1

...but first, a word:
       You know the way. You have the key. And it is your privilege.
       Go to the home of Dr. Philip Outerbridge. Go on in—you have the key. Climb the stairs, walk to the end of the corridor, and turn left. This is Dr. Phil’s study, and a very comfortable and well-appointed one it is. Books, couch, books, desk, lamp, books, books. Go to the desk—sit down; it’s all right. Open the lower right drawer. It’s one of those deep, double drawers. It’s locked? But you have the key—go ahead.
       Pull it open—more than that. All the way. That’s it. See all those file-folders, a solid mass of them? Notice how they are held in a sort of box frame? Well, lift it out. (Better get up; it’s heavy.) There.
       Underneath, lying flat, are a half-dozen folders—just plain file folders. Perhaps they are there to level up the main box-frame; well, they certainly do that. Perhaps, too, they are there because they are hidden, concealed, secret. Both perhapses could be true. And perhaps they are there because they are valuable, now or later. Value is money, value is knowledge, value is entertainment... sentiment, nostalgia. Add that perhaps to the others. It does not destroy them. And bear in mind that of the six folders, any of six might be any or all of these things. You may look at one of them. The second one from the top. You will note that it, like the others, is marked with Dr. Outerbridge’s name and, in large red capitals, PERSONAL—CONFIDENTIAL—PRIVATE. But go ahead. Go right ahead; take it out, replace the box-frame, close the drawer, light the lamp, make yourself comfortable. You may read through the papers in this folder.
       But first rest your hands on the smooth cream-yellow paperboard and close your eyes and think about this folder which is marked CONFIDENTIAL and which is hidden in a drawer which is locked. Think how it was filled some years ago, when Dr. Phil was a young staff psychologist in a large military neuropsychiatric hospital. It happened that he was then two months short of the required age for a commission, so he rated as a sergeant. Yet he had, since his freshman year in college, trained and interned in psychological diagnosis and treatment at a famous university clinic, where be had earned a graduate degree in clinical psychology.
       It was wartime, or something very like it. The hospital was swamped, staggered, flooded. The staff had to learn as many new tricks, cut as many unheard-of corners, work as unholy hours, as those in any other establishment that handled the goings and comings of war, be they shipbuilders or professors of Baltic languages. And some of the staff, like some builders and teachers everywhere, were burdened by too many hours, too little help, too few facilities, and too much tradition, yet found their greatest burden the constant, grinding, overriding necessity for quality. Some men in tank factories turned down each bolt really tight; some welders really cared about the joints they ran. Some doctors, then, belonged with these, and never stopped caring about what they did, whether it was dull, whether it was difficult, whether, even, the whole world suddenly turned enemy and fought back, said quit, said skip it, it doesn’t matter.
       So perhaps the value of these folders, and their secrecy lies in their ability to remind. Open one, relive it. Say, here was a triumph. Say, here is a tragedy. Say, here is a terrible blunder for which atonement can never be made... but which, because it was made, will never be made again. Say, here is the case which killed me; though I have not died, yet when I do I shall die of it. Say, here was my great insight, my inspiration, one day my book and my immortality. Say, here is failure; I think it would be anyone’s failure, I—I pray God I never discover that someone else could succeed with something, some little thing I should have done and did not. Say... there is something to be said for each of these folders, guarded once by a lock, again by concealment, and at last by the declaration of privacy.
       But open your eyes now and look at the folder before you. On the index tab at its edge is lettered

Here is a typewritten letter written on paper showing signs of having been torn across the top with a straight-edge, as if to remove a letterhead. The letters O-R over the date are in ink, printed by hand, large and clear.

Base Hospital HQ,
Portland Ore. : otherwise known as—
Office of the Understaff                           O-R
Freudsville, Oregon.                           12 Jan.

Dear Phil:

       First and foremost notice the O-R notation above. That means off the record, and I mean altogether. If and when you see it in future you don’t need explanations. Anything which can be gotten across by abbreviation and in code is a blessing to me, especially since they gave me this nut factory to administer without relieving me of that bedlam of yours. You’ll excuse the layman’s vulgarisins, dear doctor; believe me, they do me good.
       Under separate and highly official cover, and through channels, you’ll find orders from me to you relative to a file AX544. I’m the colonel and you’re the sergeant. I’m the administrator and you’re just staff. Hence the orders. On the other hand we are old friends and you are senior to me in your specialty six times umpteen squared. The fact—not mentioned in the orders—is that we’ve pulled the kind of blooper you don’t excuse by saying oops, sorry. This soldier was yanked out of a staging area overseas and shipped back here with a “psychosis, unclassified” label and a “dangerous, violent” stencil, by a meat-headed MedCorps major. It could only have been sheer vindictiveness, deriving from the fact that the GI punched him in the nose. Criminal he may be—according to the distinctions now current—but insane he is not. Seems to me he did the right thing; but to the major’s dim appreciation it appeared insane to strike an officer and so he was sent to your laughing academy instead of to a stockade.
       What complicates things is that we lost this guy. What with understaffing and turnover and all-around snafu, this GI has been stuck in padded solitary for three months now without diagnosis or treatment, and if he didn’t qualify as one of your charges when he got there, he sure as hell should now.
       However it happened, it comes out looking like the worst kind of carelessness, to say nothing of injustice. So what “diagnose and treat” means in the official order is, please, Phil, on bended knee, get that man out of there and out of the Army in such a way that there will be no kickbacks, lawsuits or headlines. And aside from the merits of the case itself, we have to slough off these trivial cases. We need the bed. I need the bed, or will soon if this kind of thing happens again.
       I trust you to sew it up tidily, Philip. Not only a sound diagnosis, but a sound-sounding one. And then a medical discharge. His remuneration, whether or not he ever appreciates it, can be that his fisticuffs on the person of that moo-minded major are on the house.

yr absentee landlord,
Al

P. S. : To enrich the jest, I just got word that above-mentioned major, by name Manson, got himself deceased in line of duty, in a C-119 crash. This I learned in answer to my request for any additional files he may have on subject patient. There ain’t any files.

A. W.

Field Hospital #2
Smithton Township, Cal. : also called—                      O-R
Bedpan Bureau                                                     14 Jan.
Reik’s Ranch, Cal.

Dear Al:

       You diagnose right handily by mail. You must have been studying that technique where the quack sends you a ten-dollar Kleenex and you wipe it over your face and send it back and he tells you you’ve got housemaid’s knee. I spent a half-hour with the guy today—honest to God, Al, all the time I could split off—and I found him up on the top floor all alone in a secure cell. Very polite, very quiet. Although he offers nothing, he responds well. I had no hesitation in holding out some hope to him—all he wants is out, and I handed him the idea that if he cooperates with me he ought to make it. He was pathetically eager to please. For once and probably the only time, I’m glad I’m not an officer. He doesn’t like officers. And as you said, if we put in solitary every GI who feels that way we’d have to evacuate the entire state of California for housing.
       Not having anything with me on that first visit to do any tests—including time, damn you—I sent Gus for a composition book and some ball-points and told the patient to write the story of his life any way it came to him, suggesting that third person might help. That’ll give him something to do until I can get back to him, which will be soon—even sooner if you’ll okay a requisition for a thirty-hour day and a sleep-eliminator for me.

