Prologue
Psychotics are not born. Psychotics are transformed. When it happens simultaneously to identical twins, it results in the rarest and most perfect form of psychosis called Folie à Deux from the French which translates to Madness of Two.
This short primer provides an understanding of the process of becoming psychotic and the challenges of living with psychosis. This knowledge permits readers to experience the thrills in a way previously not available to anyone other than the author, psychiatrist, or psychotic.
Most true psychotics were predisposed with a family history of manic-depressive or bipolar illness. All went through a psychotic transformation experience. Usually their transformation resulted from a traumatic event with extremely personal psychological involvement.
The psychotic experience has remained a mystery to all but a privileged few. The access the psychotic sometimes has to the most powerful and fundamental energies of the mind is viewed as nearly miraculous by people in the psychological professions. Some psychiatrists have been so envious that they endeavored to bring about psychosis in themselves. Much of our current knowledge was gained through those efforts.
The transformation experience is treasured by psychotics and coveted by psychiatrists. It occurs when some great pressure on the mind causes a sort of mental implosion that gives access to a vast subliminal realm of consciousness. Psychiatrists have been seduced by descriptions of the vivid, brilliant, and majestic moments of the psychotic mind. Many have tried various means, including self-medication and fasting, to bring it about in themselves with varying degrees of success.
The transformation is often referred to in the notes of those who have succeeded as a rebirth or a transition from not being to being. Some believe it happens when contact occurs with powers outside of human control. None have had the experience without paying an eventual dramatic price … Madness, or in our case … Madness of Two.
Regardless of whether the transformation is brought on by fasting and psychotic drugs or occurs as the result of a traumatic psychotic event, the seductive power of it will bring about an internalization. Some can resist for a period of years, but eventually, all are drawn into their own minds. To function in society for any length of time the psychotic must develop mechanisms for resisting the internalization. No one has been able to do that for long, but there are a few documented cases of children, who never knew any other state of being, who managed to live into their early thirties before self-destructing.
Psychotics experience certain energies, amplified senses, and intensified mental abilities but are vulnerable to egoistic impulses. Seen and unseen forces affect them. What starts as a glimpse of vastness and a feeling of unity and interdependence ends up as transcendence and confused self-aggrandizement. There are dramatic changes in their relationship with their own body including a growing physical vitality and mental agility and personal freedom in relationships. With their senses heightened they can be phenomenal performers in business as well as in other aspects of their lives. With the intensified mental activity, they have a constant flow of ideas, thoughts, emotions, and memory, but since there will seldom be enough stimulation in what appears to them as a relatively mundane and boring outside world, they take to flights of fancy and wild day dreaming.
To understand their speed of thought, think of the idiot savant. The savant has only a tiny piece of the abilities of the psychotic. Recall Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man. He was able to remember names and dates and statistics of baseball players and could do calculations in his head like lightning, but other more-common mental activity was not available to him. He could not function in society on his own. The psychotic has access to it all, but it proves too much to deal with for the human psyche.
Think of their mind in the manic state as a pulsating motor behind their eyes. When the environment around them becomes too boring, they must internalize. They must watch their own thoughts. If they decide to think about any topic, they can immediately play back everything they ever learned about it.
Most who have brought about psychosis in themselves have tried various mind-occupying tools to avoid internalizing. They are in real danger when they think about something negative. If a psychotic is awakened from a dream, it can be very difficult to turn it off or ignore it. Regardless of how much discipline psychotics may have, they will become intoxicated by the speed of thought. Eventually, the mind will reach a critical velocity where they see and hear a confused animation. There will always be the danger of visual and audio illusions.
The psychotic remains manic-depressive or bipolar. They are called rapid-cyclers. They alternate between manic and depressive states. Actually, they cycle through six stages, which others perceive as different degrees of depressive or manic behavior. Think of the bottom of the cycle as the slowest mental activity. When they go through the six stages, mental activity accelerates to get fast, faster, fastest, then decelerates to get slow, slower, slowest. They can cycle through the six stages in widely varying lengths of time from as little as an hour to as long as several years. At the top of the cycle they experience incredible mental agility and physical ability. At the bottom they are just the reverse, feeling miserable with muddled thinking and potentially suicidal. In the intermediate stages, they are somewhere between the two extremes and actually close to normal at times. Our twin sisters can cycle in synch when exposed to the same catalyst at the same time but are much more likely to be at different stages in their cycles.
