The Orgone Experiment

A Novel Based on the Life, Work, Persecution, and Death of Wilhelm Reich

J. P. Befumo

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Cover design by J. P. Befumo
This book was printed in the United States of America.

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“Man’s right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan...”

—Wilhelm Reich, OROP Desert (response to FDA complaint)

Preface

This story is a work of fiction, based on the life of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), a Viennese psychiatrist and pioneer psychoanalyst. Early in his career, Reich attracted the attention of many prominent scientists, and was hailed as “a new Pasteur in the field of psychotherapy” (Jerome Greenfield. 1974 Wilhelm Reich Vs. The USA . New York: W.W. Norton & Company).

Reich attributed all psychological, and many physical dysfunctions to sexual repression. He argued that physical, mental, and emotional health could not be segregated from social issues. An early proponent of abortion rights, safe sex, and universal tolerance, Reich established free clinics in Vienna and Berlin. He provided counseling and health care to the poor, and distributed literature and free contraceptives.

These controversial activities resulted in his being disavowed by Sigmund Freud, who had previously considered Reich a protégé. He was also expelled from the Viennese Psychiatric Association, and even expunged by the Communist Party.

Reich came to New York City in 1939, and taught at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village. He theorized a physical analog to Freud’s concept of the libido, underlying a new form of energy. Reich called this universal force orgone . He believed that orgone was the source of organization that overcomes entropy, and results in the formation of life.

Reich established a laboratory complex called Orgonon near the town of Rangeley, Maine. His ongoing investigation into the nature and properties of orgone led to the development of the Orgone Energy Accumulator , which he believed could collect and intensify this universal orgone flux.

Reich claimed that treatments using this device could assuage (but not necessarily cure) many ailments, including cancer. These assertions aroused the suspicion of mainstream medical science. Despite official condemnation, numerous physicians reported startling success when using Reich’s techniques to treat advanced cancer.

The medical and scientific communities, however, were not the only ones provoked by Reich’s findings. By 1947 he had also come to the attention of the FDA, which launched a massive investigation of his endeavors. In 1954 the FDA filed a blatantly falsified complaint accusing Reich of fraudulent activities.

Reich’s naïve idealism exacerbated his difficulties. He responded to the FDA complaint by arguing that scientific research was beyond the jurisdiction of any court. The court chose to interpret this response as a crank letter. When Reich, believing that he had acted properly, failed to appear at the hearing, Judge John D. Clifford Jr., under pressure from J. Edgar Hoover, entered a default judgment, and issued the flawed injunction as requested.

The proceedings continued for years. Although the fraud charge was never tried, Reich was convicted of contempt, and sentenced to two years in prison. First, however, he was forced to burn several hundred volumes of his work. (The injunction stated that he , not the federal agents, would do the actual burnings; an effort to exonerate the action on a technicality.)

Wilhelm Reich was found dead in his cell at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary on November 3, 1957—three days before his first parole hearing. The cause of death was listed as ‘myocardial insufficiency with sudden heart failure’. He was sixty years old

In his last years, Reich claimed to have run a motor using only orgone energy—a demonstration witnessed by several prominent scientists. In his article “The Day Reich Died,” Harvey Matusow , a fellow prisoner serving time for perjury in the McCarthy witch-hunts, claimed that Reich had spent most of his time working on a book entitled Creation . In this book, Reich claimed, he developed the mathematical formulation of ‘countergravity ’.

This book was never found.

Newspaper reports confirm Reich’s ability to control weather using an apparatus he called the Cloudbuster . On July 6, 1953, attempting to help local farmers after a prolonged drought, Reich’s efforts were reported to have resulted in 1.74 inches of rain over a three-day period in which the National Weather Service had predicted no chance of rainfall whatsoever. In subsequent experiments outside Tucson, Arizona, many credible witnesses described his having created a patch of green in the midst of desert.

By far, the most significant of his claimed discoveries resulted from the Oranur Experiment , which purported to demonstrate the ability of orgone energy to damp nuclear radiation. (‘Oranur ’ was an acronym derived from OR gone A nd NU clear R eaction.) Numerous witnesses allege that when one of these experiments backfired, everyone in the vicinity suffered from symptoms similar to radiation sickness, and the area was uninhabitable for some time thereafter.

Convinced that his discoveries were crucial to national security, Reich reported his findings to several government agencies, including the Atomic Energy Commission, the Bureau of Health, Education, and Welfare, the Air Force, and the White House. He claimed to have met with president Eisenhower—an allegation denied by the government, although records do prove that the president was in the tiny town of Rangeley, Maine on the date when Reich claimed the meeting occurred, and no official reason for the visit is known. Many witnesses confirm that during this period, military aircraft frequently circled Reich’s facility at low altitudes.

That Reich met with Albert Einstein can be confirmed, and on January 13, 1941, the two worked together far into the night, analyzing the results of Reich’s experiments. By all accounts, Einstein initially considered Reich’s discovery significant enough to set up another meeting for February 1, and to borrow Reich’s experimental apparatus. Then, abruptly, Einstein severed all communication with Reich. These and other occurrences convinced Reich that he was the victim of a government conspiracy to obstruct his discoveries and discredit him personally.

Whether Wilhelm Reich was one of the great geniuses of our age, or a confused neurotic, remains for history to decide. What can be concluded from available evidence is that he honestly believed in the worth of his work, and was not, as detractors claimed, a fraudulent crook.

The Orgone Experiment is a fictional tale based on the life of this colorful, misunderstood, and tortured soul. I have tried to remain faithful to the major events of Reich’s life, while dramatizing the story in a manner consistent with what is known of his work and personality. The final trial scenes draw upon the actual court transcriptions in order to convey the depth and eloquence of Reich’s insights and responses.

Chapter One

"Slut! Whore! Lie to me again and I’ll kill you!”

Crouched in a dark corner of his closet, ten-year-old Wilhelm Reich clenched his eyes and forced two small hands against his ears so hard it felt as if his skull might collapse like an egg. Still the savage sounds from the kitchen could not be obscured.

“My fault my fault my fault my fault,” he chanted. The whimper of his own voice almost masked the sounds of anger and fear from the other room, but could not camouflage the sharp report of his father’s huge hand against flesh, or his mother’s subsequent shriek. A moment later the slam of a door and a fading staccato of footfalls signaled an end to the immediate crisis.

When the last angry thud of leather on flagstone had faded, Willie ventured to lower his hands. That was a mistake, for it permitted his mother’s piteous sobs to reach his ears.

“My fault my fault my fault my fault,” he repeated.

This, of course, was not the first time Leon Reich had accused his wife of similar transgressions, nor would the bruises on her body, swelling of her face, or welts on her back be without precedent. The situation was remarkable only because this time Willie knew the indictments were true, and that his guilt was warranted.

“Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” He again covered his ears and chanted the single word until meaning had faded and his mother’s moans were almost obscured. “Why did I do it?” he asked the darkness, but the question only served to replay the memory in excruciating focus.

Willie’s father had purchased the farm on the outskirts of Galicia four years earlier. Willie couldn’t remember much before that, other than indistinct images of a neat apartment on a cobblestone street in some more civilized region of Austria. Still, the anger, shouting, and tears were an intrinsic backdrop to his earliest memories.

“Here, at least,” Willie overheard his father say shortly after the move, “I can keep my eyes on you and your eyes off of other men!”

Leon dabbled at agriculture for just one season before admitting defeat. Though forced to accept employment in a nearby hamlet, he nevertheless derived some comfort from knowing that Cäcilie was well isolated in the desolate farmhouse, where caring for the animals would keep her occupied and out of mischief.

“But Leon, be reasonable,” Cäcilie had begged. “What about Willie? He’s eight now, and must begin school. At least get another wagon so I can take him into town for his classes.”

“You’re going nowhere, whore,” Leon insisted. “I’ll find a tutor to teach him, right here. A female tutor,” he added, his glare punctuating the unspoken accusation.

Tutors, however, were not abundant, and travel was difficult in the rural Austria of 1905. After months of fruitless search, Leon had to relent. He agonized over the unsatisfactory alternatives: either grant Cäcilie the mobility she craved, or allow a male tutor to invade his domicile. In the end he settled on the latter, based on his wife’s preference for the former.

Willie was playing in the hayloft when Leon first brought the new tutor home for a pre-employment orientation. From his lofty nest, Willie could watch the animals below—a half dozen goats, two pigs, and some geese—and pretend to be a benevolent deity, maintaining watch on the societies of earth. Though he often failed to comprehend their antics, the game amused him.

Casting his beatific gaze outward, Willie could just discern the shimmering heat at the horizon as it coalesced into a dust-plumed dot.

That will be father.

Though Willie entertained himself by pretending supernatural prescience, he knew that this was a safe guess, since almost no one ever came out this way—that was precisely why Leon had chosen the place.

The smell of rotten hay and the animals below had ceased to bother Willie a short while after they’d settled here, and by now he would have found the absence of manure more unsettling than the heat-borne stench.

He had almost forgotten about his father’s approach when he heard the wagon roll into the barn. This was unusual. Leon always went directly to the house, and only after checking on Cäcilie would he drive the carriage to the barn. Willie quietly worked his way toward the edge of the loft, but froze when he heard Leon’s gruff voice.

“Get down,” he ordered.

For a moment Willie thought Leon was talking to him , but when he stood to obey, he saw that there was someone else in the wagon. For reasons he neither questioned nor understood, Willie dropped back to a crouch and slipped behind a bale of hay—a position from which he could observe, yet still remain undetected.

From this hiding place, Willie studied the new arrival. Even in the barn’s dim light, the young man’s pale complexion and fragile build were evident. Though almost as tall as Willie’s father, he must have weighed at least a hundred pounds less. The pallid stranger climbed down from the carriage and looked around him, fidgeting thick glasses with long slender fingers.

“Come here!” Leon snapped. “And hurry. I don’t have all day.”

As he approached, Leon grabbed the smaller man by the collar and slammed him against a support post. The wire-frame glasses sailed into a pile of goat dung. The stranger’s eyes bulged as Leon’s hairy muscular forearm pressed across his throat, pinning the helpless victim against the rough wooden beam.

Willie slapped tiny hands across his mouth to stifle an involuntary gasp as his father’s knife caught a stray beam of light. Leon spoke, but Willie could not make out the words. All the while, the menacing blade poised mere inches from the terrified man’s face. Then, without warning, Leon swung the knife through a wide arc: backward, down, and up into the victim’s groin. This time Willie cried out, but the sound was obscured by the stranger’s own scream. Willie watched in horror as his father stepped back and the young man crumbled in a heap at his feet.

Then, miraculously, the stranger stirred, and a moment later groped the floor for his glasses.

“Get up,” Leon commanded.

Willie fought a vertiginous swoon, barely avoiding a dangerous fall. His eyes darted around the barn, searching for some frame of reference and finally stopping at the blade in his father’s hand. Analyzing its angle, Willie realized that Leon had, at the last minute, reversed the instrument so that only the unsharpened back of the blade made contact.

The young man struggled to his feet. His legs trembled, and a large dark spot had appeared on his trousers.

“Change your clothes, Stanislas ,” Leon ordered, tossing a small satchel from the wagon.

Without a word the shaken guest dug out a fresh pair of pants, draped them over a nearby stall, and slipped off the soiled ones.

“Remember what I say,” Leon added, pointing the knife at the young man’s shriveled member. This time Willie could hear every word. “You are here to tutor my son. You stay away from my wife. Understand?” Stanislas gulped, nodded, and quickly dressed.

In the two years that followed, Willie’s tutor scrupulously heeded Leon’s warning. Whenever possible, Stanislas would give Willie his lessons out in the barn. Only in the coldest of seasons would they settle in the house, but then confined themselves to Willie’s room.

For a while Leon would show up in the middle of the day, remaining just long enough to satisfy himself that nothing was amiss. Gradually, the inspections became less frequent, and after the first year, ceased altogether.

Willie came to love the way Stanislas could make theory come alive. He taught his young student history and mathematics, literature and philosophy, but they both shared a special interest in science—particularly biology. When the lessons turned to reproduction, the farm provided a perfect laboratory.

“Haven’t you ever wondered where baby goats come from?” Stanislas asked.

Willie stared at the display before them, avoiding his teacher’s eyes and trying hard to ignore the burning embarrassment. He nodded an affirmative, mouth too dry to speak.

“Well, Willie,” the teacher continued, “that is how it all begins.”

Willie’s head swam. He wished he could be transported someplace else, someplace far away, someplace cool and solitary— someplace where there were no animals doing grotesque things to each other.

“People too?” he whispered, hating himself at once for broaching the subject.

“Of course, Willie,” Stanislas chuckled. “Where do you think you came from?”

Willie followed the chain of thought to where he knew he didn’t want to go: Cäcilie ? With Leon? Unthinkable! How could she? He forced himself to focus on the humping goats. The effort failed to displace the thought he was trying desperately to avoid:

It should be me—she should do that with me!

He wanted to cry—or vomit—but all he could do was stand there shaking his head until he felt a gentle hand caress his shoulder.

“You know,” Stanislas said softly, “it doesn’t have to be male and female. The only difference is that then there are no babies.…”

Chapter Two

“My fault my fault my fault my fault,” Willie whispered to the darkness of his closet.

When did it start? He couldn’t know for sure, but he remembered the first time Stanislas left him alone. It was just three months ago, and they were together in “the breeding laboratory,” as they had started to call the barn.

“I’m a bit tired,” Stanislas announced, right in the middle of an experiment. “You take careful notes,” he instructed. “I’m going to rest for a little while.”

He returned less than an hour later, looking distracted, but no better rested than before. Willie thought little of it at the time, but in retrospect, it marked the start of a pattern. Several times each week, and always early into an experimental procedure of some duration, the teacher would be overtaken by fatigue. Admonishing his student to give the experiment undivided attention, Stanislas would vanish for a period of time, always returning before the experiment’s conclusion.

That Friday afternoon, as Willie set up the day’s experiment, Stanislas gazed listlessly through the barn window. Willie glanced past his teacher’s shoulder and noticed that his mother was out in the yard, bringing in the first load of laundry from the line. She wore a pale yellow dress of flimsy cotton, and even from fifty meters, Wilhelm could see how it clung to her body in the damp summer heat. For a moment she seemed to stare straight at the barn.

He shrugged and began a new entry in his notebook:

“Friday, August 13, 1907: Experiment to measure the–” Willie had just started writing when Stanislas was overtaken by his customary fatigue.

“I must be growing old,” the teacher chuckled. “I need to rest for a bit. You go ahead and run the experiment. That should take, what? An hour or so?”

Willie nodded. He glanced up and noticed that his mother was no longer in sight.

“Good,” Stanislas said, walking toward the door. “Be sure to take careful notes. You know what to do. Then clean up and put the animals away. I’ll check your results when I return. We’ll make a scientist of you yet!”

Willie smiled and returned to his notebook. He scratched a few more paragraphs and set the book aside. He was about to get the test animals when a wave of lassitude overcame him. For a moment he couldn’t remember where he was or why he was there. Suddenly, all the experiments, all the copulating critters, all the counting of rodent turds , swam together into one massive meaningless jumble.

“Stanislas has the right idea,” he mumbled, closing his notebook and setting it down on their makeshift lab table. “I need a break myself.”

