Some of Your Blood Part 7

A:Well all right, there is one more thing, now that you mention it.

Q:Shoot.

A:That letter I wrote Anna, that started all this trouble. I don't want you to ask me nothing about it.

Q:(Swears, but silently.) Of course not, if you don't want me to.

A:(Lies back expansively, heaves a deep breath.) Well all right Now anything goes.

Q:All right. Then quit bouncing around and relax all over again. Close your eyes and make it black, and sink into the black and drift in it. Don't sleep. You can hear me very well. You can talk very well. Relax all over. Toes. Ankles. Fingers. One Two Three Four Five. How do you feel?

A:(Peacefully.) Swell.

Q:I'm looking through your story again for holes. I see what you mean, George. It is all here, once you know how to read it. Here's the whole thing about the watchman, and I didn't even see it the first time I read it.

A:(Peacefully.) That was after the fight with Uncle Jim.

Q:Of course you didn't go into much detail... still, it's there. You like human blood?

A:The best I ever had was human blood. But it wasn't that ol' b.u.m.

Q:(Hesitates.) Well, we'll come to it, I imagine. Oh, here's something. About the beaver lodge.

A:Yeah and the kid tripped my deadfall.

Q:You don't say much here about what happened. Wasn't he hurt?

A:Oh, his leg was mashed some. It didn't bother him after I got there.

Q:You get him out all right?

A:I got him out all right. I beat h.e.l.l out of him. I wrote it there, it was like he was that d.a.m.n baby made Anna sick and I could finally hit out at it.

Q:What happened to him finally?

A:I put him in the lake.

Q:Wait a minute... something about a lake... you made up a story in the Thematic Apperception test. You remember, the picture of the swimming hole. Something about a kid screaming, another kid pushed him under the water. Yes, his leg was hurt too.

A:Well yes, it happened like that.

Q:You cut him, George?

A:After I got him back out. He was dead them. It didn't hurt him.

Q:How old a boy was it?

A:I don't know nothing about kids, how old they are for how big. Six, seven, something like that... That was the one I told you, best I ever had. But I was so mad at him, I had a chance to hit back. That probably made all the difference.

Q:Where did you cut him?

A:Through the belly-b.u.t.ton.

Q:Whose kid was he?

A:G.o.d, I dunno. Them Polock families up that way got more kids than they can count and the dumb b.a.s.t.a.r.ds can't count so much either. This wasn't from around my way, Phil. This was up to'rds Cravensville. Matter of fact Cravensville is right on that same lake, but on the other side and around the point from where I was.

Q:What did you do with him after?

A:Just dropped him in the lake like he drowned.

Q:George, you enlisted right after that. The very next day. Was that because you were scared about the kid?

A:Yes and no. I knew I was heading for big trouble the way I was. I wasn't worried about that one, it was the next one or the one after I was worried about, if you see what I mean. You could get careless. And I made a guess the Army would be about like the school only bigger and I was right. It straightened me out for two, three years until they shipped us out.

Q:Question of being lost or not lost, again.

A:You're so right. n.o.body was as lost as me after we carried those stretchers off those C-119's. I seen where I was going and it was that. I seen where I been and it was gone. Something had to give.

Q:It did... Oh, I have a note here I wanted to ask you about, George. Something rubbed me a little as I slid past the first reading, and stubbed me the second time around. A little thing but when you describe something, I always know where everything and everybody is. But in this one place where your father came home drunk and you had the knife.

A:Oh yes.

Q:Let me read this out loud. It's where you threw the knife. Right across the room, correct? Yes. Well, listen: "... he looked down at the cut and the blood coming from it. And the mother was bleeding through her hands and her eyes bulging out over them, looking at the father. And the father pushed George away and got the dishrag..." and so on.

A:Yes, well what about it?

Q:If you threw the knife from across the room, how was it your father pushed you away? I got the feeling the father just stood there, apparently near the sink, so he didn't move toward you.

