The Poser (19 page)

I had forgotten what surgery questions are, how tiresome and difficult it is to raise an acceptable shield against them. Answers, I mean.

When he asked again, “Who is Jesse Unheim?” I said, “I don't know.”

“But you just mentioned him a few minutes ago.”

I said nothing.

“Giovanni?”

“I, I think . . . It's hard to know.”

“What effect has the medicine had?”

“A good effect,” I told him.

“Please contain your enthusiasm.”

“What?”

“I'm joking,” he said, and flashed the kind of wry grin that immediately explains a face. A glint rang in his eyes, and the doctor-veil, that air of seriousness, was lifted, though it returned quite suddenly. “Giovanni, why do you think you're here?”

“Because I've gone crazy, I think.”

“Do you remember coming here?”

I had to coax the voice out of me like a cat from under a car. I was still using Richard Nelson's. A tired, failed version of it. “I don't think so.”

This Doctor Orphels inquired more about the medication. Side effects and so on. I answered at a stymied pace, favoring economy over veracity, using “yes” and “no” interchangeably. He sat with a regal stiffness, doing without the notepad and pen I was made to believe these doctors used. I wished for him to have them. If he did, perhaps he'd look at the pad now and then and spare me, for a moment, this look of empathy. Worst of all, however, was his comfort in silence.

My longtime ally, my partner all those years in Fantasma Falls, silence had betrayed me. At night, it gathered and swarmed, pulling at my hair, my toes, my fingers until I was sure I would stretch to nothing. And I would hum or clap just to produce noise, like shooting a flare gun against the swallowing dark.

“In combination with the medicine I would like to start regular therapeutic sessions. Do you feel ready?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I thought “no” would speed us sooner to the end of questions. Seeing my mistake, I said, “Yes.”

“Yes what, Giovanni?”

“What are you asking?”

“Do you feel ready for a session?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But you said no a moment ago.”

“I made a mistake with a word.”

“But they have opposite meanings.”

I said nothing because he hadn't asked a question.

“Do they not?” he said.

“What does it matter what they mean?”

“Isn't that precisely what matters?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why do you think you're here, Giovanni?”

“Here?”

“At the Institute.”

“Because I've gone crazy, I think.”

“So you've said.”

I started clapping, a technique helpful in warding off the silence.

“How do you experience this craziness?”

“It's the, the bursting,” I said.

“Giovanni, why are you clapping?”

“Stop it, please!” I wrung my hands like they were someone else's. I bucked and squirmed, wriggled like a man in a straitjacket. “You
are
him, aren't you?” I said, “Jesse Unheim in disguise!” I said, “Hug me then, brother!”

And this so-called doctor, this impostor so summoned, rose. With that almost military gait (high knees, all business) as though he himself were a subordinate there to introduce an even greater eminence, he strode toward me, so I knew it was Unheim—Unheim, finally—because no psychiatrist would dare stand a foot away from his patient, as this stranger did now, in jeans and a plaid shirt, casting his eyes at wild me in that burgundy armchair. It was happening, as it had a hundred times in my dream. “An old friend,” Lou says. The steps can be heard, and a figure in a tuxedo appears, lumbering through the slatted shadows. A skeleton.

I stood. “Hug me!”

But when I opened my eyes, it was the doctor's face, not a skeleton's, appearing a foot from mine. He had that strong European nose, an altogether European face, which, weighed and blessed as such faces are by real history, carries more consequence than those made here, in our imaginary country. And those teeth, those absurd teeth perched on his lip, like a child who's never learned to close his mouth at the wonders of the world.

“I'm not Jesse Unheim,” he said. He studied my eyes one at a time like a lover in a film priming himself for a catastrophic kiss. Then he grinned as he had earlier. That wry grin, it appeared on my face, too.

“I'm not Jesse Unheim,” I agreed.

A twinkle came into his eye. He gave my shoulders a fraternal squeeze and returned to his chair. “Feeling better?” he asked once in it.