The kitchen was dark when he entered the house through the back door. Odd. His mother usually had a second batch of laundry ready to go out on the line so it would be dry by sundown. He glanced into the washbasin. Sure enough, there was the wash, but no sign of his mother. He was about to call out to her but paused, not wanting to wake Stanislas if he was already asleep. Besides, perhaps his mother had decided to nap as well. The summer heat seemed to affect them all.

He climbed the stairs to the second floor, avoiding the loose tread that always squeaked. Pausing at the top of the stairs, for a moment he thought he heard something; but no, it must have just been the rhythmic throb of his heart. He reached the door to his room and drew it open. He was about to step inside, then froze. There, he heard it again: a groan—still soft, but more distinct now. Perhaps it was Stanislas . Maybe he suffered from some kind of heat stroke! The door to the guestroom where Stanislas usually napped was ajar. Willie peeked inside, but found the room empty and the bed undisturbed.

He held his breath and listened once again. The moan did not repeat itself, but the rhythmic sound he thought he heard earlier seemed louder now, and more distinct. It seemed to originate further down the hall.

Worried now, he rushed toward his parents’ room, no longer making any attempt at stealth. He hurried through the half-open door without pausing.

For a moment all three stood frozen, as if caught between ticks of the clock. His mother, the yellow dress hiked up over her back, one breast hanging exposed through the neckline, bent over and supported herself with one hand on either side of the window frame. It took Willie an instant to realize that this position would allow her to watch the road by which his father always approached. Stanislas stood behind her, pants down below his knees, slender fingers gripping her hips—just like the pigs or the goats or the rodents whose mating habits they’d studied.

A jealous rage arose in Willie’s gorge.

That should be ME!

As he slammed the door and fled the room, Willie was never quite certain which one he meant.

Chapter Three

"Willie! Hey Willie, wait up a minute!”

Reich paused, roused from his thoughts and uncertain for a moment whether or not he had heard his name. He looked around and blushed as the slim young brunette caught up with him.

“Oh, hello, Annie,” he mumbled.

Annie Pink had been in several of his introductory medical classes the previous semester. Her father was some kind of wealthy industrialist, and her mother was well known in the Vienna social circles.

“Didn’t you hear me?” she panted as she caught up. “I’ve been chasing you halfway across the campus. Your legs are too damn long!”

Willie blushed again. “Sorry,” he managed to answer, “I guess I was thinking about something.”

“That’s your problem,” Annie diagnosed. “You think too much! What classes are you enrolled in this semester?” she asked, changing the subject. “Have you signed up for Doctor Freud’s lecture series?”

Willie squirmed. The previous semester he had endured Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis class. The sexual orientation of the curriculum had caught him unprepared, and as a result, the entire semester was one long embarrassment. Of course, he had his own theories on the subject, but was never comfortable espousing them in a public forum.

“Uh, no,” he stammered. “I couldn’t work it into my schedule.”

Oh, come on,” Annie urged. “It’s just once a week, and we had so much fun last semester.”

Willie blushed even deeper as he recalled Annie’s unabashed relish for the sexual material. Throughout the semester, the attractive and precocious seventeen-year-old seemed to take it as a personal challenge to draw the reticent Willie out from some imagined shell. She never missed an opportunity to engage him in some unwelcome debate on one of the lectures’ many distasteful subjects. Truth be told, Annie’s presence in this semester’s class was just one more deterrent.

“Actually,” he confessed, eager to change the subject, “I’m not certain I’ll be able to finish the semester at all. I guess that’s why I didn’t hear you call me. I was just contemplating how I might pay my tuition, room rent, and expenses. I have another two years to go before I finish my medical degree, you know.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Annie answered, her face grown serious. “I didn’t realize you had financial difficulties. What about family? Could you ask them for some money?”

Willie hesitated. “When my parents died, my aunt sold their farm. The money paid for me to attend academy, but by now.…” He shrugged. “The money is all but gone. I was planning on my father’s life insurance to see me through, but it now appears that the underwriters are not going to pay.” His eyes grew narrow and his face reddened. “Besides, Annie,” he added with a sigh of resignation, “I’m twenty-two years old, and it’s high time I learned to make my own way in the world.”

He continued on his previous course, hoping Annie wouldn’t follow, but somehow gratified when she did.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, struggling to keep pace with his stride, “but I’m certain we could think of something.”

Willie shot her a curious glance, then increased his pace. She followed in silence until they were almost at the steps of the Medical building.

“What about analysis?” she suggested.

“What about it?”

“Well,” Annie elaborated, “it’s all the rage in Vienna, ever since Professor Freud’s theories gained popularity. More people arrive each day, from all over the world. They’re seeking treatment, but there just aren’t enough analysts to go around.”

Reich stopped and faced her. “But I’m not even a doctor yet,” he protested.

“Not necessary,” she replied. “All you need to hang out a shingle is membership in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.”

“And what does that entail?” he asked, suddenly interested.

“No more than a single scholarly publication,” Annie answered. “That and a nod of approval from Freud.”

“Oh,” Willie sighed. “Is that all?”

“It’s not so bad,” Annie argued as Willie mounted the stairs two at a time. “Freud is known to be sympathetic to Jews. He’s Jewish himself, you know.”

“What’s that to me?” Willie snapped.

“I meant no harm,” Annie answered defensively. “I just thought he might be kindly inclined toward you.”

“What makes you think that I’m Jewish?” Willie demanded.

“I’m sorry…I just assumed…I apologize if I insulted you.”

Willie slowed his pace and allowed Annie to catch up, then stopped altogether.

“I overreacted,” he apologized. “Yes, I was born to Jewish parents, but I no longer claim affiliation with any organized creed. That’s why the suggestion made me angry. Do you understand?”

Annie shook her head.

“I see religion,” Willie blurted, “as yet another authoritarian tool used by a sexually repressive society to rule the genitality of youth. By maintaining the working class in a perpetual state of orgastic dysfunction, the abusive father-figure—as instantiated in the fascist government repressors—maintains control by imposition of the castration threat.”

He started walking again, his face burning despite the cool autumn air. Annie, eyes grown wide, followed in stunned silence, unaware that Willie had been similarly shocked by his own outburst.

“Willie,” she said at last, struggling to control her breath, “I had no idea you were so politically aware. You should consider joining the Vienna Social Democratic Party Youth Movement.”

Reich reined an abrupt halt. “Are you active in radical politics?” he asked with a note of admiration.

“Of course,” she confirmed. “You should come to one of our rallies. You would meet many interesting people.”

Reich appeared to consider the proposition briefly, then suddenly sprung forward toward his next class, talking to Annie over his shoulder without looking back. “My immediate problems are money and Freud,” he said. “I have no time to consider the ills of society.”

“If you tried to show some inclination toward his theories I’m sure he would give you a chance,” Annie replied, resuming her chase. “Besides,” she said at last, “I think he likes you.”

“Likes me?” Willie repeated. “The last time a teacher took a liking to me…oh, never mind. Besides, the kindest encouragement he ever offered was to admonish me to become more comfortable with my penis.”

Annie blushed once again, much to Willie’s satisfaction.

“Okay,” he agreed at last, sparing Annie a backward glance. “Let me think about it.” Then he rushed off, already late for class.

The next day, in a rare moment of resolve, Reich charged up his courage to request an audience. On Annie’s advice, he allowed her to accompany him.

“His secretary is very protective,” she explained, “but she’s a friend of my parents, so maybe she’ll get you in to see him sooner.”

Despite Annie’s presence, Irma Zimmerman seemed to make a point of remaining unaware that two people stood before her desk. She was hard at work as they entered, but appeared to intentionally slow her pace a split second later.

Willie marveled at the studied precision with which she slowly and meticulously manipulated the few trivial sheets of paper before her. Her sloth, however, was hardly surprising. He wondered how her fingers could even bend. Like pale sausages stuffed to capacity with soft white fat, each move threatened to split their casings and splatter the cook with sizzling grease. Rolls and creases of sagging flesh gave her wrists and exposed elbows the appearance of segmented armor, not unlike that of a rhinoceros. The simile struck Willie as an appropriate match for her personality as well. The notion nearly forced him to giggle, but a more serious thought overtook it almost at once:

People construct a protective armor through their own mental tensions and imbalances. Analysts think in terms of abstract defenses, but what if these manifestations were actually physical?

“Well?” The armored woman’s raspy voice curtailed further rumination. Startled from his brief reverie, Willie struggled for orientation, focusing on her features for the first time.

Her face was a small portrait lost in an oversized canvas, as if some novice artist had managed to get details right, but not proportion. Thin lips, a small beak nose, and two tiny eyes seemed several sizes too small for their environment. In contrast to the rhinoceros arms and hippopotamus torso, her facial features favored the avian–a huge Hipporhinopotabird . Willie just stood there, lips pressed together in a mute idiotic grin: a fragile dam that struggled to contain torrents of laughter.

The mismatched gryphon glared at the speechless ninny before her, then brightened as she recognized his companion.

“Why, Annie! I am so sorry. I didn’t notice you walk in. I’ve just been so busy. How are your parents, sweetie? Is your father’s gout any better? The last time I saw him he suffered from a terrible episode. Is your mother well? I’m so pleased you’ve stopped by to see me. But of course, you didn’t come by just to visit with your Aunt Irma. You must have some business with the Professor. I’m afraid he’s not in his office right now. You wouldn’t believe how busy he’s been, poor man! His office hours are booked up weeks in advance, but it so happens I have a cancellation this very afternoon. I could let you have that slot if you like. Just the other day I was talking to your Aunt Helga, and she said–”

“Father’s much better,” Annie managed to interrupt, “thank you so much for asking, and Mother just the other day commented on how it’s been far too long since we’ve had you by for dinner.”

The secretary’s face beamed at the mention of a meal. “Tell your mother I will make a point of visiting one afternoon this week, to chat. Now, shall I enter your appointment for this afternoon?”

“Actually,” Annie clarified, “it’s my friend Wilhelm here who seeks audience with Professor Freud.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed to tiny beads, while eyebrows and lips executed a synchronized descent. The entire face shrunk even further, and seemed in imminent peril of vanishing into one of the many folds of flesh. A sound emitted from deep within the baggy jowls: something between a growl and a hiss.

“Oh. I see.”

In an exercise of careful precision, she slowly moved a large green leather appointment book from the left corner of her desk to a position directly in front of her voluminous bosom. She opened the book to the first page. Distended, fleshy fingers painstakingly grasped the edge of each sheet, gingerly moving it from right to left. After each half-dozen pages or so she’d pause, look up from the book, study her guests, return to her holy scripture, and continue the reverent exercise. At last she stopped at one page, studied it carefully, ran her finger down a list of entries, then shook her head and flipped one more page from right to left, just for good measure.

“Hmmm,” she said at last, not bothering to look up, “I believe I can fit you in three weeks from this next Thursday, right after lunch.”

“I thought you said–” Willie began to protest, but Annie interrupted:

“What about this afternoon?” she suggested. “Didn’t you say there was a cancellation?”

“Well, I usually reserve those kinds of slots for important–“

“Oh, while I think of it,” Annie interjected, “when you stop by to visit my mother, you may wish to favor Wednesdays. We’ve had the servants change their schedules so that they bake while my father is at his club.”

“Bake?” the large woman repeated, suddenly intrigued. “Ah! And do they still prepare those wonderful tortes with strawberry filling and whipped cream on top?”

“Of course,” Annie affirmed. “Those are everyone’s favorite, especially my father’s. Unfortunately, he can’t eat them any more— the gout, you know—so more often than not they go to waste.”

“No!” Irma cried. “Such a sin! I would be more than happy to take some home with me—for the neighborhood children, of course.”

“Of course,” Annie agreed. “I’ll ask mother to have the servants make an extra batch this week. For the children.”

Irma smiled broadly, her diminutive features almost filling their vast flesh canvas. “That would be splendid,” she beamed. “Now, where were we?”

“Wilhelm’s appointment with Doctor Freud?” Annie reminded. “This afternoon?”

“Ah yes,” the secretary recalled, her thoughts still in another place. Nimble fingers adroitly manipulated the appointment book, moving the precise number of pages from left to right in a single motion. “You can have twenty minutes with the professor at two this afternoon,” she said while jotting a note into the book. A moment later she closed the book, returned it to the upper left corner of her desk, and looked up at Willie, her features collapsing into their natural frown. “And do not be late,” she advised. “The Professor values punctuality.”

Willie spent the ensuing hours sucking down cigarettes and rehearsing what he would say to his prospective patron. He concocted the most eloquent proposal he could manage, and committed each clause to memory. By the time he returned to the professor’s office, Willie was prepared to sit back and casually present his theories, one academic to another.

Irma escorted Willie to a position in front of the professor’s large, ornately-carved desk.

“Wilhelm Reich to see you, Professor,” she announced.

“Fine. I will be with you shortly.” Freud was busy writing, and answered without looking up. Irma turned and waddled out the door, leaving Willie alone with the master.

Willie tried to observe the room without appearing to fidget. Freud’s office was just as he had imagined: dark, atmospheric, and elegantly decorated in studious tones of leather, brocade, and Persian wool. Book-lined shelves framed the doctor as he worked behind the walnut desk. Two embroidered chairs faced the professor’s desk from opposite corners, poised to accommodate esteemed guests and colleagues. Willie stood centered between these, longing to sit, but unwilling to do so without invitation.

The professor continued to write. How much time had passed? A mantle clock ticked softly on Freud’s desk, but the face was invisible from where Willie stood. Checking his pocket watch was out of the question, so he tried to count the audible clock ticks. By the time he’d reached nine hundred, Willie’s whole body ached, and an area of numbness had enveloped his right leg. The monotonous exercise induced a sort of self-hypnosis, and Willie had to struggle to remember where he was and how he had arrived to this interminable purgatory.

“So,” Freud intoned without looking up from his papers, “I understand you wish to write a research paper. You realize, of course, that topics are distributed a semester in advance?”

The abrupt breach of silence forced Willie to grope for orientation.

“I…Uh…Yes, Sir…That is.…”

Freud peered up over his spectacles. “Come on boy,” he ordered. “My time is valuable.” He paused, seeming to notice Willie for the first time. “I know you, don’t I? Yes. You were in my class last semester, correct? Yes, of course, now I remember. You are the fellow who doesn’t like his penis.”

“I do…I mean, I didn’t…I mean, I don’t…,” Willie stammered, ears on fire and face glowing red. He wondered if it might not be best for him to turn around and run from the office, before he humiliated himself even more.

“Come now, boy. Do you suffer from some speech impediment?”

“No Sir,” Willie managed to respond. “I just…well, to tell the truth, I’ve waited so long that I guess my mind began to wander, and your questions caught me off guard.”

Willie realized his mistake as he saw Freud’s face darken. The professor’s brow furrowed and his bushy eyebrows descended. He squinted at the clock on his desk.

“Ah, I see,” he said at last. “I apologize for the wait. I became involved in my work and lost track of the time. You know how it is.”

“Yes, of course,” Willie managed to answer. “I didn’t mean to complain Sir, only to elucidate. I accept with gratitude whatever time you can spare, whenever it may be given.”

Freud might have managed a slight smile, though it was difficult to tell through his beard. Willie’s obsequious response seemed to have hit the proper mark.

“So tell me,” Freud continued, now showing signs of attention, “what areas of research do you find interesting?”

Willie registered the anticipated cue, and launched his soliloquy without hesitation.

