MADMAN - John R. Suler, Ph.D. - copyright 1995
Chapter 10 - Synchronicity
I couldn't believe what had happened. What would Henry, my supervisor, say? I know, "When something like this happens, you can be sure you were making mistakes all along." Well the hell with it! I was doing the best I could. I felt the knob of metal in my pocket. The keys to her heart? Someday this will be a funny story to tell my colleagues. Until then, I'd have to come up with a good rationalization to vindicate myself.
Whether she left the keys "on purpose" or not, she eventually had to come back for them. I wrote a very simple, straightforward note, taped it to the door of my office, and closed the door behind me. Phil was at the end of the hallway, his legs straddling the open door to the inpatient unit, his hands tugging at both doorknobs, as if he were riding a square, metal bronco.
"Phil, where's Lost and Found?"
"Lost something?"
"No, found."
"Found, eh? That's unusual. Doctors are usually losing things... It's downstairs, on the first floor, next to Duplicating."
"Thanks." I turned and headed for the escalator.
"Ya better be nice," Phil said.
The way to the escalator was the same hallway where I had pursued Cheryl. I half expected her to appear around each corner, or to walk out of the Woman's Room. I could almost feel her presence. But she wasn't there. It was eerie. What would I do if I did meet her? Give her keys back and tell her how important it would be for us to talk. Should I schedule her for an extra appointment, or just wait until our regular session next week? What would I say in the next session? Don't worry about it now. You can think about it later. You can discuss it in supervision. An image of Cheryl, naked, popped into my mind. Oh god! We're going to need a machete to chop through the countertransference!
Carefully, I stepped onto the escalator. My foot always seems to land right on the crack, leaving me teetering on the edge as the steps rise up and separate. At the end of the ride, when the steps flatten out and disappear, where exactly do they go? It's like making a fist, then letting your hand relax and open up. Where does the fist go? On escalators the ground vanishes right beneath you. It's disconcerting. I find a lot of technological things disconcerting. For instance, airplanes. Even as we take off, and I see the ground shrink away, I refuse to believe that man can fly.
I watched the end of the ride coming. The steps began melting beneath my feet. I remembered a story about a boy who got his toes caught in the teeth in the grill at the bottom of a shopping mall escalator. I winced imagining that painful sensation. Unconcerned about the whole issue, the escalator gently slid me off.
The lobby was filled with activity. There was a long line of people at the admissions desk. They looked frustrated, anxious. Several patients milled around the front entrance, waiting impatiently for someone to pick them up. All the cushy, red chairs along the escalator wall were occupied. Some of the seated people watched the activity in the lobby, some stared off into space, some read their newspapers, apparently oblivious to what was happening around them. You easily could tell the hospital staff from everyone else. They were the ones zipping across the room with stoic determination. In Minnesota, dozens of years ago, people wandering around the lobby of several hospitals were used as a control group to validate the MMPI, now one of the most widely used psychological tests. That group of people turned out to be perfectly representative of the general population. Some coincidence.
I swallowed. My throat definitely hurt. I felt tired. Well, I wasn't going to let it get to me. I cut straight across the lobby at right angles to a fast moving nurse on my right and two technicians pushing a cart on my left. Slightly adjusting my trajectory, I passed within inches behind the nurse and a fraction of a second in front of the technicians. The Blue Angels couldn't have done it better.
I entered the hallway on the other side of the lobby and soon passed the Duplicating Center. Next to it was a door labeled "Lost and Found" with faded, stenciled letters. It was locked, so I knocked.
No answer.
I knocked again.
"Go to the window!" an angry voice called from inside.
To my right, set into the wall, was a thick plate of glass that separated the two halves of a counter. A small metal bowl sunken into the middle of the counter provided the only opening between the two sides of the glass - the kind of security system used in banks and ticket booths. The woman inside the room had her back turned. Was she the one who just spoke to me?
"Excuse me," I said.
She didn't respond. Did she hear me? Windows like this often have a speaker that lets you communicate with the other side - but this one didn't. Just a solid plate of glass with that little pass-through at the bottom. Who the hell designs these things? A schizoid? I lowered my head to put my mouth near the opening.
"EXCUSE ME!" I said loudly.
"Yeah," she grumbled as she turned around.
She was about 45 years old, or so - and ugly. Not ugly in the sense that nature had sold her short on looks. But there was a burning anger in her eye, a chronic snarl carved into her face. The ugliness of a life gone sour. I recognized the type: hostile, bitter, nothing was ever good enough. Life was a string of annoyances and disappointments. No silver linings here. The kind of person who ends up working for the government - usually the Motor Vehicle Bureau. I felt sorry for her. She had never known contentment or peace of mind. She probably never would.
