Skull Session, Page 2

  And how do you toot your own horn without sounding like a narcissistic asshole? I'm thirty-eight, I've got Tourette's, I've never held a job as a teacher, but I've done a lot of research on the brain, I've gained a lot ofspecial-ed experience by working with my own son's behavioral problems, I've got an IQ of 153 and a master's degree, I'm really good, believe me. He'd already sent resumes to every high school within sixty miles and hadn't even drawn an interview.

  Giving your past such close scrutiny was not a healthy exercise. When you were broke, though, you performed these little rituals. His desk was in one of the upstairs bedrooms of the old farmhouse he and Lia rented, with eastward views over a few Vermont hills and the distant White Mountains of New Hampshire. Among the clutter of books and papers next to the computer monitor stood his full-size model of the human head, the outer features molded in clear plastic so that the diverse parts of the brain showed through in shades of pink and red, green and purple. Now the transparent face wore a pair of wraparound sunglasses, a convenient place to keep them. He'd bought the model two years before to help Mark visualize the brain and all its queer little structures. The skull opened up, and you could lift away the cerebellum, the cortex, the hypothalamus, all the other parts, piece by piece. "It's like a puzzle!" Mark had said the first time Paul showed it to him. Paul had to agree: the absolute, ultimate puzzle.

  By one o'clock he got tired of the head's silent, alien gaze and went out to the barn to work on the MG. He stood in the cold for a few minutes, appraising the car with mixed emotions, then lay down on the rough planks of the barn floor and crammed himself underneath.

  He'd always had a weakness for British vehicles—the toggle switches, the panels of walnut burl on the dashboard, the jaunty, tall-wheeled stance. When he'd bought the 1958 Twin Cam MG junker six years ago, back when he still had enough money to restore it, it had seemed like the perfect symbol of his desire for change and fulfillment. But while the Brits had class, they couldn't figure out how to make nuts stay on bolts, how to seat screws so they wouldn't work loose. The MG's charm had lasted until the first big mechanical problems arose. Now it had been up on blocks for three weeks, as he located and installed a complete new wiring harness. The car's recurrent electrical problems did not exacdy inspire affection.

  When the phone over the workbench rang, Paul was so intent that he jumped and hit his forehead on the MG's undercarriage. It took him another three rings to caterpillar out from under and pick up the receiver.

  "Yeah," he said.

  "Hi, Paulie." It was his sister Kay, calling from Philadelphia. "How's tics?"

  "Screw you, bitch?' he joked. "Actually, not bad at all right now. How are you?"

  "We're doing fine—the kids are having a better year at school, Ted's business is going great, I've lost three pounds. How about you? Found work yet?"

  "Not yet."

  "Well, that's why I called. I just had an interesting conversation, something that might involve you. When was the last time you heard from Aunt Vivien?" "Vivien? Hoffmann? I've talked to her on the phone maybe twice in twenty years."

  "I haven't heard from her much either. Before she called this morning, I don't think I'd talked to her in three years. It turns out she's been living in San Francisco for the last six months or so. After all those years at Highwood! Apparently the lodge has been empty, and she heard from the Lewisboro police that there's been some vandalism. I guess she left a lot of her belongings there, and she's concerned things are being taken. So she wants to hire somebody to check out the house, maybe fix things up, close it off so her stuff can't be taken. She says she wants someone she can trust, preferably a family member. Which is where you come in."

  "Me? She probably doesn't remember I exist."

  "On the contrary. She specifically asked if you'd be interested—she remembered you'd done carpentry and cabinetry. And I suggested that the work wouldn't be, um, unwelcome for you right now. This could turn into a job for you. Just call her, see what she wants. You might call Mother first and see what she thinks."

  Paul digested this for a moment. "Why doesn't she have Royce see to it? Why did she move to San Francisco in the first place?"

  "She didn't mention Royce. He's not exactly an attentive son. Last time I asked, she said she hadn't heard from him in fifteen years or so. As for moving to San Francisco—Christ, Paulie, she's been living in that house all alone for almost forty years. It's a wonder she didn't leave years earlier."