yrs wearily,
Phil

All the time this hunting was going on, and school days and all, things were getting worse around the house. The mother got more arthritis and pretty soon she stopped cleaning the house much and couldn’t hardly cook even. This made the father mad and he got worse than ever. Sometimes he was out all night and would go to work drunk in the morning and he was a good worker, strong, but sometimes when the foreman would say something he would argue back and once he hit him but not much. So he kept getting laid off. When he got laid off he would draw his pay and then he would go on a mad drunk until he spent it all. It was not too bad when he stayed away at those times but when he came home it was very bad. George and the mother always tried not to say the one word that would set him off but any word would do it. Then he would beat up the mother, punching her right in the face and the blood came and the mother cried but she never screamed real loud she was so ashamed. He used to beat up George too but when George was big enough to run away he would run away as soon as the the trouble started and even before that, as soon as the father came home. He would come back after the father was asleep. Once the father was asleep there was never any more trouble and when he woke up he never seemed to remember anything about it. George never ran to the neighbors because they had no use for any of them or to the cops because the father hated cops and George never thought there was anything wrong with that, who was to tell him different? He just went into the woods and lay up in a tree or hunted if it was moonlight or maybe just hung around outside until it got quiet and then peeked in the window to see if he was asleep and if he was he would come in and get in bed.
       And sometimes he would already be in bed and even asleep when the father came in and those were the times he would wake up hearing the mother crying, first, “Don’t, don’t, not now, the boy, the boy,” and the father would growl that the boy was asleep. George would keep his eyes tight closed and lie still like in the woods waiting for the rabbits, and the mother crying “no no” until she would give a little scream and say, “My hands, oh, my hands,” because that is what he would do, squeeze her arthritis until she gave in, because he always said there was nothing really wrong with her, she was faking. So she would stop saying no no but go on crying until he went to sleep. That was one thing about it, he always went right to sleep.
       When George was thirteen he was as big as a man. He was, as big as his father and maybe stronger although he did not seem to know this. His father was a yellow headed man with a lot of bad teeth and his skin hung down under his eyes with like little bloody hammocks under the eyeballs and his pants fit him best if he let his stomach hang out over his belt so he always wore them real low like that. When George was a little kid he used to try to wear his pants like that but he never had the belly for it. When he got bigger he stopped trying to do anything like the father. Well when he was thirteen something happened that changed everything.
       The father had been working for quite a spell and for a while there was plenty to eat and George helped out as much as he could with the cleaning up and all. Because the father would come home and when he was sober and the house was all cleaned up and dinner cooking he maybe wasn’t like a kind and loving husband in the movies but at least he walked in and washed up and ate and sat in the door whittling and went to bed without yelling at anybody or hitting. And once or twice he would look at something George did like white-washing the wall or fixing the busted porch rail or a step or something and he would look at it and at George and he would say “Wal aw kay!” in that foreign accent of his and George would of done anything for him then. And he could still remember the one time he came in and sniffed in the kitchen and said, “Poy, dat schmells goot!” and the mother just sat there in her wheelchair and cried. She got the wheelchair from the priest who came visiting I guess to see if a wheelchair would make her or George or even, the father go to church once in a while, but they never did, the father told them not to and cussed every time he saw the wheelchair for a month but all the same he let her keep it.
       And with things that way naturally George and the mother knocked themselves out trying to keep everything nice to make it last as long as they could and make the father glad to come home to a nice place. So this one night was the day he was supposed to stop off at the store on the way home because they were out of food pretty much but for a slab of fatback and some turnip greens. The mother set that aside for some other time and her and George got everything ready for the father to come home with the food, and they talked it around this way and that what they’d fix according to what he brought, so they could have it ready real quick, like if he had a lump of chuck they’d slice off some and quick pound it with the edge of a plate to make pan-fry steaks with onions if he brought onions, or if he brought collards they wouldn’t boil them but sear them quick in hot fat. George always felt very close to his mother but in a funny way disappointed or something like that. Like when she got sorry for herself and used to cry and tell him how she caught the arthritis from him being born and she would pat herself on her skinny chest and say how hard she tried to feed him off her own body but she couldn’t he was too big and she was too sick and how she wished she could. It was like she was always feeding him from herself all his whole life, and what she put out, it cost her, it weakened and sickened her, but still she did it and did it. For him. And at the same time it was like he needed something from her, he took what she fed him, but it was never enough and it was never the right thing that he wanted. It is very hard to explain this. But anyway he always felt her giving and giving out of herself, and he always needed something from her, and hung around her to get it, only what she was giving him all the time was not the thing he wanted. This would get so bad with him sometimes that he would have to go hunting again. That usually made him feel better.
       But now this one time when they were waiting for the father to come home and planning all the different things they might be doing to fix something quick and good for him it began to get later and later and they talked a little more to cover it up and then they got quiet and just waited, she was in her wheelchair looking down at her hands, her hands by now were all brown and twisted like cypress. And George he sat in the doorway looking down the cowpath that ran down to the road where the father would have to come. And when it got dark the mother said as bright as she could, “I know! Just shave up that fatback and we’ll fry it up like bacon and have bacon sandwiches and we can boil up a lump of it with the turnip greens and then I think there’s a little beans left too. A whole dinner, and we can have it all ready!” So George got right up out of the doorway, it was beginning to get too dark to see anyway, and he lit the kerosene lamp and shook up the stove and went to the table with the knife and the fatback to shave it up. So that is how he come to have the knife at the time. He did not go for it and he wouldn’t never even thought about it except there it was in his hand.
       In walked the father and he was drunk as a hoot-owl and he looked all around the place and said “Gaw dam dot Polock,” and that was all we needed to know, he had fought with the foreman and got laid off and drew his money and got drunk. And the mother she just couldn’t hold it in, she let out one long wail and threw up her poor crooked hands and said oh, oh again, again, and he run right through the room and punched her one in the nose so hard you could hear it break and the blood squirted out before he could get his hand away. So George clear across the room, he never could remember afterward actually doing it, he threw the knife.
       Well it was so quiet in there for so long you wouldn’t believe it. Then the father peeled off his undershirt which was all he was wearing besides pants, it was a hot day, and he looked down at the cut and the blood coming out of it. And the mother was bleeding through her hands and her eyes bulging out over them, looking at the father. And the father pushed George away and got the dishrag and splashed cold water on his chest and wiped it with the dish towel and got his other undershirt from the peg over the bed and a clean rag and put the rag against the cut and pulled the shirt on over it and went out. Nobody had said word one since he said Gaw dam Polock.
       Well nothing was ever the same after that. The father still had money when he left and he drank that all up that same night. The next day he got George alone and talked to him, he said he got drunk first because he was so mad about the layoff, and after what happened he got drunk because he was so sorry. It seemed to make a lot of difference to him that George should understand this but George did not understand it and just shrugged his shoulders. And he did not say he was sorry he threw the knife or anything else and the father did not ask him to as a matter of fact he never mentioned the knife or anything else.
       But he never again laid a hand on the mother. He spent most of the time just sitting in the open doorway looking down the cowpath. In a day or two all the fatback and turnip greens was gone and the beans and a heel of bread, but still the father sat in the doorway and the mother in her wheelchair with wet cloths to her nose. Nobody wanted to say anything to the father about getting some food in or going to work so the third day George came back from school and he was carrying a big sack of groceries. He walked right past the father and came in and put the bag down. The part of the bag where George had been holding it against his chest was marked in big black grease pencil Morosch which was the name of a white collar guy in the mine office. George quick took everything out of the bag and shoved the bag in the stove to burn up. Then he put everything out of sight, a roasting chicken and two pounds of hamburger and a loaf of stale for stuffing and a loaf of fresh, two quarts of milk, fresh carrots, a whole pound of butter, a jar of strawberry jam, a pound of coffee and some bananas.
       The mother probably was too sick to notice, what with her big shut blue black eyes and her nose three times as big. The father came in and looked at the stuff as George put it away out of sight. “Ware ya gat dat?” he wanted to know.
       George for once in his life turned and looked the father straight in the eye. “Swiped it, off the Acme store delivery wagon,” and it was the truth. If the father yelled or hit out or said nothing or flew to the moon, just then he did not care.
       The father stood for a long time quiet and then made a funny little smile. He said, “Mabbe ya amoont ta schomthing yat, boy.” And you know that made the boy George feel better than anything in his whole life, and that’s crazy. Because if ever he hated anything it was the father. If ever there was a man he didn’t give a damn what he thought, it was the father. But when the father smiled and said that he got all hot in the mirror over the sink he was all pink and to save his soul he couldn’t keep from smiling too.
       Well the father went back to work after a while, as a swamper out at the head of the slag-pile where they never could keep a man working for long, who wants to be in hell until he is dead? but the father could get back there any time. And things went on quiet, never another drunk, never much talk, and school let out, and the mother sat quieter and quieter. It was like she had quit, she was not going to fight anything any more, him or being ashamed or dirt in the house or anything. She got thin and light as a dead possum, George could easy carry her out to the outhouse and stand her up in there where she would slowly close the door and after a long time he would hear her calling and he would go back and she would be standing there and he would carry her back in to her wheelchair. George made a pass at cleaning up when he thought about it. He felt like hunting almost all the time now but he got stubborn inside and wouldn’t, just hung around her all the time. After the black eyes went away and the nose was only crooked not swole up they sent for the district nurse and she come and looked at the hands and clucked some and said she had ought to go to the hospital over to Mountaindale but the mother said no! real sharp, the first thing she said in a long while. The nurse took the arm and rolled up the sleeve and looked at it, it was like two peeled willow sticks stuck together, she tried easy to bend the arm and straighten it, it wouldn’t go but a little way each way and the mother like gasped and bit on her tongue. So the nurse shrugged again and left some pills for her to take if she was in pain. The mother died about four months after she was hit in the nose. The father went to work that day but George just hung around and hung around and when the wagon came for her he wanted to ride in it and when they wouldn’t let him he ran all the way behind it to the funeral home and hung around there until they chased him away. At night he waited until everyone went away and then got around the back and broke in and said goodbye to her in his own way. He swore they would be together one way or the other no matter what. In the morning he was there outside waiting and he hung around until they finished with her and went out to the graveyard. The father came too. They stood side by side watching the grave get filled in and like someone said they looked as if they did not understand it, and they did not. Nobody cried. Afterward the father went back to the mine and George was supposed to go back to school but he went hunting. He did not catch anything. That was the bad part.