A:Oh, it was me moved. (Suddenly quiet and intense.) It was like nothing that ever happened to me before or since. The knife stuck in his chest muscles, I don't think it pa.s.sed a rib. It just stuck there. And then when he pulled it out I walked across there like I was pulled by a wire, like a sleep-walker in the movies. I could no more help myself... I walked across there and I put my mouth on that cut and sucked on it, I was... trying to pull it together or make it go away or make it like it never happened or... or something, I don't know. Usually I have something to do with what I do even when I'm crazy mad; but I didn't that time, I just couldn't help myself.

Q:(After a pause) Well, I... guess that answers my question. How he could just reach out and push you away.

A:I scared him. I scared myself too. I guess that was why he walked out like that, and never after hit my mother or anybody. That... that sleepwalking thing, that scared me a h.e.l.l of a whole lot more than throwing the knife, do you know that?

Q:I can well imagine... had enough for today, George?

(Conventional routine to return patient to present time, and close.)

12.

Comments: A formal and complete evaluation will have to wait; not only is it necessary to get this information in the hands of Miss Quigley before she leaves for the South, there is too the matter of generating enough objectivity to do a fair job. Perhaps I am simply over-tired, but at the moment I would disqualify myself from any necessarily clinical, impersonal a.n.a.lysis of these developments. Let it suffice for the moment to skim over some of the major peaks.

It would seem that the key log in the jam was the revelation to George that his secret was out. I have remarked before on the marvellous way the sick psyche shouts for help; it is a pity we can't invent a detecting device which would show which language or which instrument or which vocabulary that shout was cast in. The burden of his secrecy must have been unbearably heavy, and must have become more so of recent weeks. I am very impressed by the way in which release came to him; at the very time when I was laboriously picking my way down into the sh.e.l.lhole to gather him up, he was standing on the edge already working hard at the answer to my question about when he started drinking blood.

Summing up his reasons for the practice, we find that he turns to it for relief only when he is hurt, disoriented-"lost", as he puts it. This is its distinction from a usual hunger. Or to put it in another way, and using George's distinction between "satisfaction" and "relief," his blood-drinking is not like the bottled-up, raging pressures which drive the true s.e.xual psychopath; it is much more like the demanding vacuum inside a suckling babe.

The a.n.a.logy, once made, bears on the question in so many ways that it stops looking like an a.n.a.logy and becomes, very nearly, an a.n.a.lysis. A hungry baby wants what it want with an insensate, unreasoning demand which brooks of no delay, argument, postponement or reason. In these terms it is quite fair to describe a baby's emotional nexus as insane... maniacal... obsessive. And a baby seeks this a.s.suagement for anything else besides hunger which troubles him. When Baby b.u.mps his head, even when his stomach is full, he can be consoled by the nipple. If he b.u.mps his head, even when his stomach is full, and he cannot find the nipple, his outrage is enormous and his demand increases.

For anyone maltreated and denied as much as George, the transferance from breast milk to blood would be understandable. In George's case it can hardly even be called a transferance-not in the light of what occurred, and what, further, he was repeatedly told, about his mother's preoccupation with her own bleeding b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

I am beginning to feel that George's problem is a s.e.xual problem only in the most remote, though parallel, way. "Arrested development" is a useful phrase but in his case too wildly understated. It would seem that his emotional development absolutely ceased, not at adolescence or in pre-p.u.b.erty, like so many of these cases, but in the most primitive levels of the infantile. The fact that his physical and mental development in all other areas is relatively unimpaired may be unlikely, may be statistically impossible, but remains a fact.

Hotel Venetian Charlotte, North Carolina May 5

Dear Dr. Outerbridge:

"Socked in," as the airlines people call it, by fog, I have to stay here overnight and get tomorrow's plane instead. I mailed my report to Col. Williams this evening, but I don't imagine airmail will move tonight any more than I will. So with an evening on my hands and a typewriter in my luggage, I thought I'd write you, if only because I know you must be on tenterhooks awaiting the news.

