The Reflection (11 page)

After the doctor had left that day, I felt more unsettled than usual. With this talk of brain lesions and psychic trauma, he’d been blunter than ever before. As if he’d found himself at the end of one strategy, giving it a last shot before embarking on another. It was true that we’d reached some sort of stalemate. By now, I had a reply to just about anything the doctor could throw at me. I had begun to resemble long-term patients I’d known, who’d had all the time in the world to consider and construct an argument against every possible objection to their delusion. It was the irony of mental wards: remove a troubled person from the world, isolate him in a room, and the tendency will always be to go deeper into the delusion, not to pull out of it. Mental asylums bred insanity, just as hospitals bred infection, and prisons criminals.

The stalemate didn’t mean that Dr. Peters and I were on an equal footing. Because of the power relation, it actually
meant that I was losing. That I would remain incarcerated in the hospital, while the doctor would gain kudos from writing up my case. How could I ever win, when the psychiatric consensus was that denial of the illness was part of the illness? I believed this myself, it was demonstrable, I’d hammered the point home to countless patients. And yet here I was, facing its essential contradiction.

If, as I suspected, the doctor was preparing a new treatment strategy for me, then I could only fear what that might be. Over the years that I’d been practicing psychiatry, I’d found my respect for it slowly ebbing away. Other medical disciplines had grown steadily more empirically based, but psychiatry still seemed like guesswork. It was riddled with invented maladies, with gurus peddling therapies that would become the rage for a while only to prove in time to exacerbate the very conditions they were meant to cure. But these particular gurus were hospital department heads, and if they decided on a certain procedure, then the patient had little to no chance of dodging it.

Some of these pointless therapies I felt I could survive easily enough—the “sleep cure” for instance, or even electrotherapy. But a recently popular one filled me with a peculiar horror. It consisted of first knocking the patient out with an electric shock, then inserting an icepick-like instrument above the patient’s eye and scraping it into the frontal lobes. Over the past couple of years I’d seen several of these so-called leucotomized patients. Some had become totally incapacitated, unable to feed or look after themselves. Others were much less badly affected, but they had all possessed the eerie quality of a brain living on as a series of set responses. I’d tried to find out whether these procedures were carried out in the hospital I was in. I’d pressed my ear to the door when I heard doctors and nurses in conversation as they walked by
my room; while I was accompanied to the bathroom, I’d scan other patients I passed, on the lookout for the characteristic shuffle of the leucotomized.

The white walls were the polished interior of my own skull—any escape, even if only to a communal room within the hospital, seemed far-fetched. Why couldn’t they at least give me books or magazines to read? With so little stimulus, I’d spent inordinate amounts of time staring into the little mirror the nurse had given me. For the first few minutes I’d just accustom myself to my face again. I could still see the ghost of the old one, but that would soon fade and, after a while, I would look relatively normal and natural to myself. That sensation could last quite some time. But always at some point, it would turn. The face would start to seem strange again. It might flicker elusively between normal and alien, but then in the final stage it would cease to look either. It would lose all signification. It wouldn’t be a face at all. Just a collection of lines, curves, colors, contours.

For want of anything better to do, I picked up the pages I’d written about Abby. I’d had a notion to write more, and glanced briefly at what I’d already done. The sentences and thoughts seemed disjointed now, although they had not appeared like that when I’d written them. That story about the friend who’d drowned in the lake: it was a shock to realize that I’d gotten it quite wrong. It hadn’t been Abby who’d told me about that at all. It had been a patient, Miss Fregoli. The one who had later committed suicide. It shook me that I could make a mistake like that.

My thoughts drifted from Abby to Miss Fregoli then back to Abby again. I remembered the moment I’d known she’d been unfaithful to me. A letter in the morning mail, which wouldn’t have aroused any suspicion if she hadn’t hurriedly
put it in her bag without even opening it. Even then I hadn’t realized, it had only hit me with full force an hour later, in the subway, while reading about a case of adultery and murder in the
Times
. Suddenly everything had felt flat, devoid of emotional substance, slowed down. I’d once been knocked down by a car on Park Avenue: this felt the same. If I’d gone back and confronted Abby there and then, she would have told me the truth. Instead I’d let it fester. I’d followed her one day and seen her with Speelman, walking arm in arm, talking gaily, barely aware of the world around them. It was as if I’d opened the door to their bedroom.

