Rabbit Remembered

"It's not that kind of chemistry," Nelson says. "I'm no doctor, I don't really understand it, brain chemistry is very complex, very subtle. That's why we don't like to assign a diagnosis of schizophrenia without six months of following the client and observing his symptoms continuously. What we do know about the disease-the disorder-is that it quite commonly comes on in young men in their late teens and early twenties, who have been apparently healthy and functional up to then. Michael does fit this profile. A breakdown early in college is pretty typical." He looks down at the yellow pencil still in his hand. On the upper edge of his vision, the faces of the parents before him, it seems to Nelson in a little hallucination of his own, rise like balloons whose strings have been released, but without getting any higher.

"What can we do?" Mrs. asks, her voice fainter than he has heard it before.

"Is there no hope?" Mr. asks, heavier, the chair under him creaking with the accession of weight, hopelessness's weight.

"Of course there is," Nelson says firmly, as if reading from a card held in front of him. "These neuroleptic medications do work, and they're coming out with new ones all the time. Michael's hallucinations have diminished, and his behavior has regularized.

Now-where YOU can help-he must learn to take advantage of our resources here, and to assume responsibility for his own medications, the prescribed daily dosages."

"He says they make him feel not like himself," his mother says. "He doesn't like who he is with the medicines."

"That's a frequent complaint," Nelson admits. "But, without nagging, without seeming to apply pressure, remind him of what he was like without them. Does he want to go back to that?"

"Mr. Angstrom, I know you don't like to make predictions," the father says, manly, ready to strike a deal, "but will these medications ever get his head so right he can go back to work- keep a schedule, pass his courses?"

Another good question. Too good. "Cases vary widely," Nelson says. "With strong family and environmental support, clients with quite severe psychotic episodes can return to nearly normal functioning."

"How near is nearly?" the father asks.

"Near enough," Nelson says carefully, "to resume independent living arrangements and perform work under supervision." To have a room in a group home and bag groceries at a supermarket that has an aggressive hire-the-handicapped policy. Maybe. "Keep in mind, though, that many tasks and daily operations that are obvious and easy for you and me are very difficult for Michael at this point. He not only hears things, he sees and smells and even touches things that get between him and reality. Yet it's not oblivious psychosis-he knows his thoughts aren't right, and knowing this torments him."

The two wearily try to take this in. Their appointment is winding down. They hear the rain lash at the loose-fitting elementary-school windows in a tantrum, in a world unhinged.

"It's a heartbreaker," says Mr. DiLorenzo. "All those years since the boy was born, I thought I was building it up for him. Building up Perfect."

"Don't look at it so selfishly," his wife says, not uncompanionably. "Think of Michael. Suddenly, where did his life go? Down the drain into craziness."

"No, no," Nelson urges, almost losing his therapeutic poise. "He's still the child you raised, the child you love. He's still Michael. He's just fallen ill, and needs you more than most young men need their parents."

"Need," Mrs. DiLorenzo says, the one word left hanging in air. She pushes herself up, holding on so her black-beaded purse doesn't slip from her lap.

"What we need," her husband amplifies, rising with her, sighing through his nose, "is peace. And a vacation. And it doesn't look as though we're going to get any. Ever." Like jellyfish changing shimmering shape in the water, their faces have gone from fear for their son to fear of him, of the toll he will take.