“Electroshock therapy? They still do that?”

“It can be very effective. For a while we considered his state to be a manifestation of bipolarity, and if that were the case, then EST would be a proper therapy. But we’ve abandoned that idea. The EST did provide some relief. But it had no effect on the central problem.”

“But maybe he really can’t remember things and this bothers him.”

“We considered that too. We even considered the possibility that the problem lay with Brigitte and not John. Sort of a Gaslight situation. But I have thoroughly fact-checked his personal biography. In most cases, the events or people he can’t remember either didn’t occur or don’t exist. The same is true of places. Historical events.”

“Places?”

“The most terrible of his delusions. He will fixate on returning to a place he claims to be very familiar with, then is tortured by the fact that he can’t remember where this place is. Two of his favorites are an abandoned harness horse track somewhere in the middle of a forest and a tenement on the South Side of Chicago. He’s never, as far as I can discover, ever lived in Chicago. But the obsession is not frivolous. Once John gets it in his head that he must find a place, if left on his own he will pursue this objective to the point of, well there’s no other word for it, psychosis. They’ve had to call in air marshals to remove him from airplanes five or six times. In a straitjacket.”

“He might have visited Chicago once.”

“It’s possible. But I don’t think so. The street names are bogus. Furthermore, on the two occasions when he actually got as far as Chicago, he had no familiarity whatsoever with the layout of the city. He has never been to Chicago, except for these wild, manic goose chases.”

“Maybe it is Alzheimer’s?”

“None of the major indicators of the disease present themselves. He can carry out tasks, he can drive a car, he can complete crossword puzzles. He can watch the evening news and give you a full report the next day. He knows what’s going on. His problem is that he is completely obsessed with the idea that he is senile and this in turn paralyzes him.”

This was not a hospital. This was a nut house. I repeated the word, “Paralyzes?”

“John becomes so stricken with fear, he can’t move a muscle. In that state, he can’t do anything but spend the day obsessing about his memory loss. Which as I said, is nonexistent. He drives himself into a fury attempting to remember information that doesn’t exist. He honestly believes that a world war took place in 1994. He insists atomic weapons were used. But beyond that, he can’t remember the details. When we seek to reassure him that no such war ever happened, he says we are humoring him. He honestly thinks that everything we say or do is part of an elaborate scheme to shield him from the pain of loss. When he enters this frame of mind, he can become completely inert, frozen and catatonic for days at a time. This is an indicator of mental illness on the order of schizophrenia as opposed to an organic illness such as Alzheimer’s or vascular dementia.”