Lis Anna-Langston

The Influencing Machine & The Strange Poetics of Delusion

My Uncle Troy believed a man named Dr. Jeever shot X-ray beams into his skull from the second floor of the house next door.

Every Sunday we piled into the car, and Troy drove us to Chickasaw Gardens. An old, quiet Memphis neighborhood with brick mansions and tidy lawns. We’d park in front of the same house and just sit there, idling at the curb. It was Jeever’s house, Troy said. We came to watch it. Or maybe confront it. Or maybe my uncle just wanted to keep an eye on what haunted him most. 

He’d sit there, staring through the windshield, shoulders tight, gripping the steering wheel. Sometimes he was silent. Other times he would begin to shake, then shout. “He’s in there,” he’d yell. “He’s laughing at me. He’s doing it right now.” His voice would rise. “He never stops.” Then he’d turn to my grandmother and scream at the top of his lungs. “Make him stop, mother.”

I remember my grandmother sitting in the passenger seat, her body locked still, her voice barely above a whisper as she tried to calm him down. “Troy. Please. Let’s go home.” She was nervous, and not just worried; she was scared. Her voice trembled with every word.

Sometimes it got close, so close I really thought he was going to get out of the car and storm up the driveway and throw a brick through the front window. I remember being eight years old, sitting in the backseat, watching that front door, expecting it to open at any moment. I believed Dr. Jeever was real and lived in that house. I believed Jeever snuck into the neighbor’s house and shot X-ray beams through the upstairs window. I believed every single word. 

One day, when I was ten years old, I waited for my uncle to walk to Taco Bell. 

I marched into the kitchen and asked my grandmother who Jeever was.

“I don’t know who he is,” she said. 

I thought she was joking. I put my hands on my hips. “Then who lives in the house?”

“I don’t know.”

“We go to someone’s house every Sunday and no one knows who lives there?” 

That felt like a really odd question to ask.

“Yes.”

“So where is Jeever?”

“I don’t know.”

“So, he’s not a person?”

“He could be, but I don’t know who he is.”

“Was he a doctor at the hospital where Troy was locked up at?”

“He never talked about Jeever before he went to Boliver, so after a while I called. There is no doctor, nurse, or even an orderly by that name that works there.”

“So who is Troy talking to?”

“I don’t know.”

Until that moment I had never once considered that Jeever wasn’t real. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life. Jeever had to be real. How could someone so central to our lives, someone with a name, a house, his very own X-ray beam, simply not exist? I was stunned. To a kid there was evidence of him everywhere. 

And yet there was no evidence at all.

It shook my belief in what was real. I went looking for proof. I watched Troy closely. I knew when the X-ray beam hit. He’d grab his head, fall to his knees, and scream like someone being electrocuted. Sometimes the episodes lasted minutes. Other times, hours. That’s what troubled me the most: how could someone imagine that level of pain for so long?

And here’s the paradox I still struggle with: I knew there was no beam. I never saw it. No one else did either. It didn’t exist. But at the same time, I believed — or had believed — that Jeever was real. That there really was a man somewhere, and that all this pain had a source. Maybe that’s the cruelest part of watching someone you love live in a delusion: you learn something can be a complete lie and devastatingly real at the same time.

While doing research for a completely unrelated project, I accidentally stumbled upon a curious device called the Influencing Machine. In 1919, a Viennese psychiatrist named Viktor Tausk published a paper called On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia. In it, he detailed a curious and recurring delusion found in some patients: the belief that a mysterious machine controlled their thoughts, emotions, or bodily sensations. These weren’t vague fears. They were detailed, technical, and specific.

Patients said the machine operated using wires, airwaves, electricity, or invisible rays and beams, gears, and pulleys. Sometimes installed in the walls, sometimes it floated in space. But always, it was run by someone else. A neighbor, a doctor, a former friend, or an unnamed authority figure. And always, it was hostile.

In reading Tausk’s work I saw my uncle’s world laid bare: the beam, the intrusion, the hidden enemy just outside his grasp. The only thing missing from the 1919 paper was the name Dr. Jeever.

