Degrees of Ignorance

—

A Novel

By

Michael Malkin

76,000 words

Michael Malkin MD

120 North Vista Street

Los Angeles, CA 90036

MMalkinMD@Gmail.com

(323) 933-3441

Contents

Prologue

Chapter I – Relative Progress

Chapter II – The Nativity of TOAD

Chapter III – Insurmountable Opportunities

Chapter IV – Salvation

Epilogue

If you don’t know where you are going,

you might wind up someplace else.

— Yogi Berra

Prologue

Things turn out.

Sometimes as desired.

Sometimes as feared.

Sometimes otherwise.

Most people care how things turn out. I’m one of them. Lately though, I’ve been wondering if all that caring really does any good. Could just be a psychic vampire. Still, I was brought up on the sovereign dogma: Outcomes matter, and they’re up to you.

So, how’s that worked out?

I could crack open my vault of bygone experience. Expose what’s happened when I’ve encountered opportunity. Disinter gambits that turned out as I’d hoped, gambits that turned out alright despite my hopes, duds too. End up with a lifetime box-score of runs, hits, outs, errors and times I was robbed by the umpire.

Then, rescore the whole lot.

If it turns out all the sweat I’ve expended getting things to end up one way or another, to make my life purposeful, meaningful, worthwhile, satisfying, has been well spent, I can write “Growing Obsessive-Compulsive for Fun and Profit”, one of those ubiquitous how-to-live-a-better-life books. Or if I discover my dedication to good outcomes accomplished no more than dumb luck, I can write “Living Better Through Indifference” and counsel enlightened apathy for other disciples of middle class ethos.

***

My name is Jerry Bender. I’m a skeptic.

TOAD changed my life.

I’m still a skeptic. Maybe a recovering skeptic.

And, I’m the Messiah of TOAD.

I’m no more delusional than most people.

And, that’s an expert opinion. I’m a psychiatrist too.

***

TOAD Books, obeisant to my eternal messianic credentials — or, for the sake of truth in publishing, their marketing value — has been after me to write something about my life and TOAD. You know, the quest for purposeful existence, being worthwhile, being meaningful, how I found redemption through TOAD, how things turned out. Sort of an autogospel.

This is it.

***

Some people seem pretty good at getting things to turn out the way they want. They accomplish what they set out to do, and they know what they want to accomplish — knowledge I’ve sometimes found elusive. They’re generally acclaimed successful.

My uncle Archie is one such person.

Hamilton Hargrove III, Director of the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, is another.

Me? Successful? Who knows?

***

TOAD has something to say about “success”.

TOAD has something to say about pretty much everything. It didn’t become the planet’s premier avant-garde religion being bashful.

Here’s what TOAD has to say about success: So what!

***

Richard Feynman said: We are a way for the universe to know itself.

TOAD says: We are the way for the universe to be itself.

We author reality.

***

TOAD is a wiki.

Human beings function as the vehicles by which TOAD reveals to other human beings details of the universal design which are catalogued in the Tenets of TOAD.

Devout TOADies, agnostic TOADies, aTOADists, unaffiliated souls wandering aimlessly through cyberspace who happen upon the website, www.TOAD.God, find, upon registering as users, an option for “open editing” and an invitation to contribute their own moral, theological and cosmological points-of-view.

By the grace of TOAD and suitably inspired user contributions, new revelations are thence properly assimilated into the TOAD canon. The TOAD program utilizes divine algorithms to relate new revelations to the older corpus of the canon. The whole mass is constantly morphing and evolving based on impenetrable algorithmic rules and the unpredictable content of new revelations which are by TOADian definition, divinely inspired. — Or divine. The TOAD Blog is currently hosting a lively debate on this doctrinal subtlety. A few hundred years ago, this kind of stuff could’ve gotten you burned at the stake.

TOAD is not just another boring rehash of foreseeable pious authoritarianism. Just when a devout TOADie figures he’s got the scheme doped out and understands the meaning of it all, TOAD can, and often does, play around with the design, confirming the illusory nature of meaning. Illusion, a fundamental component of TOAD’s universal design, is also subject to fickle amendment.

TOADian cosmogony is whimsical.

***

TOAD also says successful people are “On The Scene”, meaning they have a direct and uninsulated connection with what’s happening and thus presumably a better shot at getting stuff right. — TOAD parlance draws conspicuously from the jargon of local television newscasts, a peculiarity to be accounted for later on in the book.

I think TOAD’s “On The Scene” precept and “So what?” are not consistent with each other. But inconsistency is another fundamental property of TOADian canon. The incessant quest for resolution of TOADian inconsistencies accounts for much of TOAD’s theological dynamism. And, when resolution proves terminally hard to come by, novel virtual TOADian congregations form to accommodate schismogenic inconsistencies.

People prefer to hear what confirms rather than contests their beliefs, a truth long known to behavioral scientists and politicians. I believe allowing birds of any feather to form their own flocks within TOAD is an advantageous business model. — Honk if you agree. No one needs to be outside the TOAD fold.

Yet, despite proficiency at being “on the scene”, even the best of the successful elect don’t bat a thousand. Divine whimsy packs a mean knuckleball. Just look at Napoleon’s fiasco in Russia. But they’re right more than average. They invest time and energy in a project. It pans out. They reap rewards. Each step builds upon preceding ones. Rearward glances show a record of time well spent and provide material for admiring biographers who document their progress.

***

TOAD says: Progress, along with everything else, is illusory.

Don’t get a swelled head.

***

CHAPTER I

RELATIVE PROGRESS

Archibald Lebovics, MD is a short round man. When I was a little kid, he wasn’t so short, but as far as I know he’s always been round. He’s been one of the leading lights of behavioral science in the last half century. He’s renowned as a psychiatric researcher and theoretician. He’s a Nobel laureate. He’s my uncle.

Archie gets stuff done. He decides, he does, he accomplishes. His intentions become his accomplishments. He even accomplished becoming my uncle without intending it.

Indecision has rarely been a problem for Archie. He would have made a terrific generalissimo or an enlightened despot. As a constitutional ruler he would have been a dismal failure. He has no tolerance for the restrictions of shared authority. When institutions with which he’s been associated have tried to fetter his activities or harness his creative energy to their own purposes, he has moved on. This hasn’t happened terribly often. Archie’s ability to procure grant money is a strong inducement for institutional administrators to see things his way. Even so, when his demands are deemed impossible to meet or he feels they’re not being met, even though everyone else thinks they are, Archie picks up his marbles and finds a new more congenial game.

“I see no profit in abetting the bureaucratic obstruction of scientific inquiry,” he archly declared in a letter of resignation to Johns Hopkins University.

Archie’s readiness to dissolve affiliations with institutions at the least hint of difficulty is consistent with the fragility of his commitment to individuals with few exceptions. I am one of the exceptions.

His MO is to exhibit tremendous initial concern for people when they enter his sphere of existence. This lasts until their stupidity or malevolence disillusions him, and he blithely repudiates them. His concern is intense but delicate, and it doesn’t take much stupidity or malevolence to convince Archie it’s misplaced. It has been a source of great satisfaction for me that he long ago wrote off my older brother and sister, Hal and Susan, as “unalterable jugheads”. I couldn’t agree more. If he sees me as a jughead too, he must believe I’m alterable. He hasn’t yet given up on me. I’m happy about that.

Archie feels responsible for me. In his eyes, I’m an extension of his kid sister, Myra, my mother. He’s felt responsible for her since she was born. Archie was then six. Their parents died when he was twenty-five and precociously completing his psychiatry residency at Bellevue in New York. Myra was a blossoming concert pianist who for seventeen of her nineteen years had been nurtured in the comfortable ambience allowed by their parents’ success in the music business.

When my grandfather, Charlie — immigration changed it from Chaim — Lebovics came to New York in 1930, he supported himself repairing radios by day while evenings he played fiddle at weddings. He’d come from Transylvania. — When I was a kid, I thought he’d been a vampire. He married a Russian opera singer, Ann — nee Chasheleh — and they made beautiful music together.

Charlie and Ann were lucky enough and insightful enough to capitalize on the fiscal potential of recorded music. Ann knew something about music, Charlie knew something about electronics, and they ended up owners of a successful recording studio. Prosperity lasted until their woefully underinsured studio/home and bankroll were incinerated by a guitar player trying to cook a dose of heroin. They lost their shirt, the rest of their clothes and most of their future.

After their lifestyle was devastated by penury, the only brightness left in the Lebovics household was Myra’s piano playing. She was brilliant. Clearly virtuoso material. Everyone knew she had a promising future in music as long as she didn’t starve first.

Broken health succeeded broken fortune. Ann and Charlie died. Myra’s situation was precarious. Archie, who’d been living on his own since the age of sixteen following an early volcanic display of what would be his defining intolerance of authority, was largely unaffected by the family’s economic decline. He appointed himself Myra’s patron and saw to it she was able to keep up her lessons and had the economic freedom to put in long hours practicing. “Your mother had an honest to goodness gift,” he once told me. “Damned if I was going to let it be lost to the world because she had to spend her time working as a sales clerk. I had an obligation to art!” he proclaimed, theatrically hyperbolic.

Myra studied with the best teachers in New York and practiced prodigiously. — Everyone in my family except me has a phenomenal aptitude for drudgery. — She gave recitals and soloed with orchestras. Reviews were enthusiastic. She was on the threshold of big time.

Was she happy? My mother? Are you kidding? Her success merely fed her underlying insecurity. The closer she came to reaching her artistic goal, the more she became obsessed with doubts. Was this what she really wanted? Was it relevant? Would she, as an artist, be a decadent parasite supported by the real workers of the world? The left wing imperatives of her beloved parents’ generation did not sit well with the insouciant narcissism of her own. She tormented herself so much she developed eczema, anorexia and spastic colitis.

Fortunately for her, Archie became suspicious of her weight loss, sudden taste for baggy long sleeved dresses during a mid-August heat wave and frequent precipitous dashes to the bathroom. He got her started in psychoanalysis which was still de rigueur in New York in those days, and her symptoms improved a bit.

Archie was convinced Myra’s troubles were worsened by the social isolation which accompanied her commitment to working long hours at her music. She only knew musicians, and her attitude toward them was that any musician who took time off from music to socialize wasn’t worth knowing. Archie, being well versed in Freudian hydraulic libido theory, judged Myra to have a classic case of an excessively dammed up then sublimated sex drive. Much to his everlasting regret, he was right.

His solution to her problem was successful, as most of Archie’s efforts have been. He arranged for Myra to meet Eric Bender, my father to be, a young psychiatrist who was then making a name for himself at Columbia.

Archie inveigled Myra to accompany him to a party at the studio of Henri — nee Henry — Gontarski, a fashionably desperate artist whose claim to fame was the success of his parties not the quality of his art. Henri’s talent, to the extent he had any at all, lay in attracting others with various superior talents to the same place at the same time and brewing a lively social stew. He had no success at anything other than being a professional misfit. His ostentatious eccentricity made it difficult to fit into anything anyway, especially anything life-sustaining, and Henri profited from the prevailing cultural fascination with desperation, becoming celebrated for his persistent inadequacy. His great success as a failure was unquestionably inconsistent — Today, this might be celebrated by TOAD. — but nobody seemed to mind, and his studio was a favored gathering place. Henri’s lack of shame and inhibition catalyzed animated conversation and fostered spontaneity.

Henri died in Pamplona during the running of the bulls. He choked to death on the olive in a martini he was drinking. Nobody around him noticed because they were looking out for bulls.

Why my father associated with Gontarski is obscure. Maybe he sensed there was advantage to be had in frequenting Gontarski’s studio. Being with the right people in the right place at the right time was one of my father’s most productive aptitudes. He always seemed to be in the spotlight saying memorable things when influential people were listening.

When Archie and my mother arrived, Eric Bender was surrounded by a circle of engrossed listeners nodding and humming in appreciation of his psychoanalytic interpretation of one of Gontarski’s recent creations, “The Rock of Prometheus”, a toilet resting on an irregularly shaped and wrinkled piece of canvas infused with a variety of unidentifiable stains and scattered clumps of particulate matter vaguely reminiscent of petrified excreta.

“The Rock of Prometheus” was representative of the collection of Gontarski work strewn about the candlelit studio. My mother dubbed this oeuvre: Gontarski’s Sewage Period. She thought Archie had lured her to a Satanic cult meeting and the handsome man at the center of the group was giving a sermon on the black virtue of artistic depravity. The listeners stood entranced in hypnotic reverence.

Her first impulse was to shriek, run out the door and return to the real world. But in order to run out the door, she would have had to disengage herself from Archie who was ushering her toward the center of the room. Remembering who had brought her to this place was reassuring. Her big brother was not a Satanist. He’d always been the most rational, if most irascible, member of the family. She relaxed and concluded this business must be a joke, a farce, staged by Archie and his friends as a comic relief from her tension. Any moment the whole group would be unable to keep up their serious facade and would burst out laughing.

They didn’t. She did.

It was the first really good laugh she’d had in a long time, a body shaking release of pent up emotional energy that wouldn’t stop. Her eyes flooded with tears. When they cleared enough for her to see the querulous, annoyed expressions on the faces turned toward the source of her irreverent interruption, their petulance struck her as part of the game, and she was wracked with more waves of laughter. The more they resisted breaking down in laughter and held fast to “mock” solemnity, as it seemed to her, the more she laughed.

Eventually though, she realized they weren’t laughing because they didn’t think anything was funny. They were serious, and they thought she was crazy. That made her angry and defensive. How could anyone take this nonsense seriously, she demanded to know. It was worse than nonsense. It was obscene. Art required a fusion of talent, creativity and skill. None of which could be claimed by Gontarski. To use psychoanalysis to glorify and legitimate such trash was an insult to artists. To seriously contemplate the proposition that Gontarski’s hideous compilation symbolized universal human conflicts over anal aggressiveness was an unthinkable absurdity.

With that, she glared at Archie and stormed out. I imagine Gontarski’s skin was suffused with goose bumps as he reveled in this public vilification. Most of the others were perplexed. Who was that mad woman?

I know my father was impressed by her and her performance. An intense courtship blossomed. They were married three months later, and her psychosomatic conditions disappeared forever. Archie had succeeded too well.

Eric Bender got Myra’s mind off her worries. He also got her mind off her career. You might say she no longer needed to sublimate her sex drive. You might say she found her new identity as wife of a soon to be prominent psychiatrist and mother of soon to be children more satisfying and less demanding than that of a concert pianist. You might say she was the victim of various pressures to subordinate her future to that of my father. You might say she gave up.

She said she was happy.

Archie, I think, never forgave himself or my father or maybe my mother too. It certainly wasn’t his intention to give the world another contented housewife in exchange for a talented artist, and Archie does not gracefully accept being hoodwinked by fate. For a while, I think he hoped the allure of domesticity would wear thin and my mother would pick up where she left off refreshed by the change of pace. He was surprised when my parents entered the third year of their marriage still devoted to each other. His hopes got a real kick in the teeth when at the end of that year my brother, Hal, was born and then again a year and a half later when my sister, Susan, was born, and my mother remained an ostensibly fulfilled wife and mother. Maybe that’s why Archie doesn’t like Hal and Susan. I could give him other reasons.

Eight years later when my father was hired as director of the psychiatry department at the University of Michigan and the family moved to Ann Arbor, I was born. — At just about the same time, Henri Gontarski was being asphyxiated by an olive. If any of you hold with transmigration of souls, I don’t want to hear about it. — Archie had by then given up hope for my mother’s career, so he had nothing against me.

***

My mother didn’t give up music altogether, only her career as a big-time performer. She became the foremost piano teacher in Ann Arbor. I was her favorite pupil.

Her efforts with me weren’t totally misplaced either. I’m no hack. I did inherit her musical ear and memory. If I hear something, I can sit down and play it. I could perform that trick when I was five. It was impressive. Still is. Great at parties.

By the time I was born, my father had gotten so impressed with the magnitude of his stature in the profession of psychiatry, he gave up all pretension of being pater familias and saw himself as pater mundi. He was constantly running around the planet consulting with governments, delivering papers, meeting with committees, writing and editing books. He’d had enough time with Hal and Susan to be their father. For me, he was a graying eminence people expected me to be proud of, as in, “You must be proud to have such a famous father.” I heard “must” as an order. I declined to obey.

I used to joke that the only occasion he had time to spend with me was at his funeral. I was sixteen at the time. He’d had a massive heart attack in Washington, DC, while serving as the chairman of a presidential commission investigating The Decline In The Quality Of Family Life In America.

While I was in psychoanalysis, I spent a lot of the time talking about my father. It helped. It didn’t make me feel any less angry toward him, but I learned to stop making nasty wisecracks about him when I came to realize people who heard them just saw me as an ingrate. After all, I must be proud to have such a famous father. I learned to keep my opinion to myself.

A lot of kids in my situation might have become juvenile delinquents, but I was lucky. I never got caught. From around nine to thirteen, I was a prolific shoplifter. Lego sets and comic books were my favorite loot. I hung around with kids who were from a different world, and some of them really did become juvenile delinquents. My best friend when I was eleven, Denzel Throckmorton Jr., also had a famous father, Denzel Throckmorton Sr., an alcoholic plumber with a violent temper and a former city horseshoe pitching champion. Denzel Jr. suffered a premature demise when he celebrated his seventeenth birthday and release from juvenile hall by getting drunk and driving a stolen Mustang halfway through an old elm tree. By then, I hadn’t had any contact with Denzel for several years. I learned of his death from an item in the Ann Arbor News. The reporter, who’d been a friend of my brother, commented on the irony that if Denzel had been freed or celebrated his birthday one week later he might still be alive because that tree had Dutch Elm Disease and was scheduled to be cut down by the city. He also noted Denzel Jr.’s father was a former city horseshoe pitching champion.

When I wasn’t working at being a juvenile delinquent, I was working at being a juvenile musician. I played chamber music with other juvenile musicians. I played in kids’ recitals with my mother beaming in the audience. Some people thought I had promise if only I would put more time and effort into practicing. The hour or so a day I spent at the piano which seemed like a whole misspent childhood to Denzel and the desperados in my other life, was preposterously meager for anyone with serious musical ambitions. People had been saying that sort of thing about me as far back as I can remember. I always impressed folks as having great potential but as too indolent to achieve it. I heard it so often I was convinced.

My second grade teacher, Mrs. Starr, once told my mother at a parent-teacher conference, “Jayree….” — She pronounced my name, “Jayree”, because she was from Moultrie, Georgia. She wasn’t happy to be in Ann Arbor and put up with being marooned in the “nawth woods” only because her husband was there to get a graduate degree in something or other. I didn’t like her. She left her husband and Ann Arbor and me and returned to Moultrie in the middle of the spring semester. I used to think, grandiosely, I’d driven her away. Her favorite saying was “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I didn’t know what that meant. She seemed to intend it as an insult. She said it consistently. I was happy to see her go. — “Jayree could be doing much better if he would just applah himself.” That made my mother nervous, and that made me nervous, and I had another reason to dislike Mrs. Starr besides the fact that she couldn’t pronounce my name.

Life can be a smorgasbord of appetizing distractions. When I became bored with one dish, I grabbed another. My ninth grade English teacher used to threaten me by saying “Jayree, — Come to think of it, she too had a southern accent. — you better watch out or you’ll become a Jack-of-all-trades and master of none.”

I thought: Cool! I didn’t like her either, but I do have to credit her for giving me a sense of self, an identity to go with my modus vivendi. I would be Jerry-of-all-trades. To hell with mastery. This was especially satisfying because it contrasted so sharply with how my brother and sister went about their vitae. They were focused. They mastered whatever they deemed indispensable and ignored the rest. They were the top students, the most popular, the most likely to succeed. Their lives would have been perfect if only they hadn’t been burdened with a nosy little brother and the chore of constantly discouraging his efforts to become involved in their lives.

For years I tried futilely to get them to like me, but it was impossible. I was born at a time in my father’s life when he had little tolerance for the noisy demands of an infant or the messy explorations of a toddler. His schedule was crowded and necessitated a compulsive precision to which Hal and Susan had learned to accommodate. It was pretty clear my arrival and continued presence was viewed by my father as an annoyance, and my siblings got the message. Eventually I got the message, and my annoying efforts to be liked turned into annoying efforts to be annoying. Go with the flow.

I was often the object of unfavorable comparisons to Hal and Susan, both now professors of psychiatry at major east coast universities with impressive CVs. Would I ever be able to match their examples, honors, achievements? Some people can be awfully insensitive, and I had plenty of fuel for jealousy. Yet being a successful pain-in-the-ass truly offers only limited satisfaction. So I spent a lot of time frustrated.

But there was one area in which I wasn’t compared to Hal and Susan. Music. They both have tin ears and adapted to that deficit in their otherwise superlative bag of talents by avoiding anything musical. For them music was dispensable. It must have been a tremendous blow to my mother. Maybe that was why she wanted to try once more with a third kid.

By the time I turned fourteen, both Hal and Susan were away in out of town medical schools, so I didn’t have them to kick around anymore. I’d outgrown my lust for life on the delinquent fringe and sank into morbid ennui. I watched TV, read comic books, played video games and avoided anything constructive unless badgered by my mother. She must have been getting desperately afraid that the one child for whom she could play muse was becoming a good-for-nothing.

That summer, my parents had plans to spend two months on Long Island where my father was involved in an institute on something or other. I had refused to go along in part because Hal and Susan, whose schools were nearby, would be around. My father seemed pleased. I had also refused to spend another summer at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan because I was in no mood to socialize with a bunch of kids who were happy about their lives. My mother was distressed and almost remained home with me. Finally she accepted my arguments that I could take care of myself with supervision and assistance from neighbors.

She arranged for me to take piano lessons from a man who taught band and orchestra at a local junior high school. Probably no one more prestigious would take on a student whose practice habits were as slovenly as mine even as a favor to my mother. His name was Lowell Keynes.

He wasn’t what I expected. I hadn’t expected much. After all, who would take a job as a junior high band teacher? I’d just graduated from junior high and knew how ghastly that could be. Ugh! The answer I learned was, in addition to hacks who couldn’t land a better job, it could be someone who had plenty of ability but was satisfied with his accomplishments. That was Mr. Keynes.

He’d worked as a studio musician in New York for many years. I think he had two grown kids out on their own. He and his wife just decided they liked Ann Arbor and wanted to live there, so he took the junior high job.

When I went for the first lesson, I didn’t know all that. If my mother told me anything about him before she left, I wasn’t listening. I walked into the band room prepared to take offense at whatever he said to me, then angrily stalk out so I could spend the rest of the summer in isolation, indulging pubescent dysphoria. I spotted him across the large band room at his desk behind a mostly glass wall. His feet were up on the desk. He was holding a pipe in his right hand, looking through a stack of sheet music on his lap. I couldn’t see him distinctly through the glass and the cloud of smoke hanging around his head, but I could see him conducting the music he was hearing in his head using the pipe as baton. He looked up, saw me staring in his direction and waved for me to come in, swirling the smoke in the process.

“Say, why don’t you open that window over there,” he said as I entered, gesturing toward the only window with the pipe. I had to climb over a table covered with stacks of sheet music to reach the window, but I managed to get it open without knocking anything off. “Nicely done. I used to be that spry once. I close it to keep the music from blowing all over the office and then open it again so this air will sustain life. It’s one of the cycles of existence.”

“Why don’t you open it from the top?” I suggested, though I was worried about interfering with a cycle of existence.

“Why didn’t I think of that? Have at it,” he said.

I climbed back on the table and rearranged the window. “Youth! Supple limbs, fresh ideas. Invigorating!” he said as I descended to the floor. “Have a seat,” he pointed to the table, again with his pipe. I moved some of the stacks of music and again hopped up on the table.

Even seeing him clearly and close up, it was hard to tell how old he was. His face was fairly wrinkled and freckled and tan. His hair was a mixture of sandy brown and grey, and he had a bristly mustache the same indistinct color. He wore a white shirt, a brown cardigan sweater, tan corduroy pants and, on his feet, the same grayish tan Hushpuppies I had on. His were cleaner. He had twinkly eyes too which may have been the effect of crow’s feet wrinkles at their sides which kept them in a perpetual laugh, but I’ve seen other people with crow’s feet who just look worn out. So I’ll give him happy eyes.

“It’s a hell of a job trying to find decent music for the kids to play,” he mused. “A real challenge. Has to be easy to play. Has to sound OK without perfect intonation. Has to be interesting, reasonably melodic and have enough action for all the parts so the kids don’t have too much time to sit around and shoot spitballs. What do you think of Schubert’s Rosemunde Overture?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, taken by surprise that he was asking my opinion, apparently seriously. “That would work.”

“Yeah. I think so too. OK, we’ll do it. Got any other ideas?”

I was so flattered I couldn’t think for a minute. When I got my brain back in gear, I remembered a piece I’d heard at Interlochen. “How about La Petit Rien, the ballet by Mozart. The oboe solo in one section is the only hard part. You could always leave that out if you don’t have anyone who can hack it.”

“Say, this kid’s a genius,” he said to the score for Rosemunde in his hand. “Who are you?”

I was again taken by surprise since I assumed he knew who I was and that I’d come for my scheduled piano lesson. “Jerry Bender,” I answered insecurely, anxious this was the wrong place or time or he was not Lowell Keynes which saddened me because I’d already decided I liked him.

“Ach, Myra’s kid. Oh Jesus! I forgot,” he said apologetically. “We’re supposed to be having a lesson, and here I am using the time to pick your brains. I’m Lowell Keynes.” He swung his feet off the desk and extended his hand to shake. He had a firm, sincere grip.

“No problems,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of time.”

“Well good. OK then, where are you? I mean, I can see where you are, but musically I mean.”

“I figured my mother would have filled you in on me,” I said unsure of how much sin I needed to confess.

“She told me some things,” he said. “You have a good ear and sense of what music should sound like, but you don’t like to practice so you have trouble producing with your fingers the quality you hear in your head. No?”

I nodded.

“But that’s not what I want to know,” he went on. “What I want to know from you is where you are in relation to what you’re interested in, where you want to get to, what you want to learn, what you need to learn. If you want to play pop tunes and entertain friends at parties we can go home early. That, I gather, you can do nicely already. If you want to play Rachmaninov in Carnegie Hall, you’re going to have to make some big changes in how you spend your time. What you need to learn depends on what you want to do. That’s what I want you to tell me.”

No one had ever gotten me to think seriously about music, what it meant to me, what part it played in my life, let alone what part I wanted it to play in the rest of my life. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. I thought he was asking a good question even if I had no idea how to answer it.

“My mother has always wanted me to be a musician,” I said, musing out loud. “I know that would make her happy. But it seems there are always lots of other more appealing things I can find to do when it comes time to practice. She can’t understand that. For her, practicing was what she liked doing more than anything else. She’s told me about how hours would go by while she worked over exercises again and again, and she would eventually realize it had gotten dark. For me, playing exercises is about as much fun as brushing my teeth. It may be a necessary evil, but I don’t go looking for opportunities to do it. If that’s what it takes to be a musician, I guess Mom’s out of luck.”

“Do you enjoy music at all?” he asked, surprising me again.

“Oh, yeah. Sure,” I squawked, my voice half an octave higher than I intended.

“What about it do you like?”

“I like listening to well-played music. Although when I hear a really good performance, I often get restless and feel I’d like to be the one on the stage performing. What I usually do then, is get the sheet music for the piece I heard and fiddle around with it for a few weeks until I get bored because I can’t get it to sound the way I hear it in my head. I like playing chamber music. Playing something together with a few other people is fun. But I don’t like to play with hacks who are always fumbling around, making mistakes, messing up the tempo, and really good musicians don’t want to play with me because to them, I’m a hack. I sometimes get to play chamber music with friends of my mother who are really good, and that’s great, but I get embarrassed if I screw up too much.”

I was continually egged on by a magical fantasy that all the irregularities in my playing which I hadn’t ground away by hard work would magically succumb to a flourish of artistic genius as I played. I wasn’t any better as a magician than as a pianist, and half of me knew it, and when it came time to play something serious in public I was a nervous wreck.

I was recapitulating wreckitude just thinking about this as I described it to Mr. Keynes. I guess it showed.

“You know,” he said “when I was a kid, I used to be terrified about playing in front of people. I would sit down at the piano, and my hands would be trembling so bad, I was one of the few people in history to play piano with a tremolo.” He grimaced and shrugged as though apologizing for making a bad joke. “Maybe I should have taken up violin.”

“Seriously, I’d get so nervous worrying about making mistakes, it would cause me to make mistakes, and worse than that, I wasn’t playing musically. I was worrying so much about getting the notes right it was impossible to manage the emotional nuances I wanted to put into what I was playing, and that’s what really hurt most. Good music is good because it’s a communication between performer and audience, because of the human emotion transmitted. If you’re just going to hit all the notes, however precisely, you might as well use a machine to do it.”

I wondered if he knew, at that very moment, the Computer Science Department of the University of Michigan was collaborating with the School of Music and the Psychology Department in a laboratory about eight tenths of a mile away from us to create a machine capable of notes and emotion. I don’t know to what extent they succeeded.

“How did you stop worrying about the notes?” I asked, my magical thinking in ascendance.

“I got some good advice which probably kept me from giving up on music altogether. A friend of the family, an actor, was staying with us, and we got to talking about my musical ambitions and impediments. He said to me, I can still hear his voice, a sonorous baritone, ‘Lowell, (Mr. Keynes lowered his voice down to sonorous baritone range.), you are right to worry about the notes. What is not right is performing in public before you’ve practiced to the point where the audience doesn’t have to worry about the notes.’”

“Well, as obvious as that was, it fortunately made a big impression on me,” Mr. Keynes continued. “It led me to an acceptance that my anxiety about making mistakes was legitimate. I really hadn’t been adequately prepared to play in public like the big-shot pianist I thought I was. My vision exceeded my reach, and I knew it. And that was why I was nervous. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being nervous, and I didn’t want to lower my standards, so I had to improve my technique. And that’s what I did. It’s the easiest thing in the world. All it requires is putting in the work. If you want be able to make decent music and feel comfortable playing with good musicians and do it in front of an audience without being embarrassed, you have to put in the work. That doesn’t mean becoming a professional musician. A professional is expected to play pretty much everything well and sight read pretty much anything tolerably well. But you should be able to play pieces you like, flawlessly, with the expression you want expressed, if you want to perform music for other people.”

“The way I see it,” he continued, “we all comprise a community. And what makes life meaningful is how we perform our parts as members of the community…, whether we take responsibility for our performance. All our relationships are pieces of a community, family, friendships, whatever affiliations we form. And an artist and his audience are a community, whoever the audience is. There’s a mutuality of responsibility to one another. A good audience is attendant and responsive to what the artist is up to, and the artist owes the audience due diligence in preparation and effort, and that’s what makes performance, and life, meaningful.”

I don’t know whether it was what Mr. Keynes said or just that I liked him and he wasn’t telling me I had to do anything for his sake or for some abstract standard, but he presented me with a rational proposition: if you want x, you need to do y to make x happen. If I wanted to accomplish something meaningful, to be meaningful, I’d have to put in the effort, my due diligence.

He’d shifted my life-view from what had been, up to then, the passive dependency of entitled childhood narcissism to an awareness of communal reciprocity and my personal role in it. Maybe, in my blossoming adolescence, I was biologically primed for such a shift in mental perspective, but Lowell Keynes pulled the trigger. And by doing so, he earned, along with Archie, his historical marker along the highway to TOAD.

***

I spent that summer working on piano technique harder than I had ever worked on anything before, probably harder than anything since. I labored incessantly over scales and exercises, first making them automatic and then grinding and polishing away the flaws. During hot muggy August afternoons, pools of perspiration glistened on the ebony surface of the piano bench, evidence of my exertions. I was surprised to find out that being able to ripple through exercises with hypnotic precision really was satisfying as an end in itself. Once I was able to get past the conscious effort to play something right, I was able to play and listen at the same time. This was a new experience. It was like being able to stand apart from myself as an observer and judge whether what I observed was what I wanted observed.

Practicing became therapeutic. I could lose myself in a passage of undulating arpeggios. If I was worried or depressed, an hour or two at the piano brought tranquility and invigoration and built my self-confidence. Competence was under control. Mine. I could achieve it.

When my mother returned from Long Island, she was amazed. It seemed possible her dream of mothering a musician had become a reality.

I did a pretty fair job of stringing her along for about four years. I kept taking lessons from Mr. Keynes and working at them. I played with groups of musicians my age and older. I was appreciated. I enjoyed it.

I started college at the University of Michigan with no clear goal for the next four years of effort and expense. College is, after all, what one does after high school, at least in the universe inhabited by me. I spent the first year playing piano a lot and muddling through required courses in Literature, Science and the Arts. Toward the end of the year, I was again bored, irritable and aimless. Music was still enjoyable, but I’d developed an uncomfortable ambivalence toward it. One does not spend one’s life taking piano lessons. That’s for kids. If I was going to be a musician, I should get with it. Transfer to the School of Music. That’s what I told people I supposed I was going to do. But I procrastinated, and the school year ended with my plans as vague as ever.

My mother suggested I spend the summer in New York with Uncle Archie and take lessons from Alfred Frankl, an old teacher of hers. She said it would help me get a new perspective on music much as starting lessons with Lowell Keynes had done four years earlier. It worked once, why not give it a shot again? I think she also wanted to get me off her hands for a while. No one but a mother would have put up with my sullen moods, and even she needed a break.

On the plane to New York, I was apprehensive. Would Archie resent my intrusion in his life? What would he expect of me? I’d always enjoyed his visits to Ann Arbor. He’d tell me great stories about his travels around the world, about famous people he’d met, and he always found time to do things alone with me when he was in town. But he might not be so happy about having me around every day for a whole summer. I’d learned from my mother that the latest go-round in what passes for romance in Archie’s life, brief intense infatuations with innumerable serial lady friends, had just ended in a predictable debacle. I feared he might not be in such a good mood as a result.

Archie was waiting for me when I got off the plane at La Guardia. He seemed shorter than I remembered and a bit more overweight, but he had the same sharp inquisitive eyes, and he came toward me with the resilient stride he’d always had. The hug he gave me showed he hadn’t lost any of his strength and helped dispel my anxiety about intruding on him.

“I just got the piano tuned,” he told me when we’d settled into a taxi. “I still have the old Bösendorfer Myra used to play when she was your age. I got it from a patient of mine who was short on cash. It hasn’t had much work for a long time, but it’s back in shape now. I suppose I’m more sentimental than I like to admit, keeping it all these years. When I see it sitting there in my living room, I hear her playing. It’s like a photo on the mantle. She was a hell of a talent…. Put it to good use.”

***

For the rest of the summer, my tendency to brood was overwhelmed by Archie’s effervescent zeal. He engulfed me in a whirl of activity. I practiced piano in the mornings, then took the subway from Archie’s apartment near Union Square to his lab at Columbia where he’d gotten me a job as a lab assistant.

Grinding up rabbit brains may not seem like a satisfying summer activity to most teenagers, but I was enthralled. You feed rabbits radioactively labeled amino acids which they convert into molecules which transmit impulses in the brain. Normally a certain amount of these molecules sticks to certain parts of the brain and by measuring the radioactivity you can measure the amount of the molecules. If you hypothesize a drug works by preventing this sticking, you can prove it by measuring the radioactivity after the rabbit has been taking the drug for a while. Less radioactivity means you were right. Simple.

Archie is able to pierce the opaque cloud of information and ignorance a problem presents and grasp the key elements which hold the clues to a solution. The more time I spent with Archie, the more I wanted to be like him.

I did keep playing piano. I still enjoyed it despite having to contend with Alfred Frankl’s antique rigidity, and a nagging Bösendorfer wraith unfavorably comparing my playing to my mother’s. But after that summer’s feast of stimulation served up by Archie, it had become clear the life of a musician was not for me. What was not as clear was how I was going to break this news to my mother.

Near the end of August, I was ready to try out news breaking on Archie, not so tough an audience. One evening, after we’d attended a recital by Murray Perahia at Lincoln Center, we headed to the nearby Hudson River Greenway for some air and leg stretching before consigning ourselves to a downtown bound subway car. The bouncing rhythms of Bach’s Italian Concerto as played by Perahia filled my head, triggering mixed emotions, delight at having experienced Perahia’s awesome mastery and resignation to the reality of how far out of my reach such mastery was.

At the Greenway, riparian sounds and scents helped suggest a cooling breeze off the water even though, on that sultry night, the air was decidedly sedentary. We ambled south discussing the pennant race. The Detroit Tigers were still in the thick of it, and we had tickets for their series with the Yankees the following week. Archie paused to light a cigar, and we walked without talking for a few minutes listening to the lapping of the water and the rest of the river music below. A stagnant cloud of smoke hung in our wake, undisturbed by air in motion. Memories of all Archie and I had done together in the last two months were kaleidoscopic. Archie must have been experiencing something similar.

“Between the pennant race and your presence here,” he said, “this has been a damn fine summer. Real-time Bach and Schubert coming from that piano beats old memories, fond though they may be. And I think you’ve enjoyed yourself too, and for me that’s been the best part.”

“I’ve had a tremendous time,” I said. “Tonight was fantastic. What an artist! It’s like the piano is an extension of his being. Every note he plays speaks to the audience. That’s how I would want to play.”

“Would?”

“If I were going to stick with music…. Archie, I’ve learned so much from you and all the stuff we’ve done this summer. Working in your lab has turned me on to the kind of fun science can be. I never realized that before. Just being in and around all the give and take in your lab about how to move ahead to solve puzzles has been a real trip. I’ll even admit to learning stuff from Mr. Frankl. But the trouble is, one of the things I’ve learned is I like other stuff too much to commit my life to a career as a pianist, even if I had the talent. I’d want to play like Perahia, and I think, no matter how much time I put into it, I’d never get there. I don’t know where that leaves me. I know for a while I’ve been hesitant about making music my career, but at least I felt like I knew how to do it. Now, it’s like I’ve gone from following a clearly marked trail to not even knowing where I’m trying to get to.”

“A valuable insight, I’d say,” said Archie. “I think you’re too much of a renaissance man already, to commit to a career which would cut you off from your other interests in.… Who needs a catalogue?” He waved his arm to encompass whatever might be out there. “What the hell, there’s a whole universe full of delights for the mind and soul.”

“Jerry, you’re a good kid. I’ve never had much use for your brother and sister. They’re a couple of cold fish who’d devour anyone in their way, with too little conscience to feel guilty about it. You, on the other hand, have inherited your mother’s sensitivity and, in my book, that’s an asset. You’ll suffer more because you’ll know when you’ve hurt someone, but it will make for a richer life. You also seem to have inherited her insecurity and self-doubt. I suppose maybe those qualities go hand in hand. But I think having a sensitive soul and a clear sense of purpose and direction at the same time is achievable. I think you can achieve it. The Chinese curse wishing you life in interesting times should hold no threat for an occidental. The equalizers and amalgamators can have their utopian tranquility and the torpor that comes with it. I’ll take interesting.”

“What about mom?”

“If you live in her fantasy, and you’re miserable, will she be happy?”

***

I became a pre-med student.

I became a medical student.

I became a doctor.

I became a psychiatrist to be at UCLA.

I approached my future with TOAD.

***

TOAD says: The future, if there is to be one, depends on the unpredictable actions and interactions of TOAD users. It’s pretty likely there will be a future, at least for a while, but it’s not a certainty.

The past isn’t a sure bet either. The operating rules of the universe, which make the past what it appears to have been, could change down the illusory road, and what was wouldn’t be, or even if it was it wouldn’t be what it was under the rules which were when it was.

In fact, divine whimsy could eliminate time, and everything would happen at once.

Even the rules could be gone. Imagine that!

***

Most of the rest of TOAD’s output, though not all, is a whole lot more comprehensible and comforting than this.

***

Chapter II

The Nativity of TOAD

I’d made it through medical school at the University of Michigan with a tolerable degree of competence and a lesser degree of enthusiasm. I’d acquired an understanding, along with lots of other mental acquisitions, that it’s a lot harder to get into med school than it is to get through it. Once in, the primary requirements for success are an average degree of reliability and an above average capacity for drudgery. Anyone who couldn’t handle the drudgery wouldn’t likely have gotten in to begin with, and even though my appetite for plain hard work still paled in comparison to my family standard, I did OK when I had to.

As I was contending with med-school-year-three drudgery, Archie, who’d told Columbia to get lost shortly after my summer sojourn with him, was telling Johns Hopkins to get lost and signing up with UCLA, which, driven by its obsession with the we’ve-got-more-Nobel-laureates-on-our-faculty-than-you’ve-got-on-yours Academia Bowl, was willing to go along with Archie’s insistence that there be no restrictions on his activities. He was to be free to pursue anything he wanted to pursue, whatever happened to capture his fancy.

At that moment, Archie’s fancy was securely in the clutches of woodpeckers and slime mold. The first of these fancies is what led to his departure from Johns Hopkins. They didn’t want their Nobel prize winning psychobiologist running around the jungles of Nicaragua doing research in biomechanics which was how he, at that moment, construed pursuit of fancy. What is biomechanics? In Archie’s case, it amounted to designing a better football helmet.

When that particular bit of inspiration struck, he and I were walking near the Huron River in Ann Arbor. I had just started my third year of medical school. Archie was in town to present a paper at a conference on schizophrenia. It was late summer. We were speculating on the prospects of the U of M football team which had been pretty dismal in the previous few years when we were distracted by the resonant percussive chattering of a red headed woodpecker chiseling out lunch high in an elm tree. Archie stood in silence, gaping at the source of this furious cadence. Archie is never silent for long unless he’s deep in thought. He stood there for some time pulling at the end of his nose which he does when he’s deep in thought. I too remained silent for I recognized by these signs that he was deep in thought. Finally, after a final tug at his proboscis, his visage set in a deep frown reflecting serious perplexity, he said, “I wonder why those damn woodpeckers don’t beat their brains to mush while they’re doing that?”

Archie’s next thought illustrates one of the talents that have enabled him to become such a successful scientist. He figured the NFL would also like to have an answer to that question — and would be willing to pay for it. He was right, and obtained a handsome grant from them to study the biomechanical properties of woodpecker skulls and pecking technique. Archie determined, for reasons unknown to me, Nicaragua was a good place to find woodpeckers.

The NFL was so happy with Archie’s woodpecker study they’ve given him a special recognition award which hangs on the wall at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

The second of Archie’s contemporaneous fancies related more directly to his career quest to elucidate the workings of the human mind. Archie’s explorations had progressed from the study of the microscopic and submicroscopic trees and branches of neurobiology to an effort to appreciate the forest (not to be confused with the Nicaraguan jungle).

Archie’s pursuit of sylvan appreciation was driven by his appreciation of slime mold. Slime mold, ant colonies, some forms of human interaction are examples of self-organizing systems. These collections of individuals, without leadership, manage to coalesce and function to effectively exploit their environment, assure group welfare or achieve whatever other goals serve as the principles around which the systems evolve. Archie and a few others realized this concept could also be applied to understanding how the human brain developed, and fathoming the processes involved could explain the mental experiences produced by the brain including such fundamental human phenomena as consciousness, empathy, creativity etc.

The notion of self-organizing systems and the way they operate, leaderless masses forming and doing and succeeding, struck me as appealingly egalitarian. Who needs authority? That I could appreciate. I’ve never liked being told what to do.

Archie also appreciated the sunny virtues of southern California, and advised me I would too. The north woods of Michigan (which I credit with helping me drive Mrs. Starr back to Moultrie) did seem pretty dismal by comparison. I was ready for glitter. I was ready to move on. I was ready to be enthused by immersion in nuances of the mind, having failed to find much inspiration in esoterica of heart sounds, bowel sounds, skin turgor, lab results and the like. I already knew I preferred listening and talking to cutting and sewing.

***

Arnold Cohen was Ward Chief on 2-South, one of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute inpatient units. That’s where I’d been assigned to spend my first year as a resident learning the fundamentals of how to function as a psychiatrist. Arnold Cohen’s were the fundamentals available for me to learn.

Cohen, only a few years older than me, had already compiled an impressive list of publications some of which I’d read. I presumed he was someone from whom I could learn a lot. After a few months on 2-South, it became clear that what I’d mainly learn from Arnold Cohen was how good he was at persistently neglecting responsibilities.

I’d heard people referring to Dr. Cohen as “Cannonball”. This initially puzzled me in that he did not resemble a cannonball. But Arnold Cohen’s sobriquet was not a corporeal reference, his corpus being, in fact, long and sinewy. I soon learned he was dubbed thus because someone admired his blazing serve. Cannonball Cohen led a dual life, psychiatrist, researcher, fount of fundamentals on one hand and quasi-professional tennis player on the other. If his backhand had been as good as his serve, he might have achieved some distinction playing tennis, but it wasn’t, and he hasn’t. Nevertheless, he spent much of his tenure at UCLA engaged in tournaments or practicing to bring some order to his unruly ground strokes. His appearances on the ward, as infrequent as they were, resulted largely from his early elimination from most of the tournaments he entered. If he’d played better, we probably never would have seen him.

When Cannonball was officially, or unaccountably, unavailable, one of the residents ended up as the go-to doctor on the ward whenever an issue of ward business needed resolution. We weren’t happy about this. Resentment of higher-ups is endemic among residents who perpetually feel overly burdened with busy-work, too little respected and too often treated by their superiors as indentured servants whose raison d’être is only to perform work for which the superiors get paid a lot more money. Complaints to higher authorities are typically met with variants of “I feel your pain.” and “I remember when I was in your shoes.” Or, “No whining!”

