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?”
“‘An oedipal pantomime’ is what he called it. Part of his New Method. But I began to actually choke him.”
“And what happened?”
“I stopped myself, of course. When I did, he began coughing and rubbing his neck, and I was terrified I’d actually hurt him. ‘Good job,’ he said when he’d caught his breath. ‘Excellent!’”
• • •
It happened with the doctor’s embrace that first session. Like an athlete returned from a long injury, I rediscovered the genius of my limbs, and in the weeks that followed I became, both in and outside of his office—on the benches of the lawn and in my room alone—a second, better Orphels.
An impersonation hadn’t fixed me this way since Bernard. I quit my need for cigarettes. Memory of the gun no longer weighed on my hip. When I thought of Fantasma Falls, I felt, if anything, empathy for the people in it—for Nathan, all the Julie Darks, even for Bernard. Toward my fellow patients and the conscientious nurses, for the very birds and bees I brimmed with this same empathy: empathy, which is the surest sign of remove. I was so improved, in fact, it didn’t rattle me in the least when word began to spread, and patients began to recognize, through the veil of my beard, the face of Harry Knott. How did I end up here? I was asked by a stooped patient with sunken eyes. In Orphels’s voice, I told the truth: “I almost killed a man.”
Above all I listened greedily. The doctor, I discovered, had fashioned himself into a kind of key, a key of person, unlocking the men and women of the world. On the cushioned perch of a bay window, at tables in the mess hall, I began to conduct impromptu sessions. Underneath an oak tree. In a back carrel of the library, strangers confessed to me. It had to do with my eyes, my smile. A man who couldn’t stop chewing his nails told me about the niece he had, in the depths of addiction, prostituted. A curly-haired patient with abstracted blue eyes admitted that he may have killed a man—caught a bum mugging a woman, struck him with a lead pipe, right there on the street, then ran away.
Ideas were striking. A new act. I’d call Max after my release, imminent, I knew, given my rapid convalescence. We’d resurrect our old stage show, with a twist: I would now be Doctor Giovanni Bernini (Max could make up some bunk about a European medical degree). Each volunteer would come onstage and lie on a chaise, and I, Doctor Giovanni Bernini, regal in my chair, would tease out each one’s story until the audience—all of us together—had experienced that lurid, healing joy: the airing of another’s secrets. “An Experimental Evening with Doctor Giovanni Bernini,” we’d call it, or “You, with Doctor Bernini.” The first volunteer might be hard to come by, but after that, who wouldn’t want their story confirmed before an attentive audience? It was what all of it had been pushing toward: the insides of another person.
Of course, the interior I was most attentive to in those weeks was that of Doctor Orphels. That he hadn’t yet noticed my stolen speech or upright posture I considered a miracle. I was terrified he’d picked up on it that day he accused me of projection, but there had been no mention of it since. Every day he revealed his innermost experience without the slightest hesitation. No pausing or stuttering, no pocket-digging or side-glancing. The good doctor looked me right in the eyes and confessed, divulging his life story in a voice as airy as his office. There were no walls inside the man. Every question I asked he answered, and in this thoroughgoing manner, like a homeowner showing a burglar around his house, Doctor Orphels opened all the drawers of a forty-year life, handed me his secrets. Like a man confessing directly to a spy.
“All my life it had been my father’s plan for me to enroll at City University for premedical studies,” the doctor began one afternoon. “And when the time came, I did explicitly that. My parents paid for a studio apartment in midtown with the expectation that I would commit myself to class work. A sensible enough plan, except I was completely unable to focus. Let me say, I have an outspoken unconscious mind. I am thankful for it. For some it’s all but disabled: a person might be speeding toward a doomed marriage, an entrapping career, but their unconscious—whether through dreams or sickness or any of its usual emissaries—will keep mum. Mine, however, is, well—let’s say, forthright. So it was at school. It—my unconscious, I mean—wouldn’t let me focus. For the first time in my life I suffered anxiety attacks, couldn’t sleep at all. Soon I stopped attending class altogether. It wasn’t so much a decision as a pattern that developed. I didn’t tell my parents, of course. On the nights I came home for dinner, I told them school was splendid, though I hadn’t been in weeks.”
