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BY NOW, Elio’d made it back to the therapist enough times to realize that guy didn’t know the first thing about psychology. Hell, had he at least known about body language, he would have refrained from touching his crotch so many times in the forty-five minutes they spent together that Elio thought the guy had genital crabs. Not that he cared, but the whole thing was unsettling, to say the least. Elio often stared out the window, or settled his line of sight on stacks of books and papers on the floor, just to keep his eyes from tripping over this type’s pants.
One day, the idiot asked him about water. Did he have an opinion about it?
“Sure,” Elio said. “Water’s good, isn’t it?”
“And how do you feel about water here?”
“Here?” Elio said, holding his chin in the curve between his thumb and his index finger.
“Yeah, here. Water.”
Elio was starting to suspect a setup. He’d almost forgotten why he was there, so caught up had he been in talking about his life, even if he’d made most of it up, including his contact with his father. What the hell was he supposed to say? That the water here was infested with sharks? That it was contaminated? That if he’d caught hepatitis twice and had so many stripes on his liver that it looked like a zebra, it was because of the water here? That his mother’d drunk three times her size in water and died?
“What else?”
This guy was starting to piss him off. “What else? What else?” Elio said, scratching the side of his mouth to bid for time.
“Is this a difficult question for you?” the therapist said, leaning back in his chair.
Elio leaned back in his chair too, and laughed. “How difficult can water be? We get thirsty and we drink water. We’re dirty and we take a shower. That’s not so hard. Water’s easy.” This fucking idiot was not going to let him go until he fucking told him what he wanted to know.
“Look,” he said. “You’ve been coming here for weeks now. I think we understand each other, don’t we? The total length of your time here depends on whether or not we understand each other.”
“Sure,” Elio said. “I have a job to do. I am here to continue to admit to my revolutionary shortcomings and to be reeducated in the ways of civic propriety and ideological choices.”
“That’s right. I also made a promise to your wife. We were to identify the symptoms and provide a cure. Our weekly meetings and your admissions are the cure.”
What the fuck? Was this guy for real? What promise was he talking about? How well did Maria know this guy, anyway?
“Yeah,” Elio said. “She told me. You know, the thing is that I’ve told you everything there’s to know. I got nothing else, man. I’m emptied out.”
“I actually think you’re holding back. Why is that?”
“That’s all I have, I’m telling you.”
“None of my business—is that it? Is that what you want to say? Well, the thing is that it is my business. You see, I got a file here that says that you have a record of unusual relations, contacts going back to at least 1959.”
Here we go, Elio thought. They weren’t going to let him live it down. Goddamn 1959. He didn’t fucking leave! His father left alone! He wasn’t his father. He was here, wasn’t he? Shit, he might as well have left—a lot of difference his choices had made. Elio heard a murmur coming from behind the door, then he heard something else, the scraping of a chair on tile. Who the hell else was listening to their conversation? Had there been somebody sitting right outside the door? Was there a tape recorder somewhere in a drawer? Behind a book? In the fucking trash can? Elio imagined a rope tightening around his neck. The room suddenly got cold, real cold. Snow cold. He had to get the fuck out of there, or he was going to pass out.