Come Again 2

Part Two - Spent

The doctor sent me to a psychiatrist who diagnosed me with Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder, or PGAD. By the time I had seen the psychiatrist, Dr. Havermore, I was having attacks on a daily basis. I couldn’t drive. I didn’t want to go out in public. I had cancelled a visit to see my girlfriend, Caroline Shuster, and her parents, which had been seen by both of us as a very serious step in affirming our relationship. I wasn’t sure if she’d forgive me for cancelling at such a late date and with such a flimsily constructed excuse.

“Maybe you’re afraid of commitment,” she said. If only she knew that I wanted nothing more than to marry and start a family with her. I loved the idea of having kids when I was young and when I’d have the youth and energy to be an active fun parent. But I wasn’t even sure if I could have a proper relationship with a woman let alone a family if this problem persisted.

Aside from naming my condition, Dr. Havermore was at a loss in terms of how to deal with the problem. I could see the reflection of the Wikipedia page in her glasses as she spoke to me. “I believe a holistic approach would be the best idea.”

“I’m not much a fan of alternative medicine doctor,” I said. “Diluting things in water and what have you.”

“No, you’re thinking of homeopathy. I mean we need to look at your diet, psychology, and your physical well-being. All of it together. Persistent genital arousal…”

“But I’m not really aroused.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, I don’t have sexual feelings or anything. It just happens. Like a fit of sneezing.”

“I see. Have you been under a lot of stress recently?”

“No,” I said. “No more than usual. Probably a little less.”

“Have there been any similarities in context? Something that was repeated that might ahve triggered the attacks?”

“No, not that I noticed.”

“Have you been eating or drinking anything unusual.”

I shook my head.

“Do you take drugs?”

“I don’t even drink.”

“Do you watch pornography?”

This was very embarrassing, but I was hoping that Dr. Havermore was going somewhere with this.

“I’ve seen it, yes. I mean a normal amount.”

“How much would you say that is?”

“A few times a week.”

She was taking notes, but I could hear in her questions, the sense that she was fishing for something. I was used to talking to people and making them feel better when you knew you had nothing substantive to say which would make them feel better. Just the talking for a certain amount of time would have to do and that was what was being done to me.

“There is a medicine I can give you which might help,” she began to type into her computer. “It’s had some effectiveness. What’s the matter?”

My chin was tucked to my chest and my eyes were squeezed shut.

“Oh,” she said and left the room.

With a name for it and a physician helping us, I felt that we had some trajectory on which to take this thing. But unfortunately, having done my own research, I now knew that there was no cure as such, and the condition was chronic. I had allowed my relationship with Caroline to collapse and die, rather than revive it only to have to break to her the medical condition I had. Somehow some months later, she got wind that there was something wrong with me physically and assuming it was cancer or something, she came to visit me. She was tearful and full of regret and guilt for having abandoned me. She was now in another relationship and had no desire to get back together. She was really hoping I’d forgive her, and I was fine with that. In fact, given the context, I felt comfortable telling her what was going on.

“Jeez,” she said. “How often does it happen?”

“I can go a couple of days with it not happening at all,” I said. “On a bad day, it can be fifteen or sixteen times.”

“Oh God, that sounds… painful. And embarrassing.”

“I’m fine,” I told her and was glad when she left. I felt better. It was closure of a kind and honestly, I knew what she was giving me was a kind of pity, but pity isn’t that bad. Especially, when you’re feeling sorry for yourself, it’s nice to have someone come along and help you out.

In fact, I was in a deep depression. I couldn’t be trusted to do anything like drive, or work in the funeral parlor. My college work was suffering. The frequent attacks were beginning to exhaust me and I spent more and more time at home so I wouldn’t risk humiliation among people. I wore adult diapers when I was out. Some days, I didn’t seem to leave the bathroom. I was sore and physically tired. My concentration was going so I couldn’t read or watch television even. My family were helpful, but they too were affected by what was happening to me. They were distressed by the situation and although they would good-naturedly suggest possible solutions all of them rang hollow and none of them came to anything. What else did I have to do after all than search the nooks and crannies of the internet for anything that held out hope.

It was this way that I found the “Living with PGAD Group,” which met once a month and offered support and weak coffee and dry biscuits and advice. I got Kent to drive me downtown to the meeting. I’m not sure if the prospect of meeting with people similarly affected had a triggering effect on me but I could feel the warm groin that I had come to recognize as the forerunner of an attack. I stuffed my fist in my mouth and jerked involuntarily in the passenger seat while Kent leaned over and turned up the Billy Joel song that was on the radio: “Tell Her About It.”

The trigger must have been a common one because as I walked down the corridor to the common room, I could hear yelps and groans getting louder as I approached. Sure enough, a circle of plastic chairs held half a dozen people contorted in orgasmic climax. The leader - Patrick - stood up and approached with an adhesive name tag and a sharpie. I wrote Billy and stuck it on as the room around me subsided. “Don’t worry,” said Patrick. “We were role-playing.”

