“Most of all, he seemed fascinated by my long sleeps—my
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—and the way they pulled me apart and put me back together again. He questioned me about them at great length—how I felt going into them, coming out of them, whether I remembered anything that happened during them, whether I had any dreams while they were in progress. Then he told me about
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as a form of therapy, of how his earlier work in Europe had involved the production of prolonged comas in non-wild card patients, by means of drugs and hypnosis, to capitalize on the remarkable recuperative abilities of the body and mind during sleep. He’d apparently gotten some very positive results with this, which was one of the reasons he found my case intriguing. The parallel struck him so forcibly, he said, that he would want to pursue the matter for that reason alone, even if he couldn’t do more than adjust my feelings otherwise. But he felt that it could also be the means for doing even more for me.”
Croyd finished his beer, fetched a second bottle and opened it.
“Mr. Crenson,” Hannah Davis stated, and he met her eyes, “your tail seems to have developed wandering hands.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes it has a mind of its own.”
The tiger-striped appendage emerged from beneath the table to lash behind him. Croyd took a drink.
“So the man represented himself as being able to cure your wild card condition?” she said.
“No,” Croyd replied. “He never said that he could cure it. What he proposed later was something different—a rather ingenious-sounding way of stabilizing it in such a fashion that I’d no longer need to fear going to sleep.”
“Of course he was a fraud,” she said. “He took your money and he got your hopes up and then he couldn’t deliver. Right?”
“Wrong,” Croyd said. “He knew what he was talking about, and he was able to deliver. That wasn’t the problem.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “It would have made world headlines if someone had found a way to mitigate wild card effects. Tachyon would’ve picked up on it and been distributing it on street corners. If it worked, how come no one ever heard about it?”
Croyd raised his hand, and his tail.
“Bear with me. If it were simpler, I’d be done talking,” he said. “Excuse me.”
He was gone. A man-sized form flashed past the bar at the corner of her seeing. She heard a door open and close. When she looked toward the sound, there was no one in sight. A moment later, however, a shadow flashed by and Croyd was seated before her again, sipping his beer.
“Rapid metabolism,” he explained.
“Pan Rudo,” he continued then, as if there had been no interruption, “seemed quite taken with my story. I talked all afternoon, and he took pages and pages of notes. Every now and then he’d ask me a question. Later, Mrs. Weiler knocked on the door and told him it was quitting time and asked whether he wanted her to lock the office door when she left. He said no, he’d do it in a few minutes. Then he offered to take me to dinner and I took him up on it.
“We went out then and had a few steaks—he was surprised at my metabolism, too—and we continued to talk through dinner. Afterwards, we went to his apartment—a very nice pad—and talked some more, until fairly late. He’d learned my story by then, and a lot of other things I don’t usually talk about, too.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well,” Croyd said, “then, and in the days that followed, he told me about some of the more popular psychological theories. He’d even known the people who’d developed them. He’d studied with Freud for a while, and later at the Jungian Institute in Switzerland at the same time he was doing
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research there. He told me about Freud’s ideas on infantile sexuality, stages of development, sublimation, about ids and egos and superegos. And about Adler’s drive to power and Rank’s birth trauma. He talked about Jung’s personality types and his theory of individuation. He said he felt that they all had something to them, some more for some people than others, or at different times in a person’s life. He said that he was more interested in the final forms that these things took, in the emotional constructions they led to for a person’s dealing with life. He felt that life is a compromise between what you want and what you get, and that there’s always fear involved in the transaction—and it doesn’t matter which of all the classical sources it springs from, it’s just something that’s always there. He said that we tell outselves lies in order to deal with it—lies about the world, lies about ourselves. He had this idea, actually, from the playwright Ibsen, who called the big one—the big phony construct about yourself and the world—a ‘life lie.’ Rudo felt that everybody has one of these, and that it was just a matter of the degree of its falseness that made the difference between psychosis and neurosis. He told me that his whole approach to problems that weren’t organic involved finding out a person’s life lie and manipulating it so the patient can come to better terms with reality. Not to get rid of it. He said that some kind of life lie is necessary. Break it or tamper too deeply and you damage the personality, maybe drive the person completely nuts. He looked on therapy as a means of economizing the lie for better accommodation to the world.”