I tried to imagine her last days. It occurred to me that if she’d had a tumor removed from her trachea, she probably wouldn’t have been able to speak. She’d have been rendered mute. “Yours was the kind of ambition that meant at some point stepping into a void,” I now found myself writing. “With me it was quite different. I’d work methodically, without the possibility of error, until I’d gotten to where I thought I wanted to be.” I stopped, and knew instinctively that if I looked up now, I’d see the woman from across the courtyard. Once again I felt she was staring directly at me, although at this distance her eyes were merely two black points. I felt compelled to get off my bed and walk across the room to the window. I opened it and put my hands to the bars. At the same time I was wondering, for the first time, who had been here in this room before me. Whoever he was, he too had probably spent hours staring out this window. Had he seen the woman? Had she stared back? I thought I saw her slightly shake her head and then, more obviously, raise her hands in an almost supplicatory manner. It wasn’t clear to me what she’d meant with the gesture, if she’d meant anything at all, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was directed at me. There
was a presence between us, a ghost. It was “Dr. Manne.” But he had withered to almost nothing. He was someone without potential, without a future, not a person at all, since people live in their future. I turned away and sat back on my bed, once again locked into the absolute solitude I’d always feared and desired.

“He’s coming back to me.”

“Who is?”

“Stephen Smith. He’s been coming back to me. All night.”

“Tell me about him.”

“You were right. He comes from Ohio. He doesn’t miss it. Sometimes he misses the feeling of space.”

“Who are his parents?”

“I don’t know. I think his mother died. When he was very young. His father might be alive. There was a meeting, when he was a child. His Dad was drunk.”

“Who raised him?”

“Foster parents. Kind people. In the end, it wasn’t enough.”

“Why did he leave?”

“Trouble with the law. Nothing too serious. He’d been caught once and let go. But was told it’d be jail next time. He jumped a train and knew he’d never be back.”

“Tell me more. Tell me about New York.”

“New York was tough. The thieving wasn’t easy. I tried my
hand at pickpocketing. In the stations and subway. I was no good at it.”

“What did you do next?”

“I kept at it. But there were other pickpockets. Gangs of them, guarding their patch. One day they chased me, bashed me half to death.”

“Bashed you unconscious?”

“Yes. I woke up by the docks. A kind gentleman took me to a hospital. They bandaged me up.”

“What happened next?”

“The gentleman got me cleaned up and bought me lunch.”

“What was his name?”

“Esterhazy.”

“Did you stay in touch with him?”

“No. Years later, I thought I saw him in the street. I followed him for a block or two. Because after buying me lunch that day, he’d given me money. And I’d wanted to pay him back. But when I finally caught up with the man, it turned out to be someone else. It wasn’t Esterhazy after all.”

“After the hospital, what did you do?”

“I had the money. It was spring. I figured if I slept in the park, the money might last me a few weeks. Long enough for me to get better.”

“And that’s what you did.”

“Yes. But it was never the same, after the bashing.”

“In what way?”

“The headaches. I couldn’t concentrate so well. I’d lose my temper.”

“Did you work?”

“I got jobs, down by the docks. They never lasted long.”

“Where did you live?”

“I moved around. Cheap hotels. Friends’ places. Parks.”

“Did you ever go back to hospital?”

“Once, yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“It pains me to think of it.”

“Are you Stephen Smith?”

“I’m David Manne.”

“Are you Stephen Smith?”

“No.”

“Are you Stephen Smith?”

“I’m tired. I haven’t slept. Please leave me now.”