A small woman with hair with nicotine yellow roots and cigarette smoke spikes shuddered as I sat down next to her. “I wasn’t,” she said. Her badge read: “Pippa.” She’d drawn a little smiley face.

“Hi Pippa,” I said.

She smiled. And then frowned and looked away.

It was so good to finally meet a community of people who you didn’t have to explain anything to. They’d understood because they had experienced it themselves. The shame, humiliation, the pain and aggravation, the limitations on your freedom, the social ostracism - self-inflicted - that to me at least felt inevitable. That loneliness was at least for one evening alleviated.

We were all sorts. There was a large dentist called Max, with small John Lennon glasses and a shining bald head. He was eloquent and had an almost poetic turn of phrase. He felt like someone aspiring to old world gallantry and had a habit of using an old-fashioned turn of phrase. “I have cultivated my own embarrassments,” he said at one point. He was referring to a series of incidents early on in his illness when he had refused to change his lifestyle. Now, he had changed his lifestyle. Jayne-Alexander worked at a supermarket or had done until recently. They’d given her a job in the warehouse now. Mosely had a job as a nightwatchman. Frederick was a German exchange student from the town of Bremen and was looking forward to returning, though he dreaded the long flight. Patrick owned a chain of Greek restaurants. “I used to be very much the face of the business,” he said. “Not so much anymore.”

Pippa spoke the least. She was present and I could feel her leaning towards the person who was speaking, but she offered little of her own experience, though she did say, “I hear you” and “know what that feels like” now and then.

When Kent picked me up outside, I was surprised to see Pippa drive away on her own, in a small hatchback car. Maybe women were different. Maybe they could control a vehicle even in the midst of a powerful orgasm. Somehow, I doubted it. Maybe she was just taking a risk. There was always that.

I hadn’t felt so positive in a while and so I hoped that this would mark a turning point in my life. I was looking forward to seeing everyone again and now I was part of an online group who were also sharing experiences. Once a month was not going to be enough. That was obvious. One of the points everyone had made was that you couldn’t close yourself up away from the world. That path led to depression and even suicidal ideation. A number of people afflicted with PGAD succumbed to alcoholism and other addiction issues as a way of numbing the pain and embarrassment.

I was encouraged and now made it a point of going for walks and excursions farther afield trying to build up my confidence. I was at the cinema watching one of those superhero films when an attack struck me. My thinking had been that in the darkness of the auditorium and with the noise and distraction of the big screen no one would pay attention to me. I also tried to buy a ticket in the backrow so no one would be watching me from behind. I was in the grip of a convulsion, when I heard a small child’s voice saying, “Mummy, what’s the man doing? Mummy, mummy!”

There was a commotion. I realized that this was not going to end well and so decided to cut my losses. My attempt to escape only made my guilt all the more obvious and stumbled down the stairs, until someone further down, understanding that a general hue and cry had sounded, stuck out a leg and tripped me. I tumbled, cracking my head on the edge of a step. Blood gushed down my face and the darkness of the cinema became the darkness of concussed unconsciousness.

When I woke up, I was in an ambulance and my hand was handcuffed to the rail of the gurney. “Whaddle?” was all I could manage. “Merphum.”

The paramedic who had been fully informed that I was dealing with a pervert was none-too-gently inserting an IV into my arm.

“Shut up, sir,” he said.

At the hospital, I was x-rayed and charged with indecency and lewd behavior. I told them about my psychiatrist and my family and explained my condition, but no one seemed to be in the mood to listen and because of the crack on my skull, my mouth wasn’t as adroitly connected to what I was trying to say as it usually was. Adroitly? That was one to remember to use in front of Max the dentist next time I saw him. My head pounded and the painkillers felt deliberately meager in comparison. The doctor listened to my tale of PGAD and said he’d never heard of it. When I told him to Google it, he looked offended.

“Oh yeah, Google, why didn’t I think of that? Why did I even bother going to medical school?”

They had found something on the x-ray however and so that at least gave me the status of a problem and one that would need to pay money for his treatment which was when mum and dad showed up and began to organize things for me.

“Why didn’t you take Kent?” mum said.

“He’d already seen the film,” I told her. Though I knew it wasn’t the point. She didn’t understand that I had wanted to prove my independence somehow. Or not prove but reclaim it.

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “It’s like you want to be unhappy.”

This was so unjust, I wanted to cry real tears. I was furious with her and with the world. My father was standing there, shamefaced and worried. He was so keen to make sure no one had talked to the press that he was making me seem not only guilty but probably one of those people with a family secret. Something like a Catholic priest who the church kept moving from parish to parish. Then just to make things worse, Kent did turn up dressed as a priest, dog collar and all. As the family of a seminarian, of course, we were used to it, but the police looked at him as if this confirmed something they were suspecting. Another piece of the puzzle, falling into place.

