Silent Boy (24 page)

He said nothing.

‘Shall I go?’

No answer. He still studied me.

‘Is that what you want?’

Silence.

The world sat on me. I felt tired and unhappy and out-of-sorts. ‘Listen,’ I said,’ I’m going.’I turned and went to the bed. I lifted the lid off my box. Kevin remained at the window but he watched me.

‘You want these?’ I lifted the sketchpads out of the box.

He shook his head.

‘I got them for you. They’re no good to me. I can’t draw. You sure you don’t want them?’

‘No.’

‘The pencils?’ I held up the box of colored pencils.

Again he shook his head.

I pitched the whole works into the wastebasket. ‘You don’t want anything, do you?’

Kevin shrugged.

I then picked up my jacket and put it on. I closed the box. ‘I don’t know what you wanted from me, Kevin. I can’t change things for you. I can’t go into your head like some surgeon and take out all the rotting parts. I can’t take away from you all the bad things that have happened to you. I can’t do any of that. No one can. There isn’t a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a witch doctor or a wizard who can. It’s all up to you. The most I can do is be with you. I can come along. I can keep you company. But the journey itself is yours.’

He looked away from me. I zipped my jacket and turned to leave.

‘You could have called me Bryan,’ he said softly.

‘What?’

‘I said, you could have called me Bryan. If you’d really cared.’

I was very nearly to the door when I paused. I turned back to look at him. He was still leaning against the window, hands in his pockets, shoulders drawn up. His eyes were on his shoes and not on me.

‘Would that have made a difference, Kevin?’

It was he who was now about to cry. Still upset myself, my instinct was to get out of there. My anger ran deep. Yet I knew if I walked out the door I would be leaving for good. Kevin would never ask for me back. Even if I left him a face-saving way, I knew he wouldn’t. I remained immobile at the door.

The silence grew long and thin and brittle between us.

Kevin swallowed to keep the tears back but in the end he was unable to. Head down, shoulders up, he stood with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Then slowly, he began to slide down the window and the wall to collapse into a small heap on the floor. Burying his face in his arms, he wept in great, inelegant sobs.

I stood. I did not go to him because this was not the moment to do it. These were not that sort of tears. So I only stood, too warm in my jacket. Beyond us, behind me, were the sounds of supper arriving on the ward. I could smell the homey odors of beef and potatoes, mixing with the everlasting hospital antiseptic.

I came over and squatted down beside Kevin. His tears were hard but short-lived. Within moments he surfaced for air. Cradling his head in his arms, he looked at me.

I smiled, sadly, for the things we had lost, for the innocence, whatever innocence there had been between us. Then I reached across the gulf between us and hugged him. It seemed a long time coming, that hug, and we clung to one another like survivors of a disaster.

‘If only I could have been Bryan,’ he said at last, when we broke apart. ‘If only I could have been Bryan. Even to you I wasn’t. Even you couldn’t see him.’ Kevin studied my face a short moment before looking away. ‘That’s what’s wrong with the world, you know. So many of us shouldn’t have ever been.’

He paused and sighed.

‘We’re like ghosts,’ he said, ‘like mirror-ghosts, really. Instead of spirits without bodies, we’re bodies without spirits. Empty shells with the wrong persons trapped inside. Or with no one inside at all. Mirror-ghosts. Half a million, half a billion, geez, half a world probably, of mirror-ghosts. Just bodies taking up space, walking around empty.’

He brought a finger up and wiped away the last traces of tears from his eyes.

‘If only I could have been Bryan, if I could have really been Bryan. But I’m not. I’m just a mirror-ghost too.’

T
he one person keeping body and soul together for me was Jeff. Despite our working different sessions, he still usually came over to my house for a meal in the evenings. The only change was that now he often brought his roommate along too. Neither of them was too keen on cooking, it seemed, and I was glad enough for company after Kevin that I didn’t object too much to doing it.

Jeff’s roommate was a big, strapping German named Hans who taught the language at the local college and played semi-professional hockey. I liked Hans immensely from the first time I met him. He had the polished, urbane, intellectual style so common to European men and yet was full of humor. And exceptionally tolerant of Charity, who had decided he was the best thing since sliced bread. Hans was also very handy around the house, and for the first time in years all my drains ran, no hinges squeaked and there were honest-to-goodness shelves replacing my brick-and-board concoctions.

Jeff was the only person I knew who could persistently invite himself to dinner and make you feel it was your privilege. Hans felt guilty about it, I think, and hence, all the handyman behavior, but Jeff remained unabashed. However, he honestly was saving my sanity in those tremendously difficult weeks with Kevin. He and I would stand out in the kitchen peeling potatoes and talking, while Hans entertained Charity, if she was over, or puttered about the house. After dinner we would all do dishes, me washing, Jeff drying and Hans forever flicking the dish towel at Charity, who would shriek with delight and bait him into doing it again. Jeff was a fanatic for board games, so if he did not have duty, we would sit around afterward, losing ourselves in Scrabble or Clue or Sorry! Hans loved backgammon but in the end gave up ever teaching Jeff or me to play it. It was too highbrow for my tastes, and Jeff preferred the elemental malice of wiping me out at Monopoly.

But amidst our laughter, Jeff and I spent a god-awful amount of time trying to understand Kevin. The difficulty with that was that in the process, we had to devote a certain amount of time to trying to understand each other and ourselves. We were quite different people, Jeff and I, and while that brought a wider perspective to the problem, it also brought disagreement between us.

The most serious problem I had and had had throughout my ventures into all sides of treatment of the mentally ill was that I was an atheist amongst the pious. I could
not
bring myself to honestly believe in any of the theories of psychology or psychiatry, whether they were Freud’s, Skinner’s, mine or anyone else’s. They were all guesses and no more. And thus, to me, the schools of thought and the followings that had grown up around each theorist’s ideas, while interesting, all seemed of the same fabric as the emperor’s new clothes.