I looked at my hands, amazed they were connected to my arms. “I believe I am, yes.”

“Who's Jesse Unheim?”

The mountains, through the window, looked like a child's cutout: two blue humps collaged against the sky. A shadow lay over the birch trees. That was the gift of the window. It freed me from the beauty. “I'd rather not say at the moment.”

“That's fine,” the doctor assured me.

I said, “To your previous question, Doctor, the answer is yes. I am ready for these sessions. I am sure of it.”

We met the following afternoon, seated at that unnatural distance, our backs rigid against our chairs.

“When can I be released?” I asked.

“You're registered for a hundred days' stay. You've been here for seven. That leaves ninety-three.”

“Days that I am
forced
to stay here?”

“I wouldn't use a word like that. But yes.”

“This is legal then?”

“Giovanni, you assaulted a man. While the victim agreed to drop the charges, the judge refused to release you without a guarantee of treatment. No More Walls satisfied him as a place for you to receive that treatment. Still, we oughtn't think of it in those terms. Our aims are higher.”

“Is the story of this place true?” I asked.

“Which story's that?”

“A man with syphilis knocked down all the walls.”

“That it was syphilis has not been proven. It is true he wanted all walls removed.”

“And yet walls remain,” I said.

“An admirable goal but nearly impossible to execute: a building with
no
walls. When it comes to Mr. Lewis's philosophies, you'll be pleased to know we remain quite faithful. None of our forty occupants are restrained unless it is absolutely necessary. We believe people must be given the freedom, both mental and physical, to explore the breadth of their condition.”

“Yet I am
forced
to stay here.”

“Giovanni, the purpose of these sessions—”

“Is for you to massage me with questions until I'm lulled into a submissive state and divulge all of my secrets.”

“Far from it,” he said. “I will be talking to you—asking questions and the like—to find out who you are. Not to correct who that person is.”

“How often do we meet?”

“Every afternoon.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“What about me?”

“Do you talk, too?”

“Of course.”

“I mean, about yourself?”

“We're not here for me, Giovanni.”

“So your eyes insist. You have great doctor's eyes. They are probing but not intrusive. You occupy your doctor's chair with a kind of stiffness, so that I, the patient, am to recognize you are fit for your authoritative position without indulging it too much. Your smile reassures me that you are still human despite your duties. Do they teach all this to you in school?”

“I'm a bit confused,” he said. “Yesterday you said you were ready for this, that you were sure of it. Now you're being standoffish.”

“I am ready, Doctor. Quite. It's just, I'd like to know you a bit before I enter the vise of treatment.”

“The degrees are on the wall. Feel free to inspect them. I received my first degree at the City University of Medicine. Thereafter, I received a degree in psychoanalysis from the New-Method Institute.”

“A degree admits as much of a person as a gravestone, Doctor.”

“Then with my gravestone you must be satisfied,” he said. “I wanted to talk about the terrors you mentioned yesterday. Can you describe them for me?”

“Perhaps.”

“Might you try?”

“I might,” I said. “I might not.”

He smiled. “That's very helpful.”

“I think you're as guarded as I am.”

“Giovanni, every afternoon for the next ninety-three days you will be walked to my office. We can pass these afternoons in a kind of grudge match or we can begin the long process of treatment. The drugs, from what you told me, have helped. What you and I do here can help all the more. It is a long process—one that doesn't always work—but you have clearly suffered. From what I understand you threatened a man with a gun.”

“A fake gun.”

“Even stranger.” He seemed to think for a moment. “What you said about me earlier—about my eyes, my posture in this chair—it's a projection, I think.”

“If that's some sort of doctor's term, I don't know it.”

“It means you are projecting
your
feelings onto me. You seem to think I am up to something, that I am playing a part, assuming a role, hiding behind some mask—but perhaps
you
are.”

My heart quickened. “Is that your specialty, then—is that how you get strangers to open up?!”

