‘Maury wouldn’t have thought of it,’ Pris said. ‘Bundy – he’s a genius. He’s inspired. But it’s idiot savantry that he has; the rest of his brain is totally deteriorated by the hebephrenic process. I designed the Stanton and he built it, and it’s a success; you saw it. I don’t even want or need the credit; it was fun. Like this.’ She had resumed her tile-snipping. ‘Creative work,’ she said.
‘What did Maury do? Tie its shoelaces?’
‘Maury was the organizer. He saw to it that we had our supplies.’
I had the dreadful feeling that this calm account was god’s truth. Naturally, I could check with Maury. And yet – it did not seem to me that this girl even knew how to lie; she was almost the opposite from her father. Perhaps she took after her mother, whom I had never met. They had been divorced, a broken family, long before I met Maury and became his partner.
‘How’s your out-patient psychoanalysis coming?’ I asked her.
‘Fine. How’s yours?’
‘I don’t need it,’ I said.
‘That’s where you’re wrong. You’re very sick, just like me.” She smiled up at me. ‘Face facts.’
‘Would you stop that snap-snapping? So I can go to sleep?’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘I want to finish the octopus tonight.’
‘If I don’t get sleep,’ I said. ‘I’ll drop dead.’
‘So what?’
‘Please,’ I said.
‘Another two hours,’ Pris said.
Are they all like you?’ I asked her. ‘The people who emerge from the Federal clinics? The new young people who get steered back onto course? No wonder we’re having trouble selling organs.’
‘What sort of organs?’ Pris said. ‘Personally I’ve got all the organs I want.’
‘Ours are electronic.’
Mine aren’t. Mine are flesh and blood.’
‘So what,’ I said. ‘Better they were electronic and you went to bed and let your houseguest sleep.’
‘You’re no guest of mine. Just my father’s. And don’t talk to me about going to bed or I’ll wreck your life. I’ll tell my father you propositioned me, and that’ll end MASA ASSOCIATES and your career, and then you’ll wish you never saw an organ of any kind, electronic or not. So toddle on to bed, buddy, and be glad you don’t have worse troubles than not being able to sleep.’ And she resumed her snap-snapping.
I stood for a moment, wondering what to do. Finally I turned and went back into the spare room, without having found any rejoinder.
My god, I thought. Beside her, the Stanton contraption is all warmth and friendliness.
And yet, she had no hostility toward me. She had no sense that she had said anything cruel or hard – she simply went on with her work. Nothing had happened, from her standpoint. I didn’t matter to her.
If she had really disliked me – but could she do that? Did such a word mean anything in connection with her? Maybe it would be better, I thought as I locked my bedroom door. It would mean something more human, more comprehensible, to be disliked by her. But to be brushed off purposelessly, just so she would not be interfered with, so she could go on and finish her work – as if I were a variety of restraint, of possible interference and nothing more.
She must see only the most meager outer part of people, I decided. Must be aware of them in terms only of their coercive or non-coercive effects on her … thinking that, I lay with one ear pressed against the pillow, my arm over the other, dulling the snap-snapping noise, the endless procession of cuttings-off that passed one by one into infinity.
I could see why she felt attracted to Sam K. Barrows. Birds of a feather, or rather lizards of a scale. On the TV show, and again now, looking at the magazine cover… it was as if the brain part of Barrows, the shaved dome of his skull, had been lopped off and then skillfully replaced with some servo-system or some feedback circuit of selenoids and relays, all of which was operated from a distance off. Or operated by Something which sat upstairs there at the controls, pawing at the switches with tiny tricky convulsive motions.
And so odd that this girl had helped create the almost likable electronic simulacrum, as if on some subconscious level she was aware of the massive deficiency in herself, the emptiness dead center, and was busy compensating for it …
The next morning Maury and I had breakfast down the street from the MASA building at a little cafe. As we faced each other across the booth I said,
‘Listen, how sick is your daughter right now? If she’s still a ward of the mental health people she must still be –’
‘A condition like hers can’t be cured,’ Maury said, sipping his orange juice,‘it’s a life-long process that either moves into less or into more difficult stages.’
‘Would she still be classified under the McHeston Act as a ’phrenic if they were to administer the Benjamin Proverb Test at this moment to her?’
Maury said, ‘It wouldn’t be the Benjamin Proverb Test; they’d use the Soviet test, that Vigotsky-Luria colored blocks test, on her at this point. You just don’t realize how early she branched off from the norm, if you could be said to be part of the “norm”.’
‘In school I passed the Benjamin Proverb Test.’ That was the sine quo non for establishing the norm, ever since 1975, and in some states before that.
‘I would say,’ Maury said ‘from what they told me at Kasanin, when I went to pick her up, that right now she wouldn’t be classified as a schizophrenic. She was that for only three years, more or less. They’ve rolled her condition back to before that point, to her level of integration of about her twelfth year. And that’s a non-psychotic state and hence it doesn’t come in under the McHeston Act … so she’s free to roam around.’
‘Then she’s a neurotic.’
‘No, it’s what they call atypical development or latent or borderline psychosis. It can develop either into a neurosis, the obsessional type, or it can flower into full schizophrenia, which it did in Pris’ case in her third year in high school.’
While he ate his breakfast Maury told me about her development. Originally she had been a withdrawn child, what they call encapsulated or introverted. She kept to herself, had all sorts of secrets, such as a diary and private spots in the garden. Then, when she was about nine years old she started having fears at night, fears so great that by ten she was up a good deal of the night roaming about the house. When she was eleven she had gotten interested in science; she owned a chemistry set and did nothing after school but fiddle with that – she had few or no friends, and didn’t seem to want any.
It was in high school that real trouble had begun. She had become afraid to enter large buildings, such as classrooms, and even feared the bus. When the doors of the bus closed she thought she was being suffocated. And she couldn’t eat in public. Even if one single person was watching her, that was enough, and she had to drag her food off by herself, like a wild animal. And at the same time she had become compulsively neat. Everything had to be in its exact spot. She’d wander about the house all day, restlessly, making certain everything was clean – she’d wash her hands ten to fifteen times in a row.
‘And remember,’ Maury added, ‘she was getting very fat. She was hefty when you first met her. Then she started dieting. She starved herself to lose weight. And she’s still losing it. She’s always avoiding one food after another; she does that even now.’
‘And it took the Proverb Test to tell you that she was mentally ill?’ I said. ‘With a history like that?’
He shrugged. ‘We deluded ourselves. We told ourselves she was merely neurotic. Phobias