“It’s hard to prove a negative, that it isn’t something.”
“But have you very seriously considered the possibility that it is? Because if it is, we can’t lose; they can’t win.”
“They are doomed,” Nicholas said.
“Do you know what they are going to get?” I said. “Blood clots, high blood pressure, heart trouble, cancer; their planes will crash; bugs will eat their gardens; their swimming pools in Florida will get lethal mold growing on the surface—do you know what it’s like to try to stand against Jehovah?”
“Don’t tell me,” Nicholas said. “I’m not doing it. I wouldn’t be caught dead doing it.”
“You’d be better off caught dead,” I said.
Suddenly Nicholas ducked his head, caught hold of my arm. “Phil—all I can see are dazzling pinwheels. How’m I going to get home?” His voice shook with fear. “Pinwheels of fire, like fireworks—my good God, I’m practically blind!”
It was the beginning of the transformation in him. How inauspiciously it had started: I had to lead him home, as if he were a child, to his wife and son. All the way he muttered in fear, cringing and hanging onto me. I had never seen him so frightened.
14
During the next week the fiery pinwheels remained, obscuring Nicholas’s vision, but only at night; it was his night vision that had become impaired. A doctor who examined him told him that it resembled poisoning by alkaloids of belladonna; had he taken a lot of allergy medicine recently? No, Nicholas said. He had to stay home from work, after a few days; he was becoming dizzy, and when he tried to drive his car his hands shook and there was no sensation in his feet. His doctor suspected some form of poisoning or intoxicant, but he could not determine which one it was.
I checked up on Nicholas every day. One day when I showed up at his apartment I found him seated with several bottles of vitamins, including an enormous plastic container of vitamin C.
“What’s all this about?” I asked him.
Seated there pale and worried, Nicholas explained that he was attempting in his own way to flush the toxin out of his system; water-soluble vitamins, he had learned from his reference books, acted on the system as a diuretic; he hoped, by taking enough of them, he could rid himself of the flashing wheels of jagged, colored fire that plagued him at night or when he blinked.
“Are you sleeping?” I asked him.
“No,” he admitted. “Not at all.” He had tried leaving his bedside radio on to mild bubble-gum rock, but, he said, after a few hours the music assumed an ominous, menacing sound; the lyrics underwent a grotesque change, and he had to shut the radio off.
The doctor thought it might be blood pressure problems. He also alluded to the possibility of drugs. But Nicholas wasn’t on anything; I was certain of that.
“And if I do get to sleep,” Nicholas said shakily, “I have dreadful nightmares.”
He told me one of them. In the dream he was shut in a tiny cage under the Colosseum in ancient Rome; in the sky overhead, huge winged lizards were searching for him. All at once the flying lizards detected his presence under the Colosseum; they swept down and in an instant were tearing open the door of his cage. Trapped, with death at hand, all Nicholas could do was hiss at the lizards; evidently he was a small mammal of some kind. Rachel woke him from that dream, and, partially awake, he had extended his tongue and continued his hissing in a furious, inhuman way, even though, she told me, his eyes were wide open. After that he had come to and had told her a rambling story about walking toward the cave in which he lived, guided by his cat, Charley. Looking around their bedroom, Nicholas had begun to lament in fear that Charley was missing; how could he find his way, now, without the cat, seeing as how he was blind?
After that he kept the radio on playing bubble-gum rock. Until one night he heard the radio talking to him. Talking in a foul, malevolent way.
“Nick the prick,” the radio was saying, in imitation of the voice of a popular vocalist whose latest record had just been featured. “Listen, Nick the prick. You’re worthless and you’re going to die. You misfit! You prick, Nick! Die, die, die!!”
He sat up, heard it while fully awake. Yes, the radio was saying “Nick the prick” all right, and the voice did resemble that of the well-known singer; but, he realized with horror, it was only an imitation. It was too cruel, too metallic, too artificial. It was a mechanical travesty of her voice, and anyhow she would not be saying that, and if she had said it the station would not have aired it. And it was addressed directly to him.
After that he never turned on the radio again.
During the day he took greater and greater quantities of the water-soluble vitamins, in particular C, and at night he lay wide awake, his thoughts racing in fear, the jagged, wildly colored buzz saws spinning before his eyes, completely obscuring the door. What if an emergency occurred at night? he asked himself. What if Johnny got sick? There was no way Nicholas could possibly drive him to the hospital; in fact, if the apartment building caught fire it was unlikely that Nicholas could even find his way out. One evening the girl across the hall had asked him downstairs to look at the master circuit-breaker box; he had accompanied her down the outside stairs all right but then later when she ran up again to answer the phone he had floundered around blindly in the dark, in overwhelming panic and confusion, until at last Rachel came down and rescued him.
Eventually he found his way to a psychiatrist, for the first time. The psychiatrist diagnosed him as manic and gave him a course of lithium carbonate to take. So now he was
