“So,” he said, “the web was finished, a moth was snared, and you put a flame to everything. What do you think that was about?”
Geiger lay on the couch staring at the bookshelves on the wall. He knew the literary skyline by heart-every title, author, color, and font. In the center of the lower shelf was a framed photograph of a large, rambling house set on a rolling lawn amid majestic trees. Its strong lines and angled roof appealed to him. He’d asked Corley about the house in the past and received curt responses. All Geiger knew was that it was a hundred years old and located in Cold Spring, New York, about an hour away.
“What do I think that was about?” said Geiger. “I’m not sure. What do you think it was about?”
“Well,” said Corley, “it could’ve been about control. Power.”
Geiger’s fingertips tapped the couch in shifting combinations of sequence, speed, and rhythm. For Corley, the sound had become part of the sessions, a soft percussive accompaniment to spoken words. For the first four months of therapy, Geiger had called for an appointment only after a dream-migraine event, and that was the only subject discussed. But gradually the irregular sessions evolved into a weekly visit, sometimes twice a week, and lately Geiger seemed less strict about his first rule. Sometimes, as he’d done today, he would even chronicle a real- life event.
“Maybe it was about completion,” Geiger said.
“Interesting.”
“Is it?”
“I think so,” Corley replied. “You might have said ‘destruction,’ which could be considered the opposite of completion.”
“Good point, Martin.”
Before Geiger, no patient had ever addressed Corley by his first name, in thirty years of sessions. The first time, it had sent ripples skipping across the calm surface between them, leaving the psychiatrist unsettled and shifting in his chair. It had stirred something in him, the unforced familiarity in the gesture so contradictory to Geiger’s basic inscrutability. Corley had never said anything about it, and ultimately he’d embraced it as part of their unusual dynamic.
“Everything’s a process,” Geiger said. “Beginning, middle, end. That’s what works best for me. You know that. Completion.”
Geiger’s gaze drifted to the ceiling. Years ago there had been water damage. His eye was always drawn to the subtle change in texture caused by the repair. He knew, step by step, exactly how they’d gone about the work, because he’d done the same kind of job hundreds of times himself.
“Why do you think we’re talking about the spider?” said Corley.
Geiger bent his right knee and pulled the leg slowly up to his chest. Corley waited for the familiar, soft pop in the sacral joint.
“The spider had finished its web,” Geiger said. “So why did I torch it? I’m not sure. Because it’s in my territory?”
“And only you decide when something’s finished in your domain?”
“King of all I see?” A soft sound slipped out of him. It could have been a sigh. “That’s a line from something, isn’t it?”
“ Richard the Third?” said Corley. “ Yertle the Turtle?”
“What?”
“The children’s book.”
Corley waited, scraping fingertips down one bearded cheek and then the other. But Geiger’s silence was like the sound of a door slamming shut.
“Do you remember any children’s books?” Corley asked. “Or songs? Does anything come to mind? Maybe toys, or-”
“No. Nothing comes to mind.”
Over time, Corley had come to think of Geiger as a lost and beleaguered boy who had somehow remained undaunted. Because Geiger’s dreams were virtually the sole context in which Corley could work, he knew almost nothing about the man and could only guess at what lay beyond the borders of their sessions. Even so, Geiger’s story about the spider and conversations like this one convinced him that the child in Geiger was buried beneath so much traumatic rubble that it was more ghost than real. Sometimes Corley felt like a medium at a seance trying to contact the dead.
Corley glanced at his watch. It was the last gift his wife had given him. Engraved on the back was Where does the time go? Love, Sara.
“We’re almost out of time,” he said, “so let me put something out there for you to think about-about the spider.” He straightened the pad on his knee and wrote, Empathic? “Maybe setting fire to the web wasn’t about completion or dominion.” He noticed the dance of Geiger’s fingers becoming more intense. “Maybe you didn’t want the spider to kill the moth.”
Geiger’s fingers came to rest, and he sat up. Corley watched the overdeveloped trapezius muscles shift beneath his shirt. Geiger’s shirts were always long-sleeved, brushed black cotton, and closed at the neck.
Geiger stood up and swiveled his head left and right. Corley heard dual click s.
“Food for thought,” Geiger said. Then: “Tell me something, Martin.”
Corley had expected the request. It had become part of the process, part of Geiger’s exit ritual. It was usually Tell me something… and a question would follow, or By the way… and a seemingly insignificant bit of news would be proffered. Corley knew that these last exchanges helped Geiger manufacture a closing to a process that was, by its nature, open-ended, and so gave him, depending on the tenor of the session, a parting sense of control.
“Do you go up to your house often?” Geiger asked.
“No,” Corley said.
“Why not?”
Corley put his pad down on the desk. “We have to stop now.”
For Geiger, the morning walk to and from Corley’s office was always a sensory feast. Central Park West was a kaleidoscopic vista: taxis feinting in traffic like yellow-skinned middleweights; sluggish, ungainly buses chugging and wheezing; dogs and their walkers sniffing and eyeing each other; joggers stretching voluptuous hamstrings at red lights as they waited to enter the park; olive-skinned men trudging through the gutters, pulling their hot dog and souvlaki carts behind them like broken penitents. It was all pure stimuli for Geiger, an assault of colors, shapes, sounds, movement. Not the subtlest hue or tone or gesture went unnoticed or unheard, but no secondary, more sophisticated responses occurred. He took everything in and yet held nothing. He was both a vacuum and a bottomless pit.
He had lived in New York for fifteen years, and his arrival in the city marked the beginning of the only life he could remember. On September 6, 1996, Geiger was born an almost full-grown man of indeterminate age when a Greyhound driver shook him by the shoulder as he slept in a seat in the last row of a bus that had just pulled into New York’s Port Authority Terminal, on Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. The boy/man guessed that he was in his late teens, but otherwise he was as much a stranger to himself as the people he passed on the sidewalks of the city. He was a scarred, aching body with an unencumbered mind, a human machine without a memory card. He ran solely on instinct.
The next day, while walking the streets of Harlem, he stopped to watch a member of a renovation crew sawing a new window frame for a run-down brownstone. A moment later, he walked through the doorless entry and asked for a job. It was a pure, thoughtless act, and when the crew chief asked if he knew carpentry he said Yes and didn’t know why.
He had worked “reno” for four years-never staying with one company for long, taking nonunion late shifts, mainly in Harlem and Brooklyn and SoHo, secretly sleeping in the basements of the buildings where he worked, saving his money. All the companies paid off-the-books cash-no ID numbers, no FICA, no paper trails. At first he’d used the name Gray, then Black. One day, passing a Barnes amp; Noble bookstore, he spotted a book about the artwork of H. R. Giger. The byzantine images appealed to him, as did the name with its twin g ’s. For visual symmetry, he added an e and so became Geiger.
One night, after finishing a shift in a brownstone in Williamsburg, he’d been sleeping in a crawl space in the building’s basement. Awakened at three A.M. by footsteps coming down the stairs, he lay there watching flashlight