Col. Williams may have told you that I was a psychiatric nurse before I was a Red Cross worker. I tell you that to add substance to my congratulations. Please do not be angry at Col. Williams for having shown me your "O-R" correspondence-he is an old friend, and he is sure, as I want you to be, that I am not the kind of "record" which that correspondence is "off."

To keep you no longer in suspense, let me tell you right at the outset that you were right all down the line. The two murders did occur, they happened at the times Col. Williams calculated from the patient's history and accounts-his enlistment, for example, and the best guess he could make for the Episode of the Skunky Uncle (whom, as you will see, I met and talked with).

The death of the watchman was reported in the newspaper and on the police blotter-and attributed to heart attack. I won't go into detail as to how I proceeded from there, except to say that the resistance I encountered was not trivial, the welcome I received was not warm, the a.s.sistance I got was not helpful, the threats I made were not small, and the feelings I left behind me were ones of great relief. In bald outline, I went to the chief of police, the local bartender who operates the chief of police, and the bartender's wife, who owns the bar and operates the bartender; and having gotten clearance from her, was able then to approach the coroner sufficiently armed to raid his files. They do indeed differ from newspaper and police reports, which did not mention the knife wound. The coroner, a perfectly unbelievable example of typecasting, even to the gold watchchain and the spitoon, offered what seemed to be a weaseling excuse for letting the fact of the knife-wound get lost; yet I do believe it to be the truth. What he said was that the watchman, a chronic alcoholic of long standing with virtually terminal kidney disease, atherosclerosis, stenosis of the mitral valve, and a forty-foot tapeworm, may well have died for a number of reasons with or without having been stabbed, and only coincidentally with having been a.s.saulted. The main point to him (and the other local officials) was that where a victim was of no importance, the murderer unkown, clues few or absent, and suspects non-existent, there just was no good reason for putting an unsolved killing on the books. I gave him every a.s.surance that the books would, for all of me, remain the way they were. Col. Williams can, if you want him to, give you chapter and verse on the legal position of this matter as far as you are concerned, but I think you may rest a.s.sured that if it ever comes to investigation and indictment, the mentalcondition of your patient will make any further action useless to anyone. This as a moral issue, might, as the saying goes, cause fights in bars, but it places itself outside the immediate province of the patient's diagnosis and treatment.

My next to move to Cravensville. It is situated just as your George described it, on a mountain lake which bends around a point, obscuring the far end from the town. I acquired a boat and crossed to what certainly looked like the geography George mentioned-a little cove and a small swamp where a brook seeps into the lake-and entering the cove I horrified a half-dozen naked boys swimming there; they drifted away into the woods like little ghosts. I cannot be sure I saw the actual flat rocks from which George made his deadfall, but if anyone wanted to make one there he certainly could. I did not see any beaver or lodge, but beaver have been there, as anyone can see who recognizes a pointed sapling-stump.

As for the death of the little boy, I had no luck at all with the newspapers. The town has no newspaper, and the nearest regional gazette, a weekly, must have gone to press shortly before the death of the child and found it not worth reporting in the next issue. Your George was chillingly right in one respect-life is a lot cheaper in certain areas of those mountains than one would like to believe. Poverty, illiteracy, and too many children are three great forces against overwhelming grief at the loss of a small life and a hungry mouth.

In addition, circ.u.mstances militated against anything sensational appearing in the death of the boy. For one thing, there is a highway bridge across the opposite end of the lake, and twice in the past three years people have died there (one a suicide, the other a traffic casualty) and their bodies have been found floating in the cove-a matter, I suppose, of prevailing wind or some sluggish circulation of the lake water. This, and the battered condition of the boy's body, made it easy for the local authorities to accept the conclusion that the boy had died elsewhere than at the cove. He was wearing bathing trunks, in which he had left home the afternoon before he died (poor little thing, I'd guess he lay in the deadfall all that night) so there was not even the evidence of his clothes near the death scene.