The delusion offered structure. The machine provided a framework to understand an inexplicable world. The manipulator gave pain a face. In Troy’s case, Jeever was both the architect and the executor of suffering. A man who appeared after my uncle was institutionalized at a state mental hospital. 

At the age of fourteen, my uncle was sent to Western State Hospital in Bolivar. A sprawling, aging institution in rural Tennessee. Built in the 1880s, it was one of the oldest and largest psychiatric hospitals in the region, known for housing thousands under often primitive conditions. 

Children like him were treated as adults, subjected to harsh routines, shock therapy, prefrontal lobotomies. The world outside—the world of football games and muscle cars—was replaced with a maze of fear, isolation, and trauma.

All Troy ever said about Bolivar was that it was evil to the core. That he’d rather die than return. After my grandmother died, I found the paperwork in the garage. Electroshock therapy, prefrontal lobotomy, treatments administered without consent. Procedures inflicted on him because he was deemed emotionally troubled. 

For a young boy institutionalized in the 1950s, life at a place like Western State must have been terrifying, confusing, and lonely. Children were stripped of their dignity and autonomy. A young man like Troy, institutionalized for emotional trauma, behavioral difficulties, or even a lack of understanding, would have faced an unrelenting system that saw him as an object to be fixed rather than a person to be nurtured. These were his teen years, developmental and impressionable. These should have been the years of discovery. Instead, it was the stuff of full-blown nightmares. 

I know nothing about his stay at Boliver beyond what he told me. I can speculate that living conditions were grim but that is just speculation. Rumors of MKUltra programs being carried out in secret at these types of hospitals flew wildly. They were carried out at Western but the government archives stated the programs ended in 1948 before he arrived. For my uncle, whose time in the institution blurred into years of confusion and trauma, the inability to communicate his feelings, the sense of helplessness, and the constant barrage of treatments likely laid the groundwork for the development of deeper psychological wounds, wounds that manifested later and remained his entire life. 

The hospital was never called a hospital in our house. It was Bolivar. A dirty word, a sneer, spoken with a hiss as if naming it directly gave it teeth. For Troy, it was a cathedral of locks. Fluorescent light falling without mercy. Doors that groaned shut with the finality of iron. Shoes squeaking against tile floors that smelled of bleach and fear so sour it clung to the walls. When I think of him there, I see him swallowed by corridors bent like intestines, endless and identical, lined with rooms where voices broke against padded walls. A place designed not to heal but to contain. Each pill cup an experiment.

To Troy, Jeever was not metaphor. He was an operator. A hand on the unseen levers of the machine. Sometimes Troy described him as a doctor, white coat gleaming, eyes hidden behind the glare of fluorescent light. Sometimes he was more spectral: a laser in the sky, directing beams with casual cruelty. Always, he was powerful. Always, he was watching. Always the one person to create mayhem. Once, he instructed Troy to take off all his clothes except for his dress shoes and run naked down a major street. Another time, he instructed Troy to take a baseball bat and bust out the window of the neighbor’s minivan. Troy always did as he was told. 

What I remember most is the way Troy’s voice trembled when he spoke of him. Not fear exactly, or even anger but something more like resignation, the weary awe of a man who knows resistance is futile. Jeever was not a nightmare he woke from. He was the atmosphere. The weather. He was simply there, like air. 

Children are natural mythographers. I filled in what my uncle did not say. I pictured Jeever hovering above us, a silhouette stitched into clouds. His machine was a cathedral of wires, glowing valves, great arms that reached down like the cranes I saw at construction sites. At night, when the house was quiet and shadows pooled in corners, I imagined his beams brushing across walls, scanning, searching, trying to locate my uncle. Jeever was a distant relative, invisible but permanent, threaded through our days like static in the background. I imagined ways to get rid of him. Forever. 

Reading Tausk years later, I recognized Troy instantly. I felt a strange relief in that recognition. To know my uncle’s torment was not singular. To know he was part of a chorus, however fractured. That one fact brought me to tears.

