“Two hundred fifty.”
“And that’s how much if you paid taxes?”
“Four hundred and twenty thousand. Okay, okay.”
Geiger held his coffee cup against his chin. In an asap scenario the Jones is more of an X factor and the clock is ticking. Ordinarily Geiger didn’t like to count on luck, but when the client was in a hurry he had no choice: he was forced to hope that the Jones would slip up. Sooner rather than later, the Jones would have to show something-a weakness, a phobia, a demon-and then Geiger would play it for all it was worth. Asaps were always tricky, but they did provide their own kind of challenge.
Geiger put his cup down. It didn’t make a sound.
“Tell Hall it’s a go,” he said.
Harry’s lips sprang up at the corners in a hallelujah smile.
“Have him snatch Matheson now,” Geiger said. “Make the session for midnight, Ludlow Street.”
Geiger had an appointment with Corley coming up that afternoon, but first he wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art because Harry had said there were some de Koonings there. Geiger had never been in a museum. Carmine had taken him to a gallery in SoHo once-Carmine was a serious collector-but Geiger had been unmoved. Paintings, sculpture, photographs-they weren’t like music. They were unchanging images, and staring at them was a static event for him. But having an appreciation of a Jones’s passion is a valuable asset in IR, so he was going to see what it was that David Matheson craved.
He walked through Central Park. The sun was a yellow decal stuck onto the sky, and softball teams were out in full regalia. The park was where he had first started studying squirrels. They were marvels of psychic economy, each reflex and movement ruled by fear. Geiger sometimes watched a squirrel stop in mid-step and freeze with its paw raised for thirty seconds as it weighed a potential threat.
Soon after he’d moved into his house, he’d started an experiment to see if he could change and control their behavior. For a week, he put a pile of sunflower seeds by the birch tree in the backyard and watched from the stoop as the squirrels ate them. Then one morning he sat down by the tree, hand open in his lap and filled with seeds. He stayed absolutely still for an hour. For three mornings, a squirrel would venture within five or six feet of him, freeze, and then sprint away. Geiger realized that as the squirrels came closer, his heightened anticipation caused changes in him-pulse rate, gaze, breathing pattern-that set off their internal alarms. He would have to change his behavior to control theirs.
The next morning he sat by the tree with his eyes shut, playing a symphony in his head, denying his senses all knowledge of the external. In two days they were picking seeds from his hand; after four days they were eating while perched on his calf or thigh.
Geiger brought that experience into the session room-the ability to change his behavior to suit a scenario and to create a state of dread in the Jones while he could still function and make choices. If a squirrel’s hardwiring allows a respite from fear only when it is up a tree, Geiger’s goal was not to make the Jones fear that he’d never get back to the tree, but to make him forget that trees existed at all.
Recently he had told the story of the squirrels to Corley. It was one of the few times he had volunteered information about a contemporary event, and Corley had responded by asking if he felt “disconnected from people.”
Geiger answered, “Martin, if you’ve never been plugged in, you can’t be disconnected.”
Geiger was aware of his differentness. Of the one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week, he spent approximately five with Harry, one with Corley, and, on average, fifteen with the Joneses. Living the rest of his life alone was not a choice. It was his organic state. The parts of himself that Geiger knew, he knew very well. The parts he didn’t know, he knew not at all. Life before New York was without definition-a black room-and when he peered into it, the darkness offered faint answers. But when the dream started, it was as if a flash of lightning filled the room, and he could see that the space was endless, without borders. The dream gave him half a second’s glimpse of the room’s contents: countless faces, bodies, trees, unrecognizable shapes. That is where Corley came in. Geiger told him about the dream and its variations, and he used Corley’s eyes to help him see into the black room and discover who he was and what he had been. Geiger did this because the more he knew about himself, the more he could bring to the job. It was all about IR.
The dream had come to him again, last night, and the aftermath had been the same. He woke up at four A.M. and saw the flashes of lights announcing the powerful migraine that was already moving like a storm front into the left side of his brain. The dream’s details changed but the structure was always the same: Geiger, as a preteen boy, would rush out of someplace and try to get to a destination that was never clear. On his journey, which was filled with obstacles, he would sooner or later start to literally come apart: first his digits and then his limbs would drop off. When his head was about to fall off he would wake up.
When Corley first heard about the migraines, he wrote a prescription for Imitrex, but Geiger declined to accept it. He didn’t take pills for his pain; in his mind, that would be attacking it from the outside. He dealt with pain from the inside, and like most of the mundane processes in his daily life, his method was uncomplicated and ritualistic.
When a migraine moved in, Geiger would put on some music, always rich and textured, and curl up on the floor of the closet. He would close the door, strap on the Sennheisers, and give himself to the blackness and sound. Then he would reach down deep and wrap his arms around the pain, and when it became all he felt, the only thing he felt, he became as strong as the pain. And that’s when he would grab the pain by its throat and kill it.
Lodged in some crevice of his brain was the knowledge that there was more than one way to deal with pain. Geiger had spent much of his life traveling this road-as beast, as rider-and what few understood about pain was its dual potential. It could be used not only by the inflictor but by the receiver, and as a primal sensation it could be tapped as a source of strength. The more intense the pain, the stronger its power-he knew this. He also understood, somehow, that pain had made him who he was.
7
“I had the dream again,” said Geiger, his fingers tapping at the couch.
Corley scribbled Increasd freq of dream on his pad. The dream was a treasure map teeming with details; it was also a potential ingress to the inner self. Except for scattered, random images, Geiger had no memory of his life before he came to New York, but it was in the retelling of the dream and its variations that shadows of past catastrophes peeked into the light for Corley to see. The dreams were maelstroms of ambivalence in which Geiger’s critical need to act battled his desperate need not to. The opposing urges created such a furious storm within Geiger that, in the dream, it literally pulled him apart. In his notes, Corley had dubbed it the “Endgame” dream, and though he still didn’t fully understand it, he had become certain of one of its meanings: as a child, Geiger had desperately sought to escape from some kind of intolerable scenario, but doing so had brought on psychological disintegration, or at least the death of that part of him capable of rejoicing in his freedom.
“It’s coming more often now-the dream,” said Corley. “Three in the last five weeks.”
“Four,” said Geiger.
Corley felt a slight, queasy shift in his chest. “Four? The station wagon, the bike, the motorcycle…”
“And the skateboard.”
Corley squelched a mutter, and put pen to pad.
“I can hear the pen, Martin. What’re you writing?”
“That I forgot one of your dreams. How do you feel about that?” Corley asked.
“Meaning what? Do I see you as less imperfect than anyone else?”
“Well, I think there’s a certain reliance on the patient’s part that I’ll remember what is talked about in this room. It goes to trust.”
“Trust,” Geiger repeated. “Do you trust me, Martin?”
The quintessential Geiger tone-smooth as a mirror, devoid of affect-forcing the listener to deconstruct the
