A Conversation With Nathaniel

From "the weekly story" at eliotsstoryblog.blogspot.com

Dr. Jim has this way of leaning back in his chair as a way of calling a person crazy, without saying it outright. Probably because item one at psychology school is that you’re not supposed to come right out and call a crazy person crazy, not that it would hurt things any. It still drives me nuts, figuratively.

What he does is he leans his chair way back, tents his fingers like a cartoon villain and says "…Really?" while arching his eyebrows. Then he waits until you tell the truth, or move on to another, less crazy subject. I suppose it’s worked for him. He’s 50 or so, and he would have given it up a long time ago if it didn’t.

Before our Thursday appointment, I knew what I was going to tell him was pretty nuts, so what I did was, while he was out in the hallway chatting up the third cutest nurse on the ward, I went over and locked the recline on his chair so it sat bolt upright and wouldn’t tilt.

When he came in, he sat himself down, and smiled at me in the way people smile at you when they’re getting paid to. That was my cue.

"I had a long talk with Nathaniel in our room this morning before breakfast."

Being locked up in a mental hospital is a pretty rotten life. But sometimes, there are tiny little moments that almost- almost make it worth living through. Dr Jim tented his fingers, and said "…Rea-LLY!" and went ass over teacups over the back of his chair, shooting it forward beneath him into the underside of his desk. Even though I knew it was coming, it scared the hell out of me, which was good, because he immediately suspected sabotage. All he could do, though, was glare at me for a few seconds, right himself in his chairand continue, but without the smile that my tax dollars were supposed to be paying for.

"Nathaniel is catatonic, Ronald. He hasn’t said anything or communicated at all during the years I’ve been here, and that’s been a long time."

"Ok." I said.

"So it didn’t happen?"

"No, it did," I said, "but I’m not looking to argue about it. I just thought you’d want to know."

"Ok. So what did he say?" Tented fingers, leaning back, carefully.

"He said that he’s been talking to people for a long time, and he wants to talk to me, but I have to start listening to my voices more closely."

Now he leaned forward, to look me in the eyes. A rare level of incredulity for someone so used to the incredible. "I thought you said your voices never said anything comprehensible-"

"That’s right,"

"…And that you haven’t heard them since starting your new medication."

"That’s correct also."

That was a lie. The voices were as bad as ever, but I was ready to get out, and I had found ways of dealing. Maybe the meds helped, I don’t know.

My diagnosis was schizophrenia. A pretty mild case, actually. I didn’t have any big time delusions, nothing that made me act out under normal circumstances or kept me from having a job, but I had voices. Screaming and shouting, mostly. People that don’t have schizo don’t understand it. They think it’s like imagining a voice in your head, but for that, you have to have the idea of it, and you know it’s not real. When I heard someone shout, I’d look, because it was that real. Like someone standing in the room went "HEY!" I’d look and nobody would be there, and because I was used to it, I’d go back to what I was doing. It could wake me from a deep sleep, even. I’d gotten so good at ignoring it that people, real people, that wanted to shout at me for one reason or another sometimes thought I was deaf.

Because I was ready to get out and have a go on my own again, when they started me on some new meds, I decided to tell them I was getting better. People in psych wards don’t get at normal, they get better at faking normal.

Actually, the conversation with Nathaniel had frightened me a little. I knew he didn’t talk. My first reaction was the same as Dr. Jim’s; I thought I was crazy.

But it was real. I know because Nathaniel knew what I was thinking and proved he was actually talking to me by offering to write something down. I had it in my pocket in my meeting with Dr. Jim. A corner of notebook paper that said, "You are not crazy."

I had a feeling that it wouldn’t do much to persuade the doctor, so I didn’t bring it up. In fact I dropped the subject altogether by suggesting it had all been a early morning dream that had been particularly vivid.

"Well, all right then." Dr. Jim said, relieved. "Have you had many disturbances this week?"