What follows is the darkest moment in the story. At every point, I expected that some sort of sanity would prevail. Someone in authority would recognize what had happened, my innocence, and would sign the appropriate paper and set me free and without charge. But this was not to be.

My psychiatrist and lawyer spoke to the police. She issued her expert opinion. But these were the days in which expertise was held in low regard, and it was felt that if one side had an expert another one could be found to swear the opposite in a court of law. So it happened that I was formally charged and, once I had recovered from my head injury, was processed to the county jail. The hearing that I assumed would be perfunctory was not. My psychiatrist was treated as if her opinion was precisely that, carrying as much weight as a reader’s letter in a local newspaper. Her use of the acronym PGAD was derided by the prosecution who took to purposefully mispronouncing it “Egad!” I was kept in custody and in solitary for my own protection. This at least I was glad of as the stress of my situation caused my condition to worsen and I was dehydrating with sometimes fifteen to eighteen orgasms a day.

In the press, my case was portrayed in the most lurid terms possible. The “expert” for the prosecution weighed in liberally, refusing to use PGAD and contesting it was not a clinically recognized term. He preferred to refer to my condition as Priapism and newspaper editors were happy to include pictures of the Greek deity Priapus as illustration, some blurring the inevitably offensive member. The bond set for my bail was ruinously expensive and I told my parents to leave me in jail where I was at least out of the spotlight. They could not do this and they mortgaged the business in order to pay for my release. I was fitted with an ankle bracelet and had to sign in to the sheriff’s office every day.

Kent returned home in order to drive me every day to sign in. Some press photographers turned up the first couple of days to take snaps of me as I walked from the car park to the sheriff’s office and back again. Unfortunately, during one of these walks, I came and a picture of me crouched in the shrubbery was published on the first page of the local newspaper and the accompanying video was uploaded to social media sites internationally. My story was then picked up by the late night hosts and the embarrassed local authorities saw this incident as a breach of my bail and incarcerated me once more.

Strangely, the guards who dealt with me on a day-to-day basis and the prison doctor soon decided that I was indeed the victim of nothing more than bad luck and no perpetrator, but their duties were strictly limited to the care of the incarcerated and had no bearing on the guilt or innocence of the prisoner. Indeed, once judgement was given, they were legally obliged to treat the prisoner as guilty, for so it had been decided. The doctor, an old alcoholic called Dr Rank, told me I had been foolish to go to the cinema. That was the one thing he couldn’t fathom.

“Why would you do such a thing? You exposed yourself to danger.”

It was not a point of view I was unaware of. Indeed, the darkest moments came from the endless time of blankness I was allowed to devote to self-recrimination, and I had decided on my own guilt long before the day of the trial and the media circus which accompanied this. If anything, I was given a fairer hearing via the online commentary and talk shows. At least PGAD was explained to some extent, but the atmosphere in the country was one of sharp division and again and again came the argument that even if I had this condition - especially if I had this condition - why did I choose to go to an early afternoon screening of a family film and buy a ticket next to a child? The inference was that I was exploiting my condition in order to get some pedophiliac thrills, knowing I had a “get out of jail card” from my psychiatrist. The attack wasn’t that I wasn’t ill, which had been the view in the pre-trial hearing, but that I was ill and nevertheless acted knowingly and with criminal intent.

I was found guilty and sentenced to 13 months of prison time. My lawyer, who seemed indecently pleased with himself, said that given time served - we had taken three months to come to trial - and the potential for an early release on account of good behavior, I might serve as little as three additional months. Despite my pleas, mother and father had come to the trial and had stood in front of the cameras and given tearful expressions of love and support, but alas they knew little of editing and memes and some of their most heartfelt declarations became online jokes or gotcha moments to be examined and commented on as obvious declaration of guilt by association.

The business suffered. Who would want to give custom to criminals? And even if you believed the medical explanation, at a time of grief multiple orgasms are not what you want on your mind as you bid a final farewell to a deceased loved one. With the mortgage payments now due every month, my parents began to sell off their assets, dip into their savings and soon were so far underwater that there was no way they could save the parlor and the house.

My life in prison was unsurprisingly miserable. It was a battle to keep clean and sometimes I got so lonely I begged to be allowed into the general population, even though my case had had such widespread publicity that my safety could not be guaranteed. There is no degradation that is absolute. No happiness or unhappiness which doesn’t recognize another level immediately above or below. The worst criminals, murderers, rapists, could look down and see me below them. My crime involved children, and its lack of violence in some ways for them made me even more contemptible. I exercised on my own and I ate in my cell. I read books, several a day. I stared at the wall or climbed on the bed and looked out of the window at the stretch of wall, rimmed with barbed wire. I tried to glimpse birds, different shaped clouds. Anything that would relieve the monotony of my existence. My life.

