“Have they figured out how they’re going to handle me yet?”
“I don’t know, Charlie. I’m more interested in knowing if you’ve figured out how you’re going to handle yourself.”
Oh, he was slipping it to me, all right. Just like he kept slipping it to me after Mr. Carlson. But then I had to go see him. Now I could turn him off anytime I wanted to. Except I couldn’t, and he knew I couldn’t. It was too normal to be consistent. And I was being watched by my peerless peers. They were evaluating me.
“Sweating a little?” I asked the intercom.
“Are you?”
“You guys,” I said, an edge of bitterness creeping into my voice. “You’re all the same.”
“We are? If so, then we all want to help you.”
He was going to be a much tougher nut to strip than old Tom Denver had been. That was obvious. I called Don Grace up in my mind. Short, dapper little fuck. Bald on top, big muttonchop sideburns, as if to make up for it. He favored tweed coats with suede patches on the elbows. A pipe always stuffed with something that came from Copenhagen and smelled like cowshit. A man with a headful of sharp, prying instruments. A mind-fucker, a head-stud. That’s what a shrink is for, my friends and neighbors; their job is to fuck the mentally disturbed and make them pregnant with sanity. It’s a bull’s job, and they go to school to learn how, and all their courses are variations on a theme:
But they get you lonely, and ready to cry, they get you ready to toss it all over if they will just promise to go away for a while. What do we have? What do we really have? Minds like terrified fat men, begging the eyes that look up in the bus terminal or the restaurant and threaten to meet ours to look back down, uninterested. We lie awake and picture ourselves in white hats of varying shapes. There’s no maidenhead too tough to withstand the seasoned dork of modern psychiatry. But maybe that was okay. Maybe now they would play my game, all these shysters and whores.
“Let us help you, Charlie,” Mr. Grace was saying.
“But by letting you help me, I would be helping you.” I said it as if the idea had just occurred to me. “Don’t want to do that.”
“Why, Charlie?”
“Mr. Grace?”
“Yes, Charlie?”
“The next time you ask me a question, I’m going to kill somebody down here.” I could hear Mr. Grace suck wind, as if someone had just told him his son had been in a car crash. It was a very un-self-confident sound. It made me feel very good.
Everyone in the room was looking at me tightly. Ted Jones raised his head slowly, as if he had just awakened. I could see the familiar, hating darkness cloud his eyes. Anne Lasky’s eyes were round and frightened. Sylvia Ragan’s fingers were doing a slow and dreamy ballet as they rummaged in her purse for another cigarette. And Sandra Cross was looking at me gravely, gravely, as if I were a doctor, or a priest.
Mr. Grace began to speak.
“Watch it!” I said sharply. “Before you say anything, be careful. You aren’t playing your game any longer. Understand that. You’re playing mine. Statements only. Be very careful. Can you be very careful?”
He didn’t say anything about my game metaphor at all. That was when I began to believe I had him.
“Charlie… Was that almost a plea?”
“Very good. Do you think you’ll be able to keep your job after this, Mr. Grace?”
“Charlie, for God’s sake…”
“Ever so much better.”
“Let them go, Charlie. Save yourself. Please.”
“You’re talking too fast. Pretty soon a question will pop out, and that’ll be the end for somebody.”
“Charlie…”
“How was your military obligation fulfilled?”
“Wh…” Sudden whistling of breath as he cut that off.
“You almost killed somebody,” I said. “Careful, Don. I can call you Don, can’t I? Sure. Weigh those words, Don.”
I was reaching out for him.
I was going to break him.
In that second it seemed as if maybe I could break them all.
“I think I better sign off for the moment, Charlie.”
“If you go before I say you can, I’ll shoot somebody. What you’re going to do is sit there and answer my questions.”
The first sweaty desperation, as well concealed as underarm perspiration at the junior prom: “I really mustn’t, Charlie. I can’t take the responsibility for-”
“
“Congratulations to you,” I said. “You just described modern psychiatry. That ought to be the textbook definition, Don. Now, let me tell you: you’ll take a piss out the window if I tell you to. And God help you if I catch you in a lie. That will get somebody killed too. Ready to bare your soul, Don? Are you on your mark?”
He drew in his breath raggedly. He wanted to ask if I really meant it, but he was afraid I might answer with the gun instead of my mouth. He wanted to reach out quick and shut off the intercom, but he knew he would hear the echo of the shot in the empty building, rolling around in the corridor below him like a bowling ball up a long alley from hell.
“All right,” I said. I unbuttoned my shirt cuffs. Out on the lawn, the cops and Tom Denver and Mr. Johnson were standing around restlessly, waiting for the return of their tweedy bull stud. Read my dreams, Sigmund. Squirt ’em with the sperm of symbols and make ’em grow. Show me how we’re different from, say, rabid dogs or old tigers full of bad blood. Show me the man hiding between my wet dreams. They had every reason to be confident (although they did not look confident). In the symbolic sense, Mr. Grace was Pathfinder of the Western World. Bull stud with a compass.
Natty Bumppo was breathing raggedly from the little latticed box over my head. I wondered if he’d read any good rapid eye movements lately. I wondered what his own would be like when night finally came.
“All right, Don. Let’s get it on.”
CHAPTER 19
“How was your military obligation fulfilled?”
“In the Army, Charlie. This isn’t going to accomplish anything.”
“In what capacity?”
“As a doctor.”
“Psychiatrist?”
“No.”
“How long have you been a practicing psychiatrist?”
“Five years.”
“Have you ever eaten your wife out?”
“Wh…” Terrified, angry pause.
“I… I don’t know the meaning of the phrase.”
“I’ll rephrase it, then. Have you ever engaged in oral-genital practices with your wife?”
“I won’t answer that. You have no right.”
“I have all the rights. You have none. Answer, or I’ll shoot someone. And remember, if you lie and I catch you in a lie, I’ll shoot someone. Have you ever engaged in-?”
“No!”
“How long have you been a practicing psychiatrist?”
“Five years.”
“Why?”
“Wh… Well, because it fulfills me. As a person.”
“Has your wife ever had an affair with another man?”
“No.”
“Another woman?”
“How do you know?”
“She loves me.”
“Has your wife ever given you a blow job, Don?”
“I don’t know what you-”
“You know goddamn well what I mean!”
“No, Charlie, I-”
“Ever cheat on an exam in college?”
Pause. “Absolutely not.”
“On a quiz?”
