James Sallis: Ghost of a Flea

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,

All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means

and I have to wonder if that’s not what my life, all our lives, finally, are about, that imperative and the misreadings to which it forces us.

When I was a kid, parents would tell us not to cross our eyes because they’d get stuck and we’d never be able to uncross them, we’d have to walk around like that the rest of our lives. That’s what introspection can come down to. You keep on with it, sinking through level after level, after a while you can’t get back to the top. You just go on pounding out the same thoughts on the stone over and over, fitting your feet into old footprints. Alcohol’s the same way.

Years ago, I’d known I was in trouble when I found myself weeping uncontrollably over commercials on TV. A beleaguered housewife would smile around at her clean-as-new house, a couple’s bitter arguments trickle away as they drove their car towards snow-capped mountains, a man meet his wife for dinner, horribly late, carrying flowers-and I’d sit there sobbing, shaking, ruined. I was supposed to connect with the world, not collide with it, I remember thinking. Back then I’d got on to the habit of reading, listening to music and watching TV all at the same time as I drank. I never failed to think of David Bowie as the alien sitting before his bank of TV screens all tuned to different programs in The Man Who Fell to Earth. But I’d discovered that, when I did this, something curious took place. That I was able to follow the TV show without difficulty wasn’t surprising. But I found, and this was surprising, that I was more intimately connected with the music than at any other time, that it became impressed upon me in ways and to a degree it otherwise would not have been. And whatever books I read or half-read those times, whether Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons , Vin Packer’s The Twisted Ones or Himes’s The End of a Primitive, remained with me forever.

Then one night it all turned to shit. I’d been listening to Mahler’s Ninth, reading a novel set in Washington by some guy with a Greek name, and watching a movie in which a thirty-year-old actor playing the part of a high-school student confronted his girlfriend at a drive-in. She’d died in a car crash in the first twenty minutes of the film while riding with another young man but refused to stay put, clawing her way up out of the grave to come and tell the thirty-year-old that she’ll love him forever, there by his locker at school when he swings the door shut, now showing up at the drive-in while he’s on a date and rapping at his car window. “Forever,” she tells him, rotted flesh and a few teeth falling away as she mouths the word. “How fuckin’ long can forever be to a thirty-year-old!” I remember yelling at the screen. I’d been drinking pretty hard, apparently, harder than I thought or kept track of. I surfaced half a week or so later in the hospital, not Baptist or Touro or Mercy that time, but the state hospital over in Mandeville, this hulking, gray, utterly silent beast set among green trees and lawn where time was dipped in half-spoonfuls from the heart of glaciers and fossils deep in the earth. I was still going on about the movie as though it were real, as though everything in it had actually taken place.

The incidence of mental illness among Negroes is significantly higher than among the population at large, someone was telling me. This seemed to come from far away and from inside my head at the same time. I swam up, towards light. Away from the voice. Closer to the voice.

We sat facing one another across the kind of table you find in church basements and high school lunchrooms. It looked as if it had just been unpacked from its carton.

He looked the same way. Boy Doctor Ferguson, I thought, taking his name from the narrow slab of brass name tag above a pocket crammed with pens, rulers, tongue depressors, hemostats and, for all I knew, a dental drill. Ever alert to use of language when alert at all, I particularly admired that “population at large.” B. D. Ferguson had sparse hair the color of cotton candy and as insubstantial. He kept reaching up to brush it down, pretty much a losing proposition, since our own breaths bouncing back from the walls would be enough to dislodge it again. Whether from allergies, chronic lack of sleep or tears shed for patients, Ferguson’s eyes were shrimp-red. So, for quite different reasons, were mine. Men always have more in common than they think.

I had no idea, I said.

Few do. Why should you? Professionals who spend a lifetime studying it understand little enough. There’s no doubt the gauges we use are biased. We’ve known that for years. Culturally biased, as with IQ tests. Add in poor prenatal care if any at all, poverty, discrimination, lack of access to medical services-

Think I read about that in Partisan Review . This to a man upon whom irony was wasted.

— it’s a hopeless stew. Historically diagnosticians like myself-

Diagnosticians. Nice. And the dinosaur track of a metaphor there in the limestone. Hope for the boy after all?

— are far less reluctant, when confronted with minorities and those from lower socioeconomic levels, to attach such a potentially devastating diagnosis.

Well, I didn’t tell him, that was not my experience of the thing, not at all. Nor did I patiently or otherwise explain that, being well outside our culture, he might have no idea how to read the codes our signals came wrapped in. That mistakenly he took our distrust at being delivered into his hands for paranoia, our dissembling as some innate inability to discern falsehood from truth, when in fact it’s a highly developed form of just such discretion.

I’ve read the history your friend Don Walsh supplied the intake physician, B. D. went on. He’s been quite helpful.

Afternoon sunlight stretched long fingers across the table. A phone rang in the next room. Two teenage boys with shaved heads walked past the window eating Eskimo Pies. Life goes on.

Your mother shows clear signs of schizophrenia. Has no friends to speak of, avoids family contact-perhaps there’s been a rift of some sort? She lives alone, appears to have neither hobby nor outside interests nor, to all appearances, much of anything at all she enjoys or enjoys doing. I gather she leads a rigorously controlled life, every day exactly the same from hour to hour, growing upset at the slightest disturbance in her routine.

I sat watching this privileged young man, keeping track of sunlight popping knuckles on the tabletop and wondering how long after our talk before B. D. noted inappropriate affect in my chart. His handwriting would be cramped, precise. I’d flashed back to another interview, years before, with a psychiatrist who sat rocking in his desk chair the whole time, staring at me out of tiny round eyes with folds of fat like bitesize omelettes at the corner, neither of us speaking. I learned from the best.

The incidence of schizophrenia in the general population is approximately one in a hundred. As with so much else, we don’t understand why, but among children of schizophrenics, the incidence jumps to one in ten.

Sometimes too, he went on when I remained silent, it skips a generation.

Jumps. Skips. There was a poem there somewhere. A limerick or jingle. At very least a groaningly bad joke.

Your son has a frank history of mood disorders, reclusiveness, abrupt life changes. All this giving way to intermittent periods of productive, purposeful behavior.

Maybe you could tell me a little more about that.

After a while he said: Or maybe not.

After which (though his eyes continued to rise like twin red moons in my sky) my unsprightly self and B. D. Ferguson (certainly no son of the Fergus I knew from Joyce, O’Brien and the like) didn’t have much to say to one another. We went on not saying it for six sessions in as many days.