Croyd paused for a drink.
“It sounds very manipulative,” Hannah said, “and it seems as if it puts the therapist in a kind of godlike position. You help this guy find the key to your personality, then he goes in, looks around, and decides what to throwaway, what to keep, what to remodel.”
“Yeah, I guess it does,” Croyd said, “when you put it that way.”
“Granting that this approach is effective, it looks as if even a well-meaning adjustment might sometimes cause some damage—not even considering the possibility of willful abuse. Is that what he did to you? Mess with your self-image and your world-view?”
“Not exactly,” Croyd said. “Not intentionally or directly. He explained that he did want to explore my life lie because he had to know my fears, because they would relate directly to what he had in mind for stabilizing my condition at a level I’d find emotionally satisfying.”
“You did pick up the jargon, didn’t you?”
“Well, I was reading a lot in the area the whole time he was working with me. I guess everyone does that.”
He took another drink of beer.
“Are you stalling now?” she said. “Because you don’t want to talk about those fears? If they’re not essential to the story you can leave them out, you know.”
“I guess I am,” he acknowledged. “But I’d probably better mention them, for the sake of completeness. I don’t know how much you know about me…”
“Mark Meadows told me a few things about you. But there were a lot of gaps. You sleep a lot. You lie Iow a lot—”
He shook his head.
“Not that kind of stuff,” he said. “See, I’d thought of seeing a shrink for some time before I actually did. I guess I read a lot more in the area than I really let on—not just self-help books—some fairly heavy-duty stuff. There were two reasons for this. One is that I know what it feels like to be nuts—really out of your mind. I do it to myself regularly with amphetamines, because I’m afraid to go to sleep. And I usually wind up pushing it too far, and I can remember some of the crazy things and some of the terrible things I did when my thinking and my feelings were all screwed up. So I know what psychosis feels like, and I fear that almost as much as I do sleeping.”
He laughed.
“‘Almost,”’ he said. “Because they’re really tied up together. Rudo showed me that, and I guess I owe him for the insight, if nothing else.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, after he’d risen and stood staring out at a sudden rainfall for at least half a minute.
“My mother went crazy,” he said then, “after the wild card business. Most likely, I was a big part of it. I don’t know. Maybe it would have happened anyway. Maybe there was a schizoid gene involved. I loved her, and I saw her change. She spent her last years in asylums, died in one. I thought about it a lot in those days, wondering whether I might wind up that way, too. I was afraid of that kind of change. Then every time I took drugs to postpone sleeping I did go bonkers. I’m sure I know what she felt like, some of the things she went through…”
“Wouldn’t it have been better just to sleep then?” Hannah asked. “After all, it was going to happen anyway.”
Croyd turned and he was smiling.
“That’s the same thing Rudo asked me,” he said, and he walked slowly back to the table.
“I didn’t know the answer then,” he continued, “but he helped me to find it. It’s a part of my life lie.” He seated himself and folded his hands before him. “The way I came to see it, sleep for me represents a big unknown change. In a way, it’s like death, and all of my normal death-fears are attached to it. But there’s more to it than that. Rudo made me look into it deeply and I saw that my fear of insanity is also there. I always know that I’ll be changed, and at some primitive level of my mind I fear that I’ll wake up psychotic, like her, and it’ll never go away. I saw her change too much.”
He laughed then.
“Ironic,” he said, “the way we make these stories we’re always telling ourselves work. In a way, I drive myself crazy regularly to keep from going crazy. That’s one of my places of irrationality. Everybody’s got them.”
“I’d think that once a therapist discovered that his first order of business would be to try to get rid of it.”
Croyd nodded.
“Rudo told me that that’s what most of them would try to do. But he wasn’t at all certain but that it might be serving just that function—keeping me sane in the long run.”
She shook her head.
“You’ve lost me,” she said.