Specifically, his left leg and his right foot and ankle were crushed, although no bones were broken, and he had a good many bruises and contusions about the head and face. The incision on the naval was there, and though no one ventured a guess as to how exactly it came to be there, the hypothesis of a hit-run driver on or near the highway bridge seemed to cover everything quite neatly. I think you may chalk up one more credit to George's honesty, no matter what your convictions may be of truth being beauty and beauty truth.

I visited Mr. and Mrs. Grallus, the aunt and uncle, and I would not attempt to improve upon your George's talent for portraiture. If it should happen that George is ever freed, there is a niche for him there. The Gralluses are no longer young, and they are childless. I think the aunt has a genuine, though not overwhelming, affection for George, and would do a great deal for him if she could. I think Mr. Grallus would do even more, for he feels very guilty about the way he treated George, and would like to make it up to him. There isn't the slightest tinge of unselfishness in this; he just wishes he didn't feel guilty and would work hard to get rid of it. They both believe that George is a "dummy"-r.e.t.a.r.ded, that is; and if you and I had a nickel for everyone in this country who fails to make a distinction between the mentally ill and the mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded, we could build a clinic large enough to treat them all.

Finally, I went to see Anna. Oh, poor Anna! Numb, mute, unlovely, unloved, and loving. She reminds one of a draft animal, especially a donkey, one covered with saddle-galls and surrounded by biting flies, which stands patiently waiting, with sad and beautiful eyes, for someone to water it or kick it or kill it or tell it what to do... I embarra.s.s myself a little, Sergeant Outerbridge; I'm really not given to flights of prosody, but I declare she touched me.

She (too) is just what your George described-a stocky woman with a widow's hump, heavy shoulders and rump, and surprisingly delicate hands, feet and ankles. Her face is broad and pink with a small pug nose, close-set eyes, and a sad soft mouth. Her jaw is ma.s.sive and she has a double chin, though she isn't what anyone would call a fat girl. I met her weeding in a corn-patch, where they sent me from the house. I was glad to be able to talk to her out there and away from that drab, noisy ruin they refer to as a house. The word "mean" has several shades; everything about that house and inhabitants and all its surroundings defines every one of them.

I won't attempt a verbatim transcript of our conversation, and I have not, by the way, given one in my report to the Colonel. Anna's vocabulary and experience are so limited that the words express almost nothing. Yet she has had so little sympathy, tenderness, respect or understanding that a little of it went a long, long way.

That she loves George (she calls him Belly-didn't you report somewhere that his name is Bela?) there can be no question; she loves him through and through and in all dimensions. She accepted his apparent desertion of her, and his unbroken silence, in precisely the way the above-mentioned draft animal accepts a kick in the head. She has never broken stride, nor thought of it. She has gone right on with her succession of days, numbly remembering the two and a half years of George, and using them as her only diversion. She is not exactly waiting for him; to say that would be to imply hope, and she has never entertained hope about anything. But about one thing there is absolutely no doubt: should he ever come back, she will be here and she will be his if he will have her.

I was able to get fairly complete picture of their relationship-conversationally, she has no skill and no defenses-and through a not too murky screen of euphemisms one could see that he made his capture so total because he was gentle. s.e.xually she was not innocent when he came along-there had been some drunken tumbles with some of the threshing crew that came by when the buckwheat was in, and one of the hired hands had used her with some regularity for a period. She also mentioned one Sammy, under whose ministrations she had for the first and only time enlisted help: she told her father who, she said, beat him half to death. I did not inquire as to what Sammy was to her but gather he is her elder brother. From what your George reports, he never forced himself on Anna, and convinced as she certainly is that all males are violently driven by s.e.x and therefore violently drive, it really never occurred to her that George's diffidence was anything but enormous self-control and consideration. Seducing George required a good deal more than suggestions and availability. She had literally to perform the entire act with him. He apparently neither cooperated nor resisted, and for his disinterested complaisance, which she took to be a species of chivalry, she worships him. Evidently their coition was infrequent, occurring only when her desire became uncontrollable, but then always; he never resisted her. This alone would make it infrequent; you may add to it that she tried her best to emulate what she felt was his honorable self-denial, which cut down the frequency even more.

