Was this the schizophrenic's apathy, his progressive lack of orientation? There were gaps in the days when I had done habitual things like shaving and changing clothes. I couldn't remember doing them. The car's mirror reflected an image that could have been someone else, a young man whose face showed little evidence of strain and fatigue. In fact, despite my lack of sleep, I didn't feel tired. I felt as if I had been wound up tight and any minute I would be released and would begin to spin madly.
Madly. The word stuck. It kept coming back, the awful fear. My stumbling investigations had a double-edged motive: to find the aliens—and to prove that I was not mad. And I was slowly, inexorably, trapping myself in a narrowing circle. If I sat back, if I did nothing, I wouldn't know for sure. I could believe in mysterious beings from outer space, in sinister plots against me, in the hallucination of bodiless voices. I wouldn't have to confront unpleasant implications about morbid attempts at self-destruction or a disintegrating personality.
Even during the twenty-seven years of my life, society had come a long way in its attitude toward insanity. No longer was it viewed with a sense of shame or revulsion, something to be ignored or swept into a corner of society where you didn't have to look at it. But it was still the nation's number one disease, it still inspired the terror of the unknown. We had had many scientific breakthroughs—the famous virus break in 1971 which meant the end of cancer, the virtual elimination of the common cold; the successful "heart patch" of 1975 which changed heart disease from a leading killer to a rarely fatal disease; the total elimination of polio and multiple sclerosis and many other vicious enemies of the human organism. But the mind remained impregnable.
There had been gigantic strides in treatment, but mental hospitals were still jammed far beyond capacity. One American in five had some form of mental illness. Some, the luckier ones, found quick cures in the K7U drugs available under prescription, the laboratory narcotic that had proved startlingly effective, enabling you to induce exaggerated symptoms of psychoses under their influence, thus making possible an accurate diagnosis that could lead to prompt treatment. But there had been many cases of alarming toxic side effects from K7U. And in one area of mental illness the miracle drug had quite a different result. It accelerated the advanced stages of paranoid schizophrenia and its rarer, more logically organized cousin, paranoia.
There was a small bottle of K7U pills in the top drawer of the built-in chest in my trailer bedroom, a supply I had surreptitiously borrowed from the psychology laboratory when I first became aware of what seemed hallucinatory voices. I had been afraid to use them. If mine were a minor illness, the pills would expose it to accurate treatment. There was the risk of side effects but that did not deter me. My symptoms did.
The hallucination of voices where no one was present was a common one. It was frequently allied to a fairly well organized delusional system in which the person held the bizarre conviction that supra-human beings were trying to possess or destroy him—and often was convinced that he himself had some extraordinary powers that accounted for the persecution. He might seem quite normal in other phases of his life, well-oriented to his surroundings except for a tendency to withdraw socially, avoiding close personal relationships, and an increasing emotional apathy sometimes alternating with moments of exaggerated feeling.
This symptomatic pattern was common in paranoid schizophrenia.
Grimly I thrust aside the conclusion to which my thoughts had led me, ignoring the tight stomach cramp of fear, pretending that the reason for panic did not exist.
I was heading south through the Culver basin, the west end of the city's sprawling complex of trailer courts that ranged from the utilitarian government projects for low income dwellings to luxurious resort-like courts. I stayed off the automatic drive freeways, preferring to control the car manually even though it meant a slower trip. I needed contact with busy, noisy, normal humanity.
Moving on the ground level streets through the trailer basin gave me a viewpoint I had not had in two years. I had lived in the basin with my mother up to the time of her death. Afterwards I had obeyed the inclination to cut myself off from everything and everyone I had known. I had been fortunate in finding the vacancy in the court off Mulholland Drive. In a city of sixteen million people forever bursting out of their housing, that had been an even luckier chance than I had realized. There was already a public clamor to re-zone Beverly Hills for apartments and middle-income trailer courts. It was the city's last remaining area of private homes and only the vast wealth and influence of the rich and politically powerful who lived there had kept it from being overwhelmed by the creeping mass of trailers and great apartment cities.