“In the orient,” Reich began his well-rehearsed presentation, “the Chinese identify an intrinsic vital force which permeates all creation. They call it ch’i , and believe that its cultivation in the human body, through practices called tai ch’i , conveys paranormal capabilities. Similarly,” he continued, “in the ancient Sanskrit, kundalini is the term used to describe a form of bioenergy ; the human life force. It is that which drives evolution, and leads the race to higher states of consciousness. In fact–“

“This is all very well,” Freud interrupted, “but are we discussing medicine, or anthropology?”

“Why, medicine, of course,” Willie replied, regrouping to approach his point more rapidly. “Recent work by Sir James Frazer supports the thesis that some notion of a universal, fundamental life energy appears in every major culture. I propose that the ubiquitous nature of these concepts may indicate some physical reality, and–”

“Frazer?” Freud repeated with obvious disdain. “Understand something right now, young man. If you desire a career studying religious rites of dung-worshipping bushmen, then by all means find your way to England and enlist the illustrious Sir James as your mentor. I assume you’ve been in Vienna long enough to learn of my reputation and my areas of study, so I’ll ask that you not walk in here and expect me to alter my career in support of your interests!”

“I never meant to suggest–“

“No matter,” Freud interrupted with a wave of his hand. “The one topic still available is ‘The Breakthrough of the Incest Taboo in Puberty’. You may accept that if it suits you, or find someone else whose interests better parallel your own.” He glanced at the clock on his desk and added: “I have a conference in five minutes. When you make up your mind, you may inform my secretary of your decision. Good day.” With that, Freud returned to his papers, leaving Willie to find his own way out.

The prospect was unthinkable! Reich wandered through the streets of Vienna, wrestling with his own painful sexual reticence, and gagging on the sour guilt of his parents’ suicides. Finally, he slunk back to his room, threw himself on his narrow mattress, and buried his face in the pillow. In the end, however, practical necessity conquered humiliation, and Willie accepted the assignment the next morning.

He worked on the paper for the next five weeks, detached to an extent he never would have thought possible. He even allowed Annie to help him. He presented, in case study format, the pedagogically fictitious account of a ‘patient’ whose pathological sexual regression is found to arise from a blocked adolescent memory.

The fictitious subject was the child of a strict domineering father and a younger mother who was abused by the father in the boy’s presence. At the age of eleven and a half, the patient witnessed his mother in the embrace of his private tutor. This classical example of the Oedipus complex, Willie analyzed, was further instantiated when the patient struck out at his father by first hinting that something was amiss, and then allowing the full truth to be dragged from him. After the inevitable confrontation, the mother committed suicide by drinking a caustic household cleanser. A short time later the father, overwhelmed by guilt, insured himself heavily and took his own life by standing in an icy lake until he contracted pneumonia; apparently assuming that his death would be judged natural in cause. Ultimately, the insurance company refused to pay, and this in turn resulted in further frustration on the part of the patient, and a perennial distrust of bureaucracy.

Reviewing the nearly completed work, Annie confirmed that this was an ideal vehicle for garnering the conceited old demagogue’s favor.

“But it’s totally without substance,” Willie complained. “Just another rehash of a classical anecdote, devoid of original thought or scholarly insight.”

“Willie, you’re a student ,” Annie contended. “Remember your purpose! Hand the old man what he values. Gain his support. Procure membership in the society. Earn money as an analyst. Finish your degree. It’s a step-by-step process, don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see,” Willie mumbled. “I see that every step places my foot in a pile of manure. By the time I’m done, my education will have prepared me for a brilliant career kissing ass and cleaning shit from shoes.”

“And if you don’t finish school?” Annie asked. “What career will you have then? Will you espouse your theories while waiting tables? Selling pastries? Laying bricks?”

Willie pouted but said nothing.

“Listen to me, Willie,” Annie begged. “You will have a great career, I’m certain of it. I’ve known you for only a short time, and already you’ve broadened my horizons. You have insights that I’ve never even imagined. But you must build the foundation before you lay the bricks, and the bricks before the roof. Do you understand? I know it’s a game, but it is their game, their rules. You must join their club before you can dictate rules of your own.”

“It’s not fair.”

“Nothing is fair or unfair,” Annie answered with a note of exasperation. “It’s just the way it is !”

Willie sighed. “I suppose you’re right, as usual. What would I do without little Annie Pink to keep my feet on the ground when my big head is ready to float me into space? I will follow your good advice. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m weary and need some rest.”

Annie’s steps still echoed in the stairway as Willie started rewriting the paper. “I must be true to myself. I must be true to myself. I must be true to myself.” He repeated the mantra throughout the night as he shaped the insipid classical anecdote into a thoroughly unique interpretation:

The patient’s sexual difficulties, which consisted of erectile dysfunction, alternating with inappropriate and uncontrollable ejaculation, were caused, Reich hypothesized, not by some nebulous psychological barrier, but rather, by a neurophysiological bioelectric discontinuity. This blockage, he predicted, should be detectable by state-of-the-art galvanometers. The interruption of this energy flow is first manifest in what could be described as a lack of orgastic potency . This, in turn, promulgated the subject’s various secondary neuroses and psychoses.

The next morning he dropped off the finished manuscript, telling Annie nothing of his last-minute revision. He didn’t reveal the content to her until the paper was returned a week later, with a grade of B+. Across the cover, Freud’s comments read: “Interesting premise that begs experimental follow up. Full of valuable content.”

Despite the passing grade, Willie remained sullen. Annie, however, was ecstatic.

“I’m so proud of you!” she exclaimed. “You’ve done it! Now he’ll have to recommend you for membership in the society. Don’t you see? It’s just as I said. By presenting your work as a logical extension of Freud’s theories, he couldn’t help but support you.”

“You don’t understand anything!” Willie shouted, startling Annie into silence. “How can you say that? My work? An extension of Freud’s? Ridiculous! That imbecile postulates a nebulous force—incapable of being studied experimentally or measured quantitatively. He never had the conviction or capacity to see his theories through to completion. I, on the other hand, have related all psychoses to latent incestuous desires and disappointments, combined with castration threats by authoritarian father figures! I took Freud’s cautious and insipid theory of the libido—an elementary study of genitality —and developed it into the foundation of orgastic potency . And what did that inflated old windbag say to that?” Willie picked up the thesis and waved it in Annie’s face. “‘Full of valuable content’, that’s what he said!” Willie tossed the paper to the floor. “I needn’t tell you what content he is full of!”

Chapter Four

Wilhelm Reich, Associate Lecturer in Neurobiology, took the first three flights two steps at a time, then stopped for a moment while heart and lungs caught up and slowed down. He had to remind himself that he was just twenty-four—too young, he hoped, for heart seizure.

I’ve got to cut back on smoking, he thought as he listened to his wheezing breath.

No, it’s simply the stifling August heat.

Classes were in recess at the University of Vienna, and only a few professors, lecturers, and research associates remained on campus. Most maintained laboratories and offices on the lower floors and in the more modern buildings. The combined office-laboratory shared by Reich and his assistant, Otto Köedmann , was located in a fifth-floor attic of the oldest structure on campus.

He sweat his way up to the fourth floor landing at a more measured pace, and was breathing normally again when he started down the caliginous brick corridor. His hard soles clicked and echoed a chatter of replies in the deserted passageway. He passed the locked doors of silent laboratories and lecture halls on either side—three, four, five doors on his left, then turned toward the sixth.

The door was unlocked. It opened not into an office or classroom, but instead accessed a narrow stairway. Five steps rose to a small platform, from whence the stairs continued to the right, vanishing into shadow behind a brick wall. The window over the landing opened to a narrow air-shaft. Even at midsummer it admitted light for no more than an hour or so before and after noon.

Reich guessed it was near five, though he didn’t take time to consult his pocket watch. He had hoped to get here earlier, but was compelled by protocol to attend a particularly dry lecture.

That imbecile Freud.

He pulled the door behind him and started up the sinuous stairway.

“I thought the pompous windbag would never shut his bearded yap,” he complained, aloud but to himself.

He reached the landing, turned right, up six more steps to a second platform, turned right again, and stopped before the final step-up to the oaken door of his attic laboratory. He paused there long enough to catch his breath.

Can’t let Otto see me panting like an old man—an old Jewish man.

Otto’s incessant jokes about Jews being an inferior breed had become a source of constant circumspection, and Reich refused to cede the satisfaction of revealing how out of shape he was. Köedmann , of course, had no way of knowing that Reich was himself Jewish. At least Reich didn’t think he knew. After the first betrayal of his assistant’s racial theories, Reich had stood before a small mirror, analyzing his deep-set dark eyes, fine features, pale complexion, and black hair pushed back and well down his neck. A tall, slim, somewhat gaunt young man stared back at him. In the end he managed to convince himself that he bore none of the grotesque and exaggerated features his Teutonic associate had described as “typical of the inferior subhuman race.”

He took a final deep breath, pulled the door open, and stepped briskly through, trying his best to look as if he had just conquered all five flights without interruption.

The stifling heat of the attic laboratory, intensified by the pungent reek of specimens pickling in jars of formaldehyde, closed in around him like a swarm of irate wasps.

Otto was gazing through a narrow gable window at the far end of the room. He turned and snapped to attention as Reich entered. The warm concern on his sculpted features contrasted markedly, Reich thought, with the pale, cold indifference of his eyes— eyes animated, perhaps, with just the slightest hint of a sneer.

“Herr Reich! Are you well? Overexertion can be dangerous in such heat. Even I was nearly out of breath by the time I reached our lofty abode.”

“It’s just this damned heat, Otto,” Reich agreed, loosening his cravat, unbuttoning his vest, and opening the high collar—collectively the essentials of proper academic attire. He removed his wire-frame glasses, wiped his face with a sleeve, then brushed both lenses with the cravat before replacing them to the bridge of his nose.

“I know it,” Otto agreed. “I’ve opened the windows, but there’s no hint of a breeze. I feel like a helpless lab animal being slowly roasted alive for an experiment.”

Their eyes met and Reich noted a momentary sparkle, as if Otto found the image amusing. It was far too close to truth for Reich’s sensibilities at that particular moment. He’d been experiencing a mix of revulsion and apprehension ever since his assistant proposed the details of their present experiment.

Reich had refused at first, but Otto’s precise, professional justification resisted contradiction. Reich was also acutely aware that if he didn’t publish something soon, his prospects for being retained would dwindle to nil. Thus, practical necessity vanquished moral concern, and Reich reluctantly capitulated.

“Is everything ready?”

“Yes, Herr Reich.”

“Otto, it’s too damned hot for formality. ‘Willie’ will do.”

“As you wish, Herr–” He stopped himself short and smiled. “Wilhelm. Yes, preparations are complete and await your inspection.”

Otto had always made him uneasy, for reasons Reich could never quite identify. In the six months or so they’d worked together, Reich had become marginally more comfortable with him. Still, he often found himself cringing when the big German graduate student approached unexpectedly, or a bit too fast.

He’d first met Otto at a rally of the Vienna Social Democratic Party Youth Movement, which Annie had finally cajoled him into joining. Willie was flattered that Otto had heard of his theories, and was interested in taking therapy. Reich had been practicing since his admission into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Then, as now, most of his income came from seeing patients. His practice had started with only a few—Annie being his first—and after about a year of steady growth, had attracted considerable attention if only for its controversy. Otto showed up at a time when Willie was questioning his own abilities, and were it not for Annie’s support and Otto’s educated interest in his theories, Reich might have abandoned his research altogether. He felt a reluctant indebtedness to both of them.

He shook his head to dispel the heat-borne lassitude, and tried to focus on the experiment.

A long oak table dominated the middle of the room. Better than half its surface was devoted to a sinuous sculpture of glassware, racks, tubes, and dormant Bunsen burners. Otto stood at the left end of the table, next to a large iron-banded barrel. Willie circled toward the right, around to a wooden stool at the far side of the table. He slipped out of his vest and threw it on the stool, wincing at the clunk as his pocket watch impacted the indurate oaken surface of the seat.

The attic storage-room-turned-laboratory was some six by seven meters in size, but the sloped eaves, gable alcoves, and of course, the stifling airless heat, made it seem far closer than its measure might suggest. Interrupted only by three alcoves and a single door, its perimeter was uniformly lined with narrow built-in counters of dark, grimy wood. Above these, alternately, hung cabinets and groups of open shelves. Beneath were deeper cabinets, shelves, or drawers, all of the same time-darkened wood as the counters.

Reich bent forward and peered through two small cages set on a table against the wall. Each contained three mice. A card on one of the cages identified: “Males”. The other was unlabelled. He stood up, pulled his lab apron from its hook, slipped the heavy leather garment over his head, then suddenly cringed at the unexpected and unwelcome touch of Otto’s big fingers on the small of his back. “Here, let me tie that for you, Herr…Wilhelm,” he heard from inches behind and above his ear.

“Thank you, Otto,” he mumbled as he turned. “Ready?”

“Yes sir,” Otto snapped with military precision. “The apparatus is all assembled, and the subjects, as you see, are right here.”

“The subjects ,” Willie mused. He bent over again and studied the rodents. Their tiny pink eyes caught and then averted his gaze as they scurried around the limits of their confinement. “It makes them sound like a beaker; a pendulum; a microscope; any other piece of lab equipment, capable of being used, used up, broken, discarded, replaced—not living creatures capable of knowing fear, feeling pain.”

“They are mere rodents, Herr Reich,” Otto answered. His voice dripped condescension and that slight exasperation he reserved for any show of sentiment (humanity) that threatened what he perceived as the forward march of knowledge. “I assure you, there is no shortage.”

Willie laughed uneasily.

I suppose professional detachment is the mark of a good scientist.

Whatever his faults, Otto’s help was indispensable.

“Let’s get started then. Please take notes.” He looked up and Otto was already poised with pen in hand and notebook open.

The man never perspires.

“August 20, 1921,” Reich dictated. “Experiment to determine the neurophysiological and biochemical effects of stress, and relations, if any, to sexual activity. Our hypothesis is that…sexual activity…and in particular.…” He paused and rubbed his chin with his fingers before continuing, “orgasmic release in particular.…”

Otto cleared his throat. “Excuse me sir, did you intend to repeat ‘in particular’ for emphasis?” He asked the question without altering tempo, and Willie, his chain of thought interrupted, found it difficult to parse the unusual grammatical structure.

“Repeat what, in particular, for emphasis?” he asked, bewildered.

“The words in particular ,” Otto explained with exaggerated patience. “You said: ‘and in particular orgasmic release in particular’.” He stared at Reich, awaiting direction.

Willie’s face glowed red. “Uh…no,” he muttered, “just the first. May we resume now?”
“Of course,” Otto replied. “I merely wanted to clarify your intent.”

“Very well, Otto. Now where were we?”

“At sexual activity,” Otto replied—he seemed to enjoy Willie’s squirming–“and in particular, the orgasm.” He slowed his tempo for the last word, and increased the volume of his voice as well, though just a little. It came out: OR-GA-ZUM .

Reich flinched and continued, speaking rapidly: “exercise a salubrious influence on the nervous system, which may serve to negate the deleterious effects of external stress.”

He opened his own notebook. Two drops of sweat fell on the blank page and caused a pair of tumescent bulges to erupt on its surface. He looked longingly at the thirty-gallon barrel of water Otto had assembled near the end of the big central lab table. A thermometer clamped to the inner rim indicated 50.4 degrees Celsius on one side of the tube, and sixty degrees Fahrenheit on the other.

Otto must have spent the better part of the afternoon hauling it up from the basement in pails.