The only aggression he ever expressed must have been in every sense irresistible. You describe him as physically powerful, and his compulsion moved him as easily as he could move her. Anna's communicativeness slowed at this point almost to speechlessness, but did not quite stop. With an air of brisk and kindly matter-of-factness I was able to keep it moving and enable to put down the heavy (to her) burden of scandal and guilt involved in confessing what she had permitted. And when she had finally stammered out what she was sure was her shame and d.a.m.nation, the poor creature closed her eyes and bent her head and stood there expecting, I think, me to spit on her and G.o.d to strike her dead.

Well as gently as I could I gave her, in Basic English, as clear a delineation as I could of what I call the Kinsey Boon-the great gift given by Indiana's immortal to countless millions of needlessly worried people-the simple statistical statement that no matter what we do... we are not alone. And indeed she, like many another uninformed, non-reading, virtually non-thinking person, really did believe that what had happened between her and your patient was unique and unspeakable, and as noticeable to Heaven as a bloodspot on a white tablecloth. To learn that what had happened was fairly common and in itself unimportant-that was a revelation to her. And I even quoted Havelock Ellis (without, of course, mentioning Havelock Ellis) to the effect that any mutual act-any one, providing only that it was not forced by one upon the other, and was an expression of love, is moral... A strange scene, me in my shiny city shoes standing on a billy hillside talking to a draft animal in a clean worn dress about the ways of ecstasy. Oh dear, it must be getting late; when I get sleepy I seem always to get purple.

The frequency of this act, you will be very interested to know, was every twenty-eight days, give or take a couple. He could sense it like an animal, and probably the same way. Like other things in his extraordinary ma.n.u.script, this too was hidden in plain sight. Didn't he say something about knowing before she did that she was pregnant, because she never kept track but he did?

Do we add this, Doctor-Sergeant Outerbridge, to other data on insanity and the moon?

Well, that's my story... and Sergeant, since this is a personal letter and not exactly a report, permit me a personal comment. I'll be formal enough to state first that my opinions must be regarded as opinions... I'm not a doctor. I'm a caseworker, a nurse, and a woman.

As all such, then, let me congratulate you. I deeply admire you and the way you handled this case, and I hope some day to meet you and shake your hand.

I think that George is one of the most tragic creatures I have ever heard of. I don't doubt that be will wind up in a learned paper or even in a book. I would like to be as sure that he will wind up a free, well man, perhaps in his own cornfield with his Anna. I don't know, of course, how you plan to treat him; but somehow there is no doubt in me as to if if you will treat him. If there is anything I can do to help, please call on me. Please. It would be an honor to work with you and a triumph to succeed. you will treat him. If there is anything I can do to help, please call on me. Please. It would be an honor to work with you and a triumph to succeed.