Now the thing that George wanted to laugh at, but he was so surprised at it he couldn’t laugh, was the one building they put him in first had bars on the windows and no doorknobs just keyholes and a cyclone fence around it with five strands of barbwire on top leaning in and watchtowers at the corners and a small gate in the front with no knob just keyholes and a big gate in the back for trucks, it was a double set so the truck could go in one and get locked in, then they would open the second. The whole time he was there they never did close both sets and he never did see anyone up in the little corner watchtowers, but what was funny was the idea that anyone would want to run away from a place like that.
       Everybody had a bed of their own with a clean sheet and a clean blanket and two shelves and a closet with a brown curtain for a door to put things in. Between every bed was a board partition so that except it was open at the end away from the window, once you were in there it was like a little room of your own. In between each two beds, out in the long hallways where the open ends were, was a little wash sink, no kidding, one for each two beds, and hot water as well as cold. For each four beds there was a toilet across the hallway and a stand-up urinal and even if there was no door on it who needs it? At night one guard and two trusties watched each hallway on each floor, six hallways altogether. They had soft rubber shoes but you could hear them coming all the same.
       First thing in the morning big bright lights come on and everybody jumps up and puts pants on and comes yarnmering out to wash the face and brush the teeth and go to the john, with the guards and trusties spaced down the hallway with a pad and pencil to write your number if you horse around or skip the toothbrushing or forget to wash your hands again after you come out of the can. Downstairs you’d go two by two, no running no pushing, and there was like a damn big restaurant but with nothing to pay. You got to your seat and stood there until the matron, that was a fat woman, said grace and you bent your head down and when she was done you sat down and these trusties brought these big platters of scrambled eggs and whole buckets of hot cocoa to ladle into your tin mug. Barbwire? George thought right away it must be to keep people out, not in. Maybe the dried eggs, because that is what they were, did get old after a few months, but how many times did he go to school or off to the woods with no breakfast at all with the father passed out drunk and the mother sick and crying?
       Downstairs along with the restaurant place—they could show movies in it too and church and all—there was a barber shop and a first-aid station like a two-room hospital and a whole row of what they called connies which were consultation rooms for when someone wanted to talk to a guy private like a doctor or a priest or a mother or some other stranger, and the kitchens and a row of offices. This was the one building, three stories high, with the fence around it, and that’s where you went first. After a while when they figured you knew your way around they moved you to another building and it was only two stories and it had no fence. They had five like that, all alike. They had no offices in them and only a couple connies and a one-room first-aid station. In each one, one of the connies was made over to a library. Each building had a real piano and its own ball team and like that, with a world series every year. Every day was school from 8 to 12 and then lunch and then school from 2 to 4. Every day half of each building had to work in the fields 4:30 till sundown or 6 in winter. And if you want to know how they got the work done without any dogging-it, each building had its own field and they kept score on how much corn or tomatoes or whatever each one brought in and if you think that world series was fought, boy, you should see them kids pull weeds. There was also shop training for carpentry, electric shop, sheet metal and the bakery.
       Now everybody in that place had to gripe because they took you for queer if you did not. But I will bet you the sweat off mine against the sweat off yours that not one in a hundred of those guys lived as good as that where he came from. It was like the fashion to gripe, that’s all. Also to make as much noise as possible about how horny you were and where do they keep the dancing-girls. George wished he had a nickel for every ten thousand times those little punks talked about women, but you had to do it. And somebody was always in trouble for making grabs at the pansies or the ones they thought were pansies or the ones they wished were pansies. Most of them wouldn’t know what to do if a pansy said yes even if they knew they wouldn’t get caught which they would.
       George really liked it there. Not that he ever said that, the whole place would macerate anyone who said that. Maybe it was just George. First of all he was big so he didn’t get pushed around. Next, any time in his whole life he had been with kids they were all from his town and they all knew about him and his drunk father and his mother couldn’t talk English so good, and him getting left back in school and all. In this place, nobody ever heard of him before and all they knew was he was up for burglary when most of them all they did was their parents didn’t want them or died or something. Next thing, everybody wore the same kind of clothes and slept in the same kind of bed, so what did they have to brag about? While back home, this kid had a bicycle and that one new shoes and the other’s father was personnel manager at the mine. Next thing: school. Any kid who was well along in school before he came just went right on with it. But any kid who was behind—especially kids like George who were really behind because they got pushed one way or another and not because they were natural born dumb, well a guy like that got special time in the connies and a real chance to catch up with his age. George was really surprised by this school thing, he didn’t know school was that easy and that interesting too, he thought school was a place to tie you up out of the way most of the day and make it easy for them to catch you whatever you did. Here they showed him things he really did not know and should of, like just why it was the poles he used one time could lift a heavy tree off a deer, and also things he could use just as well as a figure-four trap, like how to wire six buttons and four bells so the buttons control the bells you want them to, and when to knock down bread when it was rose enough with the yeast. Last of all, why George liked it there, had a lot to do with George what he was and nothing or nobody else. George kept his mouth shut. George always kept his mouth shut from when he was a little boy, at first because he was scared or shamed to open it and later because it was just too much trouble to get people to understand and at last because he just got the habit. Now most of the people in the world who are in trouble are liars. The wisest thing anyone ever said about lying is this, that to tell the truth is the best because if you tell the truth you never have to remember what it was you said. Well even better than to tell the truth is to keep your mouth shut. If you lie someone is going to make you try to prove it. If you brag, even with the truth, someone is going to call you and you got to make good. If you say anything at all there is bound to be someone listening who don’t understand you or who don’t hear you right. There would be a whole lot less trouble for everybody if most people just did not talk so much. These are things that George thought a lot about when he was grown and not when he was fourteen in that place, but that’s the way he acted anyway, he kept his mouth shut. He never got the habit of running with anyone special either, so he could keep himself to himself. So all the time if he figured out something was good for him he done it. He did not try it out on anybody else and he did not make speeches about it so somebody could maybe talk him out of it. Because there are a lot of people around who can talk real good but do not know very much, they could win an argument about if you should breathe.
       Anyway, you can learn a lot more with your mouth shut. You open your mouth you block your ears.
       About some things you should have some way to block your ears. If George was out by himself he would not have to listen to all that talk about screwing and everything. Every day, every minute somebody was talking about that. George had seen enough screwing to last him a good long time, he did not have to wonder about it which is what most of those guys were really doing. At the same time it was while he was at the school he changed from a boy into a man and he felt it. He felt it more than he should because of all that talk. He finally put his mind to it and thought it through, lying in bed nights. And it was a long time before be got that thinking finished, but the way it turned out was this.
       Being able to shoot your load did not make you nothing special because every rabbit could do it.
       Shooting your load maybe was more fun than crapping or peeing but when you come right down to it it is not so special because you don’t have to make yourself do it—you can’t help it. You wait long enough and it’s just naturally going to bust loose, like when you are asleep; you couldn’t stop it if you wanted to just like sooner or later you got to go to the john whether you want to or not. So it’s nothing anybody has to work at or worry over, which is what all that talk does. If the pressure builds up and you don’t want to wait, go get rid of it. You usually go to the john before you absolutely have to too.
       But the number one top thing about sex is something that George always felt, somehow, but only figured out much later when he was grown. He figured out that everything that is alive in the whole world keeps taking things in and then working them over and then throwing out what it could not use. No matter what a living thing is doing, what it lives for is the taking in part. It does that first and then it works it over and then it gets rid of the exhaust. Taking in is why it goes and why it grows and how it grows too. No matter how good it feels or how much talk there is about it or how many laws get passed, you can’t duck the one thing, that sex is part two not part one. It’s one of the things you leave behind you while you go ahead. When they got General Science in the school and it come to Biology George memorized a line in the book, no living organism can exist in an environment of its own waste products. And thinking about that and trying to find words to hang it to, he come up with this and it finished the subject for always, that the first part, taking-in, gives you Satisfaction and the second part, throwing-out, gives you Relief. There is a whole lot of people in the world sick and crazy too who do not know that difference. They go all around looking for relief and then they get upset when it don’t satisfy. Well of course it don’t satisfy, it can’t. Satisfaction is ahead, all what you need to keep you going if you are going to be alive. Relief is what you get by dropping what you don’t need any more. It’s behind you and if you want to go chasing back to pick it up, don’t be surprised if you look a little crazy and get yourself stunk up some too.
       Well George done his two-year stretch and worked in the fields and learned to carpenter pretty good and to bake some and what he really liked was the electric shop, by the time he left he could wind a squirrel-cage electric motor or shunt. And he could solder real good, not just wires but pipe wiring which damn few know how to do any more but it is good to know, and sheet metal joining, lapped or formed. Also auto shop. Also he was pretty good with math, by the time he left he had enough geometry to measure a field or a wall-to-wall carpet and enough trigonometry to figure the angles for a timber truck-ramp and enough algebra to last him the rest of his life, he didn’t like it or English. He did not play ball but he liked to root for his building. Any job he could do by himself he liked best. He did not like to hold one end while someone held the other. From General Science the Physics part he got the word Resultant. Put down a weight and drop a rope against it, and you pull one end north and I pull the other end west, the weight will not move north and it will not move west but it will move in a resultant direction northwest. Now when George pulled north he liked the load to go north, not anything different. So whatever other people called cooperation George called Resultant and it made him uneasy until he could do it alone.
       Almost two years and no hunting and that was a funny thing because after they let you out of the Cage—that was the big building with the barbwire they took you to first—you were not tied down. You had to be where they told you when they said, and that was most of the time, but there was woods across the fields to the south and if you wanted to slip away maybe and hunt a little you could. George just did not seem to want it. Well they kept you busy and there was never enough time to do all the things around the buildings you wanted to do. Hunting, he just never thought of it.
       But then right at the end of the second year they called him to the office and he said to himself well this is it, I’m sprung. But that was not what they wanted to tell him. They said they were sorry about the news but his father was dead. He just stood there in the office and stared at them, Mrs. Dency the fat matron and Miss Grasheim the big ugly nurse although she was nice, and one of the typists who you could see was horning in to see if she could get a charge out of him breaking up or something. Well she had to do without as he kept standing there sort of blinking and trying to percolate the idea all the way in until finally Mrs. Dency said, “I’ll tell you what, George, I’ll phone your building and tell them to let you upstairs. Perhaps you’d like to lie down and think it over for a while.” Which was just exactly one hundred percent what he wanted just then. Which was the good thing about that fat Mrs. Dency, about eight times out of ten she could hit it right on the nose, whatever you needed. As he walked away she told him he could come talk to her whenever he felt like it. When he got to his building she had phoned ahead so he went right up, which during the day was not allowed, and fell down on his bed. He was supposed to be thinking things over but for a time there he could not think of anything to think. When something finally came it was like a weak joke—well, if you’re going to live at an orphange you might as well be one.
       He got up after a while and took off his shirt and loosened his belt and pushed the front of his pants down below his belly button and stuck his stomach out over the buckle. He stood looking down at the stomach for a while and then shook his head and fixed himself up again. What he thought about just then was not the father squirting blood out of the mother’s nose or hollering drunk coming down the cowpath or standing like lost in the courtroom while they sent him up. It was his face the time George stole that first bag of groceries, his face altogether with broken veins in the skin and mottled patches and the dirty-white blonde eyebrows and hair and the two red scoops of his lower lids and his little washed out pink and blue eyes and all the snaggly stinking teeth—the whole nothing mess of a face with all the messy nothing parts, put together for just once, for just one lousy second, in a way that pleased George to think of, surprised and proud, saying he’d amount to something.
       George shook himself hard and lay down on the bed. He did not feel anything special, not even relieved. Well his father had not been any kind of a weight on him to feel good taken off.
       So finally because of that it came to him what he was supposed to be thinking about. He never did have no real plans, just overall to learn a trade and be able to get a job some place, but he never thought before the some place could be some other place than that one mining town or live in any other house but that shack on the cowpath. The father would be there and that is why he would go there. Now the father would not be there.
       So all of a sudden it hit him. Not hit him, it was not like a blow at all. Like one time when he was a little kid he was over to the river and he lay down in an old rowboat tied to some willows and drowsed in the sun. And lying there he watched the grain of the dry gray wood where once was a knot, and the way the deep furrows of the weathered wood swirled in and around and out of that knot, you see things like that sometimes that though they do not move your eye keeps going into and out of and around and back again there are two spirals of hair on a cat’s back that way. Anyway he watched that for a long time until he got to know it well and half asleep and he also got to know the feel of the side of the boat on his head and the bottom of the boat on his back and rump. And something made him sit up suddenly and there wasn’t anything around him he had ever in his life seen before. The boat had slipped the rope and drifted down the current a half mile or more. But what tore him like a big pair of hands one pulling up one down was how strange it was out of the boat plus how familiar it was inside the boat. He could not move for a long time except to look out at the strange banks and look down into that selfsame knothole over and over again and feel that selfsame gray board grinding his hip. It was like he could take all new or all old not both.
       George felt lost and ripped like that on his bed thinking about the father dead. Because here in the school was the most real living he ever done if living is going ahead into newer and newer things. It was here and now and real, but everything out there was all different and like it had never been what he thought it was last time he looked.
       He got up off the bed and looked out the window. It wasn’t but about four o’clock, a late spring day, and he had no place to be now till 6:30 anyway and even if he did not show then Mrs. Dency would not say nothing, not today.
       Even if it was all right something made him be careful, he stopped halfway down the stairs to let two guys walk by down there and get out of sight, and then instead of striking off across the fields he went to the hay barn and through it and down that way.
       Once he was in the woods he felt better right away. Up here it was mostly oak and maple and he missed the ragged skinny birches and without the jack pine it smelled way different. But the leaves were all new and hot growed yet. Right away he seen a red squirrel but he did not do anything about it, a gray squirrel he might but never a red, they can about jump over a bullet and duck down and peek up at the underside before its gone by. But he saw droppings on the new grass and just when he thought woodchuck he saw the torn maple leaves on a new sprout so it was hedgehog and he cussed, he couldn’t catch up with old Porky without he had gloves and a knife which he had not, no knives in that place. The red squirrel paced him in the trees overhead yammering loudern two jaybirds and a dry axle.
       Suddenly George fell down and lay still but he had the right cocked way back as he lay on his left side. He never tried this before but it was in a book about a gray fox in the library.
       The squirrel spooked out to the outside hair of a maple where there wasn’t nothing but two leaves and a breeze to hold him but he was held up somehow, and all the time chit-chitting and scolding and quarreling fit to drive everything from ants to elk three quarter miles. George never moved. The squirrel liked no part of that. He never seen this before and seem like he did not think it was right. He scampered back to the tree trunk and down and out again lower down and took to hissing and squeaking and clacking his teeth together even, but George never moved. The squirrel ran back to the trunk and flaked off a couple scales of bark with his teeth and brought them back and dropped them one by one on George, one hit him right on the cheek and eye, and he never moved. The squirrel cussed up a storm and ran back to the trunk and right down on the ground and stood there on three legs with on front paw on the trunk ready to scoot backup in case, but George never moved. The squirrel grounded the fourth paw and shut up a minute and still George lay there. The squirrel came forward the way a squirrel and specially a red squirrel never does, not jumping but squiggling along on his claws with his legs stiff and his tail straight out behind and for eight, nine inches or so he looked like he was on little wheels and then he hit dry leaves that rustled and scared him and he disappeared like in a trick movie and there was his head peeking around the tree trunk. And now when George did not move the squirrel came out in two big bounds and stopped a yard away and began giving him hell again, and made one small jump closer and George lashed down with that cocked right just in that split second while the squirrel was in the air in the one small jump; if the little redhead saw it coming which he certainly did there was not a thing he could do about it. George’s fist slammed him down so hard if the squirrel wasn’t there the fist would of gone into the ground up to the wrist but instead he killed that squirrel altogether flattening ribs and all between them against the ground. After that George felt lots better.
       He stayed in the woods for another hour but did not see nothing but a brindle bat asleep upside down under an aspen crotch and who wants to bother with bats. He would of liked a large jackrabbit or a young possum but this woods seemed to be fresh out, anyway the squirrel had done his bit and that was a heck of a whole lot better than nothing.
       After supper he went to see Mrs. Dency. She put him in a connie and went for some papers and then came heck with them and closed the door. “Sit down, George,” she said because he had learned to stand up and wait.
       “Thank you ma’am,” he said because he had learned to say Thank you and Ma’am both.
       “Feel better? Yes, I see you do. George, I’m awfully sorry.”
       “It’s all right,” George said.
       She leaned back and pursed up her mouth the way she always wrapped small surprises. She had black hair with a patch of white on one side in front and round black-rimmed glasses with a snivvy fixed to them where they went behind the ears with a cord on so if they dropped off they would just hang. George said, “I always figured to go back but now I don’t care.”
       Mrs. Dency unpursed the mouth and smiled. “How—about—your aunt?” She handed over the idea like it was a chocolate-covered thousand dollar bill. The smile went away because George just sat there. “Wouldn’t you like that, George?”
       George said No.
       Now this aunt, the mother’s sister, had put in for George a couple times before. The two sisters never did get along and Aunt Mary was the oldest and was real mad that George’s mother got married first and things like that. Then when the father took to drinking and things got bad and she found out, she would ask to take George every once in a while but just to put on the dog or rub George’s mother’s nose in it, but not that she wanted George. Then she married this two-bit hillside farmer in Virginia and more than ever the best way she could think of to put her sister down was to ask for George because it was a way of saying he would be better off with her, which was a way of saying she was better off. Now that the mother was dead George did not trust this offer one bit because he could not see no reason for it. Also George did not get along with Aunt Mary’s husband the little he had seen of him. Also George knew the both of them would hold it against him he got sent up for breaking and entering and attempted burglary, and never let him forget it. But George did not say any of this because he never did say much of anything and besides he thought it was his business, he just said No.
       Mrs. Dency talked it around a whole lot and the upshot was George just asked to stay right where he was. This was a big surprise to Mrs. Dency but she thought it over and then said okay, because George was only fifteen then and his two years was up but in another year he would be sixteen and the school could turn him loose without he had to go to no relative.
       George was wrong on a couple of counts here but he never found that out until later, how could he if he would not talk it over but just sat there.
       So he stayed at the school for one more year and you would not know there was any difference, he worked in school and in the auto shop and in the fields and rooted for the ball team and his building won a corn shuck and George won the only thing he ever won in any kind of a race, it was eating blueberry pie with your hands tied behind your back.
       But there was a difference all the same. The two years, that is what the court said and the court and the school had a hold on George. If he went over the wall they would of dragged him back and it would be the cage for him and no movies or ice cream till hell froze over. But in this other year, he done his stretch already and he was there because there was not no place he would rather go to although he never said that, they would have maccrated him. He never did think serious of going over the wall but if he did it would not be like capturing a escaped criminal it would depend on this and that and the other thing like was he in any more trouble and did he have a clean place to live and all that, and if he was not in no trouble they would of left him alone without even bringing him back. And somehow this all made a big difference to George and it was not a good difference, it was worse.
       He was smart enough not to let it show but a thing like that is all in the way you feel. The only thing he did different from before was he slipped out into the woods all the time. He never took nobody with him and he did not do much except once a whole litter of foxes and that was practically an accident. Otherwise it was not too much good because you do not club rabbits without you can get to a meadow edge in the dark to wait for sun-up and you do not like to set a real big deadfall or a figure-four without you are sure you can leave it where no one can come and also get to it whenever you want to. It was nice getting away every once in a while but on the other hand it was never enough and it was never right. Like if you want something real real bad it is better if you do not get none at all than if they keep feeding you a little tiny bit all the time.
       But the big mystery to George is how come he could go two whole years without even thinking about the woods and all of a sudden for a year he missed it so much there was a hot place in his belly for it all the time. And the two years went by like nothing but the number three was like forever with its feet dragging.
       About the end of it, George got a message to go see Mrs. Dency and he did, and she took him in her office and closed the door and there stood Aunt Mary herself. She was a little woman and George always knowed that but not as little as this, probably because he got so big in the meantime. She looked like the mother but not much. She had a very long nose that was always red at the tip and he thought wet under that, and when she talked she had one of those soft voices like pigeons or something so she could tell you what time it was and make it sound good. George knew the minute he seen her he was not mad at her if he had ever been. She should of come the year before, it would of been the same. But how can you know something like that?
       Mrs. Dency like had it all thought out what she would say and what Aunt Mary should say and you can bet she had Aunt Mary in that office a whole hour before, to tell her just how to handle George. So once George was in and he and Aunt Mary said hello and all, and the women sat down and George said, thank you ma’am no thanks and just stood there, Mrs. Dency took a deep breath and started in at the far edge and come around and around what she was trying to say, while Aunt Mary sat straight up on the front rail of the wicker-seat chair looking bright-eyed like a dog when you got meat in your hand and he thinks it is for him but is afraid to say so yet. So in a way it was funny when finally Mrs. Dency got around to saying Aunt Mary still wanted George to come live at the farm, you could see she was like going to touch it and then bounce way off and come in again slow, but George said, and it was the first peep out of him since the hello, he said, “Why sure I will. ”
       Mrs. Dency could not no more stop than if she had fell off a cliff and was halfway down, she went on for almost a minute explaining all about blood is thicker than water and the advantages of a home and family and the only thing stopped her was Aunt Mary got up and came over to George and took hold of both his hands. So that settled that.
      