Nathaniel sat with me at lunch. He wore his gown everywhere, and walked slowly, almost without moving his feet at all. He was seventy-four, so I suppose it came with the territory. I usually sat alone, because even crazy people are irritated by crazy people. Nathaniel was okay though. He never said anything and ate with utensils.

I could tell he wanted to know how my session had gone- if I’d brought him up. He’d told me it was a bad idea- that nobody needed to know he had been talking.

"Yeah. I told Dr. Jim, but then I backed down." I shrugged. "Guess you were right."

Nathaniel stared at a spoonful of mashed potatoes. He wanted to know if I had tried listening to the voices like he’d said. I didn’t say anything.

What he had said that morning was that the shouting and the loud, obvious stuff wasn’t important. That was faulty wiring. He had a really croaky voice, you could tell it hurt him to talk, because he had gone so long without. "There’s sense, and there’s nonsense and you’re smart enough to tell the difference. It’s not words you need to hear. It’s the ideas. You’re staring at the crumbs and missing the cake."

I was about eighty percent sure I wasn’t crazy- hearing him. On the other hand, I was close to a hundred percent sure he was. "So what is it that you hear?" I asked.

"If you try to hear it, you get mush." He said, narrowing his eyes like he was instructing me on how to get a good deal on a used car, "You have to know it- think it. Get your ears out of the way. You can’t hear something that isn’t in the room with you."

"Good point."

For the rest of the day, I went about my business. I had a chess game that went nowhere because the other guy was cheating and still couldn’t beat me, even with a resurrecting queen maneuver. There was television- a good episode of Seinfeld and two hours of television judge shows. Someone, one of the younger kids I don’t bother to talk to, kicked an orderly and got dragged off.

Nathaniel went about his business too. Nathaniel’s business consisted of sitting, and plenty of it. All day, every day, for as long as I had been there, Nathaniel got up, chose a chair at random and proceeded to just sit the hell out of it.

At lights out I asked him if he was going to say anything else.

"Not just now." he croaked, "I’ll talk once you’re asleep."

I had a dream. Not a normal one. it was dark, and I wasn’t really anywhere. I was there, and that was all. Long ago, I had learned to sleep through the occasional shout or shreik, but it was pretty difficult that night. One led right into the next. It was deafening, and to be honest, I was petrified.

This is better, isn’t it? Nathaniel asked.

"Not really," I said.

Stop trying to say things.

How?

Just like that.

Oh. Sorry. A lot of noise on my end right now.

You’ll get there. If you drag the needle across a record, you get a lot of noise too, but that just means you’re doing it wrong. Just stop trying to hear it.

That’s easy for you to not-say.

It is.

What am I supposed to be not-hearing?

Everything. You’re not the only one like you are. You know, I was born in a time when you didn’t have to finish school, if you had something else going on. My family had a farm back then, just a couple hundred acres, but it was enough to keep me out of school after the seventh grade, which I didn’t really mind.

Okay…

I missed high school, and didn’t have much of an education before that, but if I took a mind to, I could describe the paint on your favorite painting down to the brushstroke. If I want to, I can listen to a Beethoven symphony the way it was supposed to sound. The instruments could never get it right, not in a million years. He hated the instruments because they could never come close to what he was hearing. I could write you a computer program in the language of your choice, not that I’d want to. I got it all right here at my disposal.

How do you do that?

Pay attention and find out. Try knowing what we’re trying to get you to know.

I don’t remember waking up that morning, but I could go back and look it over if I chose to. Once I knew, the things I was doing out there didn’t matter at all. I had to eat and sleep, in order to do my part, but it was wasted energy doing much more. I can’t put into words what Nathaniel wanted me to know, but I started knowing it. What I can say, is that it wasn’t just Nathaniel trying to get through to me, it was us. No, that’s not right- us isn’t the right word. Think of a word that means family, love, council, network, wisdom, knowledge, remembrance, life and humanity all at the same time. Being alive can be pretty miserable at times, but there are gems- glittering morsels of beauty we can’t hope to comprehend on our own, that make it worth living, if you know where to look.