Marching In
Jerome Bishop, composer and trombonist, had never been in a mental hospital before.
There had been times when he had suspected he might be in one, someday, as a patient (who was safe?), but it had never occurred to him that he might ever be there as a consultant on a question of mental aberration. A consultant.
He sat there, in the year 2001, with the world in pretty terrible shape, but (they said) pulling out of it, and then rose as a middle-aged women entered. Her hair was beginning to turn gray, and Bishop was thankfully conscious of his own hair still in full shock and evenly dark.
“Are you Mr. Bishop?” she asked.
“Last time I looked.”
She held out her hand. “I’m Dr. Cray. Won’t you come with me?”
He shook her hand, then followed. He tried not to be haunted by the dull beige uniforms worn by everyone he passed.
Dr. Cray put a finger to her lip, and motioned him into a chair. She pressed a button and the lights went out, causing a window, with a light behind it, to spring into view. Through the window, Bishop could see a woman in something that looked like a dentist’s chair, tilted back. A forest of flexible wires sprang from her head, a thin narrow beam of light extended from pole to pole behind her, and a somewhat less narrow strip of paper unfolded upward.
The light went on again; the view vanished.
Dr. Cray said, “Do you know what we’re doing in there?”
“You’re recording brain waves? Just a guess.”
“A good guess. We are. It’s a laser recording. Do you know how that works?”
“My stuff’s been recorded by laser,” said Bishop, crossing one leg over the other, “but that doesn’t mean I know how it works. It’s the engineers who know the details. . . . Look, Doc, if you have an idea I’m a laser engineer, I’m not.”
“No, I know you’re not,” said Dr. Cray hurriedly. “You’re here for something else. . . . Let me explain it to you. We can alter a laser beam very delicately; much more rapidly and much more precisely than we can alter an electric current, or even a beam of electrons. That means that a very complex wave can be recorded in far greater detail than has ever been imagined before. We can make a tracing with a microscopically narrow laser beam and get a wave we can study under a microscope and get accurate detail invisible to the naked eye and unobtainable in any other fashion.”
Bishop said, “If that’s what you want to consult me about, then all I can say is that it doesn’t pay to get all that detail. You can only hear so much. It you sharpen a laser recording past a certain amount, you bring up the expense but you don’t bring up the effect. In fact, some people say you get some kind of buzz that begins to drown out the music. I don’t hear it myself, but I tell you that if you want the best, you don’t narrow the laser beam all the way. . . . Of course, maybe it’s different with brain waves but what I told you is an I can tell you, so I’ll go and there’s no charge except for carfare.”
He made as though to get up, but Dr. Cray was shaking her head vigorously.
“Please sit down, Mr. Bishop. Recording brain waves is different. There we do need all the detail we can get. Till now, all we’ve ever had out of brain waves are the tiny, overlapping effects of ten billion brain cells, a kind of rough average that wipes out everything but the most general effects.”
“You mean like listening to ten billion pianos all playing different tunes a hundred miles away?”
“Exactly.”
“All you get is noise?”
“Not quite. We do get some information—about epilepsy, for instance. With laser recording, however, we begin to get the fine detail; we begin to hear the individual tunes those separate pianos are playing; we begin to hear which particular pianos may be out of tune.”
Bishop lifted his eyebrows. “So you can tell what makes a particular crazy person crazy?”
“In a way of speaking. Look at this.” In another corner of the room a screen flashed to life, with a thin wavering line over it. “Do you see this, Mr. Bishop?” Dr. Cray pressed the button of an indicator in her hand and one little blip in the line reddened. The line moved along past the lighted screen and red blips appeared periodically.
“That’s a microphotograph,” said Dr. Cray. “Those little red discontinuities are not visible to the unaided eye and wouldn’t be visible with any recording device less delicate than the laser. It appears only when this particular patient is in depression. The markings are more pronounced, the deeper the depression.”
Bishop thought about it for a while. Then he said, “Can you do anything about it? So far, it just means you can tell by that blip there’s a depression, which you can tell by just listening to the patient.”
“Quite right, but the details help. For instance, we can convert the brain waves into delicately flickering light waves and, what’s more, into the equivalent sound waves. We use the same laser system that is used to record your music. We get a sort of dimly musical hum that matches the light flicker. I would like you to listen to it by earphone.”
“The music from that particular depressive person whose brain produced that line?”
“Yes, and since we can’t intensify it much without losing detail, we will ask you to listen by earphone.”
“And watch the light, too?”
“That’s not necessary. You can close your eyes. Enough of the flicker will penetrate the eyelids to affect the brain.”
Bishop closed his eyes. Through the hum, he could hear the tiny wail of a complex beat, a complex, sad beat that carried all the troubles of the tired old world in it. He listened, vaguely conscious of the dim light beating on his eyeballs in flickering time.
He felt his shirt pulled at strenuously. “Mr. Bishop—Mr. Bishop—”
He took a deep breath. “Thanks!” he said, shuddering a little. “That upset me, but I couldn’t let go.”
“You were listening to brain-wave depression and it was affecting you. It was forcing your own brain-wave pattern to keep time. You felt depressed, didn’t you?”
“All the way.”
“Well, if we can locate the portion of the wave characteristic of depression, or of any mental abnormality, remove that, and play all the rest of the brain wave, the patient’s pattern will be modified into normal form.”
“For how long?”
“For a while after the treatment is stopped. For a while, but not long. A few days. A week. Then the patient has to return.”
“That’s better than nothing.”
“And less than enough. A person is born with certain genes, Mr. Bishop, that dictate a certain potential brain structure. A person suffers certain environmental influences. These are not easy things to neutralize, so here in this institution we’ve been trying to find more efficient and long-lasting schemes for neutralization. . . . And you can help us, perhaps. That’s why we’ve asked you to come here.”
“But I don’t know anything about this, Doc. I never heard about recording brain waves by laser.” He pushed his hands apart, palms down. “I’ve got nothing for you.”
