He was given an index card from which he read the names of the third-place team, the debaters rising to accept their medals, pausing for photographs with the senator. He butchered Rohan’s and Vinay’s surnames; they stood almost apologetically.
Now I am going to show you a picture and I’d like you to make up a story about it. We call this the Thematic Apperception Test, or TAT. A story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s a black-and-white photograph that appeared on the front page of The Topeka Capital-Journal. (Who is this unsmiling seventeen-year-old boy whose hair is drawn into a ponytail while the sides of his head are shaved, a disastrous tonsorial compromise between the lefty household of his parents and the red state in which he was raised? His left hand is almost touching Dole’s right, which clutches the pen; around his neck the teenager wears a medal won by speaking a nearly private language at great speed. The senator, who often refers to himself in the third person, whose campaign is advised by Paul Manafort, will be the only former presidential candidate to attend the Republican convention in 2016.) What are these people in this picture thinking? Feeling? Start by telling me what led up to this scene.
* * *
Adam had known Kenneth Erwood a little for as long as he could remember; Dr. Erwood—one of few openly gay men in Topeka, and so a frequent target of Reverend Fred Phelps and his followers—had been over for dinner, a guest at parties. He was a quiet, smiling, kind-looking man who appeared simultaneously older and younger than his age (prematurely stooped, then just stooped, but a boyish face that never seemed to change), and whose close-cut gray hair possessed no military quality (though he had in fact worked at the Naval Ordnance Test Station in Point Mugu, studying the optical assessment of self-guided missiles). Erwood listened carefully, but never held forth like other men. Although Adam couldn’t remember it, his parents had taken him to Erwood, whose office was in the same building as his father’s, for a consultation in the weeks after his concussion; they were given some meditation exercises to promote healing, reduce post-traumatic stress. He thought he could recall sitting on the off-white living room carpet with his parents, hands palm-upward in his lap.
Once, Adam had asked his mom if she knew anybody who was psychic, if she believed in that sort of thing; she’d said, without hesitation: Kenneth Erwood. Although he was careful to justify his research to administrators in the language of neuroscience, Erwood spoke openly with friends and colleagues about having been visited as a child in a waking dream and told, or given to understand, that he was under spiritual guidance. As a college student, Erwood had re-encountered his guide with the help of a well-known medium, and while simultaneously earning doctorates in physics and psychology, he’d had a vision in which he saw images of a clock tower. When he traveled to the Foundation in 1965, he recognized the building in the center of the campus; he knew it was where he was meant to undertake his work.
Erwood studied how mental processes influenced physiological responses. He was particularly interested in a person’s capacity to alter the electromagnetic field surrounding the body. Soon after joining the Foundation, Erwood started a small department of psychophysics and psychophysiology. Its centerpiece was the Copper Wall Initiative. His research demonstrated that recognized healers and meditators from a variety of traditions could induce, from several feet away, significant voltage changes in a wall-sized electrode made of copper. The wall was established in the basement of the Foundation clock tower.
Now, as a senior in high school, Adam was going back to Erwood against his will. His parents had insisted, with rare resolve, that he either consult with Erwood or start conventional talk therapy. The intensity, they said, was out of control, how quick he was to rage, even if he was relatively quick to cool. He needed “strategies.” His mom would ask him to get the dirty dishes out of the living room where he wasn’t really supposed to be eating anyway. I’ll do it later, he’d say; I’d like you to do it now, she’d respond; then out of him would issue an overwhelming barrage of ridiculous but somehow irrefutable arguments about her nagging, her hypocrisy, her failure to abide by the precepts she laid out in her books, her bizarre focus on conventional domestic order over the autonomy of others; again and again, she failed to prove topicality. The dishes remained where they were.
Or he would ask to borrow his dad’s car because the check-engine light was on in the Camry and it was making ominous sounds and when his dad said, No, sorry, I have men’s group tonight and I need it, but I can help you bring yours in tomorrow, he would suddenly lay into the whole notion of a men’s group with vicious eloquence, although his arguments were contradictory. That’s Robert Bly machismo bullshit, he’d claim, having heard mocking summaries of Iron John around the house, but when his dad said calmly, You’ve got that wrong, this is, as you know, a group of pro-feminist friends, he’d accuse them of being a bunch of emasculated yuppies who thought floating platitudes about fatherhood made them enlightened. You guys probably should go perform improvised masculine rituals in the woods. Play some drums, stew some squirrels. The calmer his dad remained, the more furious Adam grew: fights over nothing would lead him to slam doors; twice he punched holes in his bedroom wall.
His parents were, in addition to being exasperated, worried, but not that worried; as psychotherapists, they were much less afraid of open conflict than of the prospect of a kid withdrawing, disappearing into his room, into himself, a lost boy. As long as there was language, there was processing; and when he calmed down he would apologize for his intensity, deploying his Foundation vocabulary; he would often think along with them about its causes. When he wasn’t being an asshole, he was funny, curious, kind; think about how wonderful he was around his grandmother, how many good questions he asked of their friends when they managed to get him to sit down for a dinner. Folk singers and community organizers and sexperts and writers and feminist scholars stayed in their big Victorian house when they passed through the Midwest; he was always interested, quickly picked up new ways of thinking and talking. They were proud of his politics. He got straight A’s. (They didn’t suspect he cheated in math.) He was a star at “public speaking.” He was reading and writing poetry. He was probably Ivy-bound, although they’d be fine with KU. They rightly assumed part of his volatility arose from his fear of leaving home.
Then there were the migraines, their increasing frequency and severity. He would be looking at a page of text or a sign on a wall and suddenly find it impossible to read, letters like twigs floating away on water. Then large blind spots, as though he’d looked at a bright light. Then large tracts of peripheral vision fell away. Fast on the optical symptoms, on the sudden illiteracy, would be numbness in the hands, parts of the face, sometimes the tongue, which would cause him to slur his speech. Photosensitivity so severe that a little sun entering around the blackout blinds was a flashlight in his eyes, phosphenes loosed upon the world. He would have the sensation that his limbs were out of joint, that he could not control them; he would reach for a glass of water and miss it by a few inches or knock it over. When he pressed the Imitrex cartridge against his leg to give himself an injection, he could not tell leg, hard plastic, and hand apart; they were all dumb alien objects; the medicine did very little, maybe nothing. Within half an hour of the prodrome, there would be pain in his head so severe that he experienced it primarily as nausea. When the vomiting started, it wouldn’t stop for hours; more than once he’d had to go to the hospital to be treated for dehydration. Here we are again, Nurse Eberheart. Say hi to Darren for us. Layered onto these symptoms was his fear of them, how the neurological distortions recalled his concussion; his disorientation was compounded by his panic at disorientation, and each migraine, which tended to last between eight and twelve hours, felt like a little repetition of that trauma.