Overheard in a Dream. Torey Hayden

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      When Conor arrived, James began reflecting his words immediately. If Conor said “doll’s house,” then James said, “Yes, that’s a doll’s house.” If Conor elaborated and said, “big doll’s house,” then James mirrored that back in a sentence, “Yes, that’s a big doll’s house.” James felt quite secure in interpreting Conor’s extensive naming of items in the playroom as an embryonic effort at interaction. It was conversation at a most rudimentary level, like an infant’s speech, but James recognized it as conversation.

      Conor was increasingly attracted to the low shelves and their baskets of small toys. He didn’t take the baskets from the shelf, didn’t even touch them, but more and more often he would stand in front of them and press the cat’s nose against their mesh. “Meow? Meow? Basket. Wire basket. Silver wire basket.”

      “Yes, silver wire baskets. Baskets full of toys. Toys you can play with, if you want. In here, you decide.”

      Conor lifted the cat up and continued on his journey around the room. Coming to the expanse of windows, he paused. He didn’t go near them enough to look down on the vast view visible from the playroom, but he reached the cat out and pressed its nose to the glass. “Window. Meow?”

      “Yes, those are the windows. We can see out,” James said.

      Conor moved on.

      In the far corner was what James called his “road sheet”. Made of heavy-gauge white plastic sheeting, it was about four by four feet in size and printed with an elaborate layout of roads just the right size for toy cars and little buildings made of Lego bricks. It had been folded up on the shelf when Conor had been in the playroom previously, but now it was lying flat on the floor.

      Coming up to it, Conor stood stone still. Not a muscle quivered. A full minute passed, feeling an eternity long. “Meow?” he whispered.

      “That’s the road sheet,” James said. “Toy cars can drive there.”

      The muscles tensed along Conor’s jaw as he stared at the plastic square on the floor. Raising one hand, he flapped it frantically in front of his face for a few moments.

      “Man on the moon,” he said with very precise clarity. “July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong accompanied Buzz Aldrin. Apollo Project. Put the first man on the moon. July 20, 1969.”

      Surprised by this sudden burst of speech, James studied the boy. Exact regurgitation of overheard conversations was common with autistic children, but it was the first time in the three weeks Conor had been coming that James heard him do it. Did Conor have any understanding of the words he had just said or was it simply autistic echolalia?

      “Something has made you think of the men who went to the moon,” James said carefully.

      “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

      James probed further to discover if there was any glimmer of meaning. “Yes, that is what Neil Armstrong said when he stepped on the moon, isn’t it?”

      Conor raised his head. “The cat knows.”

       Chapter Three

      In an ideal world, all child therapy was family therapy. As a child’s problems virtually never arose in isolation, James considered it as vital to see the mother, the father and the siblings as it was to see the child him- or herself.

      Everyone in the business knew this, of course, but things seldom worked out that way nowadays. Philosophies had changed. The business model had taken over psychiatry just as it had everything else. “The bottom line” and “accountability” had replaced “self-discovery” and “insight”. Insurance companies often refused to pay for more than twelve sessions of therapy. Behavioural contracts and token economies provided a swifter intervention than play therapy. Drugs provided an even swifter one. Both mothers and fathers worked and were generally unavailable for therapy during office hours. And everyone was in a hurry. Impatience had become the motif of modern life. As a consequence, the main function of many psychiatrists was simply to prescribe drugs. James often felt like a dinosaur for trying to turn the clock back to a slower, more humanistic model.

      South Dakota hadn’t been a good place to choose for a renaissance of traditional therapeutic values. They were a self-reliant people, not used to talking to strangers about their personal problems, so it was hard enough to get them through the door at all. And with agriculture still the main industry, they understood “bottom lines” acutely well. Many parents of his young patients had refused outright to come in for therapy sessions themselves because of the additional cost. In the end, James had had to go “commercial” to create a genuine family therapy setting by coming up with the concept of a “package deal” – that he would see each member of the immediate family for three sessions for one set price. Truth was, he was quite proud of that idea and thought it would work, but no. Too often he still had to charm them in.

      Laura Deighton was going to be one such, James could tell. It became apparent almost instantly that from her perspective, Conor had sole ownership of his problem. When James raised the issue of family therapy, of seeing her, her husband and their daughter as well as Conor, Laura had actually stood up. She literally started to leave and James had no doubt she would have done so, if he hadn’t pulled back immediately. This reaction fascinated him, because, of course, it said so much more to him about how unwilling she was to look at the problem than words could have done.

      Conor’s father, Alan McLachlan, however, was just the opposite. When James explained how Conor’s therapy would work, Alan agreed straightaway. “Yes, of course,” he said. He’d be happy to come in.

      With the same care that James had put into designing the playroom, he had laid out his office for use in interviews and adult therapy sessions. Beyond the desk, he’d created a rectangular-shaped “conversation centre” with soft, comfortable chairs and a sofa. The coffee table, the end tables and the plants had all been chosen with care to give a pleasant, airy, relaxed atmosphere. He’d purposely picked real wood and natural materials to help mitigate the artificiality of the situation and used a pale beige upholstery to give the room an open, positive feeling. Lars kidded him about such attention to detail, but James was pleased with the effect. He felt it worked.

      Laura Deighton had shown little interest in his conversation centre and seated herself beside his desk before he’d had the chance to encourage her elsewhere. When Alan came in, however, he had moved naturally to the sofa. Sinking into the beige-cushioned softness, he settled down comfortably. So comfortably, in fact, that he soon was resting one scuffed and, as James noticed, rather dirty cowboy boot on the edge of the coffee table.

      Alan wasn’t a tall man. James was six foot, so not a giant by any means, but he must have had three or four inches over him. Alan’s hair, thick and rumpled by the removal of a red-and-white duckbilled hat, was the uneven grey of galvanized metal. His eyes were the same misty Celtic blue as Conor’s. He looked older than his fifty years. His face was ruddy and lined, his skin long since gone to leather from a lifetime spent outdoors, but he still had about him a worn-out handsomeness.

      James had been a little nervous about Alan. He’d never come face to face before with that iconic stereotype of the West – a cowboy – a man who rode horses as part of his daily working life, who gathered cattle, branded them, calved them and, when necessary, wrestled them to the ground and cut off their balls. It all spoke to James of the kind of mythic masculinity СКАЧАТЬ