Blake's Therapy

…And it was then, sir, that I decided to come in. I’d been, of course, monitoring the whole affair on my portable video, attending to Blake from the next room, waiting for his face to show that he had completed the first stage of his enlightenment. I heard him begin to confess, repent, tell Roxanna how he would make up for it, ready to face charges…. Things had gone far enough. It was time to congratulate him, reveal myself, so to speak.

He’d dragged Roxanna to the bed, wrapped her in blankets, was tending to her. He looked up, startled. Like a mad man. It always happens. Patients are not, as you know, sir, very original. They always react in the same way. As if they were, in effect, lunatics.

“Congratulations, Mr. Blake,” I repeated, emphasizing the mister, for the first time in a month not calling him just plain Blake. “Your therapy has been successful. You are cured. You need no longer entertain qualms about your morality, I take it.”

He attacked me viciously, bitterly. What sense did it have to be cured, as I put it, and which he very much doubted, what sense if the price was the suffering of these people, the death of that innocent man, this poor suicide’s life ruined? He’d see me in jail, even if it meant that he would also be prosecuted, we should all pay for this terrible crime.

I smiled at that, sir. His very words were proof, I said, that he was indeed cured. Really sane. “You care more about them,” I said, “than you do about yourself.” I explained to him that other patients had not fared so honorably, as you are aware, sir. They have surrendered to the inner demons tormenting them rather than grappling with them. They have watched the woman of their dreams—or the man—die, commit suicide, be raped, be tortured, and haven’t crossed over to the other side to save them, haven’t risked losing everything, haven’t confessed. They just stalled, idled there in utter fascination, clicked for a close-up of the dying lips, watched the heart stop beating, the scream of pain. They were also cured. The therapy always works, I told Blake, because its goal is for the client to understand who he really is and act accordingly. “And what you’ve discovered,” I said to him, “is that you may have done many improper things but that in spite of them, you are a good man. You have had your cake, Mr. Blake, and now you can eat it too.”

“You’re a businessman, Mr. Blake. How much do you think it would cost us to have somebody really die? Think of it in purely cost-effective terms. Or in terms of capital risk. Would you invest in that sort of hedge fund, futures scheme, a country that could default that easily?”

“She’s—she’s… an actress.” He stumbled over the words, stuttered them, sir. Didn’t stammer the next ones: “My God,” he said to her, went up to her there on the bed all covered with false vomit and spit, cradled in those blankets. “You’re an actress. They—all of them. They’ve all been actors, they’ve all been—”

“Congratulations, again, one more time,” I said to him. It’s a moment, I’m sure you remember, when the patients’ egos need to be massaged a bit, sir, when we have to build up their battered self-confidence. “You’re not only ethical, Mr. Blake. You’re also an extremely perceptive person. Most of our clients, even the few who do have the guts and the decency to risk crossing over to the other side, don’t realize until we tell them that it’s all been an extraordinary mise-en-scène just for them. Though the quality of the performances often depends on the quality of the script—and yours, Mr. Blake, was superb. You should have been a Hollywood producer.”

I waved my hand, you know the gesture, sir, and the whole cast of characters trooped into the bedroom. First of all, Johnny, grinning. Maybe he was grinning because he got a full month’s salary and only had to act out twenty-five minutes of seduction and foreplay and had spent the rest of the time on call, in case Blake suddenly demanded his return. And Sonia, who’s really the best of them all, we’re going to have to give her a raise or maybe even make her a partner, a junior partner, at any rate. Indispensable. And then in came Bud, who’s had the time of his life, though he does ham it up a bit and our scene director has been trying to tone down some of his improvisations in rehearsal. But our Bud did make himself thoroughly obnoxious, did provoke Blake into lashing out, going over the deep end. So he’ll get his bonus like they all will. And Fred and Jason and Silvia and Ned and all the extras as well, Ivan and Big Benjy and the policemen and the lighting designer and our prop man and the make-up artist and… well, there were enough of us crowded into that bedroom to shoot a movie which is more or less what we’d been doing, except that the camera consisted of Blake’s eyes. And Roxanna, taking a bow now—what a bravura performance, sir.

We all began to clap and then Graham Blake joined in, smiling. He’d been had, conned for his own good, to prove his own good, and he was grateful. Though you’ll be pleased to note, sir, in this videotape I’m leaving you, that our patient is trying, as we expected, to hide something dark inside and behind his eyes, behind his applause.

