Mystery Girl: A Novel (12 page)

I decided to take his case. My reasons were several: First, as a student of human nature (and by nature here I mean the grand landscapes, ever-changing climates, and infinitely wondrous wildlife of
the unconscious and still mainly uncharted mind), I could not pass up the opportunity to observe this extraordinary specimen at close quarters. Second, I was fond of him, despite his numerous shortcomings. He represented a rare type, a dying breed, the intellectual bohemian idler, the supposed man of “books and art and ideas,” who appeared, if only by virtue of his incompetence, to remain apart from the world, untouched by the love of money, status, fame or even normal respectability, and who asked only to dream on, but who awoke in shock to find himself in the wrong century, the wrong country, the wrong world. Certainly, the wrong class. Lastly, though I am not technically speaking a doctor, nor a believer in spirits, I do try to ease the pain of my fellow humans as they pass through this plane; being of service to the sick is my code. Thus I could not turn him away, for whether he knew it or not, he came to me as a patient, crying out silently and unconsciously for my help. After all, he arrived asking to become a detective, when he had never before in his life considered doing any such thing. Why? To solve the mystery of himself. To find what had been stolen from him: his wife. And to discover by whom.

In “A Difficulty in The Path of Psycho-Analysis” (1917), Freud introduces the concept of the Third Wound to describe the repeated assaults that scientific knowledge had inflicted on human conceit: first, Copernicus discovered that the sun does not revolve around the earth and that man is not in fact the true center of the universe. The second blow was delivered by Darwin: man is not set apart from the animals, nor formed by a creator in His image, but is in fact a creature among others, a variation on a theme, and no longer the center of life on earth either. The final, vanquishing blow, was of course Freud’s own: his discovery of the unconscious—that immense internal sea, full of fears and wishes, memories and fantasies, whose depths remain largely unsounded—revealed the truth, that our inner world is as alien as the universe without. “[I]ts inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is
just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.”

Man, it turns out, is not even at the center of his own mind. The greater part of our own life happens, one might say, behind our backs. “The ego is not master in its own house.”

Never had this insight of Freud’s seemed truer than when I met K. for our second session. I had set him the task of surveilling and observing a woman who I believed possessed the key to an important mystery, which I will not undertake to describe here (see The Case of the Mystery Girl). Arriving to make his report, I was amazed to see him struggle as he tried, somewhat desperately, to present himself as an eager professional, grasping a notebook and pen, ticking off irrelevant details as his unconscious leaked relentlessly through the cracks. While his words and tone were literate, reserved, even prudish, the dirt under his fingernails and the leaves in his hair, even the faint air of canine feces about his person, spoke of an almost savage state of regression. The partially unzipped fly and bunched underpants visible over his rear waistband were due, no doubt, to squatting for hours in the dark. But the fact that they remained uncorrected, left deliberately if unknowingly on display—what purpose could they have but to assert his sexual identity to another, more powerful male, to “present”? Then of course there was the blond lady’s wig peeking from his knapsack, symbolizing the wife perhaps, the burden of a repressed Other who would not remain hidden, or else the wish for a burial, the death of the troublesome mate. Or was it his own feminine side, creeping from the darkness, the “woman within”? Of the meaning of the water bottle in his rucksack, which I found upon later inspection to contain urine, I will not even venture a guess. Suffice it to say, the man was keeping secrets, from me and from himself.

In an attempt to probe more deeply, I suggested to K. that he set aside his “notes,” and try a simple relaxation exercise as an aide-mémoire. He agreed. However, he vocalized his resistance by asserting
that such techniques “never work” for him, insisting that he cannot be “hypnotized” because he tried once when quitting smoking, and launching into a long and largely pointless anecdote about acupuncture and a yoga class his wife once made him attend.

Nevertheless, it was clear that the larger part of him was eager, even desperate to be heard, for no sooner had I begun to talk him through a very simple deep breathing and visualization exercise of the sort recommended to tense air passengers than he fell into a kind of trance, revealing a deep and precise memory. He also left some drool on my chair cushion.

Our next meeting was hardly conducive to analysis, the fault entirely mine. I was indisposed, suffering a recurrence of the illness that has plagued me for most of my life, and which I cannot avoid addressing here in some detail in order to proceed with this report.

