We Can Build You

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 qua 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's 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 Originally she had been a withdrawn child, what they call encapsulated or introverted.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 public 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 and rituals and the like . .

What bothered Maury the most was that his daughter, somewhere along the line, had lost her sense of humor. Instead of being giggly and silly and sloppy as she had once been she had now become as precise as a calculator. And not only that. Once she had cared about animals. And then, during her stay at Kansas City, she had suddenly gotten so she couldn't stand a dog or a cat. She had gone on with her interest in chemistry, however. And that--a profession-- seemed to him a good thing.

"Has the out-patient therapy here helped her?"

"It keeps her at a stable level; she doesn't slide back. She still has a strong hypochondriacal trend and she still washes her hands a lot. She'll never stop that. And she's still overprecise and withdrawn; I can tell you what they call it. Schizoid personality. I saw the results of the ink-blot test Doctor Horstowski made." He was silent for a time. "That's her out-patient doctor, here in this area, Region Five--counting the way the mental health Bureau counts. Horstowski is supposed to be good, but he's in private practice, so it costs us a hell of a lot."

"Plenty of people are paying for that," I said. "You're not alone, according to the TV ads. What is it, one person out of every four has served time in a Federal Mental Health Clinic?"

"I don't mind the clinic part because that's free; what I object to is this expensive out-patient follow-up. It was her idea to come home from Kasanin Clinic, not mine. I keep thinking she's going to go back there, but she threw herself into designing the simulacrum, and when she wasn't doing that she was mosaicing the bathroom walls. She never stops being active. I don't know where she gets the energy."

I said, "When I consider all the people I know who've been victims of mental illness it's amazing. My aunt Gretchen, who's at the Harry Stack Sullivan Clinic at San Diego. My cousin Leo Roggis. My English teacher in high school, Mr. Haskins. The old Italian down the street who was on a pension, George Oliveri. I remember a buddy of mine in the Service, Art Boles; he had 'phrenia and went to the Fromm-Reichma

Maury had risen to his feet. "We better get going."

Together we left the cafe. "You know this Sam Barrows?" I asked.

"Sure. I mean, not personally; I know him by reputation. He's the darndest fellow. He'll bet on anything. If one of his mistresses--and that's a story in itself--if one of his mistresses dived out of a hotel window he'd bet on which end hit the pavement first, her head or her tail. He's like one of the old-time speculators reborn, one of those captains of finance. Life's a gamble to a guy like that. I admire him."

"So does Pris."

"Admire, hell--adores. She met him. They stared each other down--it was a draw. He galvanized or magnetized her or some darn thing. For weeks afterward she could hardly talk."

"Was that when she was job-hunting?"

Maury nodded. "She didn't get the job, but she did get into the sanctum sanctorum. Louis, that guy can scent out possibilities on all sides, opportunities no one else could see in a million years. You ought to dip into _Fortune_, sometime; they did a big write-up on him around ten months ago."

"From what she told me Pris made quite a pitch to him that day."

"She told him she had incredible worth that no one recognized. He was supposed to recognize it, evidently. Anyhow, she said that in his organization, working for him, she'd rise to the top and be known all over the universe. But otherwise, she'd just go on as she was. She told him she was a gambler, too; she wanted to stake everything on going to work for him. Can you beat that?"