Milton's eyeglasses glinted unsettlingly as he took in my crumpled clothes and unruly hair:
"So, you traveled all night, by yourself, in a hired car, to ask me this? She must mean all the world to you!"
He hasn't changed: cherubic, lecherous, bald, and clad in fading dungarees and Sellotaped, stapled sandals. Milton smelled of coffee grounds and incense.
He laid a hirsute hand on my shoulder and I retreated inadvertently and then apologized. He smiled mischievously:
"You are tired. Let's go to my office. You can refresh yourself there and I will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the Capgras Syndrome and never dared to ask."
"Capgras Syndrome???"
"Coffee first!" - Milton pronounced and wheeled me forward.
*****
Ensconced in an ancient armchair, steamy libation in hand, I listened intently, absorbing every word that came out of the mouth of arguably the world's greatest expert on delusions.
"It's nothing new." - Said Milton, chewing on an ancient, ashen clay pipe - "It was first described by two French psychiatrists in 1923. Elderly people believe that their relatives have been replaced by malicious, conspiring doubles. They lock themselves in, buy guns, change their wills, complain to the authorities. If not checked with antipsychotic medication, they become violent. Quite a few cases of murder, resisting arrest, that sort of thing."
"What goes wrong with these people?"
Milton shrugged and tapped the empty implement on a much-tortured edge of his desk:
"Lots of speculation around, but nothing definite. Some say it's a problem with face recognition. You heard of prosopagnosia? Patients fail to identify their nearest and dearest, even though they react emotionally when they see them. Capgras is the mirror image, I guess: a failure to react emotionally to familiar faces. But guess is what we have all been doing in the last, oh, eight decades." - He concluded with undisguised disgust.
"I need help with this client, Milton," - I interjected - "and you are not helping me at all."
He chuckled sarcastically:
"How often do I hear it from my patients?"
"She is not paranoid, you know. Her mind is sharp and crystal-clear and balanced."
He nodded wearily:
"That's what confounds us with this syndrome. The patients are 'normal' by any definition of this word that you care to adopt. They are only convinced that family members, friends, even neighbors are being substituted for - and, of course, they are not."
He crouched next to my seat:
"Soon, she will begin to doubt you and then herself. Next time she catches her own reflection in a mirror or a window, she will start to question her own identity. She will insist that she has been replaced by an entity from outer space or something. She is bad news. The literature describes the case of a woman who flew into jealous rages at the sight of her own reflection because she thought it was another woman trying to seduce her husband."
Milton was evidently agitated, the first I have seen him this way. As my teacher and mentor, he kept a stiff upper lip in the face of the most outlandish disorders and the most all-pervasive ignorance. And in the face of our budding, dead end love.
"What do you advise me to do?" - I mumbled almost inaudibly.
"If she refuses anti-psychotic medication, bail out. Commit her. She is a danger both to herself and to others, not the least of whom, to you."
"I can't do that to her." - I protested - "I am the only person she trusts in the whole world. She is so scared, it breaks my heart. And just imagine what the family is going through: she even wants to change her will to disinherit them."
Milton's pained expression deepened:
"Then you are faced with only one alternative: psychodrama. To save her, you must enter her world, as convincingly as you can. Play her game, as it were. Pretend that you believe in her lunatic delusions. Act the part."