Blake was very noble. Gave everyone a hug. A specially long embrace to Roxanna. Though with a hint of—what should I call it?—tentativeness. She must have noticied that slight hesitation, timidity. “No hard feelings?” she asked. And he answered, “Of course not.” But when he turned to thank me, take me in his arms, as he came toward me, I could see that he was wondering whether, as part of my duties, I also got to try out the merchandise. I could see he was thinking it, I knew he would ask me that question later on when we were by ourselves. But his crassness, when he finally popped it, surprised me, the fact that he no longer felt he needed to make any effort whatsoever to tame his tongue, hide his envy.

I answered then, later on, I mean, in our follow-up session in Houston, I answered as I usually do that it was none of his business, but implied that this sort of behavior would conflict with my personal ethics. He seemed to understand my point of view that high-energy intensive therapies can only be successful if the man in charge is above reproach. While it is happening, after all, I am aware, even if he isn’t, that nobody is getting hurt or abused, nobody is using their domination to exact pleasure or power from others. Which is the way he would be, exercising utmost responsibility, when he got back to real life.

“You’re going to have a sensational comeback, Mr. Blake. You’ve worked out your obsessions and found out that they do not influence your final moral decisions. You’ve come to terms with the difficult choices your job requires. Maybe you’ll have to administer some pain. But it will all be done with the best interests of everyone in mind. You have proved to yourself that in an emergency, when things get nasty and you have to inflict some inevitable pain, you can trust that you will look out for the greater good, everyone’s best interests.”

He explained haltingly, taking his time, as if he were just recognizing the depth of the experience, plumbing it right then and there for hidden meanings. Apparently he accessed, at the culminating moment of the treatment, when Roxanna had bathed him with that look of approval and adoration that has become her trademark, he had stumbled upon a memory of his own mother when she had been dying. He paused, perhaps waiting for me to intervene, maybe merely struggling to put into words his emotional turbulence.

“I can’t thank you enough for having cured me,” he said. “I thought she committed suicide. My mother. All these years, I’ve believed she killed herself. And that I sat by her side and watched her do it and did nothing to stop her. It’s what I told myself. Nobody else. Just myself. And hardly even myself, hardly dared to tell myself. It would surface from time to time, the guilt, the…”

“That it was a false memory. Seeing Roxanna really killing herself—well, it seemed real to me—made me perceive that my mother hadn’t died like that. In my mind I saw what… I remembered my mother dying peacefully. Thanks to the treatment, I now know that I wasn’t to blame.”

“You weren’t to blame,” I agreed. “You’re right. You probably made up that traumatic memory of your mother committing suicide to compensate for surviving, to punish yourself for not having saved her. And kept on feeling guilty about that and then about other things, so many other things.”

“What I don’t understand,” Blake said again, taking his time, “is how you knew about my mother, what I felt about her death. I mean, that’s why you planned a suicide at the end, right? Roxanna told me that she had been looking forward to that final scene all month. Her tour de force, she said. So she knew, you knew, it was coming. Where my story would end up, no matter how I had scripted it before. Only—how did you know? That it was what I needed?”

I told him that most of our therapies finish with that sort of flourish, a dramatically staged suicide at the end or some other form of extreme violence that tests the patient. I told him that I don’t believe much in Freudian theories and prefer my own Therapy Through Acting hypothesis, an almost necessary corollary of Tolgate’s syndrome. In his case, it had been a lucky guess, a lucky coincidence.

I believe that I established the specific rules and limits of our relationship when you were good enough to bankroll this business, after you yourself were fortunate enough to go through our therapy, the inaugural launch, so to speak. You may recall that I promised you the profits would be substantial, and they have been. As to the future, with four million multimillonaires in this country alone and more pressure than ever on them to both rack up profits and at the same time appear more and more ethical, well, there should be a good number of mental breakdowns, and we expect healthy growth in revenue.

But it was clear at our first meeting—and we have pursued the matter on later occasions—that the unrestricted access to the confidential files, tapes, transcripts of the patients that has been granted to you, and which you have savored, if I might say so, quite exhaustively, does not extend into my own private life or, for that matter, to the intimate details of the existence of any of our staff and/or performers. I’m off limits, sir, and intend to remain so. That is, after all, what matters in life, it all comes down to this choice: are we to be the eye that watches the microbe or are we fated to become the microbe that is watched by some superior eye?