“How did you occupy yourself?” I asked.
“Worrying, as you may know, is a wonderful hobby. It occupied me quite a bit until I discovered something even better. City University is situated in midtown, near the Handelmen Towers, an area flooded with bankers and stock traders. It wasn’t long before I befriended some of these people at lunch counters, neighborhood bars. Understand, the world of finance had never interested me. Jews, they say, are divided into two strains: the mercantile and the Talmudic, and I fell comfortably into this latter category. Money was important, certainly, but only as a means to a greater pursuit: of medicine, for instance, the mind, God. These brokers and bankers were the first men I’d met who had devoted their lives to money as an end unto itself. Every day they herded into the revolving doors of those midtown skyscrapers, those temples to money—disappeared for ten hours—then came pouring out, each with their slight variation on the same uniform: the fedoras, Italian suits, Swiss watches. Like vestments. The first ones I met were soft-spoken, especially when money itself came up. Real dollar amounts. They had nicknames and code words for it, as if saying the name would be blasphemous. I don’t mean this sarcastically: Money for them was a religious object. I started in the mailroom.”
“All while telling your parents you were enrolled at school?”
“Yes. As it happened, I found I had a talent for the financial life, the sangfroid for it—that might be the word. In four years, I became a full-fledged trader of stocks. In seven, I had bought a large penthouse apartment uptown.”
“Seduced by the high life?”
“Not at all. I’ve never succeeded in becoming a materialist. I know very well the limits of such consolation. Some of my colleagues may have believed they worked to furnish a certain lifestyle—a word I have never found much use for—to buy their wives diamonds, for instance, or to take lavish trips to Rome, but it’s not true. You know what money gives us? Why people worship it?” He smiled. “It’s a freedom from reasons. Money is the most efficient way to rid your life of reasons. No one ever questions why you want money. Doing something for the money can never be the wrong reason to do it. I wanted to eradicate the whole chorus of reason from my life, that life of my father. In this effort, money was a perfect aid.”
“Your parents found out, I assume.”
“They did, yes. I don’t remember exactly when or how. My father, of course, was horrified. For months he wouldn’t talk to me. Neither he nor my mother. By abandoning medicine, I’d betrayed them. By choosing the world of finance, doubly so. Keep in mind, he was a European intellectual. All of this was foreign to them, and yet my father’s disapproval, which once might have paralyzed me, had no effect now. ‘What is it you do all day?’ he would say. ‘What does all this matter? It means nothing.’ But when he asked me this, I was wearing my finest Italian suit, driving them around in a chauffeured car, so his questions were barely audible, if you know what I mean. You could barely hear them over the shine of my cuff links, my watch. I distinctly remember my father getting smaller.”
“Money talks?”
“I think of it this way: My wealth was my moat. I felt it especially with my colleagues, men I had worked with ten hours a day for eight years. I knew their wives, their children, their mistresses, yet we didn’t know each other at all. We were all separated by our moats—our suits, our drivers. That’s how we wanted it. We were made wonderfully apart, by money.”
“I don’t quite understand. What happened? How was it you ended up here, as a doctor?”
“My father dropped dead of a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So people say when a stranger dies.”
“How did you take it?”
“At the time I took it surprisingly well. I escaped into my work.”
“Hadn’t you already?”
“Such is the nature of escape: Since one can never truly accomplish it, one goes to further and further lengths trying to. Many nights I slept in the office. I traded day and night. My coworkers were perplexed, I think, and couched their perplexity, as many do, in jokes and nicknames. I was known as a ‘horse’—what we admiringly called our hard workers—but never before had I, or anyone at the office, steamed ahead with this kind of urgency: pacing the office day and night, yelling (something I never used to do) at subordinates who bungled my orders. And yet it worked. Watching money accrue in my bank account, watching certain stock prices rally still brought me a near-religious peace, and I thanked God that it could still be so, that money could be my medicine. Once a week I visited my mother, an occasion I very much dreaded, so I dressed in my finest camel-hair coat and treated her to very expensive meals. I gave her gifts: a fur stole, a jeweled pendant, objects she couldn’t pretend to want. My father’s death had obliterated her. I knew on some level, as everyone does, that I was not entirely well, but I believed that it would pass. A few weeks later the skin ailment appeared.”
