My analyst is dead now. Before he was my analyst, he was my therapist, and I was fond of him. The view from his office on the first floor of the maximum-security-ward building was restful: trees, wind, sky. I was often silent. There was so little silence on our ward. I looked at the trees and said nothing, and he looked at me and said nothing. It was companionable.
Now and then he said something. Once I fell asleep briefly in the chair facing him, after a night full of fighting and yelling on our ward.
“You want to sleep with me,” he crowed.
I opened my eyes and looked at him. Sallow, bald early, and with pale pouches under his eyes, he wasn’t anybody I wanted to sleep with.
Most of the time, though, he was okay. It calmed me to sit in his office without having to explain myself.
But he couldn’t leave well enough alone. He started asking me, “What are you thinking?” I never knew what to say. My head was empty and I liked it that way. Then he began to tell me what I might be thinking. “You seem sad today,” he’d say, or “Today, you seem puzzled about something.”
Of course I was sad and puzzled. I was eighteen, it was spring, and I was behind bars.
Eventually he said so many wrong things about me that I had to set him right, which was what he’d wanted in the first place. It irritated me that he’d gotten his way. After all, I already knew what I felt; he was the one who didn’t know.
His name was Melvin. I felt sorry for him because of this.
Often on the way from our ward to the maximum-security ward, I saw him driving up to his office. Usually he drove a station wagon with fake wood panels, but occasionally he drove a sleek black Buick with oval windows and a vinyl roof. Then one day he shot past me in a pointy green sports car, which he slammed into his parking place with a squeal.
I started to laugh, standing outside his office, because I’d understood something about him, and it was funny. I couldn’t wait to tell him.
When I got into his office I said, “You have three cars, right?”
He nodded.
“The station wagon, the sedan, and the sports car.”
He nodded again.
“It’s the psyche!” I said. I was excited. “See, the station wagon is the ego, sturdy and reliable, and the sedan is the superego, because it’s how you want to present yourself, powerful and impressive, and the sports car is the id—it’s the id because it’s irrepressible and fast and dangerous and maybe a little forbidden.” I smiled at him. “It’s new, isn’t it? The sports car?”
This time he didn’t nod.
“Don’t you think it’s great?” I asked him. “Don’t you think it’s great that your cars are your psyche?”
He didn’t say anything.
It was shortly after this that he began badgering me to go into analysis.
“We aren’t getting anywhere,” he’d say. “I think analysis is in order.”
“Why will it be different?” I wanted to know.
“We aren’t getting anywhere,” he’d say again.
After a couple of weeks he changed tactics.
“You are the only person in this hospital who could tolerate an analysis,” he said.
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?” I didn’t believe him, but it was intriguing.
“You need a fairly well integrated personality to be in analysis.”
I went back to the ward flushed with the idea of my fairly well integrated personality. I didn’t tell anyone; that would have been bragging.
If I’d said to Lisa, “I have a fairly well integrated personality and therefore I’m going into analysis with Melvin,” she would have made retching sounds and said, “Assholes! They’ll say anything!” and I wouldn’t have done it.
But I kept it to myself. He’d flattered me—he understood me well enough to know I craved flattery—and in gratitude, I acquiesced.
My view, now, was of a wall, an off-white, featureless wall. No trees, no Melvin patiently looking at me while I looked away. I could feel his presence, though, and it was cold and hard. The only things he said were “Yes?” and “Could you say more about that?” If I said, “I hate looking at this fucking wall,” he’d say, “Could you say more about that?” If I said, “I hate this analysis stuff,” he’d say, “Yes?”
Once I asked him, “Why are you so different? You used to be my friend.”
“Could you say more about that?”
I started analysis in November, when I was still on group. Five times a week I joined a herd of patients headed for doctors and led by a nurse. But most doctors’ offices were in the Administration Building, which was in the opposite direction from the maximum-security ward. So being on group was like being stuck on an inconvenient bus route. I complained. And I got destination privileges.
Now my hour began with a phone call to the nursing station to say I’d arrived in Melvin’s office. It ended with my calling to say I was leaving.
Melvin didn’t like the phone business. He squinted while I talked on the phone. He kept the phone close to him on his desk. Every day I had to ask him to push it toward me so I could use it.