“Please. I didn't mean to upset you.”

“I'm trying—I'm trying to finally talk and you accuse me of
playing a part—
”

“My father was a psychiatrist, you know,” he said.

“What?”

“You wanted to know about me—I'll tell you. My father started the New-Method Institute. The man was an expansive narcissist, a breed that doesn't take to parenting, or rather, takes to it too strongly. A controlling man. A brilliant one, too. Micah Orphels.”

“Your father?” I said.

“He emigrated here from Austria, founded the Orphels Psychoanalytic Institute, one of the most influential in the world. Later, he would create the New-Method. Patients traveled across the country, some internationally, to see him. Pilgrimages. He was said to cure the incurable. But these people, they didn't know who my father truly was. That old conundrum of celebrity. His closest friends were his patients, if that says anything. He'd have them over for dinner on Friday night. My mother would cook for all of them, and he'd criticize each one. My father would say, ‘Edgar, pass the salt,' and if the man hesitated for
just a second
, he'd say, ‘Look at this unconscious hostility. So much deeply repressed anger you can't simply pass the salt?' That was our household. Nothing could be free of reason.”

“Oh? So he could be difficult?”

“Quite.”

“And . . . and was he that way with you?” I asked.

“Of course. I was his firstborn, Giovanni. The brilliant child. I once finished second in a grade-school chemistry competition. My father sat me down and said, ‘Josef, I know you could've gotten first but you're scared to, so you
chose
second. But I'm telling you, it's
okay
to come in first.'”

“He thought you'd done it on purpose?”

“Everything, Giovanni, was
on purpose
.”

“But why intentionally lose a chemistry prize?” I asked.

“He told me I was scared to surpass him. ‘The consequences of oedipal ambivalence,' he called it. According to my father, I was overly modest, self-effacing. I could outdo him but was scared to.”

“Was it true?” I asked.

“Reasons are persuasive. If a child's served them at a young age, he eats them up. Everything that happened in my childhood was that way. My mother received the worst of it. If she was late meeting us, she was trying to undermine him. If she forgot her keys, she was expressing hostility. Everything was a symbol. So, yes, I believed him. What's worse, there was some truth to it. I
was
scared to outdo him.”

I smiled. “So did you start getting first place in your chemistry contests?”

“I did very well in school, yes, but it was complicated. The more my father egged me on—to be what he knew
I could be—the more I took it to mean he thought I was secretly incapable, that I
needed
him to nudge me. He developed this exercise in which I would insult him.”

“Insult him?”

“After dinner every Sunday night, he and I would go into his dark, cluttered office, in the basement of our brownstone. He would lock the door and lie down on the chaise, where his patients went. I would sit in his chair, where he sat with his patients, and he would force me to insult him.”

“And you did?”

“Of course. I was young. Thirteen, fourteen. Too young to rebel. I wanted only his approval. Now to gain it, I had to insult him. I had no idea what to say.”

“What did you?”

“He fed me lines.”

“Fed them to you?” I asked.

The doctor smiled ironically. “Ah, childhood.”

“What were they?”

“‘Call me a fraud. Tell me I'm a small man with an overgrown reputation. You will dwarf me. You will outshine me. Say, “You are a shit, Father.”'”

“And did you?”

“I couldn't disobey.”

“How did it feel, to do that?”

“At first I mumbled, and my father said, ‘Speak up, son. Scream it!' He wanted it louder. Eventually, I did. Afterward, every Sunday, I went in my room and cried.”

“Did your mother know he was doing this?”

“My mother did whatever Father thought was best. If he believed something was important, she did, too.”

“Did you resent her for that?”

“Of course. In childhood one finds time to resent everybody. I don't anymore. I understand. Part of the responsibility of any parent is to provide his child with something to resent. Or else there's a kind of stagnation, an inertia, from generation to generation. Resentment is the language with which parents speak to their children.”

I smiled again. “Sounds like something your father might say.”