There was no water supply in the attic lab, and Willie wasn’t privy to keys for the labs on the intermediate floors.

He retrieved his pocket watch from the limp vest he’d left on the stool, and bent over to record the date and hour. The notebook had already dried in the arid heat of the attic, leaving two enlarged freckles. When the gold nib of his pen reached one of them, it pulled slightly. The thin line that pursued it spread into an indistinct blur, and then coalesced as the impediment was traversed.

Otto had transferred two rats, one from each cage, to a pair of deep wooden boxes at the table-edge adjacent to the water barrel. A third box, this with sides two centimeters high, sat unoccupied next to the two deeper ones. He was busy trying to knot a short length of twine to one animal’s tail. Its companion, already prepared and returned to its temporary abode, scurried, stopped short, and circled to sniff at the unaccustomed accouterment secured to its tail. Fastened to the far end of each string was a small leaden fishing sinker.

“There,” Otto said. He tugged the string taut and dropped the writhing rodent into the empty box. “We are ready to begin.” He looked up—a bit too eagerly, Willie reflected.

“We’ll both record our observations,” Reich instructed. “Later we can compare our data in order to identify any errors or omissions.”

Otto nodded and nabbed one rat in each of his large manicured hands. He held the lead weights so that his struggling captives hung by their tails, with snouts just above the water surface.

“On your command, Herr Doctor.”

Willie waited until the second hand passed the nine on his timepiece dial.

“Ready,” he alerted. When the wand ticked onto the twelve, he commanded: “Now!”

Otto released his hold, and the two rodents dropped into the water with a single plop. They both sank a short distance, and then desperately clawed against the elusive water, managing with a furious effort to raise their tiny snouts above the surface. Willie noted the time. Otto scratched in his own book.

The desperate rodents maintained their heads above water for six and one-quarter minutes before legs became still and the lead weights drew them slowly toward the bottom. Both scientists recorded the time. The rats sank about halfway to the bottom, and then suddenly, almost in unison, resumed their struggles. They gained the surface again, but this time only gasped a few rapid breaths and immediately allowed themselves to sink once more. Both men scratched in notebooks and returned their rapt attention to the mortal struggle unfolding before them.

The rats repeated their synchronized swim: once, twice, three times, then a fourth. Each time, they’d sink just a little deeper before clawing their way back to the surface.

A curious syncopation seemed to unite both rats, and both men. The two observers, in perfect unison, would nod down, wiggle pens, raise their heads, and peer over into the barrel. A moment later the two rodents, also in perfect time, would still their struggles, drift sleepily downward, beat their way back up, pant for air. Then the two men would again snap heads down toward their books, and the entire mechanical dance would repeat like a grim interpretation of elaborate Bavarian clockwork.

Reich perceived with abrupt embarrassment that he was wearing a massive erection. He hoped it wasn’t evident behind the heavy leather apron. He looked up guiltily at Otto, disrupting the impression of a marvelous mechanical connection between scientist and experiment—tormentor and victim. Otto’s attention was fixed on the depths of the barrel.

The unfortunate mammals, exhausted at last, had given up and allowed themselves to sink. Settling gently to the bottom, they hung upward from the anchors, tiny bubbles drifting from their nostrils as they faced the end with grim resignation.

Otto looked up. “Now?”

“Yes, yes!” Willie shouted. “Now!”

Otto, sleeves already rolled past the bulges of his biceps, reached down and rescued the two desperate creatures from the threshold of certain death. He dropped them into the low-walled box. They didn’t struggle now—too weak, they lay where Otto dropped them, gobbling grateful lungfulls of oxygen.

By the time Reich scrawled his hasty entry, Otto had identified the female, rolled her over so she lay on her belly with exhausted legs splayed outward, and was lifting the male by his tail.

“Quickly,” Reich urged, “the cantharides.” He was sweating hard, shaking slightly, and no longer even aware of the explosive pressure in his britches and belly. Otto dipped a swab into a small brown bottle, picked up the soggy male, and scrubbed the greenish irritant into its genitals. A tiny black turd popped out of its anus and dropped unheeded to the floor. Then he set the male down, positioning him over the other’s hindquarters.

He prodded the still-panting male under the tail using the end of a glass rod. After a little insistent prompting, the animal shuddered and then set about scratching the chemically induced itch in the most immediate and efficacious manner. Exhausted as he was, he managed to pump a furious staccato on his partner’s hindquarters before succumbing to his exhaustion.

Oblivious to his unsentimental interruption of love’s mellow afterglow, Otto transferred the satiated little fellow to a nearby tray and efficiently severed his neck with a gleaming scalpel. Tiny whiskers twitched and legs groped, unaware as yet that their opposite ends were now a half meter apart. A larger blade, this one with fine serrations, made quick work of bisecting the severed head. Finally, the tiny pink marble that had, until just minutes ago, faithfully guided the simple harmless little creature about its simple harmless little pursuits, was unceremoniously dropped into a glass Erlenmeyer flask.

Otto plugged the flask with a rubber stopper and set it on a rack. Two glass tubes projected from the rubber plug. One of these he connected to a jacketed reflex condenser. The second tube—the longer of the two—terminated in a graceful 180 degree bend. Onto this he pushed another rubber stopper. A second flask, containing a precisely measured volume of clear liquid, went under the stopper, and was clamped a few inches over a gentle Bunsen burner flame. After a few seconds the solution expanded, filled the glass tube, and dripped down into the other flask. Inside, the brain sputtered and bubbled, sublimating almost at once. The cerebral liquid began to fume, and a purplish cloud worked its way through the helix of the reflex. Condensed by water circulating through the cooling jacket, the residue soon began to drip down into a small beaker. The entire process had taken no more than three or four minutes, and Otto didn’t look up until the first drops of creamy substance began to fall into the beaker.

“Herr Reich! Quickly, process the female before the effect can dissipate. Herr Reich! Never mind, I’ll do it myself.” Otto pushed past him and had the second rodent’s head off by the time Reich had lurched to the door.

“You must do something about that queasy stomach, my friend,” Otto shouted, laughing as his mentor fled down the stairs. But Willie wasn’t about to vomit. He had roused from a trance-like detachment, as if by a face full of ice water, to the abrupt and humiliating sensation of a warm, wet ejaculation.

Chapter Five

“Willie, you can’t just keep running away from your problems.”

Annie’s voice was calm, controlled, which only served to fuel Reich’s agitation and make him more defensive. His face reddened and the muscles of his jaw beat a rhythmic pulse independent of the swelling vein in his neck.

“Not running away!” He started out shouting, then constrained his voice to a tenuous control. When emotions got the best of him, Annie inevitably won points. Besides, he didn’t want to awaken little Eva, asleep in the next room. “I’m simply expanding my practice and my political affiliations,” he continued, his tone marginally calmer.

“Yes, your practice ,” Annie answered, glaring unspoken accusation. “What’s the matter, aren’t there enough women to seduce right here in Vienna?”

“Don’t you start that!” He could hear his voice rising again, and forced it into check. He stood and began pacing the small, austere kitchen.

“I urge my patients to take therapy in the nude because only thus can I accurately manipulate their muscular armor segments. That’s the whole basis of my discovery! By revivifying the channels through which sexual energies flow, I can restore the patient to a state of orgastic potency.”

“What about the children?” she said at last. “Eva’s only four—she won’t be in school for two more years—and in case you’ve forgotten, I’m due any time now. At least here in Vienna we have my mother to help out so I can finish my education.”

Shortly after they were wed, Annie had interrupted her own studies so Reich could complete his degree.

Yes, don’t forget to throw that in my face.

Reich glared at her swollen midsection, as if evidence of a plot to confound his plans.

“I have already thought of that,” he answered, speaking slowly and enunciating every syllable. “Both children will be cared for in my Reichian Kinderfreunde . I plan to establish one in Berlin, of course. By acclimating them to the socialist collective right from the beginning, we do a great service in preparing them to become citizens of the future.”

“Your Kinderfreunde ?” Annie’s features were a frozen mask of disbelief and horror. “Our children? You can’t be serious! How can you even consider such a thing after all that’s happened? It’s been in every newspaper. The scandal has cost you Freud’s patronage, and it remains to be seen whether it costs you your position at the university. Even my mother is ashamed to show her face! And now you’re telling me that you plan to do the same thing again?” She tapped on her head and rolled her eyes—a gesture that never failed to infuriate Reich. “Hello? Willie? Are you listening to yourself? Have you learned from your mistakes only to repeat them with greater precision?”

Reich answered her childish goading with a condescending stare.

“In my Kinderfreunde , we encourage children to engage in nudity and explore their sexuality at the earliest possible age,” he answered with exaggerated patience. “This is the only way to break the cycle of taboos and repression that ultimately leads to a cowed and easily subjugated adult populace. It’s just that our repressed society can’t–”

“Bullshit!” Annie shouted, her gaze fierce, eyes hard as granite. “Do you forget? I’ve visited your little…experiment. Naked children everywhere doing precisely what they please. Little boys…I can’t even think about it without humiliation…touching themselves in the most lascivious manner; and you instructing them on how best to stroke, and what lubricants to employ. What’s next, Willie? Will you violate your children the way you violate your patients?”

Reich’s face reddened further. His fist felt like a drawn arrow, aimed at Annie’s face and just awaiting the archer’s release.

If only she wasn’t pregnant.

When he finally spoke, his voice was soft but icy. “I have neither violated nor betrayed anyone. I seem to recall that when you were in therapy, your support for my techniques was always, shall we say…enthusiastic? Oh, but of course. I forgot! You are in favor of sexual liberation only for yourself.”
He paused while his eyes traversed her—head to foot and back again—with exaggerated disdain.
“Now that I come to think of it,” he added softly, “if your father hadn’t somehow found about it, you would now be just one more record in my patient files.”

Annie just stared at him as if trying to determine whether she had really heard what she thought he’d just said. Then, the question apparently resolved, a hurt look took charge of her features. She stood without word or sound, then cracked the brittle momentary silence as she slapped his face. A moment later he heard the metallic clink of the bedroom lock.

Chapter Six

A hundred or so curious onlookers gathered in the small circus tent just outside Berlin.

“All social revolution,” Reich exhorted, “must follow sexual revolution!” The microphone lent his voice a metallic edge.

A few more people turned and left, shaking their heads or waving a fist. A brief moment later, a half-dozen young men entered as a group. Each accepted a small pamphlet from an attendant at the entrance. Over the past few months it had been distributed to thousands. The pamphlet proclaimed:

Agenda For Sexual and Social Liberation

1. Contraceptives must be provided free to those who can not obtain them through normal channels. A massive sex-education program must be mounted.

2. All laws against homosexuality must be abolished.

3. Provision for free abortions must be available at public clinics.

4. Medical care must be guaranteed for children and pregnant women.

5. Child-care facilities must be provided at factories and other large employment centers.

6. Treatment, rather than punishment, must be guaranteed for all sexual offenders.

7. Home leave must be available to all nonviolent prisoners.

“Adolescents,” the metallic voice continued, “should be encouraged to develop their sexuality at the earliest possible age. Parents should engage in nudity with their children; should even encourage them to watch during sex.”

He paused while several more people stormed from the tent. He was well accustomed to this reaction by now.

“Moreover,” he continued, unperturbed, “lifelong compulsive monogamy is destructive, and should be abolished.”

Several middle-aged men in the audience started to applaud, but stopped abruptly in response to harsh glances from their female companions. They too walked out a few seconds later.

Reich shook his head. He had formed The Community Psychology Experiment after leaving Vienna—after being driven out, according to sly newspaper innuendoes—in order to bring his message of sexual and social revolution directly to the people. Followers set up tents, held festivals, and even went door to door. They practiced analysis, preached radical sexuality and left-wing politics, and distributed contraceptives.

“That’s it, run away!” he called after the most recent evacuees. “Spend your miserable lives as closed-minded, puritanical, sexually repressed lackeys of the authoritarian ruling class!”

“You tell ‘em , Doctor Orgasm,” someone shouted from the audience. A snicker arose through the tent.

Reich’s ruddy complexion grew purple. Eyes glared and veins bulged as he shouted: “Everywhere I look, people need sexual help. I offer a cure and they call me names.”

“All hail the prophet of a genital utopia,” someone else called out.

“My insights and discoveries are wasted on the likes of you,” Reich screamed back, nearly incoherent. “You will never be genital characters !” He used the term to characterize those capable of coping with their own sexuality.

“Why cast my pearls before swine?” he muttered to Annie, who stood beside the podium, eyes downcast. His words were unheard above the growing clamor of the crowd. “Those who would condemn me are clearly not genital characters,” he reiterated, then turned again to the microphone.

“You are all orgastic eunuchs! I will not play your insipid games. I won’t mince words or water down my theories just because your withered minds can’t tolerate the fresh cool wash of truth!”

“You’re undermining the family!” a voice from the dwindling audience accused.

“Yes!” Reich shouted back. “The institution should be ended. Removing children from their parents and raising them in state-run collectives, such as my Kinderfreunde , is the only way for them to develop their sexuality under careful guidance. Therefore,” he continued, shouting to cut through the indignant crowd, “the entire family unit should be abolished, as it inhibits the orgastic efficacy of all!”

The tent was half empty now. He started to speak again, despite the ugly tenor of the remaining crowd, but was interrupted by the arrival of the police.

“My enemies,” Reich complained to Otto several days later, “envious, scheming hounds one and all, conspired to have me arrested on spurious charges. Now I am to be thrown out of Berlin!”

Fuming, Reich paced the narrow constraint of Otto’s room. Otto sat at a simple wooden table, sipping peppermint schnapps and looking faintly and infuriatingly amused.

“Prudish, puritanical hypocrites! They debauch in their beer houses, and then have the gall to persecute me !” His anger had evolved to near-hysteria. “What shall I do , Otto? Where can I go? I can’t go back to Vienna—not after all that transpired. Besides, I could never tolerate the proximity of Annie’s parents, especially her father. You know how he persecutes me.”

Otto nodded his somber sympathy. “There is always Herr Schjelderup ,” he suggested. “You could take Annie and the girls; flee to Oslo.”

Harold Schjelderup , director of the Psychological Research Institute at the University of Oslo, had approached Reich several weeks earlier. He urged Reich to return with him to Oslo, where he promised to provide an office and lab facilities at the University. At the time, Reich was reluctant to abandon his work, and especially his patients, in Berlin. Under the present circumstances, however, he had little choice. Besides, this could provide a perfect opportunity to leave Annie behind with the girls and gain some much-needed breathing room for himself.

“Yes, Annie,” Reich muttered as his pacing accelerated. Annie’s dwindling support for his life work had precipitated a growing chasm in their marriage.

What could have caused her change of heart?

“Didn’t I make the silly little hypocrite aware of my theories and principles right from the start?”

Otto shrugged and continued drinking.

“She never fails to carry on every time I engage in therapy with one or another of my patients,” Reich complained. “Oh, she looks the other way and paints herself the martyr. Then she whines to our friends and stirs their sentiments against me.”

Now that I come to consider things from all perspectives, the opportunity to leave Berlin might not be such a bad thing after all.

“Yes,” Reich mused, “Oslo would be good.” Then, after another traverse of the room, he added, “But I believe I will go alone, just to get the lay of the land, so to speak. I can always send for the family later, of course.”

“Yes, of course,” Otto smiled.