Machines have always been society’s mirrors. They reflect the age that births them. In the nineteenth century, patients imagined telegraphs sparking through their veins, wires snaking under their skin. In the twentieth, they spoke of X-rays, of cinema projectors, of radios beaming voices into their skulls. In the twenty-first, people blame the internet, Bluetooth, 5G towers. Signals invisible but omnipresent, infiltrating the body in ways too slippery to disprove. Even as a child, I felt that terror vibrating beneath my uncle’s words. It was not only about machines. It was about control. The truest machinery of all. 

The real horror is that machines adapt and change. Fear holds on forever. 

Troy was one of my favorite people. We did everything together. To a six-year-old he was a god. A tall Cherokee man with long straight black hair and golden red skin. He ate Three Musketeers candy bars for breakfast, fried chicken for lunch and had a driver’s license. I never saw him eat a single vegetable and we went to the library every week. On Saturday mornings, if we got to the zoo before nine, we got in free. Troy’s life was filled with small acts of extraordinary love. He lifted me onto his shoulders so the peacocks at the zoo wouldn’t chase me and let me eat french fries when I refused meat. In those moments, I understood the depth of his generosity, the way he created joy despite the shadow that followed him constantly. 

Memory is a curious thing. It bends and reforms itself according to our need to survive. I learned early to navigate Troy’s world. Every interaction was a negotiation with reality itself. We went to Taco Bell and ate about a bajillion bean burritos and crispy cinnamon things together. He loved hot sauce and mashed potatoes and making him smile was just about the best thing in the entire world. 

When I was eleven years old, my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. The thought of her dying terrified him to the core. No one in the family had time for her or him. When I couldn’t convince anyone to help, I spent my entire summer at her house. Troy and I did everything together. Grocery shopping, menu making, cleaning, going to the zoo and library, and taking care of my grandmother who was in worse health than she’d admit. I learned a lot that summer. I learned adults are lazy losers and will do just about anything to avoid inconvenience. I learned that together my uncle and I could do anything. 

I learned that life was fragile. 

The stress caused from contemplating my grandmother’s mortality meant Troy didn’t have time to entertain Jeever. He only had one spell the entire summer. It was a doozy though. The epic meltdown lasted an entire day. Screaming and clutching his head, pacing, frantic, paranoid that Jeever was going to take his mother away. It was so terrible the aftermath amounted to him sleeping twenty-four hours straight.

Years later another uncle confided that Troy had been sexually abused by an antiques dealer who took him on the road as a teen. They travelled together to antique shows and what was originally thought to be a great opportunity as an intern quickly turned into a nightmare. Troy returned sullen and moody, withdrawn and angry and was eventually institutionalized. This missing piece of the puzzle led me to a striking realization. Troy went to Boliver because he was sexually abused. It explained the rage, the hallucinations, the helplessness. When I asked why no one ever told me, my other uncle said, “It’s not really the kind of thing you tell little kids.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

Pieces came together. One by one.

But those pieces still formed a puzzle whose shape I couldn’t discern. This led me down a whole new path. In researching trauma, I learned in all likelihood Jeever was a sub personality created as a defense mechanism. Jeever wasn’t just a hallucination but a psychological shield created to absorb the pain. In clinical terms, this kind of internal protector, born of complex PTSD and dissociation, is not uncommon. Not multiple personalities, but a partitioned self. Troy invented a tormentor because it made more sense than facing the memory directly. Severe trauma can cause the brain to develop a new sub personality to deal with it. It isn’t the same as multiple personalities. It is termed complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Severe dissociation. Internalized protective or idealized figures and emotional numbing that might be coped with through imaginary companions. 

Which is all to say in a very fancy way that Troy was Jeever. He created an imaginary friend to deal with the trauma. He created a monster to survive. This is all speculation, but it made a lot of sense. As a young man on the verge of adolescence, coming of age to his own sexuality, whatever abuse he suffered affected him profoundly. Profoundly enough to create a tormenter that made him suffer repeatedly his entire life. It was a terrible realization. Years and years of confusion organized into a complex web that told a story. It felt like the uncle I loved more than anything reached back across time and space to help me make sense of all the things that haunted him in the dark. 