“What ailment?”
“A rash on my fingertips that soon spread to my palms, up my arms, and down my back. It looked like a second-degree burn. Quite painful.”
“Did you go to the doctor?”
“I am a Jew, Giovanni. I went to many doctors.”
“And what did they say?” I asked.
“It was a food allergy, a rash, a bug infestation. The diagnoses were too diverse to be trusted. Within a month it had spread to my chin. I had to wear a handkerchief over my face. There were fewer handshakes, fewer drinks after work. I had gone from likably eccentric to dangerously so, dressed absurdly in huge wool coats with a bandana around my mouth. It was a panicked time. Some must’ve thought I was dying. There were moments when I myself did. Alone is when I felt safest. I have never been religious—was not raised to be—but I couldn’t help but wonder if I was being punished.”
“For?”
“Betraying my father.”
“I see,” I said. “And how did you find out the cause of it?”
“Accidentally,” he said. “I had taken a week off work. Some doctors recommended I do it. The stress of work and of my father’s death might, they hypothesized, cause this kind of spectacular nervous reaction. The theory never held much sway with me since my work, no matter how busy, always brought me more peace than anxiety, and yet here I was, away from the office, much improved. In just a few days, the rash receded entirely from my face and back. My fingers were clearing up, too. Imagine how relieved I was. Yet the rash was not eradicated. Indeed, when I paid for groceries or a carton of milk, the peeling worsened in my fingers, my skin itched terribly. So it was that I came to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“I was allergic to money. That week away from work, my skin was better at all times, except when I touched hard coin.”
“Is such a thing possible? Were you handling so much currency at the office?”
“The allergy, I soon realized, didn’t require physical contact with money. If I was making a phone call about a trade, for instance, the receiver irritated my ear. If I was sitting in my office—where stocks were bought and sold—my breath shortened.”
“You were allergic to the idea of money?” I asked.
“In a way, yes. I was allergic to those objects that through any concatenation of events led me to money. So I came to understand. Of course, it required much trial and error. I now consider it my first diagnosis as a psychoanalyst.”
“What then?”
“After much hand-wringing—all too literal, I’m afraid—I decided to visit a psychiatrist. Given my perverse history with the profession, you’ll understand my reluctance to do so, but I saw no other option. This was an ailment for the mind—a mental allergy, as it were—so I required a mind-doctor, a shrink, a second father.”
“What were you hoping to get out of your analysis?”
“The goal was simple: to rid myself of this skin problem and return, unimpeded, to work. That’s what I found so ironic. Mentally, as they say, I had never enjoyed my work more, yet my body was somehow revolting against it. Of course, my analysis changed everything.”
“How so?”
“To recapitulate all the reversals, revelations, frustrations, terrors, and insights that occur in successful analysis is to do it a grave disservice. Suffice it to say, I realized I was in the wrong line of work. Often the body cries out on the mind’s behalf. Such was the case with me—I told you mine was a forthright unconscious! The more we engaged in analysis, the more my skin cleared, yet the more my skin cleared, the more I loathed and feared my office. My associates, men I had worked with for over fifteen years, men whose company had brought me solace and sturdiness—they looked like cowards to me now, collaborators and liars. They lived in a mode of evasion. That’s what money seemed to me now: an exercise in postponement. Watching it accumulate brought me dread. When would I spend all this money? What would spending it do? I’ll put it this way, though the words only skim the surface of the experience: The moat, the moat of money, protected me too much. It cut me off from the kind of human engagement I had so long run away from and now sought again. I realized I could not escape my father. Nor did I want to. My destiny—I use the word intentionally—was to become a psychoanalyst.”
“I think I know what you mean,” I said.