Chapter Seven

“What do you think about this Hitler fellow?” Schjelderup asked over dinner. His mouth was full of schnitzel, and a fine particulate of gravy and assorted morsels sprayed onto his beard. Schjelderup had a cancer of the jawbone, which manifested itself in the form of a large growth on the side of his face. Although his beard covered the tumor well, Schjelderup still found it difficult to chew.

Reich was unsympathetic.

The old man has the manners of a goat.

“I understand he made some kind of ominous speech on February 20,” Schjelderup continued. “Four days later, riots erupted in Vienna. I wonder if 1938 is to be another year of insurgency?”

Though the masticating speaker had spoken into his plate, the question was implicitly directed toward Otto.

Something unexpected, though not inexplicable, had occurred during Reich’s two years at Oslo. Somehow, Otto had managed to ingratiate himself to Schjelderup and Elsa, his attractive blond assistant, while Reich fell from favor.

What could be going through their minds? They’re both trained professionals, with years of experience seeing through such deceptions. How could they allow themselves to be taken in?

Otto was very good at it, though. This Reich had to admit.

“Well, Sir,” Otto replied, daintily dabbing his lips and pausing a moment to swallow, “I really don’t consider myself sufficiently knowledgeable in the area of political theory to venture a definitive interpretation.” He didn’t return to his eating, but appeared to await encouragement—seemed smugly confident it would be forthcoming.

“Oh come now, Otto,” Elsa obliged. “I know you to be a man of varied knowledge, interests, and insights.”

“Yes,” the old man agreed, his mouth thankfully devoid of food this time, “as a German you must have some considered opinion.”

I suppose that as an Austrian I have no opinion at all.

Reich glowered.

“If pressed,” Otto slowly enunciated, “I suppose I would have to profess cautious optimism. I believe that right now the German people have great need for someone capable of restoring their national spirit and pride. While I cannot in good conscience defend certain of his rhetoric, I believe that Hitler will ultimately prove to be a harmless diversion for the German people—valuable for the cathartic value of his antics, but functionally ineffective.”

“He seems to be rather critical of Jews,” Reich suggested, his voice barely audible.

Elsa and Professor Schjelderup , both Jewish, had of course been spared exposure to Otto’s anti-Semitic philosophies. They stared at Reich as if he had just disgorged a hairball.

“Quite so,” Otto affably concurred. “As I just said ,” he emphasized (Reich could almost hear the others mentally articulate: ‘As you would know if you’d been listening!’), “conscience alone dictates that any theory which summarily denigrates an entire segment of the population is morally and ethically reprehensible.”

They all stared at Reich: Otto as if daring him to disagree, the other two reflecting disbelief that anyone could question so obvious a point.

“Moreover,” the eloquent Aryan continued, “as a scientist I must reject any theory that defies the preponderance of observable evidence.” He paused and swept his eyes across each of the dinner companions in turn. “I need look no further than the distinguished company at this table to support my thesis.”

The room grew thick with silence. Otto fidgeted self-consciously and dropped his eyes, as if embarrassed at having spoken out of place; uncomfortable at finding himself the center of attention.

“Hear, hear!” Schjelderup broke the silence. “And any who presume to question the humanity of the German peoples need only look to Herr Köedmann for a shining confutation of that proposition.” He stood up and held his glass aloft.

Reich joined in, eyes glazed and distant as he fought regurgitation. He waited a respectful period after coffee and then excused himself.

When he first came to Oslo, Reich had quickly fallen in love with Elsa Lindenberg . Tall, sturdy, blond, and graceful, Elsa was everything Annie had never been. She was also a doctor of medicine, and handled most details of the clinic’s day-to-day operation with focused efficiency.

Reich would sulk and bristle whenever Elsa happened by to consult, chat, or laugh with Otto. With Otto, she was another person entirely—relaxed, effervescent, vivacious. Lately she would hardly spare a nod to acknowledge the presence of the man who really loved her.

He allowed himself a brief but lingering glance across the lab. Elsa was bent over a microscope, while Otto played tour guide. Reich’s eyes followed the long taut curves of her legs.

Dancer’s legs.

“Were you aware that Elsa is a dancer?” Otto had inquired several weeks earlier.

“A dancer?” Reich responded, immediately cursing himself for playing into Otto’s trap. Clearly, he had mentioned it only to taunt Reich with the knowledge that he, Otto, was privy to confidences Reich was not.

“Why yes,” he affirmed with wide-eyed innocence. “I assumed you already knew.”

“And how is it that she confides details of her personal life to you?”

“It’s quite innocent, really,” Otto explained. “She was merely interested in the theory of muscular armoring , with respect to its application to modern dance movement–”

“Muscular armoring?” Reich gasped. “My theory?” His face reddened and eyes bulged. “She wants to discuss applications of my theories, and she comes to you ?”

“Just an oversight, I’m sure,” Otto replied with a shrug.

How could she be taken in by that conniving Hun?

Of course, Otto never showed his true colors in front of her. No, of course not! When Elsa visited he was a humanitarian, a prophet, a visionary. He lamented the suffering of mankind in each of its manifestations, and detested his own limitations in not being able to alleviate every last misery. Apparently, Elsa had fallen for Otto’s subterfuge without reservation.

“Oh, my dear, noble Otto,” Reich overheard her gushing, “already you accomplish so much for your fellow man.”

The sound of her voice snapped him from his reverie, and he had to force himself not to turn around.

“Don’t you dare denigrate yourself for not doing even more than what is already a superhuman work. One hour of the time you contribute out there, working with those poor forgotten souls, far exceeds an entire career spent locked away in a laboratory, peering through a microscope. At least in my book.”

Yes, do tell her about your humanitarian mission among the suffering, forgotten inmates: especially the female ones. Do relate the wealth of data you gather from those experiments.

“Enjoy a fine afternoon, Otto,” Elsa enjoined, gathering up some papers in preparation for her rounds. She glanced up at Reich as she reached the doorway. “Oh. Good day, Herr Doctor .” She was gone before Reich could answer. He tried to resist an urge to look over at Otto, but failed. Otto was grinning his hideous leer toward the doorway where Elsa had stood a few seconds earlier. He shifted his gaze to meet Reich’s, his expression unchanged.

“How would you like to stick your electrode in that ?” he sneered.

Reich’s face glowed. His slender, delicate fingers hardened into small bony fists. He could hear no sound but the angry hiss of blood in his ears. He took a step toward Otto, then stopped. What was he going to do? What could he do? Punch the giant German’s iron jaw? And then what? Otto would beat him to death. Even more likely, Reich reflected, he would stoically seek out Elsa’s sympathies:

“I wouldn’t trouble you, Fräulein ,” he would say, “but I was unable to find an antiseptic compress.…

“Oh, don’t concern yourself, it’s nothing, really.… “It is truly not my intent to indict a colleague.…

“I suppose, perhaps, Herr Reich may have resented your kind pleasantries, and imagined some slight to himself.…

“Of course I didn’t strike him back. What would that possibly prove? ”

No, Reich concluded, physical confrontation was not an option. He forced his fingers to hang limp at his sides. “You will mind your manners, Herr Köedmann ,” Reich icily advised, “and never again speak that way in my presence.”

“What will you do, Willie? Strike me?” Otto spoke through his teeth, scarcely wrinkling the carnivorous grin. For a moment, Reich wondered if perhaps Otto had violated even the privacy of his own thoughts.

“No, Otto,” he whispered. “I will, however, lodge a formal complaint, and make a full report of your conduct to both Herr Schjelderup and to Elsa.”

Otto’s smiled broadened, then erupted into a frigid laugh. “Please, by all means go ahead,” he goaded. “And whom do you think they will believe? Doctor Schjelderup considers you unstable—a neurotic. It was I who prevailed upon him to let you remain here after all of the scandalous reports in the paper.”

“You think I would believe anything you say?” Reich lamely countered.

Otto, still smiling, ignored him. “And our esteemed benefactor’s opinion is higher by far than that of Fräulein Lindenberg .”

“I will not hear any more of this!” Reich shouted.

“She thinks you are a demented little pervert .”

“No!” Reich screamed. “Not another word, or so help me, I’ll kill you!”

Silence gradually damped the reverberations of Reich’s words, and even eroded, though only slightly, the brittle edges of Otto’s defiant grin.

“Wilhelm, my friend ,” Otto said at last, “you do me an injustice. If I tell you these things, it is for your own good. Only the truest of friends would reveal the derisive confidences of others, as I have just done. We must not turn against each other. We need one another, you and I.”

Reich bent over his workbench and drew his thoughts around him like a curtain. He’d show them; show them all! Soon, very soon now, his research would at last come to fruition. Then his fame would be such that even the inestimable Harold Schjelderup would have to admit the error of his judgment. He would beg that Reich forgive his lack of insight; plead with him to stay on and honor the clinic with his reputation.

And Elsa , he envisioned—perhaps a little voltage is just what’s needed to shock away the perceptional blockage from which she obviously suffers. But he wouldn’t do it himself—oh no, not he. He’d wait for Otto to get around to it, as he inevitably would. Let her get a good taste of his real colors. Then, at the last possible minute, with Otto poised to do his foul deed, Reich would kick in the door, foil the nefarious perpetrator, and carry Fräulein Lindenberg to safety. Gallantly he’d wrap her in a blanket. She’d shiver in his arms, and then at last she would know which of them was the demented pervert. Yes, he would show them all!

Chapter Eight

"Wilhelm, come quickly! You must see this!”

Reich approached warily. Otto had, on several occasions, employed a similar ruse to gain his attention, only to disgust him with some grotesque anatomical sample, sliced, presumably, from an unconcerned cadaver. He was relieved to find Otto holding only a coil of cloth-wrapped copper bell wire. Nearby on the lab table he noticed a small mound of dull purple crystals.

Soon after arriving at Oslo, Reich had demonstrated that negative orgone accumulated in the body as a result of extreme stress. Under normal circumstances, this harmful substance—he named it NOR , for N egative ORgone —dissipates gradually, neutralized by the body’s nominal trickle of positive orgone , or POR . They later discovered that sexual orgasm generated an immediate flood of POR, which negates the NOR, and with it, the effects of stress.

“Here, watch this,” Otto urged. He was almost breathless, and uncommonly excited. He took one end of the wire in each hand, allowing the coil to fall carelessly between. The insulation had been neatly stripped a half inch back from each extremity. Otto poised one end a centimeter above the tray of NOR crystals. “Keep your eyes on the sample,” he directed. Then he reached the other end of the wire toward a large beaker of colorless liquid.

A blinding white arc imprinted indistinct multiples of itself in Reich’s eyes. When they had vanished, he found that the NOR sample had likewise disappeared. He followed Otto’s glance to the beaker. The liquid had taken on a foul grayish tinge.

NOR had been easy enough to isolate. A test animal would be severely stressed—a small decompression chamber provided a convenient method—and just before death occurred, its brain would be removed, and the DOR residue extracted. Until now, however, synthesizing the elusive POR had proven impossible. Isolating a material that annihilates itself immediately in the presence of the very substance that precipitates its production presented a seemingly insurmountable challenge.

For a time it appeared as if Otto’s study of NOR-induced mutation of certain microbes would be the only fruitful line of investigation. Reich had all but given up hope until Otto’s fortuitous discovery.

“Water!” Otto shouted. “The orgone has an affinity toward water. Moreover, it follows the same path to ground as electricity. Do you know what this means?”

Yes! Yes!

Reich knew, but was too excited to articulate a response. Otto answered for him: “Now we can drain off the NOR before it neutralizes the positive orgone !”

At that moment, Reich couldn’t have loved Otto more had they been brothers.

In the weeks and months that followed, preliminary experiments revealed that the orgone potential of any species was proportional to its overall cognitive complexity. Thus, cats generated more orgone than mice, dogs even more still, and monkeys the most of all—at least among the species they had tested. Since Reich had little stomach for the unpleasant procedure, Otto’s imperturbable sensibilities and icy precision became an indispensable asset.

The extraction process began with a wrestling match in which the two men struggled to restrain a wiry adult male ape. Leather straps held the scowling simian immobile in an oak rack, hairy arms at his side and legs spread. Reich had always detested the ugly little brutes, and often had to suppress a satisfied smirk at the foreknowledge of what was to follow. Nevertheless, he could never bring himself to observe more than a few minutes of the process at a time.

When the subject was adequately restrained, a six-inch silver collector was inserted into the base of its skull and down through its spine. This served to drain off the NOR as it was produced. A thick copper conduit connected the collector to a vat of water. Once the orgasm-triggering testicular electrodes were in place, the entire rack slid easily into a meter-long metal cylinder: the decompression chamber. The vessel was closed and sealed, with the animal’s head protruding from one end.

Experience had taught them that this was the most efficacious time to expose the brain. Oblivious to the frantic beast’s wild-eyed howls, Otto would efficiently saw around the circumference of the hairy little skull, and then tape the pre-loosened lid in place for convenient access later. Then they’d start the pumps.

Using state of the art equipment, the vessel was gradually decompressed to the equivalent of a twenty-nine thousand foot altitude. Respiration would often continue for as long as thirty minutes, resulting in extreme stress, which in turn triggered massive production of NOR. During this period the unfortunate subject would scream, roll his eyes, and shudder hideously. One particularly recalcitrant fellow shook so hard that he loosened the tape on his lid, allowing the brain to pop out before anyone could catch it. The entire experiment was ruined! After that Otto devised a more effective head restraint.

As stress increased, the generated NOR was continuously drained to the water. Nevertheless, the subject’s physiological bookkeeping system, unaware that the NOR was gone, prepared to generate a corresponding flood of POR to neutralize the deleterious substance.

When a fine red mist around the lips indicated that lungs had finally ruptured, Reich would throw a switch that connected the high-voltage power supplies. Current would flow, inducing a final smoking climax, which in turn triggered generation of massive quantities of POR. Under ordinary circumstances, this POR would instantaneously interact with, and mutually annihilate, the stress-induced NOR. Because the NOR had already been drawn off, however, the POR simply remained in the brain. At this point, Otto would flip back the bony lid and expertly extract the POR-engorged brain. Soon the intense blue resin would come dripping into a waiting receptacle.

With a steady, if limited, supply of POR extract, Reich’s experiments progressed, but without significant result until a chance occurrence precipitated a breakthrough.

After several extraction routines consistently produced less than a quarter of the anticipated yield, the subjects were all traced back to a single lot of experimental primates. They examined two random samples from the same lot and discovered that both suffered from advanced pathological tumors in the brain and other organs.

Otto was beside himself. “All this work! All of this time, wasted! I’ll bring these tumorous ape cadavers right back to those thieving Jews and demand a refund. If they dare to refuse I’ll make them eat monkey, kosher or not!”

Reich idly wondered whether the maligned ape vendor was truly of the Hebrew faith, or if Otto simply used the word Jew as an imprecation on anyone suspected of swindling him. The rumination was displaced by one of more pressing consequence.

“Wait, Otto,” he urged. “Let’s not be hasty. Perhaps this may teach us something about the relationship between orgone and tumors.”

“Teach us? What can it teach us that we don’t already know? Cancers inhibit the production of POR, and we have wasted our time.”

“But suppose,” Reich continued, as much to himself as to Otto, “suppose that it doesn’t ?”

“Doesn’t what?”

“Doesn’t inhibit the production of POR at all.”