Jeever was real. 

Just not the way I assumed. In essence Jeever was a part of his personality. It looped me back around to when I was ten years old and my grandmother told me he didn’t exist. Again, I was stunned. 

He did exist. Troy was Jeever. 

I realized that what he experienced was not simply madness but an intricate, tragic architecture of defense. Every fear, every elaborate mechanism, every day spent peering at the house next door where Jeever kept his X-ray gun was a way of keeping his mind intact, of surviving the memories of being raped and then months of forced torture at Western State. What I couldn’t have known then was that Troy’s delusion had roots deeper than I could see. That it wasn’t just sickness, but something stitched from both trauma and culture, from family silence and society’s fear of machines.

Every culture builds devices to contain what it fears. Hospitals. Prisons. Churches. Families. My family, like so many, was an apparatus of silence engineered to keep its secrets humming in the background. I learned early that silence is not empty. It has weight. It gathers in the corners of rooms, presses down on dinners where conversation fails to blossom. Silence is a kind of architecture, and ours was built on denial. Let silence do the talking was our mantra. The irony is that everyone thought they could contain Troy’s madness. And his was not the only madness in my family. In refusing to deal with it head on, it shaped us. And in that way silence, too, is a kind of machine. And I wonder if Jeever, wherever he lived—in the sky, in the wires, in the marrow of Troy’s bones—thrived on that silence. I wonder if he fattened himself on the gaps between our words. 

On those Sunday drives with my uncle and grandmother, I pressed my forehead to the glass and watched the city unspool. Liquor stores with neon signs, barbecue joints bleeding smoke into the street, churches on every corner. The car smelled of my grandmother’s perfume, a powdery lavender laced with lilac and violence. At night, lying in bed, I thought about beams. I pictured narrow shafts of light cutting through the roof, needle-thin but unstoppable, razor sharp as they entered his skull. Because in my own way, I, too, carried things I couldn’t always name. Fears, echoes, the inheritance of silence. And I wondered whether the line between madness and survival was thinner than I’d been taught. 

I was forbidden to see my grandmother for the last few years of her life. Since Troy lived with her, I blatantly defied my mother and her rules and snuck over anyway. I started to notice nothing had been moved since my last visit. A box on the counter. Dishes stacked on the drainboard. A bag of sugar open next to the percolator. I asked my uncle how long she’d been napping. 

He shrugged, his big wide shoulders lifting and lowering his flannel jacket that was two sizes too big in case it shrunk, which it didn’t. He told me she slept through the day because she stayed up all night praying. When I asked why he told me demons are most active at night. 

“You think Jeever is a demon?”

Troy stopped what he was doing and stared at me like I was a complete imbecile. “Jeever is real. I saw him every week at Bolivar. That’s why his name is Doctor Jeever.”

The serious tone and the way his eyes narrowed let me know the subject wasn’t up for discussion.

I inhaled sharply. “I know. Sorry.”

Troy was good to me and even though I wanted him to leave Dr. Jeever in the rearview mirror I knew not to push him on the subject. 

I glanced into the sunroom on the way out, but my grandmother was still sleeping. The next time I returned she had taken out every single item I’d ever made her as a kid and decorated the entire house. It was wild to see how many ornaments, cards, glass jars, paperweights, signs, banners, you name it, that I’d made. It was like seeing how much I loved her right in front of me. I inhaled deep and smiled. Then a harrowing thought intruded. Suddenly I knew why she’d surrounded herself with love. 

She died two weeks later.

The day she died my mother and I went to the house. Troy met me at the front door.

“The government puts poison in food. Jeever told me. Tiny amounts so that every time you eat, you’re being poisoned.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

That afternoon I found him sitting on the edge of his bed, crying. The front of his shirt was one big, wet stain.

“What’s going on,” I asked, rushing over.

Looking up at me with his big tear-stained hazel eyes, his bottom lip quivered and then he blurted out, “Mother’s dead.”

