Croyd paused for a drink.
"It sounds very manipulative," Hannah said, "and it seems as if it puts the therapist in a kind of godlike position. You help this guy find the key to your personality, then he goes in, looks around, and decides what to throw away, what to keep, what to remodel."
"Yeah, I guess it does, Croyd said, "when you put it that way."
"Granting that this approach is effective, it looks as if even a well-meaning adjustment might sometimes cause some damage — not even considering the possibility of willful abuse. Is that what he did to you? Mess with your self-image and your world-view?"
"Not exactly," Croyd said. "Not intentionally or directly. He explained that he did want to explore my life lie because he had to know my fears, because they would relate directly to what he had in mind for stabilizing my condition at a level I'd find emotionally satisfying."
"You did pick up the jargon, didn't you?"
"Well, I was reading a lot in the area the whole time he was working with me. I guess everyone does that."
He took another drink of beer.
"Are you stalling now?" she said. "Because you don't want to talk about those fears? If they're not essential to the story you can leave them out, you know."
"I guess I am," he acknowledged. "But I'd probably better mention them, for the sake of completeness. I don't know how much you know about me…."
"Mark Meadows told me a few things about you. But there were a lot of gaps. You sleep a lot. You lie low lot — "
He shook his head.
"Not that kind of stuff," he said. "See, I'd thought of seeing a shrink for some time before I actually did. I guess I read a lot more in the area than I really let on — not just self-help books — some fairly heavy-duty stuff. There were two reasons for this. One is that I know what it feels like to be nuts — really out of your mind. I do it to myself regularly with amphetamines, because I'm afraid to go to sleep. And I usually wind up pushing it too far, and I can remember some of the crazy things and some of the terrible things I did when my thinking and my feelings were all screwed up. So I know what psychosis feels like, and I fear that almost as much as I do sleeping."
He laughed.
"'Almost,'" he said. "Because they're really tied up together. Rudo showed me that, and I guess I owe him for the insight, if nothing else."
"I don't understand," she said, after he'd risen and stood staring out at a sudden rainfall for at least half a minute.
"My mother went crazy," he said then, "after the wild card business. Most likely, I was a big part of it. I don't know. Maybe it would have happened anyway. Maybe there was a schizoid gene involved. I loved her, and I saw her change. She spent her last years in asylums, died in one. I thought about it a lot in those days, wondering whether I might wind up that way, too. I was afraid of that kind of change. Then every time I took drugs to postpone sleeping I did go bonkers. I'm sure I know what she felt like, some of the things she went through…."
"Wouldn't it have been better just to sleep then?" Hannah asked. "After all, it was going to happen anyway."
Croyd turned and he was smiling.
"That's the same thing Rudo asked me," he said, and he walked slowly back to the table.
"I didn't know the answer then," he continued, "but he helped me to find it. It's a part of my life lie." He seated himself and folded his hands before him. "The way I came to see it, sleep for me represents a big unknown change. In a way, it's like death, and all of my normal death-fears are attached to it. But there's more to it than that. Rudo made me look into it deeply and I saw that my fear of insanity is also there. I always know that I'll be changed, and at some primitive level of my mind I fear that I'll wake up psychotic, like her, and it'll never go away. I saw her change too much."
He laughed then.
"Ironic," he said, "the way we make these stories we're always telling ourselves work. In a way, I drive myself crazy regularly to keep from going crazy. That's one of my places of irrationality. Everybody's got them."
"I'd think that once a therapist discovered that his first order of business would be to try to get rid of it."
Croyd nodded.
"Rudo told me that that's what most of them would try to do. But he wasn't at all certain but that it might be serving just that function — keeping me sane in the long run."
She shook her head.
"You've lost me," she said.
"Understandable. This part doesn't apply to nats. It has only to do with manifestations of the wild card virus. Rudo, as I said, had read all of the literature on the virus. He'd been impressed by certain conjectures based on anecdotal evidence, since there was no way of running controlled studies on them, due to the effect that there is a psychosomatic component to the virus's manifestation. Like, there was once a kid — we called him Kid Dinosaur — who'd loved dinosaur books. He came up with the ability to turn himself into kid-sized replicas of different dinosaurs. And there's Hits Mack, a panhandler I know who can go up to any vending machine, hit it once and have it deliver him anything he wants from its display. That's all. It's the simplest wild card ability I know. Takes care of his meals and allows him to devote a hundred percent of his panhandling income to booze. He once told me that something like that had been a daydream of his for years. Lives on Twinkies and Fritos and stale chocolate bars. Happy man.
"Anyway," he went on, "Rudo felt that the anecdotal evidence was persuasive, and that there was a way to test it now. Me. He proposed inducing dauerschlaf in me by means of drugs and hypnosis that worked with the fears behind my life lie and caused me to change in an agreed-upon fashion. If it worked it would show that there was a psychosomatic component. It wouldn't be of help to any joker or ace in the world but me, though, and it could only be used to help me because of the periodic nature of my condition.
"So we set out to prove it, if we could. If the results were positive, he'd explained, then I could decide on the sort of body I wanted to live in for the rest of my life and whatever power I wanted to accompany it, and he'd induce it. He'd do it again for several times after that, to reinforce it, along with suggestions that it would always turn out that way, and I'd be set as a well-adjusted ace."