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sorrow, and it seemed to me--just for a moment--that what I had seen in the Lincoln simulacrum had
come from her. It was here so clearly, now, the pain that Pris felt. She had put it into her creation
perhaps without intending to; perhaps without even knowing that it was there.
"I love you," I said to her.
Pris rose to her feet, naked and cool and thin. She put her hands to the sides of my head and
drew me down.
"Mein Sohn," my father was saying now to Chester, "er schiaft in dem Freiheit der
Liebesnacht. What I mean, he's asleep, my boy is, in the freedom of a night of love, if you follow
me."
"What'll they say back in Boise?" Chester said irritably. "I mean, how can we go back home with
him like this?"
"Aw," my father said reprovingly, "shut up, Chester; you don't understand the depth of his psyche,
what he finds. There's a two-fold side to mental psychosis, it's also a return to the original source that
we've all turned away from. You better remember that, Chester, before you shoot off your mouth."
"Do you hear them?" I asked Pris.
Standing there against me, her body arched back for me, Pris laughed a soft, compassionate
laugh. She gazed up at me fixedly, without expression. And yet she was fully alert. For her, change
and reality, the events of her life, time itself, all had at this moment ceased.
Wonderingly, she lifted her hand and touched me on the cheek, brushed me with her fingertips.
Quite close to the door Mrs. Nild said clearly, "We'll get out of here, Mr. Rosen, and let you
have the apartment."
From farther off I heard Sam Barrows mutter, "That girl in there is underdeveloped. Everything
slides back out. What's she doing there in the bedroom anyhow? Has she got that skinny body--"
His voice faded.
Neither Pris not I said anything. Presently we heard the front door of the apartment shut.
"That's nice of them," my father said. "Louis, you should at least have thanked them. That Mr.
Barrows is a gentleman, in spite of what he says; you can tell more about a person by what he does
anyhow."
"You ought to be grateful to both of them," Chester grumbled at me. Both he and my father
glowered at me reprovingly, my father chewing on his cigar.
I held Pris against me. And for me, that was all.
120
17
When my father and Chester got me back to Boise, the next day, they discovered that Doctor
Horstowski could not--or did not want to--treat me. He did however give me several psychological
tests for the purpose of diagnosis. One I remember involved listening to a tape of voices which
mumbled at a distance, only a few phrases now and then being at all distinguishable. The task was to
write down what each of their successive conversations was about.
I think Horstowski made his diagnosis on my results in that test, because I heard each
conversation as dealing with me. In detail I heard them outlining my faults, outlining my failings,
analyzing me for what I was, diagnosing my behavior. . . . I heard them insulting both me and Pris
and our relationship.
All Horstowski said was merely, "Louis, each time you heard the word 'this' you thought they
were saying 'Pris.' That seemed to make him despondent. "And what you thought was 'Louis' was,
generally speaking, the two words 'do we.' "He glanced at me bleakly, and thereupon washed his
hands of me.
I was not out of the reach of the psychiatric profession, however, because Doctor Horstowski
turned me over to the Federal Commissioner of the Bureau of Mental Health in Area Five, the
Pacific Northwest. I had heard of him. His name was Doctor Ragland Nisea and it was his job to
make final determination on all commitment proceedings originating in his area. Single-handed, since
1980, he had committed many thousands of disturbed people to the Bureau's clinics scattered
around the country; he was considered a brilliant psychiatrist and diagnostician and it had been a
joke for years among us that sooner or later we would fall into Nisea's hands; it was a joke everyone
made and which a certain percentage of us lived to see come true.
"You'll find Doctor Nisea to be capable and sympathetic," Horstowski told me as he drove me
over to the Bureau's office in Boise.
"It's nice of you to take me over," I said.
"I'm in and out of there every day. I'd have to make this trip anyhow. What I'm doing is sparing
you the appearance in court and the jury costs . . . as you know, Nisea makes final determination
anyhow, and you're better off in his hands than before a lay jury."
I nodded; it was so.
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