I sat down on the bed next to him and took his enormous hand in mine. After a second, I felt his warm arm lean into me. “How am I supposed to just live my whole life without her?”

I repeated one of my grandmother’s favorite sayings. “God never gives you more than you can handle.” 

He rolled his eyes. “God didn’t have Jeever.”

“God had the devil.” I said, putting emphasis on my point. 

Troy sighed long and low. The tears didn’t stop, but at least he wasn’t alone. 

“Mother had blood coming out of her mouth,” he said. “You think this could be a mistake? Maybe she’ll be okay?”

My grandmother was already dead, already on her way to the morgue. I exhaled, thinking about my approach. I opted for honesty that let him down easy. “I think blood is never a good sign.” 

My mother and I moved into the house. Now that Troy and I lived together I decided to confront Jeever head-on. By then I was seventeen years old and wanted the torment to stop. During one of his episodes, I forced him to show me exactly where the laser beam was coming from. 

He pointed at the second-floor window of the neighbor’s house. “That’s where he sets it up. He sits up there and laughs at me”

The next morning, I knocked on the neighbor’s door. An elderly woman named Mrs. Sperry answered. 

“Hi,” I said, “I live next door.”

Our neighbor gave me a sad, sweet smile. “I’m sorry about your grandmother.”

“Yeah, me too. Listen, can I bring my uncle over here to look at your upstairs room? I know it’s a weird request, but we won’t bother you. He thinks there’s someone in your upstairs room that shoots him in the head with a X-ray beam.”

Pulling her lips tight, she nodded. “Is that why he screams?”

Up until then I’d never considered that anyone outside of our house knew about my uncle. It was a sobering moment. 

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay. I’d be happy to take him upstairs. You want to do it now?”

“He’s asleep. Can we come back when he wakes up?”

Troy rolled out of bed around noon that day and I was waiting. “Chop, chop, bunny hop.”

“Leave me alone,” he said.

“Nope.” I was ready for all of his resistance. “Get dressed. We’re going next door.”

Already dressed because he slept in his clothes, he gave me the side eye. “Why?”

“Because I’m taking you up to that room,” I said, pointing in the general direction.

His golden Cherokee skin turned pale. “What?”

“You heard me. Get to it.” 

I’d had enough of Jeever.

Our neighbor led us up the staircase to the second floor. Troy grunted and huffed up the stairs behind me like a drama queen. When he was trying to get out of doing something, acting difficult was usually enough to make people give up, but I was tenacious.

Upstairs she opened a door and ushered us inside. A blessedly simple, almost empty room. Nothing strange or out of place. 

Troy pointed to an empty space on the hardwood floor right in front of the window. “That’s where he sets up the X-ray beam.”

The spot was empty. Completely empty. “But there’s nothing there,’ I said.

Defiance flashed in his eyes. I knew the look well. Suddenly, the room felt smaller and darker. The heightened suspicion on Troy’s face got my attention.

Turning around in a circle he looked at every corner, every single inch. After a few minutes, he headed for the stairs. “I’m done,” he said, descending into darkness. 

Eureka! I’d done it. I’d finally showed Troy that Jeever wasn’t in that room. I thanked Mrs. Sperry profusely and followed my uncle back to our house. 

“See,” I said triumphantly, rounding the corner into his bedroom. “No Jeever.”

“He’s still there.”

“What? No. You saw it with your own eyes. The room is empty.”

“He knew you were coming and hid everything. That’s why the room was empty.”

Son of a gun.

Since I couldn’t get rid of Jeever, I had to figure out a way to go around him. To cheer my grieving uncle up I went to the library and checked out operas. Ever since I could remember we sat glued to Saturday Afternoon at the Met. One of his all-time favorite things to do was to listen to the opera. It is where I get my great love for all things Puccini and Verdi. It became our shared sanctuary. Through my efforts I discovered the library had old records stored in archival boxes. CDs were popular at the time but the library kept the records stored in the back. Once those uptight librarians realized I wasn’t going to destroy library property, they had a new album waiting for me every week. 