Here is another of the letters with the letterhead discarded.

Looneybin Lane                                                     O-R
Orgonia, Ore.                                                     Feb 26

Dear Phil, dammit:

       With all I’ve got to do I have been sitting here pulling on my lower lip and wondering what to say to you. I’m going to tell you right at the start that when I first got that bundle of paper from you and determined it wasn’t the Sunday Chronicle complete with the spring fashions supplement, I was mad as hell. And I suppose I still am. And I began by feeling that “George Smith” should be thrown out of that maniac’s motel of yours, and I wound up feeling the same way. But you made me laugh.
       Well of course, you stinking psychologist you. Anything you might have said to me I’d’ve spit in your eye for, after all this time. If I thought about you and “George” at all, I thought no news is good news and you’d finished with it. Then you send me his autobiography with no comment at all, just nothing.
       So ruefully, it is to laugh. I know what you’re up to. You want me to react, i. e. think. Now you know damn well an administrator doesn’t have time to think any more than he has time to plow through a testament like this. You also know me well enough to knowI’d leaf through it and get hauled in and then go back and start over and hit every word. And be impressed by the effort that went into it, not excluding your pecking it all out on the typewriter. (What’s the matter—haven’t you got enough work to do?) (Seriously, Phil, I know you did it instead of sleeping and cut that out: I need you. You’re going to kill yourself.)
       Now about the biography. I am doubtless much more impressed by the pathetic horror of it than a case-hardened character like you. I am also impressed by this kid’s descriptive ability. I don’t know how a fourth-grade English teacher would parse some of his sentences (like his description of the weathered knot of wood in the boat’s side: “...you see things like that sometimes that though they do not move your eye keeps going into and out of and around and back again there are two spirals of hair on a cat’s back that way.”) but I never failed to get exactly what he meant. And aside from the one or two real insights he comes up with, as for example that discussion on sex and the machine-precise, almost delicate distinction he draws between Satisfy and Relieve, I am impressed by the completeness of his story. To this jaundiced eye he has left out nothing of significance; his portrait of himself is filled in to a substantial solid and contains no appreciable holes. What he has left out, like the exact details of his sex techniques with Anna, shouldn’t bother anyone except a grubby clinician like yourself who is beyond the reach of the chivalrous asterisk.
       I think there are a great many folks on the loose, people who would pass anyone’s sanity standards with flying colors, who are in themselves a lot sicker than this boy He’s one of the few human beings I’ve ever heard of who seems to have placed sex in a genuinely wholesome perspective. He’s inordinately self-reliant; as long as he’s alone, he could no more be lost than a cat can be lost. And that brings up what to my mind is the real nature of his sickness, if any. And it isn’t his sickness.
       I said above that many certifiably sane people are in themselves sicker than “George.” Where we can raise an eyebrow at George is in matters which concern, not a person, but people. No human being, not even George, lives entirely alone. Interpersonal flux isn’t just fun, or convenient, or decent, or orthodox. It is essential, vital. Homo sap. is an interdependent species. He may not live alone. And it’s easy to describe how “George” relates to people: he doesn’t.
       Yet, in him, I don’t think it matters. He found Anna. There’s an odd aura about that relationship but whatever it is—and I’m not prying—it’s suitably convexoconcave, if you see what I mean. She sounds like a girl with pieces missing, but she has the ones he needs.
       To sum up I think this guy’s only sickness is scar tissue from a regrettable childhood, and his only real crime is in being a loner. It feels criminal to us gregarious souls because we don’t think we could do it. It’s—well, unfashionable. It makes us uneasy because of an in-the-cells certainty we all have that without our fellows we could not survive. In a herd-and-hive culture like ours, a solitary bent seems in a way immoral. Tsk tsk.
       All the foregoing (he said modestly) is of bull-session character; this isn’t my specialty, it’s yours. For all my irritation, I am grateful to you, old buddy, for a fascinating hour. Now for Christ’s sake turn him loose.

as ever,
Al

P. S. : What in God’s name do you suppose was in that airletter that alerted the major?

Here is the carbon copy of a letter.

Lingam Lane                                               O-R
Catamite, Cal.                                        Feb 28

Dear Kernel, corps of the Nut:

       Delighted with your letter, your wisdom, your insight, your perspicacity. You’re wrong.
       1. There are appreciable holes in “George’s” narrative, and:
       2. His attitude toward sex is not wholesome.
       Having said which with such positiveness, I’ll have to be honest and say, for item One, that I don’t know what the holes are, just where they are. For item Two, I don’t think his sexual approach is wholesome but I do not affirm it is unwholesome either. This is not juggling with accepted norms, which are as you know pretty weird in places. It’s just that I don’t know what his sex-matrix is; I’m only sure it will bear investigation.
       Like yourself, I’ve been busy with several thousand other things while all this is going on, and I must remind you that this correspondence, for all these weeks, results just from his voluntary bio and our evaluation of it. I think it’s about time I scheduled some real time for him and started digging. I’ll let you know what happens. Thanks again for a grand letter.

luv,
Phil

Here is a letter.

Office of the Administrator
Field Hospital HQ                           O-R
Portland, Oregon                           March 2

Phil:

       I’ll say this as gently as possible. Friendship, and off-the-record correspondence, as factors alpha and beta, are desirable as long as they do not interfere with gamma, that is, the job. Alpha and beta are absolutely wonderful where they help with the job. But if gamma is injured or slowed, beta will have to go and if necessary alpha. Because, old buddy, gamma is bigger than both of us. I’m using Greek letters because you’re an intellectual and I don’t want to insult you with ABC’s, but Phil, it really is that simple.
       I can say I suspect you’ve been working so hard (and well, I cordially add) that your judgement is wavering. And/or I can suggest that your really admirable preoccupation with your specialty has you chasing subtleties at a time when gross shovelling is piling up on you. This is to your personal credit but no good for the shop. I can even concede that you are right about this patient, but still insist that if he is tilted, it’s not enough to roll a marble; shunt him out and forget him. Or if you must, keep track of him and bring him some aspirin when you graduate to being a civilian.
       Or, finally, I can say, and you know damn well I will if I have to, that you have to take my orders, Sergeant Outerbridge, even if you know I am wrong. Even if you know I know I’m wrong.
       Give me credit for effort literally above and beyond the call of duty, on behalf of the above-mentioned alpha. It would cost me to lose it.

Still your friend,
Al

Here is the carbon copy of a letter.

Base Hospital #2
Smithton Township, Cal.                           O-R
Staff Office                                        March 4

Colonel, suh:

       I yield to superior numbers. And eagles. I am as of above date drafting, as ordered, a sound-sounding diagnosis. I’m sorry you had to get stuffy about it, Al. I can see why, but I have to say I’m sorry you did. Oh well. Old Alpha can stand it, I guess.
       While I’m sounding (and I’m not dragging my feet on it, sir), here’s one thing for you to chew on in your idle moments:
       Exactly why did the fully filled-in, admirably portrayed GI blow his stack when asked that specific question by the major?

yrs obediently,
Phil

Here is the answer:

Sime plice                           O-R
Sime stite.                           March 13

Phil, you louse:

       You have the damndest way of slipping live ants under a man’s scalp. Aside from the fact that I have no idle moments, which you know, I made up my mind not to use them on any such dead issue. After four days it bothered me enough that I dug out “Smith’s” manuscript to find out exactly what it was the major asked him when he blew his top. It was, and I quote, “ ‘What do you hunt for, George? I mean, exactly what do you get out of it?” And then bang.
       For two more days I made up my mind, quite often, to forget it. So now, not that it matters, but just for the sake of peace, peace, sweet suffering peace: Mr. Bones, why did the nice man blow his stack?
       Not that it matters, really. You don’t have to answer this.

Al

A carbon copy:

Higgly Hatch                           O-R
Covercrotch, Cal.              March 15

I dunno, Al.

       Shall I ask him?

Phil

A letter:

Base Hosp HQ                           O-R
Ptlnd Ore.                           March 16

       No!

A. W.

A telegram:
      

SGT PHILIP OUTERBRIDGE
BASE HOSP #2
SMITHTON TOWNSHIP CAL MAR 16 6:12 PM

SO ASK HIM.

AL

Another telegram:

SGT PHILIP OUTERBRIDGE
BASE HOSP #2
SMITHTON TOWNSHIP CAL MAR 16 6:21 PM

HAVE GUARD PRESENT THAT IS AN ORDER

COL ALBERT WILLIAMS

Vultures’ Vestry                           O-R
Luna Park, Cal.                           March 17, begorrah

Dear Al:

       I was really touched by your second wire to me last evening. Imagine, it’s the first time you actually pulled rank on me and here I am touched.
       Actually, your posture of command of recent date so chastened me that I sprang to obey on receipt of your first telegram, and did not get the second, heartwarming one until I came back downstairs.
       Work proceeds apace on the clever knowledgeable diagnosis and recommendation for medical discharge, and I imagine we will have it processed in the next few hours, or say 24.

As ever,
Phil

P. S. Oh sure an’ you’ll be wanting to know phwat the man said. (March 17 always boots me right in the Erse.) He said—and with perfect calm, Colonel: he trusts me, you know, which he will not when (God willing) I get my silver bars, which should be about the time he leaves here. Man, it seems I have been waiting half my life for that commission. Tell me, Al, will I feel as good to get the lowly captain’s insignia as you did to get your lofty eagles?... but I digress. The man said, when I asked him why he blew up when the major asked him what he got out of hunting small game—you’ll remember, he stated in his manuscript that he disapproved of killing for killing’s sake, so it wasn’t that, and as for the obvious, I don’t think he once mentions hunger in connection with hunting; also, he frequently went for periods of months and even years without the slightest desire to hunt; anyway, what he answered was simply that he exploded because he thought the major had found out what it was. When I asked him why that should have bothered him, he explained carefully to me that he never was mad at the major; the major was a nice man; he was mad at himself because he had given himself away. The MP’s grabbed him while he was mad, hence the donnybrook. Begorrah. The major pitched in to help and got his nose in the way.
       He affirms that if nobody had grabbed him nothing would have happened but his cut hand when he squashed the water glass.
       I hope that answers your question, Al. Peace, peace, sweet suffering peace. He’ll be a civilian ere the dew drenches the shamrock or shortly thereafter.