Please let me submit something to you (perhaps too simple; perhaps, because of factors I couldn't possibly know about, something after all nonsensical; perhaps something you've already thought of yourself and discarded): All three of the qualifications I mentioned above-the caseworker, the nurse, the woman-speak at once when I suggest that George is not a s.e.xual psychopath at all, and therefore could not be expected to respond to any known treatment in that area. You yourself presented as a sort of trial hypothesis that emotionally he is arrested at the lowest levels of infancy, and that the true grotesquerie in the case lies in the unusual fact that he is quite fully developed in all other particulars. I think that was extraordinarily astute of you. I am well aware that modern psychiatry recognizes earlier and earlier indices of s.e.xual activity and s.e.xual differentiation. There was in Victorian times a widely accepted belief that until the age of ten all children, unless tainted by environment, were "innocent," a word which meant s.e.xless angels. Yet it seems to me that this differentiation must have a beginning point and it is not at birth. It may be that s.e.xual awareness of some sort goes back earlier than this point of differentiation, but I feel that it too does not go back as far as birth. If this is so, then there is a period in infancy when the child is, emotionally speaking, neither male nor female nor s.e.xual ent.i.ty, but simply a human infant (with all the demanding, insensate, "insane" demands you describe). I don't know if anyone has ever thought of this, but can one reasonably suppose that a girl infant demands the breast any less because she is a girl?... I know I'm being wildly intuitive and "female" in bringing this up, but I can't get it out of my head that you will find George's emotional quantum cowering in that area.

Colonel Williams made a pleasantry in one of his "O-R" notes to you, and very amusing it was; it was in reference to George's drawings of pear-shaped animals, and his jocular conclusion was that they were mammary symbols. After laughing I began to think about them, and I recalled that George had also drawn a man and a woman with the same configuration. And I remembered, too, that George drew the woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s with a single careless zigzag (i. e. not important) but at the same time went back and drew the nipples with great care. He always drew navels, as if he regarded as incomplete any rounded shape which did not have a terminal orifice of some kind.

So it occurred to me that his oh-so-humorous little sketches were possibly life as he sees life-living beings as his infantile emotional consciousness wishes they were and believes they are. Rabbits and squirrels and little boys and old watchmen-each one is a mamma, full of warm sustaining fluid. The entire organism is the manimary, and he feels this with such devotion that he even bypa.s.ses with zigzag the true b.r.e.a.s.t.s (though he cannot overlook the nipples) and in preference makes the whole female body a mammry object; this aside from, apart from, and utterly discounting the fact that it is female!

This hypothesis then leads one to the surprising conclusion that in his (perfect word!) periodic periodic aggressive erotic act with Anna, he was s.e.xlessly performing an as.e.xual function upon organ or object the s.e.x of which was as unimportant as the gender of a bottle. aggressive erotic act with Anna, he was s.e.xlessly performing an as.e.xual function upon organ or object the s.e.x of which was as unimportant as the gender of a bottle.

(I wonder if I could have spoken to Anna so convincingly of "acts of love" if I had thought this out at the time!) And in the area of symbolism also is something I derived from George's startling dictum about how to tell the cowboy hero from the cowboy villain. (And that amazingly perspicacious young man is right!!) Heroes get shot in the chest. (Breast?) Villians get shot in the stomach. Query: Is it more than coincidence that his father and the watchman, whom he identified with the father, were cut in the chest, while the boy, whom he identified with the fetus which had displaced him with Anna, was cut in the navel?

Oh my goodness, look what I've done; I meant to give you the news and congratulate you and go to bed; the window is getting pink around the edges, the fog is gone, and my plane leaves in an hour. Sergeant, Doctor, Sir Philip-whatever you're called: thanks; it has been a pleasure to talk to you. Cordially, Cordially, Lucy Quigley

13.

A letter...

Sir Philip's Bughouse O-R Sir Philip's Bughouse O-R Praec.o.x, Cal. May 8

Dear Al:

I enclose the enclosed, a monumental missive from your Lucy Quigley, who is, as you in one way or another said, some chick. What does she look like?

I send it because I think you will enjoy it, although it contains reportorial information which I know you have in her formal report and therefore don't need, and some heady compliments addressed to me which you will feel I should have modestly kept to myself.

And in all seriousness, I want you to think over her hypothesis about the non-s.e.xual, or should I say pres.e.xual, nature of George's disorder. I'm in a neither-confirm-nor-deny mood about it at the moment, but it excites me and I'd like to echo when it bounces off you.