“But we’ve just seen –”

“We have just seen,” Reich interrupted, “that cancerous monkey brains contain low levels of POR. But what if the diseased apes were actually producing normal levels of POR. Suppose that the tumors are, somehow, regions of intense NOR accumulation.”

“Then,” Otto continued, “the missing POR would be accounted for by mutual annihilation.”

“Exactly,” Reich answered. “All we have to do is examine the subject’s brain for lesions when the skull is first opened.”

“Yes,” Otto anticipated the rest, “then afterwards examine the brain again before processing.”

“If the tumor is reduced,” Reich concluded, “we can hypothesize that POR may be effective in the treatment of cancers!”

By 1939, when Reich and Köedmann published their first results reporting successful treatment of cancer in rats using POR residues, the growth in Schjelderup’s jawbone had worsened. He had already undergone several surgical procedures, and still required frequent treatments. He was in constant pain.

“You must try your therapy on me, Wilhelm,” Schjelderup insisted after reviewing their results.

Reich argued caution, but in the end, the director’s rank prevailed. “You work in my clinic, under my rules. You will perform your experiments when and upon whom I tell you. Otherwise you can make arrangements to pursue your research elsewhere.”

“The quantity of orgone residue needed will be enormous,” Reich warned. “The full capacity of our extraction fixture is barely sufficient to support the treatment of a few rodents. It may take years to collect enough to treat a human.”

“I don’t have years!” Schjelderup shouted. “I may not even have months, and I can’t endure another day of this hellish agony. You have my full authority to allocate resources as required. If you need equipment, buy it. If you need more help, hire it. I’ll instruct Otto to do whatever is necessary to ensure sufficient supply of orgone for my treatment.”

In the weeks that followed, Reich engineered and supervised the upgrade of their facility. The sheer bulk of new equipment precluded installation in the existing laboratory. An empty floor in the wing dedicated to the profoundly disturbed was allocated, and Otto was assigned full responsibility for POR production. Within six weeks of startup, Reich had more of the glowing blue crystals than he would have thought possible.

“Otto must be buying up every ape in Oslo,” he mused, “I only hope the increased demand doesn’t drive up the price.”

In the mere months since treatment was commenced, Schjelderup’s pernicious facial growth diminished from a taut angry fist, down to the size of a shriveled peppercorn. At the director’s insistence, Reich withheld publication of his results. It wouldn’t do to have the world know that human experiments were in progress at the clinic; never mind that the only human affected was the director himself. Reich agreed that they couldn’t risk attracting attention. Already there were ongoing distractions regarding experimentation at the clinic.

“Just because a few miscellaneous body parts show up in the river,” Reich protested, “or maybe a mutilated corpse or two, and right away they investigate the clinic.”

“They will find nothing,” Otto muttered, eyes glued to his microscope. “I have seen to it that.” He paused, looked up from his work, and added: “That is, everyone on the staff observes the highest standards of propriety.” He returned to his work, but continued speaking. “I suspect that your publications may be a greater source of negative publicity than a few anonymous dead women.”

“That’s unfair,” Reich complained. “Just because my particular field of research constitutes a source of prurient titillation to a few adolescent minds, the ingenital enemies of sexual-social revolution resort to their usual slanders. Then,” he continued after a brief pause, “when they’re all strangled by their own orgastic constrictions, they’ll blame me for not saving them. Just wait! Soon Schjelderup’s cancer will completely disappear. Then I’ll reveal the entire miracle cure to a grateful world. We shall see who laughs last!”

Otto looked up and smiled that infuriating grin. “In the meantime, however, reaction to your published works is…less than favorable.”

Reich’s face reddened.

“Let’s see,” Otto continued, shuffling a pile of papers on his table before finding the latest issue of The Oslo Journal of Clinical Psychology . He thumbed through the pages and read: “…lingering fixation with the licentious underpinnings of his research, as revealed in his conclusion that all neurophysiological imbalances are the result of ‘inadequate orgastic discharge’.” Otto scanned further into the article with his finger. “…Doctor Reich’s emphasis on ‘orgastic potency’ sounds, to this psychoanalyst, like a demented cry for help.”

Reich buried his face in his arms. His fist beat at the top of his desk.

“I didn’t intend to upset you,” Otto’s voice intruded through Reich’s moans. “But you know how your words are so often misunderstood.”

“What am I to do, then?” Reich whined, eyes glistening as he looked up at Otto. “Must I censure myself until the rest of the world is mature enough to hear?”

“Of course not,” Otto assuaged. “Your gifts are bestowed by God. To withhold from humanity the wisdom of your insights would be a grave transgression against your Maker.”

Reich looked up. “Do you really mean that?”

“I would not lie to you.”

Reich doubted that. Though they worked together closely, Reich was still wary of Otto and his intentions. Necessity, however, had forced him to put inhibitions aside and assume that he and Otto at least shared common scientific goals.

“But what else can I do? Whatever I say, they just call me names.”

“Say nothing,” Otto advised. “Show them!”

Reich considered how a demonstration might indeed convey what a thousand words could never say.

“You may have a point,” he mused. “Something scholarly. Something subdued.”

“Wrong!” Otto corrected. “Under their pomp and pretense, they’re all spineless, constipated little men, looking for a show that will pander to self images that are as over-inflated as their bulbous behinds. You must play to them, Herr Doctor. Flatter their egos. Your theatrics must feed them the cues they need as they play at being men of science.”

Reich wavered between enthusiasm and uncertainty. “Okay, Otto,” he said at last, “what do you have in mind?”

“Excellent,” Otto gleamed, putting his arm around Reich’s shoulder. “Excellent! Here’s what we shall do.…”

Chapter Nine

The small brown-skinned man sat upon a coarse mat of woven sisal, not much larger than a Western gentleman’s dinner napkin. He appeared oblivious to the mud surrounding him; untouched by the swarming flies; somehow protected from the stench of decaying vegetation, water buffaloes, and human excrement. He remained transfixed, naked but for a rag about his loins. The mundane world flowed by, neither noticed nor heeding.

The yogi practiced Bandha Padmasana —the locked lotus. The heel of his bare right foot was pulled in above his bony left hip. Left heel sat over the right hip. His arms locked across his back so the knuckle of his right hand rested to the left near his right toe. His left hand was similarly and symmetrically anchored. He’d been sitting like that, without moving, since before dawn. It was late afternoon, and the sun had almost vanished. During the entire period he had drawn breath fewer than one hundred times.

“In the ancient Sanskrit,” a voice from nowhere in particular and all around intoned, “ kundalini is a form of bioenergy —the human life force. It is that which drives evolution, and leads the species to higher states of consciousness.”

Reich shook his head, scribbled the word kundalini in his notebook, and looked around. He had arrived quite early, and the operating theater at the University of Oslo was still empty save for the forty-two year-old doctor and his voluminous notes and papers.

He sat high in the darkened mezzanine. Below him stretched rows of somber wooden benches that had witnessed the brutal mutilation, dismembering, dissection, and general desecration of the last naked remains of countless and forgotten men, women, children, animals.

“What sight could shock such stolid eyes as these benches of wizened oak must, by now, posses?” he asked of the darkness in whispered tones. He laughed—a quiet, prematurely bitter chuckle, cut short by the arrival of Otto, down below at the platform. He went straight into the shadows and began preparing the experiment.

A few minutes later the first attendees began to arrive. They came in groups of two or three—men with solemn beards, weighty in the preponderance of scholarly deeds, trappings no less imposing than the formal robes of their authority.

He idly wondered if he should grow a beard himself, but quickly dismissed the notion. Otto had always rankled him about his sparse facial growth. “Don’t worry,” Otto would chide, “someday even you will attain puberty,” or: “How interesting—exactly the same texture as your underarms.”

Reich frowned. Now that he could finally raise a respectable growth, it was already streaking gray.
There is no justice in this world.

He peered past the benches and the mezzanine, down into the operating platform: oft the final rest of some despoiled corpse, pre-split perhaps from vent to sternum, yet oddly indifferent to the depredation. Today the cool scrutiny of the spot-lamps focused only the blank face of a lab table and an imposing rack of instrumentation. He scanned the array, mentally checking off the essentials: power supplies, gauss meter, electrode sets—pre-connected and hanging ready from hooks on the table legs.

Of course, the Reich Orgonoscope dominated the display. It stared out defiantly through two gaping white dial-meters. At Otto’s suggestion they had replaced perfectly functional eight-centimeter gauges with oversized twenty-centimeter models. Reich agreed they would serve to draw attention toward that region where the substance of the demonstration would unfold itself. Today those two round white dials met condescending squints from above with unflinching conviction.

Reich caressed the apparatus with his eyes. It was so…elegant, so symmetrical. His pulse picked up a beat and he squirmed in his seat. Then his scan brought its focus toward the top of the intricate array of apparatus.

Those ridiculous horns!

He wondered how Otto had talked him into adding the irrelevant appendages.

In the weeks before the demonstration, Reich had agonized over every detail. He could afford no further miscalculations. The press had been having a field day with the case of a female hysteria patient assigned to his care by the state. After just four sessions with Reich, the patient committed suicide. Official psychiatrists declared the suicide ‘a result of treatment’, and turned the case over to the Norwegian Police with a recommendation that Reich’s visa not be extended. Fortunately, he counted among his loyal patients several important officials who interceded on his behalf.

Still the attacks persisted. “Reich Was Driven from Berlin,” one headline announced, “Thrown Out of Communist Party.” He had hoped to put all of that behind him. Unfortunately, the Oslo newspapers, bit by bit, dragged out every detail. They libelously encouraged wild rumors about his therapy and experiments. A recent article intimated that research at the clinic involved forcing inmates to engage in bizarre sex acts and wild orgies. Today’s demonstration, he hoped, would quell the absurd rumors once and for all.

Two dozen men dotted the auditorium, coagulating into sporadic splotches like dark mold cultures in a Petri dish. They muttered softly within their individual clusters, but the acoustics of the hall turned the aggregate into an angry buzz.

“Well, Herr Doctor ,” a man with a pointy black goatee and a pince-nez greeted him, “I hope today’s demonstration will reflect somewhat greater decorum than your most recent…scholarly treatise.”

Before Reich could reply, the chairman of the medical school’s Neurology Department—a man of considerable influence at the university—had already slipped back and re-amalgamated with the rest of the administrative organism.

Reich stared off into the shadows beyond the well-defined barrier of the spot lamps, rubbing his thumb and index finger together in a rhythmic squeak: scrinch , scrinch , scrinch —an unconscious affectation.

Reich surveyed the two protrusions atop the instrument rack with fresh misgivings. Somehow, those damned horns had slipped through his discriminatory judgment in all the excitement. Well, nothing could be done about them now. He closed his eyes, cleared his throat, and began:

“In the ancient Sanskrit,” he intoned, “ kundalini is a form of bioenergy —the human life force. It is that which drives evolution, and leads the species to higher states of consciousness.”

Are you mad? Don’t improvise! Adhere to the plan!

The words flew from his mouth unbidden, but it just seemed to feel right, so he let himself go. He heard the sound of his voice the way he sometimes caught bits and pieces from many lecture halls as he’d hurry through the buildings, lost in his more immediate and intimate phantasms. In just such a reverie, Reich could almost see the old man, an oriental, as he danced the mystic ballet of the ch’i .

Balanced in the perfected harmony of spirit and flesh, he ceases to be merely a man in motion. Transformed into an objectification of some massive but subtle universal current, his motions are smooth, circular, flowing, but pulsating with power.

Grasp sparrow’s tail.

He swoops, his entire body moving in majestic unison, arms gracefully whipping subtle fingers in the pantomime snare.

The old man is joined by a younger counterpart, an acolyte carefully matching each nuance of the master’s subtle movement.

The crane spreads its wings.

In perfect unison they step forward with their right feet. They drop right hands to waist level, then draw left wrists to their chests. Rotating to the left, they raise their arms—cranes just before flight. Then four arms thrust downward with such forceful authority that it would not have astounded the most jaded cynic had they actually risen aloft and taken flight.

“In the orient, the Chinese identify an intrinsic vital force which permeates all creation.” Reich listened curiously to his own voice in the distant mundane reality. “They call it ch’i , and believe that its cultivation in the human body, through practices called tai ch’i , conveys paranormal capabilities.”

The pace intensifies, and the dancers now engage each other with powerful thrusts, parries, strikes, and blocks. Their eyes are fixed and hard with concentration, but then they separate and bow to each other with a spirit of deep respect and profound gratitude. Each tacitly acknowledges a debt to the other’s skill, so essential for perfecting his own.

“In fact,” Reich continued, “recent work by Sir James Frazer supports the thesis that some notion of a universal fundamental life energy appears in every major culture.”

“Someone else whose carriage isn’t fully hitched,” an anonymous brittle voice critiqued from the shadows to the left. A smattering of guffaws agreed. Reich’s hands hardened into fists, then impotently turned flaccid as he forced himself to continue.

“My recent publication.…”

He paused, steeling himself for the inevitable.

“The Function of the Orgasm –”

Several throats were cleared with exaggerated thoroughness, accompanied by a few twitters.

“Demonstrated ,” Reich continued, with a force that was just a bit more commanding than he’d intended, “the existence of some unique force or new state of matter, which is intimately connected with the life process.

“In the research reported therein,” he went on, “my assistant and I discovered an unknown radiant residue in the desiccated neural tissue of highly stressed mice. No such substance was observed in the control subjects.” He paused, both to catch his breath and assess the tenor of the audience—not that it mattered, there was no stopping now.

“However, when the mice were first stressed, and then induced to orgasm–”

“How did you manage that?” someone chided from the far side of the arena. A cacophony of chuckles followed, fueling the flame in Reich’s ears and face.

“We found,” he made himself proceed, “that the brains of these mice contained a related substance, which appears to neutralize the stress-induced residue. In subsequent studies we determined that these effects represent two polarizations of a single substance, which we have named orgone , for the orgasmic force it mediates.” He tried to tune out a slight but distracting buzz of discussion in the audience. He continued speaking, but his thoughts were already beginning to drift. This time it was his own image that began to form in the wispy edges of his mind. “We found that negative orgone , NOR for short, collects in the nervous system during times of extreme stress.…”

He was in a strange room, with a woman whose name he did not know.

“Positive orgone , or POR, is created during normal sexual activity, culminating in the complete convulsive discharge.…”

He had gone to her many years ago, a week after Sigmund Freud accepted Reich’s first paper. A half-hour of her time would cost him more than half his monthly stipend, but he was determined to see it through—to finally place fear and doubt forever behind him.

“Deviate sexual behavior, we have theorized, accomplishes the opposite effect.…”

He’d spent fifteen minutes desperately trying—but to no avail. He sat up on the strange bed, in the strange room, sweating and strangely indifferent to his nakedness and the presence of the strange woman.

“Don’t worry,” she laughed. “Just save up your money and come back again.”

Whether it was some imagined taunt in her laughter, or the sudden realization of how much he had paid for services not rendered, he wasn’t quite sure, but something inside his skull exploded in deep purple shards.

“We have further speculated that the accumulation of NOR, if not neutralized, can lead to.…”

He stood beside the bed holding his wide leather belt. A violet glow seemed to overrun from his eyes, tinting the unfamiliar room a cold indifferent hue. The woman tried to pull the blanket to her chin, but he flung it clear of the bed with his free left hand and immediately began flailing her with the belt in his right.

