Ghost of a Flea

innate inability to discern falsehood from truth, when in fact it’s a highly developed form of just such discretion.

I’ve read the history your friend Don Walsh supplied the intake physician, B. D. went on. He’s been quite helpful.

Afternoon sunlight stretched long fingers across the table. A phone rang in the next room. Two teenage boys with shaved heads walked past the window eating Eskimo Pies. Life goes on.

Your mother shows clear signs of schizophrenia. Has no friends to speak of, avoids family contact-perhaps there’s been a rift of some sort? She lives alone, appears to have neither hobby nor outside interests nor, to all appearances, much of anything at all she enjoys or enjoys doing. I gather she leads a rigorously controlled life, every day exactly the same from hour to hour, growing upset at the slightest disturbance in her routine.

I sat watching this privileged young man, keeping track of sunlight popping knuckles on the tabletop and wondering how long after our talk before B. D. noted inappropriate affect in my chart. His handwriting would be cramped, precise. I’d flashed back to another interview, years before, with a psychiatrist who sat rocking in his desk chair the whole time, staring at me out of tiny round eyes with folds of fat like bitesize omelettes at the corner, neither of us speaking. I learned from the best.

The incidence of schizophrenia in the general population is approximately one in a hundred. As with so much else, we don’t understand why, but among children of schizophrenics, the incidence jumps to one in ten.

Sometimes too, he went on when I remained silent, it skips a generation.

Jumps. Skips. There was a poem there somewhere. A limerick or jingle. At very least a groaningly bad joke.

Your son has a frank history of mood disorders, reclusiveness, abrupt life changes. All this giving way to intermittent periods of productive, purposeful behavior.

Maybe you could tell me a little more about that.

After a while he said: Or maybe not.

After which (though his eyes continued to rise like twin red moons in my sky) my unsprightly self and B. D. Ferguson (certainly no son of the Fergus I knew from Joyce, O’Brien and the like) didn’t have much to say to one another. We went on not saying it for six sessions in as many days.

Little chance that my girlfriend would love me forever, of course. With the taste of boiled meat, rice, iceberg lettuce and salty, limp vegetables in mouth and memory, slowly I came to realize this. She wasn’t about to come back from the grave, reemerge from history’s undiscovered country, float to the top of the lake, swim to shore and shamble, slaking away the whole time, towards wherever it was I’d gone on with my life. None of it had been a dream as, coming to, I’d first believed. Only another of society’s makeshift facsimiles of dream, rags and tatters of movies, media, popular literature, this new mythology, that my homeless soul had taken for its own and worn into the street. Precious little protection. And how much shame could a man bear?

At the time I’m writing of, though, time of the storm and Alouette’s second baby rather than that of hospital walkways like cloisters and young men of power with piggish red eyes (I’ve just read back through the past dozen or so pages to see where we’ve got to in all this), Deborah and I remained in sight of one another though borne steadily apart, Don and Jeanette were content on their island, David soon would return from scouting out copses and caves. New lives for us all rattled doors in frames. And I, freshly become a museum diorama, New Age man in his natural habitat, hunched not over campfires but before computers, sat inert in a circle of light at 3 a.m.

I had decided again, after an evening with Deborah, to get some work done. Write the Fearing review at least, since it was due or well past. Maybe start something else, who knows. Even pursue the notion for a novel I’d had a few weeks back in which the narrator would present himself to each of the other characters as a wholly different person. See which way, how far and how fast, that notion ran when chased full throttle. As always, the very idea of such work necessitated my removing to the slave quarters and sitting there staring out through windows so darkened with dust and grime that you could safely watch eclipses through them. Consisted, eventually, of turning on the computer. Its small dynamo whirred and began a rapidly accelerating dialog with itself as Bat minnowed through the half-open doorway to join me, lugging in his wake a contingent of winged insects. With age he’d become a semi-mobile solar battery. Besides food, only sunlight drew him, his days a progression from food bowl to sunshine spot and back. Sunlight was far and away best, but if that proved unavailable, if he had to, he’d make do with artificial sources. One favorite spot was at the back of my desk about three inches below the desk lamp. Hoisting him up there, most of the insects he’d brought in coming along, I keyed in Microsoft Word and began reading my notes for the novel. Halfway down the second page, the ground gave way.

I have no idea when you might find this-tonight, tomorrow, next week. I don’t even know, really, how to begin it. Dad? Lew? I’ve never known what to call you. Are we friends? peers? father and son? A bit of all those, I suppose. And a bit of none.

I remember something you told me Dylan Thomas said, That he’d lived with it a long time and knew it horribly well and couldn’t explain it-whatever it was that drove him, beached him, bedeviled him. Much as I’d like to lay claim to something of that nature, my own situation, I’m afraid, is far less dramatic, far simpler: this simple, desperate need to be alone that comes up within and overtakes me. Whatever the reason, I seem to be unable to remain myself when around others for too long a time. I lose focus, take on those others’ properties and character, their presence, their values and ambitions, while my own, fought for so hard-not only the exercise of them, but the very recognition of them-begin to fade away.

I do love you, Lew. Dad. And these four years (four years!) have been amazing. I never thought I’d ever know anything like this. And I guess I must understand what families are about, now, for the first (I won’t say the last) time. But I have to leave-as, once you’ve found this, I’ll have done. You’ll be sad, and will want to understand. We always have to understand, don’t we, the two of us? (That’s another thing I must get away from.) At some point Don Quixote, Alonso Quixano the Good, must die, and Cide Hamete Benengeli hang up his pen. Together and apart, they both had a good run. But it’s time.

So it was that morning in its yellow hat came calling.

Six or a little after, Deborah emerged in housecoat and slippers and found me sitting on the porch. The Penguin Classics edition of Cervantes’ masterpiece was open to page 240. A bottle of Scotch lay sideways on the warped floor.

“Lew?” she said.

And the dam of my eyes broke, and tears flooded the land.

Chapter Ten

As often transpires with organizations of a thoroughgoing liberal bent, it was difficult to find anyone at the community center who’d admit to being in charge. Simple caution, or some weird excess of democratic spirit? Winnowing my way from desk to desk, eventually I fetched up before that of a lady named Valerie LeBlanc, face so white it made the pale pink sweater she wore look like a burst of violent color, and stood there thinking both about her name and the fact that she’d claim responsibility. Cast of faces around us running, as they did, from coffee to jet.

“Yes, ma’am, if that’s okay with you,” I said in answer to her nonquestion. And Alouette asked you to come by and pick up some work she could do at home. “Didn’t want to go rooting around her desk without saying something first.” If mankind cannot bear too much reality, neither does it need too much truth told it. Use in moderation. Apply to a small, inconspicuous area first to test its effect. “That is, assuming I could even find it in here.”

“So you’re Lewis?” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve seen you here before.”

“Well, from the look of things, you could have a couple of extended families living in here full-time and never know it.”

Long ago the place had begun life as a wine and liquor warehouse. Then for years it lay dormant until, during a brief period of progressive government (this oversight soon enough corrected), cascades of funds for “community improvement” became available. Delta Bottled Goods was reborn as Riverside Community Center and ever since, for some fourteen or fifteen years, it had been hanging out over the precipice with ropes afray, held aloft on half a broken wing, stupendous individual effort, all manner and forms of prayer. Now its cavernous spaces and bare,