P. O.

Base Hospital HQ                           O-R
Portland, Ore.                           March 19

Dear Phil:

       I see what you’re up to. To some degree. There’s a distinction between absolute and implicit obedience, forever discovered and rediscovered in the ranks and used to bug the officers. For all your light-hearted blarney (you see I’m not immune to the passing of Padraic) you’re still bleeding about my pulling rank on you. I can even see how you finagled me into asking just that question (Why did “George” blow his biscuit) when it was perfectly clear I was interested in the same thing the major was: what was his compulsion to hunt, if not for killing nor hunger?
       If he’s still around by the time you get this, see if you can find out.
       And look—just to forestall any of your neuroneprodding, puppet-pulling monkeyshines, let’s drop this explicit-answer-to-explicit-question bit. If you get an answer to this question don’t go giving it to me with a teaser on it for the next one.
       Oh God damn it to hell, Phil. You’re bound on this, aren’t you? If I don’t give you your head with this patient you’ll tweeze me to death with your niggling little pokes and pinches. And you know damn well I need you where you are, working as hard as you can, which I gather means working happy. My alternative is to pitch you in the stockade or transfer you out and you know I can’t.
       Okay, then, go ahead. But give everything you can to everything else. Either get results with him or kick him out.
       It’s lucky for you we’re friends. It’s lucky for me you know how to keep your trap shut. As for Nature Boy, I still think you are wrong. Hurry up and prove it.

Al

The Happy Hutch                           O-R
Far Out, Cal.                           March 21

Dear Al: Bless you, boy! I have everything lined up—Thematic Apperception, Rorschach, projective personality from profile to Patagonia. As for the other work buddy, you got yourself a dynamo. You have never seen processing like you’ll see it now. Thanks thanks thanks and don’t ever ask me if I really did start a discharge for “George.”

Gratefully,
Phil

Schizoid Center,                           O-R
Splitconk, Ore.                           March 23

Dear Phil:

       Don’t thank me, friend; and don’t worry, I won’t ask you if you really were processing that discharge You have your dear old Colonel completely submissive and under your thumb, and willing to do anything to assist you. Like I’m holding up your commission until you’re quite finished with your authorial playmate, so your being an officer won’t upset him. A tough case, Phil, but I’ll go along with you if it takes years.

Cordially,
Al

8

Here’s a sheaf of therapy notes, transcribed from shorthand. Q=Therapist. A=Patient. All notes refer to the case termed AX 544.

March 25.
Morning: 3 hours.

       Q:   Morning, George.
       A:   Who—me? George? (Lying on cot. Sits.)
       Q:   (Shrug.) A good name. You picked it.
       A:   (Nods.) What I wrote... It work?
       Q:   Work?
       A:   To get me out of here.
       Q:   It works like a brick, George, building something. Part of a whole lot of things.
       A:   All that. A brick.
       Q:   That was two whole truckloads, George. That was a good job.
       A:   (Lies down. Seems angered. Watches Q, eyes slitted. Respiration slow.)
       Q:   (Turns back. Walks to window. Fills pipe slowly. Lights. Turns. A. now looking, off-focus, at ceiling.) It takes a lot of bricks. But it’s the only way.
       A:   Okay.
       Q:   No in-and-out this time, George. I’m here till lunch time. (Pause.) If you want me.
       A:   (Shrugs slightly.)
       Q:   Want to get to work, then?
       A:   Doing what?
       Q:   What I have to do mostly is get to know you real well.
       A:   Asking questions.
       Q:   That’s one way.
       A:   Goddam major sent me here... he ask too many questions.
       Q:   (Recognizing warning: don’t pry.) Okay. Let’s try this, George. (Starts to lay out Wechsler on table. Curious, George gets up.)

The Army Wechsler Mental scale consists of ten types of questions, some requiring good use of language, others, easy mathematical manipulation, still others solving simple picture puzzles. It is a standard intelligence test, not likely to stir up violent reactions.

       Q:   (More than an hour later, halfway through tests.) You don’t talk much, do you, George? What happened: use up all your words writing?
       A:   (Slipping from passivity to surliness.) Never did talk much... Quit callin’ me George.
       Q:   Okay... want me to use your real name? (It is Bela—a natural taunt for American juveniles.)
       A:   Hell no...

(On the Wechsler, he scored at a high average level when it came to understanding conventional meanings and ideas. That is, he knew what was expected of him by people around him. But when the test demanded intense concentration and abstract thinking he did less well. He could not apply his mind to a complex idea or situation. I judged that he was equipped to do it, but was unable—at the moment at least—to use the equipment. It seemed tied up in some other task. He was the figurative clam to the letter, the impenetrable valves open a crack, just sufficient to contact what was immediate, direct, simple, touchable.)

       Q:   (Looking at watch.) Man, you’re movin’! You know we’re all done with this and we have a whole hour left? You keep on at this rate...
       A:   Yeah? (Drops passivity for a quick look at Q. Searching for sincerity. Unused to praise.)
       Q:   Want to try more?
       A:   (Dully.) Okay. (Here one could sense, rather than hear or see, a difference in the dullness. This differed from the genuinely, unstirred phlegmaticism. This was almost identical, but an act to conceal an increased awareness.)
       Q:   This is called the Rorschach.
       A:   (Defensively) Shock?

The Rorschach is a set of ten standardized “inkblots.” (You would make such a blot by putting a blob of ink on paper, folding it in two through the blot, pressing the folded paper flat and then opening it up. The blot would be irregular in shape but identical right and left.) To the ten standard Rorschach cards, most people react in certain conventional ways. They see humans or animals or insects or plant life. They see people in traditional poses or action, such as eating, talking, dancing, walking, laughing. These usual reactions are offered spontaneously at sight. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to see Rorschach blots. There is merely approach to or departure from statistical norms.

       Q:   (Chuckles.) Not “shock.” Rorschach. Name of the guy invented them. Just look at ’em one by one and tell me what you see, or what they look like or remind you of.
       A:   (For the impact second, and for the first time, eyes wide and completely alert. Scansion swift, up, down, across. Then lids lower again to usual hooded attitude; subsequent gaze steady and dull. This particular card usually seen by men his age as two figures dancing around an overgrown tree.) This is like two guys mashing an animal, pulling on it or maybe choking it. It didn’t bleed yet but it will. There’s the animal’s hole. (Pointing to a red spot on the card.)
       Q:   (Impulsively using a technique applicable to another test entirely.) Why are they doing that?
       A:   (Instantly withdrawing; concealing; secretive.) They just doing it.
       Q:   (Another card, oftenest seen as two animals crawling up a hill. ) How about this?
       A:   (Instant response.) That’s a tit. Two dragons wanted it but they spoiled it, they tore it all up. Now they are mad, they are flying at it.
       Q:   Try this. (Usually seen as a large butterfly.)
       A:   It’s like animals pulling apart somebody’s body. Vicious animals. There’s the girl’s spine and her hole. She’s cut in half. It’s red inside. (Respiration deeper perhaps but slow; eyes hooded; nostrils repeatedly dilated.)
       Q:   This one?
       A:   Oh, that’s somebody built a double deadfall, bam, it got two animals, chucks maybe or possum, both at once, mashed.
       Q:   And this?
       A:   A woman’s belly bust open. It was a baby in it bust it. But the baby bust open too, see it there?
       Q:   (Gathers up the cards. A. watches absorbedly.)
       A:   (As if he had been thinking about it all this time.) Phil...?
       Q:   ?
       A:   You could call me George if you want.
       Q:   Anything you say... we came a long way today. You’re doing real good now. You want to try some more; more kinds, sometime soon? Not now, it’s lunch already.
       A:   (Dully.) Okay.
       Q:   (Raps for guard.)

End session.

       Summary: April 3.
       Two more long sessions with George...

(...it is interesting to inject here the reminder that Sergeant Outerbridge was still on the struggling staff of an overcrowded, under equipped military neuropsychiatric hospital, carrying a tremendous load, working impossible hours. The fact that he had found six of them for George, and the lack of complaint from Col. Williams, attest to his devotion and superhuman energy.)

       ...have brought us through motor coordination tests, the house drawing, the human figure drawing, and the Thematic Apperception.
       The motor coordination was the first thing we tackled after the harrowing experience of the Rorschach. It consisted of his copying eight different geometric figures composed of circles, squares, wavy lines and dots. He did them precisely, with care and planning, making corrections to improve them. It appeared that despite a compulsively rigid manner of performing, his motor control was in good order and not overrun easily by his deeper, guarded (frightened?) feelings. Watching him do it, I felt I was watching a pencil-and-paper re-enactment of each new experience he had ever had in controlled circumstances—the orphanage, the Army bases. He sought the channels between fences; he eagerly searched for the areas in which he might, once they were known, run freely without having to think. It was easy to see how he had been able to hold down two years and more of Army motor mechanics, working much of the time alone, and free to use his hands.
       Reassured somewhat, I ventured a little closer to the emotional edge, always uncertain where it might begin to crumble under our feet. I asked him to draw a house.
       He drew a traditional house with a formal, landscaped garden, in the artistic style of an anxious six-year old. Each window was given twenty or more panes; the flower-beds and three trees were formed by forceful, tight, tiny scrawlings in contrast to the tenuous thin lines framing the larger structure of the house. Two things stood out as grotesque: the garden he placed in midair above the first story and sprawling out into the upper wall of the house, and the roof was simply cut out of his drawing by the top of the paper.
       It was hardly a balanced picture. It showed poor perspective and poor planning. It suggested that he could not be counted upon for responsible handling of everyday adult reality. He ignored the fundamentals, preoccupied with his private details. He could manage in compulsive fashion if his life were kept simple, but he might otherwise go to pieces.
       I drew a deep breath (silently) and told him to draw a human figure. I said a human figure, but he proceeded to draw a man and a woman, hurriedly, carelessly, as if, having made the outlines, he could not wait to blacken them in, which he did with a heavy hand: filled-in black legs, arms, torsos right up to the chin, then a round black hat on the woman, a square black hat on the man, close over their eyes. Cover up, cover up... anxiety.
       He stopped and I said, “Is that all?”
       To the best of my ability I said it casually and neutrally, but the heavy eaves of his eyes flicked up and he scanned my face, as avidly, for a second, as he had conned the ink-blots. There was a flicker of frown between his brows. “Can I do it over?”
       “Sure.”
       He put his pencil to the paper, held it still, and flashed me that look again. If I believed in telepathy, which emphatically I do not, I would have testified to the receipt of an urgent, “Can I tell?” Then he set to work.
       I thought, as I watched him, how the human psyche, especially the ill one, cries out for contact and communication. George’s partial alexia—the inability to use the spoken word while he could write with such facility—was a phenomenon I had not seen before although I had heard of it. But I was thinking of all the other ways a sick soul reaches out... how the hand of a lonesome person remains outstretched after a handshake, deserted and seeking; how the eyes can express terror alone out of the almost sleeping face of a catatonic; how stern control of impending tears is betrayed by the puckering of the chin. I was convinced by now that George was unaware of anything unwell or odd about himself; yet I was conscious of a thing within him, alive and fully conscious of itself and of his affliction. In that momentary glance, like a separate, sentient being which had borrowed his eyes, it pleaded, “Can I tell? I know. I know. Let me tell. ”
       George was drawing a male and a female.
       They were—pears? I would not lean closer, and divert him; I stayed where I was and peered.
       Nude. Head and shoulders together, a single sharp narrow curve. A mere suggestion of arms, perhaps held behind them. Narrow chests, the breasts of the woman indicated with a mere W-shaped zigzag. Huge, pregnant-seeming bellies, and an indeterminate squiggle for legs and feet. Just like two pears with dot-dot faces on their high narrow top-ends, and all else concentrated into that full round bulge.
       Leaning very close, holding his pencil with great care, flaring his strong nostrils again and again, he drew meticulous nipples on the careless W of the breasts, a perfectly round, very black navel, an identical opening down at the bottom. Then he donated another perfect circle to the man for a navel.
       He put down the pencil and shoved the paper across to me. He had forgotten altogether to draw sex organs for the male. I made no comment except to say that was fine, and my usual comment about how well he was doing. That young man was so starved for praise that it disappeared within him on contact, never to be heard from again.
       “You can make all sorts of animals that way,” he said suddenly, one of the few times he ever volunteered anything. He drew a whole row of the pear shapes, then on one he put long ears—rabbit—on another short spike ears and a stringy tail—possum—round ears and a thick ringed tail—racoon—sharp ears, whiskers and a thinner tail—cat—and so on, until he had eight different cartoon animals. “See?” he all but crowed. He even grinned for a second; I wished he would do that more often. A somber lad, altogether.
       I began to rise, and then sat down again to watch him return to the drawing.
       On each and every animal—they were all drawn in the same pose, sitting down, facing forward, with their round fat bellies thrust out—he was carefully drawing his small bold circular navels.
       It was time to go. I collected the papers and hammered on the door for the guard.