  They were interrupted by an explosion of children's voices at Kay's end. "Oop. Well," she said, "I've got to go get dinner ready for the hordes. Listen, Paulie—can I give you some advice?"

  "Do I have a choice?"

  "If you do this, you charge Vivien enough so that it's worth your while. I mean it. She's our aunt, but this is strictly business. Vivien can afford whatever you charge her."

  By the time Paul got off the phone, it was late afternoon and the light was beginning to fade. He'd gotten chilled, standing motionless in the unheated barn. But the prospect of having a job, even a one-time infusion of cash, had improved his outlook immeasurably. What was it Mark Twain said? "Nothing improves the scenery as much as a good breakfast." A dose of material sufficiency wouldn't hurt.

  3

  HE SWUNG THE BARN doors shut and walked to the house. The weather was muted gray, raw, typical of mid-November in Vermont. Still, he and Lia had a nice setup. The farmhouse was completely isolated yet was only twelve minutes from Hanover and Dartmouth College, and only twenty from Hartland, which made it easy to have Mark stay over every other week. The house and barn topped a little hill, offering views of overgrown fields surrounded by a wall of trees, now without leaves, still and dour.

  After being cramped under the car, he found the open landscape very alluring. He had some things to think about anyway: time for a one-man skull session, a solo get-acquainted brainstorming interlude. He got his saxophone from the house and went out into the field, wading through brittle grass to take a seat on a granite boulder that caught the last pale sunshine. Despite cold fingers, he managed to play "In the Still of the Night" by the Five Satins, and then for some reason segued into Patsy Cline's "Crazy." The pads plopped noisily over the holes.

  "Crazy" was the cue. Sometimes you used a saxophone to help figure things out—a brass-voiced oracle. He needed to give some thought to Lia's jump yesterday.

  They had driven back to the farm in Lia's Subaru with the heater blowing full-blast. Lia was tired and cold, still on edge from the jump. "This was a good one," she'd said. "Paul, you've got to try it! You've got to at least start the training."

  "I'm doing fine just observing now. It wasn't easy seeing you dive out the hatch." Lia smiled, shuddered slightly. "I was scared out of my wits."

  A high measure of praise. She could defend her controlled-risk agenda: Confronting your fear was essential to cognitive development, provided rites of initiation necessary for constructive personal growth, et cetera. But on a deeper level, it wasn't rational at all. She had a longing for the ecstatic clarity, the emptiness that came with facing danger. She liked rubbing up against the darker parts of her own nature. And that was the problem for Paul: those scarier reasons or pressures that Lia didn't consciously know about or didn't want to reveal. Sometimes her compulsion seemed almost sexual, as if Eros and Thanatos, the life urge and death wish, both drove her. And sometimes Paul wondered if the high hadn't become an addiction for her—a heightened craving for the neuropeptide rush, an increasing temptation to raise the stakes each time.

  "You waited to pull the chute. A little extra time?" He was just guessing: She had explained that she'd wait ninety seconds before pulling the cord, but he'd lost any real sense of time after she'd jumped. It had seemed intolerably long.

  "Not that much," she'd said. She'd laid her hand over his on the stick shift, a little apology.

  Paul put down the sax and rolled a kink out of his shoulders. The sun was almost gone behind the hill. He'd drifted into a cold-finger
ed, clunky version of "Take Good Care of My Baby." Bobby Vee, 1961. Definitely apropos. Everybody's got some cross to bear, Line had said, a fatal flaw.

  The odd thing about his resistance to her agenda was that he'd begun a similar project, struggling free of his own constraints, several years before meeting her. But they had different criteria for what constituted real risk. At one point when she'd made it clear she thought he was being more of a stick in the mud than necessary, Paul couldn't help asking her, "Aren't I taking enough risks already? I just went through a divorce. I've got an eight-year-old son who has neurological problems, and I'm risking nonconventional therapy on him. I took a chance on going back to school at the age of thirty-four, and now I've switched careers, which means I'm gambling on finding a position in a field where there are eight times as many applicants as there are jobs. I've got Tourette's syndrome and I'm cutting back on my medication. I'm unemployed and uninsured and dead broke. All of this isn't risky enough?"

