Not a Question of Sanity
"I don't need a psychiatrist."
"No, of course not."
"Because I'm not crazy, you know."
"I never said you were crazy, Tobias."
"Then what are you trying to say?"
"I'm trying to get you to discuss your resentment towards Jake Berenson, but you've completely redirected the course of our discussion to the question of your sanity. Do you think you're crazy, Tobias?"
"Obviously I don't…"
"Would you like to get back to my initial question?"
The secret war between the Animorphs and the Yeerks ended two years ago with victory being claimed by mankind; the Yeerks were utterly defeated, Visser One had been apprehended, and everyone tried, and mostly failed, to get their lives in order. Marco is something of a celebrity now, Cassie is doing what she does best, taking care of animals, Ax is now a Prince on the Andalite home world, and Jake is considered by all to be both a bachelor and war veteran. The war had seen a ridiculous amount of casualties throughout its course, but I think the most tragic of them all was the death of my fellow Animorph and girlfriend, Rachel. And why was Rachel dead? Simply because Jake Berenson, our "fearless and reluctant leader" had chosen her, of every one of the Animorphs—not Marco, Cassie, Ax, me, or even himself— to sacrifice her own life for the good of the planet. For a majority of the duration of the war, I considered Jake to be a rather competent leader, and there was a time when I trusted my life in the hands of Jake Berenson. Now, I think of him as being just as ruthless as Esplin 9466.
War changes people, obviously. After the First World War, the soldiers who returned home from the trenches found that the place they left behind was not the same place they remembered; and most of the time, those soldiers came home blind, maimed and psychologically scarred. But I imagine that the physical pain they sustained from the four or five years of war—the chlorine gas, the gun wounds, the loss of limbs, and the trench foot—was nothing in comparison to the constant presence of death on the front lines; lifeless bodies at every turn—in abandoned trenches and floating faced down in pools of mud and blood—and the dying crying in pain for help. I heard stories of veterans waking up from dreams of shells and gas and flamethrowers, gasping for air and perhaps crying, and never being able to shake off the memory of WW1; the Great War.
The war between man and Yeerk changed me significantly, for the better and the worse. Before I met Elfangor at that construction site I had been an orphan and a loner, and the only friend I had in the world—the only other living thing that I could call family—had been a cat named Dude. I was pushed between a neglectful aunt and an alcoholic uncle, having never felt loved by anyone until an alien looked me in the eyes and said, to paraphrase the Andalite Prince, "Hey kid, you wanna save the world?"
All it took for me to finally make friends, to finally find some sort of family to be a part of, had been a dying alien, whose final act in life had been giving five seemingly average teenagers the power to become animals. And I guess it's a bit strange to think that the invasion of the Yeerks on Earth had changed my life for the better…but it did: I had friends, a girlfriend, and an uncle who actually did care about where I went every night and if I did make it home alive.
But the war changed me in many ways, aside from improving my pathetic excuse for a social life: I went from a social outcast and teenager to a soldier in a war that looked as though it would end in the victory of the alien race known as the Yeerks. But the biggest change in my life was my metamorphosis from human being into hawk; I became a nothlit—having overstayed the two hour limit I had been trapped in the body of a red-tailed hawk; though the experience was not nearly as bad as I initially believed. Eventually, I learned to accept my fate, and soon found that I preferred my life as a bird of prey—one of the larger birds of prey, I should point out.
Everything sort of snowballed after we won the war, and I found that I was now more alone than I had been when the war began; now I didn't have a furry cat at my bedside to keep me company, only an urn containing the ashes of a girl that I loved. I don't associate with any of the remaining Animorphs—not even Ax, who had been the only other person, aside from Rachel, that I had ever had some sort of relationship with. I wrote a book on birds, but that's not much of an accomplishment when you compare my post-war life to Marco, who has milked the role he played in the war to the enth degree. Sure, I could have written an autobiography telling of my trials and tribulations; the trauma that came with the loss of my humanity; my response to the tragedy of Rachel's death; commentary on the war; and my personal history, but I really don't think that my story is worth telling; besides, one could just pick up the dozens of books Marco paid to have written. Instead of writing a book, or becoming an actor, or setting up a Hork-Bajir colony across the freaking globe, I just kept to myself.
But things started to get very bad after a few years…and I found that, even in the body of a red tailed hawk I had sunk into a deep depression. Initially, I decided that I would deal with my depression—Rachel's death and post-war earth—alone, since I've learned to survive on my own at a very young age. But after a while, being alone starts to affect the mind; the silence of it all starts to freak you out, and you just want to scream at times when you can't even sigh. There have been more than a dozen times when I've tried to kill myself, only to back out at the last possible second; and it was only when I nearly succeeded in the attempt that I decided to see some professional help.