I’ve done my share of goofing off and paid for it with a nagging conscience, so I knew, no matter how much I envied Cannonball’s abandon, I’d never be able to achieve his blatant negligence. No shame. No embarrassment. No fear of consequences. He didn’t give a damn. We picked up the slack.

This was why, on a Monday morning in May, I was the doctor to whom fell the responsibility of interviewing a new patient who’d been admitted the night before. The other two 2-South residents, pulling a Cannonball themselves, had managed to be elsewhere occupied.

The ward staff are supposed to function as a therapeutic team, so a group interview is conducted early in the game with a new patient, the whole team in attendance. This practice allows everybody on the staff to get to know their new charges simultaneously, and the charges get to know who’s who on the staff right off the bat. We traditionally met in the nurses’ station. I wasn’t sure that tradition was the best way to do business, but who was I to challenge tradition.

The purported reason for meeting in the nurses’ station was to permit nurses to attend and still keep an eye on patients in the dayroom through the large windows in the wall separating the two spaces. We’d had discussions about the propriety of this. While we could observe the patients, they could also observe us. It was suggested this might stimulate paranoid fantasies about plots being hatched by the staff where the plotters could be seen but not heard. Agnes Miller, the ward social worker came up with that one. She also suggested we meet in the day room with the patients so they could hear for themselves how benign our plots were. That idea did not go over too well with Millie Lunceford, the head nurse.

What Millie said was, “Agnes, that’s absolutely impossible.”

What Millie meant was, “Agnes, you’re an utter jackass,” which was made clear by tone of voice and roll of eyes.

Agnes is probably about fifty years old. It’s hard to tell. She uses too much make-up, and that makes her look older. Maybe she really is older and is just doing a lousy job of covering up. I suspect at some time in her youth she took a course in cosmetology for morticians. I expected her face to crack if she ever smiled, but that expectation has never gotten tested. Agnes manifests one expression, lugubrious.

If Agnes is fifty, she’s spent half her life as the social worker on 2-South. This impressive longevity is, I suppose, some justification for matriarchal pretensions, but her persistence, while remarkable, is not unique. She’s matched day for day by Millie. They signed on at the same time, and for a quarter century, neither one has seen fit to die, retire, transfer or otherwise relinquish the moral authority engendered by seniority. They run an interminable dead heat which leaves both of them frustrated and fuels mutual antagonism. Over the years, they’ve had ample opportunity to hone techniques of infighting so their attacks on each other appear carefully couched in strictly professional disputes, never overtly personal.

Other than tenure, Millie and Agnes have little in common. Millie is black and aggressively militant. Agnes is white, ostentatiously tolerant and only passively aggressive. Millie generally abuses Agnes indirectly, heaping contumely on honky oppressors in general, on fuzzy minded, worthless, liberal do-gooders and on Agnes by implication. She only talks that way when Agnes is around. There’s no question her design is to needle Agnes who forces herself to concur with Millie lest she appear to be a bigot.

Agnes retaliates by subverting ward discipline whenever possible. She subtly colludes with or encourages patients to disregard ward rules which she contends are unnecessarily authoritarian. Whenever possible, she champions patient demands for fewer regulations and restrictions. When she can’t detect a spontaneous rebellion, she foments one. Most often, she invents grievances. (Her concern about holding meetings in the nurses’ station belongs in that category. The patients didn’t give a damn about our meetings.)

This sort of thing drives Millie into a frenzy. Agnes knows what she’s doing. Millie is obsessed with the notion that without strict discipline, the ward would become a madhouse. She actually said that once. Agnes replied it was supposed to be a madhouse. If patients couldn’t feel safe to vent their mental aberrations in the hospital, where could they, she asked. Nowhere, said Millie. Our job, was to get patients to stop acting crazy, not to encourage them to be more nuts than they already were. And so on.

Variations of this debate were daily fare for anyone sufficiently interested to listen. On occasions the intensity and duration of the debate was such that a referee was needed and the most senior doctor on the ward was elected.

So, on this May Monday morning, I, as the only and thus, by default, most senior doctor present and hence, inhabitor of the apex of the ward’s medical food chain, became referee elect. And was consequently the target of imploring glances from others on the staff who’d had enough of Agnes and Millie for the day. They hoped I’d be the one to exert some authority and Solomonic wisdom and arrange a cease fire so everyone could get some work done.

“Let’s get on to Mr. Garfield,” I said in a loud and I hoped, if not Solomonic at least authoritative, voice, interrupting the argument du jour.

***

“Chester Garfield is a ninety-two year old man who was brought to the hospital last night… actually around four in the morning… after he tried to shoot his grandson,” I told the assembled ward staff, paraphrasing the admission note from the emergency room. “His daughter called the police. They came, picked him up, brought him here on a 72 hour hold as ‘Dangerous to Others’. He’s refused to talk to anyone here according to the nursing notes, but the admitting note has some history from the family. For the last six months or so, he’s become increasingly irritable and argumentative and has been picking fights with his daughter’s family. He lives with them. Last night, her sixteen year old son got home late….”

A sharp woodpeckerish rapping noise interrupted my recitation of Garfield’s story. I looked through the window to the dayroom and saw a gaunt figure who looked as though he’d disguised himself as an old man and, in the process, maybe under Agnes’ tutelage, used too much make-up. His face was a jumble of wrinkles and, seen through the smudged window glass, they seemed to merge and intersect with the wispy, sparse, white hair hanging limply down over his forehead and ears. He looked like he’d been blindsided by a spider web. The hospital pajamas he’d been issued overflowed his scrawny frame, their sleeves flapping as he agitatedly gesticulated with his hands. Even through the cobwebbing, it was clear his glare was hostile.

“Is that Garfield?” I asked.

“That’s Garfield,” Millie muttered sourly. She was none too happy when we had senile patients on the ward. They burdened nursing staff with more custodial care and dirty work than patients who were merely psychotic or suicidal but not maddeningly forgetful, helplessly confused, hopelessly disoriented and incontinent. Sowing corridors and furniture with excreta is not a universal accompaniment to the burned out cortex of dementia, but it often turned out to be a prominent one for the nurse’s aides who had to clean up or for the other patients who had to live with it. The residents also resented “getting stuck” with such patients whom we generally viewed as uninteresting, untreatable and, most unforgivable, not “teaching cases”. Even Agnes, that paragon of charity, did not welcome the senile and with good reason. They were, often enough, dumped at the hospital by relatives who’d gotten fed up with caring for them and were unwilling to make the effort to find them decent places to live. Agnes got stuck with that job, and since everyone else on the ward was anxious to see these patients quickly disposed of, she was subjected to more than the usual degree of pressure. Working under pressure is not Agnes’ strong suit.

Considering these attitudes, it was understandable there was little enthusiasm when I noted that since Garfield seemed like he might be ready to talk, we should bring him into the meeting for the interview. Cohen’s absence had bequeathed to me the executive burden of personally confronting that agitated scowling countenance and trying to instill enough order and tranquility in the impaired brain behind it to obtain some cooperation and coherence.

Silently cursing Cannonball Cohen for leaving me in this spot, I opened the door to the dayroom and found the scarred window was not to blame for his decrepit complexion. The sallow, blotchy, speckled, etched skin was all his. Would he have looked any worse if he’d been dead for a week? “Poor guy,” I thought.

“Mr. Garfield, I’m Dr. Bender,” I said, offering my best professionally reassuring smile and extending my hand.

He stared at me for a few moments. I’d just about decided he was so disoriented he didn’t know a handshake was the proper response to my overture when he slowly raised his right arm (I thought, maybe intending to acknowledge he was present.) allowing the right sleeve of his pajamas to fall toward his elbow freeing his right hand, as scrawny as the rest of him, which he extended to mine and shook. His grip was surprisingly firm and steady. There was still some life left in the old guy.

“We’ve been discussing your case, and we’d like to have you come in and talk with us about what’s been going on with you lately,” I said, indicating the open door to the nurses’ station.

He stepped inside. I followed, closing the door behind me. He stood still just inside the door, glowering as he inspected his inspectors. “Who’s in charge here,” he growled in a voice deeper than I expected.

“I am…, at the moment,” I said from behind his left shoulder, responding to a compulsion to be honest about the transitory nature of my authority, though I immediately felt a twinge of regret, fearing I’d complicated the process of establishing a working relationship with him.

My prospects looked even bleaker when he turned to face me and responded incredulously, “You’re a kid!”

I probably did look younger than I actually was, which was then twenty-six, but I think anyone under sixty would have looked like a kid to Garfield. Be that as it may, he apparently chose not to make more of an issue of it, possibly resigning himself to a world governed by infants.

Before I could offer him a chair and begin asking him questions to assess whether he knew where he was and what was going on, he pointed to the chair and told me to sit. I sat. He remained standing, putting his left foot up on the other vacant chair. Leaning forward with his left elbow on his left knee, he raised his right hand which again popped into view out of the overly long pajama sleeve, his index finger aimed at the ceiling. In that pose, he once more glowered at everyone around the room for such a long time I was guessing he’d forgotten what he wanted to say.

“First of all,” he eventually began in a hoarse and slightly too loud voice wiggling his boney right index finger, “I want to make it quite clear I know what my rights are, as well as what their limitations are. I am aware that, if you feel I’m dangerous, which I’m not, you can keep me locked up here for observation for seventy-two hours, and I have damn little recourse to contest it. However, if you want to salt me away for longer than that, I’m entitled to a habeas corpus hearing at which, since there is no evidence I am dangerous, or crazy or senile for that matter, I would be set free.” He paused for a breath.

This, so articulate and accurate, from a being who could have passed for a fugitive from a long neglected attic trunk! Astonishing!

Garfield continued, now in a more diplomatic tone, “I’m telling you this so you’ll be aware I am not intimidated by my unfortunate circumstances. I have not lost my self-respect despite the fact you’ve dressed me up like a clown in these circus tent pajamas. I know full well I share the blame, in that, having a pig-headed disposition, I chose not to communicate with any of you until now. Thus, being diligent servants of your mental health empire, you had no choice but to heed my daughter’s spurious account of last night’s unpleasantness.”

He made an even more sour face than he had when he wasn’t trying to make a sour face.

“At first,” he continued, “I said to myself, to hell with all you psychs. You can lead an old horse to water, but you can’t make him shrink.” He cackled brightly, pleased with himself. “I thought that one up this morning while I was waiting for this show to get started,” he added, making sure nobody missed his witticism. I took note of the fact his humor, while not all that funny, showed he was aware of his circumstances and cogent enough to know what his audience would find relevant. Capable of putting together a pun! A good sign.

“But then, I figured maybe you can be of some use after all. I need someone who can talk some sense to my daughter. I’ve been trying for fifty-four years with damn little effect. She’s as pig-headed as me, and maybe that’s the problem. Thelma and I…, we’d scrape and claw at each other like a couple of alley cats until Flo, rest her soul, settled us down. Flo was Thelma’s mother, the peacemaker.” He seemed to get lost momentarily in wistful reminiscence.

“Now, we need another peacemaker,” he announced, as though suddenly remembering the point he was trying to make. “Her husband, Carl, he’s a nice enough sort, but he’s just a bump on a log. He wouldn’t know which side of the brush to put the toothpaste on if you didn’t tell him. And her kid! He’s a real gangster. He’s got a worse attitude than any of us. You say ‘Good morning.’, he says ‘Fuck You’. A real snot! Last night we were all just too tired, and things got out of hand,” he shrugged and fell silent.

“Thelma said you tried to shoot her son,” I said when I realized he’d come to the end of his oration.

“Pach! Nonsense!” he growled. “I was gonna shoot out the tires on the kid’s motorcycle so he couldn’t go gallivanting all over the place at all hours of the night like he does, worrying his mother sick. She’s gotta lotta responsibilities. She’s a nervous wreck, and she takes it out on me when she’s upset. That’s what started the whole trouble. I told her she oughta take the damn motorcycle away from him until he learned to be more responsible, and she launched into me about interfering with her family, driving her son out of the house, always picking fights with him, always being critical of everything he does. I don’t think she liked it when I called the no-good-bum a no-good-bum. We were right in the middle of this when he comes roaring up, telling us both to go to hell. I figger’d the best thing to do was to fix it so he couldn’t just take off whenever the heat was on. So, I got out my shotgun and blew the wheels off his wheels. That’s all. I may have hit more of the motorcycle than just the tires, but hell, I wasn’t shootin’ at the kid. Thelma just got hysterical. I couldn’t believe it when she called the cops.”

“Why didn’t you say something about all this last night?” I asked.

“Oh…, well…, I was angry,” he said offhandedly. “I also figger’d, if Thelma actually did stick me in a joint like this, she’d have plenty to feel sorry about the next day. Tactics, sonny. Playin’ the game.” He cackled once more. Mirth, cruel around the edges.

Further questioning established he was certainly not demented. Egocentric and nasty perhaps, but mentally sharp. Was he as harmless as he wanted us to believe? I guessed we’d have a better idea about that after we heard Thelma’s version of the story first hand. Still, nobody felt he met the criteria for involuntary hospitalization as a danger to others. Even if he’d been dangerous the night before, he no longer seemed so, and there was also no evidence he had a diagnosable mental illness. Being pigheaded doesn’t count. Fortunately, keeping him on the ward was no problem. He was happy to stay until we, “talked some sense into Thelma.” I assessed that to be a sign of good judgment, a further score on the side of compos mentis.

We changed his status to voluntary and returned his clothes. I assigned Agnes the task of arranging for Thelma to come in to discuss the situation.

I felt I’d been effective. Everyone was satisfied. Millie was relieved to know Garfield could find the bathroom by himself. Agnes wasn’t going to be burdened with another placement case. If I got Garfield out within forty-eight hours, I’d have less paperwork to do. The rest of the staff got a good show. Garfield had been entertaining, and I’d done a pretty fair interview including a succinct but thorough mental status exam demonstrating his brain was working as well as most others’ in the room and illustrating the downside of diagnosis by hearsay. Tidy. Satisfying.

While Millie was satisfied with Garfield’s apparent competence in what are known to nurses as activities of daily living, she had a complaint about one of my other patients and a demand that I do something to rectify it. “If you don’t do something with Frank Carlossi pretty soon, I won’t have any nursing staff left by tomorrow. We’re just worn out trying to keep up with him. It was nice you took him off restriction over the weekend so he could get off the ward and out of our hair for a while, but we’ve had to spend our-time running all over the hospital retrieving him from other wards and offices where he’s making a nuisance of himself trying to explain MANUBOTO to everyone.”

***

First year residents like to have patients whose disorders present with classic symptoms which respond predictably to standard treatments. That way residents can develop a measure of professional security about what to treat and what to treat it with before they have to contend with psychiatrists’ more common fare, distressed dysfunctional people who appear clinically cryptic, amalgams of flawed personalities, psychotic symptoms, mood symptoms, anxiety symptoms, addictions, life circumstance problems etc., who have histories of poor response to various treatments as well as messy adverse reactions to them.

Frank Carlossi was a classic, a great pleasure for me to work with, if not so much of a pleasure for Millie’s nursing staff. A professor of computer science at UCLA, 48 years old, graying bushy black hair, bushy black eye brows, intense dark eyes, a permanent five o’clock shadow.

Carlossi evoked admiration as well as desperation. He came equipped with warmth, generosity, charm, quick wit, great intelligence, a droll sense of humor, an ebullient extroverted personality and twenty-five years of the double edged curse of bipolar disorder which had led to numerous admissions to 2-South and several volumes of chart. His admissions were mostly for mania as was the current one, and he classically responded quite nicely to lithium.

He probably could have led a fairly stable life had he been reliable in taking lithium, but Carlossi was addicted to mania. On the upward slope, he experienced an amazing rush of energy, creativity and euphoria, which contributed to some of his best work, world changing innovations he’d bestowed on the cyber-universe in particular and the context of human existence in general.

Periods of normal, just-regular-Frank mode, when he was stable, had gotten briefer and briefer as the years passed. Stability recurrently ended when something in the news about defects in the human condition somewhere in the world opened his profound well of compassion. Compassion triggered a guilty conviction that he wasn’t personally doing enough to fix the problem. Guilt led to depression, and that triggered his craving for the marvelous high of mania which he believed gave him the high-speed mental data-processing capacity he needed to right whatever wrongs the world was experiencing. He’d then become “forgetful” about taking his lithium, and, soon enough, awayyyy he’d go. Unfortunately for Carlossi, his ascending mania predictably reached a devastating crescendo. He didn’t sleep, he didn’t eat, he didn’t plan ahead for more than seconds at a time, and he didn’t appreciate the mischief lurking in his fraudulent belief that he was omniscient and omnipotent. That’s when he worked on MANUBOTO.

Carlossi could have been rich. He supplemented his professorial salary with a steady and substantial income derived from the royalties earned by his inventions. When he was just a little manic, or even stable, he was capable of prodigious feats of erudition and creation. He seemed to inhale books and could run through the equivalent of a college course on something like electromagnetic engineering in a few days. When he reached the point where a technological road ended, he figured out what was needed to progress, and he invented it. A big seller of his has been a multi-axial diastatic fugurator, which made it possible for financial institutions to talk to each other even if their computers spoke different software languages. (That isn’t the real name of his gizmo, but it sounds something like it. I have enough trouble keeping psychiatric terminology straight.) When Carlossi first told me about the fugurator and other inventions of his, I suspected he was delusional and the only real inventions were the crazy names he came up with. Yet, all but one of the creations he told me about turned out to exist and have practical application and value in the real world. Not MANUBOTO.

But Carlossi wasn’t rich. He redistributed his income to a variety of charities, keeping for himself only what he needed to maintain his rather modest lifestyle. He had no family to care for and was determined to make the world a better place. While he’d probably always been a kind person, I suspected his charitable zeal was, at least to some degree, penance for a personal tragedy he’d suffered shortly before his first episode of mania. After he’d gotten his PhD from Stanford, he married a girl he was crazy about, honeymooned at Lake Tahoe, and, while driving back to Palo Alto, fell asleep at the wheel, careened off the road, crashed and survived. His bride did not survive. Carlossi had been trying to make up for that failure ever since by saving the rest of humanity. With MANUBOTO.

Carlossi’s pursuit of human salvation did not end with his beneficial inventions and charitable beneficence, and that’s where he got into trouble. As he became increasingly manic, his thinking became decreasingly rooted in reality, and he focused all his magnanimous passion on MANUBOTO, the system he was devising to elucidate and control the operation of the universe and provide a blueprint for correcting all its deficiencies, his Theory of Everything. He had produced hundreds of pages of neatly handwritten exposition of the theory and practice of MANUBOTO complete with exquisitely detailed diagrams, equations and graphs. The form of this opus was strikingly precise and scientific. The content however was gibberish, even to Carlossi. Sentences merged uncompleted into equations or ran on for pages, their elusive meaning drowned in a flood of unrelated subordinate clauses and neologisms.

I’d long been puzzled by MANUBOTO’s handwritten form, given Carlossi’s facility with computers. Why do it by hand? His explanation was fear of someone hacking his computer and corrupting the file, or worse yet, beating him to the power inherent in MANUBOTO’s core and using it for evil.

When I first encountered him and he showed me his MANUBOTO file, he wouldn’t let me see what he considered the most sensitive parts until he was confident I wouldn’t use the information to take over the world.

MANUBOTO was Frank Carlossi’s answer to Douglas Adams’ “the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”. Not as elegant as “42” but equally unintelligible. And destined to remain so.

But when Frank was in the throes of serious mania, intelligibility seemed to him achievable. When in the throes, Frank believed he could do it, he could make sense of MANUBOTO.

Even when Carlossi was well, he was in awe of MANUBOTO. He maintained a high degree of suspicion that MANUTOTO withheld its truth from him because of some inadequacy on his part. Carlossi, in a state of mental wellness, realized he didn’t understand it. His undoing lay in the conviction that, when he was manic, his capacity for rapid cognition expanded to the point where his intellectual grasp could encompass the arcane mysteries and solve the inscrutable equations of MANUBOTO. To truly appreciate MANUBOTO’s ultimate truth, mania was the mental edge he knew he needed.

He came to believe I understood MANUBOTO as well as he did. And he was right. Zero equals zero. But that belief afforded me a certain amount of therapeutic leverage for which I was grateful. Consequently, I had, for months, made no attempt to correct his misapprehension that MANUBOTO made sense to me.

***

I found Carlossi pacing around his room, twitching his fingers to a frenetic rhythm heard only by him. On his face, a look of anguish, on his bed, a familiar thick black loose-leaf notebook, on its cover, “MANUBOTO”.

“Oh, Doc,” Frank greeted me, startled out of the world of hypo-manic tumult in which his mind, at that moment, sojourned.

“Hi, Frank. You look distressed.”

“I’ve been given the answers, and they’re all here,” he said snatching up the notebook. “As God gave ‘The Law’ to Moses on Mount Sinai, I’ve been given the truth of MANUBOTO. I’ve faithfully taken it all down just as it’s been dictated to me. MANUBOTO speaks to me. These pages …,” he said shaking the notebook like a tambourine, “the teachings, the secrets, the answers to all the questions…. I’ve been chosen. I’ve been appointed the intermediary to bring this beauty to humanity, this sublime truth, this wisdom, all that’s contained in this…, the commandments of MANUBOTO. And I’m failing. I’ve been given the opportunity to uplift mankind, but I can’t grasp it. I can’t quite get it clear…. A few days ago, I was almost there. Now I’ve lost it again. My thinking has decelerated. I can’t process fast enough anymore. How can I solve the equations, Doc? I need to think faster. I need to process faster. I need a faster brain. Doc, help me.”

“How do you want me to help you, Frank?” I asked, as though I didn’t know.

“It’s so painful to have it in my hands and be unable to put it together. I can give mankind salvation, succor, the keys to good life, kindness, utopia. It’s all here, if I could only maintain a grasp of the whole, I could do it…. That’s the key, grasping the whole at once. Here, you look at it,” he implored, thrusting the notebook at me. “Help me understand. Tell me what you see. Where am I missing the logic?”

I looked, ostensibly sharing Frank’s frustration. How do you explain psychosis to someone who is psychotic? I turned through the familiar bewildering pages of charts, equations, sketches of what looked to me like mechanical drawings of electrical circuits, diagrams of networks linking interminable interstices in cosmic and subatomic realms, sprinkled with words in mixtures of English, Greek and Cyrillic characters and arcane symbols known to no known language, eventually reaching the latest entries, no more informative than earlier ones.

“What is the meaning of the word, ‘MANUBOTO’, Frank? You’ve never told me. What does it mean? What does it stand for? Is it a name?” I asked, hoping this time he would reveal a clue he’d never previously divulged to me.

“It’s an acronym,” he said looking pensively beyond me as though he was trying to read something on the wall.

“And…? What do the letters stand for?”

“I..., I used to know,” he said, pathetically, imploring me to believe him. “But…, now, I don’t. That’s part of my failure. I’m so embarrassed. If I knew, I could fulfill my mission. I could understand it all and convey it all to everyone. Then, once everyone was governed by MANUBOTO, all human society would be blissful. Kindness! No evil! No aggression! No cruelty! I just want to do good. That’s all. I need you to help me. Help me recapture the insight. Help me!”

“Frank, listen, you’re asking me to help you go back to being manic,” I said.

I thought a psycho-educational approach might help him restructure his thinking and re-ground himself in the real world. Time for me to fess up.

“I have to confess, Frank, MANUBOTO doesn’t make any sense to me. And…, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t really make any sense to you either. You only think it makes sense when you’re manic, and, when you’re manic, what happens is that you’re really susceptible to irrational influences, and all of this,” I said, tapping the notebook, “seems to make sense to you because you so much want it to make sense. But your judgment then, about what’s sensible and what’s not, is totally screwed up. You want your thinking speeded up so you can catch up with what seems to be hidden in MANUBOTO. Mania does speed up your thinking, but it becomes chaotic. Then you can’t tell anymore what’s sensible and what isn’t.”

He looked like a small child who’d just been told he can’t have a pony, a sign of his improving mental health. When Carlossi was seriously manic, euphoria and grandiosity overrode any ability to experience loss and sadness. This augured well for his return to equilibrium. But I worried the weight of crushed dreams, now that he was becoming capable of acknowledging the loss, could push him into depression. Was I perpetrating the “cruelty” he expected MANUBOTO to extinguish?

I did feel the profession of psychiatry had failed Carlossi. I’d inherited the mantle of that failure and wasn’t happy wearing it. Sure, getting his lithium level back into therapeutic range would enable him to reconstitute as had happened many times before, but none of my mantle wearing predecessors had made a dent in his cycle. He’d reconstitute for a while and then predictably deconstitute, and I, or some other resident the following year, would be back in the reconstitution business. A good learning opportunity for the mantle’s new heir, sure, but, what the hell, we owed Carlossi more than that.

Management of his disorder had certainly helped him, but what he ultimately needed was an off ramp from his inexorable traffic circle, and highway engineering had become my responsibility. But how, I wondered, could this be done by me when all the NPI docs he’d encountered over the years hadn’t managed it?

For me, Carlossi was an enviable embodiment of the principle that a satisfying life entailed being purposeful, being meaningful. Carlossi knew what life was all about, at least his own life. He had no doubts about his chosen goal, optimizing the lot of humankind. It was noble. He was content in knowing that, for him, this pursuit was what made life meaningful and satisfying. Sure, his means to that end, MANUBOTO, was crazy, but Carlossi had firm clarity of purpose… unfortunately conjoined with a turbid vision of how to actualize it. I felt terrible that such a fine person was being recurrently done in by a problem that we…, that I…, had a responsibility to address with something more than band aids.

Wrestling with this train of frustrating logic impelled me to a naïve hope that bolstering his spirit with an accounting of all the actual good he’d accomplished in his life might do some good. He wanted to do good. He wanted, like so many revered prophets from the past, to bring “Truth” to a humanity misguided by ignorance and misunderstanding. That “Truth” lay in his scribblings on the pages of MANUBOTO reflected his own misguidance, and that was where his delusional undoing lurked.

This line of thinking led me to the thought that if I could find a way to nudge him off this psychotic pathway toward one leading to a similar end but using his eminent real-world expertise and resources, maybe he’d find enough satisfaction to abandon his search for the “Truth” in MANUBOTO.

***

Do good ends justify whatever means it takes to reach them?

TOAD says: In some of the possible universes, it would be true that application of any conceivable means was justified by the resultant good, but unless you know you’re in one of those universes, behave yourself.

Archie says: Unintended ends can end up biting you in the end.

Know what you’re doing. If you know it, do it.

For Archie, this dictum supports having the courage, in the service of a worthy but inaccessible goal, to try approaches others would reject as too risky or outlandish. He relied on his immense ingenuity, talent and knowledge to innovate in order to crack problems which had elusive solutions. Carlossi too had aptitude for innovation. He and Archie shared an empyrean level of creativity.

The conjunction of Archie and Carlossi, gave me an idea.

***

“Frank, I’ve got an idea. Here’s what I see going on. What you want to accomplish with MANUBOTO is really admirable. Your instincts are good, and ‘good’ is what you’ve always tried to do. You’ve contributed so much to the world with your charity and inventions, and you set an example of being a good person in general. But you’re not satisfied with that…, with your good works… because they’re particular, individual contributions. It seems to me, what you’re looking for is some formula for doing good in a universal way.” His agitato finger dance became a bit more andante, a good sign.

“Maybe, when you’re manic,” I continued, “mania overcomes an inhibition you otherwise feel, to take a plunge into the wholesale goodness business. Look, you could have gone into the priesthood or in some other way made religion a career, but you didn’t. You chose electronics and computer science, fields which, unlike religion, offer you predictability and control and an empirical path to finding answers. I presume you find those qualities comforting, and conversely you find issues of morality and religion threatening because they’re inherently slippery… from a cognitive perspective. But when you get manic enough, you’re no longer put off by what’s cognitively slippery because mania allows you to leap over whatever doesn’t make sense which you won’t do when you’re not manic.”

As I spoke, Carlossi looked intently in my eyes, breathing through his open mouth, his affect intense but hard to read, maybe terror, maybe sadness, maybe resignation…, maybe I was getting through.

“Maybe you can accomplish what you want when you’re not manic and confused,” I offered, “by other means.”

“Clausewitz? I’m not going into politics.”

“Science, technology. Using what you already know how to do. You’ve made a career out of inventing whatever was needed to solve a problem. The trouble you’re having with MANUBOTO is that the solution you’re trying to invent always seems to stay just beyond your reach. That’s too frustrating. You’re looking for the key that will unlock control of the moral universe, and you’re not finding it. That’s what’s devastating to you. That’s what keeps ending you up in the hospital. Maybe, you could come up with a way to have a positive general effect without the ultimate key, with influence, but without ultimate control. You know the old perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good bit? That’s where you’re hung up. Look, you want to give humanity a basis for leading better lives. Right?”

He nodded assent but looked at me like I was going to try to sell him an old bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan.

“OK. Your number one area of know-how is computer science, right?”

He gave me an affirmative nod again and attached a skeptical drawn-out, “Yes.”

“What do you know about self-organizing systems?” I asked, feeling like I was channeling Archie.

That caught him off guard. He returned a quizzical look like I was the one who needed meds. “They’re biological systems, and other kinds of complex structures, insect colonies, internet communities, which organize and develop without any central authority telling them what to do, and accomplish whatever they need to accomplish to prosper, to function,” he responded with professorial aplomb.

“How do they know what to accomplish?” I asked, feeling like I was channeling Socrates.

“Well…, they don’t necessarily have an intended goal to start with. Sometimes there is, other times it just happens. Because something useful is happening, it keeps happening. There has to be some organizing principle, like obtaining food, security, companionship, sharing information. Maybe more than one,” he replied with a shrug. “Could be lots of things. They’re not necessarily readily apparent, or consciously intended. But something needs to be the principle around which the system organizes.”

“So, if you were going to make a moral self-organizing system what would be a good organizing principal to begin with?”

“The Golden Rule,” he replied without hesitation, his inflection indicating it should have been obvious. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

“If only mankind followed it,” he appended wistfully.

“OK then,” I said. “How about tackling that as a computer science problem…, getting people to follow the Golden Rule. You could do something on the internet, like a self-organizing internet community based on following the Golden Rule.”

This was making sense to me. It didn’t need to be something that actually worked, only something to keep him challenged and busy, a non-psychotic time and energy consuming alternative to MANUBOTO, a way to get him out of his cycle of pathology.

“Wouldn’t work. No moral authority,” he declared emphatically, and I imagined a guillotine blade, decapitating my nascent enthusiasm. Thunk!

“That’s what God’s all about,” he continued. “Just having a good idea, no matter how good it is, isn’t enough. MANUBOTO holds the keys to moral authority at its core. I know it. It’s in there… even if I haven’t been able to figure it out.” He mumbled the last through tight lips.

His obstinate resistance knocked the intellectual wind out of me, and I reflexively sat down on the edge of his bed, maybe to give myself space to think. Then, it occurred to me I could be intruding, uninvited, on his personal space, and I popped back up as he continued his lecture on the merits of MANUBOTO.

“And that’s what any moral system needs to be persuasive. The Golden Rule gets preached, over and over, but what makes people follow it, when they do, is divine authority. Just putting it out there isn’t going to get people do it. You need a moral force greater than man. That’s the key in MANUBOTO…, irresistible moral authority. That’s what’s needed to bring people into compliance, to the ultimate good.

“Look, I believe humanity is ultimately good,” he insisted, “but if I can’t unlock the moral authority in MANUBOTO, people will backslide and fail, and then others will follow, and pretty soon it all goes to pot. In order to establish universal observance of the Golden Rule, I first have to understand the hidden elements of MANUBOTO. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do.” He frowned and gave me an exasperated look like I was a student getting a C-minus in one of his classes. Then, maybe feeling as intellectually anoxic as I was feeling, he sat down on the bed inviting me, with a sweep of his hand, to sit as well.

He had a point. “Follow the Golden Rule” might as well be, “Follow the yellow brick road”. As advice or commandment, it was an end to which people paid lip service but wasn’t compelling. To draw people to that end, Carlossi would need a process to engage them, to lead them there, maybe like a game, maybe something with positive social satisfactions or some other rewards. How could he get people to play his game? How could he turn their guidance-seeking commonality into a system that would organize users in pursuit of a common end, a process to lead them where he wanted, to motivate them to play? How could a Carlossi creation be different from the array of preaching, advising, commanding venues already widely available? Not just an answer-spouting machine but an engagement.

I sensed my stratagem slipping into failure as I sat down on the bed with Carlossi, and then, I had one of those moments of unanticipated inspiration. I recalled flashes of two, long forgotten lessons from my distant past (distant for a twenty-six year old anyhow). The first was Lowell Keynes’ sermon on communal reciprocity. This was followed by a recollection from two years prior to that, when as a twelve year old, I was attending Hebrew School to prepare for my Bar Mitzvah which, for reasons I couldn’t fathom at the time, my parents felt was culturally essential.

“Frank, there’s a ‘Golden Rule’ story in the Jewish Talmud about a rabbi named Hillel, who lived around the time of Jesus. In the story, a pagan comes to him saying he’d convert to Judaism if Hillel could teach him the whole of the Torah standing on one foot. Rabbi Hillel, lifts up one foot, and says, ‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it.’ ” I quoted as accurately as I could.

“Lots of people hear ‘The rest is commentary’ as ‘The rest is less important’. That’s a mistake. What we were taught was the commentary and the study of the commentary is what makes it work. I suppose the concept is, if you’re engaged in an active process within a similarly engaged community, you’re more likely to take seriously what comes out of it than if you’re just a passive recipient of someone else’s dictates. Participants would own the product. They’d have a stake in it. How about building a system using that principle with the Golden Rule at its core? Everyone in the world…, at least those with internet access…, could pose questions, get responses, comment on the responses and comment on the comments. You say you believe in the goodness of humanity. Give humanity a tool they can use to find ‘good’ and share it. Create a web based communal environment for ‘goodness’ to play out, where the members of the community are individually empowered but mutually interdependent. It’d be evolutionary, and who knows what would evolve? It could be interesting.”

I didn’t know what the hell I was saying, but I’d gotten caught up in my own rhetoric.

“Swarm intelligence? Crowdsourcing?” Carlossi exclaimed, and now I didn’t know what the hell he was saying, but it sounded to me, ominously, a lot like the language of MANUBOTO. Did he fear an attack by an army of bugs? Was I crowding him?

Carlossi stared at me, appearing incredulous, for a good fifteen seconds then said, “I’m leaving.” Then, an apparent afterthought, “Write me a prescription.”

I tried unsuccessfully to get him to tell me what his plans were. He brushed me off with “Later.”

I hoped I’d succeeded in making an appointment to see him in two days, but he seemed so distracted and immersed in his own thoughts I wasn’t confident it had registered with him. I was afraid I’d just made him agitated and blown whatever therapeutic rapport I’d managed to cultivate and the next time I saw him would be when the Emergency Room paged me. He’d be four plus manic, once again convinced the secret of MANUBOTO was within reach.

Way to go, Dr. Bender, I thought. You maybe just pushed him back into the deep end.

***

As I was writing Carlossi’s discharge orders, Chester Garfield again knocked on the nursing station glass. He too announced he was leaving. “This place is gonna be a real drag without Frank around,” he growled. He’d changed his mind about having us help him work out the difficulties he was having with his daughter, and he declined to provide any further information about his affairs or his family. He just wanted, “to get out of this nut house.” He and Carlossi left together. Buddies.

***

Agnes was waiting for me when I got to the ward the following morning. I discerned as much from the way she lunged at me from her office as I passed her doorway. She seemed relieved to see me, as though she’d just found someone to take a hot potato off her hands.

“Good morning, Dr. Bender.” She looked, even more than usual, like a discarded piece of dried fruit.

“Hi. What’s the good word?”

“Humph!” She was in no mood for levity. “I called Mr. Garfield’s daughter yesterday, as you requested. By the time I got ahold of her, you had already discharged her father. She was not happy about your decision to let him go.”

“I suppose that was to be expected,” I said.

“She was furious and very nasty. She got very threatening. I had to tell her that I was just passing on the information and inviting her in to discuss the situation, and that I had nothing to do with the decision.”

“I’m sure Mr. Garfield would appreciate your efforts,” I said.

“She wants to talk to the doctor in charge…, this afternoon.”

“Wonderful,” I said, gleeful. “I’ve heard a rumor Dr. Cohen is actually here today. She can vent her spleen on him…. He did make it in?”

“Oh yes. He came in early. He said he couldn’t sleep because his elbow hurts. He has his right arm in a sling. Poor man.”

“Well, he doesn’t have to fight a duel with her.”

I had less sympathy than Agnes for Cohen’s athletic damage or just about anything else for that matter.

***

When Garfield’s daughter showed up on the ward later that afternoon, however, I was unfortunately again de facto “doctor in charge” by virtue of my recurrent “only-doctor-present status”, Cannonball having gone off to see an orthopedic surgeon about his tennis-elbow. I imagined picking up one of his tennis rackets and sending him off to see a neurosurgeon.

Thelma had been told to wait in the day room, a fairly large space arrayed with clusters of scarred stained, worn and mismatched couches, chairs and coffee tables. At that hour, several patients were scattered about the room, mostly reading, watching John Wayne destroy the Japanese navy or simply doing their best, which was pretty effective, to appear blank and desolate. One, a newly admitted and as yet, untreated schizophrenic, was pacing around the room, muttering a variety of assents to himself, “Uh huh!” “Alright!” “Yep!” “Yeah!” “OK!”, and so on.

Thelma too was pacing around the room following a course which kept her on the opposite side from the mutterer and simultaneously maximizing the distance between herself and any other patients she encountered, a fine exhibition of broken field running. If she was trying to avoid the others in the room, as it appeared, all she had to do was stand still or sit down. They would have avoided her. Her angry visage was more than enough to dissuade any of the fearful lot peopling the day room from having contact with her.

She was dressed in a nicely tailored dark scarlet suit with the right amount of jewelry, which helped her avoid looking dumpy despite a stocky figure. She looked business-like, in fact, executive. She also looked vaguely familiar though I couldn’t place her. I decided she must have some indistinct resemblance to her father, and the similarity was triggering an unconscious déjà vu sensation. They were both very good at looking angry. Maybe that was it.

I intercepted her cycle around the dayroom when she was near the door. When she stopped, the mutterer stopped, on the opposite side of the room. He no doubt thought she was after him.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Bender.”

She shook my hand warmly, her visage modulating from angry to quizzical. “I expected to meet a Dr. Cohen,” her tone was neutral, merely stating a fact without indicating an attitude toward it.

“Dr. Cohen was unable to be here this afternoon. Today, I’m next in line.”

“You look very young to be a staff psychiatrist.” She sounded as though she was probing for information while seemingly attempting flattery.

“Probably so. I’m a first year resident, not a staff psychiatrist.”

“I see…, a student,” her momentary warmth giving way to an imperious frigidity. She did not like dealing with underlings.

I had an impulse to say, “Yeah? So?”, but, in the interest of professionalism, I restrained myself a bit and said, “I’ve been told studying should be a lifelong enterprise.”

“Well, you’ve made a terrible mistake, and I want you to correct it.”

“A mistake?” I asked, trying to sound sincere and innocent, knowing all too well what she had in mind.

“My father is ill and dangerous. He was brought to this hospital by the police after he attempted to kill my son. Even the police knew he needed treatment. Yet, he apparently did not receive any treatment, and I learned yesterday from a Ms. Miller he was released from this hospital on his own without any notification to his family. Do you realize the only place he has to live is in my home? Was I supposed to allow him to return after what he tried to do? Without treatment? How can you excuse turning out a sick, senile, old man with no place to go, relegating him to the streets? And, in fact, he did not return home yesterday. We have no idea where he is. I insist you find him and rehospitalize him at once.”

She said all this employing the same methodically calm authoritarian tone throughout. She was apparently used to being obeyed and had no doubt she would be on this occasion as well. To an innocent observer, it would seem she was just being kind to me, explaining what it was I had done wrong, perhaps so I wouldn’t do it again, as though I were a four-year-old who’d just peed in his pants and she was my nursery school teacher telling me to go and change.

Garfield’s failure to get home did cause me a flicker of concern, but I was confident in my appraisal of his ability to take care of himself and the reasonableness of his desire to be free of “shrinks” and their minions. Maybe he was still employing “tactics”.

“I understood from Mr. Garfield that you are actually living in his home. I expect he has the right to return there whenever he wants to… or not to, whatever is his pleasure.” She didn’t like that one. I was guessing Garfield had told the truth about whose house it was. Apparently, he and I were on the mark.

“On what basis did you discharge my father?” She was losing her composure.

“He wanted to leave.”

“I meant,” she snarled “what led you to decide he did not need to be confined and treated in a hospital?”

She wasn’t going to like this either. “I’m sorry, but he did not give me permission to discuss his case with you. Without his permission, I cannot legally give you information about his case. I can listen to what you have to say about him and the situation which led to his hospitalization which I’d be happy to do, but I can’t tell you about him without his permission.”

“You mean you are not going to tell me what went on with him here?”

“That’s the law.”

“I know the law.” She was almost screaming. “Who is your superior?”

“Oh, just about every other doctor in the department who’s not another first year resident,” I said. “Of course, this being part of a medical school, there are medical students around, and they have even less superiority than me. But for my immediate superior, you could start with Dr. Cohen, if you could find him. Then there’s a whole hierarchy of superior people culminating with Dr. Hamilton Hargrove the third, my preceptor and Dr. Morton Abrams, Dr. Hargrove’s boss, or the Board of Regents of the University of California or the Governor. I doubt the feds have a meaningful piece of my food chain. But who knows? Take your pick.”

“I will. Young man, you will regret this,” she declared through stiffened lips, seething.

“Gosh! I hope not,” I responded, in a juvenile display of contempt though I doubt she heard that last remark because by the time I got it out, she was already charging down the hall, fumes of fury wafting in her wake and in another four steps was out the door.

“You know who that was you just picked a fight with?” asked Millie.

“I hope it was Garfield’s daughter.”

“You got that part right, doll. Don’t you know who Thelma Burke is?”

“Oh, yeah…, Thelma Burke. No one mentioned her last name. I thought she looked familiar. Isn’t she the state Democratic Party Chairman or something?”

“Chairperson,” corrected Millie. “That’s the one, doll.”

“Well, I don’t care who she is. She could be the Queen of the Nile, but that doesn’t give her the right to come in here and intimidate people. Old man Garfield may be obnoxious, but he’s got as much right to freedom as anyone else. If he breaks a law, let the police lock him up. I’m not here to be Thelma Burke’s personal jailer.”

“Jerry, you’re a good kid,” Millie said, throwing her arm around me. “Maybe, someday, you’ll be running this place. I hope I’m still here then.”

“Thanks, Millie. I appreciate that.” I did too. At that moment, I felt I’d acted courageously, even heroically. Jerry Bender, protector of the helpless, savior of the downtrodden.

Zorro rides again!

***

Carlossi did not show up for his appointment the following day. I called the contact numbers in the chart and got voicemail. I left messages. I called the Computer Science Department and talked to the secretary who hadn’t heard from him. She advised me, this was not unususal. I left a message. I even went to Agnes, figuring she might have advanced skills as a skip tracer as it was usually her job to contact patients who’d missed follow-up appointments. She didn’t have any more ideas than the ones I’d tried, though she did comment that if he’d had family, they might have been a source of information, but as we both knew, Frank lived alone and had no family we knew about.

Right, Agnes, thanks, that’s a big help.

I did ask her to call Garfield’s home number thinking maybe he’d finally gotten back there and might know something of Carlossi’s whereabouts. She learned from Thelma that Garfield had still not gotten home, that Thelma knew nothing about anyone named Carlossi and that Thelma was still pissed off. (To be fair, Agnes’ word choice was more politically correct.)

That afternoon, I finally sought and actually found Cannonball, confessed my concerns, asked for advice, hoped for absolution.

He didn’t say, “Tut, tut,” but that was his manner. “Frank’s a survivor,” he said. “He always finds a way to get himself back here when he needs it.”

***

Thursday, Carlossi still hadn’t shown up. I worried on until four in the afternoon when I was scheduled to present myself at another venue for confession, instruction and absolution, the regular weekly meeting with Dr. Hamilton Hargrove III, my aforementioned superior and preceptor and soon to be confessor.

Each psychiatry resident at UCLA is assigned a faculty member as a preceptor who is supposed to act as the resident’s ombudsman, advisor and confidant when the travails of psychiatric training make him want to scream. Whether such assignments are truly random or are guided by some rationally benevolent administrative principles or whether, as has been alleged to have occurred in my case, some inscrutable insidious calculation influenced the hand of fate, Hamilton Hargrove III, at that time, the Associate Director of the department, was assigned my preceptor.

***

Had I consulted TOAD back then about the hand of fate and its influences, a good trick, as TOAD was, on that Thursday, still embryonic, I could have become immersed in TOADian Inscrutability Theory which holds that all such influences are inherently unknowable and has, for some time, been a hot topic on the TOAD Blog.

Inscrutability Theory says: The human mind is very good at detecting patterns in our perceptions and divining cause and effect relationships among events. We’re so good at this that we are prone to imagining patterns and falsely imputing cause and effect to explain them. All we really know, or think we know, TOADian inscrutability theorists, channeling David Hume, say is one observation routinely (but not inevitably) follows another. Attribution of causality to these patterns is a human conceit.