April 9.

       I have just returned from an hour and a half on Thematic Apperception. And if I found it possible to laugh at the ludicrous defenses a psyche can put up, I’d roar.
       George’s alexia, his difficulties with the spoken word, disappeared like magic for the Thematic Apperception, and when I reasoned out why, I marveled.

The test is simply a series of pictures, the kind of thing one sees in magazine illustrations, but carefully chosen to present a number of pivotal and interpersonal situations. For example, one might be a picture of a girl standing in the open door of a cabin. One patient says she is going out; one that she is going in; another that she has been standing there all day waiting for someone. On occasion a tremendous amount of contributory detail comes tumbling out: the girl’s name, the presence or absence of persons in the cabin behind her, and their impending actions; sometimes the comb in her hair or her “new shoe” will be the central factor. Obviously these spur-of-the-moment stories and anecdotes relate to the patient. Frequently they serve as surrogate solutions to a patient’s own problems, solutions the patient dare not face personally, as for example a girl who is in an agony of indecision about leaving home might react to the picture with a tale of a girl who left and was horribly murdered, or a girl who did not leave and got so mad she killed her father.

       It came to me, listening to George incredibly chattering on and on over the pictures, that his verbal censor sat upon the subject of himself. As he remarked in his biography, there is always likely to be someone listening who doesn’t hear right and will get you wrong. It would seem that he was afraid to be heard aright; that is, his mouth might give something away when he wasn’t looking. And give away what? Possibly some anecdotes for which he feared he might get punished (though I am morally certain he feels no guilt) but much more likely he wished to conceal feelings and conclusions and observations which would attract the attention and derision of other people. Incapable of evaluating like other people, he was incapable of knowing before he spoke the effect his words might have.
       But in the face of Thematic Apperception, his censor gave one relieved sigh and went to sleep. For it was—it must have been—convinced that as long as George talked within the four corners of a picture, he could not talk about himself!
       He talked about himself—fluently, boldly, and never knew it. And the peak of the ludicrous (if one could laugh), came when amongst the pictures appeared a white blank card with a border around it—a picture for the patient to make up himself and talk about. And when George came to it his censor awoke and restored to him his soft growling slur: “A blank one?... nothing. It would probably be about myself. No story.”
       But the ones about other people?... these are verbatim.
       A boy and a woman standing in a room: “The kid used to do a lot of stuff, he got sent away. He was away so long him and his mother don’t hardly know what they look like. He just come back. In a minute she is going to put out her arms and he will run to her and she will squeeze him real hard but the front of her dress is not soft. It’s full of rocks. And it isn’t his mother but somebody dressed up in the mother’s clothes is going to steal the money.”
       A boy standing by a window. A shotgun leaning against the wall. “Let’s say a kid is in a shack. A window and shotgun there. He has been reading up on doctor books, operations and all. His father is going to get operated on. He is going to go to the hospital and stand there and tell that doctor if he makes a mistake he will blow his head off. But the gun goes off and kills the father.”
       A man bestowing a kiss on the forehead of a silverhaired lady. “A guy is kissing his mother on the forehead. Likes her a lot. Thought about her a lot and did everything she wanted and give her a kiss like that every night or so. I could go on further but—she died. The guy went all to pieces. He wanted to go to the grave and fix it all up with flowers. He always felt better if he was around her grave. That’s why I would like to get out of here. No one takes care of my mother’s grave and father’s grave too. I always did.”
       (Interesting wish(guilt?)-fantasy; he has never seen his father’s grave.)
       A man lying asleep on a grassy bank. “I’d say probably somebody beat this guy up. Killed him. He’s going to drag his body out of the way so no one would see. Behind some tanks or something. He probably killed to get his money. He cut him too. Then he went off in the woods and I guess he will do it again some time in some other place.”
       Boys swimming in an “ole s’wimmin’ hole.” “Oh, well one of those kids got a bad leg and it starts to bleed, and so one of the other kids comes up to see and the kid that is hurt starts to scream and the other kid can’t stand that so he pushes him under and that ends that. Then the other kid comes out of the water. He was lost before but now he knows where he is.”
       Bland and unemphasized, cheerful and inventive, George talked on and on: theft, murder, mayhem, mother-death, father-death, father-murder; drownings, stabbings, operations. No seduction, rape, adultery. No (in in the conventional sense) happiness, though George, in most instances, seemed far from sad. The dying mothers sobered him a little.

A letter.

Cackle College                           O-R
Thalamus, Ore.                           April 9

Dear Phil:

       You sent your report on your Man in the Iron Mask with your usual deft timing, just when I was about to utter a long-range howl about it.
       I will concede that it is all very fascinating, and that you were right in intuiting—if it was intuition—that there was a good deal more to that young man than met the eye. But Phil—I have to tell you, word got back to me about that little occasion you had on your third floor. A violent case should not have been put there where he had to double up with another patient. Even a potentially violent one. Yet you put him there because you had no free solitaries on the fourth floor, right?
       Right.
       And you were away at the time. Sick leave! Phil—are you all right?... but all the same, you weren’t there.
       Nothing came of it this time but there can be others; there will. Now I’m way on your side about your George, and you’ve dredged up a whole mess of internal garbage, and he’s sicker than I thought he was. But—get him out of there.
       To end on a different note, thanks for sending George’s drawings along with the report. Very interesting, as my dear old mother used to say. (She used to say it at art galleries, every time. It’s something to say, and it hurts no one’s feeling no matter what.) But what interested me even more, my head-shrinking friend, is your identification of all those succulent shapes as pears.
       Granted we all have our preoccupations... but to me the little animal on the end is nothing in the world but a titmouse.
       Pears indeed. You want the name of a good doctor? Or are you becoming a vegetarian?

Al

And the answer:

Manor Depressive,                           O-R
Dementia, Cal.                           April 11

Dear Al:

       It might seem small of me to pull rank on you, and it’s damn rude, I know, to quote a guy’s compliment back at him; but you yourself once said that professionally I outrank you six ways from Sunday, or some such. And, Al, it is my considered opinion that our George is potentially more dangerous than anything else in the place.
       I’ll forestall your demand: can I prove it? by conceding that I can’t. I just know, that’s all. Nobody could boil off the stuff he does without being loaded and armed, and if he goes bang, I want it to be in top security.
       Now it could be that what he’s got is dangerous like a sword and not like a gun or a bomb. Thing is, I don’t know yet what kind of thing it might be. I will, and I think soon; but until I do I’d as soon turn a Bengal tiger loose in the halls.
       Leave me commit the further enormity of reminding you that I have been right so far.
       They are so pears. But I admit it is subject to spelling changes.
       You could be right.

Phil.

P. S. No, damn you, I wasn’t sick. I confess I went to the Big Town and credentialed myself into the cell under the library where they keep the really sensatonal doity books. Just to irritate you, I enclose my notes.

P. O.

A sheaf of handwritten notes on yellow paper.

von Krafft-Ebing, the old peeper... walking around the hind end of the nineteenth century, tattling. Had no use for Freud. By him, everything “hereditary taint.” “Bore out his fixed idea that there are certain things nice people don’t do. But indefatigable researcher all the same so shaddup keep yr prejudices to yrsif.

LUST-MURDER

Lust potentiated as cruelty, murderous lust extending to anthropophagy. Boy what a litry style von K-E had... lookit:
       “1827. Leger, vine-dresser, aged twenty-four. From youth moody, silent, shy of people. He started out in search of a situation. Wandering about eight days in the forest he there caught a girl twelve years old, violated her, mutilated her genitals, tore out her heart, ate of it, drank the blood, and buried the remains. Arrested, at first he lied, but finally confessed his crime with cynical cold-bloodedness. He listened to his sentence of death with indifference and was executed. At the post mortem examination, Esquirol [who he? Famous nineteenth century psychiatrist—ed.] found morbid adhesions’ between the cerebral membranes and the brain.
       “Vincenz Verzeni, born in 1849 in Spain; since Jan. 11, 1872, in prison; was accused (1) of an attempt to strangle his nurse Marianne, four years ago, while she lay sick in bed; (2) of a similar attempt on a married woman, Arsuffi, aged twenty-seven; (3) of an attempt to strangle a married woman, Gala, by grasping her throat while kneeling on her abdomen; (4) on suspicion of the following murders:...
       [Well, most of these don’t matter, but here’s one:]
       “In December a fourteen-year-old girl, Johanna Motta, set out for a neighboring village between seven and eight o’clock in the morning. As she did not return, her master set out to find her, and discovered her body near the village, lying in a path in the fields. The corpse was frightfully mutilated with numerous wounds... The nakedness of the body and erosions on the thighs made it seem probable that there had been an attempt at rape; the mouth filled with earth, pointed to suffocation. In the neighborhood of the body, under a pile of straw were found a portion of flesh torn from the right calf and pieces of clothing. The perpetrator of the deed remained undiscovered.
       “When caught, Verzeni confessed to this and many other murders. He was then twenty-two years old, bullnecked... [Oh-oh. Here we go on the Krafft-Ebing hobby-horse]... as seemed probable, Verzeni had a bad ancestry—two uncles were cretins, a third, microcephalic... The father showed traces of pellagrous degeneration... his family was bigoted and low-minded [!]... there was nothing in his past that pointed to mental disease, but his character was peculiar.”
       [He’d probably describe the Marquis de Sade as downright odd.]
       “...Verzeni was silent and inclined to be solitary... admitted the murders gave him an indescribably pleasant (lustful) feeling, which was accompanied by erection and ejaculation. As soon as he had grasped his victim by the neck, sexual sensations were experienced. It was entirely the same to him, with reference to these sensations, whether the women were old, young, ugly, or beautiful. Usually simply choking them had satisfied him.
       “But in the case of the girl, Johanna Motta, and, it was discovered later, other women, he had done more. The abrasions of the skin on Johanna’s thigh were caused by his teeth whilst sucking her blood in most intense, lustful pleasure.
       “These statements of this modern [to Krafft-Ebing, modern, that is] vampire seem to rest on truth. Normal sexual impulses seem to have remained foreign to him. Two sweethearts that he had, he was satisfied to look at; it was very strange to him that he had no inclination to strangle them or press their hands, but he had not had the same pleasure with them as with his victims.
       “Verzeni stated in his confession, ‘I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women... It was even a pleasure only to smell female clothing... I took great delight in drinking Motta’s blood. It also gave me the greatest pleasure to pull the hairpins out of the hair of my victims... after the commission of the deeds I was satisfied and felt well. It never occurred to me to touch or look at the genitals or such things. It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood. To this very day I am ignorant of how a woman is formed. During the strangling and after it, I pressed myself on the entire body without thinking of one part more than another.’ ”
       [Backing off from the sheer horror of it, it strikes one how Verzeni’s indifference to his genitals, his failure to think of a woman’s body as having parts and the sucking of blood—all child-like, infantile, like a wildly hungry baby.]

And a response:

Base Hospital HQ
Office of the Administrator                           O-R
Portland, Ore.                           April 12

Phil:

       All right, I’ll stand by my compliment since I meant it, at least at the time. I’ll give you an indefinite but short extension in the matter; so whatever you plan to do about it you’d better do. Because the next time I mention it there will be no arguments.

