jokes about their work, even people in the extinction business. They said it, let off steam. To stay sane.
I am a schizophrenic and my thoughts would be mad anyway (I know this, using insight), but there are mad thoughts everywhere now and at least mine are mine, not manmade, like Francesca's, all ditties and jingles and lies. Uncle Ned has run away with the idea that I have a reality problem. Oh yeah? Reality has the reality problem. Reality is right out of control and could try anything, anytime. It is like the lake, always ready to explode. Ned will understand this all too well when I tell him-and I will tell him soon-that the baby has schizophrenia.
Ned's Diary
July 27. Benson Holloway says,he'll give me $150 for the jeep and I have half a mind to accept. If I strip off the plates and use it only on the property then I don't pay tax or insurance-but the old crate still guzzles money anyway. In this weather it overheats in five minutes and starts to drip and gurgle with gook and fumes. Just coming back from town you have to drive with your head practically out the window. But Benson is a shrewd bastard and why is he interested? This time next summer, though, I'll have to pay somebody to come and haul it away. Hell, I'll take the $150 and look around for something more practical. Mother and baby blooming (Fran sleepily, Harriet noisily!) and Dan absolutely no problem. The sun is really going it. You look up there and you think-the sun is really going it. The sun is really going nuclear.
Dan's Notebook
Paradoxically, or at any rate surprisingly, the sun is powered by the weak force.
It is fueled by particle decay. If you want to witness nuclear fusion, then take a look at the sun. Ah, but you can't. Even at a distance of ninety million miles, it still hurts the eye. A thermonuclear detonation gives rise to temperatures appreciably greater than those to be found in the sun's core-or anywhere else in the universe, except for transient phenomena like exploding stars. At the Section one time, Dad showed me a film of a steel ball undergoing a significant fraction of this superstellar heat. It liquefies, and bubbles, like boiling water. And now the lake looks like boiling steel, what with the sun piling into it day after day.
Harriet, they tell me, was a premature baby. Well she has certainly made up for lost time. Many people believe that schizophrenia is a postadolescent occurrence. They are mistaken. An infant can show schizophrenic symptoms at a mere eight weeks. Harriet is eight months gone now and the condition is already far advanced. I'm afraid she is more or less a classic case.
Deviant pattern of receptor preferences. If you give her a rattle or a toy or anything else, what does she do? She shakes it, sniffs it, and puts it in her mouth. Thus the higher functions of vision and audition are rejected in favor of touch, taste, and smell.
Repetitive and stereotyped behavioral patterns. For meaninglessly long periods she bangs on flat surfaces with her palms. She shows a tragic failure to learn from her own errors. While babbling, she indulges in a random series of identical noises-then forgets them and starts making new ones!
Faulty depth perception. The baby shows early signs of deviant ambulation. She falls over all the time and bumps into things because, to her, spatial relationships are unstable and contingent.
Motor-normalcy loss and abrupt personality mutation. Often when Fran is trying to change her or clothe her or feed her or wipe her or indeed do anything which requires the baby's passive cooperation, Harriet will suddenly resist. She will go stiff, or flaccid, thus characteristically alternating between the rigid and the overrelaxed.
I could go on: time disperception, the way she often interprets humor as insult, her interludes of excessive affection, the hypomania that prevents her from sleeping. Of course, the baby is perfectly well aware that I am onto her, and that is why she has turned against me at night. She has deceived her parents very cleverly- schizophrenics often show great cunning-and I don't think either Fran or Ned suspects for a moment that the baby can talk.