Pragmatist and utilitarian TOAD bloggers, in collaborative rebuttal argue: Maybe, but it’s a conceit which has served humanity pretty well in its dealings with reality for a hell of a long time because most of the time it works just fine.

TOAD, unswayed by inscrutability theorists in its ranks, concludes (maybe under the influence of the Golden Rule):

Actions have consequences.

Play the odds.

Do good.

***

Archie grumbled when he heard the news about my assignment to Hargrove and treated me to his low opinion of the man and its history. But he guessed it was not of much consequence as preceptorial relationships are more often marked by social and bureaucratic propriety than substance.

Archie’s guesses are rarely as far off as that one.

Hargrove was very influential. He had an uncanny ability to size up my discontents with the program and restore me to contentment, even if nothing actually changed other than my perceptions and expectations. At our weekly get-togethers in his office, we would sip bourbon, relax and kick around topics ranging from the metapsychology of Sigmund Freud or Woody Allen to the latest intrigues in departmental politics.

Hargrove has the ability to create an ambience rich in charm and hospitality despite his hectic schedule. He’s able to focus his attention on a person, a situation, a topic, a moment, so thoroughly he seems impervious to distraction, and whoever is in his presence becomes mesmerized by the concentrated energy of his personality. When I was with him, he seemed concerned only with me, as though being my preceptor was the most important…, no…, the only job he had. This is a remarkable talent, one he shares with successful politicians, long lived snake charmers, high class prostitutes and gifted psychotherapists. I knew this. I knew it was inconceivable Hargrove spent his whole week anticipating our sessions as he made it seem, but I was willing to be seduced and enjoy the illusion. It seemed a harmless enough deception.

When Hargrove is particularly relaxed and buoyant or when he wishes to appear particularly relaxed and buoyant in order to be particularly seductive, he dons his primordial down-home-Texas-country-boy persona. He employs this ancestral vestige adroitly, judiciously and advantageously when he calculates it serves his purpose to seem simple and harmless. At other times, he covers his personality with a glaze of immaculate sophistication, speaking with a precisely neutral articulation exposing few clues to the identity of the real human being within. Still, his custodial glaze could be attenuated by a few ounces of distilled spirits, and, spirituality of that sort being prominent in the Hargrove family heritage, when the whisky content of our get-togethers induced sufficient lubrication, the real human being within would slip out of its protective camouflage and regale me with relatively uncensored anecdotes about his and his family’s exploits.

***

Hamilton Hargrove III’s legacy from HH I and HH II, in addition to fondness for sour mash, included (in no particular order) his advantageous philosophy of life, connoisseur’s eye for opportunity, ambition, determination and thick skin.

The first Hamilton Hargrove migrated to Texas from Indiana shortly after World War I. He claimed, probably falsely, to be trained in chiropractic techniques and developed a comfortable practice traveling about the state treating the countless injuries that befell ranch hands, oil field workers and others engaged in menial labor. He realized, though, this was no way to get rich, and getting rich was his goal. He also realized, in order to get rich, he would have to develop connections with those who were rich. He did so through the anus.

Enjoyment of opium and its derivatives had become popular among the wealthy of Texas. Opiates count among their several virtuous properties efficacy in the treatment of diarrhea. They accomplish this feat by slowing down intestinal movement. If a user doesn’t have diarrhea, opiates cause constipation. Constipation was a big problem for the wealthy of Texas, and constipation was the key to Hamilton Hargrove I’s entrée to the social stratum from which he would make his fortune. He offered discrete colonic irrigations and became an instant success. He shrewdly diversified his discrete services to include abortions and treatments for venereal diseases. His success grew. His patients, to reward his discretion as well as to ensure it, readily agreed to promote his social ascent and made him privy to advantageous financial information. He made good use of it and did become rich. He sent his son to a real medical school.

Hamilton Hargrove II, though starting off with comfortable finances and the legitimacy of a genuine medical degree, had inherited his father’s appetite for patronizing the mighty and turning a fast buck, as well as the knack for spotting where it might be turned. He obtained some psychiatric training because he astutely recognized that the services of an accommodating psychiatrist would be gratefully and generously recompensed by people who wanted to commit or divorce an unwanted spouse or have an uncooperative rich relative declared incompetent. He also commanded large fees to listen to bored socialites complain about their sex lives. (HH III insists, even when lubricated with hundred proof truth serum, there’s no hard evidence, despite the rumors, that HH II participated in their sex lives.) He cooperated with the right people at the right times, and their gratitude eventually won him the office of Texas’ Director of Mental Health. He didn’t actually want the job itself and expected to do very little of the work himself, but he did want control of the state’s mental health budget and had elaborate plans to divert much of the money into his own pockets through nursing homes and private hospitals which he controlled through dummy corporations. Either he was constantly afraid of getting caught, or to grant the more charitable though less likely alternative, he was troubled by the dirty business he was in. Hamilton Hargrove II was not a happy man. He drank heavily and regularly, and, when his liver gave out, his dream of defrauding the state of Texas was largely unfulfilled.

Hamilton Hargrove III is said (by some who don’t know him very well) to have been embarrassed by this heritage. Whether that is true or not (I doubt embarrassment is to be found in Hargrove’s emotional palette.), he did follow his father’s psychiatric footprints for a while. But HH III was determined to emancipate himself from the intimacies of social and political life in Texas and to make his mark in a more cosmopolitan arena. He wanted cutting edge. He wanted exotic. He wanted big stage. He went to work for the CIA.

While there, he published a number of articles on political terrorism and weaponized hallucinogenic drugs. It was generally agreed his publications showed evidence of some brilliance, and he developed a reputation for imaginative ideas. What else he wrote that’s still classified is anyone’s guess.

Archie, who is not shy about saying what he thinks, and who has his own history with the CIA, has opined in print that Hargrove’s efforts were misguided, that he had produced nothing more than “How to…” manuals for would-be terrorists and other maniacs.

But when UCLA was looking for a new Associate Director for the psychiatry department, Archie was not consulted. (He wouldn’t even arrive for several months.) Hargrove’s notoriety had earned enough professional attention for him to be recruited. UCLA wanted someone who was bright and energetic with good enough credentials to enhance the department but not so much of a professional heavyweight that he’d compete with the aged but prestigious Director, Morton Abrams.

HH II may not have been able to conquer Texas, but HH III did conquer Los Angeles. In his relatively brief time at UCLA, he’d become the darling of local news media, “enlightened” politicians and the Hollywood celebrity set. This (some said “dubious”) distinction he achieved not by making any significant contributions to mental health, psychiatric practice or psychiatric knowledge but rather by his excellence as a public speaker and quotable news source. Hargrove’s genius lay in authoritatively applying the scientific findings of others to situations where intense public interest or controversy guaranteed him notice.

He was capable of more. He was capable of understanding limitations in knowledge, the uncertainties of predicting how people would act under whatever hypothetical circumstances interested his audience, the vagaries of extrapolating human intention from human behavior, the complexity of events. He was capable of nuance. He was also capable of understanding what the media consuming public wanted to hear, simplicity, certainty, authority.

Hargrove marketed himself as an authority on brainwashing, violence, religion, contemporary morality, strains on the social fabric and the emotional impact of being a public figure. The last was an especially fruitful subject in that whenever some celebrity had a problem (which happens with titillating regularity in Los Angeles), Hargrove’s opinion was sought. Pretty soon, because celebrity malfunction and Hargrove were so often associated in news media, celebrities began to turn to him to get help with their problems (in and out of jail) and he really did become something of an expert. And on that and other subjects, he eventually had spoken out so often as an expert that he was perceived to be an expert whether or not he had anything worthwhile to say. His impresario’s instincts enabled him to exploit the latent psychiatric angles in a host of newsworthy situations.

To Archie, Hargrove’s “Hollywood credentials” were at best unimpressive and at worst reprehensible. Hargrove’s shoot-from-the-hip technique was the antithesis of Archie’s approach to scientific communication and intellectual progress. “That man’s evolution from his huckster progenitors has not noticeably advanced,” Archie grumbled in disgust.

I, on the other hand, was willing to accept Hargrove as a gifted Till Eulenspiegel and enjoy a vicarious satisfaction from his merry pranks. Hargrove was also popular with the other residents, and my close association with him accorded me elevated status which I did nothing to discourage.

***

So, that Thursday afternoon at four, I presented myself, as appointed, at Hargrove’s office, ready for confession, enlightenment, succor and sour mash. The door to Hargrove’s inner office was open, the approach to it guarded as always by the evil and ever vigilant eye of his secretary, the Cerberus-like, Betty. Corporeally, Betty (who, for the record, actually differs from Cerberus in having only one head) is a replicant of the same paradigm old hag from which Agnes derives. Either one could haunt a house. But the likeness is strictly visual. Agnes’ forte, her best and worst and predominant quality is her inexhaustible concern for the woebegone. Betty, on the other hand, loses no opportunity to make someone who is feeling bad, feel worse. Betty’s forte is malice.

Over my ten months of weekly preceptorial sessions with Hargrove, I’d come to realize her meanness toward me was not a consequence of anything I’d done wrong other than entering her sphere of influence. Meanness, as far as Betty was concerned, was an equal opportunity scourge. Still, while I saw no value to be had in exploring her peculiarities with my developing tools of psychiatric consideration, I’d learned failure to pay homage to her sentinel presence would lead to trouble, and on that Thursday afternoon I did not need her help to feel troubled.

Once, in a semi-inebriated moment of daring, I asked Hargrove whether he was aware of how nasty Betty was to everyone else and why he put up with it. He smiled and said, “Somp’n’ needs doin’, she’s on it like a wolf after stray sheep.”

I smiled and made supplicatory eye contact with Betty. She responded with a chilly frown, a return of her gaze to the computer monitor and a dismissive wave with the back of her left hand toward Hargrove’s open inner sanctum.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Bender. How’ve ya been?” Hargrove greeted me with an anti-Betty beam of warmth.

‘OK, except I’ve lost a patient,” I answered.

“Suicide?” He looked perturbed.

“Ah, no. At least, I don’t think so. He’s just disappeared.”

“Well, then, there’s still hope. Tell me the story. But first things first. You drinkin’?”

“Sure thing.”

He went about conjoining glasses, ice and meaningful doses of bourbon for the two of us as, in an off the cuff manner, he related the following tale.

“I lost a patient once, back when I was a resident. Young fella. Been in the hospital couple a weeks. Seemed obsessed with a fear the govn’mint was out to git ‘im. Then one day the FBI showed up and got ‘im. Turned out he’d been runnin’ guns into Mexico and coke back into Texas and was hidin’ out in the hospital.” He handed me my glass. “What’s your story?”

“I’m pretty sure Frank Carlossi’s not in trouble with the FBI,” I said before downing a meaningful slug of whisky and telling Hargrove the rest of the story.

“You got all that down in his chart?” he asked when I’d finished, and I feared Hargrove might be about to criticize me for committing my harebrained therapeutic intervention to paper.

“Uh…, yeah, all the facts, including my convoluted rationale and Carlossi’s response.”

“Excellent!” Hargrove said. “Then, I don’t think we have anything to worry about. It’s clear you tried to do the right thing, and you had a logical foundation for what you did, and if it didn’t turn out the way you wanted…, well, that’s life. Things don’t always turn out the way we want ‘em to. A jury wouldn’t hold that against you. If there’s ever a lawsuit, and you’re in the witness chair, you can tell ‘em what you tried to do and why you tried to do it. It’ll make sense and you’ll be backed up by your documentation. You’re in the clear, the hospital’s in the clear. Good Work.”

“I’m still worried Frank Carlossi’s not in the clear,” I said disappointed I was getting Hospital Administration 101 not clinical advice.

“I think what you heard from Dr. Cohen’s prob’ly on the mark. Sounds like Professor Carlossi knows how to get himself back to the hospital when he needs it. He’ll likely turn up jes’ fine.”

***

Friday afternoon, still no Carlossi. Archie called and invited me to join him for lunch at his place Saturday. I happily accepted, hoping to glean some wisdom about Carlossi figuring Archie would surely be good for something wiser and more useful than “Tut, tut,” and risk management.

Archie rented a funky house in the Malibu hills. The owner had built the house himself, mostly (maybe totally) illegally. Illegally, because getting a building permit through the California Coastal Commission (whose mission seems to be protection of the coastal environs from all but the very rich) is nigh onto impossible. Over many years, this owner/builder had fashioned a free-form concrete sculpture dug into a south-facing hillside replete with curves, nooks, embedded objets d′art, cozy cave-like living spaces and terraced gardens of flowers and herbs. The multi-level patio looked out on Solstice Canyon Park below and the Pacific Ocean below that.

***

An early Saturday morning coastal fog had largely given way to hazy late morning sunshine by the time I turned right off Sunset Boulevard onto Pacific Coast Highway. My primeval TR3 — I call her Eleanor (only my analyst, if I still had one, might know why) — wide open to the benign elements nature offered that morning, rumbled contentedly past admiring surfers along the coast until we reached the turnoff for Corral Canyon Road and its meandering tributaries which would conduct me up the Malibu hills to Archie’s place.

When I pulled up to Archie’s gate, he was waving goodbye to the driver of a white van labeled Acme Security. Archie doubtless had, from his patio, watched my labored progress up the sinuous approach to his aerie and may have anxiously doubted Eleanor’s will to make it. “No steam from the hood…, yet,” he commented. “That’s a good omen.”

“She’s tougher than she looks,” I replied with a smile, fondly stroking her British Racing Green fender. “What’s with the security company?”

“Oh, it’s just the regular monthly sweep for bugs.” (Acme Security, I suspected, was not in the termite business.) “He’s just finished. It’s clean. How are you?” he asked, changing the subject.

“Worried,” I replied honestly.

“It’ll get you back down the hill,” he joked, glancing at the car then raising his eyes and eyebrows as though it would be a good thing if heaven heard a prayer.

“It’s one of my patients,” I said. “He’s missed his follow-up appointment, and I haven’t been able to contact him. I tried a sort of off menu therapeutic intervention with him.”

“Well, good for you.”

“Yeah, but if it backfired, maybe I’ve made him worse.”

“Come on up, and let’s get the grub together. Then we can sort through your dilemma. Hypoglycemia won’t help solve it.”

I followed Archie up the contorted stairway from the parking area to his patio where the grub lay, salmon undergoing pungent immolation on the patio barbecue, salad and bottles of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale chilling in a bucket of ice on the patio table. Archie rescued the salmon from the grill and brought it to the table.

“Now, what’s the story with your worrisome patient?” he asked, doling out food while I admired the droplets on the sweating bottle approaching my lips.

Interspersed with eating and drinking, I retold Carlossi’s story.

“I figured, if anything was going to make a real improvement in his life, he needed something to interrupt his cycle. I also figured getting him to stop feeling responsible for human wellbeing on the big stage was probably a non-starter. So, I had, what seemed, at the time, an inspiration, to redirect him toward putting his energy and good intentions into a sort of salvation project he could do sober so to speak, in a state of good mental health without mania.”

Chew. Swallow. Drink.

“He’s a professor of computer science at UCLA,” I noticed an infinitesimal convergence and elevation of Archie’s eyebrows as I said this, “and a wiz at invention, so I thought maybe he could develop some kind of cybernetic substitute for MANUBOTO on the internet. Something with an actual capacity to have an effect on the real world. I hoped it would be a challenge that would keep him busy and stable, to break the cycle. Even if whatever he came up with didn’t actually work, if the project kept him engaged and taking his lithium, he’d have a shot at protracted stability. That’s what I was after. But I’m worried that by monkeying with the interface between his beneficent instincts and psychotic plans to satisfy them, I’ve pushed him over the edge again. He abruptly left the hospital, and no one’s seen him since.”

“Mm. And his name is?” Archie asked.

“Frank Carlossi,” I answered. Archie pursed his lips and nodded as though he knew that was the correct answer.

“I’ve seen him.”

“When? How?”

“He called me late Monday afternoon. He said he wanted to pick my brains about self-organizing systems for a project he was starting. He’d learned I’d been working in that area lately and wanted to get some of my thoughts, so we met at my office Tuesday morning. He didn’t say anything about you or MANUBOTO, if that’s any comfort.”

“His mental status?” I asked.

“He was hypomanic but not worse, focused, organized, intense, brimming with energy, kinetic but not chaotic. When he came in, I offered him a seat. He sat down for a moment. Then, he popped up, pacing around as we talked. Has a peculiar way of flipping his fingers around, not like a tic or a tremor but sort of like he was keeping time to some music, kinda like a kid grooving to whatever’s coming through his ear buds.”

“That’s Carlossi,” I assured him.

“Does his interest in self-organizing systems have something to do with what you discussed with him?” Archie asked.

“Yeah. That was the core of my inspiration. He believes what’s essential to making MANUBOTO work is a sort of divine moral authority that MANUBOTO has hidden in its guts, the necessary ingredient to enforce or at least inspire obedience to a universal moral system. I think he’s convinced it’s the understanding of how to unlock that power that’s always just beyond his grasp — not that the rest makes any sense either. He told me putting something on the internet or anywhere else without that wouldn’t accomplish anything. He’s a fervent believer in religious authority, the necessity to involve God or some other commanding authority as an irresistible moral force to compel good behavior.”

“He was rejecting what I’d suggested because there was no authoritarian enforcer in the package. Then I remembered what you’ve said to me about leaderless self-organizing systems, and I thought maybe what holds them together could work for Carlossi.”

“Mm? How so?” Archie queried.

“I pointed out to him that in self-organizing systems, there doesn’t have to be an authority in charge. So, maybe he could figure a way to work that into the model I was proposing he work on, like if everyone involved was working together on the same issues. Like Talmudic study, collectively hashing out tough questions of morality and meaning.”

“But as soon as I said that to him, it seemed he’d heard enough, and he was gone. It was really precipitous. I had the feeling I’d encroached on his theological turf, and he was either pissed or scared and wanted to escape from me as fast as he could. He did ask for a discharge prescription though…. So, he didn’t seem too out of whack to you?” I asked, hoping for reassurance.

“Nah, I wouldn’t say he did,” Archie replied, subtly squinting his left eye and shaking his head. “He was pretty rational, though after we’d talked about self-organizing systems for a while — and, by the way, I had the impression I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. I had the sense he’d done his homework. — he looked at me for several seconds like he was sizing me up, even his hands briefly stopped moving, and then he asked if, as a psychiatrist, and thus an expert in human nature, it was my opinion that people were inherently good.”

“It’s a good thing salmon is OK cold.” Archie attended to his beer then continued. “I gave him my lecture on the neurobiology of morality.”

***

The Professor Archibald Lebovics “Neurobiology of Morality Lecture”, condensed version:

Evolution has produced in human beings a highly efficient tool, consciousness, for symbolically representing heaps of bits of info as abstract wholes. “Good” and “evil” are constructs of that sort. Evolution has also bred into our brain function an adaptive balance between self-interest and social responsibility.

We have in our brains what are called “mirror neurons”. They clue us in to the fact that other people are thinking and feeling (solipsist disciples of Bishop Berkeley might demur) and give us a pretty good shot at figuring out what other people are thinking and feeling. We are exquisitely sensitive to what others are thinking and feeling, and we are highly reactive to such perceptions. Unless you’re autistic, it’s hard wired.

We get a neurobiological kick out of being helpful to those with whom we are empathic, mainly genetically related or other close associates. We also get a huge kick out of thwarting adversaries and doing what serves our own interests: selfishness. It’s also hard wired. We have a compelling neurobiological interest in experiencing pleasurable kicks of both kinds and averting kicks which leave us with a sore ass. Our success as a species results from a fusion of communal action on the one hand and on the other self-serving aggression which promotes innovation. The best balance between compassion and competition, to put it another way.

Optimizing the interplay between these two capacities on a social level is where morality comes from. If we didn’t promote empathic cooperative communal behavior, we’d have ended up as leopard chow back in Africa. If we didn’t promote what rewards self-interest, we’d still be hunter-gatherers and probably not too good at it.

“Good” and “evil” are cultural designations for what our evolved brains inherently induce us to promote or reject.

***

“‘So, are human beings inherently good?’ I said to him,” Archie continued. ‘Human beings are inherently what their brains have endowed them to be. To the extent that human beings have more or less normal brain function, they are inherently good, as defined by cultural expectations created by beings using the same sort of brains crafted by the same evolutionary influences. Normally functioning brains reinforce a reasonable balance between empathy and self-interest.’”

Archie’s beer got more attention, perhaps in the service of self-interest, and he continued, “Then he asked me if I was implying ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ was just a matter of neurobiological correlates. And I said I guessed that was as good a formulation of the proper neurobiological balance between empathy and self-interest as any. Though, in truth, I think it’s lacking as an universal guide to proper behavior. It seems to me, it doesn’t cover what to do if the ‘others’ want to do unto you with a big stick.”

Archie paused a moment then continued, “Carlossi looked like he’d heard enough, said ‘Thanks for your time.’, and he was out the door.”

“I guess he didn’t take kindly to your reducing the Golden Rule to the byplay of neurotransmitters.”

“Might be,” Archie replied. “I’d have been more circumspect, had I known he was a patient of yours, and I had a clinical responsibility to be therapeutic.”

“Maybe he was able to chalk it up to your just being a miserable curmudgeon,” I said with a smile.

“I’ll drink to that,” Archie announced, raising his bottle for a clink.

“And if you ask me,” Archie opined, “I’d say it’s likely that’s exactly how he chalked it up. I’d say there’s enough grandiosity in Carlossi’s chalk bag to prevent the likes of me from causing a devastating blow to his belief system…. I know there is in mine,” he added with his own smile. “I’d also lay odds that your therapeutic gambit is working, and he’s staying on his lithium as you prescribed so he can do his work. Maybe he didn’t keep his appointment because he wants to have something to show you when he sees you again. What was his last level?”

“He was at point six. That’s too low for him. He needs to be around one, so the dose I wrote, which was what he was last getting in the hospital, is probably still too small, but I won’t know until I can get another level and see where he’s at now. Maybe it’s been moving up. It is encouraging he came to see you for a sensible purpose, and he seems to be operating under pretty good control. Maybe he will have something to show me and call for an appointment before it’s too late.”

I could be hopeful if not confident. Even if he did have something to show me, what would it be?

***

Descending from Archie’s, Eleanor more cheerfully accepted gravitational influence than she had on the way up, and, thoroughly relieved of worry about overheating and partially relieved of worry about Carlossi (He had kept his appointment with Archie after all.), I was free to indulge my curiosity about why Archie needed to have his nest swept for bugs.

Was this a holdover from his CIA days? Was he working for them again or still? If he’d wanted to explain it, he would have. Ergo, he didn’t want to explain it. Why?

***

Monday. Still no word from Carlossi.

After lunch, Archie called. “I’ve been wondering about that fella Carlossi. How…, why he ended up on my doorstep, so to speak? Did you send him to me?”

“He came back?”

“No, no. The time we talked about on Saturday.”

“No. I didn’t mention you at all. Just the self-organizing systems stuff. He probably just googled it, and your name came up in the hits.”

“Mm. Maybe. Odd coincidence though. Will you ask him when you see him?”

“Sure, if I see him.”

“Oh, you’ll see him.”

***

I spent the rest of the afternoon distracting myself with mundane tasks, charting, grinding my way through journal articles, fortifying my caffeine level. By evening, I couldn’t concentrate on anything well enough to distract myself from Carlossi and what I might have done to him. So, that evening, as I had many times previously when I was out of sorts and sought to get my sorts realigned, I set off for Ernie’s Bar and Grill, a local Westwood establishment, my customary venue for emotional balancing and alignment.

Realignment at Ernie’s did not require alcohol consumption, though beer and other nutritional substances were often involved, and this evening I did have plans to meet the other two 2-South residents there for what passed for dinner at Ernie’s. There were, however, other considerations.

***

Psychiatry residency had turned out to be more inspiring than medical school. I seemed fairly good at it. I found satisfaction in helping people solve their life problems. But it was a job not a passion. I did my chores. I progressed (not yet cognizant of TOAD’s dismissive take on progress) toward being a grownup, accumulating more responsibility, more status, more income. I kept telling myself it was still early in the game, I had lots of time to uncork some aspect of the business with the potential to ignite passion. Then, in rebuttal, an interior voice would remonstrate, “Who do you think you’re kidding?”

Passion might be had by me, but I had come to believe it came only in tandem with risk, maybe something along the lines of the starving artist gambit or Carlossi’s manic devotion to saving the world imperiling his mental state and whatever else depended on his mental state in the process. If I wasn’t up for the gamble, this really was what life was all about. As a psychiatrist, I could predictably achieve competence, security, respect and ennui.

At Ernie’s I escaped ennui.

***

Ernie’s Bar and Grill is tended by a short, round, fiftyish man, Ernie Gagliardi, who has a mostly bald scalp and a ready laugh. Ernie looks somewhat like Archie except Ernie has a less hair, smiles more and dresses better. I think it’s remarkable there really is an Ernie at Ernie’s…. And, there’s a piano.

Following that evening with Archie and Perahia by the Hudson River seven years earlier, when I gave up my notion of pursuing a musical career, I didn’t give up playing piano. I just gave up working at it. In college and med school, there always seemed to be opportunities to play which didn’t demand Lincoln Center virtuosity. I could sight read pretty well, and I still had my ear. I was often recruited to accompany singers and campus theatrical groups, to anchor quasi jazz groups formed to play at parties and weddings and such like. Music worked as an antidote to the sometimes nerve wracking, sometimes mind numbing stresses of high level competitive erudition.

After I got to UCLA, playing piano continued to be the opiate I took to connect me with some inner source of primal bliss. Ernie’s became my opium den. I think this is an apt metaphor, but if any of you think it’s in bad taste, I apologize. Ernie is, in fact, an opium addict.

Ernie had spent twenty years addicted to heroin while playing saxophone with many of the finest jazz bands. He even made an album under his own name titled, “The Saxy Sound of Ernie Gagliardi”. The cover pictured a seductive woman wearing a slinky evening gown emerging cobra-like from the bell of a tenor saxophone being played by Ernie. As a musician, Ernie was a great success. The rest of his life was pretty much a disaster. Whatever satisfaction he got from music was wiped out by his commitment to a cycle of impending withdrawal and despair followed by all too brief periods of normalcy after a fix enabled him to function and feel content for a few hours until the bottom started to fall out again. His attempts to clean up were all abortive until he got into a methadone maintenance program at a VA hospital which did the trick. Now, he’s addicted to methadone. He likely will be as long as he lives. That’s OK with Ernie. He’s got stability for the first time in his adult life.

He got into the bar business because of his wife, Bobbi Binko. She keeps that name, (even though she hates it) instead of going by Bobbi Gagliardi because she’s a liberated woman and a television personality, the roving reporter for Channel Seven News. She has her own nightly eponymous feature segment, Binko’s Beat. If she changed her name, who would know who she was?

Being known as “Binko” made her feel like she was a trained circus dog, and, early on, she had anguished about how that moniker would make it difficult for her to be accepted as a serious newswoman. But success as a TV regular entrenched her “Binko” identity, and she had to learn to live with it. Ernie, an accommodating sort, offered to change his name to Binko, but Bobbi wouldn’t hear of it. The thought of being married to somebody named Binko made her Ill.

Bobbi also looks somewhat like Archie except she has a lot more hair, and she dresses a lot better. Her plump corpus capped by a luxuriant auburn hairdo like the late afternoon sun viewed through a filter of smog setting over the Pacific Ocean exudes a wholesome earth-mother magnetism I find very appealing. (So, I presume, do the viewers of Channel Seven News.)

Bobbi and Ernie met when he was just getting started as a patient in the West Los Angeles VA methadone program. Bobbi was working on a story about the rehabilitation of heroin addicts. She had seen Ernie at Disneyland fourteen years earlier when she was eighteen. At that time, he was playing with a mediocre band called Turquoise, led, and named, by a mediocre drummer named Blue Green. The Blue Green gig was pretty much the nadir of Ernie’s career, but Bobbi was impressed none-the-less, and she remembered him. She’d been at Disneyland for her high school’s graduation party and was dancing close to her boyfriend while the band played Blue Moon. (The words “Blue” and “Green” were overrepresented in the titles of the tunes in Blue Green’s book.) When Ernie played a saccharine saxophone solo she almost had an orgasm.

Ernie almost threw up, but Bobbi wasn’t aware of that. Ernie did feel Blue’s style of music was nauseating, but he played as he was told, and that wasn’t why he almost threw up. It was a paying job, and he needed the money for heroin which was why he almost threw up. He was starting to go into withdrawal and was struggling with abdominal cramps and nausea.

Bobbi’s story made a big deal about the addicts’ need for satisfying jobs when they got out of the hospital, and philanthropic viewers, maybe looking for desperate and thus presumably manageable employees, called in to offer help. One of the callers owned a building in Westwood with a recently vacated bar on the ground floor. He offered to help one of the addicts get started in business in this bar. This seemed to be a great idea since Bobbi had said in her story heroin addicts don’t become alcoholics. That’s not true, but it’s one of those comforting myths which makes life appear simple and sympathetic for which Bobbi has a fine ear.

Her prowess as a TV news personality derives in part from her talent for identifying and packaging “truths” her viewers want to believe, whether they are true or not. I believe Bobbi sincerely believes in her packages, and her sincerity sells. People just want to be on her wavelength.

Ernie and his benefactor connected to each other’s wavelength right away. Ernie took a crash course in bartending, and, armed with his Doctorate in Mixology and a liquor license, obtained quickly because his new landlord had political connections, he opened Ernie’s.

Ernie and Bobbi married soon after and lived in an apartment above the bar. They were happy. I’ve been told the landlord often visited the bar to sip a glass of bourbon and talk with Ernie for an hour or so about his problems with his family. Ernie said he looked forward to these visits. He enjoyed the conversation and said it made him feel like he was learning to be a real bartender. Bobbi said having to listen to people’s troubles all the time was like being an emotional septic tank. Still, it made Ernie feel useful, and that was reward enough, he said.

When Ernie gave up being a heroin addict, he also gave up being a musician, at least professionally. He says, in the old days, after he’d perform, he’d be so emotionally sapped that afterward, the most trivial problems seemed overwhelming. Heroin gave him courage. He was firmly convinced that for him, life as a professional musician meant life as a heroin addict. He wasn’t going to take that risk.

For the first time in his life, Ernie kept regular hours, had a regular home in one place and even some regular friends. Because of the methadone, his bowel movements were not regular (see: Career of HH I), but Ernie was content with having constipation be his most formidable problem.

Ernie’s Bar and Grill was a physical expression of the emotional stability in Ernie’s life. Informal, relaxed, warm, polished wood, brass fittings. A teak bar on the right, secluded booths on the left, round tables in between, a free standing fireplace with a gas fire in the middle and, in the rear…, a piano.

I’d been a regular customer at Ernie’s for a few months before I touched his piano. Many times I sat there sharing a pitcher of beer with other residents, engaging in disputes about the mysteries of Reich, Rolfe, Rat Man and whether schizophrenia should be considered a medical disorder or a social disease, privately imagining playing a Mozart sonata and wishing I wasn’t too inhibited to go do it.

One night, early in the fall of my first year of residency, a particularly loud group of UCLA theater students descended on the rear of the room. They were making plans to do a Noel Coward revue and lamenting their failure to find a pianist.

I volunteered. By the time Ernie closed up for the night, we’d spliced together enough songs and dialogue to make a show, and I’d become Ernie’s resident piano player.

Ernie asked if I played jazz. “Not in your league,” I answered. I was in awe of his musical credentials and was afraid of making a fool of myself much as I’d felt afraid playing chamber music with friends of my mother when was a kid. I was reasonably confident about playing from written or memorized music. But improvising? And even more so after I heard Ernie play. His piano playing was pretty rough, but on sax or flute, he was amazing. The instrument was an extension of his mind much the same as with Murray Perahia. What he thought and felt, he played. Yet, his playing was controlled and orderly, often near the limit of the musical structure but within it, unless he chose to expand the structure.

Ernie’s virtuosity was intimidating, but he offered to teach me and was patient and encouraging. His enjoyment of our sessions together reassured me. Eventually, I was able to do what he kept telling me to do, hear the underlying theme and chord structure in one part of my brain while I “heard” an improvisation, a step ahead of what I was playing, with another. This process required a trance-like combination of relaxation and concentration after which, I often couldn’t remember what I had played. Ernie kept telling me, “Don’t worry, just play.”

His exhortations rang a distantly familiar bell. He was saying the same thing I’d heard from Lowell Keynes years earlier. I suspect it’s a lesson I’ll have to relearn many times in my life. When Ernie finally allowed me to record our playing, I was surprised to find it sounded pretty good.

After I’d gotten the hang of improvisation to Ernie’s satisfaction, he started encouraging me to write down compositions. It didn’t take much encouragement. Ending up with a tangible product, a page of notes, when I finished working was an agreeable reward after the ephemeral satisfactions of performing music or, for that matter, performing psychotherapy.

I began writing variations on themes from Classical to Country to Coltrane. Then started writing my own themes. I composed duets to play with Ernie and romantic songs for girlfriends.

Ernie and Bobbi became my surrogate parents. I won’t even try to deny I encouraged it. Ernie’s Bar and Grill became a regular hangout for me, sheltering, nurturing. And besides nourishment for my soul and alcohol, Ernie’s served outstanding flame grilled hamburgers which was why, that evening, I was meeting the two other 2-South first year residents, Leo Winston and Bernie Berkowitz.

***

“Hey, Jerry,” Ernie hailed as I entered. “There’s someone I want you to meet. You know, our landlord? Well, he’s staying with us for a little while he works out some family problems. He is a fine old gentleman. You’ll like him. He’s got a friend with him. I’m sure you’ll find him interesting too. When he comes downstairs, I’ll introduce you.”

“OK, fine,” I said. So, Ernie’s mysterious benefactor was real? I’d begun to suspect he was just Bobbi’s clever invention, designed to provide an intriguing mythological back story for Ernie’s Bar and Grill. Bobbi knows how to embellish a narrative.

“Hi, fellas,” Ernie said in the direction of Winston and Berkowitz, somewhere astern of my right ear. “The usual?” (A pitcher of beer and four hamburgers, two would be for Berkowitz.)

Leo Winston, Bernie Berkowitz and I had established a pattern of studying together, and by virtue of colluding to survive trials and personal upheavals, the common lot of neophyte psychiatrists, as well as coping with the vagaries of Cannonball’s availability, we’d formed a bond.

Tall, pudgy and clumsy, Berkowitz oscillates a little from side to side like a penguin when he walks fast. He favors jeans and sandals, and his personality is as relaxed as his attire. He’s unflappably placid. A peculiar off-center grin gives him a deceptively dopy appearance when he smiles, but he’s got the best mind of anyone I know except Archie, and he isn’t saddled with Archie’s abrasive personality. Bernie planned to branch off into child psychiatry. He’s at his best and happiest sitting on the floor playing puppets with little kids, figuring out what’s going on in their heads and calculating how to correct what’s not going right.

Winston is happiest when he’s got an opportunity to boast about his plans for becoming rich. He has an MBA, attained simultaneously with his MD degree, and he expects to get his money’s worth out of it. He will. That’s what he’s best at. He’s at his next happiest, though not necessarily next best, when he’s advising other people how to get rich with some scheme for which he needs partners. He often inflicts his advice on Berkowitz and me. Winston is trim, ostentatiously fashionable and good entertainment if not taken too seriously. He has no confusion about his ambition to make a lot of money quickly and become a full-time playboy. Psychiatry appealed to him as a medical specialty because he saw in the Alzheimer’s disease business a growth industry for the subsequent twenty, thirty years. He had plans to cash in. He was convinced deficient avarice on the part of Berkowitz and myself was a mental disorder he had to treat.

As we sat down, Winston initiated therapy. “You’ve probably been wondering why I asked you two to meet with me tonight.”

“Not me. I’m here for the hamburgers,” Berkowitz declared.

“I’m about to let you in on a fantastic deal,” he assured us. But I have to ask you to keep quiet about it. I don’t want every psych resident in the city running to take advantage of this.”

“If I don’t promise to keep quiet, does that mean I don’t have to hear about it?” I asked.

“For you, I’ll make an exception,” Winston said.

“Mm. Hardball. OK, go ahead,” I said, conceding with a zipping motion across my lips.

“First…, my card,” Winston said, deftly extracting two elegantly printed business cards from an equally elegant gold case. He performed this movement with the fluidity and lethal speed of a Hollywood gunfighter. I would have fumbled at least a little. Berkowitz would have probably dropped the cards all over the floor. Passing out business cards was clearly something Leo Winston intended to do well.

“What’s with the cardboard?” Berkowitz said. “Isn’t that all done with smartphones these days?”

“I’ll text one to you as well. OK?” Winston groused, then, after a beat, continued. “As you can plainly see,” referencing the “Winston Consulting, LLC” corporate name on the card. “I am preparing for the business of salving the psyches of the distressed masses, for a respectable fee, of course, which will limit my enterprise to those masses who are either well-heeled or at least well-insured. So, until the path to my door has become thoroughly beaten, I have other enterprises in the works. One of which concerns you gentleman. This is the chance of a lifetime, an offer you can’t refuse.”

“We refuse,” I said with no hesitation. “I’m sure I can speak for you too, Bernie, right?”

Berkowitz nodded. “What’s taking so long with our hamburgers?”

“You haven’t even heard what it’s about yet,” Winston complained, sounding hurt.

“Leo, most of your get-rich-quick schemes are tainted with illegality or, at best, impropriety. I expect to have a license in a month, and I don’t want to lose it ,” I said.

“Oh, a serpent’s tooth should be so sharp,” Winston whined. “After all I’ve tried to do for you guys! You too could own a yacht and a condo in the Marina instead of throwing away your pitiful salary on apartment rent. You could be driving a Ferrari like me instead of that decrepit old MG of yours.”

“The main place you drive your Ferrari is the repair shop, and then the damn thing is out of tune five minutes after you pick it up. I like my apartment where it is. I can ride my bike or walk to NPI so I don’t have to drive much, and, besides, I like my car. It’s simple. It’s trouble free. It’s fun. It’s cheap. And it’s a Triumph not an MG.” With variations, Winston and I had played this scene before, but we paid each other the courtesy of pretending each time was the first.

He continued, building up steam. He knew his part too. “You must know you’re kidding yourself. Bernie, pay attention.” Berkowitz was gesticulating to Ernie, pantomiming his imminent death from starvation. “In an inflationary economy, if you don’t keep hustling to keep ahead of the flow, you fall behind.”

“Not much inflation these days,” I pointed out.

“It’ll be back,” he predicted ominously. “Get some capital together. Invest it. Get it working for you. Get other people working for you. You don’t want to be serfs all your lives. Do you? It’s simple economics! You’ll never get rich just being shrinks. I mean it used to be you could make a bundle running an ECT mill, but now, even if you could get around all the legal restrictions and afford the malpractice premiums, the electric bills would kill you.”

“All right,” I conceded, hoping a concession would get this over with, “What’s your new golden opportunity? Is it anything like that deal with the nursing home in Culver City you were promoting? I just read the Attorney General’s office is investigating that place for Medi-Cal fraud.”

“I got out of there in time,” Winston said, sounding defensive. “They’re not looking for me.”

“Yet.” I added.

“Anyhow, this deal is strictly legit,” he assured me. “There’s this community mental health center in Mojave.”

“Mojave! That’s a hundred miles from here,” I said.

“It’s more like seventy-five,” he lied. “Freeway all the way.”

“It’s more like a hundred, with rush hour traffic jams most of the way,” I insisted but added a petulant, “Go on.”

“OK. Relax. Just listen. They need medical coverage at night in order to keep their operating license, and the local docs, who are few, don’t want to do it. They’ll pay five hundred bucks a night. It’s a goldmine. Once were licensed, all we’d have to do is check in there and then take call from home.”

“I thought you already lined up a moonlighting job at Metropolitan State Hospital,” Berkowitz said.

“I have, but that’s just on weekends. I could handle one or two nights a week for Mojave, and if there were three of us splitting the load, it would be a piece of cake. What do you say: All for one and one for all?”

I shook my head, trying to look apologetic. Berkowitz simply produced a wan lopsided smile, got up and headed toward the restroom.

“Alright, I’ll keep my mouth shut,” Winston muttered and lapsed into taciturn silence as I registered Ernie’s hand signal and went to pick up the beer and burgers.

By the time Berkowitz returned, Winston had broken his ephemeral vow of silence and was railing against the exorbitant price charged by the county for his sail boat dock at Marina Del Rey.

I was hard at work satisfying my evolved craving for sodium, saturated fat, and the carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which make flame grilled hamburgers taste so good, when Ernie appeared and announced he’d like to have us meet his landlord and benefactor, that “fine old gentleman” (whose identity some of you have probably guessed already). Two thirds of that description could only have come from someone with Ernie’s capacity for uncritical kindness. The middle third was uncontestable. No one would dispute Chester Garfield was old. And Ernie’s prediction that I’d find the landlord’s friend interesting was on the mark too. Next to Garfield, a laptop computer clutched in his arms, a golden flash drive hanging from a lanyard around his neck, looking like Frodo the Hobbit bearing The Ring, stood Frank Carlossi.

“You’re the landlord?” I sputtered at Garfield.

“Who’d you expect, sonny, the ghost of Christmas past?” he barked.

“You two know each other?” asked Ernie.

“We’ve met,” I answered leaving the specifics of our relationship vague. Garfield could decide if he wanted it kept private.

“He’s my shrink,” he said startlingly loud. So much for doctor-patient confidentiality. “You gonna to offer me a chair?” he asked in my direction. “They’re my chairs anyhow.”

Ernie grabbed two chairs from another table.

“Would you like some beer?” I offered.

“Pach, piss with bubbles. Bourbon and branch-water. OK, Ernie?”

Carlossi made an “I’ll pass.” wave with his hand in the direction of Ernie’s enquiring look.

“Coming right up, Mr. Garfield,” Ernie said.

“Chester Garfield…, Dr.’s Berkowitz, and Winston,” I said, thinking introductions might be proper. I knew they and Carlossi knew each other.

“I saw ‘em last week, hangin’ around the ward,” Garfield growled dismissively. “Figger’d they were your type.”

“I thought you were heading home when you left the hospital last week,” I said to Garfield, my more pressing interest in Carlossi, yielding to Garfield’s seniority and social propriety.

He painted me, for a moment, with his now familiar glare as though his failure to get home had somehow been my fault. Then, his focus drifted out into an indefinite nowhere, his eyes began to tear up, he seemed to be witnessing a sad event taking place in a distant memory, and he began talking, mainly toward the pitcher of beer (maybe he thought tears and piss with bubbles went together), babbling through sniffling sobs with a cracking, croaking voice. Then regaining control and gearing down into his usual rasping bitterly indignant growl.

“I’ve lived in that house for fifty-six years. Built it and the road up to it. By myself, with my nephew, Horace. Nobody was offering to do the heavy work for us then. Horace was damn near killed when the Cat went over the side when he was cuttin’ the road bed…. Damn fool finally did kill himself climbin’ a mountain…. But he was good with machines. We cut that road and the pad for the house right out of the hill.” He seemed satisfied with the memory.

“Wasn’t anything up there then save coyotes and rattlesnakes, and we went and built the house. It’s my house. Mine! That damn ungrateful daughter of mine and her freeloading husband. None of them ever did an honest day’s work in their lives. And their kid…, he’s a real gangster.” He was gathering momentum.

“My good old dad had to fight off the Indians to keep his home, and he taught me right well. Those ‘paches thought they could scare us off our ranch.… That was near Show Low…, in Arizona…. But Garfields don’t scare easy. We got together every rifle and shotgun we could lay our hands on and set ‘em up pointin’ out all the windows and….“

“Hold on,” I demanded, hoping to get him back on track. “What’s this got to do with your going home last week?”

Garfield suddenly looked very tired. Retrieving his errant mind from the Indian wars, he resumed his narrative. “Frank and I got a cab at the hospital. He’d said he had to find some place to work on a special project and didn’t wanna go home where he’d get interrupted. I told him he was welcome to stay with me. So, we took the cab up to my place. It’s not far, just a couple miles above UCLA up in the Bel Air hills.”

“No one was home when we got there, and I couldn’t find a key to get in so I got a hoe and a shovel and went down the hill in back to work in my orchard, and Frank sat on the deck working with his laptop. The orchard’s where I like to spend my time anyhow. I’ve got thirty-eight fruit trees. I used to have chickens but one night the coyotes got in the coop an’ there wasn’t anything left but feathers and blood stains. I spent a couple hours clearing out the trenches for waterin’ the trees, you know so the water stays where you want it to stay and doesn’t just get wasted runnin’ down the hill. Tangerines were ripe and Frank and I had some of them to eat when we got hungry.”

“Sometime early in the afternoon, I heard a car pull up in front of the house. Figger’d Thelma musta’ come home. Sounded like her car. I was glad because I wanted to talk to her alone to make peace with her. I climbed up the hill an’ was just coming around the front of the house when I heard her through an open window talkin’ to her lawyer on speakerphone. I recognized her lawyer’s voice when I heard it. Thelma was saying, ‘When I called the ward they said he’d been discharged. He’s not here. I’m going over there tomorrow and talk to the doctor in charge and get them to do whatever they do when someone escapes and needs to be brought back. When they pick him up what are we going to do with him?’ And the lawyer said they’d put him in a locked nursing home which would be easier to deal with than UCLA. Then they’d got a psychiatrist to certify he was incompetent and needed to be under a guardianship, and they’d go to court, get her appointed guardian, and she’d have control of him and everything he owns, and he wouldn’t be able to give her any more trouble.”

