Tales of madness and enchantmentfrom the back ward

From The Dinosaur Man—Tales of Madness and Enchantment from the Back Ward, copyright 1991 by Dr. Susan Baur (HarperCollins).

Liken Oliver Sacks, Susan Baur explores the imaginations and behavior of deeply disturbed people and their extraordinary worlds. "Stick to polite conversation, wash, and keep your fly zipped up"-this is all she is supposed to convince her patients to do. But Baur, abandoning convention, is swept into the poetry and pain behind her patients' bizarre stories. Eventually she comes to see these tales as heroic attempts of the afflicted to make sense of a world their brains distort.

WHEN I WAS ASSIGNED to care for a man who was routinely described by clinicians as the craziest human being they had ever met, I did not expect to be dealing with a dinosaur. However, according to Maurice Nouvelle (the dinosaurschizophrenic's name), our story began 100 million years ago, and its cycles of fractures and mendings, sadness and sweetness continue even now to turn as endlessly as the seasons and with the seasons' same disregard for whom they affect. In more conventional terms, the story began on a hot day in August as my new keys jangled in a lock, a wooden door opened and I stared down the pink-tiled corridor of ward 9-2-D at Mountain Valley Hospital.

I could see a dozen or so men pacing up and down and another half-dozen shuffling into line for . It was in this slouching line of castaways that I first saw Mr. Nouvelle. A slight man with a halo of gray hair radiating from his head, he was dressed in a peculiar uniform made up of army fatigues decorated with strings and badges. His disconcertingly intense stare and bizarre gestures suggested that he was actively engaged in private negotiations of a complex and pressing nature, and I learned later that this 56-year-old man had spent his entire adult life in mental institutions. He was so persistently delusional that routine information, such as the names of brothers and sisters, was missing from his record.

IT WAS EARLY WINTER before Mr. Nouvelle offered me a glimpse of his private world. He materialized in my path just outside the dayroom and quietly, intensely told me that he remembered me from long ago.

"I, ah...watch you now all the time," he said, twisting his hands nervously, "and I think that perhaps--maybe a long time ago--I think I was the husband dinosaur and you were the wife dinosaur." He went on to tell me that he was a Nicodemosaurus and I a Tracodamosaums and that as such we had privileges not shared by others on the ward. If I could arrange to get him a day pass, for example, he would drive me around the neighboring town of Hillsdale in a limousine--escorted by a dozen motorcycles, he added, noting my hesitation. Escorted by fleets of cars. Accompanied by bulldozers.

Then, suddenly, we were talking about , or rather, he was; but I, not having made the transition, momentarily maintained the companionable stance of the previous conversation.

"Of course, I try not to touch myself and, uh, keep chaste" he was saying, the words now tumbling over them selves. "But if I were with a woman now, if I were touched, I would probably just go---" And he snapped his right forearm rigid, bent at the elbow.

A dozen ways to flee flashed across my mind.

"Are you leaving me now?" asked Mr. Nouvelle, reading my thoughts as persons with near-intolerable levels of sensitivity are often able to do.

"Yes," I answered.

"But you aren't leaving me forever... yet." And he smiled a quizzical smile and held me a moment more with his golden hazel eyes.

INITIALLY, MR. NOUVELLE AND I MET IN A small room across from the nurses' station. Our early meetings were totally confusing. He was a Venetian policeman, an inspector general, my father, or even me; and I in turn was Mother, wife, son, daughter, duck egg, or dinosaur. Yes meant no, and every word we used slid out from under its usual meaning and hustled us toward sex or violence.

He said, "When a woman has too much Mother, which is not good for a grown man, she mustn't pull out her words like '0ooooo, Maurice, come onnnn.' So I punched her in the head and beat her head on the floor, and she lay there curled up like a baby. 'Are you all right?' 'Noooooo.' But I did what was right."

"Mr. Nouvelle," I said, after watching him silently relive the kind of incident which I knew happened among the profoundly mentally ill. "Mr. Nouvelle, do not hit me. Do you understand?" "I frightened you, didn't I?"