I opened the box and folded the layers of tissue paper back. “We’re going to listen to the opera and I’m going to tell you what they’re saying line by line, scene by scene.”

Troy didn’t often look confused, but when he did it was funny and innocent, uplifting and rare. “Really? You’re gonna tell me the story for all them operas we been listening to?”

“Yes. Don’t you ever wonder what they’re saying in the songs?”

“Well, yeah, ‘cause they’s all in Italian.”

My hunch paid off. Jeever didn’t follow us into La Boheme and La Traviata. Jeever hated opera and stayed away. Those afternoons became our sacred time, a ritual of sound and story. We rediscovered opera together, old records that smelled faintly of dust and history. I read the translations aloud as Troy listened, learning the narratives, feeling the emotion. Music became a bridge between our worlds. The imagined and the real, the painful and the beautiful. It was one place Jeever could not reach, one place Troy could be entirely himself.

In between operas, I came and went, finishing up my last year of high school. 

We spent a lot of time together the last year I lived in Memphis. I came to understand the fragile, luminous boundary between madness and magic. Troy taught me that delusion forms its own methods of seeing the unseen, of constructing meaning where ordinary logic falters. In a life punctuated by rage and paranoia, love and loss collided in strange geometries: parents who could not protect him, friends who disappeared, the indifferent machinery of institutions and society. His heart carried all of this, and it radiated outward in ways that shaped my own understanding of the fragile architecture of reality, both real and not real. 

I embraced my uncle wholeheartedly. Yet, I knew I had to leave. My mother’s lifelong addiction to drugs and drama made life even more chaotic. My uncle and I talked about me trying to get power of attorney after I turned eighteen, but he knew my mother would never go along with it. With his inheritance and disability checks he funded the entire household. She was never giving that up.  

“I’d like to poison her,” he leaned in close. “That’s how the Romans got rid of you. They’s poisoned each other.”

“No,” I said, so loud and firm it made him jump. “You can never do that. Do you understand?”

He didn’t. 

“Push her down the stairs, then,” he said.

My eyes went wide. “Double no. If you do that they’ll send you back to Boliver and label you criminally insane.”

That got his attention. “With Jeever?”

“24/7 Jeever.”

His jaw tightened into anger, then slackened in defeat. Finally, he said, “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“I won’t kill her. Don’t mean she don’t deserve it.”

Troy had never liked my mother. When he changed the subject I knew he was up to something.

Three days later I walked into absolute hysteria. Troy had tried to attack my mother from behind with a hammer. She was livid. I walked straight into Troy’s room to find him sitting on the edge of his bed staring defiantly at the hard wood floor.

“You,” I whispered, pointing my finger directly at his face.

Narrowing his eyes, he said, “She’s evil.”

My mother grabbed her car keys and left. I waited until I heard the broken muffler of her VW bus turn off our street.

“You’re gonna get yourself locked up,” I said. “Did Jeever put you up to this?”

That defiant look melted down into a frown.

Shaking his head, he admitted, “Jeever likes her. Jeever likes everyone who torments me. She’s mean and hateful.”

Grasping for literally anything, I said, “If you leave her alone, I’ll get you candy bars or Taco Bell or some new books.”

After a minute he asked, “What kind of candy bars?” 

“The kind you like. A twelve pack.”

“Two twelve packs,” he bargained. “I’ll hide them in my drawer.”

“Two twelve packs and you freaking behave yourself or I’m gonna lose my mind.” 

The great mystery of my uncle was that sometimes he was so complicated it was impossible to navigate. Other times, it was as simple as candy. 

“Do not mess with her. I mean it. I’m trying to graduate.”

Beneath this labyrinth of rules and warnings, the astounding part was that Troy’s imagination was boundless. A wild, intricate machine that generated entire worlds, histories, and systems. Jeever, terrifying as he was, was a testament to Troy’s extraordinary mind, a mind that refused to yield to cruelty. Troy was alive in ways that defy explanation. He was dangerous in the way all broken hearts are dangerous: capable of seeing things the rest of us are too afraid to face. My uncle lived in a frequency no one else could hear.

