Though she had been a semioutcast because of her marriage, she was still a fellow Hungarian. And, now that she was down, she should have learned her lesson and be properly contrite, as the old phrase went.
The Grimsons had not been able to buy the insurance to cover property damage or loss from the collapse of underground structures. Though they did have fire insurance, they would not be paid if the fire had been caused by an act of God. That had not yet been determined.
Eric Grimson could not afford a lawyer. But one of Eva’s cousins, an attorney, had volunteered to take the case. If he won, he got ten percent of the payoff. If he lost, he got nothing. Clearly, he was donating his time because of clan unity and because he felt sorry for his cousin. That she was married to a non-Magyar who was also a shiftless bum and an atheist who had been a Protestant was bad enough. But to lose her house and all her possessions and to have a son who’d gone crazy … that was too much. Though a lawyer, he had a big heart.
The money needed to keep Jim in therapy was provided by the medical insurance, but the quarterly payments were very high. Eva Grimson had taken on another job to pay for them. The two times she had visited Jim, she had looked very tired. Her weight had gone down swiftly, her cheeks were hollowing, and her eyes were ringed with black.
Jim had felt so guilty that he offered to quit therapy. His mother would not accept that. Her son had been given the option of taking the therapy or being sentenced to jail. The district attorney had wanted to treat him as an adult, which would have meant a more severe sentence. She would do all she could to prevent that. Besides, though she did not say so, she could not hide her belief that Jim was genuinely crazy and would remain so unless he was treated by a psychiatrist.
Jim’s father had not visited him. Jim did not ask his mother why Eric Grimson stayed away. One reason was that Jim did not wish to see his father. Another was that he knew that Eric was deeply ashamed because he had a “crazy” child. People would think that insanity ran in the family. Maybe it did in Eva’s family. All Hungarians were crazy. But not the Grimsons, by God!
Actually, Jim had been very fortunate in being taken into therapy so quickly. Because of the lack of funds in the area, programs for treating the mentally disturbed had been cut far back. Normally, Jim would have been in the back of the long waiting line. He did not know why or how he had been jumped ahead to favorite-son status.
He suspected that Sam Wyzak’s uncle, the judge, had used his influence. Also, his mother’s cousin, the attorney, maybe brought some pressure to bear, probably not all of it with strictly legal procedures. Though Doctor Porsena would not comment on how Jim had been leapfrogged over others, he may have had something to do with it. Jim had the impression that the psychiatrist thought that he was a very interesting case because of his history of stigmata and hallucinations.
Maybe he was just being egotistical. After all, he was really nothing unusual, just another jerkoff, blue-collar, mongrel, squarehead-Hunkie punk. When he got down to the ungilded basics, that was what he was.
Doctor Porsena finally hung up the phone.
He said, “We were talking about other patients now in this program who had previously tried other types of therapy. Those had not succeeded with these patients, all of whom were hostile to psychiatric therapy of any kind.
“What I’m offering you—there’s no pressure or force used here—is immediate entrance into a type of therapy we’ve had much success with.”
Doctor Porsena spoke very rapidly but clearly. He was remarkable in that his speech had very few of the pauses or hesitations halting most people’s talk. No uh, ah, well, you know.
“It’s not easy; no therapy is easy. Blood, sweat, and tears, and all that. And, like all therapy, the success depends basically upon you. We don’t cure the patient. He or she cures himself with our guidance. Which means that you have to want to be able to handle your problems, genuinely desire to do so.”
The doctor was silent for a moment. Jim looked around the office. It seemed quite luxurious to him with its thick (Persian?) carpet, overstuffed leather chairs and couch, big desk of some kind of glossy hardwood, the classy-looking wallpaper, the many diplomas and testimonials on the wall, the wall niches with busts of famous people in them, and the paintings which seemed abstract or surrealistic or whatever to Jim, who knew little about art.
“You understand everything I’ve said?” Porsena asked. “If there’s anything you don’t comprehend perfectly, say so. Patient or doctor, we’re all here to learn. There’s no shame in exposing one’s ignorance. I expose my own quite often. I don’t know everything. Nobody does.”
“Sure, I understand. So far. At least you’re not talking down to me, just using monosyllables, none of that psychological gobbledygook. I appreciate that.”
Doctor Porsena’s hands were flat on top of Jim’s opened case file. They were slim and delicate and had long thin fingers. Jim had heard that he was an excellent pianist who usually played classical music, though he sometimes played jazz, dixie, and ragtime. He would even knock out some rock now and then.
He only had two hands but could have used four. He was very busy, which was to be expected. Not only did he run the psychiatric unit of the hospital, he had a private practice in an office a block away on St. Elizabeth Street. He was also head of an organization of northeast Ohio psychiatrists and a teacher at a medical college.
Porsena’s accomplishments awed Jim. But what most impressed him was the doctor’s 1979 silver Lamborghini. Now, that was in the WOW! category.
The doctor turned a page of the file and read a line or two. Then he leaned back.
