Ghost of a Flea by James Sallis

“population at large.” B. D. Ferguson had sparse hair the color of cotton candy and as insubstantial. He kept reaching up to brush it down, pretty much a losing proposition, since our own breaths bouncing back from the walls would be enough to dislodge it again. Whether from allergies, chronic lack of sleep or tears shed for patients, Ferguson’s eyes were shrimp-red. So, for quite different reasons, were mine. Men always have more in common than they think.
    I had no idea, I said.
    Few do. Why should you? Professionals who spend a lifetime studying it understand little enough. There’s no doubt the gauges we use are biased. We’ve known that for years. Culturally biased, as with IQ tests. Add in poor prenatal care if any at all, poverty, discrimination, lack of access to medical services—
    Think I read about that in Partisan Review . This to a man upon whom irony was wasted.
    —it’s a hopeless stew. Historically diagnosticians like myself—
    Diagnosticians. Nice. And the dinosaur track of a metaphor there in the limestone. Hope for the boy after all?
    —are far less reluctant, when confronted with minorities and those from lower socioeconomic levels, to attach such a potentially devastating diagnosis.
    Well, I didn’t tell him, that was not my experience of the thing, not at all. Nor did I patiently or otherwise explain that, being well outside our culture, he might have no idea how to read the codes our signals came wrapped in. That mistakenly he took our distrust at being delivered into his hands for paranoia, our dissembling as some innate inability to discern falsehood from truth, when in fact it’s a highly developed form of just such discretion.
    I’ve read the history your friend Don Walsh supplied the intake physician, B. D. went on. He’s been quite helpful.
    Afternoon sunlight stretched long fingers across the table. A phone rang in the next room. Two teenage boys with shaved heads walked past the window eating Eskimo Pies. Life goes on.
    Your mother shows clear signs of schizophrenia. Has no friends to speak of, avoids family contact—perhaps there’s been a rift of some sort? She lives alone, appears to have neither hobby nor outside interests nor, to all appearances, much of anything at all she enjoys or enjoys doing. I gather she leads a rigorously controlled life, every day exactly the same from hour to hour, growing upset at the slightest disturbance in her routine.
    I sat watching this privileged young man, keeping track of sunlight popping knuckles on the tabletop and wondering how long after our talk before B. D. noted inappropriate affect in my chart. His handwriting would be cramped, precise. I’d flashed back to another interview, years before, with a psychiatrist who sat rocking in his desk chair the whole time, staring at me out of tiny round eyes with folds of fat like bitesize omelettes at the corner, neither of us speaking. I learned from the best.
    The incidence of schizophrenia in the general population is approximately one in a hundred. As with so much else, we don’t understand why, but among children of schizophrenics, the incidence jumps to one in ten.
    Sometimes too, he went on when I remained silent, it skips a generation.
    Jumps. Skips. There was a poem there somewhere. A limerick or jingle. At very least a groaningly bad joke.
    Your son has a frank history of mood disorders, reclusiveness, abrupt life changes. All this giving way to intermittent periods of productive, purposeful behavior.
    Maybe you could tell me a little more about that.
    After a while he said: Or maybe not.
    After which (though his eyes continued to rise like twin red moons in my sky) my unsprightly self and B. D. Ferguson (certainly no son of the Fergus I knew from Joyce, O’Brien and the like) didn’t have much to say to one another. We went on not saying it for six sessions in as many days.
    Little chance that my girlfriend would love me forever, of course. With the taste of boiled meat, rice,