On a Beam of Light (10 page)

“Terrif. So long, doc. ” On his way out he grabbed a couple of pears and bit into one of them, and I knew that Rob had “retired” for the day.

“Prot?”

“Yeah?”

“Want to go to a picnic on Monday?”

“Will there be fruit?”

“Of course. “

“Count me in. “

“Good. And I wonder if you’d do me another favor. “

He mumbled something in pax-o.

“I’ve got a patient I’d like you to talk to. ” I told him about Michael. He seemed quite interested in the case. “If I let you into Ward Three will you try to help him?”

“Help him commit suicide?”

“No, goddamn it. Help talk him out of it. “

“I wouldn’t dream of it. “

“Why not?”

“It’s his life. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll find out why he wants to do it and see if we can work something out. “

“Thank you. That’s all I’m asking. I’ll set something up as soon—”

“Time!” prot shrieked. “And someone’s waiting!”

I thought he meant Rodrigo, who had brought him up, but when I opened the door Betty was there with Kowalski. “Problem in the wards?” I asked them.

“It’s Bert. “

“Where’s everyone else?”

“Most of the doctors have gone home early for the weekend. “

“Listen—will you and Roman take prot down to 3B? I want him to talk to Michael. I’ll be there shortly. “

“Sure. “

Prot said, “I know the way. “

“I want Betty to see this, too. “

He smiled tolerantly. “Okay, coach. “

I ran to the stairs and down to the second floor, wondering what could have gone wrong with Bert, who can get along for days or weeks without a fuss before becoming desperately anxious about finding whatever it is he has lost. In this respect he is like the patients suffering from manic depression (bipolar disorder), traveling the mountainous road between indifference and near panic.

Bert has been with us for only a few months, arriving not long after he spent his own surprise birthday party destroying the shrubbery and beating in the neighbor’s garage door frantically searching for something. A fine athlete who looks much younger than his forty-eight years, he would seem to be a man who has everything: friends, a job he loves, excellent physical health.

All the likely things were checked out early on, of course—a safety deposit key, a briefcase, his wallet—nothing of any importance seemed to be missing. Nor did it seem to be anything so obvious as a loss of youth (his hair was still thick and flaming red), of money or religious faith, or of a family member, or even the respect of his coworkers, factors that sometimes play a role in one’s state of well-being. The only clue we had was a closet full of dolls his mother had discovered when she paid him an earlier visit. But even that led nowhere.

On this particular occasion Bert was accosting everyone he encountered, loudly demanding that they empty their pockets and subject themselves to a “body search. ” I tried unsuccessfully to calm him down, but, as usual, ended up ordering a shot of Thorazine.

While I was helping get him back to his room, one of the nurses came running up, out of breath. “Dr. Brewer! Dr. Brewer! Betty needs you upstairs right away!”

“Where—Ward Four?”

“No! Ward Three! It’s prot!” My first thought was: Damn! What’s he done to Michael?

I signaled for someone to take over. “What happened?” I asked the nurse as we ran for the stairs. Suddenly I remembered prot’s comment about Robert’s attempt to drown himself in 1985: He has that right, doesn’t he? I had made a stupid, amateurish, tactical mistake. Prot might well have agreed with Michael’s desire to end his life and tried to help him.

“It’s the autistic patients, ” she puffed. “Something’s happened to them!”

“What? What’s happened to them?” But we were already banging into 3B and there was no need for further explanation. In my thirty-two years of practice I have seen some terrible and some wonderful things. Nothing could match what we found there that afternoon.

Prot was sitting on a stool facing one of the autists. It was Jerry, the matchstick engineer, who had not said six words of his own since he arrived at the hospital some three years earlier. Prot was squeezing and stroking one of his hands in a warm and tender way, as if caressing a bird.

Jerry, who had not looked anyone in the eye since he was an infant, was gazing into prot’s. And he was speaking! Not loudly or frenetically, but quietly, almost in a whisper.

Betty was off to one side, smiling in her teary way. We edged toward her. Jerry was telling prot about his childhood, about certain things he liked to do, about his favorite foods, his love for architectural structures. Prot listened intently, nodding occasionally. After a while he squeezed Jerry’s hand one last time and let it go. At that instant, poor Jerry’s eyes wandered to the walls, to the furniture, anywhere but to the people in the room. Finally he got up and went back to working on his latest model, a space shuttle on its launch pad. In short, he reverted immediately to his usual state of being, the only existence he had known for the twenty-one years of his pathetic life. The whole episode had lasted only a few minutes.

