It was not easy for Petya to be hypnotized, because he kept wanting to argue with the hypnotist’s suggestions and in addition he disliked certain Antipodean notes in the man’s voice, and his sense of humor, and so on. The first sessions were difficult. “I’m not in a trance,” Petya would interrupt Mr. Lett. “I’m feeling relaxed and in a good mood but I’m in full control of my wits.” Or, another day, “Oh dear, I was so nearly there at last. But a fly just went up my nose.”
Petya noticed too much. It was one of the things that most seriously got in his way. On one of my visits to the room of blue light, when he seemed willing for once to talk about the Asperger’s, I mentioned the famous Borges story, “Funes the Memorious,” about a man who was unable to forget anything, and he said, “Yes, that’s me, except it’s not just what happened or what people said. That writer of yours, he’s too wrapped up in words and deeds. You have to add smells and tastes and sounds and feelings also. And glances and shapes and the patterns of cars in the street and the relative movement of pedestrians and the silences between musical notes and the effects of dog whistles on dogs. All of them all the time running around my brain.” A sort of super-Funes, then, cursed with multiple sensory overload. It was hard to imagine what his interior world was like, how anyone could cope with the crowding in of sensations like riders on the rush-hour subway, the deafening cacophony of sobs, honks, explosions, and whispers, the kaleidoscopic blaze of images, the muddled reek of stenches. The Inferno, the carnival of the damned, must be like this. I understood then that to say that Petya lived in a kind of hell was the exact opposite of the reality, which was that a kind of hell lived inside him. This understanding allowed me to recognize, and to be embarrassed that I hadn’t recognized it before, the immense strength and courage with which Petronius Golden faced the world every day, and to have a greater compassion for his occasional savage complaints against his life, like the episodes on the windowsill and on the subway to Coney Island. And I also allowed myself to wonder: If that immense force of character were now to be dedicated to his animus against his unborn soon-to-be half brother (actually, as we know, not his brother at all, but let that thought lie for now), his troubled half brother and above all his treacherous full-blood brother, of what vengeful deed might he be capable? Should I worry for my own son’s safety, or was that instinct proof of my knee-jerk bigotry toward Petya’s condition? (Was it wrong to call it a condition? Maybe “Petya’s reality” would be better. How difficult language had become, how full of land mines. Good intentions were no longer a defense.)
Let me turn to the drinking. I’m on firmer ground there. Petya had a drinking problem; there was no disguising that. He drank alone and heavily and was a melancholy drunk but it was the way he had found to shut off the inferno within and get some sleep, or, more precisely, to pass out and spend some hours being blessedly unconscious. And in the hour before unconsciousness, on the single occasion that he allowed me to witness his nightly slide into oblivion, at the start of Vasilisa Golden’s final trimester when he said he “needed my support,” I heard with growing discomfort and even dislike the extent to which his inability to control the flood of chatter pouring into him or to censor his own linguistic flow resulted, when alcohol was added to that tumult of information, in a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that revealed the extent to which he had internalized the adversarial fragmentation of American culture and made it a part of his personal damage. To put it plainly, his drunk nocturnal self revealed a lurch toward the extremes of conservative attitudes; the presence of a Foxy, Breitbartian other-self bubbled through his lips, fortified by liquor, enabled by isolation and his wholly justifiable fury at the world: Obamacare, terrible!, Maryland shooting, don’t politicize it!, minimum-wage rise, scandalous!, same-sex marriage, unnatural!, religious objections to serving LGBT people in Arizona, in Mississippi, freedom!, police shootings, self-defense!, Donald Sterling, free speech!, shootings on university campus in Seattle shootings in Vegas shootings in Oregon high school, guns don’t kill people!, arm the teachers!, the Constitution!, freedom!, ISIS beheading, Jihadi John, disgusting!, we have no plan!, take them all out!, we have no plan!, oh, and Ebola! Ebola! Ebola! All this and more in an incoherent torrent mixed up with his hostility toward Apu, if Apu was going left then Petya would go right to counter him, whatever Apu was for he would be against, he would construct a moral universe that inverted his brother’s reality, black was white, right was wrong, down was up and in was out. Apu himself got the rough end of Petya’s monologues a few times that year and responded gently, not taking the bait.
“Let him say what he wants to say,” he told me. “You know it’s badly wired in there.” He tapped his forehead to indicate Petya’s brain.
“He’s one of the most intelligent people I know,” I said, meaning it.
Apu grimaced. “It’s a cracked intelligence,” he said. “So it doesn’t count. Out there I’m trying to deal with a cracked world.”
“He’s trying super hard,” I ventured. “The hypnotherapy, et cetera.”
Apu dismissed this. “Call me when he stops sounding like he’s at the Tea Party with a mad hat on his head. Call me when he decides to stop being the GOP elephant in the room.”