“You seem to be a wide reader,” he said, “though you prefer science fiction. So many young people do. I have been a fan of science fiction and fantasy since I started to read. I began with the Oz books, Grimms’ and Lang’s fairy tales, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Homer’s Odyssey, the Arabian Nights, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and the science fiction magazines. Tolkien quite captivated me. Then, while I was in residency in Yale, I read Philip José Farmer’s World of Tiers series. Do you know those books?”
“Yeah,” Jim said. He straightened up. “Love them! That Kickaha! But when in hell is Farmer going to finish the series?”
Porsena shrugged. He was the only man Jim had ever seen who could make a shrug seem an elegant gesture.
“The point is that, while I was at Yale, I also read a biography of Lewis Carroll. A phrase in the commentary on the chapter in Alice in Wonderland titled. ‘A Caucus Race and a Long Tail’ sparked something in my mind. I then and there got the idea for Tiersian therapy.”
“What’s that?” Jim said. “Tiersian? Oh, you mean from the World of Tiers?”
“As good a word as any and better than some,” Doctor Porsena said, smiling, “It was only a glimmering of an idea, a zygote of thought, a brief candlelight that might have been blown out by the hurly-burly winds of the mundane world or by common sense and logic rejecting divine inspiration. But I clung to it, nourished it, cherished it, and at last brought it to full bloom.”
This guy is really something, Jim thought. No wonder they call him The Shaman.
However, Jim had been misled and deceived by adults so many times that he did not entirely trust the psychiatrist. Wait. See if his words matched his deeds.
On the other hand, Porsena was this side of thirty. Old but not real old. Young-old.
It was a good thing that he was in biology class, Jim thought. Otherwise, he would not have known what the doctor was talking about when he had spoken of “zygote of thought.” A zygote was any cell formed by the union of two gametes. And a gamete was a reproductive cell that could unite with another similar one to form the cell that develops into a new individual.
He had started out as a zygote. So had Porsena. So had most living creatures.
As he listened to the doctor explain the therapy, Jim understood that, in a psychotherapeutic sense, he was a gamete. And the object of the therapy was to become a
zygote. That is, a new individual composed of the old personality and another one which was, at this moment, imaginary.
CHAPTER 3
“The Tiersian therapy patients form a small and elite volunteer group,” Doctor Porsena said. “Usually, they start out with volume one, The Maker of Universes, and read the rest in proper sequence. They choose a character in the books and try to BE that character. They adopt all the mental and emotional characteristics of the role model whether they’re good or bad. As therapy progresses, they come to a point where they start getting rid of the bad qualities of the character they’ve chosen. But they keep the good features.
“It’s rather like a snake shedding its skin. The patient’s uncontrolled delusions, the undesirable emotional factors which brought him or her here, are gradually replaced by controlled delusions. The controlled delusions are those which the patient adopts when he or she becomes, in a sense, the character in the series.
“There’s much more to the treatment than this, but you’ll understand that as therapy proceeds. You follow me?”
“So far,” Jim said. “This really works, right?”
“The failure rate is phenomenally low. In your case, even though you’ve read the series, you will have to reread it. The World of Tiers will be your Bible, your key to health if you work with it and at it.”
Jim was silent for a while. He was considering the series and also wondering which character—some of them were really vicious—he would like to adopt. To become, as the doctor said.
The basic premise of the series was that, many thousands of years ago, only one universe had existed. On one planet only in that universe was there life. The end of its evolutionary path was a species that resembled humans. These had attained a science vastly exceeding anything Earth had ever known. Eventually, the humans had been able to make artificial pocket universes.
So knowledgeable and powerful were these beings, they were able to alter the laws of physics governing each individual pocket universe. Thus, the rate of acceleration in a fall toward the center of gravity could be made different from that in the original world. Another example, one pocket world might contain a single sun and a single planet. The World of Tiers, for example. This was an Earth-sized planet shaped like a terraced Tower of Babylon. Its tiny sun and tiny moon revolved around it.
Another universe contained a single planet which behaved like the plastic in a lavalite bottle. Its shape kept changing. Mountains arose and sank before your very eyes. Rivers were formed within a few days and then disappeared. Seas rushed in to fill quickly forming hollows. Parts of the planet broke off—just like the thermoplastic in the liquid of a lavalite bottle—whirled around, changing shape, then fell slowly to the main body.
Many of the Lords, as the humans came to call themselves, left the original universe to live in their artificial pocket universes or designer worlds. Then a war made the planet unfit for life forever and killed all those then living on it. Only the Lords inhabiting the pocket worlds were saved.
Thousands of years passed while more artificial universes were made by the Lords living in those already made at the time of the war. These were inhabited by the life forms that the Lords had introduced on the planets of their private cosmoses. Many of these forms had been made in the laboratories of the Lords. There were other humans than the Lords on these. But these lesser beings had been made in the laboratories, though their models were the Lords themselves.