Ned's Diary
August 1, A pinch and a punch, the first of the month. Born four weeks early on New Year's Day, the baby is now two-thirds of a year old. Keep it up, Hattie… Fran tells me of a rather spooky conversation she had with Dan. It happened while she was feeding the baby in the living room. Apparently Dan starts in by saying that he thinks he's a homosexual! Just blurts it out. Strange, the new precocity -they all feel they're wised-up in their heads. Fran asked him his reasons for thinking this and Dan shrugged, admitting that he had never had a homosexual experience or encounter of any kind. He said it was to do with his 'histamine count'-at least, that's how Fran remembers it. Also he accidentally busted her in the tub the other day. Fran says he was out of that door like a scalded cat. Now he leaves the room or turns his chair around whenever Fran hikes her shirt to give the baby a suck. He does say the damnedest things, and not all of them are off the wall by any means-he's bright, no question about it. This morning at breakfast I was fanning myself and scratching my hair over some new baby-battering atrocity in the newspaper and I said-Is it just me, or the media, or is there a boom in child abuse?
And Dan said, 'It's exponential, like everything else these days.' Himself a hostage to heredity, Dan naturally argued that if you abuse your children, well, then they will abuse theirs. It adds up. In fact it multiplies. Yes, but would that make any difference proportionately? Do people who abuse their children have more children than people who don't? I'm not sure how the math pans out on this, but maybe the kid is onto something. Sold the jeep. $125. Benson Holloway is a canny sonofabitch and you never know what he's planning or where he's really coming from. Still great, great heat. I don't think the sun can keep this up much longer.
Dan's Notebook
In common with Harriet, or Hattie, the 'baby,' I have had no sleep for four nights.
But who needs it? True, I sometimes achieve unpleasant half-states that are further from wakefulness than from its opposite. Often, now, when I jerk upright in my bed, the baby is hiding nearby. I hope she will soon tire of this vicious frolic or tedious torture. My insight, though certainly a remarkable tool, is no help to me here. Of course whenever I rouse myself, with infinite pain and difficulty, and get up and go to her room, the baby is back in her crib. She lies there and pretends to be asleep. I watch over her for hours but she never weakens in her imposture. Schizophrenics can do this because, you see, they don't need sleep. And when at last I return to bed she comes creeping in immediately. The baby is trying to make me do something that I will never do.
Thwarted in her plans and ambitions, Francesca is wounded and remote, and feigns indifference. She concentrates on the baby in that finessing, wouldn't-you-know strategy always employed by females and fate. Ned is understandably angry about this too. He wanted Fran to take me as her lover; he is so old that he cannot expect to satisfy her for very much longer. So Uncle Ned ignores me, furiously busying himself elsewhere. All day I am very nice to the baby, repeatedly imploring her not to come to me at night. But she takes no notice and just pretends to be an unexceptional little creature called Harriet. When she does reveal her feelings, when she stares at me with a scowl of almost farcical hatred, they just think she's crying, like a baby.
They all seem to love each other here and maybe that's the point I'm missing. Ned loves Fran, who loves Harriet, who loves Fran, who loves Ned, who loves Harriet, who loves Ned. You know, through all this somber torment and disgusting confusion I sometimes imagine that if I weren't so sick I'd just be feeling lovelorn, love- beleaguered. I'd just be lovesick. Dad is gone, and my mother, so to speak, has always been conspicuous by her absence. I'd just be lovesick. For when it comes to the love match around here, I have lost, I am wiped out, love- six, love-six, love-six.
Even with my time disperception I know that I spend hours contemplating the firebreaks of the water. Insight. Will I cross them? Together the bugs and fauna in the wood make a noise like a great dry-hinged door slowly closing forever, closing ahead of me, closing behind me. Loathed am I too by the fierce and beautiful dragonflies that keep guard over Flame Lake.
Ned's Diary
August 5. Dan is kind of gruff or matter-of-fact with the baby-but extraordinarily gentle. When Harriet, pleased to see Dan, opens her arms to him from her highchair, his face is studious as he bends to pick her up, and he shows the extra care of the clumsy person, feeling in her armpits to get the balance just right before hoisting her skyward, anxious not to strain those little joints. Out on the scorched lake-front, when the baby is kneeling there and stuffing God knows what into her mouth, or crawling at top speed toward the water, Dan is always in frowning attendance and never lets her out of his sight. I notice that he talks to her a lot, and that's good, because I don't.
