Tales From the Spaceport Bar

by George H. Scithers

  The editors find they can add nothing to that, except to recommend to those unfortunates who have not previously encountered them such vintage volumes of Davidsoniana as the novel The Phoenix and the Mirror and the collections Collected Fantasies, The Best of Avram Davidson, The Redward Edward Papers, and The Inquiries of Dr. Eszterhazy.

  A PESTILENCE OF PSYCHOANALYSTS

  by Janet O. Jeppson

  Tales are told in luncheon clubs too....

  As usual, an undertone of argument permeated the sacred precincts of the Psychoanalytic Alliance, an exclusive luncheon club known to its intimates and its enemies as Pshrinks Anonymous. The Oldest Member was holding forth. This also was not unusual.

  "I tell you again that these newfangled analysts use peculiar words that no one understands. If I hear any more about the parameters of the paradigmatic processes I’ll eat my hat.”

  "You’ve got it wrong,” said one of his younger Freudian colleagues who liked to keep up to date, "and you haven’t got a hat anyhow.”

  "Furthermore,” continued the Oldest Member, "I object to the pollution to which all of you have subjected the name of our club, adding a silent p to shrinks..... ”

  "Perhaps it was inevitable,” said one of the Interpersonals. "And even ominous,” she added.

  For once the Oldest Member looked pleased to be interrupted by a female and an Interpersonal (in order of annoyance).

  "Ominous?” he asked.

  Simultaneously, the rest of the membership groaned and bent closely over their desserts, Bananas Castrata Flambé. The Oldest Member nodded encouragingly at the Interpersonal, who grinned.

  The experience I am about to reveal [said the Interpersonal] happened only recently and has been much on my mind. This vignette, while obviously clinical, is not a case, since the person who brought the problem to my attention was not a patient but a colleague I hadn’t seen for years, a Pshrink that I used to know when we both carried large iron keys to the locked wards of a well-known psychiatric hospital.

  This colleague had always been a rather pedantic, phlegmatic man who yawned his way through analytic school some years after finishing his psychiatric residency when the rest of us were already analysts, struggling to stay afloat on the ever-increasing ocean of jargon. I recalled that this down-to-earth type had a limited vocabulary and what some of us referred to as poverty of imagination. He had, naturally, left Manhattan for some Other Place when he started his analytic practice.

  I was shocked, then, to get a frantic phone call from him, begging me for a private lunch because he needed to discuss a confidential problem affecting his work. I told him my noon hour was free and he said he would bring lunch in his briefcase.

  As we munched corned beef on pumpernickel in my office, I discovered that he was in town for one of the psychoanalytic conventions. Being allergic to cigar smoke, I had not yet been to the meetings; and

  I wondered what psychologically traumatic paper had affected my old friend.

  "Listen, I remember that you’re a sci-fi buff,” he began.

  "SF!”

  "Whatever. Do you believe in that stuff about ESP and dreams that come true and mysterious extraterrestrial beings and whatnot?”

  "I’m still waiting for the hard evidence.”

  "Well, I don’t have any, but after attending this convention it seems to me that I detect—something.”

  "Alien influence?” I asked facetiously through my corned beef.

  "How did you know! Are you part of the conspiracy?”

  I began to wonder whether or not I was doing a regular psychiatric consultation after all. I swallowed the last of my sandwich and studied my colleague. While plumper and greyer than he had been, the striking change was the faint twitching of his shoulders, possibly due to muscle strain caused by his new habit of looking nervously over them.

  "No,” I said. 'Tell me what on Earth you are talking about.”

  He sighed. "I never was much good with words, you know. I barely made it through analytic school because I had so much trouble mastering the vocabulary. Since then I’ve tried—oh, how I’ve tried, and then my wife...”

  "She’s in the field, as I recall,” I said.

  "Yes, a-” (he named one of the more ver

  bally agile allied fields). "She tried to help me; and so did some sympathetic colleagues, because at meetings I was a total loss. My papers were so easy to understand that nobody paid any attention to them, and I couldn’t understand what anyone else was saying. Finally, after years of study and trying to catch up, I began to use and even understand some of the important words.”

  "The jargon.”

  "A pejorative word if I ever heard one,” he said with a shrill laugh. "You see—I did it! I’m always doing it!”

  "Using a big obscure word?”

  "No! I mean, yes—a word with a p in it!”

  "I am puzzled...”

  'There, now you’re doing it! I’m convinced that it’s a disease, catching and deadly dangerous.” "Unfortunately our field is riddled with p’s—psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis...”

  He moaned. "That’s just it. That’s why we’re the conduits for the malevolent influence from outer space.”

  "The what?”

  "You heard me.” He bit into the untouched second half of his sandwich, eyeing me suspiciously over a fringe of buttered lettuce that was sticking out. My colleague was a WASP who always ate butter and lettuce with his corned beef sandwiches, which may be another reason why he had to emigrate from New York.

  I decided to humor him. "Supposing there is a mysterious alien influence—how do you know it’s malevolent?”