The squeak of the linoleum, the door opening and closing, the turn of the key: I was alone again. It was true what I’d said about being tired. Just talking to the doctor had exhausted me, although it had been no effort at all to come up with the story of Stephen Smith. On the contrary, the details had flowed out of me, almost of their own accord. Of course, I now realized, I’d drawn on past case histories of patients of mine, so many of whom had spent time as a vagrant. On top of the tiredness, or because of it, I could feel the kick of euphoria. I could have easily botched it. Instead, my performance had seemed real enough, to me at least. I knew I had to pay attention. It was common enough for patients to fake it, to humor their doctor, for whatever reason. A good psychiatrist would view any surrender with suspicion. In the coming days and weeks, I could look forward to continued probing from Dr. Peters. I’d have to carefully construct my capitulation.

There was something else to the euphoria as well. Once I’d finally decided to ditch Manne, I’d felt liberated. And Smith had mysteriously come to life. I’d sensed it even before the doctor had entered the room. It wasn’t only that Stephen Smith was now my best chance of getting out. I’d begun to have hopes for him. After all, he was starting from nowhere.
He was someone who could still invent himself, begin afresh. On the face of it, Manne had a lot more going for him. Manne was educated, a professional; Smith was a homeless man, with a history of mental instability and suicide attempts. But Manne had made choices that had remorselessly narrowed his horizons, until finally they’d vanished altogether. For Manne, there could be no real continuation, except in a sort of living death.

“Tell me about David Manne.”

“I don’t know anything about him.”

“Are you David Manne?”

“No. I’m Stephen Smith.”

“Who is David Manne?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then tell me about someone you do know.”

“Like who?”

“Like the photo. On your bedside table. Who is she?”

“Her name is Marie.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Marie? She was a few years older than me. It was after the war. The refugee boats were coming in. Down by the docks there were two big warehouses converted into dormitories. One for men, one for women and children. Refugees could stay there free, for a week. I was working at the Coimbra Shipping office opposite.”

“She was a refugee?”

“Yes.”

“How did you meet?”

“I came across her, sitting on a suitcase in the street. She’d spent her week in the dormitory. After, she had nowhere to go.”

“What did you do?”

“I bought her a cup of coffee. Then I found her somewhere to stay for a few nights.”

“Did you see her again?”

“I took her to the movies one night. She didn’t talk about herself. After, I asked her if she wanted to get a drink. I took her to bed, in my room at a boarding house.”

“Was that the only time?”

“No. We wound up living together for a while. She had a husband in Europe. She didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. So we pretended to be married. We rented two rooms in a street near the docks. For a while we were happy. Then I started imagining things. One night I threatened her with a broken bottle. She called the police.”

“What did they do?”

“They restrained me. They got a doctor. He committed me.”

“What was the doctor’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it have been Manne?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it Manne?”

“No.”

“It was Manne, wasn’t it?”

The woman on the balcony disappeared. Perhaps she’d moved out, perhaps she’d taken a vacation, perhaps it was too cold to stand on the balcony any more. But I couldn’t help thinking that it was because of me. She’d vanished at the very moment I’d given Manne up—I felt the connection even if I couldn’t see what it might be. A week at least had gone by, and although my hopes of seeing her again diminished with each day, it didn’t stop me from looking out the window. But after a while, it started to feel right that she was no longer there. I saw that final supplicatory gesture of hers as a sort of goodbye.

I was astonished to have a visitor one day. His name was Peter Untermeyer, and he’d been a psychiatry intern with me at Bellevue, years ago. I’d only seen him once since, a chance meeting in the street. He’d been in uniform, I now remembered, and was just back from Europe. I’d asked him what he was up to and he’d told me about a psychiatric unit he was helping to set up. We’re looking for people right now, he’d said, doctors and psychiatrists to join the team. Perhaps I might be interested? I’d followed him to an office in a ramshackle building in Turtle Bay, on one of the streets they’d later razed for the UN headquarters. He’d been all apologetic about the premises and had said they’d soon be moving uptown, now that the army funding had come through. After introducing me to a few of his colleagues there, he’d outlined some crackpot psychiatric model they were working on, the details of which I could no longer recall. I remembered saying I’d think about it, that I’d call, although I never had—at that time I’d still entertained hopes for my Park Avenue career. And that had been the last time I’d had anything to do with him.