Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by M.D. Mark Vonnegut Page A

heart was fine and joked that it was nice seeing me but that he had to go take care of sick people.
    He asked me about alcohol and drugs, and I told him I drank a few beers after work, had half a bottle or less of wine with dinner, maybe a shot of bourbon after dinner, and Xanax as prescribed for insomnia. He said nothing, so it must have been okay. Apparently what I had used to be called “soldier’s heart” because so many soldiers complained of the same thing during World War I. I was a good soldier. Crushing chest pain and nausea were just part of being me.
    My wife and I were two cordial, barely connected children of divorce who mostly wanted no drama. The harder I tried to be a good husband, the worse it seemed to get. She was married to a doctor—what more could she want?
    My sisters and I were on good terms. I was glad they were married to decent men and having children. We all knew Jane had cancer that wasn’t going to go away, but she was doing remarkably well.
    Man Recovers from Mental Illness, Goes to Medical School, and Becomes a Doctor
. It was a perfectly good story with a perfectly good ending.

    For about ten years running, Kurt had hosted a family fishing trip out of Montauk, near his place on Long Island. It was usually the weekend after Labor Day. It was usually an all-guy thing, though sometimes my father enjoyed inviting Betty Friedan along. We were all fighting our own battles, looking for some time off, and willing to show up for Kurt and see what happened. Bluefish are, pound for pound, the most vicious of God’s creatures, and we caught a lot of them.
    Bernie, Kurt’s older and only brother, usually came with two or three of his five sons and sometimes a grandchild. Sometimes my sons came with me, but not on the 1985 trip. Kurt and Bernie would tell the same stories and jokes. I knew most of the punch lines, as did Bernie’s sons.
    Bernie was Kurt’s only real peer at that point in his life. Eight years Kurt’s senior, he was a scientist who did things that hadn’t been done before, like seeding clouds to make it rain. My favorite experiment of his was the release of several tons of chicken feathers into thunderclouds to see where the air currents were going. Kurt and Bernie’s sister, Allie, the mother of the four cousins who came to live with us, had been a gifted painter and sculptor who said, “Just because you’re talented doesn’t mean you have to do something about it.”
    One of my favorite stories about Bernie and Kurt involved a trip they took to see their father, Kurt senior, when he was dying. On the way to Indianapolis, the car they were driving ran out of gas, so they were going to hitchhike to a gas station. Kurt propped the hood up to let people know there was mechanical trouble and asked Bernie if there was anything else they should do.
    “We could let the air out of the tires,” suggested Bernie.
    ——
    On the 1985 fishing trip, Bernie brought twenty glass-and-gel plates he had used to record the path electricity took through gel under different conditions. The branching patterns were intricate and beautiful. Bernie’s provocative question to Kurt was whether or not they were art. Kurt thought they weren’t art, because the objects weren’t made by an artist who could have a conversation with himself or anyone else about what he had done. For it to be art there had to be an artist who could learn from it and do something different or the same the next time.
    Maybe Bernie, by noticing these things and dragging them to Long Island for us to see, was the artist? You can’t create or destroy matter or energy, but you can take blank paper and write a novel or canvas and make a painting or wood and make furniture. An artist is someone who isn’t put off by how terrible his first tries are, who finds himself talking back and notices that he changes and grows when he makes art.
    That trip was the beginning of the end of what I had assumed was a lifetime no-cut