I came to understand that Troy’s life was not defined solely by tragedy or delusion. It was defined by resilience, creativity, love, and an unyielding will to exist. The stories he told, the rituals he created, the invisible forces he battled were all a part of a tapestry that, when viewed closely, was breathtaking in its complexity.

I began to see Troy as a human embodiment of Tausk’s theory, living proof of how the mind externalizes internal chaos. The influencing machine highlighted a powerful psychological dynamic. The machine Troy feared was not just a physical device, but an idea, an all-encompassing force that ruled over him from a distance. Jeever bore the horror Troy could not name, transforming real trauma into a figure that could be confronted but never defeated. 

The antiques dealer was real. The abuse was real. Boliver was real. And yet, Jeever was not. 

I sometimes dream of a world where Troy never met Jeever—a life uninterrupted by invisible beams, a life lived entirely in operas, sunsets, and libraries. In that world, he is unbroken, laughing, and at peace, but that is just me playing God. 

The truth is richer and more complicated. He bore his pain and found love alongside it. And in loving him, I learned the strange poetics of delusion. I learned that he was mine, and he was not mine. He was an uncle, ghost, warning, best friend, and mirror.

In the end Tausk committed suicide. What little we know about him comes from working with Freud. A troubling end to a troubling subject. Not at all far from my uncle’s life. In 2006 he choked on a piece of uncooked broccoli and ended up in a coma for nine days. Then my mother pulled the plug. She lied about him being dead for another three years so she could live in the house and continue to spend his money. 

When I think of Troy now, I don’t see the institution or the warnings. I see a man standing at the edge of night, eyes turned toward the stars, listening to voices that no one else heard. I see his relentless refusal to surrender the world he believed in, even when it cost him everything. 

Because what is madness, if not the insistence on a reality other people cannot see? 

What is faith, if not the same thing?

The longer I sit with Troy’s story, the more I see how that monstrous institution shaped me, too. Not through medication or confinement, but through the silence it forced on my family, the way it turned Troy into a cautionary tale. 

And the older I get, the less I believe in cautionary tales. 

They are too simple, too neat. 

I was raised by Jeever. 

I know better. 

I sometimes imagine Dr. Jeever as a figure stepping out of history. Part bureaucrat, part phantom, part machine humming in the background of the twentieth-first century. A shadow stitched from surveillance and medicine, secrecy and shame. But I also imagine him as something more intimate: the voice of every institution that tells us not to trust ourselves. The whisper that insists you are wrong, you are sick, you are less than whole, you will never be enough.

If that is true, then Jeever never left. He lives in every story we are too afraid to tell.

And in that sense Jeever is my uncle’s absolute masterpiece. 

Perhaps that is what Troy was trying to show me—not that Jeever was real, but that the machinery of influence is real, humming beneath our daily lives, waiting for us to surrender to its siren song. And that thought is breathtaking.

Amid all the chaos our rock in the storm was always the opera. 

I can still see him sitting next to me on the sofa at the end of La Bohème.

He sat, rapt, silent, a rare moment of stillness breaking through decades of chaos.

Troy leaned forward, hands clasped like a boy at church. I read him the end, line by line, as the music swelled to a finish. The record crackled as the needle slid home and the opera was over.

Troy blinked hard. “She dies at the end?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Mimi dies at the end.”

He sat back, stunned. His whole life, he’d listened without knowing the story. 

“That’s sad,” he said finally, “but still my favorite.”

It was the closest we ever came to exorcising Dr. Jeever. Not by logic, not by proof, but by beauty, by depth. For one afternoon, the beam stopped firing. The machine went quiet, and I got my uncle back, whole and shining. In that moment the entire world was his oyster, and he was a magnificent triumph of unstoppable glory. In some quiet, unwatched part of myself, I always listened for him. The real him. And in that single afternoon my uncle revealed his true self, if only for the length of time it takes an aria to play. If only for the length of time it takes a heart to break.