James’s original psychiatric training had been strictly Freudian, and the practice in Manhattan had been almost exclusively psychoanalytic. In this cloistered world nothing was ever as it seemed, but was instead an expression of hidden or repressed desires, aversions and anxieties that the client slowly uncovered as he gained self-awareness in the presence of the benign but detached psychiatrist.
James found it hard to cast off some aspects of that decade’s training. He was comfortable in the traditional psychiatric role of passive listener, allowing the client to set the pace without his active interpretation. It was natural for him just to listen, to hold himself in a non-judgemental place that did not draw active conclusions of any sort. Clients could tell that about him – that he did not presume or have a pre-set agenda for uncovering what he believed the problem was – and they responded well to it. It had often made him successful where others had failed.
In addition, James was well aware of how very florid the mind of a disturbed child could be. Children did imagine. Children did dream. Children did misinterpret.
James sighed. He still found it challenging to probe actively for literal meanings in the confusion of dreams, fantasies and misinterpretations that made up childhood. He was determined, however, that there would never be another Adam.
So what was he to make of Conor’s conversations? James was certain there had been an event around age two to three that had impacted Conor deeply. Was it a real event? Did it involve an actual death? Was the red finger-paint blood? Were the ghost man and the man under the rug the same person? Was he a real person? Conor was a very intelligent boy, which would have made him more perceptive than adults would have given him credit for. He was also very young and sensitive. These aspects would have affected the accuracy of his interpretation of any literal events. Everything was being filtered through the limited experience of an anxious toddler.
It all could just as logically be a symbolic event. Based on his psychoanalytic training, James would interpret “the man” as Alan, as an expression of Conor’s Oedipal stage in which, according to Freud, the son harbours strong hidden desires to kill his father and marry his mother. The “ghost under the rug” would then be interpreted as Conor’s guilty conscience. Perhaps Alan’s impregnating Laura at this point, just when Conor was being forced into separation by daycare, proved too much. Perhaps he came in on Alan and Laura having sex, a classic traumatic event in Freudian psychiatry. Perhaps he felt supplanted by Morgana, who distanced him further from his mother.
Of course, Conor’s disturbance could also be a thoroughly confusing mix of the two, of literal events Conor was too young to understand and half-remembered dreams. So much of it, like the rocket ship and the trip to the moon, made no sense to James in any context, such that he remained reluctant to draw conclusions without further information.
In the end, James decided to ask Alan back in yet again and see if he could glean more from an adult perspective.
“I really appreciate your coming in,” James said, as Alan settled himself into the conversation centre.
“Hey, I’m pleased to help,” Alan replied heartily. He pulled off his duck-billed cap and ran a hand through his rumpled hair in an effort to smooth it down. “I can’t tell you how great Conor’s been doing, especially now that his homeschool teacher has started. He comes down to the cabin almost every day now after his teacher leaves. All by himself. If you’d told me in September we could get to a place where we’d actually trust him to walk safely between the house and the cabin on his own, I’d have said, ‘Knock me over with a feather.’”
James smiled. “I’m very pleased with his progress myself. But listen, what I’d like to explore with you once again is that period when Conor’s problems started. The more verbal Conor becomes, the more confused I seem to get. Clearly events affected him when he was two or three, but I’m having a devil of a time piecing together what exactly may have happened,” James said.
“Yeah, I can imagine,” Alan said.
“Sometimes the events that impact a child can seem quite minor to adults. Because children are very egocentric at this age, they sometimes put a different spin on things and believe they’ve caused an event that was in reality entirely unrelated to them. Occasionally the event hasn’t even happened at all. The child has a false memory, either given to him accidentally by someone around him, who’s talking about something, or created from a dream or a TV program or something similar.”
James paused. “So this is where I’m at right now. To help Conor fully, I need to identify more clearly what was affecting him then, but this is a challenge because at the moment he can’t tell me.”
Alan considered this a while. “I think I’ve pretty much told you everything,” he said finally. “I mean, it was a very disruptive time. The financial troubles and nearly losing the farm. The unexpected pregnancy. Conor being diagnosed as autistic …”
“That’s too far along the timeline,” James replied. “Conor isn’t autistic. I’m absolutely certain of that now and I know other professionals would agree. He withdrew. He stopped talking and began all this magical thinking about cats and mechanical things in response to the traumatizing event or events, so it would have to have happened before he was diagnosed. He was diagnosed at four and up until he was two, you remember him as developing normally. So I think the event had to have happened in that period in between.”
Again, Alan was pensive. Slowly, he shook his head.
“Do you remember anything with blood?” James asked. “Any unusual amount of blood? Any blood where it shouldn’t be? Anything where Laura would be involved?”
Alan lifted one eyebrow. “That’s kind of a scary question.” A pause. “The only thing I can think of is the miscarriage.”
James nodded. “Anything else you remember? What about anything going on with Laura?”
“The truth is, I really feel bad that I left her alone so much,” Alan said. “I can appreciate now how it must have contributed to all of this. Not only because I wasn’t able to stay on top of what was going on at home, but because Laura was vulnerable there by herself. She did tell me that at the time. But I was so worried about losing the ranch that I just didn’t see I had any choice but to keep trying to find extra work to stay afloat.”
“Yes, I can understand,” James said sympathetically.
“The only other thing I can think of during that time was that fan. The obsessed guy who was bothering Laura. I never actually saw him, but if Conor did – well, I suppose that could have been pretty scary for him …”
“Can you remember this guy’s name?” James asked.
A small silence filtered in as Alan sat, lost in memory. James could hear sleet hitting again the large picture windows in the playroom
Finally Alan shook his head. “No. I’m afraid not.”
“Could it have been Fergus somebody? Does that ring any bells?”
Alan again shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Why? Was there a Fergus that I should have known about?”
James shrugged. “It was just a guess. Somebody Laura had mentioned from her time in Boston.”
“Boston?”
“Yes,” James replied. “When she was getting her medical degree.”
Alan’s features drew down in an expression of bewilderment. “Boston? She didn’t get her medical degree in Boston. She got it at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.”
“What?”
“To my knowledge,” Alan said, “Laura’s never even been to Boston.”
After Alan had left, James stood in stunned silence before the office window. Hands in his pockets, he stared out eastward across the vast expanse of plains. The sense of shock kept his mind absolutely blank for several minutes.
How could Boston not be real?
Maybe Alan was wrong. Maybe a mistake had been made. But then James realized that Laura had to have lied to someone. If not him, then Alan. A sense of betrayal began to sink in.
Like Scheherazade charming the king, so too had Laura used the power of storytelling, gently getting the upper hand with her long, gentle, softly spoken monologues. James had simply been following his “in here you decide” creed. He’d never wanted to interrupt her with many questions. Indeed, somewhere along the line questions had largely ceased forming for him. He had wanted her to continue uninterrupted.
The real spell, however, had not been cast by Laura, but by Torgon. James might have been able to stay on even keel if Laura’s monologues had been all there was. Even as the line between personal history and story blurred with Laura’s tales of an altered reality, that still remained within the scope of an ordinary therapy session. What had changed it all was the arrival of the Torgon stories.
With those, Laura’s imagination was no longer confined to two hours a week at the clinic. It went home with James. Ate with him. Went to bed with him. And when he read, his mind became one with Laura’s and together they created a new reality. James had started the stories as nothing more than a means of better understanding Laura, but as he became more and more caught up in what happened next to Torgon, he ceased to be an objective bystander. He became, instead, a participant in Laura’s imagination, and from that joining had sprung a Torgon – and, indeed, a Laura – of his own creation.