Much of the exploring and learning a young person does, particularly when he or she is bright, takes the form of mystery-solving. Why is the sky blue? How does gravity work? What causes fire? Can cats fly? What is in that book I’m not allowed to read, that drawer I’m forbidden to open? Even the most primal and immortal questions of all can be seen as mysteries. Freud and the Ancients offer their famous readings, but I saw Oedipus as the first detective story and with the first, best, and now most tired twist: Oedipus Detectus searches for a killer who turns out to be himself. Although our own crimes and secrets are in general less horrific (and our punishments less severe than poor Ed’s), the essential mystery we all solve is the same: Where did we come from? Where do we go? The child peeking through a keyhole at his mother taking a bath, or crawling on the floor beneath her skirt, or lying in bed hearing her parents wrestle in the next room, her father’s curses, her mother’s cry—each little gumshoe learns the shocking secret for himself, the truth they try to keep us from uncovering: We enter the world naked and bloody through a hidden opening in our mother’s body, where our father has secretly planted a seed. And each of us will leave this world as
well, disappearing one by one, as in a late night horror show, until we too vanish forever. Sex and death stand behind everything, before the beginning and after the end.

Of course, my early career as a detective in training was a bit humbler. Early cases included: Who the Hell Keeps Taking the Paper? (the next-door neighbor), Where Does the Guy Up the Block Go in the Middle of the Night? (to visit the next-door neighbor’s wife while he’s out of town on business), and Where Is the Cat When He’s Not Here? (shockingly, it turned out that my cat, Patchy, had a whole other family, who let him in, fed him, and petted him, calling him by another completely different name, Mr. Boops.)

Although a bit disillusioning, these first ventures nevertheless inspired in my young mind a vision of the world as full of enticing secrets to be discovered. The next step, the lesson that opened up my interest in psychology, came a bit later, when I began to ponder the concept of lying. Reprimanded and severely spanked for my own mendacity, in the Case of the Vanished Chocolate Bar, I began to wonder how my mother could “tell” I was lying, she said, by the way I twitched and shifted. I remember the term she used and which fascinated me to no end: “You gave yourself away.” Why, I wondered, would I do that? Why would anyone? Nevertheless, as my mother astutely observed: “Everybody has a tell.”

So the man who arrived at my father’s place of business, the kitchen table, promising him that his debt would be paid on Friday when his check cleared, was deliberately lying, while the next man, who confidently assured my father that he would recoup all losses on the next game, which was a “lock” was, in his own mind, really telling the truth, despite being equally “full of crap.” Why? He was lying, not to us, but to himself! This was a life-changing insight: while truth and lies are opposing concepts, they are not set in their logical relationship. The honest person constantly puts forward the falsehood he believes, while the liar unknowingly reveals the truth. Within a few months, I was reading Freud, and soon I was skilled enough to see through most anyone, even my mother, the best gambler
I ever saw, when she spoke the first of the only two lies she ever told me, an hour after my father, who had been yelling on the phone and smoking a Pall Mall as usual, suddenly clutched his chest and fell, crashing into the coffee table and burning the rug. I stared as his face became a mask, mouth open, eyes still. I peeked from my window as men took him away in what looked like a plastic garbage bag and loaded him into an ambulance. And when my weeping mother told me that he was now in heaven, watching over me, and could hear me when I prayed, I knew that she was bluffing. I knew she had nothing at all.

It is a truism that psychologists and therapists are first drawn to the field in order to solve their own problems. Perhaps only those of us who realize that we ourselves are unsolvable go on to be great: the powers of insight we develop are that much stronger, and, useless on ourselves, they snap into sharp focus when aimed at another.

In my own case, my difficulties did not begin to emerge until my late teens, though looking back now I wonder, did I have a premonition about my own fate? Was I somehow, unconsciously, preparing myself? If so, it was of little use. When my turn came, I believed the lies my own mind told, just like an amateur.

At first I began to suspect that someone was watching me. I wasn’t sure who, of course, because I couldn’t catch them. But I became convinced that “they” were lurking outside the house, ducking behind a tree when I turned or quickly pulling their shades. When I drove with my mother, I would become certain a car was following us. I would force her to drive in circles, change lanes, make sudden, aimless turns, but this proved or disproved nothing. Perhaps the reason the suspicious blue car didn’t follow was that the driver knew I suspected him and so was acting like an innocent person driving a blue car to trick me. Or perhaps it had been the green car all along.