Perhaps he complained, because soon I got grounds privileges—only to therapy, but it was something. For other activities, I was still on group.
So it was that in December, when I joined Georgina and some other people going to the cafeteria for dinner, I discovered the tunnels.
We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren’t there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them. This was the way I felt about the tunnels. They weren’t news to anybody else, but they made such an impression on me that I felt I’d conjured them into being.
It was a typical December day in the Boston area: tin-colored clouds spitting bits of rain mixed with flat watery snowflakes and just enough wind to make you wince.
“Tunnels,” said the nurse.
Out the double-locked double doors and down the stairs as usual—our ward was on the second floor for added security. There were many doors in the hallway, one of which went outside. The nurse opened another one, and we went down a second flight of stairs. Then we were in the tunnels.
First their wonderful smell: They smelled of laundry, clean and hot and slightly electrified, like warmed wiring. Then their temperature: eighty at a minimum, and this when it was thirty-three outside, probably twenty-five with windchill (though in the innocent sixties, windchill, like digital time, hadn’t yet been discovered). Their quavery yellow light, their long yellow-tiled walls and barrel-vaulted ceilings, their forks and twists and roads not taken, whose yellow openings beckoned like shiny open mouths. Here and there, on white tiles embedded in the yellow, were signposts: CAFETERIA, ADMINISTRATION, EAST HOUSE.
“This is great,” I said.
“Haven’t you been down here before?” asked Georgina.
I asked the nurse, “Do these run under the whole hospital?”
“Yes,” she said. “You can get anywhere. It’s easy to get lost, though.”
“How about the signs?”
“There aren’t really enough of them.” She giggled; she was an okay nurse named Ruth. “This one says EAST HOUSE”—she pointed up—“but then you come to a fork and there isn’t another sign.”
“What do you do?”
“You just have to know the way,” she said.
“Can I come down here alone?” I asked. I wasn’t surprised when Ruth said I couldn’t.
The tunnels became my obsession.
“Anybody free to take me into the tunnels?” I’d ask every day. About once a week, somebody would take me.
And then there they were, always hot and clean and yellow and full of promise, always throbbing with heating and water pipes that sang and whistled as they did their work. And everything interconnected, everything going on its own private pathway to wherever it went.
“It’s like being in a map—not reading a map but being inside a map,” I said to Ruth one day when she’d taken me down there. “Like the plan of something rather than the thing itself.” She didn’t say anything and I knew I ought to stop talking about it, but I couldn’t. “It’s like the essence of the hospital down here—you know what I mean?”
“Time’s up,” said Ruth. “I’m on checks in ten minutes.”
In February I asked Melvin, “You know those tunnels?”
“Could you tell me more about the tunnels?”
He didn’t know about them. If he’d known about them, he would have said, “Yes?”
“There are tunnels under this entire hospital. Everything is connected by tunnels. You could get in them and go anywhere. It’s warm and cozy and quiet.”
“A womb,” said Melvin.
“Yes.”
When Melvin said Yes without a questioning intonation, he meant No.
“It’s the opposite of a womb,” I said. “A womb doesn’t go anywhere.” I thought hard about how to explain the tunnels to Melvin. “The hospital is the womb, see. You can’t go anywhere, and it’s noisy, and you’re stuck. The tunnels are like a hospital without the bother.”
He said nothing and I said nothing. Then I had another idea.
“Remember the shadows on the wall of the cave?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t remember them. “Plato said everything in the world is just the shadow of some real thing we can’t see. And the real thing isn’t like the shadow, it’s a kind of essence-thing, like a—” I couldn’t think what, for a minute. “Like a super-table.”
“Could you say more about that?”
The super-table hadn’t been a good example. “It’s like a neurosis,” I said. I was making this up. “Like when you’re angry, and that’s the real thing, and what shows is you’re afraid of dogs biting you. Because really what you want is to bite everybody. You know?”
Now that I’d said this, I thought it was pretty convincing.
“Why are you angry?” Melvin asked.
He died young, of a stroke. I was his first analytic patient; I found that out after I quit analysis. A year after I got out of the hospital, I quit. I’d had it, finally, with all that messing about in the shadows.