Ellison shuts her eyes a moment and tries to recall if she really did say that two weeks back or if he’s just banking on there being so little left of her short-term memory that she’s not in a position to argue the point.
“Did I?” she asks, opening her eyes again. On the wall behind the psychiatrist there’s a cheaply framed print, a copy of an oil painting of a rocky seashore someplace like Rhode Island or Maine or Massachusetts. Or Wales, she thinks, and not for the first time. “Well, if I did—if I did tell you that—I shouldn’t have. If I did say that, I’ve changed my mind.”
The psychiatrist frowns his consternation and rubs at his bushy white eyebrows. “Are you sure?” he asks her, and she tells him yeah, she’s sure. In fact, she’s very, very sure. “All right, then what would you prefer we talk about today?” he asks. “What about your sister? We never did quite finish with that, did we?”
Ellison almost asks which story about her sister he means, which fabricated version of the truth is it that the psychiatrist would like her to continue with—and, by the way, for the record, she never actually had a sister (and the psychiatrist knows that), only an older brother whom she never even met because he died of a fever when he was just a baby. But she doesn’t ask. Asking would almost certainly violate the rules of the game, whatever those might be.
“When I was a kid, I got a pet monster,” Ellison says, before she can think better of it, before it occurs to her this is the worst imaginable way of cheating, because, as it happens, she’s telling the truth.
The psychiatrist stops rubbing his eyebrows and clears his throat.
“A monster,” he says—not in a way that dares to sound as if he doubts what she’s told him, but only as if to suggest that maybe he wasn’t paying close attention or perhaps the noise of a delivery truck rattling past down on Livingston Avenue made it hard for him to hear what she said.
“Yeah,” she says, astounded at her own audacity and wishing she had a cigarette, wishing the psychiatrist would let her smoke in his office. “Well, I didn’t really think of it as a monster, not when I was little.”
The psychiatrist opens the bottle of water on his desk and takes a swallow. Then he clears his throat again. “You mean like an imaginary friend?” he asks her, and to Ellison it almost seems as if he’s asking hopefully.
“No, I mean like a monster,” she says. “It wasn’t imaginary, and I never thought of it as especially friendly, either. Though, every now and then, it was sort of helpful.”
“Sort of helpful,” says the psychiatrist, and then he taps at his pad before screwing the cap back on the water bottle and setting it aside. “Helpful how, exactly?”
“Like, sometimes it would show up when I was in trouble.”
“If it was helpful, why do you call it a monster?” the psychiatrist wants to know.
Ellison sits up a little straighter, and she glances at the window and the dingy beige drapes hiding the view of the world outside. Her mouth has gone a little cottony, and right now she wouldn’t mind if the psychiatrist deigned to offer her a sip of his water. She says, “It seems to me that the world is full of helpful monsters. I don’t necessarily see a contradiction between monstrosity and usefulness. Some of the most terrible things, the most hideous things, we let them into our lives—knowing full well that they’re monsters—because they’re helpful.” She expects the psychiatrist to ask her to pony up an example, but he doesn’t. If he had she might have said nuclear fission, or she might have said religion, or she might have said something else altogether. She might even have said psychiatry, only she isn’t so sure it’s of much use to anyone.
“I see,” says the psychiatrist.
“Do you?” Ellison asks, still watching the drapes. When she arrived for her appointment almost forty-five minutes ago (she’s usually early), the sky was hidden behind a blanket of blue-grey clouds, much as the drapes now hide her view of Arbor Hill. The air had smelled of ozone and the promise of rain. She’ll probably get soaked on the way home, bus or no bus.
Now the psychiatrist is looking at the drapes, too, as if he’s afraid he’s missing something, as if there might be something here he ought to see, but doesn’t. He says, “What I mean is, I understand the point that you’re making, about the occasional usefulness of things most people would find monstrous.”
“A lot of people wouldn’t understand,” she tells him, then looks away from the window, looking back at the psychiatrist and the framed seashore. “Or, I don’t know, maybe they would, if they ever had a reason to stop and think about it.”
For a few seconds, neither of them speaks, and then the psychiatrist asks her, “How old were you, the first time you saw this monster?”
It’s not too late to make a bad joke of the whole thing, Ellison thinks. It’s not too late to go back to lying and chalk it up to being in a worse mood than usual. He’d believe that. But then she reminds herself that the psychiatrist possibly doesn’t live in a universe that permits the existence of monsters—not real monsters, anyway—and besides, by the unspoken rules of their game, everything she tells him is a lie, every confidence a deception. So it really doesn’t much matter what she says.
“I was almost eleven years old. No, wait. That’s not right. I was already twelve. I’d already started junior high school. I was in sixth grade the first time I saw the hound.”
“The hound?” he asks her. “So, the monster was a dog?”
“No,” she replies. “No, it