And so our conversations went--many utterly incomprehensible, others making more and more sense as I learned his language. At first he was loath to tell me anything about himself unless transported into dinosaur stories. He told me, for example, that these great creatures live 100 million years and that each ordinary day seems to them like 'days within days and years within years." On winter afternoons, especially when the snow swirls between the steep-roofed hospital buildings and the dinosaurs drift among them" like enormous shadow, time stands still, frozen and unpromising. "Will it ever be spring for me?" the dinosaurs ask then.

Gradually, Mr. Nouvelle allowed me to exhume portions of his that had been buried under mountainous piles of delusions. He had been raised in a logging town near the Canadian border, and when he was six, he began attending a parochial school where the nuns spoke French as well as English. He quickly got the reputation of being a bright boy. In the third grade, however, his troubles began to surface. He took to masturbating three or four times a day on the living-room couch, especially when his father, who could rarely work now because of a bad back, went off to Canada to stay with his brothers.

There were happy memories as well-trips to his uncle's sugar maple farm, picking beans with his father, and running off to the local parish to help Father Victor Bisette with the rabbits and chickens. "I had a craving to hold chickens in my hands and kiss their wattles," he remembered. In high school he had belonged to the Future Farmers of America.

ALTHOUGH THERE WERE pieces missing, an outline of Mr. Nouvelle's life made it easier for me to understand his convoluted language and baroque delusions. Before knowing he had been active in the Future Farmers of America, for example, I had not understood why duck eggs and chicken wattles played such a large part in his , and why fruits and vegetables were so frequently substituted for those parts of a woman's anatomy that he loved to linger over in his mind. These luscious remnants of a rural upbringing were an especially important part of his lovemaking "under sodium" with the "invisible ladies." "Under sodium" apparently referred to a time when he had been given sodium amytal to help him sleep.

About 11:00 every evening, the patients on 9-2-D changed into their pajamas and retired to the dormitories. The nightly safety check made around 2:00 A.M. was the signal for the invisible ladies to come into his bed.

They flowed along the tiled corridors, slipped under the closed door of the dorm, and, sinuously wafted over and around the partitions that divided the patients' "rooms."

Insinuating themselves like slender fingers under his green hospital blanket, the invisible ladies trembled down the length of Mr. Nouvelle's body, and he became aroused. So did the women, he added, and the cantaloupes between their legs ran with the same fragrant juice he had tasted in the hot fields behind his boyhood home.

There followed nightly orgies of incredible proportions. Sweet milk ran from the wombs and penises, a son sucked his mother's zucchini, and duck eggs moved throughout the male and female anatomy as easily as one draws a breath. Soon the invisible ladies moaned in ecstasy, as Mr. Nouvelle drove his 38 good dicks into their cantaloupes and streams of green beans poured from the women's fingers and out their ears. But as soon as the connection was made, it was annulled. Amid protestations of blamelessness, the exhausted Mr. Nouvelle assured the Father that he was still a virgin. The Father Himself had sent these ladies, he told me, and even though they had had intercourse, the experience did not count. And indeed it did not.

AT FIRST I BELIEVED the relationship between Mr. Nouvelle's intense desire for fornication and his equally intense need for God's protection was one of fairly straightforward conflict.

Because sex was a sin and would lead to damnation, Mr. Nouvelle had worked out a way of passively enduring sexual delights while remaining blameless and, alas, uncomforted. As I learned more, however, it began to appear that his yearning for a perfect and everlasting union with God had actually fueled his desire for women, and vice versa. The Father needed to give Mr. Nouvelle invisible ladies to prove both His power and His compassion, and the ladies could not have unleashed their full and ferocious passion on Mr. Nouvelle unless God were at hand to temper their assault on his emotions.

With the invisible ladies, lovemaking was largely without substance and without risk. They were not, as he termed it, "really real." On the other hand, making love to the "real women who stand in front of me" was more satisfactory, except that it involved the possibility of rejection and took a little more explaining to God. The first of these pitfalls Mr. Nouvelle tried to avoid by hiding his intentions, in fact by hiding the entire act from his partners, and the second he skirted by letting the Father have the final say on whether or not "it" happened.