“Well,” Garfield growled, now steely calm, “it didn’t take a great genius to figure out what ‘him’ they were talkin’ about. So I grabbed ahold of Frank, and we skedaddled down the hillside to Beverly Glen and hitched a ride back into Westwood. Got picked up by a real nice kid, not much older than Thelma’s kid. Didn’t like his taste in music, but he was real helpful. Took us right here. We’ve been holed up here for the last week figgerin’ out what to do.”

“You’re welcome to stay with us as long as you want,” Ernie offered.

“Thanks, Ernie. This’s been a good hideout. But this afternoon, Frank and I got it figger’d out.”

He paused and looked around the table as if to assess whether his tale had won the audience over to his side.

“What did you figure out?” Bernie probed encouragingly.

“Sounds like you need a good lawyer yourself,” advised Winston. “Get a court order. Throw those people out of your house.”

“Mm, I suppose I could,” Garfield mused sadly. “Then what do I do? Thelma’s all the family I’ve got. I can’t throw her out. But she’s dead set on saltin’ me away in a nursing home. I don’t want that either.”

“Look,” I said, “there are other possibilities between those extremes. She did come over to 2-South the day after you left and was pretty upset when I wouldn’t discuss your case with her without your permission. But maybe she’s calmed down by now. Anyway, it was me she was mad at not you. You could call her. You could try getting into family therapy. If you made some adjustments in the way you deal with each other, you might be able to get along OK.” I didn’t believe it, but I wanted to sound a note of professional optimism, pretty much the sine qua non of psychotherapeutic success.

“Wouldn’ work,” Garfield said with grim finality. “I gotta fight her. Thelma only negotiates when she’s beaten. I taught her that. We’re both too old to change now. I gotta fight her. And I wanna get back in my house. Frank’s gonna help me. We got it worked out tonight. We’re goin’ up to the house tomorrow, and Frank’s gonna stay with me for a while. Should’a realized this last week, but I panicked. Frank’ll be my witness, so she can’t pull any funny stuff with nobody lookin’. I figger, when she sees I got her stymied, she’ll come around.”

Carlossi was nodding his assent, and our eyes met. “How are you, Doc?” he asked.

“I’ve been worried about you, Frank,” I replied. “ When you didn’t show up at last week’s appointment, I was afraid you were having trouble. I couldn’t find you. I left messages.”

“Oh…, I’m really sorry,” he said looking genuinely remorseful. “I guess I got distracted. I’ve been really busy. But I’m fine,” he added cheerfully. “I’ve been able to get a lot of work done.”

“The man’s a true genius, a saint,” Garfield proclaimed, his tone daring anyone to dispute that opinion. “I told you as much last week,” he said glaring at me.

“What are you working on, Frank?” I asked, wary of uncritically accepting Garfield’s endorsement. Fearing Carlossi might have spent the last week integrating self-organizing systems into MANUBOTO sold Garfield on its virtue. He didn’t seem any more manic than he had when he left the ward, but that appraisal was too brief for me to rely on.

“The assignment you gave me,” Carlossi replied. “What else would I be doing?” unspoken but implied by the earnest “A” student look he gave me. “Here, I’ll show you. I finished it yesterday,” he added as he moved our plates and the mostly empty beer pitcher to clear space for his laptop. He unclipped the flash drive from its tether. “This,” he proclaimed solemnly, gesturing with the flash drive toward our faces like (as another cinematic simile would have it) Indiana Jones showing off a recently unearthed, human-destiny-altering artifact, “is TOAD.”

“Uh…. Great, Frank,” I said cautiously, anticipating a new, now digital, iteration of MANUBOTO. What the hell was he talking about? Towed? Something dragged along by MANUBOTO? Toed? MANUBOTO with pedal digits? Toad? An amphibian version of MANUBOTO?

Carlossi popped in the golden flash drive, ran his fingers around the keyboard and touchpad with such dazzling speed I couldn’t follow his movements, and up popped, not “MANUBOTO”, but “TOAD”, in block letters filling the screen.

“Here it is,” he said beaming proudly, hitting a few more keys, now filling the screen with rapidly scrolling computer code (at least, it looked like what I thought computer code ought to look like — my experience with that medium being limited, mostly to scenes from science fiction movies).

Uh, oh. Now he’s made MANUBOTO even more obscure, apprehensible only by manic computers. “Uh…. What is it, Frank?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s just the guts. Here’s TOAD for people!”

He hit a few more keys and up popped what looked to be a colorful webpage showing “TOAD” in a banner across the top and then the usual webpage array of text and highlighted links. From what I could see, there were several blank fields, with labels I couldn’t read from where I sat, which looked like places to type in text. This was superimposed on a modified image of The Creation of Adam from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco. In Carlossi’s image, the scene was reversed and God inhabited a computer monitor. Who was creating whom seemed ambiguous, maybe a two-way street.

OK, at least this was a more coherent public face than MANUBOTO, but…?

“This is just a mock-up of the site,” Carlossi explained. “It’s not online yet. But it’s fully functional and ready to go as soon as I get approved by ICANN (I heard, “… get approved if I can.”) for the new TLD I want to use. Normally, this can take years, but I’ve got some connections, so, I expect to go live in a few days. We’ll save the world, Doc. I owe it all to you. Humanity owes it all to you. Doc, you are the true prophet, the Messiah of TOAD! TOAD is the pathway to salvation prescribed by you.”

The others stared at me as though they thought I could tell them what this all meant. I was as confused as they were.

“Frank, will you please explain this?” I asked. “What’s getting approved if you can’? What do you need approval for? Who do you need approval from? What’s TLD? What’s TOAD?”

Now it was Carlossi’s turn to look confused, a few moments blank stare, then a light turned on. “Oh…, ‘I can’. That’s I-C-A-N-N, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It’s the organization that’s responsible for managing the internet’s domain name system. You know… URL’s, internet addresses…, those things. The address is called a domain, and the last part is the ‘Top Level Domain’, the TLD, like dot COM or dot ORG. ICANN’s just down the road in Marina Del Rey.”

I flashed Leo a quizzical look (“Your neighborhood?”). He shrugged a tacit “Beats me!”

“Well…, sorry about all that,” Carlossi continued, seeming embarrassed to have drowned us in jargon, “I wanted TOAD’s place in cyberspace to be special, and I thought a new TLD, “dot GOD”, would do the trick nicely. Of course, other religious sites will be able to use dot GOD too, but TOAD will be the first. Getting ICANN approval for dot GOD is what will take a few days more.” He looked satisfied, resting his case.

“But what is TOAD? What does it mean?” I asked again.

“It’s an acronym,” he said.

Mm…! Just like MANUBOTO.

“Do you know what it stands for?” I asked cautiously.

“Of course!” he replied, “Transcendentally Organizing Algorithmic Divinity.”

Huh?

“And that is…?” I asked.

“What you told me to do. Your prescription. I followed your teaching and built your church,” he declared reverently. “TOAD is your church. TOAD users will act together in a self-organizing moral community with seeking ‘good’ as the organizing principle. They’ll be guided by the Golden Rule to, as it were, become ‘God’, to spell out their own commandments, to perfect them, to make them useful. Through TOAD, users will wield communal moral authority…. At least that’s what will happen once it’s up online.”

Lowell Keynes would be delighted.

“Wow! Jerry,” Winston exclaimed. “I had no idea your bag of talents included venture theology and church design. Are you switching career tracks from psychiatry to ecclesiastical development?”

“Oh, Dr. Bender came up with this idea to keep me stable,” Carlossi said, smiling knowingly at me. “To keep me occupied and on my lithium. But in so doing, he illuminated the pathway to humanity’s salvation, and I’ve followed it.”

“It’s complicated,” I added vaguely.

“And how is this going to save humanity?” Berkowitz asked.

“Simple,” Carlossi said. “TOAD will lead its users to the ‘good’. Users will be inspired by the community of TOAD to follow its teachings because they will have had a part in creating them. They won’t just be told what to do by some detached authority. They’ll all be participants in the creation of the moral reality that works best for them. As long as it’s consistent with the Golden Rule. They’ll be a part of the process. They’ll have skin in the game. And once usership reaches critical mass, the process will be self-sustaining like a nuclear reaction.”

“What is it about TOAD that enables users to create this inspiring moral reality?” Berkowitz prompted sounding intrigued.

“What you saw at first, the stuff scrolling on the screen,” Carlossi continued, “was code for a set of algorithms which tell the system how to match up probes about moral concerns with the contents of the database and optimize the responses to best follow TOAD’s core precept, the Golden Rule. Users post questions or concerns about how to do the right thing, how to live a better life, how to be good, what is ‘good’, any moral issue about which they seek enlightenment. All the sorts of issues you’d discuss with your priest or rabbi or imam or whomever.”

Carlossi paused as Ernie showed up with Garfield’s bourbon and asked if we wanted him to warm-up our burgers which had become cold cuts. We told him variants of yes, thanks, and Berkowitz asked Carlossi to continue.

“So, when users who are seeking guidance submit queries, TOAD generates responses. They may come in various forms, answers, comments, instructions, parables, all depending on the structure and context of the user’s query and stylistic randomization I built in to keep the output from becoming stale. TOAD ranks its possible responses according to congruence with the Golden Rule and conformity with what the user seems to be seeking. The building materials for responses come from TOAD’s database. The architecture and the building codes are in the algorithms.” He seemed very pleased with the metaphor.

“I’ve seeded the mine, the database, with texts of the writings of moral philosophers and theologians as well as the standard religious texts, the Bible, Old and New Testaments, the Koran etc. Initially responses will come from this data, but users will be encouraged to supply their own responses to queries from other users or to edit the responses generated by TOAD.”

“Eventually the database and TOAD’s functionality will be remade by user contributions. Users will vote to rate submissions from other users according to what they appreciate, based on characteristics such as utility, clarity, aptness, elegance. User input will influence how the system operates and which elements of the database will be given the highest priority by the system. The highest rated users will wield the greatest influence on the process.”

“Won’t there be a risk the most influential users will become sort of high priests and hijack the system?” Berkowitz asked.

“Covered!” Carlossi said with bright satisfaction. “Sure, the most appreciated contributors will wield the most influence, and that’ll persist if they continue to produce the most useful and appreciated material. But they won’t be able to rest on their laurels. Oh no! I’ve built in a ‘What have done for me lately?’ value bias to reward up-to-the-moment relevance. If the quality of a user’s input, as judged by the rest of the users, drops off, that user’s influence drops too.”

“TOAD will evolve,” Carlossi said with another grin aimed at me. “Natural selection, driven by user determined moral utility, will promote what’s beneficial and prune…, or at least deemphasize, what’s worth less. Just as you said. TOAD will be alive. TOAD will evolve.”

At this point, Carlossi stopped for air. We were awestruck.

“Wow! You did all this in six days?” Competing with God?

“Oh, no,” Carlossi replied. “I got a lot of work done at night too.” Maybe God did as well.

“How’s this going to generate revenue?” Winston asked, sounding intrigued. His venture capitalist antennae on high-gain.

“It won’t,” Carlossi said firmly. “No commercialism. TOAD must be untainted by Mammon. Unless he becomes a registered user. Heh, heh! Then, of course, he’d be subjected to the same rules as everyone else. I guess I’ll have to apply for a grant before it gets too big. I tried to get a grant for MANUBOTO once,” he added with a noticeable wince. “I got turned down.”

“No need,” Garfield announced. “I’ll cover the tab, Frank. You’re a genius and a saint. You don’t need to worry about money. I’d be honored to foot the bill.”

Thus, TOAD was born.

***

TOADian Haiku:

Theogenesis

TOAD’s gift to humanity

Adam creates God

***

Carlossi proudly informed me I was already a registered TOADie, as he’d decided a user was to be called. He’d assigned me the user ID of “Doc” and a temporary password. I was all set to question and comment and blog as soon as TOAD was up on the web. He told me I could edit my registration and change my ID, but I haven’t. I’m “Doc” to this day.

Carlossi had misjudged his influence on ICANN. TOAD was not up and running in a few days. It actually took a few weeks.

The rest is.… Well….

***

Bobbi thought TOAD was wonderful. She thought Carlossi was wonderful. She knew Garfield was wonderful after all he’d done for Ernie. She convinced her producer that viewers would want to know about TOAD.

Within a few days of TOAD’s debut on the web, the Binko’s Beat crew was at Ernie’s, shooting a piece about TOAD for that night’s news. (Bobbi, with her knack for the telegenic, understood the story would play better if the birth of TOAD occurred in an observable realm with a real address, and the free advertising wouldn’t be bad for Ernie’s either.) Viewers responded with so much interest that the news piece shortly led to a thirty minute special much of which was picked up by the network then viral ensued and soon www.TOAD.God was inundated with hits. Carlossi’s savvy and Garfield’s wallet managed to keep TOAD’s capacity ahead of the torrent, and TOAD refused to drown. TOAD, much to my amazement, soared.

Garfield, acting as TOAD’s sugar daddy, paid for staff and equipment and soon established the whole venture in a vacant space in one of his other buildings in Westwood. He continued to idolize Carlossi and even acted sort of pleasantly toward me on occasion, though I saw no sign he bought into Carlossi’s exaltation of me as the true Messiah of TOAD and thereby according to Carlossi, occupant of a spiritual station superior to the mere sainthood Garfield’s canonization accorded Carlossi.

My therapeutic stratagem for Carlossi seemed to be working as well as I could have hoped. Carlossi dedicated himself to TOAD, refining code, designing hardware, troubleshooting process, building in enhancements (those he thought up as well as those contributed by users) and managing the whole enterprise with aplomb. His work on TOAD did not require from him more than he could accomplish when mentally stable. He recognized mental stability was crucial for doing what needed doing and that pharmacological stability was crucial for mental stability. He did as good a job as a patient as he did as the Wizard of TOAD.

I continued to follow him as an outpatient after my first year and stint on 2-South were over. I had some qualms that as TOAD succeeded and grew, Carlossi would feel a need to reengage his mania to keep up with the workload, and we talked about that at our regular appointments. But when the workload got to the point where his hands (and more importantly, his brain) in a state of health couldn’t keep up, he hired more hands and brains. He bought hardware and whatever else the new hired hands needed to meet the demand. He was the CEO of TOAD and handled it adroitly, including incorporation as a not-for-profit entity. Carlossi continued to insist TOAD should not become a vehicle for making money. Garfield made that possible.

Over the following two years, TOAD flourished, enrolling over two hundred million registered TOADies across the world. Carlossi remained stable and increasingly delighted that, as TOAD spread across the planet, it was approaching the critical mass he calculated would be needed to sustain its beneficial impact on humankind. Garfield cheerfully continued to bankroll the action. (He didn’t act overtly cheerful when I was around, but I’m guessing he must have felt a degree of inner cheer, as loathe as he was to let it show.) He’d started showing signs of increasing bodily fragility and reassured Carlossi that in his will he was going to set up a perpetual trust for TOAD so funding would never be a problem. The truce he’d established with Thelma appeared to be holding, and a few months after their blowup, her party chairperson obligations necessitated her moving to Sacramento.

Garfield was a bit lonely, but content. He had fruit trees.

Carlossi was stably frenetic, but content. He had TOAD.

I was progressing (still undaunted by, as TOAD would have it, the illusory nature of progress). But I was not content. Unlike Carlossi whom I enviously regarded as secure in his knowledge of what was meaningful in his life, I was muddled. My GPS to a life of meaning and satisfaction had lost its signal. My messy adolescent personal destiny disarray had reemerged in spades. As I approached the finish line of my residency, I was increasingly nagged by that old question: What the hell did I want to do with my life anyhow?

***

Chapter III

Insurmountable Opportunities

On a sunny Monday morning late in May, a tall, husky, blond man was momentarily reflected in the glass doors of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. He wore a porcine visage, a tan silk suit, a red tie and a look of confidant superiority. His large body was threatened, but not yet conquered, by overindulgence. His age appeared to transcend forty, probably not fifty.

The image in the glass showed him turning to wink at a short attractive red-haired girl who was not in the reflection. His wink thus looked, in the reflection, more like a facial tic than a social gesture.

“I caught you on the Breakfast Byline show this morning. You were terrific,” the effervescent redhead gushed.

The reflected blond man, who had responded to her facially rather than verbally, was multitasking. His verbal equipment was already occupied with a task, that of conversing with someone else who was in the reflection with him, another man, somewhat younger (under thirty), somewhat shorter (under tall), wearing $24.99 non-iron chinos (also tan), a blue shirt (also non-iron) and no tie. The shorter younger man’s visage affirmed his assiduous concentration.

The attractive redhead was Cinnamon Laudermilk, a psychology intern with whom I was peripherally acquainted. The tall blond man, for whom Cinnamon was on the make and with whom I was closely acquainted, was Hamilton Hargrove III, MD, still the Associate Director of the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science and still a preeminent eligible bachelor in a city acclaimed for its eligible bachelors. The shorter man with whom Hargrove was conversing was I, a less eminent but equally eligible bachelor and, by this time, a third year resident in the department within five weeks of finishing up and becoming something else.

What I might become in five weeks was the focus of Hargrove’s ambulatory oration. He was hustling me to take the job of Ward Chief replacing Cannonball Cohen on 2-South at the NPl. The very 2-South where I’d spent the first year of residency and where I’d spent the first ten and three-quarters months of the third year as a Chief Resident after having been hustled by Hargrove a year earlier. Maybe hustling was just a rite of spring? Maybe Hargrove had wised up to Cannonball’s game?

“Jerry, Ah gotta tie down that position now,” he said as we entered the NPI. ”You want it, gotta lemme know. But do it right quick. Ah been stallin’ your friend, Dr. Cohen, too long as it is. This opportunity’s got a short shelf life.” He then gave me a look of amiable encouragement combined with a conspiratorial deep-throated chuckle intended, I’m sure, to suggest our mutual trust and interdependence.

“You should really have a show of your own. I just love watching you,” babbled Cinnamon who’d caught up with us.

“You’re right,” I said to Hargrove, ignoring her intrusion. “I’ll let you know for sure when we meet on Thursday,” I said.

This time, as I turned to head for the elevators and 2-South, I got Hargrove’s wink and heard “Fair enough.”

Actually, “Fair enough” is not what I heard. That’s a translation. What I heard was “Fay-yer-nuff”.

Then, Cinnamon got, “Well, It’s right nice of you to say so, Cinnamon.”

“Oh, call me Cin, Dr. Hargrove,” she said emitting an imbecilic giggle.

***

“Opportunity”, one of Hargrove’s most cherished subjects, is a fundamental element of his philosophy of life: Keep your eyes open for opportunities, especially moments of chaos and uncertainty. (Create them if necessary.) Be decisive. When everything’s in flux, people will follow the man who appears to know where he’s going.

***

Hargrove says: In the land of the befuddled, the one track mind is king.

TOAD says: In the land of the befuddled, everyone is king.

***

“Opportunity, now-a-days in academia,” he had explained to me in one of our whisky imbued preceptorial sessions, “is to be found in peddlin’ namin’ rights to folks who’ve got more money than they know what to do with. Gettin’ someone to pay to have their ID attached to a hospital, an institute, a school a whatevah. That’s how the system stays afloat. Bring in the folks with bags-a-bucks, you’re a rainmaker. Writechyer own ticket. Learn that, Jerry, if you wanna succeed in this business. Baggin’ Wes Craft was somethin’ special, a lesson to study on.”

Six months earlier, UCLA with much ado had announced a fifty million dollar gift from Craft Enterprises to establish the Craft Religion And Public Policy Institute. I hadn’t previously known about Hargrove’s role in it, but I could see how he would expect gratitude from UCLA for the cash infusion if not its dedicated use.

The Institute was generally referred to with its unhappy acronym by cynics who believed it was simply a ploy to facilitate veiled evangelical propagandizing by Wesley Craft, the Wes whom Hargrove so proudly bagged. Craft, a Texas mega-multi-billionaire, operated a media empire (and various other imperial ventures) which he dedicated to promoting evangelical Christianity, rightwing politics and maybe, so it was rumored, a neo-fascist militia group, The Patriotic Front. Craft’s dough would certainly influence CRAPPI, and there were many at UCLA who wouldn’t be convinced he was about to check his agendas at the door.

“Wes’n mah daddy got to be pals in Texas when daddy was state mental health director, and Wes’n I’ve kept in touch. Wes’s always been a holy rollah type. Got daddy to make sure his radio stations were piped into all the state mental facilities. Easier to do in those days than it is now. And there’s the opportunity! Wes wants a venue. UCLA wants a donation. Voilà tout! We had us a deal.”

The Institute would, its boosters assured all who cared to listen, foster interdisciplinary scientific study of the many areas in which religious belief and societies’ decisions interacted or could interact. (In the final draft of the proposal, “could” replaced “should”, thanks to the editorial skill of a reviewer sensitive to Californian proclivities and the US Constitution.)

CRAPPI did inspire a fair amount of interdisciplinary activity. Professional academics know how to sniff out sources of grant money or they quickly end up being amateur academics.

“The challenge gettin’ the deal through the state legislature was sellin’ it as science, not preachin’, non-denominational, un-denominational.” Hargrove chuckled as though recalling some delicate point of political legerdemain. (Old Grand-Dad’s lubricious influence at work.) “Actually, finessin’ that move wasn’t all that difficult, as politicos (much the same as academicians, I supposed) will be highly inventive with bucks on the line. So, we got us a big bucks program that funds un-denominational scientific studies, how religion connects with mental life, social life, ethics, sex, drugs, rock-n-roll and all that. Everone’s ahead.”

“When Mort Abrams steps down as Director, which, I ‘spect’ll be a near-term event,” he confided, “that’ll be a useful résumé entry.”

“Doesn’t Wesley Craft have something to do with The Patriotic Front?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s just a bunch a Texas boys like to blast away at tin cans and beer bottles…, so’s they can be prepared in case California mounts an invasion,” he said grinning broadly.

***

After all the thoroughly blueprinted years I’d spent moving along the psychiatrist assembly line through premed, med school and residency, I’d reached a juncture on the conveyor belt of my life where I had major choices to make. Many people reach this type of juncture a lot earlier in their lives than I had, but the seemingly interminable course of education in a medical specialty postpones the arrival. However, my time for dallying had at last run its course.

My professional “best used by” date being in sight, it did appear I’d have to actually choose one of the occupational alternatives I’d spent almost three years learning about.

I’m a true believer in the following dictum, important to psychiatry and ornithology:

Denial of unpleasant reality, the ostrich defense, is a great way to avoid anxiety as long as it isn’t carried too far or employed when the reality is worse than just unpleasant. When the lions start getting close, any ostrich who wants to become an old bird had better get his head out of the sand and run like hell.

I’d been in the sand as long as I could afford.

***

“Psychiatry offers the practitioner a plethora of possibilities from which to pick a preferred professional pathway.”

No kidding! I got all that information (the alliteration too) from a purportedly authoritative source. That’s what it said in the introduction to the orientation manual I was given when I started residency at UCLA. The manual included sketches of the various approaches to the practice of psychiatry, psychoanalytic, behavioral, biological, bio-psycho-social, individual, group, family, adult, geriatric, child, forensic, academic, public, administrative. You name it, it was sketched. And if none of the above turned out to be totally satisfying, there was always the ever popular, though often disparaged, eclectic. So the manual said. It did admonish the reader to exercise some measure of restraint with the last approach lest an excess of eclecticism lead one to be so open minded one’s brains might fall out.

It actually said that! It did!

***

Pogo said: We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.

Quantum Physics says: We surmount them simultaneously,

one way or another, or not.

Thomas Carlyle said: Work while it is called today;

for the night cometh, wherein no man can work.

***

Heeding such indisputable wisdom, “The first priority of the residency program,” the manual said, “will be to instill a thorough grounding in the principles of all the basic models of psychiatric treatment.” (Presumably, the manual writers were not so concerned about dooming neophyte residents to the awful eclectical fate of discovering their brains dripping out of unguarded mental orifices forming puddles on the floor.)

Once securely in possession of the principles, residents will learn to master their implementation, and entré to the aforementioned plethora of possibilities will be at hand. Besides patients to treat, residents will be given opportunities and encouragement to pursue research interests, to get experience teaching and to assume administrative responsibilities, thereby preparing those not destined for private practice, for careers in academia, research, public sector and mental health administration.

Egad! What a goldmine of opportunity. Surely there’s something in this psychiatry business for everybody.

Most of my peers would be going into private practice. Psychiatry may be one of the poorest paid of the medical specialties, but even so, private practice can be comfortably life sustaining. Still, it would require some initiative, hustling referral sources and the like, managing accounts receivable and insurance forms, sitting in the same office day after day, listening again and again to the same repressions, projections, denials and delusions, having every private moment subject to invasion by an answering service with a distraught caller. For me, no way José.

Bernie Berkowitz would be spending the next two years doing a child psychiatry fellowship at UCLA. That had been his plan all along. He knew what he wanted to accomplish.

Leo Winston, to my surprise, was also doing a post-residency fellowship, in his case, geriatric psychiatry. I had imagined he couldn’t wait to graduate to full-time self-enrichment. He already owned a couple of nursing homes. But Leo calculated spending another year acquiring the prerequisite for geropsychiatry board certification was a sound investment. He knew what he wanted to accomplish.

Research? I had an open door there if I wanted in. Archie doggedly maintained his offer of a job in his group pursuing what was still his quest for the grail, divining the nature of the brain as a self-organizing system, his Grand Unified Theory of the Human Mind.

Wow! Brain biology would be growing explosively in the coming decades, and starting out with Archie, I’d be on the inside track to the action.

Mm, not for me.

I’m sure dozens of young psychiatrists would gleefully sacrifice their superegos for a piece of the action with Archie. It would mean instant respect within the research community and automatic access to all the prestigious journals. Something like being part of Rembrandt’s atelier for a neophyte artist.

Working with Archie wouldn’t be dull. He’s a dynamo and is forever coming up with many more problems to be solved than even he could possibly tackle himself. However, doing decent research, let alone keeping up with Archie, requires, as Edison put it, a lot more perspiration than inspiration, and Archie’s feelings would be hurt when the labor of love didn’t translate for me to love of the labor. I knew it wouldn’t. Not that I’m immune to enthusiasm and inspiration, but the payoff in serious research is too far down the road for my taste. I’ve been down that road with Archie before with unpalatable results.

I should have told him to give it up, but Archie so wanted me to be his protégé, and I was loath to disappointment him. The way he saw it, the gift he could give me to get me started was scientific curiosity. I often did get curious, but not enough to sustain a career. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him it wasn’t going to work. For a long time, I couldn’t bring myself to tell myself. I’ve always wanted Archie’s love and respect. Serving as his apprentice, might facilitate that. But leading him on and disappointing him would only make us both miserable and earn me no respect, even from myself.

Archie also had, over the past two years, become noticeably more irritable than usual, which took some doing, as world class irritability has always been a cornerstone of his character. I wasn’t sure whether he really was touchier or I was just noticing it more. But something had changed. I, happily, was never a target of his ire. Toward me he as always showed only love and trust and concern for my wellbeing. In fact I had lately begun to appreciate that I was the one confidant with whom he shared his dissatisfactions with pretty much everyone else in his ambit. He perceived evil intent in the shortcomings of everyone from clerks to other researchers working with him. “They’re doing this to sabotage my work” or “They’re doing that to get under my skin” were common Archie interpretations of stuff going on around him.

Archie warned me to be wary of the jealousies of colleagues as well as rivals should I choose to ignore his counsel and work in the department as Hargrove proposed. “Academia is a vicious world,” he warned. “Prestige acquisition is a zero sum game. If you succeed, you steal someone’s glory. They’ll want it back.”

Someone like Archie, who had acquired a world full of prestige and left in his wake a long debris field of bruised egos would surely make enemies, but the scope of iniquity he discerned was hard to accept. Shit happens. Sometimes it’s intentional even if unconsciously so. Other times it’s just bad luck. People do just make mistakes. Psychoanalysts might disagree.

My mother seized upon my professional indecision as the best available excuse for her to express her state of worry about me. She had recently called from Ann Arbor. She tried to sound relaxed. She’s not very good at sounding relaxed. She is very good at sounding worried. My mother remains a cauldron of worry most of which is focused on or otherwise associated with me. She had spoken to Archie and learned I had no firm plan for the coming year. Is that true? Did I talk with a counselor at the university? Ma, this isn’t high school. I know what my options are. I just need to make some decisions about what I want to do. Is something troubling me? No, ma. I feel fine. Do I need any money? No, I have enough money. Do I want her to talk to Hal or Susan to see if they can help me find a job in New York or Boston. Oh good God! No! Look, Ma, everything is really fine. I have a bunch of possibilities. I just need to choose one. That’s all. I thought about getting her to promise not to discuss my situation with my siblings. But that wouldn’t stop her, and if she’d promised not to she would just end up feeling guilty about it, and that would give her something else to worry about.

***

With thoughts such as these and “Fay-yer-nuff” reverberating between my ears, I arrived once again at 2-South.

A year earlier, as my second year of residency had about run its course, Hargrove had asked me about my plans for the third year. He knew, then as now, I had none.

“Make me an offer,” I said. He had one ready.

Arnold Cohen had requested the assignment of a Chief Resident to work with him on 2-South. As Cohen’s lieutenant, I’d get experience in administration and teaching and have an opportunity to do clinical research under Cohen’s tutelage. It would offer me a head start on the career in academic psychiatry toward which, Hargrove said, I seemed inclined. I detected in that comment the hint of future benefits Hargrove could bestow. On the surface it held the promise of being a good deal. Hargrove bought (or at least didn’t dispute) Cohen’s claim that having a Chief Resident to assume some of the burdens of running the ward would free up time he could employ in the service of his research interests. I suspected Cohen’s interest was in the kind of service responsible for his nickname, but I succumbed to Hargrove’s hustle none-the-less. Advantage, Dr. Cohen.

***

A newly admitted patient was to be introduced (in her case, reintroduced) to the ward staff. And I, as a consequence of the foreseeable absence of Dr. Cohen (whose presence had long since come to surprise me), was in charge.

The patient, Marilyn Duncan, well known to 2-South, consequent to frequent admissions triggered by recurrent histrionic self-threatening, and, when driven by desperation to make her desperation memorable to those around her, self-injurious behaviors. John Wong, the first-year resident presenting the case, proceeded with his mechanical account of Ms. Duncan’s presence on 2-South. John is the least expressive ostensibly normal person I have ever known. He could read the script for an Abbot and Costello routine and make it sound like a Chevrolet shop manual. Imagine “Who’s On First” without inflection.

The usual assemblage of ward staff, residents, Agnes, Millie, other nurses, motley therapists, perched on counters, desks, the sink and the few chairs available in the tight confines of the nurses’ station. Despite Wong’s stale delivery, they seemed absorbed in the saga of Ms. Duncan’s turbulent life.

Me too. I seemed absorbed. I’d learned to do a superb job of appearing as though I was really paying full attention whether I was or not. I could nod and grunt appropriately and even make moderately intelligent comments when provoked. This faculty is a standard psychotherapeutic technique, a basic skill to be mastered by fledgling psychiatrists, like knot-tying in surgery. When put to proper use this sort of mental multi-tasking enables the therapist to attend to what a patient is saying while simultaneously considering past history, the content of previous sessions, non-verbal data like body language, all the while on the alert for missing data which may be repressed clues to occult problems. I’d learned well.

I often employed this facility to daydream without broadcasting my distraction. That’s pretty useful. Sometimes, I felt guilty about deceiving people who thought I was giving them my complete attention. I’m proud of that guilt. It’s not as though guilt somehow makes deceit honorable, but I think it’s a mitigating factor. Mostly, I was just afraid I’d get caught in the act and be embarrassed.

On this occasion as flakes of my mental bits and pieces drifted amongst Marilyn Duncan, John Wong, Hamilton Hargrove, Cannonball Cohen and the formidable desires of my girlfriend, the delinquent majority of my attention was hard at work contriving the lyrics to a patter song for the first act of a musical comedy, The Cannibal’s Couch. This song is sung by a witch-doctor’s anxious addled assistant. He’s struggling to overcome his ravenous excitation and stammering so he can convey a news flash: a half drowned but conspicuously edible blonde has been discovered washed up on the shore. He’s telling his boss in song that the island’s barrier atoll’s been breached by a beached bleached blonde. He thinks she’d make a great hors d’oeuvre.

Ernie had kept encouraging me to compose. Eventually, I built up enough confidence to tackle a project more complex and demanding than simple discrete tunes and songs. I think this was a dream germinating ever since Ernie first suggested composing and maybe before that. Book, lyrics, music, I wanted to write a musical comedy. It’s got psychiatry, love, exotic locales, a lot of nonsense, even TOAD. Why the title, The Cannibal’s Couch? It sort of fits the story. Why a story about cannibalism and psychiatry? That’s another question for my hypothetical psychoanalyst.

The project became obsessive. New ideas would intrude on my mind, according no deference for whatever was already there or was supposed to be there. Unpredictably, I’d interrupt what I was doing to jot down notes about these ideas, trying to make it look as though my note taking related to whatever I was supposed to be doing. By the end of a day, my pockets would be crammed with scraps of creativity.

That was not the problem.

Music and lyrics rattled around my brain, distracting me and sometimes embarrassing me when people caught me staring into space humming and mumbling.

That was not the problem.

I spent less time sleeping in order to spend more time creating.

That was not the problem.

The problem was a repetitious memorable adjudication reverberating around in my brain along with music and lyrics et. al., “Writing a musical comedy is a hobby, not the real thing.”

***

In our progressive psychotherapeutic culture, it’s generally accepted that masturbation is OK if the real thing is not readily available, like for individuals such as adolescents, prisoners, maybe astronauts. It’s probably not so OK as a means of evading the real thing. Productive work equals sex. Freud said stuff like that.

A TOADian minority libertarian opinion (which begot one of TOAD’s schismatic virtual congregations) following Diogenes, advocates therapeutic masturbation, whenever, wherever.

***

Sure, for some people writing musical comedies is the real thing, and I’d toy with the idea I could be one of them. Then I’d recall a gloomy caveat about the horrors of artistic mediocrity and shudder. The Salieri paradigm threatened my sense of worth. Writing unexceptional musical comedies was not going to satisfy my craving to have a meaningful life.

My confidence that I had talent as a composer was pretty tenuous, and what was worse, I feared my enthusiasm might be nothing more than a transitory burst of neurotic passion which would quickly fade once composing became my work rather than the means of avoiding my work.

The prospect of giving up on psychiatry and starving in a garret making futile contributions to cultural heritage gave me stomach spasms. I like to eat.

My girlfriend, Consuela Katzenstein, known to me, and others known to her, as “Kat”, insisted I should get out of psychiatry altogether and stick to composing. She thought psychiatry was, in her aesthetic universe, along with its other repugnant attributes, unromantic. She also, once, suggested we travel to Alaska and spend the winter in an igloo cuddling under a pile of polar bear skins. Ahhh! Romance! More recently, she’d come up with a competing proposition a good deal less weird and a good deal more appealing than wintering in an igloo.

“I’ve gotten a fellowship to study in Italy. Come with me,” she purred, snuggling closer, which in no way diminished the allure of her proposal. “You can compose while I’m in class, we can picnic in the hills of Tuscany, take moonlight strolls along the Arno, make love in Verona.”

“Dodge bullets in Palermo,” I suggested.

“It’s the chance of a lifetime,” she advised, ignoring my sarcasm.

“You’re right,” I admitted.

She was right.

***

I had, at that time, been in love with Kat for two months which is exactly how long I’d known her. I had a lot of good reasons for being in love with her. Kat is wonderful, remarkable, exciting, an inexhaustible wellspring of vitality. She is also intractably mercurial as in: She can change directions faster than a mongoose in a snake pit. (Homespun saying, courtesy of Hamilton Hargrove III. Proper enunciation is best achieved by application of a homogenizing inebriated drawl minimizing the occurrence of discretely audible phonemes, something like: fayhsernamongoosnasnapit.)

Kat had been closing in on a master’s degree in physical anthropology when she realized the prospect of crawling on her belly through a lifetime of prehistoric river beds made her itch. So she went to law school. She graduated from law school having learned that going to law school was what interested her, being a lawyer wasn’t. She then decided to become an architect. She’d been at that for a year and a half when I met her but had just decided she was really interested in theatrical set design (in my opinion, vaguely related to architecture). She’d just been awarded a fellowship to study set design in Italy.

Kat is also mercurial as in thermometer. Hot! What a temper! On the other hand, she has a full repertoire of gentler (equally hot) passions which more than make up for occasional abuse at her hands. She is unfailingly sensuous, input and output, delighting in and appealing to all the senses. When we’re in contact, I feel she’s melting into my body in some sort of primordial protoplasmic amalgamation. She can produce this effect on me just holding my hand walking down the street let alone in the course of sexual pursuits of a more overt and private sort.

Her father owns the largest jewelry store in Buenos Aires. His father had been smart enough to foresee the magnitude of the Nazi menace and mobile enough to get himself and his family and his business out of Hungary while he still could. Kat’s father grew up in Argentina and met Kat’s mother in Argentina where they jointly produced Kat before Mama Katzenstein ran off with a troupe of flamenco dancers. She hasn’t been heard from since.

Think there might be a gene for mercury?

Papa Katzenstein lavished the fruits of his wealth on Kat. He’s spoiled her. He knows it. She knows it. I know it.

Papa’s money enabled Kat to play musical careers. She describes herself as dependently wealthy, but, in truth, she’s pretty damn independent. Her father’s love and largess are bestowed without strings as far as I can see, neither overtly authoritarian nor neurotically covert. He seems genuinely happy to know she’s enjoying herself, and that’s all he cares about. He did feel, however, it had gotten to be about time for her to begin thinking about settling down. He had to be kidding himself.

Kat settle down?

Fortunately for her father, he doesn’t worry about it too much. She doesn’t worry about it at all.

I met Kat’s father a few weeks after I met Kat. I think one of the reasons he finds such delight in supporting her continued sojourn outside of Argentina is that it provides him with good excuses to get out of Argentina. He says he’d like to live in a country governed by laws rather than personalities, but business is good so he stays.

I liked him immediately. He’s warm and generous and has an uncensored sincerity which may have come from surviving enough real catastrophes in his life to have learned not to waste anxiety on imagined ones or maybe having a healthy set of emotional priorities is the reason he survived in the first place.

He liked me too. That’s reasonable. I’m a likeable guy (my siblings’ opinions notwithstanding). He thought I should marry Kat. I thought that was reasonable. He thought if she married me, she’d settle down. He had to be kidding himself. I wasn’t. Kat’s a terrific person to be in love with. She’d probably be terrific to be married to. Settle down?

Prominent among Kat’s ferociously defended, though fickle, opinions is: psychiatrists merit a moral standing right up there with child molesters and swindlers who rip off widows’ life savings.

What accounts for her affection for me? She thinks I’m an aberration.

If my psychiatric persona had been in ascendance when we met, she probably wouldn’t have stuck around long enough for my loveable aberrant qualities to make their appearance. Fortunately, when we met, I was a piano player.

***

When business at Ernie’s was slow enough for him to pick up the saxophone, he and I enjoyed playing a musical game called trading fours. It’s an improvisation exercise. The idea is to have a musical dialogue in four bar utterances, listening to each other and responding appropriately and creatively.

I was doing a pretty fair job of keeping up with Ernie one evening when some people from the theater department (including some of the Noel Coward crowd) came in. Kat was with them. I immediately fell in love with her.

Kat has a dark beauty, a serious beauty, a look that says she means the way she looks. There is no mistaking her mood. She can be frivolous, but when she is, she’s all in, never half-hearted. She totally devotes her attention to whatever she’s doing or experiencing, and anyone with her knows it.

She has prominent features, high cheekbones, penetrating eyes which crinkle at the corners when she’s happy, nostrils which flare menacingly when she’s angry, full lips on which she chews when she’s concentrating. Her subtle Spanish inflection gives her speech a delicate lightness I find entrancing.

Her figure is made up of the usual parts of average sizes and shapes but the total effect is somehow feline. Her nickname fits. Sitting on a chair, she tends to curl up, feet off the floor, legs entwined with arms, cradling her head and long dark hair.

That was the way she appeared to me when Ernie and I finished and I went over to say hello to the Noel Coward crowd and Ernie went back to bartending. She was wearing dark blue jeans, a black turtleneck and a navy-blue pea coat which in the dim light of the bar created a dark background that from a distance made her face, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, seem to float independently from her body. It was striking.

We were introduced, but before I could say more than “Hi, I’m Jerry Bender,” one of her companions shoved a piano score for “Trial by Jury” under my nose and asked me if I could play it. “Sure thing,” I assured him, glancing at Kat. They were planning to put on a scaled down version of the show, he said, and he laid out some of the details of the project including the fact that Kat was designing a set for it. I needed no more inducement to agree to be their orchestra and to run through some of it then and there.

What a time for an opportunity to show off! And I was impressive, especially because everyone thought I was sight reading. I didn’t see any need to divulge I’d played this same arrangement of “Trial by Jury” with a similar group in college, and while that had been some years earlier, my fingers remembered.

“You’re terrific,” Kat said, clearly impressed.

“Thanks,” I said, enchanted, thinking: Wait’ll you get to know the rest of my terrificness.

“Are you in the music department?” she asked.

“Sometimes I wish I was,” I said. “But actually, I’m a resident in the psychiatry department,” I added, confidently delivering the coup de grâce line from my standard seduction speech. Renaissance Man (upper class Jack-of-all-trades), always a hit.

“A shrink!” she shrieked. Her voice conveying revulsion, loathing, disgust, horror, with maybe an extra helping of revulsion. Her face leaving no doubt revulsion squared, loathing, disgust, horror were what she’d intended her voice to convey. With her Spanish accent it came out “A shreenk!” which somehow added to the revulsion etc. She also conveyed “A shreenk!” (followed by a slew of Spanish expletives) loud enough that the few other patrons in Ernie’s swiveled their heads to see who was being assaulted. Everyone was staring at me, clearly identifying me as the perp.

“Shrinks are nothing but mind-fuckers!” she informed me and everyone else in the bar, slightly less loudly, but loud enough to elicit assenting nods of the head and affirmative vocalizations from the other patrons who were still staring, accusingly, at me.

“You think you’re so almighty superior with your theories and pills and prisons. ‘Therapy is salvation.’ ‘Everyone needs to see a shrink.’ ‘Everyone is neurotic.’ It’s all a big game. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing. There’s no proof for any of your theories. All you do is take normal people and make them crazy so you can justify yourselves. You always know what everybody is thinking even if they don’t know themselves, and people can’t be normal until they agree with you. Shrinks are the self-anointed arbiters of sanity. Don’t you realize what frauds you are? Don’t you have any conscience?”

“I play piano!”

“And Nero played violin. Why should that get you off the hook? Defend yourself!”

“Defend myself?” I responded, defending myself. “That stuff doesn’t have anything to do with me or what I do. Why are you so freaked out about psychiatrists?”

“I didn’t have a negative transference to my analyst if that’s what you think,” she said.

“Now you’re being defensive,” I pointed out.

“In law school, I studied mental health law. I know how psychiatry fucks people over,” she said.

“Ah! So you’re a lawyer,” I said.

“What’s wrong with lawyers?” she asked menacingly.

“Probably nothing more than is wrong with psychiatrists. On the other hand, plenty of psychiatrists would say that because of misguided lawyers, lots of sick people don’t get the treatment they need. They might also say plenty of other less complementary things, but that’ll do for starters,” I said. I was enjoying this. I hoped she was too.

“Because of those lawyers, lots of people aren’t locked up in crazy-houses and deprived of their civil rights,” she said.

“Sometimes, people’s rights and needs conflict,” I said.

“Exactly” she said. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

“In the abstract, it’s an interesting problem, but when it comes to doing what I have to do as a psychiatrist, it doesn’t keep me up at night. I’m not some ogre who gets off on keeping people chained in a dungeon. Lots of times people with problems are, for irrational reasons, scared of making changes they need to make to fix what’s wrong in their lives…, what’s causing their problems. It’s my job to help them get over those obstacles and get better. If it’s debatable, I wouldn’t push anybody to do anything they don’t want to do.”

“Who decides if it’s debatable?” she asked.

“I do.”

“Look,” I continued. “I once had a patient who heard voices telling her to kill herself because she was evil and selfish. She’d been in and out of the hospital a bunch of times because as soon as she’d get a little better she’d insist on being discharged and since she’d no longer be actively suicidal, she’d get out…, in accordance with the law. Then she’d be back in again a few weeks later after throwing herself in front of a bus and being lucky enough to not get killed. The last time around when she said she wanted to be discharged I said ‘No!’ No discharge until she was stabilized on medication and had some reasonable plan for getting along OK after leaving the hospital. She kept saying she wanted out. I kept saying no discharge. She wasn’t even restricted to the ward. I just wouldn’t discharge her. She could have walked out of the hospital any time she wanted. She never tried. She stuck around long enough for us to optimize her meds and arrange a move to a halfway house and a job in a sheltered workshop. Now she has some self-esteem, some insulation from her parents who could drive anybody to throw themselves under a bus and two years of reasonable stability. She had a right to the help she needed whether she was capable of saying she wanted it or not. I suppose now that she has some income, she could hire you and sue me for deprivation of her civil rights, but I don’t think she wants to.”

“You know something, Bender?” Kat said warmly. (To this day she calls me “Bender”.) “I like you. Don’t get the idea you’ve changed my feelings about shrinks in general, but I think you’ve got promise. You could turn out OK. How did you get mixed up in this sordid business?”