“…dangerous deviant behavior.…”

She screamed and struggled across the mattress, trying ineffectively to protect all of her skin with no shield save that same inadequate flesh. Each time the belt cracked down, the prostitute tried to shield the point of impact, exposing by the effort some alternate target. She made for the door, naked though she was, but he put himself between victim and egress and drove her back with the swinging leather strop, noting with satisfaction the red welts that now crisscrossed her thighs, flanks and breasts.

She lost her balance and tumbled, twisting into the heavy wooden footboard at the base of the bed. The momentum of her retreat carried her ample upper torso over onto the mattress, while the unyielding bed frame precluded further progress of her hips and thighs. Her eventual state of equilibrium was a rather indecorous pose, with feet on the floor, and upper body bent forward over the high crossbar of the bed’s foot.

Reich raised the whip over his shoulder, about to crack it smartly against her upturned rump. He paused, abruptly aware that he was finally prepared to complete the transaction for which he had bartered. He threw down the belt and stepped up behind her.

Beneath the narrow focused beam, a bead of sweat glimmered on the young man’s forehead, blinking like a signal lamp to the accelerating rhythm of their bodies.

“This is the most.…” The voice sputtered as if uncertain whether to speak, choke to death, or explode. “It’s an absolute outrage !” A portly bearded professor with bushy gray eyebrows and a glowing red face stormed out of the theater, followed closely by better than half of those in attendance.

The wide white instrument-eyes stared in astonishment, their delicate needles throbbing toward the high end of their scales. Slender bundles of wire connected the console to electrodes fastened to both test subjects. The wires had, by this time, settled into a complex harmonic, and vibrated a lascivious counterpoint to the pervasive rhythm. Both subjects, whose identities were protected by veils, wore long lab coats—suitably slit and arranged to allow necessary access without actually exposing any part of the anatomy that would offend even the strictest Victorian sensibilities.

Reich had to raise his voice above the murmur of even this dwindling audience. He spoke quickly:
“The current experiment will conclusively demonstrate and quantify the aforementioned bioelectric release at the moment of sexual climax.”

Two men up front turned around simultaneously. Their glaring disapproval cut through the shadow like a beacon.

“The instrumentation you see before you has been specially modified, according to my own design, to register potential gradient as the charge of NOR accumulates in preparation for the flash when NOR and POR are mutually annihilated.”

The general buzz of reprobation approached and then overshadowed the heavy pants and occasional moans from below. The aroused hum of the instruments and their power supplies, however, still prevailed over all.

Another group of three rose as a unit and stalked toward the nearest exit. The man in the lead stopped suddenly before passing through the door. The other two almost knocked him over, so abruptly had he halted. He turned toward Reich. A diffused but definitely undulant illumination reflected off the white lab coats of the performers below, and projected up on the angry features. Contorted though they were, Reich recognized them as those of the chairman.

His red face pulsed as the licentious frequency of the extraordinary trick of lighting approached its frenzied culmination.

“A disgraceful display of…of.…” The chairman looked as if his head were about to pop. His eyes bulged, pince-nez dropped, and his black goatee stuck straight out from his beet-red face, making him look like a glowering Beelzebub. He stood speechless, shaking his fist until he regained sufficient composure to continue. “I’ll see to it that–”

His intended threat was never articulated. At that precise moment, a report like the discharge of artillery shook the room, accompanied by a blinding fireball. Then, dwarfed, but not obscured by the sudden electrical discharge, Reich’s test subjects wailed unrestrained shrieks of ecstasy.

Shit! I forgot all about the lightning machine!

Anticipating a somewhat less hostile reception, Reich had finally capitulated and authorized Otto to install a large Van de Graaff electrostatic generator, triggered by a discriminating circuit in the orgone detectors. Reich had argued that the flashy finish had absolutely no relevance to the experiment. Otto countered that, since POR and NOR extinguished each other with no trace—unless of course, they were to remove and dehydrate the subjects’ brains—the lightning machine was a legitimate prop for reproducing what otherwise could not be displayed. When Reich remained unconvinced, Otto added that it would also serve to draw attention away from the copulating couple at the crucial moment. Reich finally agreed.

When the man, the woman, and the lightning machine simultaneously erupted, the chairman had frozen, fist in the air and mouth wide open, caught in the middle of his denunciation—accusatio interruptus .

The wide “O” of his mouth remained agape, but began to quiver around the edges. Still, no sound came out for several seconds.

“Charlatan! Fraud!” he shouted. “Profligate!” He stormed out, followed closely by his entourage. The remainder of the auditorium emptied nearly as quickly, and with similar sentiment.

Reich sighed. “Maybe the lightening was a bit much after all.”

Chapter Ten

Down below, the formidable tower of dials, wires, insulators, coils, belts and motors contemplated its most recent edification in somber silence. A faint but still acrid aroma of ozone drifted up on some stray air current from the amber electrodes of the Van de Graaff . At the right edge of a privacy screen, Otto was smiling his open, gregarious smile and chatting to the test subjects—recruited from the Art School’s contingent of nude models.

As Reich watched, first one and then the other white canvas lab coat draped itself over the top of the two-meter high screen. He studied Otto’s face. Though well up in the mezzanine, Reich could tell—knew without even having to look—that Otto’s innocent, guileless smile had not betrayed as much as a twitch. He heard the incessant good-natured babble of Otto’s voice, but could not distinguish the content. Still, He could almost see that familiar dagger glint in Otto’s icy blue eyes.

If that blissfully ignorant couple only knew what he would do—to both of them—in the absence of restraint or censure, they would wither to their souls and flee from this place; flee for their lives! Out into the streets of Oslo, without the slightest thought for their nakedness.

Otto counted out a fistful of currency and handed it over. A few seconds later two people slipped out from behind the screen, fully attired, and hurried out through the door. Reich shuddered and gathered his notes. His movements bespoke lethargic indifference as the sheets of paper gathered themselves into a shaggy haphazard heap. He stood up and heaved a sigh of resignation— almost a whimper.

A sudden movement from the shadows snagged in his vision. He thought for a moment it was Otto, who always seemed to come at him from shadows, both in waking hours and in dreams. His head snapped toward the approaching mass.

He could see at once that it wasn’t Otto. This was a gaunt fellow, several inches taller than Reich, and perhaps fifty years old. Reich breathed a sigh of relief.

A stern, almost maniacal face, punctuated by a deeply knit brow atop two bulging, ogling, accusing eyes, stopped a few meters away. A tweed jacket hung off the stranger’s angular frame as if tossed over a wooden coat rack. He wore no vest and no tie in his shirt. His wild mane and untrimmed beard were a greasy black, dotted and streaked here and there with a splatter of gray. He wore thick lenses in sturdy frames that looked like steel.

“You are clearly a young man undeterred by controversy in his pursuit of science. That’s good.” His stare never released Reich’s eye.

“Why…thank you…Herr?”

The visitor ignored the implied query, and sat himself on a bench two tiers higher than the level where Reich stood. Reich could feel the tension in the stranger’s muscular armor. Very rigid.

The man is orgastically imbalanced.

Reich made an effort to respire through his genitals, in order to protect his own aura by increasing his body’s natural orgasticity .

“You’ve attacked me…,” the ominous fellow said at last. Reich, startled, began to protest, but the man held up his hand and continued in a less theatrical, but still authoritative voice: “…with insight, professional reserve, and focus, not personal rancor, as have some others.”

“But Herr Doctor,” Reich protested, taking a strategic guess at the stranger’s credential, “I have never even laid eyes on you before just now!”

“Nevertheless.”

The strange man stood abruptly. Reich instinctively took a half step back and almost fell over the next tier of benches.

“Careful!” the intimidating visitor shouted. He hurried around the seats and down to Reich’s level. “I intended no threat, and harbor no resentment. In fact, I’ve rather enjoyed your opinions and critiques.” He extended his hand. “I’ve anticipated your acquaintance for some time. I am Doctor Briehl from–”

“Columbia Medical School Department of Psychiatry,” Reich finished excitedly. “Of course, I should have recognized.…”

Although they had never met, Wilhelm Reich and Walter Briehl had exchanged a series of challenges, replies, and counter-interrogatories a year or so earlier. The subject had been Reich’s theory of Character-Analytic Vegetotherepy .

“I-I apologize, Herr Doctor,” Reich stammered. “I never intended–”

Briehl again held up his hand for silence—an authoritative gesture that Reich found genitally offensive. “Please, please,” Briehl laughed, “I wish to applaud, not chastise you. As I said, your observations were focused, incisive, and well considered. No good scientist can resent that kind of criticism, especially from a bright young man whose career is on the threshold of its bloom.”

“I thank you, Sir,” Reich managed. The older man’s grip was firm, and Reich wished he’d let go. “However, I am no longer young, and as you have just witnessed, my career is more precisely on the bitter brink of a plummet.”

“Nonsense!” Briehl bellowed, still laughing and squeezing until Reich was certain he could hear small bones grind themselves into dust. “The night seems longest in the moments before dawn.”

“Well sir,” Reich replied, managing at last to slip his hand from the other’s grip, “forgive my doubts, but I’m not optimistic at this moment.”

Briehl laughed again and slapped his arm over Reich’s shoulder. The concussion snapped his neck backward and caused him to bite the end of his tongue.

“Come! Pack up your papers and join me for dinner. I’m anxious to hear more about your theories and results, especially this new therapy of yours—what do you call it? Body armor something-or-other?”

“OMET ,” Reich pronounced: “Orgonotonic Muscular-armor Engineering Therapy.” He had always had a penchant for acronyms, and was particularly fond of this one. “It’s an outgrowth of my earlier Character-Analytic Vegetotherepy , about which we have…communicated,” he finished in a small voice.

“Yes, yes of course,” Briehl replied. “After our previous exchange of ideas and opinions, I began to experiment with some of your analytic methods. Despite their unorthodox nature, I found myself impressed by the results. When I learned about your most recent developments, I knew I had to come to Oslo and learn them for myself.”

“You mean?”

“Yes! I wish to spend some time here as your patient and student. I understand this is your preferred method for indoctrinating new practitioners into your methods?”

“W-well, that’s correct,” Reich stammered, “however, as you’ve seen, my tenure in Oslo may be curtailed.”

“We’ll think of something over dinner,” the enthusiastic Briehl maintained. “We’ll be joined by Doctor Theodore Wolfe, a colleague of mine from the university. I’m certain the two of you will get along.”

Reich decided to comply. Compensating two people for fornicating in front of a theater full of dry old men had left him with the prospect of a severe and lengthy season of fast. More than likely, his misjudgment of the liberal, permissive tenor of Norwegian sensibilities would cost him his position at the university, and probably result in his expulsion from the country. Though the patronage of one or two American psychologists wouldn’t carry much weight in Oslo, right now he needed whatever support he could muster.

They dined in the furnished suite Doctors Briehl and Wolfe had leased in anticipation of a protracted residency in Oslo. They discussed, expanded upon, critiqued, and defended their own and each other’s theories. While they spoke, an unobtrusive and rather obsequious maid served them a meal of stewed sausage, herbed spätzle , and a fine Médoc . The maid appeared to be about thirty, slim, dark, and quite attractive in an unassuming kind of way.

Briehl did most of the talking, while Doctor Wolfe—a modest, clean-shaven gentleman who Reich supposed was about his own age—listened carefully, interjecting an occasional well-placed comment. Reich found himself liking Theo, as he asked to be called, while developing a simultaneous aversion to Briehl .

“So, Willie, is it true that this new therapy of yours requires that the patient receive treatment in the nude?” The leering Briehl had raised this line of inquiry on several occasions over the course of their dinner. Each time, Willie patiently explained to him the idea of a segmented muscular armor, which impedes the natural flow of orgastic energy through the patient.

“This armor is both the result and the cause of the impediment,” Reich elaborated. “With the patient unclothed, the practitioner can use his own orgastic sensitivity to locate auras in the patient’s armor, and manipulate it accordingly. Of course, the practitioner’s genital health must be in the most highly developed state, or there will be insufficient sensitivity to detect and manipulate the patient’s pathways. That’s why I insist that practitioners must be patients first.”

Wolfe listened while Briehl just sat there with that obscene grin. “What exactly might you be wearing while you’re…manipulating the patient?”

Willie did his level best to convince Briehl that the OMET method was not just some lascivious facade for seducing patients. “That was the whole purpose of today’s demonstration! I was showing them that my research isn’t just some prurient backstage sex show!”

“I think some of them may have missed your point,” Briehl observed.

Despite an underlying tension—a result of both Reich’s immediate apprehension, and concern about repercussions of his miscued strategy—the evening was rather enjoyable. Reich’s rapport with Wolfe grew in proportion to his loathing for Briehl .

“We’ll take brandy in the study, Grethe ,” Briehl instructed the maid. “Come,” he addressed Reich, “let’s sit back and talk business.”

Reich pried his attention from Grethe’s graceful contours, and followed his hosts.

Well before dinner’s conclusion, Reich had come to suspect that the strategic blend of Theo’s companionable openness and Briehl’s incisive probing might comprise a surreptitious assessment of his qualifications. It came as little surprise when Briehl , after receiving their snifters and shutting the heavy paneled doors of his study, broached the subject of America.

Reich sat back in a too-deep club chair, lit a cigarette, and, rolling amber cognac to coat the big crystal snifter, tried to disguise his excitement.

“Listen, Willie,” his host began. “I don’t want to be rude, but it looked to me back there like you’ve pretty much worn out your welcome in these parts.”

“Indeed it does,” Reich agreed, with an outward slouch of sadness.

“Theo and I were prepared to spend some time here with you, but under the circumstances, maybe you’d rather think about coming back with us.”

“To America?” Reich asked, as if the idea was unanticipated.

“Sure, why not?. It might take a few months, but I’m pretty certain we can get you a visa under the auspices of the school.”

“The school?” Reich gasped, hardly believing his ears. “You mean…Columbia?”

“Columbia?” Briehl repeated. Then he laughed. “Oh no, not Columbia. Sorry Willie-boy, I couldn’t swing anything like that .”

“I believe Walt was referring to this little experimental place down in Greenwich Village,” Theo Wolfe explained. “It’s called The New School of Social Research. A couple of our students are involved in it. They do some pretty avant-garde stuff there.”

“Yeah, you’d fit right in,” Briehl agreed. “I’m sure we can get them to sign you to a lecture contract. Theo and I would have to guarantee your salary, but that’s all you should need to swing a visa.”

“Sure,” Theo concurred. “We’ll be your first patients, so that’ll offset the advance. Until you’re on your feet you can stay with Grethe and me. We’ve got lots of extra room at our place.”

“Grethe ?” Reich repeated.

“My wife,” Wolfe explained. “The one who’s been serving us all evening.”

“Oh, I see,” Reich replied, trying to sound disinterested. “She appears orgastically fit.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Wolfe grunted, eyeing him narrowly. He brightened immediately. “So what do you say? Will you come to America?”

Reich looked up, blank for just a moment.

“I accept your offer, gentlemen.”

“Good! Very good,” Briehl bellowed. He again pumped Willie’s hand. “By the way, do you have family to accompany you?”

“Family?” Reich thought briefly about Annie, back in Vienna with Eva and Lore, their youngest daughter. He hoped they would fare well, what with Hitler’s annexation of Austria and all, but he couldn’t let that concern him now.

“No,” he replied at last, “I’ll be coming to America alone.”

Chapter Eleven

Months had passed and still the most encouraging news from America was: “Another month or two, at least.” Reich had staved off the hordes of inquisitors—so far—but it could only be a matter of time until adversity would prevail.