  Lia mimed playing a violin.

  "I'm serious!"

  "Those aren't risks, those are just headaches. Problems," she said, deadpan. "There's a difference." When it came to the aesthetics of danger, she had exacting standards.

  "I'm living with you," he'd said. "Does that count?"

  If only he could get it across to her: Lia, it's different for me. I've got a son to think about, I intend to stay alive to be a father to Mark. I've also been burned before, I've got to take it slow.

  It was 1985, he'd been married to Janet for two years, and they'd just learned that she was pregnant. Both were very happy about it, but for Paul the impending birth brought on some soul-searching. The whole episode started with his asking a comparatively harmless question: What kind of father did he want to be? Eventually he was up against some large and difficult existential questions: Who was he? And that, he decided, he couldn't begin to answer until he found out who he was without the daily consumption of a powerful drug that controlled the chemistry of his brain.

  Haloperidol was great at suppressing the tics and impulsive behavior. Between the drug and his father's training, he'd stayed stable, fairly predictable. Motor tics manageable, coprolalia very rare, verbal outbursts mostly limited to snatches of song or movie lines, and usually more irritating than offensive to others. Yes: stable, predictable, even-tempered, levelheaded, methodical, restrained, repressed, dull, boring, bored, practically comatose. Or so it seemed at times. When he was five, he'd been considered gifted. At six he was an avid amateur scientist, working through all the experiments suggested by the chemistry set his father, Ben, bought him, and he could hum any tune after hearing it once—he was still playing them on the sax by memory.

  But something happened to the whiz kid. He got buried under an avalanche of neurological problems, held down by decades of haloper- idol drowsiness and self-restraint and the methodical habits instilled by Ben. By 1985 Paul had realized that if he wanted more out of life, he'd have to have access to all his own potentials. Was the whiz kid dead or just locked in an attic room, wearing a haloperidol straitjacket?

  So a month after Janet announced that she was pregnant, he decided to go off the drug and find out who was in there, in the attic between his ears. A friend offered his remote vacation cabin, and Paul packed up enough food for several days and drove up to the Northeast Kingdom—leaving the haloperidol bottle in the medicine cabinet. He told Janet he needed to get away to think about things, but didn't tell her about the experiment; she'd no doubt worry unnecessarily. Plus, she'd probably disapprove. Janet was a big believer in playing by the rules, and her rules didn't include unsupervised medical experiments.

  Mid-August: The leaves of the trees were the deep, lacquered green of late summer. The cabin stood in a little clearing at the end of a long gravel driveway, six miles of dirt road from the nearest town. No one would bother him here.

  Inside, the cabin was funky and comfortable, one big room with a wood stove, a sink with water brought down from a spring uphill, no electricity or phone. Pleasant smell of woodsmoke, mouse piss, and insect repellent—a summer-camp smell. Paul unpacked and set out to reconnoiter, and found it to be a pretty piece of land, i covered with a heavy forest of maple and birch. A stream played over clean-scrubbed rocks not far from the cabin, and a knoll just up the slope gave him views of miles of rolling hills.

  Aside from a somewhat manic sense of expectation he didn't notice anything different about himself that first day or the next. On the third day, though, he sensed that the haloperidol had fallen below therapeutic levels in his bloodstream. At first it wasn't much. He had gone out to cut some firewood with Bill's chainsaw, and at some point he realized that his jaw ached. In fact his whole head hurt. The reason was that for over an hour he'd been unconsciously playing shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits! on his teeth, clicking them together by shifting his jaw rapidly side to side.

  Okay, that was interesting. Not exactly an act of genius, but it was the first little compulsive gesture. He had started the wild mystery roll-ercoaster ride. This was going to be great.

  The day went fine. He worked hard, getting up a good supply of wood which he split and stacked under the eave of the cabin. It wasn't until evening that the first disquieting flights of morbid ideation came to him. Whole scenarios would play out in the blink of an eye. It started out with a normal, passing concern for Janet: / hope the nausea isn't bad. I hope she's okay at home alone. But then, compressed into a second or less, a whole scene played out in living color: Janet sitting at home, an intruder at the window, breaking in, pursuing her. Her desperate attempts to reach the telephone, the blow to her stomach that would cause her to miscarry, their struggling at the kitchen counter, the cutlery rack nearby—

  He shook his head to clear the awful image. Just a flight of morbid fantasy, not unusual for some Touretters, he told himself. On the other hand, he thought, pacing around the cabin.

