Raveling (29 page)

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a fact I’ve been hiding all my life.”

The essential feature of the Paranoid Type of Schizophrenia is the presence of prominent delusions or auditory hallucinations
in the context of a relative preservation of cognitive functioning and affect…. Delusions are typically persecutory or grandiose,
or both, but delusions with other themes (e.g., jealousy, religiosity, or somatization) may also occur. The delusions may
be multiple, but are usually organized around a coherent theme. Hallucinations are also typically related to the content of
the delusional theme. Associated features include anxiety, anger, aloofness, and argumentativeness. The individual may have
a superior and patronizing manner and either a stilted, formal quality or extreme intensity in interpersonal interactions.
The persecutory themes may predispose the individual to suicidal behavior, and the combination of persecutory and grandiose
delusions with anger may predispose the individual to violence. Onset tends to be later in life than the other types of Schizophrenia,
and the distinguishing characteristics may be more stable over time. These individuals usually show little or no impairment
on
neuropsychological or other cognitive testing. Some evidence suggests that the prognosis for the Paranoid Type may be considerably
better than for the other types of Schizophrenia, particularly with regard to occupational functioning and capacity for independent
living
.

“He wanted to kill me,” I told her, “when we were kids. Eric wanted to torture me.”

“Did he ever do it?” she asked. “Torture you, I mean?”

Once, just after Fiona disappeared, when I was ten, I think, Eric located me in the woods, had come looking for me out there,
in fact. I was hiding in a particular bramble of bushes, playing with a nest of tiny, newborn, almost hairless mice. I heard
my brother’s dry voice behind me. “Do you know what that man did to her?”

I turned around. “Shhh.” I put my finger to my lips. “There’s mice here. Check it out.”

“Fuck the mice,” Eric said. “Don’t you want to know?”

I shook my head.

“He raped her. Little tiny Fiona. He raped the shit out of her. He tied her tiny little stick arms together behind her back,
and he spread her little legs open, and he raped her. He stuck his huge, mean penis directly inside her tiny little-girl vagina.”

“Stop it,” I said.

“Why?” Eric said. “Don’t you want to know what happened to our little sister? Don’t you care?”

I put my hands over my ears, but Eric slapped them away from my head.

“Then he fucked her in the ass.” He was whispering now.
I was starting to cry, I think. On the outside, I felt like I was melting, my face getting all hot, but inside I was dividing,
losing language. “He pushed his enormous, man-sized penis into her tiny little asshole.”

I said, “Please, Eric.”

“It could have been you,” Eric said.

“No.”

“It would have been you if you were just a little bit younger. They like boys better, everybody knows that. They’re called
pedophiles
.” He overpronounced it.

“No, they don’t.”

It was getting more and more difficult to squeeze out my words. And now, some of what Eric was saying seemed hard to understand,
like he was speaking a new language, something I hadn’t heard before.

“He’s out of jail now, you know. They released him. And he’ll be coming after you. He probably wanted you to begin with. He
wanted to fuck a little boy instead of a little girl and now he’s angry that he didn’t get to. Oh yes,” Eric said. And when
I opened my eyes I saw his face, but it wasn’t his face. It had too many muscles in it. “He’s definitely coming back. He’ll
probably fuck you in the mouth first—” I had never thought about this before, had never heard of anyone doing something like
that “—fuck you until you gag, until you practically choke to death, and then he’ll tear apart your ass. You’ll be lucky if
he kills you before he cuts your penis off. They like to eat children. That’s why they can’t find Fiona’s body. That’s why
she’s gone, because he ate her.” It seemed like I could hear Eric now, could hear Eric’s voice, but at the same time I could
not understand what he was saying, the words themselves. I was the wolf boy. I let my eyes roll back into my head. I was clutching
at the dirt next to me.

“Dissociating,” Katherine said. “It’s something children do to deal with situations they don’t like.” She touched the tip
of her silvery pen to the yellow pad of paper. “Let me ask you something, Pilot.” She leaned into the question. “When you
were out in the woods recently, before you came to the clinic, did you feel like the wolf boy?”

I thought about it. I had lost the power of speech out there, I remembered that. I had forgotten myself. “Maybe,” I said.
“I just remember everything becoming extremely concrete, more solid than it should be, everything flat and artificial.”

“You couldn’t speak, though.”

“No,” I said. “I couldn’t. I just, all I could do was see things and hear things, you know, just the trees, the highway, and
there were all these thoughts, thoughts that didn’t seem to be mine, exactly.”

“Do you remember having that experience as the wolf boy, that same concrete reality feeling?”

I thought back. I remembered bringing my face closer and closer to Eric’s trap, then pulling away. “Yes,” I said, “I guess
I do.”

“You had a traumatic experience when your sister disappeared, and then your brother teased you cruelly. He shouldn’t have.”
Katherine’s face softened. Her eyes, emerald shards glowing, brought their focus into mine.

“Why did he do that?”

“Perhaps you can talk to him about it now.”

“What good would that do?”

“He could apologize.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

I knew that Hannah was listening upstairs. I could see her face responding to everything we said.

“Pilot,” Katherine said, “it’s not ridiculous at all.”

Eric left me there, deep inside those bushes, where I had found the nest of baby mice. I remember that my face became hot
for a while, and then I remember feeling the liquid glass pouring over me. I took a small pointy stick and pushed it, one
by one, into the heads of the little hairless mice inside the nest. Their tiny skulls made a popping sound when the stick
poked through. And the remaining ones started squeaking and wriggling around frenetically, a panic settling over them. I imagined
the little mouse parents coming back and finding the little mouse babies all dead like this, their tiny skulls crushed. So
I picked up each of their little dead baby mouse bodies and flung them outside of the bushes, knowing that it would be worse
for the mouse parents this way, to come home and find them missing.

Find them missing. Find them missing.

I pawed at the dirt beside me. My throat felt rough, like I had been growling.

Find them missing.

They were in bed again, the
enclosure
dimly shadowed, lights out, their clothes on the bare floor beside them, both huddled under a thin sheet and Katherine’s
only blanket, a white summer throw she had managed to keep after the breakup with Mark. A wind was building steadily outside,
beating itself like a giant moth against the apartment-complex windows.