One day the guard came to my cell and told me to follow him. It wasn’t time for my exercise, so I didn’t understand. He was a large Mormon and I’d managed to engage him in conversation by pretending to be interested in the Church of Latter-Day Saints, but the man was no fool and I learned this had been the tactic many prisoners had pursued at one time or another.

“I don’t know if we’d want you, to be honest,” he’d said, after I had made noises indicating I was interested in joining his church. Jesus, the evangelists had given up on me.

I had a visitor, it would seem. I had told my family not to come. I didn’t want them to see me in this context and vice versa. At this point, I knew nothing of their difficulties and part of the reason they acceded to my request - I later learned - was that they couldn’t afford to come and see me. Mother was now working full time as an accountant and father was working as a freelancer for other funeral parlors. He had a good reputation and there was a brotherhood among the undertakers which came from being misunderstood and the butt of many a joke and consequently, they protected their own. Kent had thrown himself into his studies and I was told he had gone on a retreat which involved a three-month vow of silence. Sally was concentrating on her high school exams. Later I would learn she had dropped out due largely to the bullying she received on my account and would have to finish her high school exams at Community College. Likewise, I suspected that Kent’s retreat was in part ostracism from a Catholic church well practiced in shunting embarrassing members of the community off to a quiet siding.

In the cubicle with the telephone connected by a cable to the wall was Pippa. She smiled and waved as I entered. I sat and smiled also, shuddering a little. I picked up the phone and wiped the receiver with my sleeve: “Hey.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come earlier,” she said. “Max and everyone say hello. They’re sorry too. They wanted to speak out for you but…”

“It’s okay, I understand.”

Patrick, the leader of the “Living with PGAD” group, had actually sent me a really nasty letter. He said I had brought the community into disrepute and made the lives of sufferers worse with what he called my “shenanigans.” Like I was an Irish tike. I came to understand from a message Max sent me that my case had split the group. Some wished to support me and others felt that I should be condemned. The silence was the compromise. Frankly, I didn’t see how they could’ve helped so the whole argument was meaningless. Though obviously it hurt.

“I was wondering what are you going to do when you get out?” Pippa asked.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’ve been trying to work that out. I don’t think I can go home. Already I’ve cost my parents too much. I can’t get a job. At least not one which would involve being with other people.”

“Have you considered porn?”

She looked at me so steadily I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not. And then she cackled with the throaty timbre of a one-time smoker.

“I’ve had offers,” I said.

“I bet you have.”

Some dude from Las Vegas - an adult entertainer impresario, he styled himself - wanted to pay me for a series of videos. He even sent me scripts which surprised me. I didn’t think porn movies had scripts. What I wasn’t going to tell Pippa is that I had written back asking for more details. I knew how much my parents had paid, and I desperately wanted to pay them back, but obviously the added notoriety attached would kill them. It was moot anyway as I got a curt email telling me that Mambo Films had decided to go in a different direction. Someone upstairs had decided that someone with a criminal conviction wasn’t ideal for their image.

“I have a suggestion,” Pippa said. “A proposal of sorts.”

“You have a captive audience.”

She smiled. “We’re setting up this community in New Mexico. It involves people who have conditions which are anti-social. People with severe Tourettes, PGAD, Narcissism, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Anti-Social Personality Disorder, Borderline.”

“Sounds… delightful.”

“The idea is we’ll put you under scrutiny. Truly attempt to find out what is at the root of your condition and what therapy might be conducive to leading a better life. You’re a young man. You have your whole life ahead of you. It can’t simply be ruled by this.”

“Right.”

“We’re looking for a holistic approach. You understand what I mean by holistic.”

“I found out recently. Let me ask you one question.”

“Shoot.”

“You don’t have PGAD, do you?”

Pippa smiled. She shook her head. “No, I’ve been recruiting subjects from various groups. These groups don’t always trust medical researchers, having historically not been well served.”

“Is that the last lie you’re going to tell me or will there be others?”

“No, that’s the last one.”

There were twelve girls in the dance camp. One morning they woke up to find that it was snowing and they girls went outside to play in the snow. It was strange snow. It was warm to the touch. What they didn’t know is that the night before the first atomic bomb had been detonated and the snow they were playing in was actually radioactive ash. Only two girls would survive into their forties. Science would argue that the sample size is too small to draw any significant conclusions.

This was in Ruidoso, New Mexico and the Merry Time Camping Ground was about forty minutes from the town. The Merry Time Camping Ground was actually a collection of buildings and trailers. There were shower rooms, a large communal kitchen and canteen, about fifty bungalows and a further thirty trailers. There was a non-denominational church and a community center which had a digital projector. There were art workshops including pottery wheels and a kiln.