“Oh?”
“I, too, used a moat.”
“Yes? What form did yours take?”
“I played at being someone I wasn’t. Someone terrible. I did it for years.”
“Who was that?”
I said, “The man I tried to kill.”
• • •
So it began. As the doctor recounted his father’s death or discussed his start in the field of psychiatry, words, unbidden, rose in my chest. “My mother was murdered,” I declared. “I used to give these speeches. All of them lies.” In Orphels’s voice, I would speak. The way it came out, it felt closer to listening than talking. With each name I uttered—Max, Mr. Heedling, Lucy, Bernard—with each anecdote I shared (when I thought I was being booed the first time I performed at the Communiqué, when I first learned to flirt while aping Max at the train station), the more deliciously foreign it sounded. What a rare fellow, I caught myself thinking, this Giovanni the Impressionist.
I wanted a story like the doctor’s, one driven by its end, but mine resembled more the first blabberings of a child, when the impulse to speak trumps any ability to do so. My experiences were in a terrible knot, and we depended on the wayward, but thorough, logic of association to untangle them. Often we worked backward, starting, say, with my malfeasance in Fantasma Falls, which led to the sight of Lucy and Bernard backstage, which led, in turn, to my failure to imitate Lucy, which recalled, in the following order, my journey to the City; my encounter with Max; my politeness at the station; my fondness for Mr. Heedling; and last, always, to Mama.
Certain phrases in particular caught his attention. “Sympathetic to the bone,” for one.
“Do you feel that you are?” he asked.
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll explain this way: We used to do an act onstage. Two family members would come up. A mother and son, say. Max would lead the son and me behind a screen at the side of the stage, then the two of us—the volunteer and I—would go backstage for a second and come up with a little speech, one that used the names of the child’s parents or some personal details that couldn’t be faked. Then we’d hide behind the screen again and deliver our speeches, one at a time, so the mother would have to guess which of us was which. Usually the mothers (and the husbands, and the wives, and the children, for we did all types) were dead certain they could pick their son’s voice. ‘The second one,’ they’d say. ‘I’d know my Jimmy anywhere.’ Lo and behold, after a tense silence, I’d come out from behind the screen. ‘Hi, Mommy!’ I’d say, and the audience would applaud and this mother, who a moment ago in her heart of hearts knew that I was her son, would stare at me, this huckster in a tuxedo—and how did she react? This is why I bring it up. How do you think someone would greet such a surprise?”
“She was happy.”
“Have you ever seen a person embarrassed by their own good fortune, a person mortified by luck? That’s how it was. These mothers didn’t know what to do with their hands. They blushed, hugged me. The men grabbed my shoulder, they pumped my hand. Many times this happened, and yet every time I stepped out from behind the screen, I secretly flinched, sure that the family would see what a charlatan I was, that the audience would join, and I would be stoned.”
“That seems extreme,” he said.
“The stage, Doctor, knows only extremes.”
“Why a charlatan, though? Were you cheating them? Would you pretend to have produced a voice you hadn’t?”
“Not at all. Sometimes they did guess right, and that was notable, too, for how disappointed the mother or father always was.”
“Why a charlatan then?” he asked again.
“Because they thought I was doing something I wasn’t. Why else would they react that way?”
“You interpreted their interest in your act as a belief that you were ‘sympathetic to the bone.’”
“I suppose so.”
“Were you? When you performed your stage act were you being ‘sympathetic to the bone’?”
“No. That’s what I mean. I knew I wasn’t, but I hoped I was.”
“How did you know you weren’t?”
“Because I was so relieved when each volunteer stepped off the stage. After they’d thanked me—hugged me, patted me, shook me—after the applause had died, the volunteer walked down the stairs back into the audience, and a new volunteer emerged, and I was thankful. Because each one—they wanted to talk and share secrets, or do whatever people do to ‘get to know each other,’ and each, if they didn’t have to return to the audience, would have discovered what a fraud I was.”
“Fraud, charlatan, huckster. Why? You did exactly what you purported to do: you exhibited a skill and they appreciated it.”