"Excuse me, is this Lost and Found?"
"Can't you read the sign?"
I dropped the keys into the bowl. "I'd like to leave these for someone to pick up."
She poised her pencil above the clipboard in her hand. "Where'd you find them?"
"Well, someone left them in my office."
She slapped her hand against the clipboard. "Why don't you just give it back to them?!"
I felt cornered, like I had to justify myself. Thank god for the plate of glass separating me from this Being. The architect had uncanny foresight. "I have to leave, so, I left a note for her on the door, telling her to come down here to pick them up."
"Name?"
"Dr. Thomas Holden," I said as clearly as I could.
She hissed and again slapped her hand against the clipboard.
"NOT YOU!" she almost shouted. Anxiety and confusion whipped through my brain, scrambling my thoughts.
"I don't understand."
"HER NAME! HER NAME!" She shot the words at my face. I felt embarrassed, stupid - but underneath, angry. How dare she treat me like this. The bitch. If my throat wasn't so sore...
"I'd prefer not to give her name," I said as firmly as I could, aware that I was struggling to contain myself.
"What is this? Some kind of guessing game?"
I could have explained the confidentiality of psychotherapy, but that would only give away Cheryl's identity as a patient, as well as antagonize this irate creature who came from the bowels of human unfulfillment.
"Her name is Cheryl."
"Last name."
"I don't know what her last name is." I was lying of course, but I wanted to take all steps to protect her confidentiality. The woman looked at me as if I were a complete moron. She picked the keys out of the bowl, turned around to drop them in a basket, and began shuffling papers on her desk. I waited, expecting more to happen, but she didn't turn around. After looking at her back for a minute or so, I realized our business was finished. I bent over and put my mouth right next to the little opening.
"Have a nice day," I said sadistically.
She didn't say anything, not that I expected she would. In fact, I convinced myself that it was good. I had the last word.
With a few minutes to spare, I decided to treat myself to some fresh air. I hurried back across the lobby towards the front entrance. As I entered the automatic doors, I came face to face with a patient entering. He had a broken arm. We both stopped dead in our tracks to avoid a collision. I side-stepped to my left, he side-stepped to his right, paralleling me. I moved back to my right at the same time he moved back to his left. I went left again just as he went right. Stalemate! We were trying, but we couldn't pass each other!
Our eyes met and we laughed - then we walked around each other without mishap. Freud might say our little dance was an unconscious simulation of sexual activity, but then, for Freud, dancing, going up and down stairs, getting run over - virtually everything and anything symbolized sex.
The fresh air felt good. The overcast sky glowed with an even, cool light that seemed almost comforting. As a breeze swept up the hill, helping to clear my head, I noticed Jon in his distant security booth waving at me. "Thomas, Thomas, come here!" he was calling as he waved something in his hand. Whatever it was, I knew I probably didn't have time for it. Nevertheless, I quickly marched across the wide parking lot to his booth. Inside, he was arranging multi-colored pickup sticks into neat piles. Concentrating intensely on them, he barely looked up at me.
"Aren't you a little young to be playing with those things?" I said.
"No sir, Holden, this is serious business. This is the I Ching."
"I Ching?"
He tipped his stool towards me, deftly halting his fall by placing his hands on the door frame of the booth. His eyes widened with excitement. "Ah, an ancient Chinese practice. You can use it to interpret the past, to probe the meanings of the present moment, to predict the future."
"Is that all?"
"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt in your psychology." He tipped back to an upright position, and pointed a red pickup stick at me. "All you have to assume is that there is synchronicity in the universe, that all things are somehow interconnected, that events parallel and reflect each other. Nothing occurs by coincidence. If I use the ancient method of shuffling these sticks and randomly dividing them into groups, they form a pattern of even and odd numbers, of yin and yang. And that pattern has a meaning."
"How do you know what that meaning is?"
He held up a book. "The 64 hexagrams, the 64 possible outcomes of working the sticks, are all described here, in the I Ching. Each hexagram is a fusion of two images. Of course the meanings are ambiguous, open to subjective interpretation. The fathers of the I Ching were no logical positivists.... Why don't you try it?"
"I have to go," I said. "I have a seminar."
"It will only take a minute. We'll use a faster method than the sticks - the coins." Jon reached into his pocket, pulled out three quarters, and held them out to me. "Here. Take these."
"No," I said somewhat impatiently, "you do it."
"No, No. It has to be you who throws them. That's the whole point. That's how your mind becomes linked to the coins." He pushed the quarters into my hand. "Now, what's the question you're posing to the I Ching?"
"A question?"
"Yes, a question. The question will link your mind with the coins, and with the moment."