I managed to get a hold of a psychiatrist based in New York City, whose reputation and line of work had been known in California; specializing in cases of depression, amongst others. When I set up the appointment with one Doctor M. R. Mackenzie, I assumed that I would be dealing with a man; for some reason, I got the image of Freud in my head when I pictured myself speaking to a high and mighty psychiatrist. But when I finally met Doctor M.R. Mackenzie, I found a gorgeous Pilipino woman dressed in a black suit and holding a pen and notepad handy; sitting cross legged on a leather brown chair placed in front of the ugliest desk I had ever had the misfortune of seeing.
"I am guessing that you are Tobias. It is a pleasure to meet you. I am Doctor Madison Mackenzie," she smiled, rising from her seat to shake my hand. "I am aware that you've written a book. I was surprised when I learned that it had nothing to do with the War."
"Yea, well life is full of surprises." I replied, taking a seat on an identical chair across from Doctor Mackenzie.
"You are, I assume, surprised that I am not a man." She asked, smiling at me.
"I have to admit, I didn't think many women chose this line of work…but that's probably just ignorance on my part…I haven't been…active in the world lately."
"The result of the war, I assume?"
"More or less…most likely less, but all the same I guess."
"Yes, well, we will eventually get to that. I want to take advantage of this hour that we have together and get to know who you are. Try to think of this as an introductory session. Tell me about your life, for starters."
I remember leaving that session convinced that psychiatry was a scam, and an overpriced scam at that. I didn't expect to walk into Mackenzie's office and have all of my problems diagnosed and solved in a single hour, but I also didn't expect to spend that hour discussing things that most people could read from the internet. Sure, Madison Mackenzie had been nice enough, and was extremely elegant, but those weren't the qualities that I was looking for in a psychiatrist. What I wanted was a person who would leave all of the pleasantries aside, and tell me this is what you've got, here's how you can fix it. Instead I got a beautiful Asian woman in a pricy plaid suit. So after my first meeting with Doctor Mackenzie, apparent PhD in Psychology, I wasn't really friendly.
"I get the feeling that you don't have complete faith in me, Tobias," Mackenzie said during our third session of the month. "Are my methods not to your liking?"
"It's not that at all, Mrs. Mackenzie." I said.
"Tobias, I've told you to call me Madison." She smiled, patting me on the knee. The pat on the knee made me feel uncomfortable in a variety of ways.
"Well…Madison…it has nothing to do with your methods. I just don't particularly believe in psychiatry. I thought it would work for me at first, but I'm not convinced."
"Tobias, we've only had two sessions up until now." Mackenzie laughed. "Rome wasn't built in a day."
"I realize that, doctor." I said. "But I think I can sum up the next few sessions for you. I could tell you about my childhood—how I have been abandoned by my mother as a child, left to an uncaring aunt and uncle, and forced to grown up on my own—and you'll probably diagnosis me as an Oedipus complex, or tell me that I have separation anxiety. You'll probably try to convince me that the relationships that I've had in the past are the result of the lack of love I've had from my mother, and that I try to find that same motherly compassion in the people that I meet.
"Or, you can say that I am the archetypal orphan, if you want to take the Jungian path; tell me that I rely on others to solve my life's problems, and I try to seek love in all the wrong places. And, if I'm not an Oedipus complex, and if I don't fit into what Jung had in mind when talking about archetypes, you'll probably diagnose me as obsessive compulsive, or else try to convince me that I'm suffering from Asperger's syndrome.
"Or maybe you're hoping that we can re-enact the Robin Williams-Matt Damon scene in Good Will Hunting; you'll tell me that it's not my fault over and over and over again until I burst out into tears and finally accept that it really is my fault. But the point is, I don't believe that anything you will say to me will help much. I guess you have to be a certain person for psychiatry to work."
"Tobias, have you ever considered that I just might be another person to talk to?" she asked. "Your impression of psychiatry is limited to television and books, or else things you may have heard from other people on the street. Don't think of me as a doctor charging 150 to 200 dollars an hour three or four days out of the month, think of me as another human being. You've come to me asking for help with your depression, and I'm here to give it to you. I assure you, I am not merely trying to tear apart your essence and fit into neat little categories. I'm here to listen…at a price of a hundred and fifty dollars a session." She smiled.
Needless to say I kept the sessions going, though I was still something of a sceptic and very difficult to talk to. But Madison was very patient, and she was never critical about what I said; she didn't laugh, she didn't judge, and I never got the impression that she had been lying about being another person to talk to, because she meant it. Soon enough, I started to talk to Madison about Rachel, my time spent as a hawk, my relationship with Ax, Loren, my issues with Jake, and just about everything else that I've kept bottled up for the last five or six years; hell, I think I've mentioned Visser One, Erek King, and David a few times as well.
"Would you like to get back to my initial question?" Madison asked.
"Sorry?"
"Would you like to get back to my initial question—do you hate Jake Berenson?" she repeated, patiently.
I thought about the question for a moment, looking away from the understanding and sympathetic Asian woman who sat in the leather bound chair across from me. I looked around the office of Doctor Madison R. Mackenzie, staring at the numerous awards and doctorate certificates that hung from the rust-red coloured walls, thinking on the question,
Do I hate Jake Berenson?