“But they believed an insight attended that skill, and it didn’t.”
“But how do you know that?”
“I appreciate it, Doctor, and I suppose it was thrilling to be imitated, but what I was doing, you see, it concerned the outside of a person. They thought I’d touched the inside.”
“To the bone.”
“Precisely.”
“But is there no place where the outside and inside meet?”
“Not that I know of.”
“But I think you do,” he said. “One of your peculiar phrases. The loose seam that sticks out and, when pulled, unravels a person.”
“The thread.”
“Let me ask,” he said. “Why does one pull it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why must one—must you—pull on it? Couldn’t one observe a loose seam without tugging it?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s a malicious act—or it can be—to unravel a person. As a child, it was pure impulse. I couldn’t help it. I was impatient.”
“Impatient with what?” he asked.
“The theater of things, maybe. I think that was what my politeness was about—my being so polite when I worked at the train station. I was participating in a theater—‘Hello, ma’am,’ ‘A good day to you, sir.’ All that false gloss on life. What Bernard called the ‘show.’ I was entering it.”
“It reminds me of the thought you had when you first mimicked Maximilian: that everyone around you was an imitator, too.”
“Perhaps. The world was crowded with impressionists, so, I suppose, one had to pull their threads and find out who everyone really was.”
“There’s another word for that,” he said. “A projection.”
“Not my favorite word.”
“Perhaps the hiding and acting that you ascribed to others was actually your own.”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Which begs the question: If you were projecting your own feelings onto others, and as a result pulling those people’s threads—well, did you ever wish for someone to pull your thread?”
“Perhaps.”
“I believe we’re hitting on something.”
“Why’s that?”
“Whenever we hit on something, you say, ‘Perhaps.’”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Let me then repeat the reporter’s question. The one he asked you that night, for it’s an important one, I think: What is your thread, Giovanni?”
“Mine?”
“If someone wanted to impersonate you, how would he?”
“I don’t know. I’ve certainly never been imitated, but I suppose you mean it more abstractly than that. . . . When I discovered Lucy with Bernard, that maybe was close to it.”
“The moment of betrayal.”
“Yes. It felt like something had been revealed. Like something inside me had been pulled out.”
“When else?”
“This is strange. It just occurred to me.”
“What?”
“When I wrote those letters to my mother, when she wrote hers to me. The writing—I never described or thought of it so—but it felt like that. On the page, I was free to pretend to be myself. To pay out my thread, if that makes sense.”
“Opposite experiences, it seems to me, and like all opposites, quite similar.”
“I don’t catch your meaning.”
“The two you mentioned,” he said. “Writing. And betrayal.”
• • •
Flooded as I was by the desire to reveal, I had to dam up at times and withhold certain close gems of facts and feeling. Most of all I had to maintain the ruse that I was not impersonating the doctor. This, of all my jeweled secrets, was the one I could not give away. An easy illusion to maintain, it turned out, since Orphels was too engaged in my story to detect the voice with which I told it. Each day he stared into his own wounded eyes, each day listened to his own overenunciated voice, and each day failed to notice. The differences between us were those of dress (he in his jeans and flannel shirts, I in my scrubs), hairstyle (his slick and parted down the middle, mine a cauliflower of black), and facial hair (he clean-shaven, I messily bearded). Early on I hunted around No More Walls for pomade, locating some eventually on a gaunt chin-scratcher named Tony. That night after some modest experimentation I succeeded in parting my hair exactly like Orphels’s. For an hour I was delighted, striding about the room. “Money was my moat. It protected me,” I said, “Resentment is the language with which parents speak to their children,” before realizing, with crashing disappointment, that I would have to wash it out. It brought the resemblance too close. As much as I despised my own hair, it allowed me to maintain the ruse. From then on, I applied the gel only when alone in my room, usually before bed. The sound it made (the faint crinkling against the pillow) functioned as a kind of medicine.