Everything was set out in a series of serpentine white gravel paths bordered by emerald-green grass and hedged by cacti and desert shrubbery. Pipes ran through the borders and at seven pm and seven am a chugging sound could be heard throughout the camp followed by hisses as water irrigated the grass.

There was a small farm which kept chickens and pigs and goats and there was a stable of fifteen horses. There were two swimming pools. One was indoors and was Olympic sized. The other was outdoors and as you would find at any motel, littered with floating fluorescent loungers which came with their own drink holders.

At Merry Time, I was given my own bungalow. I had driven with Kent across the country to be there. It was during this long drive that I learned about my parents and what they had been through as well as Sally leaving school. Kent never made me feel that I was responsible so much as this was all of a piece with God testing us. He told me the story of Job as being particularly pertinent to our situation.

“Really?” I said. “You think God is just fucking with us and that’s okay?”

Kent shook his head. “I see jail has given you some fruity vocabulary.”

I apologized. The truth was I had become hardened. I didn’t recognize myself anymore. It was partly jail, but it was also the trial and also my condition. You can’t just keep coming all the time and be the same person. I stayed away from people now. I had grown a beard in jail, and it made me look different. My hair was also longer. This way I wouldn’t be recognized, I hoped. The car was full of books and boxes of adult diapers. I’d found a slimline brand that suited my purposes. I wore baggy clothes, tracksuits and t-shirts. We stacked the shelves and Dr. Vaughn came to visit me and said that we had thirty minutes before Kent would have to leave.

This upset me terribly. I’d hoped he would stay the night before driving home. I hated the idea of him being on the road on his own. He was my kid brother after all, and he still seemed so naive and vulnerable. But he had assumed the role of protector and even now, I was trembling on the verge of tears, and he was smiling with grim stoicism and nodding as the doctor spoke.

“I still don’t really get this place,” Kent said as I walked him out to the parking lot. “Is it a government thing or a private concern?”

“A mixture,” I said. Though in reality I hadn’t enquired too closely. As far as I was concerned it was a port in a storm and if they’d have me, I was willing to be had. I hadn’t told my family about the pornographer.

“You know this universe is very unlikely?” Kent said.

“I suppose,” I leaned my hand on the very hot roof of the car and then took it off very quickly.

“And life on this planet is really unlikely.”

“Yes.”

“Your life… it’s the result of all the people who didn’t die in a world where dying was the easiest thing to do. Thousands of people went in to making you. Over millions of years.”

“Gotcha. Is this a sermon you’re working on Kent?”

He grinned. “How’s it sound?”

“It’s good.”

We hugged and I cried as his wheels blew up the dust of the desert and the car disappeared in the cloud.

Dr. Vaughn told me the rules of Merry Camping and they were what you’d expect from a dormitory campus. No loud music after ten at night or before nine in the morning. Group therapy Thursday afternoon. Individual therapy daily except the weekend. Twice a week we were also bussed out to a local clinic where fMRIs were conducted, and we were put through a series of tests.

Community assembly Mondays where any matters regarding living quarters and communal areas can be discussed and complaints and suggestions given in a collegiate atmosphere. He cautioned that the other members of the community had antisocial tendencies I might be uncomfortable with. There was a man who habitually stripped nude and wandered around. There were several kleptomaniacs who roamed the area and so I should always make sure my doors were locked during the day and at night. Arguments could be very heated and it was up to members of the community not afflicted with Histrionic Personality Disorder or anger issues to try and diffuse such moments, if at all possible.

Violence would not be tolerated. There was an onsite police officer who would be called in to arrest anyone harming a member of staff in any way whatsoever. That said, there was a leeway given to the fact that the behaviors of the various members of the community were compulsive and did not originate from a decision-making process.

Dr. Vaughn then repeated a mantra he was to use time and again: “We choose what to do, but we don’t choose our choices.”

The holistic nature of the therapy meant that I was signed up to do a variety of activities, along with my therapy and I was placed on an individually designed diet. I learned to ride a horse. I swam twenty laps of the pool every morning. I did Pilates twice a week and I participated in group discussions. The community center was running an Adam Sandler season and so I watched a bunch of his films I had never seen. They were intermittently amusing.

My condition improved slightly. It had already calmed down somewhat in jail, once the preliminary period of nervousness and stress of the trial had simmered down. But now I could go three or four days without an attack. When the attacks came, they were less severe. I also benefited from being in a community which was by comparison often worse off than me. I felt sorry for the people who were in grips of mental illness for instance. My condition was entirely physical. The psychological impact was a side effect. Collateral. I was depressed because of a loss of human contact and my own bodily autonomy. Others, though, had no psychological autonomy. Their minds tricked them. They hallucinated, or their thinking processes got into grooves and traps of their own making.

This I talked through with my therapist Isabel, and under Dr Vaughn’s supervision I was weaned off valium and Zoloft. I became friends with members of the community. I ate lunch with Manfred, an elderly black man from Chicago. He told me how his parents had persecuted him because of his sexuality and had even taken him for electro-shock therapy at an early age. His father was big in the church, and it had been considered a shame.