“Psychiatry or Gilbert and Sullivan?”

***

In the course of what was left of the evening, we exchanged and compared notes on what had gotten us to where we were, sordid and otherwise. Honestly…, at least we tried. That, we both appreciated.

Kat acknowledged “volatile” had been her defining adjective for as long as she could remember. Intensely involved in something until her interest abruptly switched. She played whatever game of the moment she found appealing. She also saw herself as intractably subversive with prohibition being the parent of appeal. All someone had to do was say “no”, and that was motivation enough for her. Her only real concern was a nagging fear she’d be likened to her mother. I thought that was a reasonable expectation, considering. I told her so. I was trying to be honest.

I also found out about the source of her antipathy toward psychiatrists.

Kat had a girlfriend in Buenos Aires whose adolescence had been as tumultuous as her own. They had collaborated to subvert whatever constraints Argentine society or law happened to lay in their path. They were good friends.

Papa Katzenstein, relying on his ultimate confidence Kat’s good sense would prevail over her wayward impulses before it was too late, maintained his usual liberal composure. Kat’s friend, however, had the misfortune to have parents who were not the least bit tolerant of her pubescent excesses.

So, while Kat soon tired of the meager thrills of juvenile delinquency as I had, her friend was obliged to strive for ever higher levels of outrage or concede defeat to her parents. Her parents knew when to give up, if not how to give up, and they turned their filial embarrassment over to a psychiatrist who assured them (likely erroneously) she was schizophrenic and her diseased mind was no reflection on her upbringing. This is, at least, how Kat reported the story to me.

Kat’s friend was incarcerated in a sanatorium for young ladies of high social standing and low social grace where she received treatment, became pregnant, had a sloppy abortion and died. Kat blamed the girl’s psychiatrist and thereafter the rest of his ilk. To my credit she said she couldn’t imagine me locking up a girl like her friend. To my credit I told her I could. I was trying to be honest.

She gave me a look somewhere between terminal frustration and first degree murder, held it for a moment then announced, “Bender, I’ve got to get you out of psychiatry before it ruins you. I’m not giving up on you.”

I hope she never does.

***

Despite the distractions imposed by cannibals, Kat, career options etc., I heard enough of what Wong was saying about Ms. Duncan to resurrect the image of a thin young woman with bright platinum hair (The old line about the suicide blonde, “Dyed by her own hand.” would have been grimly apropos), scars on her wrists and a serious potential to unintentionally end up dead. She’d never been actually suicidal, as in “wanting to die”. Yet, her escapades with noxious chemicals and sharp implements often might have turned out lethal were it not for her exquisitely calibrated pre-escapade logistical considerations. For Ms. Duncan, risk abatement involved knowing the whereabouts and schedules of key individuals in her life and imparting subtle admonitions to those individuals about their own risk of perpetual guilt and damnation should they ever fail her. Over the years she’d refined her technique, thereby reducing her risk. Unfortunately, refined technique vied with key individual fatigue and perturbation stemming from recurrent manipulation, which conversely increased her risk.

I did the interview which allowed her the opportunity to assure us she had gotten the angst out of her system as well as the OD of Valium she’d taken shortly before opening her left radial vein in her boyfriend’s recording studio a few minutes before his band was to convene for a rehearsal.

When we, the community of authorities on 2-South, had devised a satisfactory game plan for preserving what was left of Marilyn Duncan’s wrists and enlisting the boyfriend in an ongoing scheme to identify and head off her anguish before it got to blood-letting level and enabling the competent parts of her psyche to lead her back to what passed for stability outside the hospital, I reminded everyone, if given the opportunity, she would seduce and repudiate, identify transitory angels and devils among them and wreak havoc on ward organization. No decisions regarding her care or status were to be made in isolation no matter how much she implored, cajoled, demanded. Every decision pertaining to her case was to be handled as a team. The alternative would be predictable incitement of internecine warfare among us at which she was a virtuoso to her detriment and ours. I suggested to Wong that he look up the literature on use of opiate blockers to decrease the endogenous heroin-like rush she got from dissecting her skin.

Afterward, I made rounds, finding 2-South’s contingent of the mentally debilitated getting along passably or better. Emily Parker, a clone of Marilyn Duncan, announced her old boyfriend had called the previous evening and invited her to go with him to Hawaii for a week. She wanted a pass from the hospital. That’s the craziest idea I’ve ever heard, I told her. She wasn’t about to listen or be deterred. No surprise. No pass, I told her. Discharge or nothing, arguing if she was well enough to return to the jet set, she was no longer inpatient material. For a moment, I thought she was about to try to throw herself or me out of a window, but she must have realized that would mean no trip to Hawaii, and her incipient tantrum vanished. I waited patiently while she lavished undeserved praise on me for having helped her more than she could ever repay. I also let her talk me into allowing her to stay in the hospital until the day of her boyfriend’s planned departure. I was not being altruistic or soft headed or unaware that I was violating my own prohibition against agreeing to plans with patients such as Ms.’s. Duncan and Parker without first obtaining a treatment team consensus. But I was impelled to act out of the fear that if she moved in with him again before they left for Hawaii, he might change his mind or again provoke her to mayhem. Once in Hawaii, she might decide she liked Hawaii’s counterpart to the NPI and stay there.

Rounds finished, I grabbed a cup of the corrosive liquid Millie calls coffee and retreated to the sanctuary of my office for meditative reflection on my future.

When reflection failed to induce resolution, I propped my feet on my desk and opened the latest issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry to an article on the phenomenology of amok in New Guinea. The study was replete with enough gory details of maniacal slaughter to have been a big seller at a corner newsstand. Reading it may have offered me sublimated release of tension, and it reminded me I was supposed to meet Archie for lunch in an hour.

I was reminded of Archie because he is something of an authority on amok (as well as lots of other obscure topics). Early during the Viet Nam war, he spent two years as a consultant with the CIA trying to develop a chemical agent which would stimulate susceptible individuals to run amok. The idea was, when they had the right stuff, to sneak it into the North Vietnamese Army’s water supply and wait in safety while the enemy annihilated themselves. Was Archie troubled by the moral implications of developing such a weapon? Not much. He says the potential benefits of learning about the neurochemical causes of violence, not to mention winning the war, outweighed the risks. Easy for him to say.

After preliminary study, Archie thought he had the stuff he was looking for, and he was ready for a clinical trial, but even the CIA wouldn’t let him try it out on our people. Archie decided to use bull elephants instead since they too sometimes naturally run amok. It’s known as “must”.

Archie was probably on the right track. A few hours after he gave his concoction to test elephant number one, the beast developed the appropriate frenzy. Then it broke out of its enclosure and destroyed a substantial portion of Greensboro, North Carolina. The local authorities were pretty upset. The SPCA found out and put a stop to the whole project.

So much for the advancement of science. And the war dragged on.

There’s also a story that Archie also became a consultant to the Oakland Raiders. What did Archie know about football the Raiders would consider valuable (he hadn’t yet gotten into woodpeckers and helmet design)? Damn little! But he did know something about a drug which could enable a defensive end to play like a rogue elephant. Somehow, as it’s been rumored, the league commissioner found out about the substance of mutual interest Archie and the Raiders had in each other and put a stop to the project. He argued the substance might impair competitive balance in the league.

Another rumor also has it that before the commissioner found out, Archie had done an informal pilot study with a middle linebacker who in one quarter sacked the opposing team’s three quarterbacks nine times. There were three quarterbacks who played in the quarter because the first two became too seriously injured to continue playing. The linebacker was finally removed from the game when he’d amassed one hundred and forty yards in penalties which cost his team more than they gained by his ferocious play. He then tore up the locker room.

When Sports Illustrated interviewed Archie about this, he constructed a denial that convinced everyone it was true. Archie enjoys being at the center of an enigma.

***

I was engrossed in the exploits of a young New Guinean who’d beheaded eleven of his closest friends and relatives when a head appeared in my open doorway and emitted a cheery voice trimmed with a Russian accent, “Hey, Doc! Is Glickman.”

Without awaiting invitation, the rest of Harry Glickman came through the doorway and seated itself upon my desk. He looked like he’d made the wrong turn on Wilshire Boulevard. Glickman and his wardrobe would have fit in better with the crowd on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills than at the NPI. Gucci loafers, gold chains visible through the open neck of his silk shirt, haut lounge lizard attire. Trim, athletic, graying curly hair. He could have passed for a patriarch jockey. When standing, his heavy eyebrows leveled around my shirt pocket. His head is a little too large for his body, his eyes and nose are a little too large for his head, his ego is a little too large for his own good. Glickman claims to be forty-five. I’d guess early fifties, but that as well as most of the other information we have about him is uncertain. He’d told me he fled Russia and the Russian Mafia about ten years earlier and until recently had lived in New York before fleeing once again to Los Angeles to avoid mayhem. At one point, I was planning to send for his old medical records to try to verify some of the history he’d given me. He told me to tell him which version of his history I wanted the records to verify and he would tell me which records to send for. I decided not to bother.

Glickman and I shared a peculiar quid pro quo relationship based on an exchange of professional services. What he got from me was fairly straight forward psychiatric treatment which had undeniably improved his life.

Glickman, like Carlossi, is bipolar. When I first saw him, he was still groggy from a substantial overdose of Valium and vodka. He’d been found unconscious in his room at the Bel Air Hotel and was taken to the emergency room at the UCLA Hospital where for 16 hours he was watched and watered (with an IV) until he got around to waking up. When he was deemed “medically clear”, the psych-on-duty, who on that night was I, was summoned to pass judgment on his suicidal potential before he could be released. I ended up admitting him more out of curiosity than a belief he needed my help to stay alive.

He kept telling me one improbable story after another. I kept telling him I might be able to do him some good if he’d cut the bullshit and level with me.

“You know, Doc, Glickman thinks you don’t believe,” he’d complained.

“He’s right.”

“Is OK, Doc,” he conceded. “You one mean son-of-bitch. Is OK. Glickman OK with that. Glickman know lot shrinks who couldn’t find asshole with bloodhound, wouldn’t know bullshit they covered in it.”

“Why do you always refer to yourself in the third person?”

“Is style.”

Persistent meanness trumped persistent deception, and over the course of a few days I got a more extensive and possibly true history of his previous brushes with psychiatry. During his most severe manic episodes he’d be high as a kite, grandiose, irascible, talking a mile-a-minute about five different subjects at the same time and loving it. In Russia he’d usually been given Thorazine, or whatever is its Russian equivalent, to slow him down. It did slow him down but left him feeling like his head was full of toothpaste which he hated. He also hated and lied to the psychiatrists who’d treated him.

“They would ruin Glickman,” he complained. “Glickman cannot afford be zombie. Business of Glickman is jungle. Glickman get slow, Glickman get eaten. Would give Thorazine to Churchill or Lincoln?”

“They were born too long ago to benefit from modern psychopharmacology,” I told him.

I suppose Glickman’s antipathy toward psychiatric treatment in general and medication in particular made him a poor candidate for treatment with lithium which requires close follow-up and cooperation. I thought it was worth a try. He didn’t, but by the time I suggested it we’d developed enough rapport for him to give it a fair try.

After a few months without mood swings or toothpaste, he was convinced. The longer he remained emotionally stable, in the mildly hypomanic state he preferred, the more he came to see me as a sorcerer who’d performed a miracle for him and the more he became determined to make me the beneficiary of his own brand of sorcery, a good deal less conventional than mine.

Maybe conventionality lies in the eye of the beholder.

Glickman appointed himself my personal oracle, assuming responsibility for keeping me informed about whatever he thought I ought to be informed, from the activities of other patients to opportunities to pick up new plasma television sets or laptop computers at very low prices. (I’m writing this on one of them right now.) “Doc, you tell Glickman what you want, what you spend, is yours,” he’d say.

Oracles, prophets, psychics, fortune tellers, economists succeed because their output is cryptic, and credulous recipients of their augury can, after the fact, fall back on “Oh, that’s what he meant,” to maintain belief. In Glickman’s case, it’s “Is he kidding?” He employs the same naively earnest wide-eyed expression whether he is being serious or absurdly deceitful. He too likes enigmas.

***

Mark Twain said: There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Jerry Bender says: And expert opinions.

Quantum physics holds: All lies are true if they’re told in

the right universe.

TOAD holds: Odds are, a kind lie beats

a pair of brutal truths,

most of the time.

Harry Glickman holds: Odds are last resort.

Certain pays better.

***

Glickman’s penchant for prophesy and droll deception doesn’t just benefit me. His prowess earns him a handsome living. He’s a professional gambler. Yet, as he is wont to say, “Glickman don’t gamble. Why take chance?”

He owes his professional success to his ability to ferret out inside information about all sorts of anticipated events from sports to politics before it’s known publicly. He’s thus able to make sure-thing bets at long-shot odds and clean up. His gambling, or non-gambling, the actual betting, is, as a consequence, a very dull business which he likens to running a bank.

“Is living,” he says. “Why take chance?”

***

TOAD proffers an actuarial take on life’s vicissitudes:

The odds will get you most of the time.

***

The rest of Glickman’s business is a lot of work. Not only does he have to ride herd on the shadowy gang of assistants who place the bets for him (no one in the business would knowingly bet against Glickman), but he has the arduous task of gathering the obscure data which keeps the rest of the operation dull. This is the area in which his virtuosity is most apparent. He uses a combination of sharp perception, uncanny instincts for knowing where to look, subtly devious and seductively disarming interview techniques, computer hacking and on rare occasions blackmail or bribery. He disparages bribery which comes into play only as a desperate last resort. “Paying for info takes away fun,” he says. He does consider blackmail potentially lots of fun, depending on the mark and the mark’s hidden iniquity. Glickman enjoyed his work.

Glickman also enjoyed unofficial volunteer status on 2-South, escorting patients to appointments and running errands. He was very fond and protective of the other bipolar patients, very patient and understanding with the schizophrenic patients and wonderfully supportive with the seriously depressed. Millie loves him.

He wanted to be an official volunteer. I tried to accommodate. The NPI’s director of volunteer services, who should be boiled in oil, refused on the grounds that Glickman was a patient. I argued he was an outpatient, perfectly stable and more reliable and helpful than most of the paid staff. She wouldn’t budge. I complained to her superiors that she was being discriminatory toward our patients. They wouldn’t budge

It didn’t help Glickman’s case that he was president of the local chapter of CAP, the Coalition Against Psychiatry, a gadfly organization composed of former and current mental patients (and others who should be), litigious social advocates and civil rights attorneys. Kat, despite her fondness for me, maintained enthusiastic support for CAP. CAP pickets were an everyday feature of the NPI façade.

“Glickman want be sure you guys think hard what you do to people,” he once explained to me. I could respect that. Archie thought CAP served a worthwhile purpose. (Little did he know.) Hargrove thought they were colorful, even entertaining and, though misguided, only a minor nuisance. (Little did he know.) Others at the NPI were less sympathetic, bristling at CAP’s aggressively adversarial tactics. (Maybe they knew.)

Glickman relished the controversy. “Glickman got score to settle,” he informed me unnecessarily. (That, I knew.)

***

A cornerstone of the dogma promulgated by CAP is the notion that psychiatry is inherently evil because it conceptually segregates people into two unequal classes, the enfranchised mentally healthy who know what’s going on and the mentally ill who, in one way or another, don’t and are thereby disenfranchised.

***

According to TOAD, that dichotomy is overly simplistic.

TOAD’s meteorological contribution to epistemology goes:

Nobody knows which way the wind blows,

but there are degrees of ignorance.

I’d say TOAD is on the mark.

***

“Glickman got you news,” he said, beaming down at me from his perch on my desk like a Semitic leprechaun, apparently unconcerned with my educational venture into amok.

“Dr. Cohen has made an appearance?” I guessed.

“Wrong,” he said. “Not even good guess. Try harder.”

“You’re disbanding CAP. You’re embarrassed by all the nonsense they’ve been spreading around,” I said.

“Come on,” he said. “CAP stronger than ever. Who wants shrinks tell them what to do?”

“Lots of people,” I said.

“Well, that not news,” he said “Last chance.”

“I give up,” I said.

“You no fun anymore,” he said.

“I’ve never been fun. You’re forgetting,” I said.

“OK. Your uncle, Dr. Lebovics, taking trip to Israel next week,” he said. “Glickman thought you want to know.”

“How do you know about this?” I snapped, annoyed that Glickman should know about it sooner than I did. How did he even know Archie was my uncle?

“How Glickman know?” he said, looking hurt. “Such question!”

“And why is he travelling to Israel?”

“He probably tell you at lunch,”

“Thanks for the info, Harry,” I said. “You should be somebody’s mother.”

He knows my social calendar too?

“Sure, Doc.”

***

I found Archie waiting in front of the UCLA faculty club, though “waiting” is a misleading term applied to Archie. It suggests a state of being in which one’s activities are subordinated to an anticipated event. Archie is never waiting. He’s always got something productive to do. He was sitting on the grass, back propped up against the trunk of a purple blossomed jacaranda tree, engrossed in a book on the abuses of psychiatry in Russia which argued that the social control practices of the former Soviet Union had not died out with a change in government. Maybe Glickman had contributed to it.

Archie’s modal facade is rumpled, and, on this occasion, he came à la mode. His shoes had seen the worst of too many mud puddles, his pants wore grass stains from doing just what he was then doing, his corduroy sport coat was worn into a state of comfortable exhaustion, its pockets bulging with note pads, pens, pencils and pipe smoking accoutrements.

Observed from a distance, Archie might have been a poorly handled marionette, slumped on the ground, legs stretched out in front of him making an “L” with his trunk, head bobbing and shaking in assent or dissent with his reaction to what he was reading. He mumbled to himself as he read intermittently pausing to scribble a note in the margin of the book. My approach caught him mid-scribble.

“Archie, hi.”

Without looking up from the book, he held up his right index finger to indicate, “One moment,” then continued scribbling for at least seven or eight more moments until there was no longer any blank space on the page and his script had become so small and cramped he probably wouldn’t have been able to read it anyhow. When he was finished he removed his reading glasses and looked up at me with a sad expression on his face. “Jerry, this book is a frightening documentation of the dangers of trying to supersede natural processes. Sit down a minute.”

Down, I went.

“Whenever man learns something new and helpful someone’s on deck to step up and misuse it. This,” he said, waving the book menacingly and apparently referring to its subject, “is a perfect example of the perversion and misuse of the fruits of science to stifle new ideas and creativity instead of nurturing them.”

“No one sees the future well enough to say which ideas are going to be good and which not,” he said plaintively. “Some of their brightest minds judged insane, declared worthless, purged of creativity in the name of social betterment. It’s disgusting. You would of course expect such things from a tyrannical government but for the profession of psychiatry to cooperate and officially sanction such practices and provide a patina of scientific justification…, bah,” repugnance broadcast by his sour face.

He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Psychiatry and state should be held separate like church and state. Psychiatrists must be doctors who treat suffering people, suffering from real illnesses, not a Gestapo enforcing social norms for political purposes.”

Our style in these kinds of discussions was point-counterpoint, so I played my counterpart. “I suppose if the consequences are sufficiently dire, you do what you’re told to do.”

“Sure, but the problem is not lack of individual courage. It’s institutional depravity,” Archie exclaimed. “There is some individual dissent to these practices, and there would be more if the risk were not so great, but the objections are individual. Russian psychiatry as an institution views it as perfectly appropriate to use psychiatric knowledge and skills to maintain social order and social order is defined by the state. The Chinese do the same thing.”

“But that happens here too,” I counter-pointed. “American psychiatrists lock up people who are dangerous. We make decisions about which patients are in need of involuntary treatment to correct deranged thinking. That certainly serves to maintain the social order.”

“Ah! Yes, in a way. But the ethical context in which that occurs is quite different,” he said flashing a smile indicating I had given him just the counter-argument he was looking for in order to make his point. “American psychiatry deals with madness as an illness, not as a social aberration. The medical model, as it’s called. Deranged thinking has to produce behavior that’s pretty seriously deleterious to the individual who’s doing the behaving or pretty seriously and imminently dangerous to others for the mental health system to intervene involuntarily. The ultimate goal is to help the patient whether that coincides with immediate social interests or not. When we evaluate and treat patients we are physicians first, behavioral scientists second. Acting as agents of society doesn’t even come in a distant third except for the indirect benefit of having as healthy a polity as possible. The basic assumption of psychiatry here is: we apply what we know to patients to cure their illnesses not to stop them from being a pain in the ass. What the state wants is irrelevant to those considerations. With that orientation, abuses of power can be minimized. Sure, they occur, but they aren’t basic to the institution. It’s reassuring. For thousands of years, medicine has taught doctors to have respect for the individual patient and humility for themselves. That’s good thing to remember.”

I said I’d remember it.

We got to our feet, Archie with less trouble than one might expect. He left his reading glasses on the grass under the tree which I’d anticipated. I retrieved them. I’ve had a lot of practice. Archie has many pairs of reading glasses, all with his name and phone number taped to the earpiece so when he loses them whoever finds them can return them. He meets a lot of people in this manner. It’s more than simple absentmindedness. I think he sees presbyopia as a manifestation of aging and the inevitable mortality he would, ostrich-like, prefer not to think about. He evades aging by repudiating his glasses and his need for them. He shouldn’t complain. Just about everyone else in our family including me is myopic as hell.

When I’d resigned myself to the least offensive of the vapid luncheon options, a beer and a roast beef (à la shoemaker) sandwich, we found a vacant table on the patio outside and I said “What’s with the trip to Israel?”

Archie looked startled. He stared at me, registering serious perplexity, his mental gears meshing, attempting to making sense of what I’d said.

“How do you know about that?” he asked, looking like some fundamental component of the universe he inhabited had been disturbed.

“A guy told me. He’s a patient of mine and a sort of unofficial ward volunteer. His name’s Harry Glickman. If there’s information to be had, Harry has it, if he wants it. He believes I’ve turned his life around, and he’s appointed himself my personal intelligence agency. How he knows about your plans, I have no idea, but I’ve given up being surprised at his capacity to know stuff. It’s how he makes his living. I don’t even know how he knew you were my uncle.”

“Mm,” growled across the table. “I’m not happy about this, Jerry. I’ve kept these plans to myself. Why did you do this?”

“Why did I do what? I haven’t done anything.”

“Let this Glickman person into our personal lives. You don’t know who he works for, who he reports to.”

“Archie, I haven’t let Glickman into anything. All I’ve done is treat his bipolar disorder. He’s grateful. He’s elected to repay me by keeping me informed about whatever he thinks I’d want to know. He’s got this amazing talent for finding out what’s going on or what’s going to go on. He just finds out stuff on his own. He’s a character, but benign. He’s a good guy. I’m sure of it.”

Archie paused, pensively silent for a few moments, more gears evidently meshing, then he appeared to settle on a judgment that I, and by association, Glickman, could be trusted.

“OK,” he finally said. “I planned to tell you about the trip at lunch today.”

I wasn’t going to mention Glickman had predicted that as well.

“You know I’ve moved around a fair amount,” he began. I nodded.

“There’s a history,” his tone of voice implying this wasn’t to be a travelogue. “In the late sixties, I was dedicated to a career as a psychoanalyst. I loved the intricate process of extricating the mind’s secrets from its web of self-inflicted obfuscation. Like Sherlock Holmes, divining clues hidden in the fabric of the analytic process, words, silences, inconsistencies, evasions, the flaws in the weave. It was great fun, and because the best intellects in the profession were similarly engaged, it was honorable, it was righteous, blessed by the best. Psychoanalysis required intense intellectual rigor, continuous self-examination and constant alertness to the veiled meanings of the many levels of interplay between analyst and analysand. I loved all that.”

“But after a while, I started questioning the assumptions under which we operated, wondering more and more about the basis for believing in their validity. Increasingly, I became convinced our pride and smug satisfaction in representing the pinnacle of psychiatric practice was just mysticism cloaked in imaginative mythology. The elegant rhetoric. The seductive metaphors…, sex, aggression, narcissism, whatever the hell the theory du jour happened to be. We were no better than the priests of an esoteric cult. Pretty soon, I was saying as much at conferences and in journals.”

“Well, the gurus of psychoanalysis did not take kindly to one of their protégées publicly exposing the racket they’d been perpetrating. And they’ve never let me forget it. They used to try to interfere with my getting academic appointments and getting papers and books published. The quality and importance of my work eventually put my professional activities beyond their reach, but they haven’t given up. They’ve pursued me wherever I’ve gone.”

“Eventually, everywhere I’ve worked, people around me let me know they’ve been reached by those who won’t let me dodge their bygone enmity. They do it by telling coded jokes or they’ll look me in the eye and smirk. They’ll sit close next to me, crowding me, clicking ballpoint pens, balling-up sheets of paper…, all the signals they’ve established to let me know I can’t escape my past.”

This wasn’t just Archie the grouch, this was paranoia! In silence, I absorbed Archie’s litany and, with it, a crumbling of some of the foundation on which my sense of what’s reliable rested. What could I say to him that wouldn’t accelerate the crumbling? An impossible situation.

“For me that’s an impossible situation,” Archie went on. “If I were to complain about the annoyance, I’d be giving them the evidence they need to show the world Dr. Lebovics is unfit for society, he’s paranoid, he’s a trouble maker…, he can’t play with the other children.” He added the last with a grim chuckle as though he was remembering a primeval assessment by his kindergarten teacher.

“In Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau said,” and Archie quoted, “‘I am now alone on earth, no longer having any brother, neighbor, friend, or society other than myself. The most sociable and the most loving of humans has been proscribed from society by a unanimous agreement. In the refinements of their hatred, they have sought the torment which would be cruelest to my sensitive soul and have violently broken all the ties which attached me to them.’”

After a moment of suspended animation imparting dramatic accentuation to his soliloquy, Archie went on.

“Well, Jerry, It’s fair to say I’m not the most loving of humans, but I have tried to play nice…, at least, fair…, and the proscription visited on me all these years drips with the venom of a hatred exquisitely refined by those who’ve sought to persecute me for the crime of speaking the truth.”

“And so, I endure as much as I’m able to until the intensity of the harassment becomes so severe it distracts me from doing my work. That, I can’t tolerate…. That, I won’t tolerate…. When that point is reached, I’ve learned to start fresh somewhere else.”

“This tiresome scenario is starting to replay once again,… here…. So far, it’s been restrained, but that’s how it always starts, and over time the momentum builds, more local people are recruited, the harassment becomes increasingly blatant. Well, Jerry, I’ve learned to prepare escape routes in advance.”

“Some of the best neuroscience research these days is being done in Israel. I’m going to visit some folks I know and reconnoiter. So, when I’m ready to get the hell out of UCLA, I’ll know where I want to go.”

“I do not want my purposes broadcast, and I do want your Mr. Glickman, whether he has ulterior motives or not, to stay out of my business.”

“I’m not broadcasting anything to anyone, Archie. And I’ll talk to Glickman,” I said, though I assumed telling Glickman to stay out of Archie’s world would probably just make him more curious to find out what was going on in it. This is one of the problems with paranoia. If you act as though you think people are paying inordinate attention to you, they pay inordinate attention to you.

“And please keep Myra and your siblings out of this,” Archie added in a tone indicating he knew this request didn’t need an explanation.

“Archie, I always filter anything anxiogenic from anything I say to mom, though that really doesn’t stop her from finding reasons to be anxious, and I haven’t exchanged a meaningful word with Hal or Susan in years,” I said.

“I trust you, Jerry. You’ve always been straight with me, and I hope you feel I’ve always been straight with you. I’ll do my best to insulate you from whatever my troubles at UCLA develop into.”

I experienced a bit of a mental shudder at that. I’ll do my best to keep you from getting sucked into my whirlpool.

I love Archie. He had always been straight with me.

Was it possible his former peers in the psychoanalytic wing of the psychiatry business nursed a persistent grudge over perceived acts of betrayal?

Sure. That was possible. Books have been written about the vicious internecine conflicts between schools of psychoanalysis. Their history is a lot like that of early Christian sects which battled ferociously over who had the “correct” dogma until many were snuffed out by the sect that ended up running the show in Rome. Darwinian natural selection in theo-political action.

Was it possible a psychologically sophisticated foe would use a psychologically sophisticated method of effecting persecution? Sure.

Was it possible this scheme would be perpetuated so many years? Maybe, if the perpetrators were sufficiently obsessed.

Was it possible sufficiently obsessed, psychologically sophisticated, now fairly ancient perpetrators could succeed in recruiting accomplices in the various locales to which Archie had bolted across the country? Archie could certainly piss people off, a few of the pissed might have it in for him enough to do something about it, but a proliferating network of secret, obedient conspirators doing the nefarious bidding of vengeful psychoanalytic greybeards? That, I couldn’t buy. And without that element, Archie’s account was untenable.

Still, I was emotionally unable or at least emotionally unwilling to renounce the “father” who’d always been there for me. I wouldn’t live in Archie’s world, but I wouldn’t repudiate him for doing so.

***

TOAD says: Watch out when you connect dots.

You may not like the pictures.

TOAD asks: How much of your budget is

worth investing in defense?

TOAD adds: Don’t knock cost-benefit analysis.

***

I settled my disarray to the extent I could, pretending nothing between Archie and me had changed. I could still believe in him as a quake-proof foundation I could stand on in times of turmoil.

Ah denial, a wonderful defense…, while it lasts.

***

After lunch, I attended a seminar on Kleinian psychoanalysis and was entertained with the legend of the “good breast” and the “bad breast”, a gripping tale. It’s all about evil lurking in the hearts of the infantile which to varying degrees is pretty much everyone. The villain is a wicked character called “splitting” who sets up shop in our psyches until we’re able to enter the Valhalla of emotional maturity and perceive breasts (significant others) as simultaneously good and bad rather than good or bad. Until then, we’re stuck with detecting adversaries when things are going bad and allies when things are going good, thereby distorting our perception of reality.

***

TOAD’s aphorism about Aeolian ignorance (Nobody knows which way the wind blows….) makes a similar claim about the universality of humanity’s perceptual deficiencies and its individual variations.

***

Melanie Klein’s tale might have played better around a primeval crackling campfire where exaggerated shadows and strange night noises promoted an illustrative regression into the mythic depths of the infantile unconscious. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it.

I wondered if the psychoanalyst telling the tale, a dapper, graying fellow cloaked in a Harris Tweed jacket and a snooty accent (sort of George-Plimpton-like, British or Ivy League, I couldn’t decide which), had it in for Archie. I’d bet this guy wouldn’t take kindly to having his Beverly Hills clientele induced to question his role as the personification of the good breast.

Channeling Winston, I mulled over the money making potential of inventing a new metapsychology myself. It would need only a catchy metaphor and a fast mouth. I wondered if anyone had come up with a psychoanalytic theory based on the effect of gravity? Certainly a common affliction. Eleanor knows. Therapeutic regressions could be carried out while sky diving.

Maybe set it to music and work it into The Cannibal’s Couch. “I’m falling for the taste of you….”

Mmmm. Maybe not.

***

Before heading home, I checked in at 2-South to verify nobody was in desperate need of my services and to retrieve my cell phone which I’d left on my desk. Millie assured me everything on the ward was under control and Cannonball was actually around in case anything threatened to get the upper hand on control. She did, however, supply an addendum to fuel my “What am I going to do with my life?” quandary.

“Kat stopped by,” Millie informed me. “She said she’d called you, but you didn’t answer your phone, so she told me to tell you she’ll see you at Ernie’s tonight. Oh, and I’m also supposed to tell you she loves you and if you don’t stop playing hard to get she’s going to have to stop being shy and assert herself.” Then Millie added her own contribution to the fuel supply, “You better get your act together, Dr. Bender. I like her. She’s a good kid. You better do something while you have the chance. That’s my advice.”

***

When I got home and got around to checking voicemail and missed calls, I found my phone bore the residue of eight telephonic contacts. The first was a voicemail message from Kat, half Yiddish, half Italian. It said, “Nu? Ciao!”

Voicemail message number two, from an unfamiliar number, was an awful sounding, possibly human, vaguely familiar, slightly feminine noise, which could have been uttered by a starving mountain lion who’d just missed grabbing a succulent deer. Judging from a sound print stored in my brain’s library of repugnant noises, it had been emitted by my sister. The next four bits of residual information, also from the mountain lion or at least the same phone number, were hang-ups without noises. Number seven was a second voicemail message from Kat, this time in English and Italian. “So Bender, damn you. Where the hell are you? You don’t answer your phone. You’re not at work. Are you still trying to hide from me? It won’t do you a damn bit of good. Sooner or later you’ll have to stop teasing me and give up. You love me. You can’t live without me. It is true. I know it. You know it. You don’t want to be a shrink all your life. You’re just afraid once I get you in my clutches, you’ll never escape. So OK you’re right. But it’ll be fun. I can promise you that. Meanwhile I’m going to give you a taste of your own medicine and play hard to get…, until tonight, nine o’clock, Ernie’s. Ciao!”

Number eight was a voicemail message left by my brother. It informed me how much he detested voicemail and how he wouldn’t even have left a message if he’d had more time. It included the suggestion (Seriously!) that I should be grateful I had a big brother who would make such sacrifices for my sake. The substance of the message following this preamble proclaimed he’d be in Los Angeles in two days to address a conference on psychotherapy and would see me then. To facilitate our meeting within his tight schedule, he would buy me dinner. I was ordered to choose a good restaurant.

I began working up a pretty good head of outrage. Did he think my audience could be acquired for the price of a meal? Who the hell did he think he was? Who the hell did he think I was? Did he think I’d run after him salivating because he offered me food? No gastronomic delights could make up for an evening of his egocentric anecdotes.

I was fuming fairly well when my zealous indignation was dampened by a disquieting awareness. Something didn’t make sense. Why the hell did he want to see me?

For twenty-eight years, he never wanted to see me. Why now? Sure, he’d get a kick out of subjecting me to bragging and gloating making me miserable. But he knew I still could be and would be a snot and would repay every misery in kind. Consequently he avoided me, and I avoided him, and that suited us both. Hal, turning soft and sentimental in middle age? His message didn’t sound as though he’d become any less pernicious.

At that point, the phone interrupted my conjecture, mountain lion once again on the screen.

“Hello,” I said.

“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get you all day,” she carped, not identifying herself save by her shrill uniquely abrasive voice. Somewhere in her laryngeal palette in addition to infuriated mountain lion was the whine of a dentist’s drill.

“Where I was, I couldn’t get a signal,” I explained. This was sort of true in that where I had been was not where my phone had been. “If I’d known you were going to call I’d have stayed by a cell tower all day and taken my chances with brain cancer.”

“I called five times, and all I got was your goddamn voicemail,” she whined.

“I know,” I said.

“How do you know? I didn’t leave messages,” she said.

“The first time you called, you snarled before you hung up. I’d know your snarl anywhere.”.

“I can’t stand goddamn voicemail. It’s just dehumanizing.”

“And you don’t have far to go,” I muttered, sotto voce.

“What was that?” she said.

“Eskimo fart in snow,” I repeated even more sotto.

“What?”

“Why are you calling me anyway?”

“You’ve got mother worried sick now that your residency’s ending. She thinks you won’t have any direction in your life. She’s worried about her baby,” she said, her tone cryogenic, evoking submerged memories of childhood attempts to be close to my big sister only to be met with frigid rejection.

“She’s probably afraid you’ll start shoplifting again,” she added icily.

“You knew about that?” I was astounded. I never realized.

“Of course we knew. We just didn’t know what to do about it.”

“Some psychiatrists,” I grumbled. “I suppose if I’d gotten caught, it would have been a terrible embarrassment for you.”

“It certainly would have been,” she said. Susan is so self-righteous she’s got no room left for a sense of humor. She never realizes when I’m poking fun at her which takes most of the fun out of it.

“Then, I’m glad I didn’t realize that at the time,” I said.

“Why? Would you have felt guilty?” How can she be so dense?

“On the contrary. I’d have made sure to get myself caught,” I said. “But you don’t have to worry anymore. They won’t catch me now. I’m specializing in stealing money directly from the US treasury by computer. It’s foolproof. All electronic. My computer tells their computer to tell their bank’s computer to give the money to my bank’s computer which puts it in my account. If anyone ever finds out what is going on, I’ll simply claim that their computer malfunctioned, and sue them for interfering with the sanctity of my bank account. It’s elegant. It’s fun.”

Susan was silent. Was she really considering the possibility that what I was telling her was the truth?

“You wouldn’t!” she said, thereby betraying her belief that I would and encouraging me to do it if I had even the slightest inclination to do so in the first place. How many murder victims have sealed their dooms with just those words?

“Better watch out or I’ll name you as an accessory.”

“Why is it you always have to upset everyone in the family? You’ve always had a mean streak, Jerry. (She should talk to Glickman.) Your narcissism always kept the family in turmoil.” (She was probably recalling the unforgivable history that I cried as a baby.) “If it hadn’t been for all the disruption you caused, daddy would probably still be alive.” Whew! Heavy stuff. What did I ever do? “And now you’re doing it again.” What? What?

“OK. I admit it. I’m the worst son since Oedipus. Now you’ve extracted that confession from me. Have you accomplished your mission?”

“No. I called to offer you help. Mother says you don’t know what to do with your life. She thought maybe I could help. I’m offering to help you straighten out,” she said.

“Gee. Thanks. I’ll tell her you tried,” I said.

“You don’t want to tell me what’s troubling you?” she asked hopefully.

“Oh, God,” I moaned. “The anguish is just too great to inflict on my own flesh and blood. I couldn’t do it to you. To expose my tortured soul to someone so close to me would be just too…, too cruel. No, I just can’t do it. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Maybe if you got back into analysis, it would help you?” She sounded relieved she wouldn’t be the one who had to deal with my offensive pathology.

“Maybe so,” I mused. “Say, how much longer is your analysis going to take anyhow?”

She started to give me a serious answer then, at last, realized the question was an insult. “God damn you, Jerry. You ingrate. You rotten, spoiled, narcissistic baby. You can rot in the gutter for all I care.”

“I’ll tell mom you tried,” I said.

“You’d better,” she said.

***

Susan’s call had been helpful in a perverse way. She’d solved the riddle of Hal’s call. It was now clear to me that Hal as well as Susan had been the victim of maternal coercion. He didn’t want to see me any more than I wanted to see him. That was comforting. I could still rely on some of the verities in my vault of life experience. I was even willing to give him some credit for being an obedient son. Our mother had, no doubt, prevailed on him to offer me some job counseling while he was in Los Angeles. Her inability to comprehend that any constructive interaction between me and Hal was incomprehensible was not something I could hold against him. I was sure Hal comprehended it.

Here, I give him an edge on Susan. Hal is quite comfortable acknowledging he doesn’t like me any more than I like him and leaving it at that. He doesn’t have Susan’s noxious penchant for playing Julius Caesar to my Brutus. I was not, however, so comforted that I wanted Hal’s opinion on any aspect of my personal life, especially my current quandary which may not have been truly existential in the will-I-or-won’t-I-exist sense but certainly grabbed at my core region of how-will-I…. When he got to LA, I’d find some excuse to dodge him.

I figured in Hal’s case employing the ostrich defense would be advantageous so I set my cell phone to block calls from his number and send them directly to voicemail. I’d talk to him when I felt like it, not on his schedule. I did the same for Susan’s number though I was pretty sure she’d taken her one shot for our mother. There would be no more calls from Susan.

Hal’s message did, however, trigger enough introspection for me to acknowledge, as much as I didn’t want it to be true, his opinion of my stature did affect me. I did not want to go through life being unfavorably compared to my father, my uncle, my siblings, even if the comparisons came only from myself.

If Italy with Kat was the chance of a lifetime, so was a paid seat on the UCLA faculty. Whatever his motives, Hargrove was offering me an opportunity which might never come around again. As a psychiatrist on the UCLA faculty, I’d get some respect, even prestige. That was a sure thing. (Something Glickman could appreciate.) I too would be Professor Bender. All it would take was what I already brought to the dance and a moderate amount of diligence, not genius, not inspiration, not luck. Not courage. For the moment, I chose not to deal with the last one.

Maybe get Millie and Agnes to stop fighting? Mm! There’s a meaningful career goal! Not the exalted level of Carlossi’s human salvation but something.

For me to take a pass on what Hargrove was offering would be like a minor league shortstop taking off on a fishing trip just when he’s given a shot at the bigs. I’d have to be crazy to throw away all the time and effort I’d already invested in a profession that pretty much guaranteed a place in the aristocracy of social esteem (At least a social esteem I’d grown up with, “You must be proud to have such a famous father.” and all that.). I told myself that. Hargrove, I was sure, would think such an ill-timed romantic escapade with Kat meant I’d lost my marbles.

Kat, I was equally sure, wouldn’t give a damn what Hargrove or anyone else thought and wouldn’t understand why I did. She also wouldn’t understand why I was making such a big deal about chucking all the time and effort I’d put into becoming a psychiatrist.

“Then, you did that! Now, you do this! What’s the big deal?” she’d say.

TOAD would probably say the same thing.

Simultaneous, incompatible, insurmountable opportunities.

It was possible I could get some useful advice from Berkowitz and Winston at Ernie’s before Kat arrived. And even if advice wasn’t forthcoming or wasn’t productive, just articulating my impasse out loud to someone else might ease me into a resolution. Psychotherapy often works that way.

***

I got to Ernie’s just as the TOADies finished noding. (Not an uncaught spelling error. To be explained shortly.) Winston and Berkowitz, occupying our usual table near the piano, had already started on a pitcher of beer. I picked up two glasses from the bar and joined them.

Other than treating Carlossi, I generally managed to minimize direct contact with TOAD, a practice I maintained for various reasons, not the least of which was my relationship with Hargrove who’d written an article, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry a couple of months earlier, about “the menace of cults and other predaceous pseudo-religions”. He mentioned TOAD as an example of the latter. I think that was a mistake on his part. I think he was wrong about TOAD being predaceous. I don’t know if he’d agree now that TOAD was not then predaceous, but he’d probably agree it was a mistake to say so.

Staying clear of TOAD was, for me, no mean feat considering where and how and with whom I spent a lot of my time.

Ernie’s is the locus of the original TOAD Node.

Bobbi is the Madonna of TOAD.

***

Early on, Ernie had told me Bobbi was an exceptionally mystical being. “She has a natural instinct for cosmic spirituality,” he explained. Ernie’s exceptional faculty for clarity of musical exposition is not matched by an equivalent aptitude when it comes to rhetorical exposition. He didn’t understand the concept of “cosmic spirituality” any better than I did but when understanding failed him reverence sufficed.

Since early in her life, Ernie related, Bobbi possessed (maybe was possessed by) spiritual instincts. However, until TOAD, her transcendent prowess had been attenuated by her inability to organize her chaotic notions about religion. She’d spent years seeking spiritual enlightenment, comparison shopping amidst the myriad disparate belief systems flourishing in the Los Angeles area. She’d attended services of religions, quasi-religions, cults, clans and covens. She actually produced an award winning series of TV news stories based on her efforts. The editors of her “Binko’s Beat” segments of the evening news kept the mind boggling array of faiths sorted into digestible packages fit for consumption by the standard twelve year old intellect for which their news programs were tailored. Bobbi’s own intellect, however, was as boggled as could be by the slurry of philosophies and rituals she’d sampled. As a result, she ended up with a religious persuasion à la collage, developed not by logical inquiry but by accretion of the bits and pieces of her experiences in the cathedrals, churches, synagogues, storefronts and back rooms littering Binko’s Beat.

Bobbi’s haphazard quest for enlightenment led her to an eccentric theology. Her view of God was not a traditional “Creator of the Universe”, but something she called the “Divine Designer”, a sort of celestial Martha Stewart. “The DD saw all that loose stuff floating around the void,” said Ernie, paraphrasing his esteemed wife’s version of cosmogony, “and decided to organize it to make the universe more tasteful.”

“Mm, Decorator of the Stars,” I said and laughed.

Ernie frowned at my irreverence, but continued. “Bobbi says the source of troubles in the world is everybody’s unconscious fear the DD’s taste will change and inspire a new design for the universe, not just small time stuff like earthquakes and ice ages but a reorganization of the entire collection including the basic laws that make up the meaning of everything. So, says Bobbi, people are driven to score as many points as they can while they still know how to play the game. That causes tension, conflict and aggression and all the bad things stuff like that leads to.”

“I can see how that could be nerve wracking. One day you look out at the universe, and there’d be a sign…, Under New Management. Were there other… uh, others who followed this faith?”

“We had really just started organizing. We were going to send out a monthly newsletter. Then, TOAD happened.”

***

The “Binko’s Beat” piece had given TOAD a jump start, and Bobbi was celebrated as TOAD’s discoverer and evangelist in chief.

Since TOAD first went up on the web, Bobbi had been one of its foremost contributors, and since other users astonishingly, tended to give her contributions high marks she was one of the most influential contributors. I find this astonishing because her TOAD postings are derivative of her garbled theological history and her adoration of the Divine Designer. It has been said, in Bobbi’s conception, TOAD offers something for everybody.

I’d say, in Bobbi’s version, TOAD offers everything for everybody.

***

Carl Sagan said: The major religions on the Earth

contradict each other left and right.

You can’t all be correct.

TOAD says: All religions and their contradictions

are simultaneously correct.

But maybe not in the same universe.

Richard Feynman would probably have agreed with TOAD.

***

Writing in the TOAD blog, some quantum physics theorists have debated over whether Bobbi’s theological contribution to the TOAD canon is a corollary of Richard Feynman’s “Sum Over Histories” which offers an explanation of the observation that subatomic particles simultaneously follow all possible paths around the universe in their journeys from point A to point B. Thus reality is an actuarial construct dependent on probabilities. This works for Feynman and TOAD.