“Understandable. This part doesn’t apply to nats. It has only to do with manifestations of the wild card virus. Rudo, as I said, had read all of the literature on the virus. He’d been impressed by certain conjectures based on anecdotal evidence, since there was no way of running controlled studies on them, to the effect that there is a psychosomatic component to the virus’s manifestation. Like, there was once a kid—we called him Kid Dinosaur—who’d loved dinosaur books. He came up with the ability to turn himself into kid-sized replicas of different dinosaurs. And there’s Hits Mack, a panhandler I know who can go up to any vending machine, hit it once and have it deliver him anything he wants from its display. That’s all. It’s the simplest wild card ability I know. Takes care of his meals and allows him to devote a hundred percent of his panhandling income to booze. He once told me that something like that had been a daydream of his for years. Lives on Twinkies and Fritos and stale chocolate bars. Happy man.
“Anyway,” he went on, “Rudo felt that the anecdotal evidence was persuasive, and that there was a way to test it now. Me. He proposed inducing
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in me by means of drugs and hypnosis that worked with the fears behind my life lie and caused me to change in an agreed-upon fashion. If it worked it would show that there was a psychosomatic component. It wouldn’t be of help to any joker or ace in the world but me, though, and it could only be used to help me because of the periodic nature of my condition.
“So we set out to prove it, if we could. If the results were positive, he’d explained, then I could decide on the sort of body I wanted to live in for the rest of my life and whatever power I wanted to accompany it, and he’d induce it. He’d do it again for several times after that, to reinforce it, along with suggestions that it would always turn out that way, and I’d be set as a well-adjusted ace.”
Croyd finished his beer, went back for another, stamping out a line of passing ants along the way.
“Is that where he crossed you up?” she asked.
“Nope, we tried it and it worked,” he said. “He was right. So were the other people who’d made guesses along these lines. I told him I wanted to come out looking like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca—I’d always liked that movie—and when I woke up I was a dead ringer for Bogie.”
“Really? And what about a wild card ability? Was he able to do something with that, also?”
Croyd smiled.
“Yes,” he said. “It was just a small ability, but for some reason it stuck. Maybe because it was so small it didn’t take up much space wherever these things are managed. It followed me through any number of changes. Haven’t tried it in years, though. Wait a minute.”
He raised his beer can, took a slow drink, stared off into the distance.
“Play it, Sam,” he said in a strangely altered voice. Then, “Play it!”
The tape recorder clicked to a halt. Then the Play button was depressed. The sounds of a piano playing “As Time Goes By” emerged from the small speaker. She stared for several moments at the machine, then reached over and turned it off. Immediately, she set it on Record again.
“How—How do you manage it if there’s no tape recorder around?”
“Almost anything that can be induced to vibrate in the audible range will do,” he said. “I don’t know how. Maybe it’s even a smaller ability than Hits Mack’s.”
“So you woke up looking like Rick, and you could provide your own soundtrack whenever you wanted.”
“Yes.”
“What happened next?”
“He gave me a couple of weeks to enjoy it. Wanted to observe me and be sure there were no undesirable side-effects. I went out and got stopped on the streets and approached in restaurants for autographs. Rudo wrote up his notes. He did send me to some friends for a full physical at that time, too. I still had an abnormally high metabolism and my usual insomnia.”
“I wonder whether those notes still exist, somewhere?” she said.
Croyd shrugged.
“Don’t know,” he said. “wouldn’t matter anyway. I wouldn’t want anyone to mess with the process that way again.”
“What happened?”
“We saw each other regularly during the next couple of weeks I went over ideas of what I wanted to look like and what I wanted to be able to do. I didn’t want to stay the way I was. It was fun the first few days, but after a while it wears kind of thin, looking like someone famous. I wanted to be sort of average in height and build, sandy-haired, not bad-looking but not real handsome. And I decided on a kind of telepathic persuasive ability I once had. You get in less trouble if you can talk your way out of things. And it could come in handy if I ever wanted to be a salesman. Rudo in the meantime said that he was studying medical literature, looking for anything else that might be useful in my case, to help nail down the change good and tight, to make it permanent. Once, when we were having lunch together, I remember him saying, ‘Croyd, for all of that you know you’ll still be a caricature of humanity. I just wish it were within my power to wipe out everything that demon bug did to you—wipe out all of the others, too, for that matter—and leave the human race as clean as it was before.’