“I became a pariah,” he said. “I drank, I stole, I became what they thought I was. What they told me I was. A demon.”

This gentle kind man had found solace and peace in the community, and I wondered that he was still here. I thought they must be holding onto him like a mascot, or out of pure benevolence, knowing he probably had nowhere left to go. There was only so much we would tell each other about our conditions. Some of them were easy to diagnose. The Tourette’s guys would walk around spitting and swearing and grimacing. It was strange how used you became to it. The nude guy, Jerry, stopped being shocking after the first week. It was as if he carried his own changing room around with him where the context of his being nude made perfect sense.

My neighbor on one side was Laura who was only a few years older than me. I guessed thirty. She was a paranoiac and at the height of her delusions had grandiose delusions of God-like powers. She seemed like she was recovered, and we spoke frequently, and I was beguiled by her wit and her fluency. She made perfect sense. It saddened me that she would no doubt leave soon, having been effectively cured. The truth was I was falling in love with her from our first conversation and by the second I was already in love with her. Laura had a way of looking at me that encouraged intimacy. It was me and you against the world.

When I asked him about Laura’s status, whether she had been cured or not, Dr. Vaughn reminded me of a prohibition about using the “C” word:

“Everyone here has a chronic condition, Billy,” he said. “No one here will be cured. Treated, yes. Hopefully, their lives, your life will be improved. But you have to get rid of this shibboleth: cured.”

“Do you ever wonder why you’re here?” Laura said.

We had eaten tacos and were sitting out in the cool of the desert night looking up at the stars. It was a corner of the complex which had the least light pollution, and the belt of the Milky Way shone particularly brightly this evening.

“I know why I’m here,” I said. I had told her about the condition and indeed she had witnessed it before we had even spoken. Everyone at Merry Camping seemed to be aware of me from the news.

“I don’t mean your diagnosis. I mean what are they gaining from it?” she said.

I nodded. This was uncomfortable territory. After all, this was precisely what Laura was supposed not to do. “Knowledge. They’re scientists. And they’re working out from our cases how they can treat similar cases.”

“Really? But our cases are fairly rare, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“They are. I’ve done the math. You’re less than one percent of the population. I’m a tiny proportion too. Tourette’s in 0.6 at most of the population. These aren’t exactly cash cows when it comes to private medicine. And yet look at how much this whole set up is costing? Nope. Something else is going on here.”

“But I’m sure there’s a crossover between what we suffer and more popular conditions. Look at me. It’s basically a genital malfunction. If my condition can help them understand how the genitalia work then imagine the possibilities for treating impotence or premature ejaculation.”

I suddenly felt embarrassed using these terms in front of Laura. I also thought, wouldn’t it be typical if I came right now. But thankfully, for once, I didn’t.

We lay back on our loungers, looking up at the stars. We had blankets over us.

“Do you think they want us to fall in love?” Laura said.

“What?”

“They put us close to each other,” she said. “We’re close in age. We have timetables that allow us to spend free time together.”

“I just thought that was luck.”

She laughed and it was a lovely sad sound.

I felt her hand take mine.

And so it went for several months. I felt better. My condition didn’t improve any, but I was in a context where it was understood and contained. I was with people who understood me because they themselves were misunderstood. My friendship with Manfred grew and my love of Laura deepened. There was no sense in moving it onto a physical level because that was impossible for me, or at least so I thought. Laura had maintained me at a certain distance because she felt that her feelings had been manipulated, but she came around to expressing frankly that she too had feelings for me and regardless of the source she was interested in moving our relationship further along.

So, we began to kiss and cuddle and then we had sex. Remarkably, the first time, the sex was normal. Or at least as normal as I remembered it being the first time, several years earlier. Laura lay in bed and we discussed what we could do when we left Merry Camping.

“We need to get you a job that you’d be able to do,” Laura said. “You need to learn coding or something along those lines. Something you can freelance from home. Webdesign, you know. Something along those lines.”

“I could ask Isabel,” I said. They were always offering us vocational courses and I’d never thought to take advantage of the opportunities, but now Laura said it, it made perfect sense. Everything Laura said felt true. I was so pleased she was taking an interest in me. Despite her diagnosis, she was the most level-headed person I’d ever met. Which was what made her delusion about the malignant conspiracy behind Happy Camping so disturbing.

“I’m not saying that I’m not a paranoiac,” she said. “I’m just saying that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The idea of conspiracy theorists was started by governments who were actually engaged in conspiracies, real ones. The very nature of politics is a series of more or less conspiratorial dealings. Anyone can be branded a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t go for it. It demeans and discredits them. Governments like you to believe there was such a thing as MK Ultra and the Bermuda Triangle. Yes, we invented AIDs and are putting emasculating chemicals in the water under the cover of fluoridation. Believe all that nonsense and you won’t notice that we actually fuck you over on a daily basis with this sham we call democracy and the way society is built by the people paid the least.”