Certainly, I enjoyed a rousing session of theorizing as much as the next person. There was nothing so exciting to me as the thought that that
might
be the reason for a certain behavior or action. But I could never carry it beyond that intellectual-curiosity stage. I wished I did know but I didn’t and I couldn’t make myself believe I did. This quickly branded me as a heretic.

And it drove Jeff wild. While he was not among the hardliners in psychiatry, like Dr Rosenthal, he was a firm believer. He fretted about transference and the fact that working the way he was with Kevin, he could not properly distance himself. But what bothered him even more was my part in it, that he could not convert me to what he considered to be basic truths about the human mind. He would have preferred, I think, for me even to hold completely polarized views to his, but that I held none at all troubled him. Of course, I wasn’t much better. I couldn’t see how he
could
believe. He was so intelligent; how could someone with all those brains actually think we
had
answers when we so obviously didn’t. If Freud were right, I’d rant, why didn’t he have a hundred percent success rate? The same percentage of people are helped with psychoanalysis as are helped with laying on of hands. Explain that, Jeff.

I slumped onto the living room couch without even bothering to take off my jacket. Jeff and Hans were already there, and Jeff, in one of his rare philanthropic moods, had brought supper in the form of half a dozen Big Macs, fries and Cokes. Charity was ecstatic. The whole house stank of hamburgers. On the coffee table, Jeff had the innards of two Big Macs strewn out while he made sure he wasn’t going to be poisoned by any stray dill pickles. When I flopped down, Jeff spun a Styrofoam hamburger container top full of dill pickles in my direction. It whirred through the air like a flying saucer.

The raging argument I had had with Kevin was still on my mind and I needed Jeff’s solace. He leaned back in a chair and nursed a large cup of pop as he listened.

To Jeff’s way of thinking, Kevin was dredging up all sorts of things from his childhood; hatred, fixations, oedipal feelings, thwarted desires, and transferring them all onto me. The way I worked did not allow the distance from the patient that Jeff’s training had said was necessary, and because I did not remain cool and uninterfering in Kevin’s life, Jeff was uncertain if Kevin could sufficiently work out his problems. I did the things Jeff had been taught not to do. He believed they were wrong, or at least if not wrong, then not right. I, of course, saw no evidence that they were either one. And because I was as successful at my work as anyone else on the clinic staff, I knew I plunged Jeff into all sorts of intellectual dilemmas.

Jeff shook his head as he listened to me. ‘How the hell do you work? Do you have any theory at all that you function from?’

I contemplated a dill pickle for a moment. ‘Yeah, I guess. The theory of probability.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘That if I keep trying long enough, sooner or later, the probability that the odds will be in my favor has to occur.’

Again, he shook his head. I knew he wasn’t thrilled with what I’d done with Kevin this night, with my getting angry with him and making him cry. I knew he thought I was some sort of aerialist, swinging dangerously between points and never firmly grounding myself anywhere. He picked up the Coke cup and fished a piece of ice out of it. He stared into the cup, shook his head again and sighed.

‘For me, Jeff,’ I said, ‘it’s more like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box to follow. You have a thousand little pieces to try and fit together and only so much time. I don’t know what the picture looks like, so I forget the picture and I just try to get as many of the pieces together as I can. To me all your theories are like sitting around trying to decide what the picture on the box must look like and then searching for the pieces to make up that picture. Maybe that works for some people. But for me it doesn’t seem like the most effective way to go about it. I just try. I fit a couple of wrong pieces together sometimes, but that happens no matter how you go about it. All I want to do is get it together and get it together as fast as I can, because for the kids, every day is a day lost. It is for everybody.’

Jeff frowned. ‘But you’ve got to know
why
, Torey. You’ve got to
understand
what you’re doing.’

‘And you do? Jeff, no one understands. It’s all guesses. The theories are for
us
, Jeff, to make
us
feel better, to keep us from feeling stupid because we can’t understand, to make us feel less insecure about that incredible unknown place between our ears. And probably just because theories are fascinating things to think about. But they’re all academic, every single one of them, and it’s sheer intellectual naïveté to think we do understand. Worse, it makes us lose sight of why we’re actually doing what we’re doing. The purpose of doing jigsaw puzzles is not to appreciate the artwork of the finished picture. It’s to get the pieces together.’

Jeff was silent. With one finger he etched away the wax on the outside of the Coke container. ‘Shit,’ he said at last, his voice soft, and then he fell quiet again, staring moodily into the cup. ‘You’re not right, you know. I don’t believe you. The Hayden 1000-Piece View of the Universe. I don’t believe you.’ He paused and let out a long breath of air. ‘But shit. What do I believe? What do I understand? It’s pointless, isn’t it. I mean, if you really stop to think about it. It’s pointless, what we’re doing. Because in fact, we really don’t know a thing.’

But for all our differences, together Jeff and I made the greatest team. And I grew to cherish those evenings when he was over, when we were uninterrupted by the phones and the chaos of the clinic and we could just talk. He was an incredible person to stretch a mind with. We could talk together for hours, building our own brave new world.

I never really stopped to consider how Charity or anyone else, for that matter, might interpret these evenings. My social life had not exactly been on fire previously, and so there was plenty of time to enjoy sitting around talking or playing board games. Jeff was over as often as three times a week, and often Hans was as well, although it was clearly Jeff and I that had the compelling need for one another’s company. Yet it was on a purely intellectual level. Even Hans gave up on us eventually to watch TV. He called it ‘mental netball,’ what Jeff and I were doing, and he couldn’t believe we’d keep at it so long and so often. But I never stopped to think how others might see it. It was all innocent fun. However, I discovered, innocence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.