Every female in the hospital, from age 15 to 60, from patient to psychiatrist, was Mr. Nouvelle's unknowing partner. Upon spotting a woman, he would glide up to within two feet of her and stare intently at her nose or breasts. Then, without warning, "it" might happen. It was over in a second, although sometimes Mr. Nouvelle could extend the pleasure by saying a magic word.

The highest level of lovemaking was "flesh on flesh," and I was relieved to learn that God the Father would consider this a mortal sin. "You can't be the one I do it with flesh on flesh," he explained. "It won't be very good for me because I haven't been indoctrinated."

As WINTER MOVED INTO WHAT, FOR MOST people, would be spring, I began to see that my presence was having an effection Mr. Nouvelle's imaginary comforts.' He had apparently decides that although befriending me entailed the great and familiar dangers of rejection, abandonment, and enslavement, he could risk the connection if we merged and became identical. Thus he expressed an intense desire to be exactly like me. No matter how I took my coffee, he took his the same way, and no matter how many cookies I ate, he ate exactly the same number. He refused to express any differences of opinion, and he insisted that as "capital T-true father and daughter" we had been born on the same day. Nevertheless, he could not help feeling uneasy. Something peculiar was happening to his wives.

"Am I going to be able to leave you and go on with my other lives?" he once asked. Or again, quite possibly saying the reverse of what he meant, "My wives aren't acting like good wives. They say I don't satisfy them."

THE SNOW MELTED and widening pools of brown lawn spread out around each building, and it became apparent that Mr. Nouvelle's wives were leaving him, and in a particularly tormenting way. He would spot one of them, move toward her, and be cut off from his pleasure by a sudden transmogrification. Of course, it did not occur to Mr. Nouvelle that either his own of his wives was unraveling--as his picture of me would undoubtedly decompose when I left Mountain Valley--or his ability to delude himself and thereby change what is into what could be was losing its power. Those were my explanations. His were that his wives were angry at him for spending so much time with me or that I, being a killjoy of the worst sort, was ordering them to stay away. In either case, he understood that my presence worked against his magical pleasures and that had a decidedly dark side.

Although gratified to see Mr. Nouvelle's nearly 40-year-old system of delusions began to soften and change, I was distressed to realize that his wives were not fading into some kind of benevolent, personal legend. They were not becoming dinosaurs, for example, nor were their deeds and characters being grafted onto the memory of a beloved grandmother or a good doctor. Instead, it seemed that whatever small comforts the gym teacher or the ward psychiatrist had given Mr. Nouvelle were simply being lost along with his delusions. What a price to pay for a. little sanity, I thought, and wondered what would become of his memory of me and of my affection for him when I was gone.

There was a brighter side to these changes, of course, and if my presence was diluting the of Mr. Nouvelle's six wives, it was also enhancing his own sense of in small ways. For one thing, he was spending more time as "plain Mr. Nouvelle"; for another, he was able to switch in and out of his delusional word with greater ease. For example, one of his standard fantasies-roaming through the nurses' locker room as an invisible spirit--grew flexible enough first to permit me to join him on these expeditions and then to be voluntarily turned off in favor of remaining with me in my world.

"Well, I don't need invisible nurses," he would say smoothly when I declined to accompany him into fantasyland. "I have you."

EVEN WITH A NASCENT ability to disembark from his own runaway trains of thought, Mr. Nouvelle still believed that his only hope of safety lay in merging with me, and this he found increasingly hard to do. He continued to construct a joint past which linked us as ; he tried literally to dive into my stomach one morning during Mass; and he continually attempted to pull me into his word. But none of these tactics carried him closer to the promised land of total and unqualified love. Nothing satisfied the old Nicodemosaurus who, with increasing frustration, seemed to ask, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?"

One afternoon Mr. Nouvelle gave me $100,000 in invisible money and was annoyed I would not give him a dollar bill in exchange. He then listened to his brother Terry's voice and couldn't believe that I could not hear it also. Finally, retreating to a topic that might restore our sense of unity, he asked if I had seen my mother lately. "No," I replied, not spotting the danger in time, "she lives far from here."