  "No," he argued out loud, "it's just Tourette's, old Mr. T, it just seems very real because you're not familiar with the way your head works when you're off haloperidol." Then in a high, quick voice, mimicking neurotic concern, he answered himself: "But you never know, better safe than sorry!" It wasn't a verbal tic so much as a compulsion, the pressure building inside until he had to externalize his thoughts. He shook his finger in the air like a chiding, busybody old aunt. "Better safe than sorry?' It was a funny voice, self-satirizing, but finally this was the side that won out. He went to the car in the dark, drove six miles on dirt roads to call Janet from the pay phone in Craftsbury.

  She answered groggily after ten rings.

  "Oh, hi, honey. It's me," he said. "I'm just calling to check in, see how you're doing."

  "Christ, Paul, it's eleven-thirty! Couldn't you have 'checked in' a couple of hours ago?"

  "I'm sorry. Lost track of the time. Everything okay?"

  "Everything's fine," she said grumpily.

  "Good, good," he said. "Hee hee." The bogus laugh escaped before he could stop it, the two syllables necessary to "balance" the good good, almost like an echo.

  "Are you drunk? I thought you were going out there for some soul-searching, not for boozing it up."

  "No. God, no. Just checking in to make sure you're all right. You sure you don't want me to come home?"

  "It sounds like you're the one who wants to come home."

  Actually, she was right: After the anxiety attack, he was nervous about returning to the cabin, to the whole experiment. Embarrassed, he reassured her and got off the line.

  The next morning he cooked a delicious breakfast of eggs, bacon, and coffee on the Coleman stove, occasionally making a snatching movement in front of his face like the proverbial martial-arts master grabbing flies out of midair. It felt good, pleasing, a multisensory "tune" played on the instrument of his mind and body—a kinetic melody that was very satisfying. The origin of the movement was the idea that kept coming to him at the back of his mind: seize the opportunity. That's what he wanted to do with this time at the cabin,
with life, by God: carpe diem. He felt aggressively optimistic. Snatch! Your thoughts and urges were always running in polyphony, like a piece of music by Bach, themes and subthemes. The normal person was seldom even aware of the sub-themes, the subthoughts, but the Touretter let them come immediately to the foreground, to be expressed in word or gesture. Snatch! Consciously or unconsciously, a Touretter seized the offbeat thought, indulged the latent impulse. Sometimes what came out was socially inappropriate, but so what? Social convention could use a little slap in the face. It was playful. It felt great. You had to be willing to take risks if you were going to get ahead in life.

  The parade of classic Tourettic symptoms went on, with Paul sometimes conscious of the urges and sometimes startled by them. Looking out the window at the glorious morning, he made grabbing gestures at the pretty view of trees and sky, the fresh sunlight on the leaves, and brought his fist back to his open mouth as if eating the beauty of it. He found his fingers tapping quickly the red-hot burner of the Coleman stove, the baited mousetraps, the edges of the kitchen knives—satisfying some hidden curiosity about little dangers, committing little violations of safety-related taboos.

  The phenomenon was fascinating, but it raised some troubling questions. Where, ultimately, were the boundaries of behavior? Should there be boundaries? Themes and subthemes, conscious and subconscious—where did this stuff come from? Thinking along these lines, he improvised a comic dialogue between his conscious and his subconscious as he washed the dishes in the numbingly cold water from the sink's single faucet.

  "Straighten up and fly right," the conscious mind said. "Touching knives and stove burners—settle down, guy." The voice he used was gruff and martial, the voice of a disgusted drill sergeant. Sergeant Haloperidol.

  Subconscious mind's voice was self-parodying too, a limp-wristed voice, sensitive but taunting, manipulative: "Are we feeling threatened or what? Has it ever occurred to you that you'd be better off if you didn't go into a defensive crouch every time your control slips?"