Just like Giordano Bruno.

Bruno, a victim of the inquisition, had become a favorite analog to Reich’s own persecution. Bruno went beyond Copernicus by claiming that not only was the sun the center of our solar system, but was merely one of countless stars, any of which might have planets in its orbit. He was pursued for seven years by a zealot named Mocenigo , and finally burned at the stake. Reich had been so impressed by the similarity that he deigned to immortalize poor Bruno by incorporating his tormentor’s name into an acronymous imprecation. He combined the first two letters of Mocenigo’s infamous name with the first three letters of Stalin’s original name: Djugashvili : Modju —it just sounded right somehow. A fitting name for the carriers of this virulent emotional plague—the deadly orgastic strangulation. A fitting name for his noisome detractors—modjus , one and all!

Across the room, Otto rearranged his newspaper with a flourish and went back to his reading. Reich sighed and returned attention to the article he was writing. Although each maintained a private suite of offices, most of their time was spent here, in the laboratory they both shared when Otto wasn’t up in the Extraction Facility.

Reich was troubled by Otto’s keen and patriotic interest in the recent politics of his native Germany. Although he would never like Otto, he’d come to depend on him during the years they had worked together. Reich worried that Otto might volunteer his talents in service to The Fatherland. Now, he guiltily realized, he, Reich, would be in America long before any of that could happen— another month, no more than two.

Perhaps Americans might prove themselves more hospitable than had the modjus of Oslo. His most recent line of research, if successful, would provide an unlimited source of high-grade orgone without the necessity of biological extraction. In the meantime, Otto would continue to provide all that was needed, though in doing so he might well deplete the world’s monkey population. Reich grinned and kept writing. Soon now, very soon, he’d be sailing for America, and with him he would take the world’s entire supply of precious orgone .

“This year’s prize for science,” the Nobel Committee’s spokesman was saying, “is awarded to a man destined to go down in history as the father of modern orgonomy –”

There was an anticipatory clatter of applause. Reich felt his ears begin to glow, and fought a familiar flutter in his stomach.

“For his pioneering discovery of the very essence of the life force, Doctor Wilhelm Reich!”

He waded through the thunderous waves of applause, cheers, and whistles as he made his way up to the podium. He accepted the prize, shook the hand, and fumbled for the brief statement he’d prepared. He waited for the cacophonous chorus to subside, but it seemed, if anything, to intensify.

A rhythmic pulse of feet stamped in unison—stomp, stomp, stomp, bang, bang, bang —merged in perfect counterpoint with the almost primitive chant: Wil -helm! Wil -helm! Wil -helm! Wil -stomp! Helm-bang! Wil -stomp! Helmbang ! Wil -stomp! Helm-bang! The elemental throb charged the air and penetrated the substance of the floors, the walls, even the crowd itself, creating an oscillation that fed upon its own energy. It was like a giant mutual synchronized orgasm.

“Wilhelm! Wilhelm!” Bang, bang, bang! “Wilhelm, are you awake? Come quickly!”

He looked around groggily, wondering for a moment where the crowd had gone. He fought to orient himself. The last thing he recalled was.…

His ears began to burn as he realized what had happened, and noticed the familiar warmth and dampness in his pants.

BANG, BANG, BANG! “Wilhelm, wake up!”

He pulled on a lab coat and buttoned it around the obvious stain in his white trousers before responding to Elsa’s urgent entreaty.

“Wilhelm, thank God!” she gasped as soon as he opened the door. He had never before seen her in such a state. Her usual aloof demeanor was gone, replaced by frantic confusion. Her face was white as chalk, and her blond hair—always knotted into an efficient and professional bun—fell in thick waves around her face and shoulders. He glanced down and immediately snapped his eyes back up, meeting and then averting her gaze. She was barefoot and wore only a nightgown. It was heavy white flannel, but it revealed, in that single embarrassed glance, more contours of her anatomy than would have seemed possible. He was immediately grateful for the lab coat.

“What…what.…” He searched for the next word, but nothing recommended itself.

“Wilhelm,” Elsa urged, “Otto is gone. You must come quickly. Something awful! Come now, please.”

“Otto?” he repeated. “Gone? Let’s check his apartment.”

“No, he’s not in his apartment.” She looked at him with fear in her eyes, perhaps a hint of guilt. “I’ve already been there. That’s how I found out he was gone. I stopped by to offer him some…coffee. When my knock went unanswered I thought perhaps he was working late, so I went over to the old building to check his laboratory. That door was also locked, so I went back to his apartment and let myself in, fearing he might be unwell.”

Is this possible? Could she truly have been fucking that perfidious animal?

“That’s when I found this.” She held up an envelope with Reich’s name written on it.

He snapped the paper from her hand, eyeing her with disgust, and unfolded the brief note.

“Wilhelm,” it began, “I can no longer remain here in the comfort and shelter of our research while my fatherland is most in need of allegiance. I go now, tonight, before I can again convince myself otherwise. In addition to my personal notes and clothing I have taken a few items from the facility. I trust you will forgive me, but the cause is noble and the need is great. I have taken whatever orgone extracts were on hand. (You can easily produce more as needed.) I have also appropriated the orgonoscope , the meter, and a few journals. Again, I took nothing I wasn’t confident you could replace or reproduce. Perhaps we will meet again, after our destinies bring us to greatness.” It was signed: “O.K.” A brief postscript added: “Sorry about leaving such a mess in the lab, but again, I’m sure you’ll manage to clean it all up. Ha, ha, ha.”

“Have you read this?”

She nodded.

“Do you have a key for the laboratory?”

She shook her head.

“Wait here,” he icily instructed. “I’ll fetch mine.”

He flew through the chill brick corridors of the new building, leaving Elsa to follow several paces behind. At the east end of the third floor an enclosed walkway spanned the narrow alley separating the old building from the new.

The old building had stood empty for years. It was pressed into service when the Schjelderup Clinic accepted a commission from the state to accommodate overflow from the asylum—the most violent representatives of the criminally insane. Responsibility for their care had been delegated to Elsa, and although the population was far too extensive for her to minister their individual needs, she did a creditable job of insuring their wellbeing.

Two years ago, the entire third floor had been given over to Otto’s extraction laboratory.

Reich bristled at the mental image of Elsa and Otto, off in some empty cell, rutting like the animals they both were. He increased his pace, mentally daring her to keep up with him.

Once through the connector and into the dank stone building, they turned right, climbed a wide stairway, and stood before the black double oak doors of Köedmann’s orgone extraction facility. The doors were clasped from the outside and fixed with a banded iron padlock. Reich fumbled with three keys before a fourth creaked through the lock’s innards.

The cavernous stone interior of the lab was brighter than the stairway, but still too dim to distinguish anything but the most macroscopic shapes. He fumbled for a valve and turned up the gas that was still used for lighting in the old building. The feeble dots of light fluttered and then their mantles glowed white hot, throwing illumination to the corners of the room.

On a table to the left, papers covered the surface and spilled over to the floor. Otto had clearly gone through them in a great hurry. Against the right wall two gaping doors revealed racks of empty trays in an icebox interior.

“All of our orgone,” Reich lamented.

Toward the center of the laboratory were six cylindrical decompression chambers. Beyond, he could just make out the edges of another identical row. He walked toward them, marveling at their size and number.

“They must be two meters long,” Elsa whispered from behind him.

Slut!

He ignored her and tapped the top of the furthest tank as he walked around the far side. Glong, glong, glong, it echoed.

He stopped short, and a heartbeat later heard a shrill gasp behind him. To her credit, Elsa hadn’t screamed. He admired her for it, especially considering how close he himself had come to shrieking at the sight that awaited them.

The tanks were arranged in two rows of six, with a space of about two meters between them. On each side of this walkway, six wide-eyed grimacing heads protruded from the ends of the tanks. An eight-inch circle had been sawn from the crown of each skull, and each brain removed. From where Reich and Elsa stood, they looked like a display of exotic bowls lying on their sides, each festooned with the features of a different hideous gargoyle. It was a sight he had seen many times before, albeit on a smaller scale. But it wasn’t the extent of the operation that shocked him. It was the fact that these were the despoiled remains of men !

Elsa stared mutely and Reich put his arm around her shoulder, though he may have needed support more than she.

“It’s okay, Elsa,” he said, his own voice quivering. “You’ve had a terrible shock, but it will be all right. Everything will be okay.” He had already banished any concern for the human heads that surrounded him. “We’ll get you started on therapy right away.”

Elsa seemed dazed. “Yes, Wilhelm, I believe you may be right—it may be time for me to start.”

Reich knew he couldn’t let this unforeseen turn of events interfere with his departure. “Any time now,” Wolfe’s letter had promised. He would find some way to keep this under wraps until he was gone.

After that, well, who cares?

Elsa had charge and responsibility for everything that went on in the state wards, and, Reich calculated, she would be the one to answer whatever questions might be asked. In the meantime, a few sessions of therapy will help her overcome her genital reticence.

He glanced back at the tanks and shook his head at the mess Otto had left.

There is certainly no shortage. All of that orgone, though. That will be missed.

Chapter Twelve

War was brewing, and the Americans viewed all prospective immigrants with suspicion—suspicion and slow, careful, deliberate scrutiny. At long last, however, Reich’s departure was finally arranged. On August 19, 1939, he stood aboard the Stavenger Fjord and watched the Norwegian coast constrict to a thread. He rolled his eyes and breathed a long-awaited sigh of relief. Over the past few months, Reich had disposed of the twelve cadavers through the normal channels. The death certificates all listed cause of death as ‘seizure due to brain tumors’. As a result, the condition of the corpses went unquestioned—until just a week ago, when the modjus started asking questions about the high incidence of brain tumors at the clinic. “Had any of these inmates been used in experiments, Herr Reich…?”

Yes, I am leaving just in time.

He smiled inwardly. The delay had also allowed sufficient time for Elsa to benefit from analysis. He reflected with some satisfaction how quickly he had managed to transform Elsa’s composed reserve into frenetic passion.

Damn but I am good.

Unbidden, an excerpt from one of Freud’s early lectures elbowed into his thoughts: “…In psychoanalysis the term transference refers to a powerful process by which the patient’s deepest emotions unconsciously associate themselves with the analyst. In this condition, the patient is extremely vulnerable, and the therapist is morally constrained against misuse of the resulting power.…” Reich shook his head and dismissed any consideration of conventions.

Such trifles are meaningless in the shadow of monumental destiny.

The delay in acquiring a visa had also allowed Reich to increase his patient load. Once they understood the magnitude of their therapist’s discoveries, most had contributed generously in order to accelerate his research. The reward, he promised them, would be total orgastic potency, not to mention freedom from disease. The power of orgone, Reich proselytized, is practically without limit! As a result he would begin life in America with ample funds to start his own research facility. He smiled again. Everything had actually worked out for the best

The Stavenger Fjord rocked in the North Sea chop. Reich pulled his long coat closed and struggled to button it against the frigid breeze that blew from the Arctic even in summer.

Harold Schjelderup, unfortunately, would die. Reich had to stop all POR production following discovery of Otto’s chicanery. Unable to explain the sudden dearth of POR without divulging details of its source, Reich continued treatment, substituting an inert look-alike for the salubrious serum. As expected, the Professor’s condition slowly regressed. Reich hoped the incident wouldn’t be interpreted as a failure of POR treatment, but there was nothing he could do about that now.

He studied the purple-gray haze that obscured all detail from the receding coast. “NOR,” he mused. The wind off the tundra, the air over the sea, all were steeped with NOR. It was an evil breeze, insidiously encircling the globe.

“Fools! Modjus!” he whispered into the spray. They all stood poised upon the threshold of cataclysmic upheaval, and didn’t even realize how close they were to the abyss.

Never has the world needed me as much as now.

“You were very fortunate, you know,” Theo Wolfe reminded him.

Reich looked up from his coffee. Wolfe had met him at the dock ten days earlier, and insisted that Reich stay in his Manhattan apartment, at least until they could arrange more permanent accommodations.

“The Stavenger Fjord is to be the last ship from Norway for some time, it would seem.” He tossed a newspaper on the smooth Formica surface of the kitchen table. Limited by his command of written English, Reich stared at the unfamiliar text. He managed to decipher only that it was September 4, 1939 before Theo translated: “War has erupted in Europe. We got you out just in time, my friend.”

“I owe my good fortune to my good friends.” He smiled at Theo, and then at Grethe, who had just entered.

“Good morning Theo.” She kissed her husband’s cheek.

“Good morning Doctor Reich.”

“Please Grethe,” Reich answered in English, with what he hoped was a continental flair, “dispense with formality, especially in your own home. Call me Willie.”

“Okay, Willie. Sleep well?”

Her voice was the clear reverent music of golden liturgical bells. The vibrations resonated with some innate frequency of nature—a propensity of reality toward mellifluousness. Her few chiming utterances had swelled and expanded to fill the entire room with a contagious luminescence.

“Yes, thank you Grethe. I slept very well, but seeing you makes me happy to be awake now.”

She laughed. The sound brought pleasant chills to his spine.

Therapy would do her a world of good.

Grethe bent over the table to study the newspaper, providing Reich with a tantalizing glimpse of her anatomy. “This is very serious,” she said at last, looking first at Theo and then to Reich.

“Yes,” Theo agreed, “I’m afraid it is.”

“Perhaps if you think it might be safer not to travel?” Reich suggested.

“I see no cause to change our plans,” Theo reassured him.“The war is in Europe, at least for the time being.”

“It’s a dreary day for a drive to the country,” Grethe observed, then added, “but we’ll be optimists and pack a lunch regardless.”

Reich’s eyes followed her as she hurried into the kitchen to make their sandwiches.

Acting on Reich’s behalf, Theo had selected several prospective habitations, and Reich was anxious to select one, settle in, and resume his research. He had work to do, important work—work crucial to the future of humanity.

The first prospect was a three-story brick structure in Forest Hills, just a half-hour or so from lower Manhattan. The basement was bright and dry, and offered high ceilings—nearly eight feet. The wiring was adequate, and the furnace was sound.

“I’ll take this one,” Reich decided.

“But you haven’t seen any of the others,” Wolfe protested.

“He hasn’t even looked beyond the cellar of this one,” Grethe added with a note of concern.

“No matter,” Reich stubbornly insisted. “I’ve seen what need to know. I’m anxious to get started, and this will suit my purposes.”

The owner’s agent seemed pleased at so quick a sale, without the slightest attempt at haggling.

“Have you arranged financing?” he asked hopefully.

“Financing?” Reich repeated.

The Realtor’s countenance dropped.

“No financing!” Reich ranted. “No modju bankers! No thieving insurance companies!”

“Mode-what?” the bewildered agent asked. He was a tall elderly fellow with a Scottish accent and plaid tam-o-shanter, who now wore an expression that suggested he had kissed his commission goodbye.

“I’ll pay for the house with gold!” Reich shouted.

“Gold?”

“Yes,” Wolfe clarified. “Doctor Reich’s funds are being converted from a Swiss account. The full amount should be available no later than the end of the week. In the meantime, I’m prepared to cover the deposit.”

“Thank you, Theo.” Reich shook his hand. “You’re a very genital character. You too, my friend,” he addressed the gaping Realtor, “although I detect signs of orgastic anxiety. You should come to me for therapy.” Then he left Wolfe to conclude details with the startled Scot, and went back down for a closer inspection of the basement—his laboratory !