Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

Finally…I just want to acknowledge and thank two people I haven’t mentioned thus far who helped with the autobiography — the psychiatrist Dr. Robert Berger and the psychic Janet Horton.

Bobby Berger is a very interesting, extraordinarily smart, compassionate guy I met years ago at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, when he was the director of forensic psychiatry there. In early May of 2014, I drove up to Westport, Connecticut, to visit him and talk about Gone with the Mind . (He currently works for the Correctional Managed Health Care Division of UConn Health, which provides medical and mental-health services for the jails and prisons of Connecticut.) He and his wife and son live in a wonderful old house up there with a rambunctiously affectionate French bulldog named Dot. We sat down in his office, I drank black coffee, he smoked Camels. I began talking to him about my original conception for Gone with the Mind— the first-person shooter game involving Mussolini’s flying balcony, fighting your way backwards through my life until getting into my mother’s uterus and unraveling the zygote. Berger understood instinctively that this, far from representing any kind of suicidal imperative, signified the intention to return home, to a pre-individuated existence, a world before man, to rid oneself of one’s self, to truly become something else, etc. We chatted about video games a bit, and I told him about how I’d found it impossible to get beyond even the most rudimentary level of Call of Duty and quickly became demoralized and bored with it all. Then I showed him a photo on my phone of the bathroom tiles with the craquelure suggesting the lineaments, the face of the Imaginary Intern, and I got the feeling that he was a little, I don’t know, a little skeptical about his existence, and I said, “Y’know, it’s funny, it was actually the Imaginary Intern who suggested I talk to you in the first place!” (He showed me a photo of him and his wife, Linda, dressed as Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick for a Halloween party.) I explained how the book in its original conception began to seem like this tedious obligation to me and how the Imaginary Intern helped me reconceptualize it, how we wanted to create an autobiography that is a record of its own making, that hides nothing, but rather renders its mode of production transparent— prozrachnost . I don’t remember if I showed him a picture of her or not, but I certainly discussed with him how much I’d been thinking about the Russian constructivist Varvara Stepanova. Berger grinned at me. “You’re into her. You have a crush on her, don’t you?” Even though Stepanova died in 1958 (or perhaps because she had), I blushed, making it obvious that, yes, I did have a crush on her. I explained the book’s protagonist — an angry, moribund man who, on the inside, is a sleepy little boy wandering around the piazza in his pajamas, holding a balloon on a string, who, more than anything else, just wants everyone in the world to like him, etc. It was difficult describing the project to him because it seemed to me at the time so abstract and inchoate. But he easily assimilated it all and seemed to get it completely. “Something about what you were saying before about your fascination with cyborgs and the surgical robot who removed your prostate gave me an idea,” he said. He got a booklet out of a folder. “This is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It’s a standardized psychometric test we use to assess and analyze an individual’s personality dynamic. It’s got about six hundred true-or-false questions. You fill this out and then the computer will generate a report.” Well, I thought this was absolutely perfect! I was just delighted with the idea that psychodiagnostic algorithms would generate a posthumanist psychiatric profile of me for the autobiography. And both the Imaginary Intern and I felt this would really streamline the process, that it would save us a tremendous amount of work, and obviate the need for all that cloying introspection and redemptive candor that we both found so nauseating and counterrevolutionary.

So, I just want to read several excerpts from this interpretive report… (MARK crouches down, opens an old nylon messenger bag on the table, and thumbs through a miscellany of papers.)

Fuck… (He flips through the sheaf of papers once again, shaking his head in consternation.)

Well…unfortunately…

I’ve got it. (She reaches into her handbag and retrieves the MMPI-2 report.)

Would you like me to just read it?

Sure.

The whole thing?

Just read the highlighted sections, please.

(Skimming through the report.)

The highlighted sections…the highlighted sections…okay:

(She clears her throat.)

“He endorsed a number of unusual, bizarre ideas that—”

Mom…first, could you just read the test date on the, uh…on the cover page, and then the ID number, which, if I remember correctly, is on the upper right-hand corner of each ensuing page…I just want to establish the authenticity of the document.

The test date is May 7, 2014. And the ID number is, um…let’s see…upper right-hand corner…okay…the ID number is 654321.

Thank you. Now the highlighted sections, if you would…

“He endorsed a number of unusual, bizarre ideas that suggest some difficulties with his thinking…He may physically or verbally attack others when he is angry…He is likely to be considered by others as a pervasively aggressive person…[He] apparently holds some unusual beliefs that suggest he may be somewhat disconnected from reality…and might experience unusual symptoms such as delusional beliefs, circumstantial and tangential thinking, and loosening of associations…He feels intensely angry, hostile, and resentful of others, and he would like to get back at them…He may be visibly uneasy around others, sits alone in group situations…his unusual thinking and bizarre ideas need to be taken into consideration in any diagnostic formulation…His acknowledged problems with alcohol and drug use should be addressed in therapy.” (MARK folds his arms across his chest, juts out his chin, and surveys the food court.)

I don’t come here tonight as a panegyrist of my own bowel movements, believe me. That’s what mothers are for. Thank you, Mom.

I just have one comment about the report. I believe that I have a genetic predisposition to violence and narcissistic acting-out. This is essentially what my mother was corroborating in her introduction earlier when, describing my first birthday party, she said, “He received beautiful gifts, put both fists in the cake, cried at the company, and later in the evening ‘performed’ for them and for the camera.” I believe that I inherited my predisposition to violence from my mother who, again, in her introduction, admitted first to assaulting her aunt Bea: “That summer, I was really acting out, I know I was…I remember I slapped my aunt Beatrice across the face. That’s the thing I remember the most that shows how completely wacko I was. She was an overbearing person and bossy, and she said something to me that I didn’t take well, and instead of just telling her to mind her own business or whatever, I just reached over and gave her a good one across the face.” And then, when she was talking about that anti-Semitic nurse at the hospital, admitted, “I walked toward her, as I remember, one or two steps, because I really wanted to just do something horrible to her.”