Brooklyn Zoo by Darcy Lockman Page B

Ritalin and then sent off to trial. “Multiple personalities!” he exclaimed under his breath and walked off, shaking his head.
    The next week Grant was returned to the courthouse twiceto take hour upon hour of tests. Given that our mutual efforts would likely culminate in the conclusion that he, like all the others, was unfit to stand trial, it seemed like overkill, but who was I to say? First thing in the morning, he was waiting for me in the basement holding cell, his head held low. We started with the WAIS—the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. David Wechsler, the American psychologist who developed the test, defined intelligence as “the global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.” The test measures verbal and nonverbal abilities, and it’s how you arrive at someone’s IQ. Some parts of the test involve learning a new skill, and these measure what is called fluid intelligence, while others look at fund of knowledge, or crystallized intelligence. Generally speaking, intelligence is impacted by a lot of things. Like every aspect of being, some of it has to do with innate capacity, and some of it has to do with environment. Grant had only gone as far as the ninth grade, and given all the abuse he was enduring at home, it wasn’t likely he was able to focus on what was going on in the classroom, whether or not he had ADHD. As Grant and I moved through the different parts of the test, it was obvious he wasn’t doing well. We’d been carrying on for a while when he couldn’t define one of the vocabulary words I presented to him, and he looked as if he might break down. I stopped to ask why he thought he was getting so upset.
    “I want to do well because then I’ll feel happy,” he answered, and I couldn’t say which I thought was less likely.
    After Grant and I had spent two days and many hours engaged in the Rorschach, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System, and the Test of Memory Malingering, among others, on yet another morning Dr. Wolfe came down with me to meet Grant and to administerthe Multidimensional Inventory of Dissociation (MID), to determine once and for all if our guy had multiple personalities. Grant spoke a little differently of the white man named Ken this time around, and it was hard to say whether he was a hallucination or an alter. The MID wasn’t a huge help because while Grant agreed that yes, he had trancelike episodes where he stared off into space and lost awareness of what was going on around him, felt uncertain about who he really was, and relived traumatic events so vividly that he totally lost contact with his surroundings, he didn’t always seem to completely comprehend the statements he was endorsing. Dr. Wolfe was not convinced, and I didn’t know what to think. With so much trauma in his history and so many symptoms in his present, it was difficult to parse the whole thing out. This was almost always the case with our defendants, though Grant was an extreme example. Dr. Wolfe and I settled on a diagnosis of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, among others.
    Every testing report ends with recommendations, and beyond suggesting that Grant be found unfit to stand trial, ours came down to this: get this guy some serious psychological help. I had never before so vehemently hoped that my recommendations would be implemented, but given that Grant still stood accused of holding up honorable citizens at gunpoint on the subway, and that the justice system had limited resources when it came to mental health care, I doubted he would ever get the therapy he’d need to have any relief. Grant Carson was probably the first person I’d ever met who made me question whether significant relief was always even a possibility. Maybe a person could only take so much. Maybe there was a point of psychological no return.

    As one month passed at forensics and then another, I began to