  "You haven’t been to a psychoanalytic convention lately, have you?”

  "No.”

  ’Then don’t ask. Or maybe I should tell you. No, I’ll just describe my own symptoms. It began with dreams, and don’t try to analyze them the way Siggy would have.”

  "You know perfectly well that I’m non-Freudian. Tell me about your dreams.”

  "You sound just like me when I’m humoring a psychotic patient.”

  "Yep.”

  "What the hell. The dreams come every night. And they’re full of words, most of which begin with p, that come to life in my head and chase each other around and threaten me. When the dreams began, I became aware of how everyone in my local psychoanalytic society talks like that. I used to feel I didn’t belong, but suddenly I began to be part of the group.”

  "Comrades in jargon?”

  "That’s it. You don’t know how I’ve been fighting it since I entered your office for lunch. Trying not to use many words beginning with p. I can feel them straining at the leash inside my skull, trying to get out, to join an invisible network throughout the terrestrial electromagnetic sphere..... ”

  "Whoa!” I shouted, since his face was beginning to turn purple. "It does seem to be true that our fellow Pshrinks speak in a lot of p’s. Does it matter whether they are silent or vocalized—the p’s, I mean?”

  "I don’t think so, but the vocalized seem worse. Proclivities instead of tendencies, parsimonious instead of stingy, paranoid instead of suspicious, and of course the multitude of words beginning with the unvocalized p in psycho.”

  "You’ll have to blame most of the problem on the ancient Greeks.”

  He frowned. "Maybe they were subject to alien influence first. Come to think of it, maybe you’re one of the ringleaders. You’ve got several p’s in your name. The world is full of pee—”

  As his voice rose in a wail, I interrupted. "You can always go to a Freudian and have your urethral complex analyzed.”

  ["P—U!” murmured one of the club’s pundits.]

  My highly disturbed colleague gulped and began again, in a whisper. "It’s much worse out where I live and work.”

  "Cheer up,” I said. "Around here they’re into illusory others and imaging and identifications that are introjective...”

  "But where you have introjective you also have projective!”
>
  ["At least that gets us off the excretory system and onto more interesting anatomical analogies,” said one of the Eclectics.]

  "Now let’s not get carried away,” I admonished him. "The world is full of people who don’t use words beginning with p.”

  "Is it? My son came home from college asking me to define the parameters of a meaningful marital pairing. My daughter at medical school heard a lecture on probability factors in the success of paternal participation in parturition. When I complained to my wife that the passion was going out of our partnership, she said I was predictably puerile. Then I started having repetitive dreams of being surrounded by a posse of parameters with pink faces and pallid tongues, or possibly the other way around.”

  "Well, I agree with you that all these p’s do get to be pretentious, pompous, ponderous, and pedantic,” I said.

  "Pshaw! You’ve got it too.”

  "How can any of us help it?” I said, hoping that if I got into the spirit of the thing he might start analyzing me and stop being so crazy himself. "Sometimes I think that the patients have it much worse than the Pshrinks. Why just the other day...”

  "You’re right. Nobody says anything simply, anymore. Even patients postulate prohibitive propositions like trying to persuade me to cure their passive-aggressive personality with psychodrama or their psychosomatic punishment with positioning patterns. They say they want profound sex and peak experiences...”

  ["I think I may be having one now,” snarled a Freudian.]

  "... and I ask you, isn’t it likely that we Pshrinks are the most likely to be affected by all these p’s? Day after day we listen to the voices of the people, talking and talking and talking...”

  "Which accounts for why we tend to get verbal diarrhea when let loose from our offices,” I said, proud that I had managed a sentence with no p in it.

  He was not amused. "Just last week one of my patients complained about the propinquity of the couch to my chair.”

  "Perish forbid,” I said without thinking.

  "Where did you get that expression?”

  "My father used to say it when he wasn’t actually swearing.”

  "Aha! You see! Unto the fourth generation!”

  "If you go back that far they weren’t speaking English.”

  "I was speaking metaphorically, implying that the alien influence began a long time ago,” he said, picking crumbs off his pants. "My theory is that if you think and speak often enough and hard enough in words containing prominent p’s, your mind jells up and gets petrified.”

  "Paralyzed by p’s?” It was impossible to resist.

  He glared at me. "You are then locked into an alien mind somewhere in the universe—maybe in outer space, maybe hiding somewhere in our solar system. I don’t like what could be developing in the middle layers of Jupiter, or under the ice cover of Europa.”

  Since his voice was rising again, I said, "So what?”

  "Idiot! Don’t you understand that after the aliens have gotten enough human minds locked to their system, .they’ll take control—take over Earth civilization!”

  "I think you are—you should excuse the expression—projecting. Haven’t you been worried about how the lunatic elements are trying to take over our field? I seem to remember now that you wrote a scathing paper on fringe groups.”

  "A paper that psychoanalysts and psychiatrists and psychologists perused without perceiving the profundity of the principles!”