Bobbi has yet to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

***

The content of Bobbi’s offerings to TOAD is fortunately laden not so much with the jargon of quantum mechanics as with that of her day job. Thus, the output of TOAD has come to take on the flavor of a local television news broadcast.

Bobbi’s doctrine runs something like this: since everything that exists in any category, spiritual, material, moral, intellectual, emotional, you name it, has been collected and placed in the Divine Design by the Divine Designer, everything is ipso facto valid and acceptable. True holiness is realized when one attains “Ultimate Acceptance”, a station achieved by adopting a mélange of all beliefs no matter how inconsistent or contradictory they are. Bobbi (thence TOAD) calls this “Full Coverage”. Arriving at the station of Full Coverage can lead to enormous confusion (probably similar to the plight of an eclectic psychiatrist whose brains are falling out), but submission to heightened confusion can with sufficient practice and mental effort induce a trance-like condition which actually serves to enhance its mystical allure sort of like Transcendental Meditation.

Bobbi’s comforting TOADian take-home message is: Anyone who believes anything can feel right at home, and those who believe everything are on the path to Nirvana.

***

If one accepts Bobbi’s teachings in TOAD, the inescapable conclusion about the morality of human conduct is: all actions and decisions are simultaneously proper and meaningless. Proper, in that they become valid components of the Divine Design and meaningless in that any other action or decision would also have become a valid component of the Divine Design. Bobbi and her acolytes seem content to pursue her teachings somewhere short of their logical conclusions.

If Feynman were still alive, he might say about the theology of TOAD that it represents an accurate portrayal of moral reality in all possible universes. What moral reality an observer would find in this particular universe would depend on an analysis of the statistical probabilities of all the elements comprising this universe and the histories they could have experienced. Good luck putting all that together in time to make a decision.

For some people, notably Ernie, TOAD’s philosophy works better than Valium. For others, it’s been fortunate that TOAD’s open editing permits users with a higher standard of rational discourse and a lower threshold for cognitive dissonance to refurbish Bobbi’s contributions.

So proceedeth the ceaseless dynamic of TOAD.

***

Whereas I have little regard for Bobbi’s theology (or Carl Sagan’s for that matter), I do acknowledge Bobbi’s brilliance in coming up with the concept of TOAD Nodes.

Bobbi is a people-person. When she interviews the denizens of Binko’s Beat she casts a net of enchantment, binding them to her in a kind of empathic plasma. They lose all inhibition and feel free to tell Bobbi on camera anything she wants them to talk about. (Glickman’s pretty good at that too.) The popularity of Binko’s Beat is no accident.

Though she contributed often and ardently to the TOAD website, Bobbi felt stifled by the lack of face-to-face humanity. The virtual community of TOAD had its virtues, Bobbi would concede, but without a congregation of real people, it was deficient. Her fix for this deficit was the institution of TOAD Nodes which she proposed and promoted in the TOAD Blog. TOAD Nodes were to be places in the real world where TOADies could meet and greet and practice TOAD.

Bobbi chose Ernie’s Bar and Grill (no surprise) as the inaugural real world TOAD Node locale, and Ernie’s has ever since lent itself to this enterprise every Monday evening from seven to eight-thirty.

Nodal services at Ernie’s (Other TOAD Nodes’ modes vary.) typically consist of readings from any sources offering views of reality or morality or schemes for dealing with either one of them. On any given evening, one might be subjected to the thought of Moses, Mae West, Bertrand Russell, Jane Russell, Russell Westbrook, Jimi Hendrix, Confucius, John the Frog (a local Voodoo practitioner) and others. Presenters are limited to ninety seconds (a practice Bobbi borrowed from her TV news experience). Devotees are thereby exposed to a kaleidoscope of notions, and the chance for one species of notion to gain ascendancy over any other by virtue of having more “air time”, as Bobbi calls the reading sessions, is minimized. Presenters are encouraged to create their own readings either de novo or by combining the thoughts of two or more recognized thinkers. A popular combination, I’ve been told, is Casey Stengel and John the Frog. Bobbi thinks this is due to similarities in their manner of expression rather than the content of their thought.

Ernie’s offers a free Wi-Fi hotspot so that TOADies toting tablets, laptops, or smartphones, who are inspired by the nodal goings-on can log on and fire off updates to the TOAD canon in real time.

One of the side benefits of hosting a TOAD Node for Ernie was enthusiastic consumption of drinks and burgers by TOADies who’d come for the noding but wanted to augment TOADian food for the soul with Ernie’s food for the gut.

***

A Freudian might say: TOADian nodal experience

promoted a regression

to the infantile oral phase of

psychosexual development.

A Kleinian might say: Ernie’s was the good breast.

Leo Winston said: Mm! A quick buck.

***

Leo prowled Southern California, identifying bars, restaurants, night clubs and various other venues whose owners would agree to host TOAD Nodes. Leo proposed to take care of the marketing for a cut of the take. The appetite of TOADies for new, hip nodal locales proved insatiable and kept the already busy Leo even busier.

Quite a few nodal attendees actually utilize TOAD Nodes as instruments of social outreach, sort of social media with flesh. TOADian piety is available in many flavors.

***

Ernie and Bobbi persistently solicited my participation in the Ernie’s B&G TOAD Node. Ernie thought it would be “real classy” if a psychiatrist read something by Freud. I told them nothing written by Freud could be intelligibly presented in ninety seconds. I joked, almost disastrously, it would make as much sense to read ninety seconds worth of material from the notebook of one of my psychotic patients. They alarmed me with the assurance that either one would be acceptable (and presumably equally classy). I managed to get off the hook only by insisting professional responsibility to a colleague prevented me from doing an injustice to Freud’s memory by inadequately presenting his ideas (I was banking on an assumption that the ninety second rule was inviolable. I was right.) and the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship prevented me from divulging the products of my patients’ thoughts.

I did not know, at the time, the patient I had in mind, Frank Carlossi, had, himself, been regaling noding TOADies with ninety second excerpts from MANUBOTO.

***

I did know the fabric of Carlossi’s stability had been fraying over the past few months. He occasionally missed some of our weekly appointments. When he managed to show up, he seemed increasingly though still subtly agitated and dysphoric. He had reasonable sounding excuses for cancelling appointments, and while he acknowledged not feeling quite right, he couldn’t or wouldn’t identify a satisfying cause, maybe odious Computer Science Department politics he once suggested. His lithium level remained where it was supposed to be, he was sleeping OK, and he really didn’t appear manic, just uncomfortable.

In our recent sessions, he’d been spending a lot of time obsessing about his dissatisfaction with the philosophical trajectory TOAD was following. Of particular concern to him was the TOADian notion that the rules of the universe (including TOAD’s rules) could willy-nilly undergo change. He did acknowledge that such a tenet arising from user inputs to TOAD was an evolutionary development following the principles of natural selection he himself had built into TOAD’s algorithms. The Golden Rule could not be removed from the core of TOAD. He’d made that invulnerable (unless Bobbi was right about the impermanence of fundamental universal rules and their vulnerability to whimsy on the part of the DD, in which case nothing Carlossi had done was going to make any difference anyhow). But he couldn’t become comfortable with the TOADian insistence that every other element of doctrine was fungible in accordance with the whims of TOAD’s registered users despite his having made it so. That the truth or falsity of ethical propositions varied moment to moment was to Carlossi deeply creepy. The random messiness of moral evolution driven by natural selection chafed at his need for predictable order. His faith in the capacity of the mass of TOAD-using humanity to reach the exalted end he intended was being severely tested.

“Doc, you’re the Messiah of TOAD,” he said to me one day as he often had before. “I’m just your Saul of Tarsus. You spoke the Word, and I built TOAD, your church, to realize your teaching, to implement your pathway to salvation. I need you to tell me: Is TOAD good?”

“Frank, keep in mind,” I said to him as I often had before. “I’m just a doctor. I’m not a theologian. I’m not a priest. I’m not a deity. I’ll grant TOAD has become full of a lot of weird stuff. But the people using it seem to feel it helps them with their lives. TOAD still seems to promote goodness between people despite the strange content it’s acquired. So, it seems to be working. How it’s working, I don’t know. But it’s working. It is good, and it’s accomplishing a lot of what you wanted, getting people to pay attention to what’s right and what’s not, connecting people to their goodness.”

***

As I and my two glasses arrived at the table, Winston was engaged in that night’s version of his familiar jeremiad about dock fees at the Marina and was fantasizing about running for the County Board of Supervisors so he could correct the iniquity.

“Guys, I need a consultation,” I said pouring myself a glass of semi-flat beer.

“Patient related?” queried Berkowitz.

“Investments?” queried Winston.

“Life,” I said, and took in a swig of beer.

“Better to have it than not,” Berkowitz advised, deadpan. “You got it, keep it. Long as you can. At least that’s my considered medical opinion.”

“Yeah, the alternative’s deadly,” Winston added.

“No doubt,” I said, “but my quandary’s more qualitative than quantitative,” and I filled them in on my difficulty resolving the opportunities proffered by Hargrove and Kat.

“Taking off with Kat would be exciting,” I said. “I mean how many chances do you get in life to just play and love and create, and there’s a project I’ve been monkeying around with I could work on. But you know who’s in my family. I don’t want to go down in history as the pathetically deviant heir to the Lebovics and Bender gene pool who ran off with a femme fatal and amounted to nothing, or worse. And you guys also know who’s on the faculty here, or anywhere else for that matter. They’re not all brilliant scientists like Archie or hustlers like Hargrove. Some of them are just good teachers, problem solvers, people who can make a system work. I’m pretty good at that stuff. I know I’ll have to publish to stay around, but there’s plenty of publishable stuff to talk about in this business besides hard science. I can handle that. Once I’m in the door, unless I totally screw up, I can follow a fairly well-trodden career path to tenure and authority and enjoy a life as a respected member of my community, maybe even my family. I think I’ve gotta go with Hargrove’s offer, but I don’t want to lose Kat. What do you think?”

Berkowitz spoke first. “The faculty appointment’s a plum to grab while you’ve got the chance. If you take a pass now but want to try something like it later on, maybe you’ll succeed, but there’ll be lots of competition. Italy’s not going away…, though, with global warming, some of the best parts may end up under water…, you could take up scuba diving…, and, if you and Kat really have a future, she’ll stay connected. I don’t know how much you can rely on Hargrove, but getting in the faculty door is a good first step, and after that your future there is gonna be more up to you than him. Hargrove is ninety-nine percent hype and glitz. He’s never done anything beyond generating interesting ideas and unlimited charm. But I think you’re not a lamebrain. So, I’m disposed to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

“I appreciate your confidence.”

“I vote with Bernie,” Winston added. “If you chuck this opportunity now, a reputation as a flake might be hard to overcome if you ever want to get into the academic end of the business down the road.”

“OK,” I said. “I guess the three of us all see it the same way. Now I just have to figure out how to make it a foursome and convince Kat to stick with me.”

“Look,” Winston said. “Be an optimist. Financial security and some prestige might even enhance your allure with Kat. And speaking of financial security….” He modulated into crowing about how well his “TOAD Node Promotions” business was doing and trying to seduce Berkowitz and me into joining him in branching out nationally and even internationally.

“We could make millions,” he claimed. “You’d get to travel all over the world, tax deductible, scouting locations…. Jerry, are you paying attention?”

I was paying attention…, but not to Winston.

Kat’s arrival offered a welcome respite from Winston’s incessant sales pitch. She was glowing with excitement. The glow could have come from of a whiff of amyl nitrate, but I went with excitement. “Hi, guys,” she said to Berkowitz and Winston while waving a greeting to Ernie behind the bar and in the same fluid motion tossing her canvas bag and a portfolio on the table, snuggling her way onto my lap, pulling her broad brimmed straw hat askew to shield us from view and smothering me with a voracious kiss.

“Alright, so you’re not glad to see me,” I said when I could breathe.

She straightened her hat, “I’ve got presents. I can’t wait to show you.”

“Is this something you can do in public?” I asked.

“Sure, totally wholesome,” she said, undulating off my lap and onto a chair. “First,” she said, reaching into her bag and extracting with a dramatic flourish, a Berlitz Italian-English phrasebook.

My heart sunk, and it must have registered on my face. Kat froze like a startled deer waiting, motionless, for me to explain my body language. “What?”

“I’ve decided to take Hargrove up on his offer of the 2-South Ward Chief job,” I said.

“What? Nooo!”

“I know you think psychiatry is just some unfortunate detour I’ve gotten suckered into. But you’re wrong…. Kat, this is the main road for me. Sure I get a kick out of music, but that life’s a fantasy. It might come true, but this is real now. It’s what I’m good at and what I’m trained for, what I’ve put a hell of a lot of time into earning.”

I was becoming uncomfortably aware of the two voyeurs across the table but pushed on. “Going to Italy with you would be living a romantic dream, but it’s like that movie, Elvira Madigan. I can see you and me, and sun and flowers and hear the Mozart… and the gunshots at the end…. I’m afraid when the summer’s over, and reality’s replaced romance…. I mean, I can always earn a living, but this UCLA deal is something special.”

“Bender, you’ve got to stop watching movies. Amadeus, Elvira Madigan. They’re stifling you.”

“Kat, I can’t give up my opportunity here. I want your support. I want your understanding. I want you to keep loving me.”

“I won’t stop loving you, Bender.” No one else was at the table for her. “I’m not giving up on you, and I’m not giving you up. If you think I’m going to let that… cabronazo …, Hargrove get away with this you’re loco. I don’t like that son-of-a-bitch one bit. You’ve told me plenty about him. I know he’s got to have some no-good motive up his sleeve.”

“What do you mean ‘motive’?” I erupted, though I’d wondered about the same thing myself. “What motive does he have to have except having me fill a slot he needs filled. He’s offering me a great job and a kick start to a prestigious career. We’ve known each other for three years. We know each other pretty well. He needs a job filled. I need a job. I’m the right choice. It’s a natural. It makes sense. It’s not too good to be true. It’s just good for him, for me, for anyone who really cares about me.”

“Oh, that’s great,” she said. “Now I can’t really care about you unless I agree with you.”

“Yes! Damn it! Caring about me has to include having some respect for my opinions. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether you like Hargrove or not. He’s not offering you a job.”

“And I wouldn’t take it if he did.”

“Kat, I’m not going to miss this boat. I’ve earned my place on it by doing good work for three years here, by being smart, conscientious, dependable, by showing Hargrove and anyone else who cares if they hire me I’ll make them look good. This is about me not about Hargrove. He’s just opening a door for me.”

We glared at each other until, overwhelmed by an abundance of stupidity, I said, “You’re jealous. That’s what your problem is. You can’t accept the reality that the trip you’re promoting is coming in second to Hargrove’s so you attack him and you attack me. You don’t care about me. You just care about you, and you’re jealous. To you Hargrove’s a rival, and you’re taking your jealousy out on me.”

We glared some more until she stood up and said, “Bender, you’re chicken. You’re afraid to do what you know you really want to do. You’re wrong. You’re nuts. And I’m going to prove it to you. Hargrove’s got you under his evil spell. You can’t think straight…. I’m not giving up.”

She grabbed her bag and portfolio and started around the fireplace toward the door. After a few steps, she turned, reached into her portfolio and pulled out a sheaf of drawings which she tossed in the general direction of the table and said, “I almost forgot your other present.” Her eyes shimmered with tears and fury. Then she turned, disappeared around the fireplace and left.

I sat, silent, incensed. Anger the only emotion I allowed myself to acknowledge. Damned if I was going to go running after her, as I was convinced she expected.

For a while, Winston and Berkowitz were either too stunned by the scene or too considerate to say anything. For which I was grateful. Winston whose mouth had the greatest recuperative powers and the least susceptibility to consideration, was the first to speak.

“She’s right,” he said.

“What!” I shouted, an exclamation, not a question.

“If Hargrove does really need you now, you’ve got him by the short hairs. You ought to leverage that. A signing bonus. Time off to help out your old friend, Leo Winston, expand TOAD Node Promotions.”

“Leo…! Shut up.”

“OK. OK.”

“What do you think?” I queried in the direction of Berkowitz.

Bernie chewed, swallowed and said, “First, I think you should pick up Kat’s drawings before some drunk spills his beer on them.”

I did and noticed the title page, “Set Design Sketches for The Cannibal’s Couch”. My guts wrenched. I put them on the table where they’d be at least marginally safer.

Bernie continued. “Second, I like Kat, and I’m sorry you two are at odds.”

“She’ll calm down,” I said without conviction. “Look, I love her. I didn’t come here tonight with a plan to pick a fight with her. But I can’t follow her around like the caboose on a runaway train. Can I?”

When no response to “Can I?” was forthcoming, I continued. “I wanted to be able to share this with her more than anything, but if she doesn’t want to share it with me, I can’t make her. Maybe this is happening the best way after all. She’ll calm down, and we’ll make up. She’ll go to Italy and learn to be a great set designer and, in a year when she’s ready to come back and take Hollywood by storm, I’ll be a lock in the UCLA firmament. Then Kat and I can settle down… sort of.”

“We can all drink to that,” Winston said brandishing his beer. “If only Kat were here drinking with us…. Here’s to us and our domains, you and UCLA, Bernie and the puppets, me and the global economy.”

“Right, Leo,” Berkowitz said.

“Thank you. I normally charge by the toast, but, out of respect for Jerry, on this special occasion…, on the house…. What’s with the drawings?”

“Oh. I’ve been playing around with writing a musical comedy. That’s the project I would have worked on in Italy. Kat knew I was ambivalent. I guess she made some sketches of sets for the show to whet my appetite…, maybe tilt the balance in her direction.”

“No wonder she was so upset,” Berkowitz said softly. I nodded sadly, in agreement.

“You never told me you were writing a musical comedy,” Winston said as though I was contractually obligated to keep him informed of everything I did. “Is it any good?”

I shrugged noncommittally.

“I suppose you don’t have an agent?” he asked sounding as though he was certain a dope like me would be unaware of the need for such a critical commercial appurtenance. He was right, though he didn’t wait for me to tell him so. “You gotta have an agent, man. I mean, if you want to get into the big bucks. These days there’s lotsa money in stuff like that. If you want a good deal for movie rights and audio and all that other stuff, you’d better get a good agent. That’s the most important thing.”

“Do you want the job, Leo?” I asked.

“Who me?” he responded, momentarily caught off guard. “I don’t know anything about that business.”

Berkowitz and I shared a grin.

“On the other hand,” Winston said, instantly reconsidering the question before allowing himself to relinquish any opportunity offering even the slimmest chance of making money, “what’s to know? I’d probably be good at it. So, what’s the story?”

“You’re right, Leo. Getting an agent has never crossed my mind,” I admitted.

“No, no. I mean, what’s the story? What’s the plot? What’s the show about? What’s it called? That stuff.”

“I’d like to hear it,” Berkowitz said.

“All right,” I grumbled in a petulant tone, hoping to heighten their awareness that I was giving in to their demands and they’d better not be too critical.

“It’s called The Cannibal’s Couch. Here’s the story: A half-drowned, beautiful, blond, girl is washed ashore on a tropical island after falling off her father’s yacht during a typhoon. She’s nursed back to health after her ordeal by a handsome witch doctor who’d kept her off the lunch menu by convincing his cannibal tribe-mates via song that blonds give you gas. She tells him she’s been a cheerleader and a dancer since she was a little kid and her life-long dream has been to be a Radio City Rockette. She knows she has the talent, but her career’s been stifled by a disabling case of stage fright. The witch doctor, who has recently returned to the island from Harvard where he did a combined residency in psychiatry and tropical medicine, makes a few timely psychoanalytic interpretations from the Greek tragedies and cures her. At which point, her father’s yacht, which has survived the storm, arrives, with some musical references to The Flying Dutchman, and she sails off to New York, fame and fortune, leaving the witch-doctor in a state of disagreeable ambivalence, having cured his patient but lost his love.”

“I’d buy a ticket,” Berkowitz said kindly.

“The ending!” Winston exclaimed. “It’s gotta be upbeat if you wanna make any money.”

“That’s just the first act,” I snapped hoping to make him feel gauche, as though he’d applauded after the first movement of a Beethoven sonata. “If you promise to act enthused, maybe someday, I’ll tell you the rest.”

***

When I got home, I carefully composed an email to Kat. I wrote, “Your sketches are perfect. You make me feel vital and creative. I don’t want to lose you. I love you.”

I also told her I was who I was and a big part of who I was was the professional identity into which I’d put a hell of a lot of time and effort, and I was now being offered an opportunity to raise that part to another level. I reprised some of what I’d said to Berkowitz and Winston about my sense of hereditary burden. I told her I really wanted to find a solution. I told her again, “I love you.”

About an hour after I sent it off, she replied, “Yeah…. Right.”

***

Chapter IV

Salvation

Carlossi showed up for his appointment the following day. He didn’t look so good. His fraying mental fabric had seriously unraveled. He hadn’t slept. He was tremulous, twitchy, and his sunken red rimmed eyes flashed with wanton agitation. MANUBOTO once again was clutched in his arms.

I ordered stat electrolytes and lithium level. Glickman offered to escort him to the lab and make sure Carlossi and the results made back to the ward.

When they with evidence of a seriously sub-therapeutic lithium level and slightly off base electrolytes had returned, I sat Carlossi down in my office and said, holding up the lab report, “This is not good, Frank.”

“It’s not enough!” he insisted as he popped up from the chair.

“Well, you’re probably not taking the dose you should be taking,” I suggested, assuming he was referring to his lithium dose. He sat again momentarily, and then was up again, agitatedly pacing around in my office’s meager pacing space.

“TOAD’s not enough. Humanity’s not enough. TOAD’s corrupted. It’s distorted, way off track. Evil’s been at work to undo all the good we’ve accomplished. But I can fix it. They’re calling out to me for help. I hear them calling. I’m ready to answer the call. We do need the key. I know that now. I need to find it, to solve it, to decode it, to figure it out for all of humanity, to do the calculations. And I will,” he said shaking MANUBOTO in my direction. “I’ve gotten back to work. My mind is sharp. I’m almost there. I sense it. When I get it, I’ll repair TOAD. I’ll repair the world. I’ll repair humanity. I’ll repair the universe. It’s all going to be wonderful. You’ll see. So much time…, just wasted, but I’m working just fine now, and I’m so close. I just wanted you to know I’m taking care of things the right way, so you don’t have to worry. That’s why I came in today. But I have to get back to work. You’ll see, it’s going to be great. You’ll see. I’m on it. It’s all here. It’ll be fantastic!”

“I’m glad to hear you’re working well, Frank,” I said. “But you need to sleep too, and I’m worried about your electrolytes and other chemistries and your kidneys. Your lithium level is much too low. You look dehydrated. All this stuff getting out of whack can really mess up your health, and then you won’t be able to work,” I said, hoping a focus on mundane bodily concerns would sell him on my next statement. “I want you to come into the hospital so we can check you out better and make sure all your systems are all working the way they should.”

I didn’t think I could get away with putting Carlossi on a hold, legal niceties being what they are in California. I was banking on his having at least a subliminal perception that he needed help and enough trust to let me provide it. I was guessing that’s what had gotten him to the appointment in the first place. I guess I’d guessed right. He agreed to stay.

I found his pulse a bit on the high side, his blood pressure a bit on the low side, his skin, dryish and inelastic, but no apparent problems that couldn’t be alleviated by something to drink with the right chemicals in it, assuming Millie and her subordinates could get him drinking and an IV wouldn’t be necessary. I ordered more lab work and some Seroquel to slow him down and, hopefully, allow him to get some sleep. I was afraid if he actually resumed taking lithium while dehydrated, he could end up with too high a level which could be lethal. He was lucky he’d stopped taking lithium when he stopped eating, drinking and sleeping, though that’s probably a chicken and egg issue.

I told him he’d be restricted to the ward until we got his bodily functions sorted out. He seemed agreeable. As I left the ward, I observed him regaling Glickman, most likely about his mission of universal salvation, gesticulating with MANUBOTO in one hand and a bottle of some greenish electrolyte replacement drink in the other. Glickman, ever the good trooper, looked enthralled.

***

After lunch, with no ward business demanding my attention, I went for a bike ride through lower Bel Air and upper Beverly Hills to air out my head and lungs and formulate some plan to approach Kat without digging my hole even deeper and maybe even convince her to stay In Los Angeles. Sure, Italy would be interesting, but there certainly must be venues in Los Angeles for advancing her study of set design. And…, she’d have me!…. I was convinced.

By the time I’d absorbed all the air my head and lungs could use and returned to the ward, it was around four o’clock. I was still convinced but no closer to a promising scheme for convincing Kat.

Millie was waiting for me when I arrived. “Dr. Winston came by looking for you, I told him you went for a bike ride and didn’t want to be called unless it was an emergency. He said it wasn’t. And Frank Carlossi’s been keeping the ward nice and agitated. He’s in everybody’s face with TOAD and MANUBOTO. Now, he’s a double handful with two things to drive us all crazy with. It was a lot easier when there was just one. Believe me, doll, that man is ready to go back on lithium. His vitals are fine, and he’s had plenty to drink. He says he’s willing to take lithium, but he’s refusing the Seroquel you ordered to slow him down. He says he’s taken it before and doesn’t like it. He says it slows him down. And…, oh yes, do you have a brother?”

“Unfortunately, I do,” I confessed.

“Well, honey, you need to teach that man some manners. He called a couple hours ago. At first, I thought he was someone impersonating you when he said he was Dr. Bender, so I told him he didn’t sound like Dr. Bender. Then he got real uppity and started giving orders like this was his plantation. He said you weren’t answering your cell phone and I’d better make sure you got the message that your brother, Dr. Bender, had arrived and to make certain you called him by three o’clock. So, sure enough at three o’clock he calls back demanding to know if I gave you the message and yelling about how can I not know where you are and when you’ll be back and what kind of operation are we running anyway and I better make sure you get the message.”

“That’s my brother.”

“Well, he left a number, but if I were you, I wouldn’t call him.”

“If I don’t call him, I can’t teach him manners. Just be thankful he’s not your brother.”

On the other hand, a manners tutorial could wait. No rush to return Hal’s call. I could still savor my measure of perversity.

I envisioned him pacing around a hotel room glaring at his phone, willing it to ring, willing it to bring me under his control, furious that neither the phone, nor I, nor Millie were behaving in accordance with his desires. He would learn nothing by waiting, but I would demonstrate my independence if only to myself.

***

I found Frank Carlossi in the day room engaged in animated conversation with the chronically schizophrenic Marsha Jablonsky, the only other inpatient for whom I was primarily responsible. Marsha’s mental state had been approaching discharge condition, and I was anxious to intervene before Carlossi’s frenetic energy threw her out of kilter, a serious risk. Carlossi, whose hydration did look better, played the animated side of the conversation. Marsha, unless she is ragingly psychotic, gets about as animated as petrified wood. Her affective blankness was, sadly, a sign of therapeutic progress. She was ready to return to the domestic cocoon of life with her tedious but steadfast husband. They are an amazingly good match.

***

TOAD has heartening messages for the lovelorn:

Love is strange and mysterious.

People are wonderfully diverse.

Connection is unpredictable.

Attraction is inscrutable.

Love is out there.

Keep trying.

Marsha and her husband could be the poster children.

***

Lately, Marsha at her best is not as much off base as she used to be She’s been a subject in a research project conducted by Cannonball, studying social cognition in schizophrenia. He’s attempting in essence to teach schizophrenic subjects to read other real people’s minds in actuality (which most people without schizophrenia are pretty good at) as opposed to in hallucinations. He believes this will help them get along better in a world full of other real people. By virtue of her status as Cannonball’s subject, she got to be hospitalized at UCLA, and I got to be her doctor.

***

“Oh, hi Doc,” said Frank, beaming, as I came into view. “I was just telling Marsha about TOAD and how I’m repairing it. I don’t think she understands much about MANUBOTO, but I think TOAD would be absolutely great for Marsha.”

“Don’t you think so, Marsha?” he asked.

“Huh?” said Marsha.

“I think TOAD would help Marsha out of her shell,” he said to me.

What a terrifying prospect! Marsha’s shell, painstakingly fabricated with antipsychotic medication and cognitive therapy, was a vital containment vessel keeping her reality testing, her frail social cognition and the rest of her life together. Her record was full of disastrous efforts to help her hatch. I wanted to nip Carlossi’s amateur therapy in the bud. Surprisingly, Marsha beat me to it.

“Don’t worry, Dr. Bender,” she said, flaunting her improved capacity to read my mind, “I know that stuff’s not for me. I need my peace and quiet.”

“I agree, Marsha,” I said. “Too much stimulation throws you out of kilter. How do you feel today?”

“Huh?”

“How do you feel today?”

“I feel fine. Can I go home?”

“Sure, if you think you’re ready. Are the radio messages still bothering you?”

‘‘Huh?

“Are the radio messages still bothering you?”

“Oh, they’re fine.”

“Do you still think your neighbors are trying to control your thoughts?”

“Huh?”

“Are you aware every time someone asks you something, you say ‘Huh?’?”

“They mind their own business.”

“The neighbors?”

“Huh?”

Marsha was as good as she gets, ready for discharge back to the day treatment program. I also noted Frank had been able to keep his mouth shut while I talked with Marsha, for him an admirable display of impulse control despite his low lithium level.

“That guy who claims he’s Dr. Bender is on the phone again,” announced Millie from the nurses’ station door. “I know it’s the same one because when I told him you were with a patient, he started to blow up again. You want me to disconnect him?”

“No, thanks Millie. Transfer him to my office,” I said indulging an impulse to keep Hal waiting a bit longer rather than taking the call in the nurses’ station.

“All right. It’s your funeral.”

A few minutes later, I said, “Hello, this is Dr. Bender,” trying to sound professional and pretend I was unaware of the caller’s ID.

“This is your brother, Hal,” he said peevishly and redundantly. He knows as well as I do I only have one brother and he’s it. “Do you know how long it’s taken me to get through to you?”

“I am truly grateful for your dedication,” I said, reprising my earlier pas de deux with Susan. “I haven’t spoken to a soul in weeks. If it hadn’t been for your persistence I don’t know when I would have had human contact again.”

“That dimwit who answered the phone refused to get you on the line,” he said. “No wonder everything in California is so weird. I don’t see how anyone who isn’t an absolute moron can stand to live here. Cretins! Imbeciles! Did you get my message?”

My first impulse was to ask “What message?” but I exercised my own impressive impulse control and said, “Sure, what time do you want to eat?”

“You mean you didn’t make a reservation?” he said astounded.

“ How could I? I didn’t know your schedule.”

“Oh, right,” he condescended, displaying rare forbearance for the inadequacies of his baby brother. “Eight o’clock. Do you have a car?”

“Hal, this is Los Angeles,” I reminded him.

“Yes, I suppose so. I’m staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. You can pick me up.”

“We can have dinner there,” I suggested, thinking the Beverly Hills Hotel was swanky enough to suit anyone.

“Hotel food?” he exclaimed incredulously.

“Rrright…, I’ll find someplace else,” I said quickly before he could launch a lecture on the ignoble aesthetic of eating in an establishment where sleeping was allowed.

“I’ll pick you up at seven forty-five.”

“See you then,” Hal said and hung up.

***

My two favorite places for dining out at that time being Ernie’s and the sushi bar at a downtown Japanese hotel, I felt a need for consultation with someone who had greater experience with refined cuisine in Los Angeles. Leo Winston seemed likely to be my best source of information about elegant eateries around town, and I still had to find out why he was looking for me.

I explained the situation to Leo.

“Who’s buying?” he asked.

“He is.”

“Take him to Café Chaparral. It’s up in the hills, secluded, very in, very expensive. He’ll be impressed. Tell the Maître D I told you to call, and they’ll have a table for you.”

“Thanks, Leo,” I said.

“Think nothing of it. That’s what agents are for.”

“Millie said you were looking for me. What’s up?” I asked.

“Kat called me. She thinks the show you’re writing has real potential. She says the music is great even if the story is weird. If I could get you to keep at it, it could be worth big bucks. So, I started thinking….”

“Stop thinking, Leo,” I told him. “And stop listening to Kat. I’m done with music for now. I’m going to be doing what I want to do, and I’m tired of being told I don’t know what I’m doing. Convince her instead the world needs me to be a professor of psychiatry so I can fix all the things she doesn’t like about it. And she needs to stay in LA and help me do it.”

“OK, it was worth a try.”

“Thanks again, Leo.”

“Don’t mention it.”

***

The TR3 is one of the great landmarks of automotive design. Scooped out sides create a svelte feminine profile and minimize the feeling of being boxed in and isolated from the elements. Of course, when those elements are hostile, this is not so desirable. Eleanor is a good time girl, only really fit for fine weather which fortunately Los Angeles generally has in abundance. Her low sides also enhance an occupant’s sense of proximity to the pavement and thus of speed and of proximity to other cars and thus of vulnerability. At first this can be disconcerting.

Hal almost didn’t get that far.

“You expect me to ride in that?” he squawked as I rumbled up to the entrance to the hotel where he was waiting and leaned over to push open the passenger side door for him.

“It’s safe,” I protested. “It’s got seat belts, headlights, brakes, the works. What else do you want?”

“I want a taxi ,“ he said with a straight face.

“Very good!” I said in genuine appreciation. “A sense of humor? Who knew?”

“That was not a joke.”

“Oh, come on,” I cajoled. “I promise not to run into anything.”

“What if something runs into us?” he said, making no move to narrow the gap between himself and the annihilation portal he envisaged yawning open before him.

“Look,” I said. “I’m not taking a taxi, and I’m sure you don’t want to return home and have to tell mom you blew your chance to save me from the heartbreak of sloth and penury because you were afraid to ride in my car.”

“We don’t have to go on the freeway, do we?” he asked, defeated. “I just heard on the news that a truck turned over and dumped thirty thousand pounds of frozen fish on the freeway.”

“No, surface streets all the way.” I didn’t mention the narrow winding road up into the hills.

He inhaled as though it would be his last time, performed the genuflexion, hip flexion, vertebral flexion and various other flexions necessary to get a body into a TR3 and, emitting a forlorn exhalation, descended into the seat and pulled the door shut.

“How did you know I’m doing this for mother?” Hal asked after he buckled his seat belt and I’d pulled away from the hotel. He’d apparently accepted Eleanor as transportation to dinner not extinction.

“Simple deductive reasoning,” I said proudly, delighted to have my surmise so easily confirmed. “It was a reasonable probability you didn’t decide to look me up on your own initiative. What irresistible force could account for your unprecedented fraternal interest, I asked myself? I answered myself, our mother’s insatiable worry that I’m bound for life as a ne’er-do-well and she’ll be blamed for not giving me a proper upbringing. She learned, maybe from you, that you were coming to Los Angeles, and she prevailed on you to save me. For your part, you realized if you turned her down, the bad end for which you also believe I am headed would forever be on your head. Mom’s no chump. She knows how to get what she wants. So, you agreed to try and straighten me out. I’m curious to know how you plan to accomplish that.”

“I confess, you’re a hundred percent right,” Hal said, seeming relieved to have the charade over with. “I also confess, I have no plan in mind, and that does not make me happy. I like to know what I’m going to do before I do it. I have plenty of connections in New York within the Department of Mental Hygiene and other places where I could find you a job, but I imagine on your own you could easily find a job out here or anywhere for that matter. It’s not hard to find work as a psychiatrist, unless you’ve done something really disgraceful.” He paused.

“I haven’t, unless you count living in Los Angeles, which you probably would,” I said, answering his unspoken question.

I had, by then, turned off Sunset Boulevard onto the aforementioned narrow winding canyon road leading up into the hills and Café Chaparral. Hal seemed to be having renewed concern about the potential for undergoing death by traffic and was concentrating on staying alive as though his will power could project a force field to ward off any hard objects bent on colliding with us. We were actually going fairly slowly, not more than twenty-five miles per hour. I wasn’t looking to terrify him or myself, and If I had been, it wouldn’t have been by driving too fast. I didn’t want to harm Eleanor, and as always going uphill she’s much better able to producing the illusion of speed than the reality of speed. Though, as Hal looked out over the low sides at the pavement apparently rushing by a few millimeters from his rump, I’m sure he was impressed with the illusion.

“Shouldn’t you slow down?” he suggested.

I looked over at him and saw he was holding on to the edge of the seat with his left hand and the car door with his right hand. Every time we passed a parked car, he’d pull in his right hand apparently fearing I’d go too close and rip off his fingers.

“Watch where you’re going!” he commanded when he noticed I was looking at him and not at the road.

“If I go any slower, the cars behind us will have a fit, and besides…, we’re here,” I announced. I was as relieved to have arrived as Hal was. I didn’t want to have to deal with his tension any longer. I wondered if I’d be as fearful of being mugged riding the subway in New York as Hal was of being maimed riding in a car in Los Angeles.

I pulled into a parking space in front of Café Chaparral, an irregularly shaped two story wooden building apparently added onto at different times, clearly converted to use as a restaurant rather than designed for it. I had driven past it before but had never looked at it closely. Now that I had, it seemed to be a first rate fire trap, wooden siding, a shake roof.

“Oh Café Chaparral! I’ve heard of this place,” Hal said. Had some celebrity gotten food poisoning here? “The New York Times wrote something about it.”

“What did they have to say?” I asked warily.

“I don’t remember. They discussed a number of Los Angeles’ leading restaurants. They concluded some were adequate. Some weren’t.”

The interior was as woody as the exterior which was attractive enough in a reclaimed-barnish sort of style, and I noted an abundance of sprinklers on the ceiling which was reassuring. We were escorted up a narrow staircase to a narrow dining room in which six irregularly sized wooden tables of varying types and shapes were arrayed with the suggestion of an aisle between them. We were placed at one of the smallest of these, a round pedestal model which wobbled when I leaned my elbows on it.

The chairs were similarly heterogeneous and mine none too comfortable, encouraging me lean forward on the table which wobbled annoyingly encouraging me to lean backward in the chair which was uncomfortable, saepenumero. The look they were striving for, besides barnish, seemed to be garage-sale chic. I wondered if Leo had ever actually been in this joint. (Maybe he had some deal with the owner to move business in their direction. Maybe Café Chaparral was one of his TOAD Node venues.) I had some misgivings about taking Leo’s advice without double checking, but Hal showed no sign of displeasure so I kept my mouth shut.

We warmed up with some sherry while perusing the menu which seemed to be mainly southwest European, Spanish and what I guessed might have been Portuguese or maybe Basque but was fairly intelligible to anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of international gastronomic nomenclature. The prices were in American dollars and were high enough to keep the café exclusive. Hal still seemed contented. I thought for such prices, the chairs should be comfortable, the table shouldn’t wobble, and I shouldn’t have to worry about a waiter dropping a tray of food on my head as he squeezed along the “aisle” between my left side and the back of the fat lady sitting at a larger table across the “aisle” from me.

When we’d decided on our orders, Hal declared he would choose the wine since, as he informed me, he was an expert oenologist. I thought “So what?” (probably what I’d have been advised to think had I consulted TOAD) but simply said, “Fine,” and Hal commenced studying the wine list as though he were going to have to take a test on it. He accompanied himself with a continuo of hums and grunts, smiles, frowns and a profusion of other censorious facial deformations. When the waiter arrived, Hal requested a wine which was on the list, Chateau Hors de Prix, or something of the sort, but a year that wasn’t. This precipitated fretful scurrying around and the prompt appearance of the solicitous but regretful Café Chaparral proprietor who, in an elusive, maybe Eastern European enunciation (Greek? Albanian? Hollywood accent coach?), begged our forbearance with the inadequacy of his wine cellar and assured us the vintage he did have would be found to be pretty good stuff.

Hal deigned to try it. The owner looked relieved. Hal looked smug. I suspected Hal’s whole performance was designed to impress his attendees and the other diners in earshot with his unfathomable sophistication and to implant the governing principle that his whims were to be taken very seriously. The wine soon arrived, but Hal wouldn’t touch it until it had ample time to breathe. While we waited for the process of oenile respiration to run its course, Hal regaled me with tales of his recent achievements and plans.

He told me his lecture at the psychotherapy conference had been a great success and paid for his trip. “People out here are hungry for news from the East coast,” he said.

“Yet,” I responded in mock sincerity, “life on the western frontier has certain pastoral charms which make such deprivation tolerable.”

“I suppose people learn to tolerate what they must,” he said, his narcissism immune to my sarcasm.

He told me he was building a harpsichord for his nine-year-old, Samantha.

“Sounds complicated,” I said.

“I enjoy the challenge,” he said. “I got bored with painting and sculpting and growing orchids.”

He told me how musically gifted Samantha was (I wondered, considering his tin ear, how he could tell) and how ”Mother will be pleased to know that she finally has a descendant with real musical talent.”

Ouch! I was summoning up a counter attack when Hal announced it was finally time to try the wine and summoned the waiter who, now thoroughly cowed, anxiously poured the requisite sample and stood back in servile humility to await the verdict.

Hal executed the usual manual, ocular, nasal and oral contortions associated with wine tasting, (the facial equivalent of getting in and out of a TR3) shrugged his shoulders and mouth and allowed he considered it “adequate”

I thought so too. The rest of the meal Hal also pronounced “adequate” which is the highest rating Hal can be expected to bestow on anything he has not done himself.

As we were sipping cognac after desert, I decided it was time we got down to business so I said, “It’s time we got down to business. You can go back and tell mom I’m not on the verge of ruin after all. In fact, I’ve got a pretty good gig lined up for next year. I’ll be on the UCLA faculty.”

Hal looked at me dubiously as though I was trying to peddle a bottle of schlock wine. I explained who Hargrove was and described the 2-South Ward Chief job.

Hal told me Hargrove was well known to him and, maintaining his dubious countenance, asked “What does Archie think about this?”

“I haven’t told him yet. He’s been out of town. Why do you want to know, anyhow?”

“He’s always been your mentor. I don’t expect he would approve,” he said.

“Why the hell not?” I said loud enough to attract a disapproving glance from the fat lady. “He’s always had a hope I’d follow in his footsteps. Now, I’ll sort of be doing it. He should be happy about it. And even if he isn’t, I’m old enough to make my own decisions about my life and what I’m going to do with it.”

“I should think,” he said, sounding insufferably pompous, “Archie would, as I do, view having too close an association with Ham Hargrove as something of an embarrassment. Certainly, our profession sees him as an embarrassment, a typical Hollywood showboat, fancy shell, no substance. He’s a self-aggrandizing publicity hound who contributes nothing to the understanding of human behavior or the alleviation of mental illness. Once psychiatrists give up their principles as scientists and healers, they degrade the profession. (Had he been reading from Archie’s script?) Our source of professional standing is our status as doctors who treat the sick and rigorous scientists uncovering hidden truths not as slick fonts of pop-psychology. Only a place like UCLA would allow him in the door.”

“Hargrove is getting me in the door. And lots of people would say, UCLA is a damn fine institution. Of course, it’s not in New York, so maybe you haven’t heard of it. I can’t imagine Archie having a problem with this. You’re full of shit. (Fat lady glance reprise.) Maybe jealous too.” Jealousy had become a recurrent theme. Maybe it was the alcohol.

“I’m just trying to give you some good advice,” Hal said, remaining annoyingly calm in the face of my turbulence. I’m just trying to keep you from making a mistake you’ll regret. But,” he added with a theatrical sigh, “you never were any good at listening to anything anyone else had to say. Maybe when you hear it from Archie, you’ll listen.”

“And maybe you can’t accept anything is worthwhile unless you can take credit for it. Let’s get out of here.”

Having expected my job prospect to garner at least an “adequate” from Hal, I was pissed. On the way back to the hotel, I did drive too fast. Maybe that too was the alcohol and gravity. If Hal registered increased risk, he kept quiet about it. Maybe, he feared if he said anything, it would just make things worse. Maybe he’d have been right.

***

Wednesday morning began poorly.

“Frank’s gone,” said Millie when I got to the ward.

“When? Where?”

“Nobody’s sure,” she said. “He got a dose of lithium yesterday afternoon and another at eight PM, and that’s the last anyone’s seen of him according to the nursing notes. None of the other patients remembers seeing him after that. No one saw him leave.”

“I’ll make some calls and see if I can track him down,” I offered.

“I’m worried,” Millie said.

“Me too.”

***

As had been the case two years earlier, the standard phone numbers for Carlossi produced no results. I called Chester Garfield, hoping Carlossi might have, once again, headed up to Garfield’s hillside redoubt to hide out with his pal. Garfield hadn’t seen or heard from him, but assured me he’d let me know immediately if he did. “I’ve been worried about Frank lately,” he told me, associating himself with the rest of us in the worrying community. “He’s been real hyper, and I get the feeling he’s not taking care of himself too well. I think he’s been worried about me too. My health’s not been so good lately. I just don’t seem to have any energy anymore. I think that’s been weighing on Frank. He’s also been real troubled about TOAD, going on and on about it being off the track, can’t trust evolution, evil at work, weird stuff like that. I’ll sure let you know as soon as I hear from him. I know he thinks the world of you.”

