Happy Pierrot

My psychiatrist supervisor, Terry Winsen, thinks that I should work on the techniques of isolation of my consciousness, in order to be able not to have friendly emotions towards my patients.

Today was the first day of my therapy with one of them.

It was an unusual case – a guy, whom I named in my thoughts Happy Pierrot, because he was so purely entertaining and, at the same time, terribly disappointed in life.

He told me his biography, which turned out to be much more detailed, than his anamnesis and rumors that circulated around in "Atlantis".

They worked with him for years, and yet they couldn't find out if he was mentally sick, or just pretended to avoid punishment for his offenses.

He was arrested for a burglary when he was a kid, and as a teenager he played a bad joke with one of his classmates who bullied him.

Poor guy was rich, and his parents led it to expulsion of Pierrot from high school.

He never entered any education institution ever since, and soon he found self-realization in crimes and anti-social activities. It helped him to make a living higher above average, and even brought him some sort of dark fame in criminal world.

I was looking into criminal description of Happy Pierrot, and yet I couldn't see the man described in the room.

Face to face, Pierrot seemed to be just a broken, wounded person, whose naive representation of the world did not match reality.

In the description however, he was convicted of murders and burglaries. He was diagnosed a few times as a devoted psychopath, with unconfirmed paranoid psychosis.

It was believed that for years of imprisonment and incarceration in mental health institutions Pierrot masked schizophrenia. He mastered faking psychological and psychiatric tests, and he also managed to escape asylums a few times.

At our sessions Pierrot was telling me his life story, mixing it with jokes, and I couldn't feel more amazed than in a puppy theater.

He was grimacing and gesticulating, as if he was a performing actor. He did it with such enthusiasm, that it seemed like he actually thought that we were in a circus.

But then the ball ringed, signifying the end of therapy session, and a guarding soldier entered the room.

Pierrot immediately got back to reality – his arms fell down, facial expression got blank and gloomy, and he looked away.

"Goodbye, professor Vendelinn" - he was saying with a heart-breaking tone, looking like someone who sensed that he will be beaten up.

As I walked to the exit, I tried not to look back.

"You must find out if he is actually mentally diseased till the end of the year, - supervisor told me.

- And if he is not? - I asked, drinking second cup coffee. Work made me exhausted in the middle of the day. I couldn't do anything else after it, except for eating and drinking caffeine. - What if he is just a cold-blooded manipulator?

- Well, - Terry sighed, - Then he will be departed to face capital punishment.