There is real danger in the manic state. The mind speed is beyond our comprehension. There is often repetition, multiplication, and proliferation of ideas and thoughts. Thoughts can become visualizations, immediately, or they can become voices, immediately. Thoughts can become creatures called infernal animations. The speeding mind attaches visual forms to thoughts just to have more to do. It has the capacity and needs to use it. This leads to an onslaught of perverse impulses. This will always happen. Sometimes it begins slowly, but it only needs a suggestion or innuendo or an urging to get it started. It escalates into a furious onslaught of infernally animated oppositions, thought and anti-thought often appear together. Some give in easily, some struggle against the preposterous ideas rushing into their minds demanding actions. Indecent ideas from infernal animations that have been fought off in the past will come back the next time they reach that stage in their cycle. It is inevitable that eventually, the right coincidence of circumstances will come together at the right time and those perverse ideas will be carried out.
We do not blame the psychotic. They are not evil. The hallucinations are infinitely more compelling to them than ordinary reality. They are super real. They make ordinary reality and even life itself less important, even trivial. That is why they must self-destruct in the end. They will either follow through on the perverse impulses in the extreme manic state or decide they cannot face them again and end their own lives during the most depressed state.
The psychiatrists who take the psychotic drugs to induce psychosis do so with a plan to master the mental speed. In order to do it, they must have help from someone who truly understands it. Each time they successfully cycle through, they learn a little more about how to handle it. When experiencing the mind speed, they must be made to rest, they must be continually reminded to protect the body, to hold still, to stay attached to the reality of their existence. They often have trouble orienting themselves, remembering where they are in time and place. They must be disciplined not to watch the operations of the mind, not to get caught up in them, not to get distracted by them. They must constantly be reminded not to get swept up in the visuals, not to dwell on anything that happens in the mind. Think of the visuals as a movie playing in the mind that they can jump into at any time. The temptation is to go with it. They must be extremely disciplined not to get fascinated. The trick is to look ahead of the thoughts and just wait for the next one to go by. No matter how compelling, do not follow it, just wait for it to come along again. Watch the next thought and the next thought and the next thought. Anticipate, but never dwell. Do not struggle against the speed. Just let it be and avoid taking it personally. That proves to be the hardest to resist, something so personal they simply cannot ignore it. The idea is to eventually be able to disassociate from the speed, to turn away from it when they do not need it and only use it when they need it. Some have been able to do it for a time. All fail in the end.
It may be possible to master it, but it would take a constant, devoted, and even loving support system provided by a person or persons who have an intimate understanding of the needs of the particular psychotic. No such support system has ever been designed, much less put into practice … until now.
Enola Gay
Enola Gay is the name of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 killing 75,000 Japanese including 20,000 soldiers. The fuselage was displayed at the Smithsonian Institution until 1998. The bomber was reassembled and restored and is currently on display at the National Air and Space Museum facility in Chantilly, Virginia.
O.J. Simpson
Orenthal James Simpson was arrested for the murders of his ex-wife and her male friend in 1994 on the day before this novel opens. O.J. was a high profile national celebrity working as a broadcaster, actor, and spokesman at the time having been a football star at the University of Southern California where he won the Heisman Trophy and in the National Football League where he played eleven seasons as a Hall-of-Fame running back.
Corporate Downsizing
By the mid-1980s, over 90% of the workforce were employees. Blue-collar workers were routinely laid off and called back due to fluctuating demand. To prevent abuse those workers were typically protected by unions or the threat of unionization. White-collar jobs were generally more stable and not subject to variations in the economy, so those workers did not have protection. With the introduction of computers and office automation in the early 1990’s companies found themselves with excess white-collar workers. Various Corporate Downsizing schemes were debated and developed to eliminate those employees without causing a backlash by the workers or the government.
Applegate-Fairburn Double-Edged Dagger
The knife depicted on the cover was originally designed by William Fairbairn and issued to British forces during World War II. It was perfect for thrusting cuts as well as slashing cuts. Colonel Rex Applegate added a handle with adjustable lead weights that changed the balance point to fit the user. The new variation of the original combat knife became known as the Applegate-Fairbairn double-edged dagger.
In 1942, Fairbairn wrote; “In close-quarters fighting there is no more deadly weapon than the knife. It is essential that the blade have a sharp stabbing point and good cutting edges, because an artery torn through tends to contract and stop the bleeding. If a main artery is cleanly severed, the wounded man will quickly lose consciousness and die.