Betty, still teary-eyed, said, “He did it for three of the others, too. “

Prot turned to me. “Gene, gene, gene, where the mischief ‘ave you been?”

“How did you do that?”

“I’ve told you before, doc. You just have to give them your undivided attention. The rest is easy. ” With that, he headed for the stairs, Kowalski trotting along behind.

“And that’s only half of it, ” Betty said, blowing her nose.

“What’s the other half?”

“I think Michael is cured!”

“Cured? Cmon, Betty, you know it doesn’t work that way. “

“I know it doesn’t. But I think this time it did. “

“What did prot say to him?”

“Well, you know Michael has always held himself responsible for the death of anyone he has ever had any direct contact with?”

“Yes. “

“Prot found a way out for him. “

“A way out? What way out?”

“He suggested that Michael become an EMS technician. “

“Huh? How would that solve his problem?”

“Don’t you see? He can make up for any deaths he has caused by saving other people’s lives. He neutralizes his mistakes, so to speak, one at a time. It’s perfectly logical. At least it is to Michael. And prot. “

“Is Mike in his room now? I’d like to see him for a minute. “

“I sent him to the library with Ozzie in Security. He couldn’t wait to get hold of a manual on emergency medical procedures. You’ll see. He’s a totally different person!”

A great many thoughts raced around my head as I stared out the window of the train to Connecticut. I was thrilled that prot had apparently been able to do something for Michael that I, in several months of therapy, had not. And his interaction with the autists was something I would never forget. (Before leaving my office I called Villers, Jerry’s staff physician, and told him as calmly as I could manage what had happened. His only comment was an unemotional “Zat is so?”)

As I gazed at the houses and lawns flying by I wondered whether psychoanalysis had somehow gotten on the wrong track. Why couldn’t we see things as clearly as prot seemed to be able to? Was there some simple shortcut to a person’s psyche if we only knew how to find it? A way to peel back the layers of the soul and put our hands on its core, to massage it like a stopped heart and get it going again?

I recalled Rob’s telling me about his nights in the backyard with his binoculars, his father’s arm around his shoulder, both of them gazing into the heavens, the dog sniffing around the fence. If I tried hard enough could I become a part of that scene, feel what he must have felt?

I blamed my father for my loneliness as a child. As our town’s only doctor, he commanded a great deal of respect, and this aura seemed to transfer to me as well. The other boys treated me as if I were somehow different, and I had a hard time making friends even though I desperately wanted to be one of them. As a result I became somewhat introverted, a characteristic I retain to this day, unfortunately. If it hadn’t been for Karen living right next door I might have ended up a basket case.

I frankly envied Rob his relationship with his father and with his dog. I, too, wanted a dog. My father wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t like dogs. I think he may have been afraid of them.

On the other hand, if he or I had been different, or if he had lived longer, perhaps I wouldn’t have become a psychiatrist. As Goldfarb is fond of saying, “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon. ” As I stared into the hazy sunlight trying to make some sense of Robert/prot’s life, I suddenly thought of Cassandra, our resident seer. Could she tell me what would happen if prot left or, for that matter, whether he was, in fact, departing on the twentieth?

I didn’t feel much like going in on Saturday, but Dustin’s parents had requested a meeting with me and it was the only time I could manage. I found them waiting in the lounge. We chatted for a few minutes about the weather, the hospital food, the worn spots in the carpet. I had met them before, of course. They seemed a genial couple willing to try to help their son in any way possible, visiting him often and assuring me we had their complete confidence and full support.

They had requested the meeting to discuss Dustin’s progress. I told them frankly that there hadn’t been much as yet, but we were thinking about trying some of the newer experimental drugs. As I talked with these gentle people, I found myself contemplating the possibility that despite their almost obsequious behavior, they might have abused Dustin in some way. A similar case came to mind involving a beloved minister and his wife who had, together, beaten their small boy to death. No one in the congregation seemed to have noticed the bruises and contusions, or they chose to ignore them. Could Dustin’s be a similar case? Was he harboring injuries we hadn’t yet been able to detect, presenting us with cryptic hints to the underlying cause of his problem?

