Story About A Story Michael Greene, Professor Humanities, Social Sciences and Management This is a story about a story. Meta-fiction, you are thinking. No such thing. This is not even fiction. It is just what it says, a story about a story, and how I learned to read it in a different way, so that it means something different from what it meant when I first heard it and cherished it. About twenty-seven years ago, my friend Bonnie told me a story about her work. At the time she worked in a mental health clinic in Maine where she met with and talked to many different people who came into the clinic uncertain about their mental health. One day, she told me, an old man came in and talked with her. He was very concerned about his wife. They had been married for over thirty years and had always been together through thick and thin, through better and through worse, in sickness and health. Now the old man was worried about something worse than death coming between them. What could be worse than death? In this case, confusion and bewilderment. The old man told Bonnie that his wife was imagining things. “What kind of things?” she asked him. He hesitated, trying to decide whether he could trust this young woman who did seem concerned, but how could she understand. “My wife thinks that God is angry with her. She thinks he is angry and throwing rocks at the roof of our house. Whenever she hears a noise outside, she is certain that it is God, up to His tricks, bombarding our home with sticks and stones,” the old man told her. His voice was quavering as he spoke, his throat trying to stop him from telling this, from betraying his wife of over thirty years. “It’s alright,” Bonnie told him. “It’s important that you can talk to someone about this. We can’t begin fixing a problem until you can say what it is. How long has your wife been feeling this way?” “Not that long, but the thing is, that last night…” he hesitated. “What?” she asked him. “Last night she took the shotgun and went outside and blasted the sky. She was trying to shoot God I guess. But I got scared and thought I should talk to someone about it.” “It’s a good thing you did,” Bonnie assured him. “Your wife certainly is disturbed from what you tell me. It’s important that you get some help for her.” “Is she going to be o.k.?” “I don’t know, but it is important that she talk to someone. It’s really important that you come back here, even if she doesn’t want to,” Bonnie told him. Of course, I have made up all of this conversation. Bonnie told me this story, I think, in straight paragraphs, narrative without dialogue. “After a week,” she told me, “when the old man didn’t come back, Linda and I, Linda was the clinical psychologist, drove out to his trailer. When we knocked, the old man answered. His wife wasn’t home. He let us in. And when we talked to him, the old man told us that God had been throwing rocks at the roof of their home.” “Folie a deux,” Bonnie said. “ Two people joined in the same fantasy.. The old man loved his wife and didn’t want to lose her or be separated from her so he joined in her fantasy. He became mentally ill so he could stay with her.” I thought this was the most romantic thing I had ever heard about, loving someone enough to go crazy with them. And I cradled this story in my heart for many years, thinking that if I could find the right person I would be willing to do that too. It turns, however, that I made this story up, just like the conversation/dialogue up above. When I talked to Bonnie last week, I told her that I was writing about this story she had told me twenty-seven years before. Then I told it to her. “I never said that,” she responded. “What I told you was a story about a man whose wife was seeing little blue men crawling out of the radiators.” “I told him that his wife was disturbed,” she said. “And that she could probably be treated. There were medications for that sort of thing, medications that would probably work. Or she could come in for therapy.” “On the other hand,” she told me, “I told him that if he could live with this and it wasn’t harming any person or their relationship, then he could let it be.” “Did he believe in the little blue men?” I asked her. “No,” she said. “He didn’t believe in them or see them and he told her this almost every day. But they lived together and were alright.” What a surprise to me! The story about a story that I wanted to tell you turns out to be a story about a story that wasn’t true, a story that I made up. A meta-fiction, I guess. Thank you very much for listening. BACK