As my fears worsened, I took to wearing disguises. First I tried to hide this new obsession (my obsession with hiding) from my mother by simply donning a hat or scarf or dark glasses. Soon however, I
became an expert, devising and refining elaborate characters with wigs, makeup, clothes, and prostheses: an old man, a large woman, a mailman, a blind beggar. Of course on some level I knew this was ridiculous. I am not a small person, and leaving my house in an Afro wig, my skin darkened and wearing a housedress, did not make me less conspicuous. Quite the contrary! But I could not stop.

Finally I gave up leaving the house altogether. My mother was growing deeply concerned, but I was in denial, still consulting for colleagues via the mail, reviewing case files and critiquing their reports. Still, a crash was inevitable, and as my paranoid fantasies combined with the compulsive eating that marks my acute manic phase, I would order grand feasts, instructing the deliverymen to leave the food on the porch. Finally I lost all control and ordered Indian, Chinese, pizza, Mexican, and Thai at once. The deliverymen arrived to find me in an upper window, disguised as a rabbi and ordering them to place the food in a basket that I lowered from a rope while tossing loose cash onto the lawn.

It was after this incident that I apparently blacked out and woke up in Green Haven, a well-regarded hospital for the mentally ill. I was medicated, stabilized, and returned to a coherent, if shaken state. They say that doctors make the worst patients. I certainly had as little interest in my psychiatrist’s attempts to fix me as I had regard for my hosts’ ideas of quality in food, books, or housekeeping. My only concern was to get out as soon as possible, first by arguing with my keepers and demonstrating my intellectual superiority (this rarely wins people over, I’ve found), and later by acceding to their demands—interpreting their splotches, solving their puzzles, coughing up their preformed epiphanies, and, most important, swallowing their pills.

The pills! That chemical rainbow, those little time bombs of sanity, were to define the next era of my life. The cycle was always the same. For a while, I eat the brain candy, and life is placid as a suburban kiddy pool: chlorinated, clear, depthless, and dull. Sluggish and sheepish but technically sane, I paddle along, until something,
a case, a clue, a crisis, or sheer boredom, restarts my mind. Inevitably I forget to take the pills or I “forget” to take the pills, or I misremember that I did take them or I just decide I don’t need them anymore. I’m better. I’m fine. Actually, I feel great. Greater! Really, I’ve never felt so good. The air is fresh and the sunshine sparkles and I savor every moment of the day. Food tastes wonderful (uh-oh) and music sounds divine (really this is the only medicine anyone needs) and I am grateful to be alive. I find myself deeply engrossed in my work, my mind blooming with new ideas, and frankly I am more brilliant than ever (though of course I am never brilliant enough to recognize that this happens every time, that this very brilliance is a symptom of the coming crash). Finally, I become so brilliant that I can barely keep up with my own amazing brain as it races ahead, without sleep, without cease, seeing more and more, understanding more and more, reading the world like a foreign text that suddenly makes sense, like a closed book that suddenly falls open.

It is at this point that some small part of me, some inner librarian, taps my shoulder or whispers in my ear and asks, “Isn’t this merely a fiction? Don’t we remember how it ends?” But I don’t listen, my ears are plugged and I am racing ahead to the climactic chapters: paranoia, delusions, epic binge eating, intellectual ecstasy, and suicidal despair. And then I turn the blank page.

I wake up in Green Haven with a tube in my arm and Doctor smiling kindly down at me and I know it has happened again. And again. And again. For it is a circular story, an eternal return, with minor variations (an escape, in my underwear, from dwarf-commandos who turn out to be girlscouts, a taxi trip to Sacremento chasing a cloud) and one major development: as the years passed, I ceased to be a troublemaker. I was too much humbled. What good was my supposedly great brain if it could not help me, if in fact it was my own worst enemy, the nemesis that beat me every time? (For those who are keeping score, this was the occasion of my mother’s second and last lie to me: her assurance that I was going to be fine. Once again her poker face revealed exactly what was on the cards
she pressed lovingly to her maternal bosom. I will never be fine. She was, as she’d say, full of crap.)