“Wow,” was all I could say.

There was something that I learned from a John Carpenter film I saw on late night television: “An idea is valid no matter what its origin.” It doesn’t matter if the person giving you the idea is crazy or has nefarious motivations, you still have to consider the idea for what it’s worth. And that’s what I thought about what Laura was saying.

It felt even more valid when Dr. Vaughn called me into his office. “I see that you have begun a relationship of … ahem … physical intimacy with the community member Laura Bonnet.”

“How did you find that out?”

“There aren’t many secrets around here. Don’t worry, Billy. We don’t wish to pry. No rules have been broken. I’m just interested as a purely clinical matter, how we are to progress. How we are to include this new development in your treatment.”

I was uncomfortable and Dr. Vaughn saw that I was unwilling to proceed with this line of discussion. “Let’s table that,” he said.

I was sent for a further fMRI the next day which was odd and then I noticed my medication had changed. I don’t know if it is the same sort of bias that makes you suddenly notice a brand of motorcar on the roads when you’ve just bought that same brand, but I could see for the first time the CCTV cameras that were half hidden everywhere. The expressions on the faces of the staff which suddenly appeared more watchful, calculated. Had they always been taking notes on those little tablets? Or had they just begun now? I also hadn’t questioned people so much and now I noticed that no one ever really answered me. The tabling or putting the pin in of discussions was almost constant.

“Let’s come back to that at a later date,” Isabel might say.

I even began to wonder if the food was tasting different. My request for the vocational course was turned down because of a scheduling issue.

I wanted to talk to someone neutral. I knew Dr. Vaughn became angry when the clinic as a whole was questioned. He took it as a personal slight when the ultimate end of everything we were doing here was thought about in terms more specific than “the ultimate good of all mankind.” I was nervous as well that they would latch onto my new relationship with Laura and use that against me. I could hear the conversation: “So you’ve been spending a lot of time with Laura Bonnet and you know Laura has a lot of problems. Persecution complex, paranoia, borderline personality disorder, a history of self-harm.”

She had told me herself the weapons they were ready to use against us. How my heart lept when she said “us” though.

I decided Manfred would work best as a confidant I could trust who was also disinterested enough to see my relationship with Laura.

“She thinks this whole place has been set up for what then?” he asked.

“Control.”

“Control?”

I tried to gather my thoughts. “She says that there is a military application to the research that they are doing.”

“How?”

I noticed I was now quoting Laura but there was no avoiding it. She really expressed the ideas in the best way possible. And an idea was valid etc etc.

“Imagine if you have a bunch of soldiers and you can hit them with a gas or a radio wave that would trigger a part of their brains to behave the way my brain does when I’m in the middle of an attack.”

Manfred laughed. “Oh I’m sorry that’s funny. All them soldier boys falling over themselves and jizzing in their drawers.”

“But you could see how that could be useful against an enemy army, or a protestors, or even just an individual leader during a press conference.”

Manfred nodded. “Well, I suppose…”

“All of our conditions have this antisocial aspect in common. Tourette’s being induced during a meeting of world leaders. Paranoia or Histrionic personality disorder on a leadership team during a delicate political negotiation or an election.”

Manfred spooned some mashed potatoes towards his mouth and then stopped. He lowered it and his expression became deeply thoughtful. “Jerry walking around buck nude might not go down too well at the United Nations.”

“Right!”

“What about me?”

“What do you mean?”

“What about my condition? How would that be useful?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I noticed that one of the attendants was watching us carefully. Or were they? Maybe they were just doing what they always did. “I always felt it was weird you were in here anyway.

I mean to me. I mean you’re gay. It’s not considered a disorder anymore.”

“Hey man, I’m not gay,” Manfred said. “Who told you that?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I mean you said that your family persecuted you because of your sexuality. They sent you for treatment and all that.”

“Yes?”

“So wasn’t it to pray away the gay, or something?”

“No, that wasn’t it. I like girls, man. Little ones. The younger the better.”

I didn’t mean to recoil but I did. He saw it in my face as well. “Oh yeah, here it comes. The hate.”

“You mean you’re a…” I hesitated.

“I’m a pedophile, that’s right. Spit it out, son. I’m not going to have you shame me. I didn’t choose who I was aroused by. I try now to act on it. I fight with myself on a daily basis, my whole life. You think I want to be what I am?”

Manfred was shouting. I’d never seen him so upset. But then I was upset too. This man I’d confided in. I had assumed we were the same, but he was actually what the prisoners had thought that I had been. It made me feel sick to the stomach.

The attendants were coming over. Were there more of them than usual? Had the cameras and microphones picked up everything they needed to have? To what purpose?