“Oh…, and Thelma was back in the house for a while,” he added. “She had to go back to Sacramento this week, but she said she’ll be back as soon as she can. She’s worried about me too. She had a doctor from your place come up here to see me the other day. Big fella name of Hargrove. He told me Thelma was worried about my safety and whether my thinking was still in good enough shape for me to take care of myself. I told him I don’t need to do much in the way of thinking anymore. My life’s pretty simple up here. I got my fruit trees to take care of me. I meant that as a joke. I’m not sure he got it. He asked me a lot of questions about TOAD. Wanted to know my opinion of it, what my connection with TOAD was, how it got started, even asked about Frank and Ernie and Bobbi. He said he knew you too. Seemed like a nice enough fella. You know who I’m talking about?”

“Yes, Mr. Garfield. I know Dr. Hargrove pretty well…. Please get ahold of me if you hear from Frank. And thanks.”

What the hell was that all about?

***

My next call was to Ernie.

“We haven’t seen Frank since he was at a TOAD Node a couple weeks ago,” Ernie said and threw in with the growing contingent of worriers. “He’s been real intense at the meetings for the last couple of months. Like he’s troubled about something and can’t figure out what it is.”

Ernie too assured me he’d get in touch if he picked up any clues to Carlossi’s whereabouts.

***

Finally, I called Glickman who surprisingly hadn’t yet heard of Carlossi’s disappearance. He said he’d get right on finding him and would let me know as soon as he did. He felt Carlossi wasn’t making much sense in the conversation they’d had on the ward the day before and was heading for trouble if he didn’t get help. Another worrier added. Glickman, despite his allegiance to CAP, thought Carlossi needed to be in the hospital whether he wanted to be or not.

***

By Thursday, nobody had found or heard from Carlossi. I’d still heard nothing from Kat. I was eager to meet with Hargrove to tell him my decision to take the 2-South job and find out what the business with Garfield was all about. Waiting until our four-in-the-afternoon appointed time was difficult, what with all my troubling imponderables demanding pondering, and waiting wasn’t eased by my restless compulsion to over-stoke with caffeine which just made me more restless. I was looking forward to indulging in some of Hargrove’s under-stoking sour mash and toasting my ascendency to the UCLA peerage.

At three fifty-seven, I strode into Hargrove’s office, hoping to appear more mellow than I felt.

Betty informed me Dr. Hargrove was out of the office for an urgent meeting and hadn’t yet returned, but I could take a seat and wait (as though I needed her permission to do so). She would thus be able to enhance and perpetuate my discomfort, casting belittling glances at me while I waited in uncertain anticipation.

After about ten minutes, like a cat losing interest in tormenting a mouse, Betty suddenly said, “Oh, here’s an email from Dr. Hargrove. He says something came up suddenly, and he has to fly up to Sacramento this afternoon. He needs to cancel his appointment with you this week.”

Deciding it would be neither productive nor conducive to my mental health for me to pursue the question of when that email had arrived (or if it even existed), I asked if we were still on for next week? She made an elaborate effort to once again consult her computer screen and, with an unsympathetic shrug, told me she didn’t see why not.

I gave Betty as hard a look as I could muster to demonstrate I knew her game and walked out.

I’d send Hargrove an email informing him I was accepting his offer. Sour mash celebration would have to wait a week.

***

Friday and the weekend passed uneventfully, thus I experienced none of the events I was hoping for, a reply from Hargrove, Carlossi’s reappearance, Kat’s response to the emails and texts I’d sent and voicemails I’d left. I’d tried to edit out any tone of desperation from my communications to her, anxious she’d be turned off by it, but I was at a loss to come up with a way to reach out to her. None of my calls were getting answered by her, and I wondered, as I edged toward despair, if she’d done to me what I’d done to Hal and Susan, programming her phone to send my calls directly to voicemail. Showing up, uninvited, at her door seemed too likely to lead to disaster. I wished I could enlist Cyrano de Bergerac to hide in the bushes and be my proxy spokesman. She had said she wasn’t going to give up on me, but maybe she’d changed her mind. Maybe that meant something different to her than it meant to me.

***

Late Monday morning Glickman called. “Glickman found Frank,” he said somberly. Russian accents are particularly fine vehicles for the expression of “somber”. Maybe, in the coming year, I could induce Agnes to spend some time in Russia.

“Terrific,” I said. “How is he?”

“Dead,” he said, even more somberly. “Glickman tracked Frank to motel in Van Nuys. Got manager to open up when no answer to knocking on door. Frank sitting in chair looking at computer. Seemed calm, not like violence happen. Looked like dead couple days. Police investigate. You hear from Detective Garcia pretty soon.”

“Oh, Harry, I’m so sorry,” I said. “You did a lot to help him…. Hold on for a sec. Someone’s knocking on my door.”

There, LAPD badge and ID aimed at my nose, stood a fortyish man, sad eyes a bit higher than mine, thinning black hair, slight but friendly smile, tired greenish sport coat, brown and yellow striped tie.

“Detective Garcia’s here” I reported to Glickman. “I’ll get back to you.”

Garcia told me pretty much what I’d just heard from Glickman and said he was hoping I could provide some more information. I wondered for a moment about the fine points of doctor-patient confidentiality, but concluded the least of the possible evils matched up with being helpful. If he wanted an actual copy of Carlossi’s chart, he’d have to fight it out with medical records.

He wanted to know whether Carlossi had medical problems, whether he was suicidal, whether I had any idea why he’d be in a motel in Van Nuys. I told him no, I didn’t think so, and I had no idea. Though right after I said the last, it occurred to me Carlossi didn’t want to be found until he was ready, so he hadn’t gone home or any place else I’d think to look. I told that to Garcia too.

He told me Carlossi had a black notebook with MANUBOTO (which he spelled out) on the cover, filled with what looked like coded messages which made no sense but contained a lot of MANUBOTO’s and TOAD’s and, toward the end, there were MANUBOTOAD’s, and he had a laptop computer which had what looked like computer code on the screen. Garcia said the forensic science lab at LAPD had the notebook and computer and would try to figure out what it was all about, but did I have any information that would help? He particularly wanted to know if I had any sense of whether Carlossi might be involved in espionage or a terrorist plot. He thought the references to TOAD might have something to do with the religion and, if so, maybe Carlossi had some grudge against TOAD, and he wondered whether the coded content of the notebook might warrant the attention of Homeland Security.

I explained the words in caps were acronyms, Carlossi pronounced them rather than spelling them and opined the crime lab and Homeland Security would have no more luck sorting out MANUBOTO than anyone else including Carlossi. I told Garcia it was going to be a long story, offered him a cup of Millie’s evil coffee which he accepted. So, Styrofoam in hand, I gave him an account of Carlossi’s life, the history of his bipolar disorder, the role played in it by MANUBOTO and my hope to break his cycle of illness and how that led to the creation of TOAD.

“Wow!” Garcia said, awe in his voice. “This guy was the creator of TOAD? My wife and I are really into TOAD. It’s made a big difference in our marriage. We go every week with the kids to family TOAD Nodes…, couple times a week sometimes. I wonder if some rival religion could of had it in for him. I’ve heard TOAD’s been responsible for cutting church attendance way down. That hits ‘em in the pocketbook, you know. He ever mention threats?”

“No threats, I said. “Conspiracy theories are up to you and the crime lab, but my guess is, he most likely died from lack of sleep, along with electrolyte imbalances and a cardiac arrhythmia resulting from some such sort of physiological derangement. It’s possible he OD’d on lithium, but I’d bet he wasn’t taking it or anything else. I think he just wore himself out trying to fix TOAD so it would live up to his expectations. Carlossi was a genuinely good, kindhearted person. He was driven by a sincere desire to make the world a better place and a conviction he was the guy who could do it. And since he believed he could do it, he also believed he had a responsibility to do it. MANUBOTO was the scheme he came up with in his delusional search for a way to achieve that goal. TOAD was a means to approach that end which was not delusional. And as you apparently affirm, seems to be working.”

“TOAD was designed to evolve in response to user input, and it has,” I continued. “But Carlossi was troubled by the course the evolution was taking. He was a perfectionist, uncomfortable with anything other than an orderly universe. His vision for how MANUBOTO would work was as a direct pathway to unalloyed good, but TOAD required Carlossi to accept compromises he wasn’t comfortable with.”

Garcia seemed to be paying close attention, taking notes. I went on.

“A lot of the innovations in TOAD doctrine and practice seemed to him misguided. For the last few months, he’d been getting increasingly anxious to do something to get TOAD back on what he viewed as the correct path. Eventually, that process drew him back to MANUBOTO. When he got manic, he believed the power in MANUBOTO was the answer and mania, by speeding up his thinking, would enable him to bring the power within his grasp. My guess is he was working on amalgamating TOAD and MANUBOTO to bring TOAD in line with his uncompromising vision of salvation.”

“As I told you before, he hadn’t slept for some days before I hospitalized him, and he probably didn’t sleep after he split, and that combined with his frenetic activity level and likely dehydration did him in. I can’t imagine Carlossi being involved in terrorism or anything likely to cause harm to anyone. He was a zealot, but not a violent zealot. His guiding principal was the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’, and that’s what he practiced and built into TOAD. He wasn’t a spy or a terrorist.”

Garcia seemed satisfied. I asked him if he’d let me know about the toxicology and autopsy findings and whatever the crime lab had to say about MANUBOTO and Carlossi’s laptop. He assured me he would and left.

Alone in my office, terribly sad, I saw ironic symmetry in the tragic sleep related bookends of Carlossi’s bipolar disorder. His bride died because he couldn’t stay awake, setting it off. He died because he couldn’t fall asleep, bringing it to an end.

I never heard from Garcia again.

***

I did hear from Carlossi’s lawyer. Uh, oh! Was I about to be sued?

He told me when he heard about Carlossi’s death, he’d gone over Carlossi’s will. I was mentioned in it.

Carlossi was leaving all royalty income and the rest of his worldly possessions to various charities. To me, he’d left his other-worldly possession.

I’d inherited TOAD.

***

I ran Eleanor up to Garfield’s home to relay the sad news in person and found him around back sitting in the sun atop his south facing hillside backyard, looking over his orchard. After I told him about Carlossi, he was silent for a while, slumped like an overheated candle, seemingly lost in thought. When he found his way back, he said, “Then, I suppose it really doesn’t make any difference.”

“No difference that Frank died?” I asked, surprised by his seemingly callous reaction.

“Oh, no. That’s terrible. Just terrible. A terrible loss.” He became silent again, seeming to have lost his train of thought.

“What doesn’t make any difference, Mr. Garfield?”

“Thelma’s cuttin’ off the money for TOAD. I was fixin’ to fight her on it, but that was for Frank’s sake.”

“How can she cut off the money? It’s yours. Isn’t it?”

“Her lawyer and that Dr. Hargrove fella. They’ve gone to court to get a judge to say I’m senile, and I can’t handle my money any more, the change in my will’s no good, the plan to leave money for TOAD’s no good. They’ll make Thelma my guardian, and she’ll handle the money. I got some papers in the mail about it. There’s a trial or a hearing or something next week. They’re sayin’ when I was in the hospital two years ago, Frank figgered I was an easy mark and came up with a scheme to get me to pay for his crackpot pseudo-religion. That’s what they’re callin’ TOAD. They’re sayin’ Bobbi and Ernie were in cahoots with Frank, and they got me to change my will to leave my money to TOAD. They’re sayin’ I was the victim of a big con job. The court papers call ‘em ‘predatory’.”

“But you’re not senile or incompetent. They’d have to prove that in court. You could defend yourself. Get another evaluation done. You could testify, if there’s a trial, and show the judge you know what you’re doing.”

“Yeah, I know. I could. And I was gonna. But with Frank dead, what for? Thelma’s gonna get my money pretty soon. Whoever’s gonna be runnin’ TOAD will just have to pay for it themselves. I’m just tired out. I am sorry for Bobbi and Ernie. I know TOAD means a lot to them. But now, I just wanna stay up here and tend my trees. I don’t wanna be hassled anymore.”

I didn’t feel up to revealing to Garfield that “Whoever’s gonna be runnin’ TOAD” was, as Pogo would have uttered in swamp-speak, “a pusson name a me,” at least until whatever was in TOAD’s bank account, if there was one, ran out. “I can understand how you feel, Mr. Garfield. I’m so sorry to have brought you the bad news about Frank.”

“I just hope she lets me keep my trees,” he mumbled sadly as I turned toward my car.

***

Tolstoy said: The only piece of Earth a person owns is his grave.

Archie says: And that’s at the mercy of anthropologists and forensic pathologists.

TOAD says: Ownership is a two way street.

***

So much for inheritance.

I had to admit, TOAD had a good point about ownership. I was relieved I’d soon be relieved of TOAD and the attendant responsibility. Running a website and a religion, pseudo, crackpot, predatory or not, was not how I wanted to spend my time, energy or future. Owning TOAD would not endear me to Hargrove especially if he’d told a court Garfield was nuts to be paying for it. Whatever facilitated my new-found focus on pursuing a career as a professor of psychiatry was a good thing.

So I told myself.

***

Thursday, still no word from Kat or Hargrove, or Archie, who should have been back in town by then. I felt isolated, abandoned, lonely. Even Glickman wasn’t around to provide his usual distracting jabber. Millie told me he’d left word he’d be otherwise occupied for a few days and would be unavailable for his usual volunteer duties. She speculated the more radical elements in CAP were unhappy about their chapter president helping out in the lair of the enemy. She thought maybe Glickman was working with them to ramp up their tactics. I thought it was more likely that he was developing a betting line on the remaining NBA playoff games.

***

I worked up enough determination to show up for my four o’clock session with Hargrove despite his failure to respond to my email (maybe it’d been intercepted by Betty and never got to him, or so I hoped) and despite a nagging fear I could expect to be stood up again or otherwise embarrassed. Betty had condescended to check his schedule and informed me I was still on it, in a derisive tone of voice that implied she wondered why. I wondered as well.

As I was making my way to his office I grimly imagined what I’d experience when I got there. My fantasy trended toward morbid. “Look, son,” Hargrove would say in a lugubrious drawl, “Frog wantsa catch flies, he gotta flick his tongue. Can’t expect ‘em to fly in on their own account. You were stallin’ so long, I figgered you were hopin’ for some sorta divine intervention. (In my imagination, he chuckled at this point.) I don’t need a melancholic Dane who can’t make up his mind. I’ve gone ahead and signed Dr. Cohen up for another year. You’re out of luck.”

And so on.

***

When I arrived, Hargrove’s inner office door was once again closed. This time, Betty claimed he was on the other side of it, but in conference, not to be disturbed (especially by the likes of me), and he’d be out when he was out, an occurrence I could again await in the full glare of her baleful scrutiny.

By the time I heard a rattle from Hargrove’s doorknob I’d settled on feeling peeved as preferable to feeling stupid. Hargrove emerged from his office shaking hands with a familiar feminine humanoid form I hadn’t seen in two years. I heard Hargrove saying to Thelma Burke, “… and so they’ll be making the announcement any minute now. Thanks for all your help. I truly appreciate it,”

To which Burke replied, “Well, congratulations again and my sincere thanks again to you. We still have a lot to do.” After which, as Hargrove escorted her to the outer door, her gaze landed on me, and, though I’d have called it inconceivable, she managed to out-baleful Betty.

“Jerry, Ah’m so glad you could make it,” Hargrove said, turning to me and beaming his hallmark radiant smile. “Ah ‘pologize for keepin’ you waiting. Come on in. We’ve got a bit a time to talk before the TV crews show up.”

TV crews?

“Poor boy. He was worried sick you’d forgotten all about him,” Betty tossed out, not looking up from her computer.

I followed Hargrove into his office shutting the door on Betty, while I imagined rigging her computer with a large chunk of plastic explosive. She’d boot it up in the morning and….

“Times like this call for drinks on the house,” Hargrove said as he reached for his decanter and poured substantial Grand-Dads over ice for both of us. I accepted mine and settled into my customary spot in the cushy black leather chair while he crossed the room, looked thoughtfully out the window, then eased his body down to his desk chair and elevated his feet to the desk top.

“What times are we drinking to?” I asked, cautiously resisting commitment to great expectations and ending up embarrassed when they weren’t fulfilled.

“The times of our ascendance,” he said raising his glass triumphantly.

“OK…! Our?” I said, mirroring his salute.

“Yeah, Ah got your email last week, sorry Ah didn’t get back to you sooner. This’s been a crazy week. Mort’s retirin’ and they’re hitchin’ me up as lead mule. We’re having a news conference at four-thirty. Maybe catch the five o’clock news, six for sure.”

“And of course, in a few weeks you can expect to be the new Chief on 2-South…. Jerry, Ah knew you could make up your mind and seize your opportunity. You’re passin’ through a doorway to an excitin’ future. Ah’m ‘bout to make things happen ‘round here. UCLA’s in the heart of the media capitol of the universe, and we’re gonna be the center of attention. You’re in the big time from now on. Welcome to first class.”

He took a long drink.

“I guess it’s all happened just the way you thought it would,” I said raising my glass in salute.

“Knew it would, young fella. Knew it would. There’s even a side benefit to what’s been happening that’ll please my buddy, Wes Craft. Ah expect you’re familiar with something called TOAD?”

“I’ve heard of it,” I replied as neutrally, vaguely, obscurely as I could manage.

“Ah’d guess you would have. Seein’s how two of your patients are its heart and soul. The fella dreamed it up, name a Frank Carlossi, that one disappeared on you couple a years ago, and the fella payin’ the bills, also a guy you dealt with couple years ago when he got admitted to 2-South. You might remember him. Chester Garfield’s his name. You also might remember the lady leavin’ when you came in. Her name’s Thelma Burke. Remember her now? She’s Garfield’s daughter. She told me she had a run in with you at the time ‘bout your dischargin’ her father… prematurely, as she puts it. Well, Ah looked over his chart, and you documented your reasons nice and clear. So, Ah explained to her you’d done the proper thing, just how we trained you to do. Well, she wasn’t happy about Garfield giving his money to TOAD which he’d been doing since he met that Carlossi fella in the hospital. She figures Carlossi and a couple of other freeloaders who run a bar in one of Garfield’s buildings have been takin’ her father for a ride with this TOAD scam, and she wanted to get it stopped. Ah helped her get the ammunition to cut off TOAD’s free lunch. Ah do hope Professor Carlossi won’t be too troubled by that.”

“Frank Carlossi died last week,” I told him.

“Well then, Ah s’pose he’s beyond bein’ troubled.”

“I guess so,” I said. “I hope so,” I thought.

“That TOAD operation’s been quite a phenomenon. ‘Bout a year ago, Ah wrote a paper about TOAD and other religious scams of that ilk.”

“I’ve read it,” I said.

“Well, Wes was real put out ‘bout how TOAD was pullin’ folks away from true churches and their teachin’s an’ all and cuttin’ down on the contributions it takes to operate ‘em. Of course, TOAD’s been free ‘cause Garfield’s been payin’ for it. Wes ‘preciated what I wrote, and he’s been real supportive here. Ah also got a lot of support at the state level from Ms. Burke who happens to be the California Democratic Party Chairlady. She helped win over the Board of Regents and some other folks. You might want to get to know her better eventually. Good person to have in your corner. It’s truly amazing the gullibility so many folks have to get themselves involved with things like TOAD…. Well, drink up. Ah gotta get out of here to meet the press, ‘n press the flesh, as Lyndon used to say.”

I slugged down the remaining whisky in my glass and left the office shaking hands with Hargrove much as Thelma Burke had done a bit earlier. I had a sense of relief, TOAD wasn’t being held against me. I had a measure of satisfaction, I was going to get the job I wanted. I had the support of the new boss. I had my opportunity. I had a new identity I could grow with.

Still, the bill was being paid by TOAD, and Garfield, and Bobbi and Ernie and Garcia and his family and a world full of unsuspecting, maybe gullible TOADies whose source of spiritual contentment was about to crash. That part of my new identity was dirty.

To reach my bike, chained to the rack in front of NPI, I had to pass the CAP pickets parading around with signs bruiting the plight of the disenfranchised inmates within and the usual slogans like “Therapists = The rapists”, “Psych Meds Broke My Brain”, and a new one I hadn’t seen before, “Don’t Shrink – Expand – TOAD Saves”. Not much longer, I thought.

As I pedaled my bike homeward, Hargrove’s whisky worked its way from my stomach to my blood to my brain, and booze on the brain fostered a self-soothing conviction that I was not to blame for Hargrove’s transgressions. I was not to blame for Thelma Burke’s transgressions. I had honorably tried to help Frank Carlossi, and it worked for a while. I was, however, troubled, despite the booze, that by urging Carlossi toward a compromise solution to humanity’s ills, I had set him up for tragedy when his need for absolute perfection met up with the reality of TOAD’s human imperfections. But alcoholic obfuscation gave me shelter in the conviction that TOAD had been an adventure and unpredictable, and maybe that was exculpatory. I was only TOAD’s accidental owner. I was not TOAD’s keeper. Hargrove was opening the door for me to the UCLA faculty, a public institution not his personal claque. I was seizing an opportunity, not committing crimes against humanity. I was pure of heart, if not pure of brain, and my alcoholic buzz fostered another conviction that despite Hargrove’s despicable conniving to get what he wanted, I was an innocent beneficiary. I should be content to live with that. I’d done nothing wrong.

Wending my way through Westwood traffic, I was, despite my buzz, sober enough to appreciate my vulnerability to the dysfunctions of similarly buzzed vehicle operators with chemically fortified cardiac purity, and I contemplated the poetic irony, that, just as I was on the threshold of success, I could be crushed by a Hummer driven by some other self-medicated celebrant of a tainted accomplishment. It occurred to me to wonder whether TOAD’s editorial appraisal of such an event might be, “So what?”

***

Back at my apartment, I put on a CD of Glen Gould playing the Goldberg Variations (his more leisurely second go at it) and committed my body to the sofa and suspended animation until my brain’s purity caught back up with that of my heart. Half an hour later, I was swinging, Tarzan-like, through a dense jungle via lianas hanging from thick trunked trees. I was weightless and moved effortlessly, always finding a new vine in the right spot at the end of a swing. The foliage was so dense I couldn’t see the ground or the sky, but nothing obstructed my path. A beam of sunlight illuminated a large delicate orange and white flower growing from a fat branch shaggy with moss. Compelled to snatch up the bloom to enjoy its fragrance, I plucked it. It came free with a pop. I brought it up to my face to savor the delicious aroma I anticipated. It was artificial. Startled, I looked down at the hole left in the branch where I’d removed the flower. It contained a large many-legged creature, writhing around and laughing at me with a high-pitched, warbling, chirping sound which kept up until I awoke and attended to the ringing of my cell phone (or more precisely, since “ringing” these days is only produced by uncultured cell phones, to Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute, the ring tone I’d assigned to my mother).

“Hello.”

“Hello, Jerry, honey, it’s your mother.”

“Hi, Ma. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I was just worried because I hadn’t heard from you for a while. It’s important for a mother to know her children are all right.”

“I’m fine, Ma. I’ve been meaning to call you. I’ve been very busy lately, and….”

“Hal called me. He said he’d been in Los Angeles to give a lecture, and he wanted to see how you were getting along so he took you out to dinner. I think he was annoyed that you didn’t seem to appreciate it. He said you didn’t thank him. He said he’s very worried about you. He said you drive like a madman in a dangerous old jalopy.”

“Ma, Hal wouldn’t say anything good about me if his life depended on it. And my car is fine. Hal doesn’t know anything about cars or about driving.”

“He’s afraid living in California has given you crazy ideas. He said you’ve gotten yourself caught up with… what did he call it?… some Hollywood con artist.”

“The Hollywood con artist Hal is talking about is the Director of the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences which is in California but is not Disneyland. He’s got the same position at UCLA dad had at U of M, and he’s offered me a ward chief job here which will make me an assistant professor. It’s a great opportunity. Hal thinks civilization ends at the Hudson River. But UCLA is big time in the real world, and Dr. Hargrove, Hal’s con artist, is going to make it bigger. And I’m going to be in the middle of what’s happening. I’ll have an office, a title, a paycheck, a future. Hal can’t see anything has value unless he can take credit for it. Believe me, I’m fine Ma. I’m not doing anything crazy. You’ll be proud of me.”

“You know I worry a lot about you, Jerry.”

“Yeah Ma, I’ve noticed.”

“It’s just because I love you, and I want you to be OK.”

“I am OK, and I’m going to be OK. You need to stop listening to Hal and Susan. They’ve made careers out of telling you I’m a bum. I’m not a bum, Ma. I’m not going to be a bum. I’m doing just fine. Don’t listen to them.”

“OK Jerry honey. Stay in touch. I love you.”

“I love you too Ma. I’ll keep in touch.”

***

Friday morning Millie asked if I’d seen the flyer announcing Dr. Hargrove’s promotion and his scheduled address at noon to the NPI family. I told her I hadn’t, but I did know about the promotion from meeting with Dr. Hargrove yesterday. I also told her I’d be the 2-South chief in July. She gave me a massive hug and said, “I’m sooo happy. And now we’ll have a direct pipeline to the mountain top.”

I told her to keep it under her hat for a while as I didn’t know when Dr. Hargrove would tell Dr. Cohen.

Millie also told me the University of Hawaii’s Queen’s Medical Center had requested Emily Parker’s records.

Things were looking up all over.

***

By the time I got to the auditorium for Hargrove’s address, it was crowded, buzzing with conversation. I was later than I’d expected to be because I’d decided to run out to get a sandwich. A stiff Santa Ana wind kept blowing dust in my eyes, and I had to keep stopping to clean the dust out of my contact lenses.

Santa Ana winds, which periodically sweep over Los Angeles from the northeast, are a mixed blessing. They blow the smog out to sea. That’s a good thing unless you’re also out to sea.

Santa Ana winds can act like bellows, turning brush fires into blast furnaces. This has been going on for thousands of years in southern California. It’s part of the normal local ecology. If nobody lived here, that too would be a good thing.

And, as known by Raymond Chandler, Santa Ana winds are associated with an increase in the murder rate. That’s not a good thing. It’s said to occur because the high concentration of positively charged ions in the air is thought to make people irritable.

I was irritable. Maybe ions had something to do with it. Maybe it was because my eyes were scratchy from the dust. Maybe it was because I was late. At least Betty wasn’t in the auditorium. I don’t know if the ions had made it inside.

Winston waved me over to an empty seat he’d saved next to him. I squeezed past several brain researchers who were having an animated discussion about the vicissitudes of cyclic AMP and membrane transport systems. They didn’t seem to notice as I stumbled across their knees and feet. The NPI is a bit like the United Nations. Each discipline talks amongst itself in its own language, biochemistry, psychoanalysis, learning theory, etc. Without translation, their conversations are largely unintelligible to outsiders. Archie is one of the few I’ve run across who can readily cross all the borders and still really understand what’s going on.

Winston was pumped. “Jerry, I’ve got a fantastic idea for you. It’s just incredible. All you have to do….”

Hargrove had entered the auditorium from a side door at the front triggering a subsidence in the din, and I motioned Winston to be quiet. He acquiesced, noticeably peeved.

Hargrove draped his beefy frame over the lectern leaning on his elbows and forearms, looking like a successful predator holding his kill, body language proclaiming, “This is mine!”

For quite a while, he surveyed the audience. His small pale blue eyes, hypnotically indistinct. From a distance, it was hard to tell where he was looking. He seemed to be in no rush to begin his address, patiently savoring the moment as he and his audience considered each other.

When his delay had built optimum tension, Hargrove began to speak, his talent for that sort of thing immediately apparent. Relaxed, informal, he quickly relieved the tension with a facility extraordinary performers possess for making what many find difficult seem easy. He was captivating, weaving together the threads of his topic with jokes, spontaneous associations and asides to individuals in the audience. Hargrove is really at his best after a few drinks, but that day, even (presumably) sober, he was damn good.

He reviewed advances in neurophysiology, neurochemistry, genetics, how developments in learning theory, systems theory and computer science had begun to bring the understanding of human behavior out of the abyss of mysticism into an arena where it could be the subject of rigorous scientific study and rational analysis.

We now had the potential, he said, to create the kind of human society dreamed of for ages, to create an environment of interpersonal harmony and eliminate the human suffering that throughout the history of the human race had resulted from dysfunctional minds. To achieve this end, we had merely to apply the burgeoning fund of knowledge about human behavior and its determinants to the pursuit of rational and advantageous evidence-based social policies. The necessity to follow this course would become apparent as the planet became more densely populated, bereft of readily available resources and increasingly dependent on sophisticated, complex systems to produce and distribute the food and other goods and services humanity needed to prosper. Economic globalization and instantaneous world spanning information and communication technologies had humanity on the doorstep of a unitary global community. The main obstacle was reliably collective will.

For the global community to flourish, social technology had to catch up. Social policies for the global human community had to have a rational basis in an empirically based understanding of human cognition, emotions, behavior. It was imperative for psychiatry and related behavioral science disciplines, as the fields possessing the most expertise in this area, to take a leading role in developing and promoting this concept. To this end he said, we needed to market our expertise, to acquire influence with those in government who make public policies so that we as a profession could rationally shepherd society in beneficial directions.

In the course of the coming year, UCLA would create a major new program, the Center for Behavioral Science and Social Policy. The Center, as Hargrove envisaged it, would have a number of functions. It would promulgate the need for behavioral science input in public decision making, publish a periodical bulletin, host colloquia and, with a variety of public relations techniques, foster alliances between social science, political science and behavioral science. It would serve as a hub for research in the area of evidence-based social policy. And on the level most valuable locally, he said, offering a sop to the present audience, the university and the NPI would reap great benefits from new grants, additional faculty and enhanced recognition.

Hargrove didn’t mention another, more personal beneficiary of this project, himself. But anyone else who noticed the omission or cared about it would have been in a small minority. When his address ended, it seemed everyone was euphoric. All around me, I heard snatches of excited chattering about new possibilities for expansion amongst the UCLA family. Researchers were already figuring out how to amend grant proposals for planned or ongoing projects to incorporate the social policy angle, and there was talk of developing connections with other departments, history, political science, the law school.

Hargrove was triumphant. He’d generated a tsunami of enthusiasm that surged through the auditorium. I heard someone say his speech would go down as a historic moment for the profession. I also noticed the local TV news cameras in the rear. Some among the faculty may have harbored unfavorable opinions as to Hargrove’s clinical, scientific or moral contributions to the NPI, but his worth as a promoter was unchallenged. The future seemed bright.

I saw Archie, scowling, heading upstream toward the exit. Hargrove’s performance had not won his heart as was to be expected. I was surprised Archie was even there at all. I wanted catch him to tell him my good news and find out about his trip to Israel. I got up, prepared to stumble back across the legs of the brain researchers who were still in some other universe. Maybe they figured membrane transport was not, like mass transit, a social issue.

Winston was tugging at my arm. “Look,” he implored, “when can I talk to you? This is important.”

“Not now,” I said. “I need to catch up with Archie.”

“Tonight. How about tonight? I’ll meet you at Ernie’s. I can tell you about this opportunity then. Be there at twenty-six minutes after nine.” Winston was in the habit of making appointments at odd fractions of the hour. He claimed it made people think his time was precious and being punctual was vitally important. I knew better but humored him.

“OK. Nine twenty-six. You got it,” I said as I climbed over into the now empty row of seats in front of us rather than contend with obstructing appendages in our row.

Following Archie, I too pushed upstream toward the exit in the back of the auditorium, struggling against the downstream current of would-be sycophants flowing toward the lectern. I encountered Cannonball trying his best to maintain place within the descending crowd and still prevent its constituents from colliding with his swaddled and slung right elbow, “Some speech, huh, Jerry?”

“He sure got everyone turned on,” I said.

“Great time to be working here. Huh? This is going to be something special. I was afraid I’d cooked my goose with my extra-curricular activities,” he laughed. “But this will keep me closer to home,” he said waving his elbow and wincing with the effort.

Obviously, Cannonball hadn’t yet been informed about the transitional nature of our job.

***

“Archie! Hi! Welcome back,” I said when I’d caught up with him.

“Gegen die Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens,” he muttered, reprising Friedrich Schiller’s succinct dissertation on the omnipotence of stupidity.

“Hargrove?” I asked.

“The department, the university…, the human race,” he snarled in disgust. “Einstein said it almost as well, ‘Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.’ Einstein and Schiller knew the score.”

“How’d your trip to Israel go?” I asked, attempting a segue to a less incendiary topic.

“Yes…, quite a trip. I’m still a bit unsettled. You’d think with all the traveling I’ve done, I’d have become inured to jet-lag, but, alas, no. However, it was necessary for my peace of mind, jet-lag or no.” He paused for a quick breath. “You have time for a stroll over to the botanical garden to talk?”

“Sure. Let’s go,” I said, and we headed off to the southeast corner of the campus and the garden a short distance away.

“You remember Nate Halpern, don’t you?” Archie asked as we walked.

“Yeah, sure.”

Halpern was a psychiatrist who’d been a childhood friend of Archie’s in the Bronx and had moved to Israel in the 1980’s. He’d done a lot of research on assessing the effects of psychotherapy, a murky and controversy ridden subject if there ever was one. He’d been at UCLA a year earlier to present a colloquium on some of the results of his work. The research instruments he’d designed produced quantifiable data which did measure certain kinds of changes, but I had the feeling the changes being measured did not reflect what patients expected to get out of psychotherapy, whatever that was. I said that to Halpern. He said I could be right. But even if he hadn’t totally succeeded in empirically capturing the essence of the therapeutic process, his efforts, and those of others, had, at least, sharpened the discussion. If you want to accomplish something, he said about research, you do what you know how to do. When you learn to do something better, then you can do that.

Sounded a lot like the wisdom of TOAD…, and Kat.

I liked Halpern.

***

“Nate is now director of research at Technion University in Haifa,” Archie went on. “He’s been inviting me to join him there for some time. Based on what you and I discussed a couple weeks ago, I decided this was a good time to take him up on his invitation. I liked what I heard and saw. I’ll be moving there as soon as I get packed up. Shouldn’t take long. I’m done here. This business today demonstrates how polluted the UCLA pond has become.”

Archie’s mood was hard to read. I couldn’t decide if congratulations or condolences were called for. He seemed satisfied enough about moving, yet his haste was odd. I’d gotten the impression when we’d talked at the faculty center he was just doing preliminary scouting for some possible future need. Why get out so suddenly?

“Wow! This seems so sudden,” I said. We’d gotten into the garden proper and found a place to sit on a pleasant bench backed by a grove of massive bamboo plants.

“As we discussed a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking of doing this for a while, and now conditions seem propitious. My importunate friend, Nate, is offering me a very appealing destination. You, and what I take to be distinct signs of your developing autonomy, have convinced me I should get out of your hair. As much as I’ve enjoyed our closeness and being a part of your development in the last three years, I believe you need your own space free of entanglements with me.”

“Those entanglements have done me a lot of good, Archie.”

“Yes. I hope they have. And I thank you. Nevertheless, despite the uncertain future you were facing after June, you were loath to accept my offer of a research position, even though by doing so, you would have gained considerable security without giving up much freedom. It was an offer many in your position would have jumped at. So, why not you? I know, it’s apparent you were afraid of disappointing me if you didn’t show sufficient zeal for research. Sure. I accept that as part of the reason… but not all. I think the more important part is, you’ve reached a stage where you want to be out of my shadow. It’s no longer acceptable for you to be dependent on me. That strikes me as a healthy maturation. But you didn’t want to hurt my feelings so you stalled until you found an appealing alternative. Hmm?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much on target.”

“I thank you for your concern,” Archie continued. “So, when I clear out, you’ll have more room to grow. Don’t get me wrong. You’re not responsible for my leaving. Your circumstances now just make my leaving easier.”

He paused to inhale prodigiously while I wondered what “circumstances” he had in mind. Had he heard about the 2-South job from my mother? From Hal?

“Now, why such a sudden departure? What is it that does compel me to leave?” His eyes narrowed to slits as he again took a deep breath. His expression hardened. “My material needs are not extravagant. They can be met almost anywhere. Places aren’t important to me, but peace of mind is. I won’t spend my time wrestling with jealous pygmies whose only goal in life is accumulation of power so they can harass those they envy. It’s too much of a distraction. I will not degrade myself to the level of my adversaries and spend my energies as they do. Too many brilliant people and their careers are stifled by political infighting. And to believe anything is accomplished even by a victory is delusional. The process is seductive and perpetual. Scientific priorities are replaced by political ones. The reservoir of fresh challengers and battlefields is inexhaustible.”

“Mort Abrams did not need to enhance his own ego by dominating others. Ham Hargrove does. It turned my stomach to see the members of our faculty clambering over each other to gain the choicest spots at his feet. With one speech, Hargrove turned the department into a pack of groveling jackals. It was appalling.”

I felt myself tensing. It must have been visible.

“You think I’m exaggerating. Right? Not so. This new program Hargrove wants to start is a logical extension of his mentality, and I don’t like it any more than I like him. What he’s proposing will lead the department, and, if he were to achieve his megalomaniacal fantasies, the world, down a slippery path to a totalitarian future. And he wants our profession to lead the way? At best, it entails a major change in emphasis in the philosophy of the department which should be carefully thought out and thoroughly debated by the whole faculty, not mindlessly incorporated like a new cheer at a pep rally…. Maybe they never read Orwell.”

“Yesterday, when I learned about his forthcoming promotion and the speech he planned to give, I thought there might be some opportunity to slow the process down, to allow for more careful consideration and evaluation of the potential effects.”

“How did you know about all that yesterday?” I interjected.

“Oh,” he said smiling and chuckling. “I’ve had some contact of my own with Harry Glickman. (Oops! I’d forgotten to tell Glickman to stay out of Archie’s business.) After you told me about him, I was concerned about his motives, the risks he presented. So, I contacted him. We talked. I now accept your vouching for him was spot on. (Whew!) I regret any qualms I previously had about him. A fine fellow as you said, eccentric, but all the best of us are. He’s elected to keep me informed as he has you. As a result, I know, how Hargrove schemed with Thelma Burke. How she used her influence in state government to exert political pressure on the university to encourage Mort Abrams to step down and to install Hargrove in Mort’s place. So, yesterday, when I got back to LA, I dropped by Hargrove’s office to talk with him about his plans for the department and my concerns about them. I got the distinct impression he expected me. No, more than that, that he had lured me in, and I’d taken the bait. I spoke my piece. He listened. He smirked. He disputed nothing I said to him. He simply didn’t respond to anything I had to say. When I’d finished, he proceeded to make it clear to me just how miserable he could make my life at UCLA if dared to get in his way.”

“He threatened you?” I asked.

“He made it quite clear he was orchestrating my departure. Of course, the personal message to me was camouflaged in a pronouncement about the department in general, but the message was clear nonetheless. He told me much of the departmental administrative machinery would be tied in with the Center and anything that interfered with the smooth development of the Center would also impair the other administrative functions of the department. If that happened, all sorts of problems involving grant administration, personnel, supplies, etc. could arise.”

“He was telling me, toe the line or my secretary doesn’t have printer toner, no equipment is purchased or repaired for my lab, it becomes impossible to hire anybody to staff my research. You name it.”

“But the grants that pay for all that are yours. Aren’t they?” I asked.

“True, but they’re administered by the department, and that means controlled by Hargrove, and that means he has me in his talons. Which leaves me three options, fighting, suffering or leaving. Only the last one is acceptable…, better than acceptable, actually. It’s, davka, liberating.”

“Davka?”

“As far as I’m aware, Jerry, there’s no adequate English equivalent,” Archie explained. “It’s a term Israelis use in sarcastic admiration for irony’s precision targeting. I heard it a lot in the last couple weeks.”

“So, now, I’m liberated. I have a congenial place to land. It’s time to go. I’ll miss Malibu, but the hills around Haifa are damn pretty too. Portability is the essence of my lifestyle.”

“So, there you have it,” he concluded. “I apologize for any strain my abruptness may cause you, though I’d guess getting out of your hair will relieve strains for you rather than cause them. If I’m wrong, and you decide you want to tag along with me, they’ll be a spot for you in Israel.”

“Archie, I love you, and I know how much you’ve pulled for me and with me. And you’re right, I need to do something on my own without your safety net ready to catch me. I’ve known that for some time. The problem was I hadn’t been ready to commit to anything. Now, finally, I have. I hesitate to tell you though. You’re not going to like it.”

“Look,” Archie said encouragingly, “you don’t have to do anything to satisfy me. I’m proud of you. You’ve paid your dues on the long road to becoming a psychiatrist. A hell of a long road. You will always have what you’ve earned. It can be an honorable profession. If you feel that at this point in your life, you want to play piano, and write music…, cherchez la femme…. La femme Katzenstein, n’est-ce pas? Who’s to tell you that’s not the right decision? Incidentally, my secretary informed me Ms. Katzenstein left me a message while I was gone. She wanted me to call her when I returned. I haven’t had a chance yet. Any idea what that’s all about.”

“I’d guess she wants you to convince me to give up on psychiatry, run off with her to Italy and write a musical comedy.”

“So, go. Follow your heart and your sweetheart. You don’t need me to make that permissible. If that’s what the two of you want to do, do it.”

“That’s not what the two of us want to do. That’s what she wants me to do. We had a blowup about that a couple weeks ago when I told her what I’ve decided to do. I’m not giving up psychiatry, Archie. I’m staying at UCLA…, with Hargrove. I’m going to be the Ward Chief on 2-South in July. I’ll be part of Hargrove’s NPI team.”

Archie looked as though I’d driven a stake through his heart. He stared at me, his expression a mixture of incredulity, bewilderment, pain and anger. Muscles rippled under the skin of his cheeks as he clenched his teeth, staring at me, saying nothing, tension unbearable. His silent rage strangling us both. I’d said he wouldn’t like it, but I hadn’t expected this. So I was going to do something he disapproved of. That had happened lots of times and at most produced an impassioned discussion between us. Never this kind of withering hostility.

“Archie,” I said, interrupting the oppressive silence, “Hargrove may be your nemesis, but he’s not mine. I can’t go through my life battling your enemies, people who are jealous of you. There are too many of them. Hargrove has always been fair with me and helpful too. Besides, you don’t seem all that upset about leaving. Why are you so angry? Alright, so you don’t like his plans for this new project, and you don’t like my being associated with it, even though my only connection will be as part of the faculty. I’ll be running an inpatient unit and teaching inpatient psychiatry to residents, not degrading human society. We’ve had disagreements like this before. What’s the big deal?”

“I agree,” I said, plunging on. “You have a good point. It’s certainly debatable whether Hargrove’s proposed Center and his notions about socio-political management are good ideas or not. Maybe they could lead to bad ends. But you could say that about almost any significant new undertaking. What did I do?”

Archie was shaking his head slowly in obdurate disapproval, listening to some inner voice. “I think you will find the future of your new situation a bit more complicated than you anticipate. Once you trade in the Hippocratic covenant between patient and doctor for an allegiance to some social authority, you will have to make some mighty unsavory decisions, and that’s the ultimate course Hargrove’s plotting for the department. I wouldn’t have thought you’d be comfortable with that. New psychiatrist may be but old inquisitor writ in politically correct psychosocial babble. But you’re right, it is an issue to be debated. Just because I happen to think it’s an abomination does not require you to think as I do. If I’m right, you’ll find out for yourself in due time.”

“No, Jerry,” he continued, “the wound you’re inflicting is deeper and more personal than that. By submitting yourself to Hargrove’s seductive clutches, you’ve betrayed me as surely as if you had stuck a knife in my back.”

“You think I’m doing this to hurt you?” I stammered, astonished.

“No of course not,” said Archie. “I know you wouldn’t do anything intentionally to hurt me, but betrayal is there nonetheless, and it is no less consequential. Your perfidy was not in accepting Hargrove’s offer. That was naïve, not treacherous. Your attitude now is what is perfidious.”

“If, after what I’ve told you this afternoon, you do not realize what Hargrove has done to me, what you’ve enabled him to do to me, then you do bear the responsibility, because you ought to realize it. You aren’t stupid, Jerry. You must realize it. If you choose to deny what is the apparent reality of Hargrove’s actions and intentions, then on some level, you are siding with those who for years have been persecuting me with the denunciation that I’m a paranoid, disruptive troublemaker who is unable to work within an institution without destroying it.”

“Your mother believes it. If I talk to her, all I hear is I’m seeing things that don’t exist or misinterpreting things or making trouble for myself. That’s why I hardly talk to her any more. She has always been too fearful to entertain the possibility I might be right. ‘Don’t make waves. You see conspiracies in everything. Those things happen to everybody.’ I know what to expect from my dear sister, so we no longer have much of a relationship, and I’m beyond caring.”

“But I still care about you, Jerry. I thought you had inherited some of your father’s toughness…. I had my differences with him, as did you, and for good reasons, but your father was not deceitful. He was not afraid to call things as he saw them.” He paused. “Why do you suppose Hargrove chose you?”

“He knows me pretty well.” I answered. “He knew I was available and I’d be interested. He needs to replace Arnold Cohen who is flagrantly irresponsible. Hargrove and I have talked about psychiatric input in social issues lots of times, but I had no idea about his plans for this new program until he gave his address just now. I had told him I wanted to take his job offer in an email last week…. Look, this is a great opportunity to do something I want to do. I have no doubt Hargrove can be vicious and vindictive as hell, and he probably is jealous of you, lots of people are, but I’m not siding with him in any betrayal of you. What I’m doing doesn’t have anything to do with you…. I think we’ve said enough about it.”

“I think not,” Archie snapped. “Your tender sensibilities can stand a bit more enlightenment…. Hargrove chose you long before he offered you the job on 2-South. He initiated his seduction when he made himself your preceptor three years ago. He’s been planning this a long time.”

