John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Kozlowski mused.

“Bitter!” Clumly said. “Except that that would depend on how much pride you had, wouldn’t it? And how much temper?”

Kozlowski said, “You think he was right?”

Clumly rubbed his chin, forehead wrinkled as a bulldog’s. “I don’t know. There’s something wrong with it, but damned if I can catch it.”

“It’s unchristian,” Kozlowski said, possibly joking. Clumly couldn’t tell.

Three minutes later the doctor came in.

“I’m Dr. Burns,” he said. He was small, excessively cheerful, very young. He wore a beard and plastic glasses with one side wired up. “You must be Police Chief Clumly.”

Clumly nodded. “This is Officer Kozlowski.”

They shook hands. The doctor spoke as if with pleasure of the run-down condition of the hospital, the limited staff, the barbarism of his colleagues. Clumly shook his head politely, not listening. Abruptly and irrelevantly Clumly said, “You don’t approve of shock treatments, then?” The doctor looked startled. “Everything’s relative,” he said. He smiled. There was an awkward pause. Then: “We go this way.”

He led them back to the entryroom and toward the stairs. As they went up, the doctor taking two steps at a time and sorting his keys, Clumly said, “How is she, doctor? What is your—” He hunted for the word.

“Prognosis,” the doctor said brightly. “Well, you’ll see. Not good, I’d say. As you may or may not be able to observe at a glance — it all depends — she hears voices. Projections, you know.” There was no one in the hallway that opened out at the head of the stairs. The doors to the left and right of the hallway were closed, perhaps locked. Not a sound came from any of them. “Her conscious mind is seriously crippled, possibly destroyed. The projections — the voices — are of course the unconscious mind at work, stirring up memories of old sensations — as for present sensation, she’s cut off from it entirely, you see. She, uh—” He selected a key and fitted it into the lock on the last of the high, peeling doors. He turned the key and opened the door an inch but paused, looking down the hallway, and went on with what he was saying. “She has emotions, sensations, and intuitions, but in all cases old ones, nightmarish memories, so to speak. As for intellect, it’s reduced to ashes. Ashes. The voices that mumble are, as you might say, dreamlike representations of the old emotions and so on. I’m telling you this to prepare you.”

Clumly nodded.

“Each case is different, interesting in its own unique way. The ordinary layman would be amazed at the infinite variety of psychotic avenues — no two exactly alike. Like snowflakes, you know, or crystals. Because of course no two people are alike, not even identical twins. Put it this way. We receive sensations — you do, I do, Officer Kozlowski here does. You feel the rain falling, you see green leaves, you hear a frying pan fall off the sink. Well now some people have a more acute sense of feeling than other people have. Some people hear more acutely, others see more acutely, and so on. All this can be measured, at least relatively: a cathode in the brain can register the degree of psychoelectric charge an individual gets from any given sensation — A440 extended to thirty seconds, for example. But sensation is the ground of our experience, not so? First we sense things: a bull in a field, say. Then we ratiocinate. After that — or before that (there are several theories) — we emote. Finally we intuit. To be healthy, normal people — if we may use the expression — we need a balance of sensation, ratiocination, and the rest. Or if not a balance, then an adequate compensation. A fascinating business, let me tell you. The Germans—”

“Excuse me,” Clumly said. He pointed tentatively toward the doorknob with one curved finger.

“Yes of course,” the doctor said. He opened the door.

“The Germans are far ahead of us in this. They did some really magnificent experiments during the War — induced neuroses, then altered the sensation-field, by blinding the subject, for instance, or terminating his hearing, et cetera. It’s incredible, the ways in which neurotics compensate. And if that’s true of a neurotic, you see, we can hazard that it’s equally true of the so-called normal psyche. — Oh, don’t worry, she can’t hear a thing. At least not from the outside. — Kathleen?” He clapped his hands.

She sat perfectly still, hands lightly folded in her lap, her back against the wall. Her eyes were open and contained no life. She was so much like a corpse, in fact, that Clumly caught his breath. There was nothing whatever in the room, only the bare floor, the bare, chipped walls, the naked window. She smelled of urine. Her hair was gray, cut short just at the middle of her ears. Some of it had fallen out, over her temples. The face was old.

“She never move at all?” Clumly said.

“Almost never. The layman might think her an absolute vegetable, but actually that would be an oversimplification. She may possibly have a fine intelligence in there, fast asleep. If there were time enough, it might be possible to rouse it. But there isn’t of course. With five years of concentration on no patient but her, using violent pleasure and violent pain, I might be able to get her to smile when I enter the room. Five more and I might be able to get her to play with blocks, say, or rock a doll. Five more — well, you see how it is.”

Clumly put his hands on his knees and bent down closer, squinting into the eyes, looking for some spark. There was nothing. “How do you know she hears voices?”

“Ah!” the doctor said. “An excellent question. — Shall we go down now?”

They followed him to the door. He held it for them, then closed it and locked it.

Clumly said, looking at the doorknob, “Why do you lock the door?”

The doctor wrinkled his nose with disgust. “Rule,” he said. “An idiotic rule.” He dropped the keyring in his pocket, and they started down the hall. “So,” he said, “the voices. We don’t know what she actually hears, of course, we are entirely in the area of theory. We know she used to hear voices, and we assume — it’s all very complicated really, but one can express it simply without altogether distorting the matter — we assume she has relinquished her hold on external reality out of preference for the actuality of her voices, if you see the distinction.” He pinched his own cheek — an odd sort of gesture, it seemed to Clumly — then went on with great interest in his subject. “At certain periods outer reality does seem to reach her: the nurses find her sitting in the middle of the room, for example. A clear indication that she is aware of the walls — and resents them, needless to say. Feels bombarded by them. That’s the effect of reality on us all, you know. A constant blitz.” They were going down the stairs now, Kozlowski in front, then Clumly, the doctor behind. “And we all have our periods of withdrawal, of course. At a time of sorrow, for example. When a loved one has died the whole world seems full and terrible, you know what I mean? The trees are suddenly more oppressive, intolerably so. A car horn has a nightmarish kind of effrontery, or a birdsong. Not the tripe of poets, I don’t mean anything like that. No no! Sorrow, which is to say violated memory, a crack in the armor of our individuality, takes precedence for us. Thus in the moment of the catastrophe sights and sounds are unusually clear, unusually violent and distinct, an imposition. But after the first shock we withdraw to the point where sights are barely seen, sounds barely heard. Interesting?”

Clumly nodded. He thought a moment, then nodded again.

“This way,” Dr. Burns said. “I’d like you to meet my son.” He led them down a hallway opening to the right off the entryroom, a series of doors exactly like the doors upstairs, but here the doors had metal signs, some of them the names of doctors. “Kathleen’s a fascinating case,” he said. “I wish I could give it the time it deserves. I have some theories, actually. But this is no place for trying out one’s theories. We barely get the taxes paid.” He came to a door with the name Orr on the plate, and got out his keys. “This is my office,” he said. “The nameplates are old. It’s been years since there was a Dr. Orr in this place.”; He laughed, then shrugged a little fiercely, and unlocked the door. “Are you familiar with the Jungjan theory of the stages of life?”