"Well, let's see... How about this: 'Will my cold get worse?'"
"Questions that look for a yes or no answer don't work well. Make it more open-ended."
"O.K. How about 'How can I get over this cold?'"
"Now throw the coins six times. Go ahead," he said eagerly as he stepped out of the tiny booth and ushered me in.
I held my hand above the small counter inside. The quarters felt unusually warm - probably due to their coming from Jon's pocket and my hand being on the cool side. I dropped them and they spilled with a loud clank onto the metal surface. Three tails. "Yin" Jon called out. He drew a broken line onto his pad. I threw the coins again. "Yang." He added a solid line above the first. Then four more throws, four more more solid yang lines above the others.
"My, my. That's an interesting one," Jon said. He flipped through the pages of the I Ching. That's hexagram 44, called Kou, or 'Coming to meet.'"
"So what does it mean?"
Jon was reading intently. "It says 'the principle of darkness, after having been eliminated, furtively and unexpectedly obtrudes again from within and below ... an unfavorable and dangerous situation ... coming to meet means encountering ... the maiden is powerful; one should not marry such a maiden.'"
"The whole thing sounds pretty ambiguous to me. Like astrology, or fortune-telling. You give a person a very vague and general description of their personality, or of what is going to happen to them, and it seems to fit. In fact, it would fit anyone. It's just a matter of base rates. The Barnum Effect - for the suckers born every minute."
"You can hide behind scientism, if you want," Jon replied unshaken by my argument, "but I would take this seriously. The I Ching is based on ancient wisdom, knowledge we westerners have long since forgotten. Anyway, it doesn't look like your cold is going to get better."
A car horn honked behind us. It was the surgeon in a black Jaguar, his fingers tapping the steering wheel impatiently. With one foot in the road, Jon was blocking his path.
"I'd better go, Jon."
He didn't look up from the book. "Oh, he's always in a rush. Probably has an appointment across town to extract someone's heart. Listen to this, 'When heaven and earth meet, all creatures settle into firm lines.'"
The surgeon stuck his head out the window. "Will you please move!"
"Excuse us, sir," Jon called back. "Dr. Schweitzer and I are caught up in a debate about where the soul is located. He claims it's in the pineal gland; I agree with Sir Eccles that it's in Wernicke's area 13. What's your opinion, sir?"
The surgeon's face dropped from irritation to perplexity. "What?"
"Listen, Jon, I'd better get going," I interjected. "I'll talk to you later - and by the way, you're a lunatic."
"Thank you, Dr. Holden," he replied through his smile of self-satisfaction.
As I walked away, I looked back over my shoulder. With pick-up sticks in hand, Jon was waving down the Jaguar.
Coming to meet. Yin and yang. Tea leaves. Biorhythms. Wouldn't it be nice to have some fast, easy way to understand yourself. Like those quizzes in popular magazines. "How independent are you?" "Are you happy?" "Are you a good lover?" Answer these twenty true/false questions to find the answer. If only the public knew what a complex, arduous task it is to to construct a truly valid psychological test. And once you've got one, you're not going to publish it in Woman's Weekly or Playboy.
Good tests are hard to come by.
As I approached the building, I began to think. I thought about the woman in Lost and Found, how I should have told her off; I thought about the keys, about Cheryl and what our session meant; I thought about my inpatients - Kathy Mummon in her wheelchair, still suicidal - Mr. Tennostein, struggling to keep his brain intact - and Elizabeth, poor Elizabeth. Why did she step in front of that mail truck? Then I tried not to think, to shut it all out. But my stubborn mind sprang back, again and again, with another idea, another worry, another reminder of something I had to do. I was ruminating. I hate ruminating. But my mind had a mind of its own. I tried to concentrate on the scenery around me, on the trees. I knew they were beautiful, but that realization could not sink to a feeling level. It was just a stale, lifeless thought.
Through a clearing in the trees, just before I entered the building, I could see off the top the hill and into the distant landscape. There were several distinct brown patches in the otherwise green vista. Condo and town house developments. They were springing up all over the county. The last time I had gone home to visit my mother I drove past my old elementary school - or at least where the school used to be. Long outliving the baby-boomers for whom it was built, the school was knocked down, and on its site replaced by one of those quaint indoor plazas with shops that sell Shetland wool sweaters, gourmet cheeses, and car phones. I thought about the last time I had been inside that old school - the tiny chairs and desks, the water fountains down by my knees. The hallways seemed so familiar, but so distant in my memory. Where is that school now, the desks, erasers, bulletin boards, lunch trays, the red bricks? Where are all those things? Were they reused, scattered among other schools throughout the country? Or was it all destroyed, buried, burned?