It—my hair—was nagging me the afternoon I narrated to Doctor Orphels the worst day of my life. I’d failed to wash it the night before. The doctor’s, meanwhile, shined and behaved, a black swim cap, except for that thin part in the middle. I envied his jeans and starched flannel shirts, too. Nonetheless, I managed to outline that fateful scene at the theater: the call in the office, the brawl between Bernard and me. “Jesse Unheim killed my mother,” I told him and, after the story, confessed that I had never talked about it before.
“How does it feel? To talk about it?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet. Good, I suppose. Emptying.”
“Emptying?” he asked.
“It’s always been that way for me. With my private stories. They’re like babies in the womb.”
“How do you mean?”
“A pregnant woman wants to deliver the baby, of course, but she is terrified, I’d think, to give birth: to divide with her child. It’s like that with these stories.”
“You’re afraid to separate from them?”
“I suppose.”
“This will sound strange: Do believe you were born?”
I looked at my hands. “I think so, yes.”
“You said your mother was the one person you never needed to impersonate.”
“Yes.”
“Is that because she was a part of you?” he asked.
“I divided from her pretty violently when I moved out west. For five years we barely spoke.”
“Escape is a far cry from separation.”
“It sounds wise, Doctor, but you’ll need to explain.”
“The place or person you’re escaping—that is the engine of your days. If your mother was what you were escaping, then you were quite close to her those years. Too close still. Unseparated.”
“Perhaps.”
“Is it a betrayal to be born?”
“Abstractly, I suppose.”
“Is it a betrayal for the baby to divide with the mother?”
“This is all too abstract, Doctor. You can’t talk about life this way. Like it’s some math proof.”
“Please answer the question.”
“But it’s the worst kind of shrink question,” I said. “Really, it’s absurd.”
“You’re unusually defensive today.”
“On the contrary, I’ve been maximally forthcoming.”
“Then be forthcoming again.”
“Let’s move on to something else: your early days in medicine?”
“Let me in, Giovanni.”
“I’m not? I just told you something I’ve never told another soul in all my life. Is that not letting you in?”
“If you refuse to investigate what it means, yes.”
“How much does something like that have to mean?”
“Please answer my question,” he said.
“Fine. Is it a betrayal to be born? Yes.”
“Now you’re being dismissive.”
“When you started in medicine, did you immediately know you’d made the right decision?”
“We’re knocking on the door, Giovanni, but you’re refusing to enter.”
“Was it the refuge you hoped it would be?” I asked.
“I think it’s time we moved on.”
“Good.”
He sighed. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed, Giovanni, for I myself have encouraged it. After our first session, I knew you would not talk about yourself, would not begin the therapy unless you could do so in another’s voice, so I lent you mine. I lent you my voice, my posture, my facial expressions. More than that, I lent you my history. It is the New Method, Giovanni. My father’s method. To play the role dictated by transference. Usually one becomes the patient’s father or mother or lover, but in your case, the transference has required my taking on the idealized version of the patient himself, of you, Giovanni Bernini, and so I gave you my life story, let you borrow it. I knew some of your story—the death of your mother, the attack on Bernard, whom you had impersonated for years—and shaped my own so that it could better mirror yours. So far it has worked. You’ve told me quite a lot, and for that I am grateful. And now we’re knocking on the door—your betrayal of your mother. But this, Giovanni, this you must understand. It is not sufficient for you to surround yourself with yet another moat if you are to be cured. Being me is no different from being Bernard. And so it must be said: You are not me, never have been and never will. Your fingers on the armrests of that chair do not feel the leathery scratch as mine do, your toes do not inhabit your cotton socks as mine do, your thoughts do not move and agitate in the skull as mine do. In fact, these past few weeks, as you’ve strode in and out of this office in that eerie reproduction of my gait, walked the grounds and, as me, exuded a subtle superiority over the other patients—all the while you have been yourself. When you were Bernard, you were yourself. When you were Heedling and Max, you were. You are yourself right now. You have always been yourself. Behind the moat there you lie, hiding still. We have just been skating on the surface—we’ve found some words for what ails you, and that’s a start, but we need to plumb deeper now. Tell me, Giovanni, is it a betrayal to be born?”