Access to these pocket worlds was gotten through “gates.” These were interdimensional routes activated by various kinds of codes. As the Lords became increasingly decadent, they lost the knowledge of how to make new universes. The sons and daughters of the Lords wanted their own worlds, but they no longer had the means to create them. Thus, as was inevitable, there was a power struggle among them to gain control of the limited number of worlds.
By the time The Maker of Universes began, in the late 1960s, many Lords had been killed or dispossessed. Even those who had their own universes wanted to conquer others. That they could live without aging for hundreds of millennia meant that most of them had become bored and vicious. Invading other worlds and killing the Lords there had become a great game.
If they could not create, they could destroy.
The World of Tiers series was clearly an anticipation of the “Dungeons and Dragons” games which were so popular among youths. Its gates, the traps set by the Lords in the gates, the ingenuity necessary to get through the gates, and the dangerous worlds in which a wrong decision would land a character prefigured the D-and-D games. Jim was surprised that the series had not been adapted to such a game.
He was even more surprised to find that the books had become a tool used in psychiatric therapy. But it seemed like a great idea. It certainly appealed to him far more than conventional therapy, Freudian, Jungian, or whatever. Though he did not know much about any of the various psychiatric schools, he nevertheless did not like them.
Rest-room graffiti flashed across his mindscreen.
“Mental illness can be fun.” “Over the edge is better than under it.” “Nobody catches schizophrenia from a toilet seat.”
Doctor Porsena looked at the clock on his desk. A puppet of Time, Jim thought. Doctors and lawyers, like railroads, ran on Newtonian time. They knew nothing of Einsteinian. No loafing and inviting your soul, to hell with relativity. But that was how they got things done.
The psychiatrist rose, and he said, “On to other things, Jim. Excelsior! Ever upward and onward! Junior Wunier will give you the books, no charge. He’ll also acquaint you with the rules and regulations. May you be safe from the curving carballoy claws of Klono, and may the Force be with you. See you later.”
Jim left the room thinking that the doctor was really something. That reference to the Force. That was from Star Wars, and any kid in America would recognize it. But that bit about Klono. How many would know that Klono was a sort of spaceman’s god, a deity with golden gills, brazen hooves, iridium guts, and all that? Klono was the god whom spacefarers swore by in E. E. Smith’s Lensman series.
Jim found Junior Wunier at the officer of the day’s post near the elevators. Junior Wunier! What a name for parents to stick a kid with! Handicapped him from birth. As if he wasn’t handicapped enough. The eighteen-year-old had hair like the Bride of Frankenstein’s, a curved spine like the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s, a dragging foot like Igor’s, and a face like the Ugly Duchess’s in the first Alice book. Besides the hump, he had a monkey on his back. He was a speed freak. Jim hoped that he had been caught before his brain had been burned out.
Worst of all was his tendency to drool.
And he, Jim Grimson, had thought he was born with two strikes against him.
Jim pitied the poor guy, but he couldn’t stand him.
Wouldn’t you know it? Junior Wunier had chosen Kickaha as his role model. Kickaha, the handsome, strong, quick, and ever-tricky hero. Whereas Jim would have thought that Wunier would pick Theotormon. That character was a Lord who had been captured by his father and whose body had been cruelly transformed in the laboratory into a monster with flippers and a hideous and bestial face.
Wunier went into the storeroom and brought out five paperbacks for Jim. “Read ’em and weep,” he said.
Jim put the stack of Farmer’s novels under his arm. Were they to be his salvation? Or were they like everything else, full of promises that turned out to be hot air?
Wunier led Jim to his room through halls that were, at this moment, empty. Everybody was in his own room, in the recreation room, or in private or group therapy. The long wide halls with their white walls and gray floors echoed their footsteps. Jim had been assigned, for the time being, to a one-person room, small and very hospital-looking. The tiny closet was more than large enough, however. The only clothes Jim had were on his back, and these had been brought by his mother, who had gotten them from Mrs. Wyzak. Being Sam’s, they fit him too tightly. The shoes were embarrassing, square-toed oxfords that Sam would
have worn only if his mother had threatened to kill him if he didn’t, which she probably had.
Junior Wunier pointed to a niche in the wall. “You can put the books there. Now, here’s the rules and regulations.”
He leaned against the wall. Holding the paper with both hands close to his face, he read it aloud. A spray of saliva moistened the paper.
Jim thought, Suffering succotash! This guy was another Sylvester the Cat.
He sat down in the only chair, a wooden one with a removable cushion. He wished he had a cigarette. His teeth ached slightly; his nerves were drawn as tightly as telephone cables; his temper badly needed tempering.
Wunier droned on as if he were a Buddhist monk chanting the Lotus Sutra. The patient had to keep his or her room neat and orderly. The patient had to take a shower every day, keep his nails clean, and so on. The patient could use only the telephone by the officer of the day’s desk and must not tie it up for more than four minutes. Smoking was permitted only in the lounge. Graffiti was forbidden. Those patients caught with nonprescription drugs or booze or tearing off a piece (Wunier’s words) would be subject to being kicked out on his or her ass.
“And when you jack off,” he said, “don’t do it in the showers or in the presence of anyone else.”