Months of and frustration burst to the surface.

"That's not possible!" he shouted, his face flushing and his pupils contracting to pinholes. "My dinosaur wife lives behind Building 9. If you are my daughter, she must be your mother!"

Both alarmed and betrayed--how dare this patient use logic and delusion at the same time?--I scrambled to regain control of the conversation. "Does it frighten you to feel separate from me?" I asked.

"No!" he shouted, getting to his feet. "No, I'm not frightened, but I need your goodness. They've taken all mine out and left me betwixt!" Mr. Nouvelle slammed back into his seat, vomiting a geyser of incomprehensible . He banged his head on the table. He clawed at the crown-of-thorn scabs he kept open on his forehead. He held on to the edge of the table and shook. Abruptly he relaxed, face down on the table.

"What...am...I...supposed...to...do?" he finally asked, rising slowly to his feet, his voice anguished. "What do I have to do? Rape you? Attack you just to get you into my arms? You have taken me over, but you won't give me what I have to have. I will not meet with you anymore." And with that Mr. Nouvelle walked calmly and deliberately out of the room.

I saw myself then as the latest in a long line of people from whom Mr. Nouvelle had sought love and understanding. When he was born, his parents were so overwhelmed with raising a huge family in a hard time that they simply did not have those gifts to give, and as he grew and was beset by more than his natural share of uncertainty and confusion, no one came into his life equipped to handle his exorbitant demands.

So NOW IT WAS MY TURN TO STAND UP against this old and unsolvable problem. Would I too meet his demands with a demand of my own--just stop it and be normal? Would I drift away or stay but stop trying? What would it take, I wondered, to be the first person to step out of that long line of expectations, to be the first not to repeat "You will be punished if you ask for love."

Over the next month, as the days lengthened and the trees along the drive leafed out, Mr. Nouvelle and I embarked on a new kind of relationship. Although still preoccupied with sex, he increasingly treated me as a "pal."

"You know," he once told me in a whisper so that no one else would catch on, "a man needs a steady pal, just one steady pal for life."

So we became pals. He helped me make signs for the ward bulletin board. I showed him how to fix a zipper. He saved pictures for me of ladies' underwear. I gave him magazines. Together we decorated the ward for the Fourth of July.

ALTHOUGH I HAD not yet told Mr. Nouvelle, our time together was drawing to a close. My job would soon end on 9-2-D. During the next several days he gave me the uncanny impression that he knew I was going to announce my departure.

"Summer could end at any moment," he would say to me cryptically. Or "my sisters told me they'd visit me on my birthday, but when I woke up my birthday had passed. I never saw them again." But above all Mr. Nouvelle seemed intent on telling me how much he wanted a taste of ordinary life, just a decade or so of perfect bliss surrounded by adoring women who would cook for him without their clothes on. These stories got all mixed up with God, but the theme that was constant throughout was Mr. Nouvelle's desperate yearning for a perfect and everlasting union.

As we sat in the deep shade of a maple one morning, Mr. Nouvelle made a heroic attempt to blast himself into an orbit of heavenly peace. It was one of the strangest performances I have ever seen, and to this day I can only guess what was going on. For half an hour Mr. Nouvelle's memory and imagination seemed engaged in a private transaction of considerable urgency. He rattled on about disappearing days, invisible beans, and other private quarrels, and gradually I noticed that passages from the Bible were being invoked, perhaps for emphasis. At first there were only a few words--"Thy will be done"--then longer and longer phrases were added. To my amazement, long selections came pouring out with increasing speed.

Tears rolled down the old Nicodemosaurus's face, but his pace did not slow. He was thrashing his way toward heaven.

"Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus saith unto him, 'How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time...?' Tell me! Tell me! Can he?"

Was I watching a miracle or seeing a man drown? I burst into tears. Mr. Nouvelle stopped his recitation and tenderly took my hands into his.

"I made you sad?" he asked in surprise. "Or are you too happy? Or are you happy and sad at the same time?" I nodded, tears streaming down my face. I had no reply.