“My father was often right, Giovanni. That was the problem. Nothing, I don't think, is so insidious as the truth. If he had been an abject brute, that would have presented its own challenges, its own traumas, yet it would have been easier, in the end, to rid myself of him. But he wasn't. He was a brilliant and insightful man.”

“Who forced you to insult him,” I said.

“Worse than that, I'm afraid. By the time I turned seventeen, my father had all but anointed me his confidant. I was his first son, you see, and he interpreted this role with a kind of biblical intensity. He would take me into his office, lie down on the chaise, and confess. This, when I was eighteen. He worried my younger brother was too dull. That he no longer found my mother attractive. In many ways I became
his
psychiatrist, though in truth he orchestrated all that happened in that room. He divulged some very private things to me. Confessed that he'd cheated on my mother. With a patient, no less.”

“He told you this?”

“A Russian-Jewish girl, a nineteen-year-old. Her father, a renowned dental surgeon, had brought her in. She suffered from fainting spells, anxiety, and hysterical deafness. After a few months of analysis, though, my father was able to locate the source of her neurosis. The patient's father, you see, had made it his habit to belittle and disparage her and did so terribly during crucial stages of her erotic development. As a result, she felt herself to be worthless. Social settings of any kind created such anxiety in her that she fainted or ‘went deaf.' My father uncovered this all fairly quickly. Yet as any analyst knows, naming the problem is simple in comparison with
treating
it. It's in treatment that true ingenuity is required. You may look at a patient—sit across from him day after day—knowing exactly what's wrong with him, what it is precisely that troubles him. But that insight is meaningless if you don't know how to provoke such insight in him.” He shifted in his chair. “As it happened, my father tried a number of things: hypnosis, word association, even some Gestalt methods, which he generally considered frivolous, but nothing reached the girl. It was around this time my father was experimenting with his New Method, the one I would eventually study. This New Method—it depended on the concept of transference. Have you heard the term?

“It's a common, indeed inevitable, occurrence in psychoanalytic treatment. When a patient transfers a deep psychic attachment—one usually with the father or mother—onto the analyst. In most schools of thought this transference is considered a kind of spell, one that must be broken. The New Method, however, involved
exploiting
this spell, this transference, very explicitly, so that the doctor—well, let's say, if the patient will inevitably transform
the doctor into her father, the doctor, my father believed, must
play the role
of the father, must become the father the patient wished she had. A second, better father. Sometimes this meant he would act domineering, sometimes meek. The character the doctor played would depend on the patient.”

“And in this case the better father would
sleep
with his daughter?”

“My father believed the patient needed to
perform
the incest moment so as to free herself from its grip.”

“Did any of this
work
?”

“Of course not. She became infatuated with my father. His refusal to sleep with her again she took as a confirmation of her worthlessness. Fun for the night, then in the trash. Daddy's mistress, instead of Daddy's bride. She had a series of hysterical episodes, even told people what my father had done, but no one, not even her own father, believed her word over Micah Orphels's.”

“Your father admitted all of this to you?”

“He said, ‘I've made many mistakes and will make more. But it is all in the name of science, which is, by its nature, provisional.'”

“And how did
you
take it?” I asked.

“Since I was supposed to act as his analyst, I said, ‘Do you really believe sleeping with her was a scientific exercise?' He said, ‘It gave me brief physical pleasure, sure. It catered to my ego, yes, but principally it was an experiment in treatment. A failed one, in this case, but I believe I have found a New Method. It needs to be implemented more carefully, but the future lies in transference.'”

“Why deny doing it to the patient's family then?”

“I asked him that exactly. ‘They wouldn't understand,' he said, and their misunderstanding would ruin his reputation. Prevent him from helping the patients who depended on him so.”

“Did you believe him?”

“No. I was beginning to understand that he was a dangerous narcissist, a master of justification. I hated him and resented my mother for allowing him to run wild. He once asked me to simulate choking him.”

“Choking him?”