“I need some time to process this,” I said.

“Yes, boy, you better scram, before I get some of the filth in me on you,” Manfred said. “I see it in you. I see the hate.”

Tears were running down his face. I felt like I had betrayed him. How could I pity him? What had he done in his long life?

Laura and I plotted our escape, though in the end there was no need for any subterfuge. We took the horses early one morning and rode cross-country to a local town about fifteen miles away. We left the horses under a tree in the back field abutting the general store and called Merry Camping to tell them where they were before boarding a bus to the airport. They said as soon as we knew where we were going to be to send them our addresses and they would forward our belongings.

I felt I couldn’t go home, and I didn’t want to. Laura had a place in Colorado, a place in the mountains where we could “live off the grid.” I didn’t care so much for that. All I wanted was to be with her and to be away from people. That was the most important thing.

The house smelled like inoccupancy and old winter. We opened all the windows that morning, waking up. We brewed coffee and lit a fire because though it was summer we were high in the mountains and the pine trees around us shaded the cabin from the sun.

I wrote Kent a long letter and Laura took it down to the store. In the garage, I found an old Range Rover and so with the help of YouTube started to clean it up and see if I could get it to work. It took a week and asking Laura to run out and get me some tools and parts, but I was proud to hear the motor thrum into life.

I chopped wood all morning and then read books in the afternoon. Together we would hike above the tree line to where you could sit on the exposed rock off the mountain smooth as a bald man’s scalp and look to where it seemed the Earth curved before you.

Sometimes we had to stop while coming down for me to lean against a tree and at nights I had to dissuade Laura that the lights of passing commercial flights had any malintent when it came to our lives. They were flown by people who didn’t know us for purposes that would never register on our lives. Our belongings arrived from Happy Camping, something Laura came to bitterly resent. She increasingly spent her time alone in the woods, trying to find physical evidence that Happy Camping were on our trail or continuing their surveillance.

We lived together for five months, and we enjoyed it mostly. We had our arguments like any other couple, but they were usually resolved. We got bored of each other and our problems. The isolation exaggerated this normal effect, but mostly we enjoyed each other’s company. I suspected she needed me more than she wanted me and she felt the opposite. I dreamt of my family a lot and I was indecently happy when I had any news of them. Because Laura hated electronics everything was done via physical mail. One day, in early spring I drove the Range Rover down to town, slipping and sliding on the ice with the intention of picking up some carrots and onions and beer and I found myself driving past the town and on through the endless switchbacks down down down into the valley below. I reasoned with myself that this was just an excursion. I was curious to see what the rest of the world looked like now. That’s what I said. So why was I in the airport and why was I boarding a plane?

The airplane trip wasn’t as fraught as it could’ve been. I had one minor incident. No one knew who I was anymore. The searchlights of infamy had passed on to beam their lights on new victims.

I called my parents from the airport and called the store in Colorado and left a message for Laura. An apology and instructions on where I’d left the Range Rover.

My father and I hadn’t seen each other face to face since the night I had got out of prison and even then it had been brief. We hugged in the car.

“You look good,” he said. “In shape. You’ve become a man.”

I laughed. “I’ve been living like a lumberjack.”

It was seven years later, and I was thirty years old when I had the last attack. From that point on, the PGAD I’d suffered from disappeared entirely and with as little reason as it had turned up in the first place. Grandfather died and we gathered at the funeral parlor. We had reopened and business had steadily crept back to the levels we had enjoyed prior to the terrible things which had occurred. Kent was now a priest and had taken the Christian name Simon.

“Simon was the man who had helped Jesus carry the cross,” Kent explained to mum.

“I know but what’s wrong with Kent?” she asked Kent.

“There’s no Saint Kent, so Father Kent sounds wrong,” said Father Simon.

We’d all become honorary Catholics out of respect for my brother. The way we’d all become avid comedy fans because of the way Sally was carving out a reputation as a comedian. I’d never liked the late-night shows, especially not after the way they treated me, but with Sally making a name for herself - a different one to ours obviously - we watched them all and not just when she was on them. We wanted to compare her competition and be able to reassure her that she was much better than those bozos.

So, my father and I prepared my grandfather and made him look good in his favorite suit. We played his favorite music and arranged his favorite flowers, and then we took him to the Church of Saint Patrick where Father Simon officiated. My wife Sybil and the twins Grace and Jennifer had inherited the funeral parlor talent of precocious tranquility and sat in their push chair, awake and alert but silent. Occasionally they’d grasp each other’s hands and then play with each other’s fingers.

Father read one of the readings and I read a passage from the Book of Job. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?” it bombastically asked. “Have you commanded the morning since your days began, And caused the dawn to know its place, That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, And the wicked be shaken out of it?”

I sat back down next to Sally.

“Well Billy?” she said. “Have you commanded the morning?”