A. W.

P. S. Your library notes range all the way from distasteful to disgusting, and fail to make your case.

10

Comments: This is the day, the breakthrough, and man, man, man, the number of times I almost blew it. (Later) Had to go for a walk and come back. Too excited to write for a while. Now let’s see where we suddenly are.
       First of all, George’s suggestibility. I don’t know why, but I am always surprised when some shingle-bundled busted-hinge ego turns out to be a good hypnotic subject. Clinical data bear it out and I should not be amazed, but I always am. You always think the integrated phlegmatic type is going to go under easiest. Why, George slips under like a saucer in a dishpan. And he regressed, at least in light trance, to four years old as if he had a head start.
       Next was the experiment to see if the trance episode had increased rapport between us in the waking state. That was another time I almost tipped everything over with one wild whoop of joy. He chatters like a lil ole jaybird.
       And then there was the test of Ferenczi’s “forced fantasies”—catching up a wish, no matter how casual or ardent, and leading the patient to the next step and the next until, like any good natural function, the wish-fantasy is achieved and peace settles in. Peace would have settled in if it hadn’t been for that undignified scramble for lunch. For a while I thought it was going to be the peace you rest in.
       But of course the most important achievement today was the watchman episode. What a perfectly beautiful (clinically speaking, of course!) slide that was, effortlessly from the major to the father image to the old watchman... come to think of it, it’s right there in George’s autobiography. Will look that up. I bet it’s there to be read. I bet there are other things to be read in it now that we know the language... and George will fill in the gaps for us.
       Got to write to Al.

A letter.

Cuckoo Cavern                           O-R
Glandular, Ore.                           April 16

Well, Phil!

       If you say I told you so I’ll punch you right in the—on the other hand I haven’t the heart. I’ll say it for you; you told me so; you told me and told me. And God, when I think of the pressure I put on you: throw the bum out, I said. Give him to the waiting world, I said.
       In all seriousness, congratulations, Philip. You did a superb job at wicked odds, and for as much as I was in your way I apologize.
       I’ve contacted Lucy Quigley. Ever meet her? She was for a long time with the Regional Red Cross. She’s on her own and available for a little job for us, and is willing, damned able, and almost ready.
       I’ve asked her to go down to George’s home town and root around in the newspaper files for information about that watchman’s death.
       If any. Now don’t get mad, Phil; but you know better than I that this could be a fantasy. If there was such a death, and if it checks with what he says, it’s a feather in your cap, of course. If there was no such death, or if it doesn’t check out according to George’s description, then it’s something he heard about and appropriated. So hold your breath, kid; this is the big checkout.
       Meanwhile she’s going to interview Anna too. She’s capable as all git-out, as I’ve said, and tactful and kind, as well. She’ll be leaving in a couple of days, so if there’s anything you want asked of anyone in the area, or checked up on, fire it up here.
       You know what you are, you’re a detective, that’s what.

Al

Base Hospital #2                           O-R
Smithton Township, Cal.                           April 18
       (I don‘t feel funny this afternoon.)

Dear Al:

       A little weary and shook up as I write this: I think the enclosure will explain why. It was fascinating to do and I never want to do it again. My warmest regards and thanks to Miss Quigley; tell her I will be waiting, like the cat that ate the cheese and sat down by the mousehole, with baited breath.

yrs.
Phil

       Enclosure:
       Therapy, April 16.
       (Light trance induced at the outset. Achieved without resistance and rapidly.)

Comments: A formal and complete evaluation will have to wait; not only is it necessary to get this information in the hands of Miss Quigley before she leaves for the South, there is too the matter of generating enough objectivity to do a fair job. Perhaps I am simply over-tired, but at the moment I would disqualify myself from any necessarily clinical, impersonal analysis of these developments. Let it suffice for the moment to skim over some of the major peaks.
       It would seem that the key log in the jam was the revelation to George that his secret was out. I have remarked before on the marvellous way the sick psyche shouts for help; it is a pity we can’t invent a detecting device which would show which language or which instrument or which vocabulary that shout was cast in. The burden of his secrecy must have been unbearably heavy, and must have become more so of recent weeks. I am very impressed by the way in which release came to him; at the very time when I was laboriously picking my way down into the shellhole to gather him up, he was standing on the edge already working hard at the answer to my question about when he started drinking blood.
       Summing up his reasons for the practice, we find that he turns to it for relief only when he is hurt, disoriented—“lost”, as he puts it. This is its distinction from a usual hunger. Or to put it in another way, and using George’s distinction between “satisfaction” and “relief,” his blood-drinking is not like the bottled-up, raging pressures which drive the true sexual psychopath; it is much more like the demanding vacuum inside a suckling babe.
       The analogy, once made, bears on the question in so many ways that it stops looking like an analogy and becomes, very nearly, an analysis. A hungry baby wants what it want with an insensate, unreasoning demand which brooks of no delay, argument, postponement or reason. In these terms it is quite fair to describe a baby’s emotional nexus as insane... maniacal... obsessive. And a baby seeks this assuagement for anything else besides hunger which troubles him. When Baby bumps his head, even when his stomach is full, he can be consoled by the nipple. If he bumps his head, even when his stomach is full, and he cannot find the nipple, his outrage is enormous and his demand increases.
       For anyone maltreated and denied as much as George, the transferance from breast milk to blood would be understandable. In George’s case it can hardly even be called a transferance—not in the light of what occurred, and what, further, he was repeatedly told, about his mother’s preoccupation with her own bleeding breasts.
       I am beginning to feel that George’s problem is a sexual problem only in the most remote, though parallel, way. “Arrested development” is a useful phrase but in his case too wildly understated. It would seem that his emotional development absolutely ceased, not at adolescence or in pre-puberty, like so many of these cases, but in the most primitive levels of the infantile. The fact that his physical and mental development in all other areas is relatively unimpaired may be unlikely, may be statistically impossible, but remains a fact.

Hotel Venetian
Charlotte, North Carolina                           May 5

Dear Dr. Outerbridge:

       “Socked in,” as the airlines people call it, by fog, I have to stay here overnight and get tomorrow’s plane instead. I mailed my report to Col. Williams this evening, but I don’t imagine airmail will move tonight any more than I will. So with an evening on my hands and a typewriter in my luggage, I thought I’d write you, if only because I know you must be on tenterhooks awaiting the news.
       Col. Williams may have told you that I was a psychiatric nurse before I was a Red Cross worker. I tell you that to add substance to my congratulations. Please do not be angry at Col. Williams for having shown me your “O-R” correspondence—he is an old friend, and he is sure, as I want you to be, that I am not the kind of “record” which that correspondence is “off.”
       To keep you no longer in suspense, let me tell you right at the outset that you were right all down the line. The two murders did occur, they happened at the times Col. Williams calculated from the patient’s history and accounts—his enlistment, for example, and the best guess he could make for the Episode of the Skunky Uncle (whom, as you will see, I met and talked with).
       The death of the watchman was reported in the newspaper and on the police blotter—and attributed to heart attack. I won’t go into detail as to how I proceeded from there, except to say that the resistance I encountered was not trivial, the welcome I received was not warm, the assistance I got was not helpful, the threats I made were not small, and the feelings I left behind me were ones of great relief. In bald outline, I went to the chief of police, the local bartender who operates the chief of police, and the bartender’s wife, who owns the bar and operates the bartender; and having gotten clearance from her, was able then to approach the coroner sufficiently armed to raid his files. They do indeed differ from newspaper and police reports, which did not mention the knife wound. The coroner, a perfectly unbelievable example of typecasting, even to the gold watchchain and the spitoon, offered what seemed to be a weaseling excuse for letting the fact of the knife-wound get lost; yet I do believe it to be the truth. What he said was that the watchman, a chronic alcoholic of long standing with virtually terminal kidney disease, atherosclerosis, stenosis of the mitral valve, and a forty-foot tapeworm, may well have died for a number of reasons with or without having been stabbed, and only coincidentally with having been assaulted. The main point to him (and the other local officials) was that where a victim was of no importance, the murderer unkown, clues few or absent, and suspects non-existent, there just was no good reason for putting an unsolved killing on the books. I gave him every assurance that the books would, for all of me, remain the way they were. Col. Williams can, if you want him to, give you chapter and verse on the legal position of this matter as far as you are concerned, but I think you may rest assured that if it ever comes to investigation and indictment, the mentalcondition of your patient will make any further action useless to anyone. This as a moral issue, might, as the saying goes, cause fights in bars, but it places itself outside the immediate province of the patient’s diagnosis and treatment.
       My next to move to Cravensville. It is situated just as your George described it, on a mountain lake which bends around a point, obscuring the far end from the town. I acquired a boat and crossed to what certainly looked like the geography George mentioned—a little cove and a small swamp where a brook seeps into the lake—and entering the cove I horrified a half-dozen naked boys swimming there; they drifted away into the woods like little ghosts. I cannot be sure I saw the actual flat rocks from which George made his deadfall, but if anyone wanted to make one there he certainly could. I did not see any beaver or lodge, but beaver have been there, as anyone can see who recognizes a pointed sapling-stump.
       As for the death of the little boy, I had no luck at all with the newspapers. The town has no newspaper, and the nearest regional gazette, a weekly, must have gone to press shortly before the death of the child and found it not worth reporting in the next issue. Your George was chillingly right in one respect—life is a lot cheaper in certain areas of those mountains than one would like to believe. Poverty, illiteracy, and too many children are three great forces against overwhelming grief at the loss of a small life and a hungry mouth.
       In addition, circumstances militated against anything sensational appearing in the death of the boy. For one thing, there is a highway bridge across the opposite end of the lake, and twice in the past three years people have died there (one a suicide, the other a traffic casualty) and their bodies have been found floating in the cove—a matter, I suppose, of prevailing wind or some sluggish circulation of the lake water. This, and the battered condition of the boy’s body, made it easy for the local authorities to accept the conclusion that the boy had died elsewhere than at the cove. He was wearing bathing trunks, in which he had left home the afternoon before he died (poor little thing, I’d guess he lay in the deadfall all that night) so there was not even the evidence of his clothes near the death scene.
       Specifically, his left leg and his right foot and ankle were crushed, although no bones were broken, and he had a good many bruises and contusions about the head and face. The incision on the naval was there, and though no one ventured a guess as to how exactly it came to be there, the hypothesis of a hit-run driver on or near the highway bridge seemed to cover everything quite neatly. I think you may chalk up one more credit to George’s honesty, no matter what your convictions may be of truth being beauty and beauty truth.
       I visited Mr. and Mrs. Grallus, the aunt and uncle, and I would not attempt to improve upon your George’s talent for portraiture. If it should happen that George is ever freed, there is a niché for him there. The Gralluses are no longer young, and they are childless. I think the aunt has a genuine, though not overwhelming, affection for George, and would do a great deal for him if she could. I think Mr. Grallus would do even more, for he feels very guilty about the way he treated George, and would like to make it up to him. There isn’t the slightest tinge of unselfishness in this; he just wishes he didn’t feel guilty and would work hard to get rid of it. They both believe that George is a “dummy”—retarded, that is; and if you and I had a nickel for everyone in this country who fails to make a distinction between the mentally ill and the mentally retarded, we could build a clinic large enough to treat them all.
       Finally, I went to see Anna. Oh, poor Anna! Numb, mute, unlovely, unloved, and loving. She reminds one of a draft animal, especially a donkey, one covered with saddle-galls and surrounded by biting flies, which stands patiently waiting, with sad and beautiful eyes, for someone to water it or kick it or kill it or tell it what to do... I embarrass myself a little, Sergeant Outerbridge; I’m really not given to flights of prosody, but I declare she touched me.
       She (too) is just what your George described—a stocky woman with a widow’s hump, heavy shoulders and rump, and surprisingly delicate hands, feet and ankles. Her face is broad and pink with a small pug nose, close-set eyes, and a sad soft mouth. Her jaw is massive and she has a double chin, though she isn’t what anyone would call a fat girl. I met her weeding in a corn-patch, where they sent me from the house. I was glad to be able to talk to her out there and away from that drab, noisy ruin they refer to as a house. The word “mean” has several shades; everything about that house and inhabitants and all its surroundings defines every one of them.
       I won’t attempt a verbatim transcript of our conversation, and I have not, by the way, given one in my report to the Colonel. Anna’s vocabulary and experience are so limited that the words express almost nothing. Yet she has had so little sympathy, tenderness, respect or understanding that a little of it went a long, long way.
       That she loves George (she calls him Belly—didn’t you report somewhere that his name is Bela?) there can be no question; she loves him through and through and in all dimensions. She accepted his apparent desertion of her, and his unbroken silence, in precisely the way the above-mentioned draft animal accepts a kick in the head. She has never broken stride, nor thought of it. She has gone right on with her succession of days, numbly remembering the two and a half years of George, and using them as her only diversion. She is not exactly waiting for him; to say that would be to imply hope, and she has never entertained hope about anything. But about one thing there is absolutely no doubt: should he ever come back, she will be here and she will be his if he will have her.
       I was able to get fairly complete picture of their relationship—conversationally, she has no skill and no defenses—and through a not too murky screen of euphemisms one could see that he made his capture so total because he was gentle. Sexually she was not innocent when he came along—there had been some drunken tumbles with some of the threshing crew that came by when the buckwheat was in, and one of the hired hands had used her with some regularity for a period. She also mentioned one Sammy, under whose ministrations she had for the first and only time enlisted help: she told her father who, she said, beat him half to death. I did not inquire as to what Sammy was to her but gather he is her elder brother. From what your George reports, he never forced himself on Anna, and convinced as she certainly is that all males are violently driven by sex and therefore violently drive, it really never occurred to her that George’s diffidence was anything but enormous self-control and consideration. Seducing George required a good deal more than suggestions and availability. She had literally to perform the entire act with him. He apparently neither cooperated nor resisted, and for his disinterested complaisance, which she took to be a species of chivalry, she worships him. Evidently their coition was infrequent, occurring only when her desire became uncontrollable, but then always; he never resisted her. This alone would make it infrequent; you may add to it that she tried her best to emulate what she felt was his honorable self-denial, which cut down the frequency even more.
       The only aggression he ever expressed must have been in every sense irresistible. You describe him as physically powerful, and his compulsion moved him as easily as he could move her. Anna’s communicativeness slowed at this point almost to speechlessness, but did not quite stop. With an air of brisk and kindly matter-of-factness I was able to keep it moving and enable to put down the heavy (to her) burden of scandal and guilt involved in confessing what she had permitted. And when she had finally stammered out what she was sure was her shame and damnation, the poor creature closed her eyes and bent her head and stood there expecting, I think, me to spit on her and God to strike her dead.
       Well as gently as I could I gave her, in Basic English, as clear a delineation as I could of what I call the Kinsey Boon—the great gift given by Indiana’s immortal to countless millions of needlessly worried people—the simple statistical statement that no matter what we do... we are not alone. And indeed she, like many another uninformed, non-reading, virtually non-thinking person, really did believe that what had happened between her and your patient was unique and unspeakable, and as noticeable to Heaven as a bloodspot on a white tablecloth. To learn that what had happened was fairly common and in itself unimportant—that was a revelation to her. And I even quoted Havelock Ellis (without, of course, mentioning Havelock Ellis) to the effect that any mutual act—any one, providing only that it was not forced by one upon the other, and was an expression of love, is moral... A strange scene, me in my shiny city shoes standing on a billy hillside talking to a draft animal in a clean worn dress about the ways of ecstasy. Oh dear, it must be getting late; when I get sleepy I seem always to get purple.
       The frequency of this act, you will be very interested to know, was every twenty-eight days, give or take a couple. He could sense it like an animal, and probably the same way. Like other things in his extraordinary manuscript, this too was hidden in plain sight. Didn’t he say something about knowing before she did that she was pregnant, because she never kept track but he did?
       Do we add this, Doctor-Sergeant Outerbridge, to other data on insanity and the moon?
       Well, that’s my story... and Sergeant, since this is a personal letter and not exactly a report, permit me a personal comment. I’ll be formal enough to state first that my opinions must be regarded as opinions... I’m not a doctor. I’m a caseworker, a nurse, and a woman.
       As all such, then, let me congratulate you. I deeply admire you and the way you handled this case, and I hope some day to meet you and shake your hand.
       I think that George is one of the most tragic creatures I have ever heard of. I don’t doubt that be will wind up in a learned paper or even in a book. I would like to be as sure that he will wind up a free, well man, perhaps in his own cornfield with his Anna. I don’t know, of course, how you plan to treat him; but somehow there is no doubt in me as to if you will treat him. If there is anything I can do to help, please call on me. Please. It would be an honor to work with you and a triumph to succeed.
       Please let me submit something to you (perhaps too simple; perhaps, because of factors I couldn’t possibly know about, something after all nonsensical; perhaps something you’ve already thought of yourself and discarded): All three of the qualifications I mentioned above—the caseworker, the nurse, the woman—speak at once when I suggest that George is not a sexual psychopath at all, and therefore could not be expected to respond to any known treatment in that area. You yourself presented as a sort of trial hypothesis that emotionally he is arrested at the lowest levels of infancy, and that the true grotesquerie in the case lies in the unusual fact that he is quite fully developed in all other particulars. I think that was extraordinarily astute of you. I am well aware that modern psychiatry recognizes earlier and earlier indices of sexual activity and sexual differentiation. There was in Victorian times a widely accepted belief that until the age of ten all children, unless tainted by environment, were “innocent,” a word which meant sexless angels. Yet it seems to me that this differentiation must have a beginning point and it is not at birth. It may be that sexual awareness of some sort goes back earlier than this point of differentiation, but I feel that it too does not go back as far as birth. If this is so, then there is a period in infancy when the child is, emotionally speaking, neither male nor female nor sexual entity, but simply a human infant (with all the demanding, insensate, “insane” demands you describe). I don’t know if anyone has ever thought of this, but can one reasonably suppose that a girl infant demands the breast any less because she is a girl?... I know I’m being wildly intuitive and “female” in bringing this up, but I can’t get it out of my head that you will find George’s emotional quantum cowering in that area.
       Colonel Williams made a pleasantry in one of his “O-R” notes to you, and very amusing it was; it was in reference to George’s drawings of pear-shaped animals, and his jocular conclusion was that they were mammary symbols. After laughing I began to think about them, and I recalled that George had also drawn a man and a woman with the same configuration. And I remembered, too, that George drew the woman’s breasts with a single careless zigzag (i. e. not important) but at the same time went back and drew the nipples with great care. He always drew navels, as if he regarded as incomplete any rounded shape which did not have a terminal orifice of some kind.
       So it occurred to me that his oh-so-humorous little sketches were possibly life as he sees life—living beings as his infantile emotional consciousness wishes they were and believes they are. Rabbits and squirrels and little boys and old watchmen—each one is a mamma, full of warm sustaining fluid. The entire organism is the manimary, and he feels this with such devotion that he even bypasses with zigzag the true breasts (though he cannot overlook the nipples) and in preference makes the whole female body a mammry object; this aside from, apart from, and utterly discounting the fact that it is female!
       This hypothesis then leads one to the surprising conclusion that in his (perfect word!) periodic aggressive erotic act with Anna, he was sexlessly performing an asexual function upon organ or object the sex of which was as unimportant as the gender of a bottle.
       (I wonder if I could have spoken to Anna so convincingly of “acts of love” if I had thought this out at the time!)
       And in the area of symbolism also is something I derived from George’s startling dictum about how to tell the cowboy hero from the cowboy villain. (And that amazingly perspicacious young man is right!!) Heroes get shot in the chest. (Breast?) Villians get shot in the stomach. Query: Is it more than coincidence that his father and the watchman, whom he identified with the father, were cut in the chest, while the boy, whom he identified with the fetus which had displaced him with Anna, was cut in the navel?
       Oh my goodness, look what I’ve done; I meant to give you the news and congratulate you and go to bed; the window is getting pink around the edges, the fog is gone, and my plane leaves in an hour. Sergeant, Doctor, Sir Philip—whatever you’re called: thanks; it has been a pleasure to talk to you.

Cordially,
Lucy Quigley

13

A letter...

Sir Philip’s Bughouse                           O-R
Praecox, Cal.                           May 8

Dear Al:

       I enclose the enclosed, a monumental missive from your Lucy Quigley, who is, as you in one way or another said, some chick. What does she look like?
       I send it because I think you will enjoy it, although it contains reportorial information which I know you have in her formal report and therefore don’t need, and some heady compliments addressed to me which you will feel I should have modestly kept to myself.
       And in all seriousness, I want you to think over her hypothesis about the non-sexual, or should I say presexual, nature of George’s disorder. I’m in a neither-confirm-nor-deny mood about it at the moment, but it excites me and I’d like to echo when it bounces off you.
       You’ll be happy to know that I obeyed your orders of about five months back and got some sleep, about fourteen consecutive hours’ worth, and that since then I have worked for forty consecutive hours cleaning up all the work which the sleep and my preoccupation with George caused to pile up. So everything is normal again. I’ve only seen George once in that time—I happened to be candling the head of a strait-jacketed neighbor on his corridor—and all I did was chat. One interchange you’ll be interested in: I told him that I would respect his wish not to discuss his specific conduct with Anna, and the contents of the airmail letter which fused this bomb; I assured him further that I was about to ask him a question which he need not answer. I then asked him why he did not want to discuss these things.
       Well, our George sat on the edge of his cot and scratched his handsome yellow head, and at length gave me a diffident smile and said, “I just wouldn’t want you to think I was queer.”
       What’s new with you?

Phil

Palace of Pathology                           O-R
New Rosis, Ore.                           May 10

Dear Phil:

       Have read and reread Lucy’s letter and return it herewith. You’re quite right: she’s some chick. Or was I the one said that? All right; I’m right: she’s some chick. As to what she looks like, you can see for yourself. She’s arriving here tomorrow and we’ll grab a chopper and buzz down your way for dinner. Okay?
       As to an opinion on her hypothesis, you will please excuse me, dear friend, but I have none, and if I had I wouldn’t tell you. Please always regard me as being something like an airline ticket agent. I know how they come and go and I fix it for people to ride; but don’t ask me how the new-fangled things work. So no opinion. As to clause 2 above, wherein I depose and say I wouldn’t give you an opinion if I had one, leave me state here and now that I think you’re a great man.
       A clever man. A good man in several senses. But from time to time I get these uneasy feelings. Every time I express opinions to you it turns out three months from now that I have ordered you to do this or permitted you to do that, and what’s more you can prove it.
       I have two pieces of news for you. One is that when I arrive I shall give you a little box with some costume jewelry in it, like silver bars, and a paper with a message suitable for framing, like a commission, and a paymaster’s voucher retroactive to your 25th birthday. You can, if you are able, square it with your own conscience that under false colors you have been endearing yourself to George as a sergeant while actually an officer the whole time.
       My other piece of news has to do with the late Major Manson, may his shade be reading over your shoulder to catch this my heart-felt apology. (Remember when I called him moo-headed and concluded that he had slapped a “psychosis unclassified: violent” on George solely because George had punched him in the nose?) Well, after his honorable deceasement, our efficient Army separated his personal effects from government issue and sent the former to his survivor, a daughter. She quite understandably let some time go by before she tackled the job of sorting his things. Among his papers was an unmailed air-letter form. I enclose it, and I think no one need wonder why that mail censor was intrigued enough to bring it to the major, nor why the major sent for George.
       Skip lunch. That’s an order. You and Lucy and I are going to eat up a storm.

’la. vista,
Al

Enclosure: An unmailed air letter form. It bears the soldier’s serial number, an APO post office address, and the designation of a combat unit. It is signed. The body of the letter, in toto, follows:

Dear Anna:
       I miss you very much.
       I wish I had some of your blood.

Close the file. You’ve read it all.
       You are sitting in the lake of light from Dr. Outerbridge’s desk lamp. It has grown late. But sit a while; you will not be interrupted by the fictional psychiatrist, who after all exists only for you, The Reader.
       So place your hands on the bland smooth face of the closed file folders, and close your eyes, and quietly think.
       Since this is and must be fiction, what would please you?
       Dr. Outerbridge found Lucy Quigley absolutely charming, and in due course she became Mrs. Dr. Outerbridge. They worked famously together and achieved togetherness and fame. Does that make you happy?
       George was turned over to a Veteran’s Administration facility and his arrested emotional persona was attacked with narcoynthesis, reserpine, electric shock and an understanding analyst, and in three years and five months he was discharged as cured. He married Anna, inherited his aunt’s farm, and they live quietly near the woods and each other. He has learned to love children. Okay?
       Or if the idea of such as George still offends you, why it’s the easiest thing in the world to have therapy fail and we’ll wall him up forever. Or he could get killed in a prison riot, or escape and be brought down by police bullets. Would you like him shot in the chest? Or in the belly? You would? Why that: what is he to you?
       But you’d better put the folder back and clear out. If Dr. Outerbridge suddenly returns you’ll have to admit he’s real, and then all of this is. And that wouldn’t do, would it?