No!
Sure. In some cases, anyway. Look at me—my tics are all contraries. Just then, because I
wanted
to say yes, Igor said no. The neurochemical theory of Tourette's doesn't answer an important question: Why should the excess of dopamine in your synaptic cleft selectively produce oppositional social behaviors? Some social behaviors are hard-wired into our brains, but we'd have a pretty sad vision of mankind if we believed that everything we are is pre-established by the biological equivalent of a circuit board. There's got to be a psychological component—the personality plays some role. That's where the shadow idea makes so much sense."

Paul sipped his beer, thinking it over. In Damon's case it was believable. All his competitive urges, all his negative thoughts, all his self-aggrandizing desires had found their way to his Tourettic impulses, leaving the conscious Damon clean, a deeply sincere, compassionate, well-intentioned person.

"Suck me?"
Damon said to the bartender. "I mean, how about another one of these?" He raised his glass. When the bartender turned away, he called after her: "It's a neurological disorder!" He turned back to Paul, shaking his head. "The perpetual plea for understanding," he said.

Another couple had taken seats a few stools down, and the bartender took their order. They averted their faces at Damon's outburst.

"So," Paul said after a time, "what about that librarian? Making any headway?"

"Ahh," Damon said sadly. "I was trying to ask her out. Got too tense about it. Igor went bananas."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Heads were turning. She asked me to leave the library.

Politely."

"You should have explained."

"This was
after
I had explained." Damon chugged the beer the bartender had set down. "I've got too many strikes against me, Paul. We're talking the princess and the frog here. I didn't get the good facial bones, like you." Seeing Paul's expression of commiseration, Damon rallied. "But I met this lady ski instructor. Her body's out of this world, but her face, she could be my sister.. . . Maybe I've got a chance. Seems understanding. A sense of humor, anyway."

"Tell her you're an incarnation of the archetypal mischief maker—Loki, Coyote. Or Krishna—he had a blue face too. Tell her there's a long and honorable tradition of monkey wrenchers in every culture."

"Nah. I tried that one on the librarian."

They sipped their drinks. Damon: a good friend. Like Dempsey, but in a very different way, a point of reference. In Damon, Paul could see one example of severe, uncontrolled Tourette's. Damon didn't respond well, physically or philosophically, to medications. As a result, he was an odd, often lonely person. He didn't hold jobs long. Not much luck with women. Nobody's idea of a success. An example to consider when thinking of cutting back on his medication.

Was that what he was thinking about, cutting back even further? Apparently. Vivien must have gotten to him more than he knew.

But Damon managed to love his life, to enjoy living "wild and woolly," as he described it. He played keyboard in various bands, in a brilliant, uneven, extemporaneous style for which he was highly respected. He was an avid reader, a philosopher. He loved his daughter absolutely and was a terrific father. He was as good a friend as anyone could ask for.

"But what about me?" Paul finally said. "Given that my tics aren't so contrary. People aren't all that offended by quotes from old rock 'n' roll songs and little finger dances. What's my shadow doing? Where are all my banished feelings and behaviors going?"

Damon shrugged. "We're all different. So you're parking it someplace else. I guess I just got lucky, huh?" He lifted himself off the stool, stretched his long arms, ticced convulsively. "How about some pool? Before someone else gets the table?"

Driving home, Paul abruptly made up his mind that, yes, he'd cut back dosage. No big fanfare, just quietly taper off. Over the last few years he had cut back from eight to six milligrams daily and had been able to live with himself; maybe now he'd try a few days at four, a few more at two, then maybe skip a day now and again. See what bubbled up out of the primordial ooze. Maybe see where his shadow lived, maybe have an occasional chat with the whiz kid within. You could only ask yourself who the hell you were so many times, and then you had to have some kind of an answer.

Yes, Vivien had gotten to him—not wounding him, really, just mercilessly reminding him of the wound he carried with him always. It was time to see what he'd be like with just his unadulterated, natural brain, the juices he was born with, without a factory-produced substance dominating his neural chemistry.

That idea got him thinking about his brain, and soon he found himself suffering from a full-blown case of what he called the
brain blues.

This was a mood, a Tourettic
idee fixe,
when he'd become conscious of the living brain pulsing in his skull. It nauseated him.

He could see it,
feel
it in him: spinal cord thickening into the brainstem. Cerebellum, hypothalamus, pituitary gland. The arching fornices, the baked potato-shaped thalamus, the caudate and lentiform nuclei, the little egg of the amygdala. The corpus callosum, like an extended tongue, covered by the proverbial gray stuff, the wrinkled cerebrum, and the cortex, only an eighth of an inch thick, intricately folded upon itself. The whole thing just the size and shape of your two hands if you put them over an apple.

And all of it made out of billions of tiny octopi, the neurons and dendrites, each with tentacles branching hundreds or thousands of times, connected to each other in an incalculable number of ways. All jittering with tiny electrical currents, squirting minute releases of chemicals that made up your thoughts, feelings, memories, reactions.

And that's your brain. That's where you live. That's
you.

The problem was, it wasn't that simple. Or that nice. Paul's stomach churned, picturing it. He'd dissected a fresh human brain in a class at Dartmouth and could never forget the feel of it on his hands, the grayish-pink clots clinging to his scalpel and his skin.
Forget the cute
analogies to potatoes, eggs, apples. Think of a raw clam: gray, wet, quivering soft
stuff, hiding in its hard shell.
That's
the brain.
That's
you.

He sighed, wishing he'd skipped the last round he and Damon had drunk.