“The department has tolerated Arnold Cohen’s imperfections because he does decent research and gets published, and that makes UCLA look good, and that’s what they care about. That hasn’t changed. Hargrove didn’t offer you Cohen’s job because he needs to replace Cohen, but because you represent a meaningful pawn for him to use against me. Through you he can torment me. Jerry, you are my Achilles’ heel, and Hargrove is sufficiently clever to recognize it and sufficiently sinister to exploit it.”

“I’m a stoic, Jerry. For many years, I’ve known connections to the material world are ultimately compromising, dependent on the whims and eccentricities of others. Valuing those connections can only lead to a loss of autonomy and a degree of slavery. God knows I enjoy comforts and privileges and… beauty,” he waved his arms to indicate our present surroundings, “but I value my freedom more. My mind and my soul are independent, and that is vastly more important to me than whether I have a fancy lab, a new car or a prestigious title. The stoics knew what they were talking about, whether they were slaves or emperors. They knew the only meaningful freedom, ultimately the only possible freedom, was freedom of the mind, and they also knew the only way an individual can lose that freedom is to enslave himself.”

“It’s a difficult ideal to actualize, Jerry. It requires a kind of autistic detachment, devaluing and potentially repudiating relationships with everything outside one’s mind, including other people. But I do value my relationship with you, Jerry. Hargrove knows that. He knows you are the portal to my vulnerability, and that is where he’s thrusting his blade.”

Once again, as at the faculty club, I couldn’t speak. Here was the man I had, since adolescence, admired, hoped to emulate, idolized. The bulwark who had provided a secure mooring for me when my life seemed in danger of drifting into chaos, who offered the calm, reasoned perspective I relied on when mine was off the wall, who, once again, was venting beliefs any first year resident would have unhesitatingly identified as paranoid delusions, and now he’d made me party to them.

And once again, as I reviewed the calculus of his tormented logic, it led me to paralysis. If I repudiated his condemnation of Hargrove, would I indeed be committing the betrayal Archie’s impeccable reasoning had bound to me. Despite how crazy it seemed to me, maybe he was right. There was nothing in what he had said that was impossible. Yet, it seemed unacceptably improbable that Hargrove would spend three years nurturing this plot, or that, at the crest of his wave of success, he would devote the time and energy needed for such a subtle, private vendetta against Archie. I certainly wouldn’t have. But maybe Hargrove would.

Acceptance of Archie’s thesis would commit me to the whole of the crazy narrative he applied to his life. There would be no way out once I granted his first premise. I’d be obliged to spurn the prize Hargrove offered me and the clarity it had brought to my personal identity which had seemed, so recently, in vaporous disarray. That prospect was as threatening as wronging Archie. Was it just my self interest in preserving a good relationship with Hargrove keeping me from agreeing with Archie? If I possessed the kind of stoic autonomy endorsed by Archie, would I see things his way? I didn’t think so. What if I was wrong?

Archie, why are you doing this to me?

I don’t know long we sat, silent, on that stone bench. I was emotionally chilled despite the hazy warmth of the garden sunshine. I didn’t know what to say, and, worse, I feared saying anything would just lead me to dig myself further into the morass. Archie, reading me accurately, and maybe as pained as I was by my awkward stasis, let me off the hook for the moment.

“You now have some decisions to make,” he observed soberly. “But then, difficult decisions are integral to the process of achieving the maturity and independence you’ve been so assiduously seeking.”

“Actually, we both have some decisions to make. Mm?” he said with a bemused grin which, at the time, seemed merely incongruous but, in retrospect, I would label diabolical.

“He who lives by the sword. Eh? Closing the circle? Mm?” he said enigmatically, smiling and tipping his beret to a gorgeous blonde strolling past us through the garden.

“Anyway, I don’t think we need to sit here and stonewall each other while you think of something therapeutic to say to your uncle. When we can talk, you’ll be able to find me,” he said.

“Yeah. OK,” I mumbled. Archie nodded in acknowledgement and shrugged his shoulders. I left, embarrassed, whipped, dismissed but grateful to get away, comforted by locomotion.

As I was walking away from Archie, who remained seated on the bench staring in the direction of dense foliage across the path, I picked up the sound of humming that sounded like the cat motif from Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

By the time I reached 2-South, I’d reconstituted sufficiently to be able to live with myself without being psychotic. I couldn’t agree with Archie, not without more concrete evidence than he was offering. I’d known Hargrove for three years, and, under the circumstances, it was perfectly reasonable for him to offer the job to me. I didn’t need to go searching for conspiratorial explanations. I had some independent worth of my own. I was not merely a means to hurt Archie.

***

I would not live my life as an extension of someone else’s fantasies.

Not Archie’s paranoid fantasies.

Not Kat’s romantic fantasies.

Not my mother’s anxious fantasies.

Not Hargrove’s megalomaniacal fantasies?

Look…, three out of four’s not so bad.

***

I got to Ernie’s at nine-thirty (close enough to Winston’s schedule) ready for a hamburger fix and a chance to fill in Ernie and Bobbi and Winston on what was happening to TOAD. Winston, presumably there since well before nine twenty-six, was already working on a fix of his own. I corralled Bobbi and Ernie and updated the three of them about Garfield and Burke, TOAD and its woes and me. I informed them TOAD had about a month’s worth of cash in the bank and I’d advised the employees to look elsewhere for work. I talked fast and pretty much had it covered before my beef and accouterments were ready.

Bobbi and Ernie considered the option of looking for a post-Garfield sugar daddy but felt one might come with strings attached and a substantial vetting process would be needed to keep TOAD string free, and neither of them wanted to undertake that.

Bobbi looked despondent. Ernie looked like he’d found some inner peace. I probably looked like I could use some methadone too. Winston looked like he’d explode if he didn’t get to say his piece soon.

“TOAD has problems? Man, you’re nuts. It’s a goldmine!” Winston exclaimed at me. “Ads man! Can the not-for-profit shit and run ads on the website. You’ll make a bundle. Cut me in, I’ll do it for you. TOAD’s a cash cow mooing to be milked.”

I chewed for a while in what probably appeared a thoughtful manner, and I was giving his proposal the respect of serious consideration.

Consideration concluded, I said, “Leo, I understand. There might be money to be made from TOAD. I don’t think so, but maybe you’re right. But I think commercialization would kill TOAD and, for sure, it would kill the ideal Frank Carlossi had in mind for it from the start. It’s flourished by being open, non-authoritarian and free of any ulterior motives. TOAD has always been, as Frank Carlossi designed it, an unfettered self-help resource for the human race. It exists for the betterment of humanity and for no other purpose…, certainly not in the interest of marketing. That’s its appeal. People appreciate that. They’ve believed it’s only there for them. It’s honest. It’s unsullied by commercialism. It’s clean. Adding a profit element would be the end of TOAD as Frank intended it to be. Even if we kept it nonprofit and only used ad revenue to support TOAD, the appearance of marketing would taint TOAD’s purity and Carlossi’s legacy. He always insisted TOAD must not be commercialized. Better TOAD dies an elegant aesthetic death from starvation and passes into some mythic realm…, the realm of departed religions which wouldn’t cave in to materialism. That’s my opinion, anyhow.”

Bobbi was sadly nodding her head in agreement as I was speaking.

“If I were a gambling man,” Winston said, “and you know I am, I’d bet you were naïve about the public’s aversion to marketing. Materialism is an even more popular belief system than TOAD, and merging the two is a natural. But you’re the boss. It’s your call.” Then with a friendly smile and a shake of his head, “Jerry, you’re a romantic sucker. You’re never gonna get rich.”

***

The weekend left me with nothing to do but feel lonely and bereft. I missed Kat and her spontaneity. I was very distressed about Archie and caught between dueling indictments. I had failed him. He had failed me. I pondered the legitimacy of his accusations. Had I had sold my soul to Hargrove?

The Santa Ana winds continued to blow, raising dust, temperature and my irritability quotient.

I hoped Winston might want a crew member for some sailing despite off-shore smog, dust and positively charged ions, but he was engaged in interviewing to hire a new manager for one of his nursing homes. Berkowitz, I knew, had gone to San Diego for a two day conference on children’s sleep disorders. I would have joined him to have someone to hang out with, but he’d gone there with his girlfriend. They didn’t need my morbid company. None of my other friends were available, and I didn’t even feel up to music time at Ernie’s.

***

Monday morning Cannonball was actually at work, his swaddled arm still in a sling prompting an outflow of sympathy from Agnes. We’d had four new admissions over the weekend, perhaps incited by Saint Ann, and with Cannonball in the driver’s seat, there was little to occupy me besides guarding against prematurely letting on that he wasn’t long for this ward.

Glickman had again called Millie, this time, to say he’d be out of town for a few days. She still thought he was reinforcing CAP. I still thought he was researching basketball teams.

***

Tuesday, more of the same.

Cannonball again showed up for work. No sign anyone had informed him he was being replaced. My state of underemployment persisted. Glickman was still away doing whatever profligate stuff he was up to. Berkowitz sent me and a bunch of others, a Tweet announcing he was engaged. At least his weekend had been productive. No word from Archie. No word from Kat. No word from UCLA Human Resources.

***

Wednesday, more of the same.

I wanted to at least say goodbye to Archie before he left my side of the planet. So, fraught with appreciation of the emotional peril involved, I dropped by his office. His secretary said he was out, and declared it was all so sudden and mysterious. No, not his plan to move to Israel, but interrupting his packing up and taking off now. Where to? Sacramento. What for? He wouldn’t tell her why except to say he had to “confer, in person, with a source.” Whatever that meant.

No, he hadn’t seemed worried, quite the contrary, he was very cheerful although he had been acting very strange. What did she mean by strange? “You know,” she said, as though she been studying Roget’s Thesaurus, “peculiar, mysterious, secretive. When he was in his office, going through his papers and packing, he was constantly humming that tune from Peter and the Wolf, you know, when the cat is creeping around. Bumbumbum, bumbumbum, bumbumbumbumbum….”

“And he was always smiling like he was thinking of something funny or sinister, like a cat with a mouse. (Maybe Archie had caught it from Betty when he’d visited Hargrove’s office.) And then there was that time yesterday when he’d gone out and left his cell phone on his desk. It rang for a while, and, after it stopped, the office line rang, and, when I answered, it was a strange phone call from Texas. The caller wouldn’t say what he was calling about. He just asked me to take a message, ‘Lone Star from Texas calling for Professor.’ But he sounded like he was from Russia… not Texas.”

She then told me what had been going on this week had been so strange that before TOAD, she would have been a total wreck. But she kept telling herself it was modal, not moral (one of TOAD’s self-soothing aphorisms, taken to mean: whatever terrible stuff you’re experiencing, remind yourself it’s an average occurrence and not something to beat yourself up about), and that had sustained her. I told her I understood many people found great comfort in the teachings of TOAD, and I’d appreciate it if she’d tell Professor Lebovics I’d been by when he returned.

***

Thursday?

Mm?

Change!

I chained my bike to the rack in front of NPI, and girding my psychological loins, so to speak, I moved to perforate the wall of CAP pickets arrayed in front of the glass doorway when I observed their signs had changed.

“NPI infiltrated by Nazis” said one with photos of Hargrove and gun toting fanatics in camo, cowboy hats and swastikas under the text. “UCLA Psychiatry in League with Patriotic Front” with the same photos. “NPI - Fraud - Graft - Corruption” with pictures of Hargrove and Thelma Burke. “Assault on Civil Rights”, no photos on that one. “Protect the Constitution”, also without photos. And on a few signs, variants of “NPI Chief Kills TOAD” which pictured Hargrove alone and “Evil at NPI - TOAD Saves - Save TOAD”.

A picketer with a stack of paper but no sign thrust a pamphlet in my direction. I took it hoping it might explain what the hell this was all about and hoping acceptance of the pamphlet might buy me passage through the barricade of pickets. I scored twice. And as CAP’s curtain of outrage parted to allow me through, I noticed the Channel Seven News truck and the camera crew shooting Bobbi Binko, microphone in one hand, Harry Glickman in the other.

The CAP pamphlet detailed (perhaps “alleged” would be a better word for legal purposes) a slew of crimes, quasi-crimes and unsavory less-than-criminal-stuff going on among Hargrove, Burke, Wesley Craft, UCLA, the Regents of the University of California, the California legislature and the Patriotic Front. (For the sake of truth in propaganda, it should be acknowledged that not all the alleged misconduct allegedly involved all the alleged perpetrators simultaneously. Presumably, leftwing perps and rightwing perps were not knowingly in cahoots with each other.) Hargrove was identified as the evil mastermind residing at the hub of this vast array of infamy like the black hole at the center of a galaxy.

The Pamphlet declared Hargrove had conspired with Thelma Burke to have her father found incompetent so she could gain control of his wealth and by doing so, cut off his charitable sustaining contributions to the online wiki-religion, TOAD. Hargrove had done this to satisfy the demonic wishes of Wesley Craft, who saw TOAD as a threat to the evangelical movements he’d supported for many years. Thelma Burke had, as her contribution to Hargrove’s plot, inveigled her Democratic Party colleagues to pressure the Regents and the University to depose Mort Abrams and install Hargrove as Director of the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. Wesley Craft, grateful to Hargrove for his role in the assassination of TOAD, had committed to fund Hargrove’s Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy which would also provide Craft with a reputable venue from which to spread the neo-fascist ideology of the Patriotic Front which he similarly bankrolled. This claim, the pamphlet proudly pointed out, dovetailed nicely with CAP’s long-voiced indictment of psychiatry as the creator of two unequal classes of people, a “master race” of the mentally well and the disenfranchised dregs of society, the mentally ill, social purification via diagnostic cleansing in action. The Center, in league with Craft and the Patriotic Front, CAP predicted, would promulgate this atrocity as the “final solution” to the ills of humanity.

A further allegation, for which CAP admitted it had picked up intimations but no hard evidence yet (investigation was ongoing), was a plan by Burke and Hargrove to defraud the State of California, by having the legislature allocate funding to nebulous Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy programs at UCLA which would disappear into the pockets of Burke and Hargrove and, because of the vagueness of the intended uses, be impossible to police. Illuminated by knowledge of the Hargrove family’s history, this plot represented HH III’s attempt to actualize his family legacy and make up for HH II’s cirrhotic failure to defraud the State of Texas.

The pamphlet concluded with demands for redress ranging from firing Hargrove to prosecuting all the identified miscreants and freeing the prisoners of conscience locked up in NPI and other psychiatric hospitals throughout the land.

***

With all the distraction, no one at NPI got much work done that day. The primary employment in which NPI employees undertook to employ themselves involved coalescing in groups dedicated to speculation about the truth of the charges, their likely outcome, whether CAP was righteous or evil, and so on. A secondary area of employment employed NPI insiders in gawking at the crowds of outside gawkers who employed themselves in milling around the CAP pickets in front of NPI, gawking at everybody else and enjoying distraction from whatever useful activities might otherwise have employed them.

I didn’t have much work to do, as usual, so my distraction from useful employment wasn’t much of a loss to anyone.

One of our newly admitted “prisoners of conscience”, a psychotic, psychopathic, methamphetamine addict, managed to employ the employees’ distraction to his advantage, slip off the ward, rape a speech therapist, make his way out the front door, steal a mobile broadcast van and disappear. The van was later recovered near Barstow. The “prisoner” is still out there somewhere. Maybe his conscience is too.

At noon, with the door more effectively secured, pretty much everyone on 2-South who wasn’t totally disabled by their internal distractions gave in to gawking at a new distraction on the dayroom TV, Bobbi Binko’s Channel Seven breaking news coverage of the CAP excitement at NPI. Advantageously for Channel Seven, the van stolen by the escaped prisoner of conscience belonged to Channel Two, so Bobbi had the scoop to herself.

A dozen or so CAP pickets were shown on-screen along with close-ups of their signs and the crowd of outside gawkers, some of whom made on-camera noises toward Bobbi’s microphone orating about how serious these CAP revelations were and how they’d had no idea UCLA was involved in such reprehensible activities and how something had to be done to put an end to these outrages. Bobbi then announced she had a CAP spokesman standing by to explain how CAP learned of the transgressions they were exposing today, and, pivoting to her left, she aimed her microphone at the mouth of Harry Glickman.

Glickman, responding smoothly to Bobbi’s leading questions (as though this whole performance had been scripted), praised CAP’s team of investigators. They’d followed the trail on which they were set by concerned TOADies who’d learned of the threat to TOAD’s very existence when TOAD’s benefactor, Chester Garfield, was spuriously deemed incompetent and control of his estate was turned over to his daughter, Thelma Burke. The psychiatrist who had evaluated Mr. Garfield and whose specious assessment had convinced the court, turned out to be none other than Dr. Hamilton Hargrove III. Many in the TOAD community who knew Mr. Garfield, knew he was as competent as anyone else in Los Angeles, and CAP realized this collusion between Burke and Hargrove represented another in the litany of psychiatric abuses CAP was dedicated to fighting. CAP’s conscientious investigations in Los Angeles, Sacramento and several locations in Texas uncovered the links to the rest of the plot. Etc. Etc. Glickman concluded his testimony with a moving (though fanciful) autobiographic vignette about his having fled Russia to escape this sort of repressive corruption.

When Bobbi had finished with Glickman, the telecast cut to a second location, also familiar to me, the hillside home of Chester Garfield. Bobbi, explained where she was as she walked around the house from the driveway in front to the back, leading the camera and viewers to Garfield, sitting once again where I’d left him ten days earlier, on his rear deck, gazing contentedly over his hillside orchard. He greeted Bobbi like an old friend (which I knew her to be). He appeared to have recovered his usual state of alertness and animation, a testament to his manifest competency. As she had with Glickman, Bobbi led Garfield through a narrative account of his involvement with TOAD including an encomium to the late Frank Carlossi, the developer of TOAD, and to the individual Carlossi considered truly responsible for TOAD’s existence, its spirit, it’s mission, TOAD’s CEO, Dr. Jerry Bender. “I’ll bet he was the one figgered out how to expose all that evil stuff Hargrove’s been up to,” Garfield concluded.

Every head in the dayroom capable of registering input from the external world swiveled in my direction, manifesting looks of incredulity. I smiled. I shrugged. I wished I could pull on an invisibility cloak and disappear.

***

As appointed, I went to Hargrove’s office at four, probably in the grip of some unconscious ostrich fantasy in which, if I acted as though everything was normal, maybe it would be. In through the outer door I went, to be, as usual, confronted by the ever malevolent visage of Betty which, though unusually frazzled, was no less malevolent.

“He’s not seeing anybody,” she screeched at me. “Least of all you!” (This time shouted, no longer merely implied.) She stared at me as though daring me to try to get past her. Cerberus everlasting.

Having neglected to equip myself with a sop, I gave her a nonchalant shrug instead, attempted to communicate a face saving nonverbal, “No big deal,” and departed with my saved face more intact than the chaotic detritus of the suddenly deconstructed future I’d recently expected to experience.

I executed a successfully anonymous retreat from NPI, past pickets and a thinner crowd of gawkers (the professional gawkers of the news crew having long since departed) and headed to my apartment to ponder the existential terrain.

Leaning against my apartment door was a copy of the novel, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Protruding from the pages was a blue envelope addressed to “Bender” in Kat’s familiar script, redolent of the familiar scent of her favorite perfume. It contained a sheet of similarly blue note paper, similarly redolent, bearing the similarly familiar script which said:

In my mailbox, lurking amidst the day’s allotment of junk mail, was another envelope, this one plain white, this time, addressed to “Jerry”, this time, in Archie’s familiar scrawled quasi printing in number two pencil. No redolence, but the note within, written on a sheet of steno pad paper, contained pretty much the same information as Kat’s.

Jerry,

I’m leaving for Israel today,

I feel terrible we parted

under such foul circumstances.

Our coalition (those who love you)

has done its best to save you.

The rest is up to you.

Please visit me in Haifa.

By the way, I like Kat.

You have fine taste.

Love,

Archie.

At least he still wanted to see me.

***

The six o’clock Channel Seven News iteration of Bobbi’s piece had added interviews in Sacramento with several state government functionaries who, while not literally confirming the CAP allegations, did confirm they were at least circumstantially plausible. For Bobbi’s loyal viewers, her tone of voice and innuendo in posing questions would have been sufficient evidence to reach a hanging verdict.

I still cringed when I again heard Chester Garfield finger me as exposer in chief of Hargrove’s plots and Father, Scion and Wholly Kingpin of TOAD.

In one day, my profession had gone from professor of psychiatry to Pope of a crackpot religion.

***

By nine or so that evening, I’d exhausted whatever existential pondering had to offer and reached a state of numb acceptance that my present and future existence was irrevocably different than it had been in the morning. Mental healing, self-soothing obfuscation and guardian sophistry even enabled enough courage for me to entertain the proposition that this could be a good thing.

Now that Til Eulenspiegel’s public image had degenerated from charming to reprehensible, I was cravenly embarrassed to have been so dependently connected with him. I contemplated adding a confessional line to my CV: Experience as Close Associate of Notorious Scumbag.

Had I been such a naïve fool? Had Hargrove just suckered me to hurt Archie? As far as I knew, nothing formal had ever been done to get me signed up for the 2-South job, nor did it appear anything had been said to Cannonball. Was it all an illusion? Had my own narcissism blinded me to the reality that he had never intended for me to have that job in the first place? Could I take some comfort in my status as one of Hargrove’s dupes rather than one of his co-conspirators?

Choosing Hargrove and what he seemed to offer had led me to injure the two people I cared most about, to tacit collusion in the abuse of Chester Garfield and, by virtue of that, to complicity in the attempted murder of TOAD. The demise of TOAD would have wounded Bobbi and the millions of others who, though it still bewildered me, obtained comfort and guidance from TOAD. At least, now it seemed, with Garfield’s competence resurrected, TOAD’s salvation was at hand.

Yet, I was as embarrassed to be in charge of TOAD as by the rest of my failings. The popular balm of TOADian placebo effect notwithstanding, peddling cyber snake oil to the masses was not an undertaking for which I wanted to be remembered.

***

Concluding no more peace of mind was to be had hiding out in my apartment and needing to get out, I emerged to wander around Westwood, hoping as usual air and exposure to the world at large would clarify my murky mental state. I was pleased to discover that other Westwood wanderers as well as those engaged in more purposeful perambulation, paid no attention to me which should not have been a surprise. My name had been broadcast, not my face, and apparently internet hounds of the social media scene hadn’t yet picked up my scent. So far so good, and the fog in my head was lifting.

The same could not be said for the Westwood atmosphere. The Santa Ana’s were gone, the night-time onshore breeze had returned with a vengeance and the street lights of Westwood glimmering in the foggy air provided an eerie evocation of the set for a London murder mystery. If the streets had been deserted, it might have been unnerving, but the ample Westwood crowd, undeterred by fog, made it more likely a pedestrian would be trampled than garroted.

Eventually, my wandering took me past Ernie’s, in front of which, Bobbi was emerging from an airport shuttle van, presumably on the last leg of her return trip from Sacramento. Our eyes met and she said to me, “We had to do what we could, Jerry. Please, don’t hate us.”

“I’m the one who’s let everybody down,” I confessed. “I should be grateful to all of you, but I’m not there yet. It’s gonna take a while to digest.”

“Do you want to come in for a cup of tea to aid your digestion?” She offered.

“Sure,” I said. “I’d also like to hear how this all went down.”

I followed Bobbi through the bar (Ernie blew a kiss to Bobbi and flashed me a thumbs up as we passed) and up the stairs in the back to the apartment above. She parked me at the kitchen table with a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies and went about doing the tea.

“Kat got us started,” Bobbi reported while putting water on to boil. “After you two had that row downstairs, she was really upset. She phoned me later that night. She was convinced Hargrove was just stringing you along. She said you had told her a lot about what a gonif he was, I think that’s the word she used, sort of a crook….”

“Yeah. That sounds like the word she would have used,” I interjected.

“…and she couldn’t believe you were falling for whatever game he was playing. We talked for a while about what to do. Since you seemed dead set on doing what Hargrove wanted you to do, she thought you were beyond reasoning with. I came up with the idea of contacting your uncle, Professor Lebovics. She tried. He was out of the country, but she left a message with his secretary and when he returned, he called her back. She said he was as upset as she was about what you were doing. He also felt arguing with you wouldn’t accomplish anything. He said he’d already had an argument with you about it.” She paused to attend to the now whistling pot. “Herb OK? Or, we’ve got mint, green or regular if you want.”

“Herb’s fine, thanks,” I said.

“You want honey, sugar, milk, lemon?” she asked handing me a steaming mug and a teabag.

“Nothing, neat please, thanks. Cookies are great.”

“So…, your uncle…, he thought the best approach was to go after Hargrove. He was certain Hargrove had dirt under his rug, was the way Kat said he put it, and he knew just the man to uncover it. So he brought in Harry Glickman who is the president of the Southern California CAP chapter. Seems strange for a Professor of Psychiatry to be friends with someone from CAP, but I guess they knew each other from someplace. So we all got together one evening, right here around this table, same tea, same cookies, and I told them what had happened about Mr. Garfield and his daughter and TOAD, and your uncle also knew about Hargrove having some connection with Wesley Craft from Texas. We all figured looking into the connections between Hargrove and Thelma Burke and Wesley Craft were good places to look for dirt, and your uncle and Mr. Glickman said they would split up the research…, and they found the dirt. My job was to break the story so big it would get too much attention for them to cover it up. That’s what we did today. Have you seen the piece?”

“Oh, yeah. Couple of times. I’ve been especially impressed by the segment where I get outed as the head of TOAD by Chester Garfield. Was that part of your plot or just serendipity?”

“Well…, I think Mr. Garfield just wanted to make sure you got the credit you were due. He knew how much Frank Carlossi thought of you and wanted to make sure the world knew about all the good you’d done.”

“I did feed him the line about you exposing Hargrove,” she added sheepishly. “We had to seal that part of the deal. Kat insisted we had to cut off Hargrove’s hold on you.”

“Bobbi, I really don’t want to be responsible for TOAD. I don’t have any interest in running TOAD. For that matter, I also don’t have any aptitude for running a website, a business, a religion. TOAD requires all three. Those were in Frank Carlossi’s skill set, not mine.”

“TOAD will be your salvation,” Bobbi prophesied and gave me a hug.

***

During the last week in June, graduating residents traditionally have little or nothing to do. For me, an already familiar state of being. For prospective inpatients, getting admitted to places like NPI near the end of June is nigh onto impossible. Prospective outpatients are put on waiting lists to await a new class of healers. This, largely dead time, in such institutions, is typically used by prospective graduates to complete last minute preparations for whatever’s coming next.

I began the week forlornly oscillating among my options, should I go pursue Kat in Italy (the leading candidate), look for some dreary employment as a psychiatrist or actually prepare to be the full-time Messiah or Pope or CEO or whatever of TOAD. I’d told the engineers and other TOAD workers that Chester Garfield’s resurrection meant they still had jobs and a place to do them. Despite the rollercoaster ride they’d been through, they all were delighted. I wished I could share their enthusiasm.

Option three, my distasteful sally into ecclesiastical administration of the crackpot sort, remained viable until eleven-thirty Monday morning when Harry Glickman, looking unusually harried (Oooh! Sorry! Inadvertent pun acknowledged.) appeared at the door of my soon to be old office at NPI.

“Hey, Doc,” he said as usual by way of greeting.

“You OK, Harry?”

“Bad news, Doc,” he said. “Garfield had stroke over weekend. If not incompetent previous, for sure is now. Ball again in Thelma’s court. TOAD again circling drain. And Glickman needs get out of town. One of evil troika contracted hit on Glickman. Glickman thinks is Craft, but could be any or all working together. So, Glickman come say thanks and Do svidaniya.”

“How’re you going to get your lithium and get your levels checked?”

“Alive is first. Glickman has number. Maybe you get call.”

“Good luck, Harry. CAP won’t be the same without you.”

We hugged, and, as he turned toward the door to leave, I was seized by a chilling specter. “Harry, hold on a minute. What about Bobbi or me? Are they after us too? Should I warn Bobbi? Should we get out of town too?”

“Glickman only hear about Glickman,” he said. “Will let you know if more info.”

“OK, Harry. Thanks. Good luck.” We hugged once more, he was gone, I was sinking in a swamp of dread. Was the danger real? Was I overreacting? Glickman’s info had always been reliable, but he didn’t have any about anyone other than himself. What about Archie? Would he be out of Craft’s reach in Israel? Craft has unlimited resources. He could hire killers anywhere. Couldn’t he? How could Bobbi protect herself? She’s always out in public, an easy target. What about Kat? If I joined her in Italy, we could be jointly mowed down by Craft’s hired Sicilian hit men? Efficient, true. Neither of us would be painfully left to mourn the other. A romantic dénouement, sure. But still!

“Ring!” my soon to be ex-office phone interrupted my morbid excursion through the ghastly litany of terminal possibilities.

“Yeah!” I answered in a tone that must have sounded as surly and unprofessional as I was feeling.

“May I speak with Dr. Bender, please,” asked a cheery, male, Ivy League type voice, pointedly eschewing offense. It could have come from that Kleinian psychoanalyst. Was he trying to find out where Archie had gone? Was he now working for Craft?

“Who’s asking?” I replied, pointedly declining to join in the proffered civility.

“I am Jordan Cosgrave, Executive Vice President of Craft Enterprises. I’m calling to speak with Dr. Bender at the behest of Wesley Craft.”

My first impulse was to say, “Bender’s been gone for days. Nobody knows where he is,” and hang up.

My second impulse was to query whether Mr. Cosgrave’s executive responsibilities included executions and, if so, whether he did the wet work himself.

My third impulse, which came in first, was a product of curiosity and, maybe, given my grim mood, a modicum of suicidality. “I’m Dr. Bender. What can I do for you?”

“Mr. Craft has a proposition for you. He asked me to invite you to come to his Los Angeles office in Century City, at your convenience, to discuss it.”

“What kind of proposition?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss the details, though I can say, when you hear it, you will be surprised.”

“How soon can we do this?” I asked. I wanted to get my dread over with as soon as possible. Worrying about every dark shadow, every unexpected creak of a wooden floor, every meal prepared by anyone other than myself, the innumerable ways I could imagine being done in at any moment. Not a state of existence I wanted prolonged.

“Whenever you’d like in the next few days. Mr. Craft’s schedule is quite flexible this week.”

“How about this afternoon? Two o’clock?”

“That will be fine. I’ll let Mr. Craft know.”

“Can I bring an armed bodyguard?”

“Um…, well…,” that caught him by surprise. “Weapons are not actually permitted at Craft Enterprises. There’s a metal detector and….”

“It’s a joke,” I interjected, though it wasn’t, really, given the possibilities I envisioned for the surprise I’d experience when I heard the proposition. “OK. I’ll be there, unarmed.”

He gave me the address.

I wasn’t planning to pack a gun, but I did send a text message about the meeting to Winston. If I wasn’t back by this evening, there would at least be a record of where I’d been, and the search for my body would have some place to start.

***

The view to the west from Craft Enterprise’s immense office suite on the thirty-third floor of FOX Plaza in Century City (Nakatomi Plaza of Die Hard fame, some other identities in other movies) captured pretty much all the Los Angeles area coastline. I wondered how much of Craft’s visually captured domain he’d also captured in title.

Craft’s secretary or PA or whatever she was, a trim, elegantly attired woman of indistinct age, probably early middle, showed me in to Craft’s office and announced me to him. I hadn’t had any idea what Wesley Craft looked like. I’d been expecting cowboy, long, lean, tan weathered skin, chiseled face etc. What I got was short, fat and pink, a delicate pudgy face adorned by a finely trimmed whitish-reddish moustache and a fringe of fading, retreating, whitish-reddish hair over his ears, topped by a pink scalp, all sitting above citified chubbiness wrapped in a white silk business suit. His feet did, however, bear the requisite Texan pedal affectation, cowboy boots. They didn’t look as though they’d ever had, nor ever would have, a close encounter with stirrups. As he made the considerable trip from his desk across the room to the door, he walked as though his feet hurt. I thought he’d be better served by a pair of running shoes than boots designed for a day in the saddle. “Doctor Bender, good afternoon. I am so glad you could make it,” he said, extending a pudgy paw. He didn’t seem like a potential assassin, but then what did I know.

“Hello, Mr. Craft,” I said as our hands met. His felt like it had been stored in industrial strength moisturizing cream.

“Call me Wes, please. Come on in and sit a spell,” he said indicating a pair of facing couches separated by a glass topped coffee table. I sat facing the windows. He sat opposite. “Coffee?”

“Uh…, thanks, black,” I responded after a quick estimation that the odds of something toxic in additives were higher than in the java itself, and, if he drank, I could drink. The elegantly attired whatever glided over with a tray of the coffee necessaries and then was dismissed by good old boy “Wes” with a flick of his eyebrows.

He rose, poured for both of us, helped himself to sugar and cream, sank once again into the plush cushion behind him, sipped his coffee (OK, safe to drink!) and got down to business. “TOAD is quite an operation. You boys came up with one hell of an idea when you put that one together. I’m highly impressed, and you are surely to be congratulated.”

“It is my understanding that, following the unfortunate demise of your cofounder, you have inherited the whole shebang. (I nodded what I guessed to be an unnecessary confirmation just to be sociable.) As you may know, I, myself, have been an active player in the religion industry for quite a few years. Can’t be a bad thing for God to know you’re on his side. (Here, he paused for a chuckle and another sip of ostensibly nontoxic coffee.) Through Craft Enterprises, I have established and sustained many brick and mortar churches, travelling ministries and radio and television ministries, and we’ve been real successful reaching out to the masses who are in search of God’s message.”

“When you boys came along with TOAD, our numbers hit the skids. You’re capturing the market. I know this to be the truth because I hear about it all the time from my ministers. They’re losing their congregants to TOAD, and, frankly, just between us religion entrepreneurs, they’re taking a painful hit in the accounts receivable (chuckle, sip).”

‘Well Sir, I’ve got a proposition for you.” His expression morphed to far less chummy, far more serious, and he paused for another sip (no chuckle this time) and a dab at his pink lips with a cloth napkin.

Here it comes, I thought, as he sipped and dabbed: Get out of Dodge (or get out of TOAD) or you’re getting fitted with concrete cowboy boots and will soon be sleeping with the fishes several miles out into that blue stuff you can see from my window. Or, maybe getting out wasn’t even on the options menu, and he’d go straight to concrete and fish.

He obviously hadn’t heard about Garfield’s stroke and the consequent impending demise of TOAD. I was rapidly calculating whether it would make any difference if I informed him of that fact and reassured him that TOAD was going down the drain without his needing to lift a finger, as well as considering the possibility that he already did know about Garfield and was more interested vengeance than market share, and a squad of not so elegant whatevers would show up momentarily to haul me off to wherever Craft kept his concrete, when he put down the napkin and continued.

“I’d like to buy TOAD.”

***

I suppose my three years of psychiatric training and experience maintaining a professional poker face when I’m being told lunatic nonsense helped me some just then. I was stunned. Craft seemed to take my blank silence for resistance to his offer, and he added, “Oh, of course, I recognize your compensation would need to be substantial…. I was thinking of one hundred million dollars.”

A number of thoughts whipsawed through my mind in milliseconds: the concrete and fish future was for TOAD, not for me — Craft was a businessman not a Mafioso. The way he’d choose to dispose of TOAD was to buy it and then kill it , not its proprietor — I would once again be guilty of selling TOAD down the road — One hundred million dollars is an awful lot of money — Bobbi was right about my salvation.

We again shook hands. Craft summoned several other elegant whatevers (male this time) armed with nothing more lethal than contracts and pens. I assumed ownership of an account containing the money. Craft assumed ownership of TOAD.

I told him, in the interest of truth in religion, while whoever he wanted could be CEO of TOAD, my identity as the Messiah of TOAD probably could not be assumed by anyone else as that was a matter of historical, if not theological, fact.

Richard Feynman might have said: That fact only occurred in one, or maybe some, of all the possible histories of TOAD in the universes in which it could occur.

TOAD, as it was constituted at that moment, would have agreed with Feynman.

Craft said: The mythology of TOAD is of no concern.

***

Epilogue

So…. Things turned out.

Not as planned.

Not as feared.

Otherwise works.

Who (certainly not I) would have predicted Wesley Craft’s conversion to TOAD? Who would have predicted Craft, with all his billions, would see TOAD as a ticket to even more billions? Well, Leo Winston probably would have. Leo saw as much himself. And making billions is, after all, what Craft does best. He, much as Leo had, grasped TOAD’s inherent commercial power, the teeming dollar signs infusing each TOADie’s most intimate concerns, their commentaries on everyone else’s most intimate concerns, their commentaries on the commentaries. And for Craft, avarice trumped evangelism.

Craft’s perhaps even more notable genius (one Leo Winston, unlike Jerry Bender, also shared) lay in his understanding that the TOAD using public would not be offended, threatened or otherwise driven to apostasy when he began to use their religious fervor in the service of targeted marketing. TOAD is now thriving as a commercial venture. Algorithmic tweaking has allowed TOAD to ferret out of TOADian communications the inner dynamics of users’ minds (Souls, perhaps?) and identify undeclared (even unconscious) voids in the substrate of their contentment and then match up those voids with the very products and services best suited to promote fulfillment. TOADies love it. Commerce loves it. Craft loves it.

***

TOAD’s core organizing principle may now be best stated as:

Have done unto you what you really want done unto you

whether you know it or not.

***

As the Tenets of TOAD matured, I had always thought most of it was a lot of crap. I still think most of it is a lot of crap. But I do concede it’s popular crap, influential crap, respectable crap, maybe as good a body of crap as anybody else’s body of crap. Certainly, it’s profitable crap.

***

Carlossi probably wouldn’t love it. Though, I’d like to think he would. Then, I’d have less to feel guilty about, but a hundred million dollars buys a lot of rationalization. So, I tell myself: While there’s no sign I can see, of TOAD producing a utopia of universal good, “universal good” is a pretty loopy notion to begin with. (I’ll warrant that’s not a very messiah-like attitude for me to espouse.) TOAD never was going to accomplish what MANUBOTO was supposed to accomplish, and when Carlossi’s brain was in decent shape, he understood that. Maybe Carlossi’s ghost ought to love TOAD despite commercialization and TOAD’s less than utopian very human imperfections. MANUBOTO never would have done anything useful for humanity in the real world, but TOAD does. (And I don’t mean just enhanced shopping.)

What’s real, what isn’t? Where do common irrational beliefs, the distortions of everyday perception, the universal, constant remolding of memory and all the rest of the fakery applied by our brains to mental life fade into psychosis? What’s the teasingly obscure meaning of life, events, experiences? How does one make sense of what’s going on? TOAD addresses all of this.

But it’s not the content of TOAD’s often cockamamie “wisdom” that’s useful. What’s useful is, like an undulating blob of slime mold, TOAD provides a user-friendly communal instrument for coping with the exigencies of existence. In TOAD’s case, it’s attending to humanity’s daily ordeal, the challenge of finding meaning, divining reality, sorting through the vast array of shady, distorted perception people constantly confront. What’s true, what’s illusory, what’s delusional, what’s safe enough, what’s not? What’s good? The value of the answers TOAD offers is (according to TOAD itself) as illusory as the rest of perceived reality, but shared ignorance turns out to be more comforting than going it alone. And that’s arguably a manifest good. That’s what TOAD offers, not “truth” but “good”, not “utopian good” but “pretty good”.

I believe Frank Carlossi would appreciate that.

***

Were I a believer in destiny, I could assert that fate delivered TOAD to me as the vehicle of my liberation from the burden of seeking purposeful existence, amounting to something, accomplishing something, doing right, being worthwhile, being meaningful. I, however, am not a believer in destiny. I’ve become, davka, a disciple of the TOADian axioms: inscrutability, imponderability and the overwhelming agency of incalculable caprice…, not destiny. So, I can’t take comfort in the notion there’s an orderly universe and that some fundamental property of that universe is looking out for my welfare (or, for that matter, be troubled by dread there’s one out to get me). Still, I do feel liberated, and I’ve struggled to account for how having a substantial chunk of money has eased the burden of making my life meaningful. It has though, and I accept it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Money is not meaning. But maybe the reptilian core of my brain doesn’t know that. Maybe the reptile within finds money in the bank meaningful, like a belly full of meat. I’ve become an aficionado of congenial absurdity, and for now, that’s good enough.

Initially, I was hoping to take my hundred million and find some TOAD-forsaken corner of the universe where I could await the demise of TOAD in lonesome obscurity, some place where I’d be invisible to the hordes of vengeful TOADies I expected would be after my scalp when they learned I’d enabled Craft to pull the plug on their salvation. I figured I’d need to hide out a few months at most, before the hordes lost interest. But of course, thanks to Wesley Craft’s psychological and commercial acumen, there are no hordes of vengeful TOADies.

Even so, I’ve been happy enough to vaporize for a while into the ether of anonymity. I’m sure l could be found if someone really wanted to try. For sure, Glickman could find me, though he already knows where I am. Money may not be meaning, but it has meaningfully enabled my pursuit of a romantic fantasy (Can one be simultaneously a skeptic and a romantic?), and so, while having escaped big-stage nightly news celebrity in my fifteen minutes of ignominy (Or was it grace?), I have created a personal small stage in my version of “Rick’s Café Américain”. It’s not in Casablanca, and the name’s different, but I get to play both Rick and Sam. I also get to play my mother’s old Bösendorfer, rescued from storage where it had lain ever since Archie left New York. Archie could never bring himself to sell it. He’s happy I’ve got it. So is my mother.

Archie, for the moment, is also happy in Israel where he’s become something of a Zionist, a remarkable advanced-age conversion for someone who’d spent a lifetime deriding politics. “It’s refreshing to live in a country where paranoia is the norm and for such good reasons,” he tells me. “As Nate Halpern is fond of saying, ‘For two thousand years, the Christians blamed us for killing their god when we’re the ones who gave them their god. Now the Arabs accuse us of committing genocide when it’s what happened to us that made genocide a household word and Hamas wants to push us into the sea and Iranian lunatics threaten to blow us off the face of the Earth.’ Bizarre! But it keeps you on your toes.”

Ernie’s happy too. With my TOAD proceeds, I was able to offer him sufficient inducement to flee with me and run the bar and house orchestra. (I prescribe his methadone as well.) Bobbi, too, was happy to come along. That was not so difficult a decision for her. She’d been fired by Channel Seven as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Hargrove and Burke who, by the way, remain where we left them with respect to GPS coordinates, job descriptions and whatever moral parameters seem applicable. Bobbi has decided try her hand at becoming an independent film maker. She’s working on a TOAD documentary and wants to produce The Cannibal’s Couch when I finish it. Glickman, who admits the prospective “hit” on him was an embarrassing misinterpretation of data, has also joined our cast of outcasts and supervises the casino. (I prescribe his lithium as well.)

I tried to find Kat in Italy but learned, when I got there, that, shortly after she got there, she was inspired to embark on a protracted trek in Nepal, sans electronics. I tried to find her there and managed to follow her trail as far as Katmandu, but then it and she disappeared. I’d gotten an assemblage of Sherpas and Buddhist monks looking, but they produced no results. Even Papa Katzenstein hadn’t heard from her. He claimed he wasn’t worried and asserted l shouldn’t be either. I, being the skeptic I am, was worried, a worry money couldn’t assuage.

For a while, I held onto feeble hope that somehow, despite the multiplicity of gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Kat would trek into mine and romance would flourish once again, and I struggled for a while to live with the misery of unrequited anticipation. But when my meager hope wore too thin to sustain, I returned to Katmandu.

I really had no sensible plan for searching. Maybe touring Buddhist monasteries, maybe trekking to the Everest basecamp, maybe traversing all the other myriad Nepalese trekking routes? Wrestling with the depressingly vast array of unpromising possibilities, in hope of encountering inspiration, I wandered through warrens of Katmandu streets, through mobs of pedestrians, bicyclists, motor-bikers, honking car-drivers, rickshaw pedalers, through the riot of many-hued scarves and saris worn by Nepalese women and those hanging from storefronts, under the jungle of electrical wires and sari bedecked clotheslines. One day, I found myself pointed toward Swayambhunath, the Monkey Temple, high on a hill, and I decided I’d climb the stairs up the hill to it. Maybe the panoramic view would give me some ideas where to look. Maybe the wisdom of sacred monkeys included guidance in finding lost love. So, I set off to the temple.

Then, I saw her, a couple hundred feet ahead of me in the crowd, also heading toward the temple hill, wearing jeans and a tan safari jacket, a camera slung over her shoulder. “Kat! Kat!” I called out again and again as I struggled through the noisy mass in the narrow congested street, closing the distance between us until I was close enough to be sure she could hear me calling, even with the din of the street. But she didn’t respond. Had she gone deaf? Did she hear my voice but want nothing to do with me?

I was finally within ten feet and called out again, “Kat! Kat!” Still no response.

Then…, “Bender?” coming from somewhere on my right. And there she was, in a red and yellow sari, standing in front of a sidewalk stall that peddled cell phones, shopping for reentry to the twenty-first century.

***

Einstein said: God doesn’t play dice

Heisenberg said: The hell He doesn’t.

TOAD says: Uncertainty’s all right.

You’ve always got a chance.

For pessimists, a chance to lose what you’ve got, to get screwed.

For optimists, a cause for hope

things will turn out OK.

***

When ecstatic embracing, kissing, tears of joy and blubbering paeans to our redemption had run their course and we were capable of removing ourselves from the peril of traffic, we made it to a café, and, over tea, recounted.

Kat said she was ready to settle down.

Mmmm!

Things turn out.

QED