Nor did Mr. Nouvelle have a reply when I told him that I was leaving 9-2-D and would no longer be meeting with him. For nearly a week he ignored this and then with unbearable energy called back all the magic he had ever used to endure 37 years of chaos and . He went on a hunger strike and lost 15 pounds. He increased his number of wives to a thousand, then to a hundred thousand. He even tried to back up his magic with logic. Would I stay if he took me to Mass? Was I tired of him? Had I expected him to marry me?

ONE AFTERNOON, Mr. Nouvelle was sent back to the ward from occupational therapy, where he had been coloring owls in a coloring book. He had begun sticking his fingers down his throat in an attempt to remove a woman who was lodged there, and now, still coughing and gagging, he was as upset as I'd ever seen him. We sat in the old meeting room for a few minutes, but he would not speak. Abruptly he began to weep, and his shoulders began to shake. Clenching his fists and locking his jaw, he arched backward in the chair and then, without warning, threw his head down on the table. I could hear his glasses crack. He had told me earlier that at unpredictable times he "died in agony," and I surmised that I was witnessing one of these times.

"Are they dead forever?" he asked between sobs. "The Father and the good images? Will I never have them again?"

Minutes passed as Mr. Nouvelle threw himself again and again against the inescapable hurt of parting and against the unjustifiable confusion that permeated every minute of his life.

"I am afraid," he finally said, raising his head from the table. "I am afraid everything will be over and I won't have had anything. Does a dinosaur, I mean a dinosaur's daughter, understand that?"

The last two weeks with the Dinosaur Man were terrible. He was upset and delusional, and there were no reprieves. During our last meeting he caught sight of a new patient, a man of about 25. He stared across the hall at him and poured into that stare the same intense question and promise that he'd held in his eyes when he first looked at me, and before me at his six wives, at a hundred nurses, and at all the women in the world.

"Miss Baur," he asked, still staring at the patient, "am I obliged to stay with you the whole hour?"

"No, Mr. Nouvelle."

"I see Tommy Hammond over there with a bag in his hand," he continued, swaying toward the young man. "He may be my dinosaur son, and I think he has something for me."

And thus we said goodbye as the million-year cycle of betrayal and enchantment began again, and I did not think I would ever know whether or not the Dinosaur Man could carry in his heart the memory that for a day within a day and a year within a year someone had cared for him a great deal.

APPROXIMATELY ONE YEAR LATER I HAD occasion to revisit 9-2-13. In the meantime I had heard that Mr. Nouvelle was behaving as he always had. He continued to stare, to talk incomprehensibly about sex, and to forage for Coke cans and cigarette butts. As I unlocked the. ward's heavy wooden door, I recalled the questions I had asked when I first met Mr. Nouvelle. Had I been watching a man wounded in childhood? Or struggling against a disordered brain? I was inclined to answer yes to both questions now. But I had not known enough when I first arrived at Mountain Valley to ask a third question: Did Mr. Nouvelle's bizarre behavior also serve to sustain the belief that he was a lovable person and a valuable member of a community in a place where he was not, in fact, deeply loved or valued?

The answer to that question also appeared to be yes. It no longer seemed strange to me that Mr. Nouvelle was not to give up his delusions. In fact, as I walked down the familiar pink-tiled corridor, I thought to myself that any person who wanted to stay alive in a situation where there was no hope for love or health or meaningful work would have to be crazy to admit to himself that his of love, health, and work were only fantasies.

As I stood before the ward bulletin board copying a list of names, up floated Mr. Nouvelle, frowning deeply.

"You have been here all the time," he said accusingly. "You just didn't want my eyes to see you."

Before I could reply, he turned his back to me and crouched before a warped metal mirror that reflected only freaks.

"My mind has been irrelevant since you left," he continued in confusion. "I forgot you. I forgot everything you said to me."

"Everything?" I queried as I prepared to leave.

"Everything," he answered.

Suddenly the old Dinosaur Man himself stood up and stared at me intently. He smiled his quizzical smile and held me a moment more with his golden eyes.

"Everything," he repeated, "except the words of love."

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