Child molestation takes many forms. It can be sexual, or involve other types of physical or mental abuse. Because of the child’s fear and reluctance to tell anyone else, it is one of the most difficult aberrations to track down. A visit to a doctor will sometimes turn up evidence for such maltreatment (though physicians, too, are sometimes reticent about acting in such instances). But Dustin’s medical records indicated no such problem, and it wasn’t until he was in high school that he suddenly “snapped. ” Why it happened then is a mystery, as is the case, unfortunately, for many of our patients.

I was gripped, as usual, by a strong sense of deja vu as Karen and I waited for everyone to show up on a sunny, though relatively cool, Labor Day. It was here, five years ago, that I first became aware of the turmoil roiling deep inside prot’s (Robert’s) mind, and that I caught a glimpse of his ability to influence people’s lives, not only those of the patients but members of my own family as well.

Shasta and Oxeye, the dalmatians, sniffed about the yard, keeping an eye on the front gate as well as the picnic table. They were well aware that visitors were on their way.

Only half the family would be coming to this, the last cookout of the summer. Our oldest son Fred was on location shooting a film musical (he had a part in the chorus), and Jennifer, the internist, was unable to get away from the clinic in San Francisco. In fact, we hadn’t seen either of them for several months. One by one, it appears, your children separate the ties and slip away. At moments like this I begin to feel older and older, less and less relevant, as the drumbeat of time grows ever louder and harder to ignore. Though still (barely) in my fifties, I find myself wondering whether retirement might not be preferable to running down like an old grandfather clock.

Karen keeps asking me when I’m going to put away my yellow pad, and sometimes I think it would be quite wonderful to spend my days wandering leisurely around the wards, chatting with the patients, getting to know them intimately as prot does, a knack that Will, and a few of the nurses, seem to have been born with. A busman’s retirement, to be sure, but I know one or two drivers who love to spend their holidays riding around the country seeing things they had missed before. And no more cottage cheese!

Abigail and her husband Steve and the kids were the first to arrive. Abby greeted me warmly. As both of us have grown older she has begun to understand that I did my best as a father, as I, in turn, have come to grips with my own father’s shortcomings. We all make mistakes, we never get it right, as she is learning for herself, which (as prot pointed out) is probably the only way any of us ever really learn anything.

Abby, perhaps sensing an ally in our alien visitor, took the opportunity, which she hadn’t done in years, to ask me whether I realized yet that animal experimentation was “the most costly mistake in the history of medical science. Not that some good hasn’t come of it, ” she went on before I could respond, “as there would be for almost any piss-ass approach to scientific problems. But we have to ask how much farther we might have progressed if better methodologies had been developed decades ago.”

I reminded my daughter, the radical, that she might get farther with her case if she cleaned up her language a little, and if the animal-rights people would stop breaking into laboratories and terrorizing researchers.

“Oh, Dad, you’re so fucking establishment. As if property and what you call ‘bad language’ were more important than the animals you kill every day. They called the war (she meant Vietnam) protesters terrorists, too, remember? Now we know that was just bullshit. They were right and everybody knows it. It’s exactly the same now with the animal-rights movement. Fortunately, ” she added, only half jokingly, “all you old farts will peter out someday and things will change. The younger guys are beginning to see the folly of animal research. ” Then she smiled and kissed me on the cheek. Happily, all our arguments end this way.

My astronomer son-in-law Steve knew all about Charlie Flynn’s interview with prot, and he reported that his colleague was busy searching the skies with renewed vigor for evidence of inhabited planets. Over the past few years Flynn has received a number of prestigious awards for his “discoveries” of several previously unknown worlds, including Noll and Flor and Tersipion, all of which were brought to his attention by prot in 1990. He and some of his colleagues were also working with officials at the State Department in hopes of visiting Libya or, at a minimum, of arranging to import as much excrement as possible from a certain spider indigenous to that country. And he had put all his graduate students to work shining lights into mirrors, hoping they would skip across the laboratory at superlight speeds, so far without success. “Ah love it, ” Steve drawled. “It’s just like bein’ in a sci-fi novel. “