  "Hey! You have it bad, don’t you!”

  He burst into tears and threw himself prone on my couch.

  The afternoon sun streaming into the window made the room warm, and I was too bemused by the problem to turn on the air conditioner. My next hour, I tardily recalled, was also free, since the patient was a young psychoanalyst in training who was ait that moment delivering a paper at the same convention from which my friend was playing hooky. Soon my colleague was snoring and I was drowsy enough to have a hypnagogic hallucination ...

  ["You mean you fell asleep,” said another Interpersonal.

  ["I did not,” she said.]

  I had a momentary impression of strange lines of force from far away, converging on my snoring colleague and then transferring to me. It was rather eerie, and I was glad when he woke up and bounded off the couch.

  "You’re marvelous! I’m cured!” He bent down, hugged me, grabbed his briefcase, and made for the door, where he paused. "It’s all clear to me. I just had to tell someone about it in order to feel OK. I guess I was only a carrier.”

  "You perfidious proselytizer!” I exclaimed.

  "Sorry about that. I’m going home. Maybe I’ll see you at next year’s convention.” He held up two fingers. "Live long.”

  "And prosper peacefully,” I said as he left.

  A pregnant silence ensued around the luncheon table when the Interpersonal finished speaking.

  Suddenly and simultaneously some of the more argumentative members of the club began to talk.

  "The parameters of the problem are...

  "The physiological principles in pronouncing the p...”

  "You Interpersonals and your parataxic distortions ...

  "And your participant observation...”

  "Prostituting the precepts of psychoanalytical..."

  "Perseverating in the problem of the p...”

  "Perhaps it’s only a problem of psychic phenomena ...”

  "Probably poisoned by polypramasy...”

  "The proposition is positively polymorphously perverse...”

  And just as suddenly they all shut up. There was an uncomfortable shuffling of feet under the table. Then the youngest member, a first-year psychiatric resident allowed in to learn from his superiors, spoke timidly.

  "Perhaps it’s the fault of philosophers. I almost majored in philosophy in college, and it seems to me that they promote a plethora of phrases...” He stopped abruptly, eyes wide.

  "Piffle,” said the Oldest Member. "None of the jargon is absolutely necessary, although I’m partial to 'id’ myself.”

  "Would you willingly give up 'penis envy’?” asked the Interpersonal.

  "I think you should keep it in your prefrontal cortex,” said the Oldest Member with frosty dignity as he stroked the erect waxed tips of his silver moustache, "that I do not need to have penis envy. Nor did the Master...”

  "Who was primarily a physicalistic psychobiologist,” said one of the more militant non-Freudians.

  "But the Master had no p’s in his name,” said the Interpersonal, favoring the Oldest Member’s moustache with a glance of unalloyed admiration.

  "Thank you,” said the Oldest Member, patting the Interpersonal on the patella. "You do think that hypothesis about aliens is a lot of stuff and nonsense, don’t you?”

  The Interpersonal shrugged. "I haven’t the slightest idea. I wish, however, that I didn’t have this insatiable desire to go home and read Pickwick Papers—or possibly promulgate a parody.”

  Janet Jeppson, MD., is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and writer; "the order,” she tells us, "subject to astonishing variation.” She lives in Manhattan and is married to another contributor to this anthology, Dr. Asimov. As for the genesis of this story, she remarks, "I was in a pique about the polysyllabic puzzlements of psychoanalytic jargon and I happily vented my spleen.” The Pshrinks stories ran for several years in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Amazing Science Fiction Stories, and Doubleday recently published them in a collection, The Mysterious Cure.

  THE REGULARS

  by Robert Silverberg

  "Charley never needs to ask. Of course, he knows us all very well.”

  It was the proverbial night not fit for man nor beast, black and grim and howling, with the rain coming on in sidewise sheets. But in Charley Sullivan’s place everything was as cozy as an old boot, the lights dim, the heat turned up, the neon Beer signs sputtering pleasantly, Charley behind the bar filling them beyond the Plimsoll line, and all the regulars in their regular places. What a comfort a
tavern like Charley Sullivan’s can be on a night that’s black and grim and howling!

  "It was a night like this,” said The Pope to Karl Marx, "that you changed your mind about blowing up the stock exchange, as I recall. Eh?”

  Karl Marx nodded moodily. "It was the beginning of the end for me as a true revolutionary, it was.” He isn’t Irish, but in Charley Sullivan’s everybody picks up the rhythm of it soon enough. "When you get too fond of your comforts to be willing to go out into a foul gale to attack the enemies of the proletariat, it’s the end of your vocation, sure enough.” He sighed and peered into his glass. It held nothing but suds, and he sighed again.

  "Can I buy you another?” asked The Pope. "In memory of your vocation.”

  "You may indeed,” said Karl Marx.

  The Pope looked around. "And who else is needy? My turn to set them up!”

  The Leading Man tapped the rim of his glass. So did Ms. Bewley and Mors Longa. I did the same. The Ingenue passed, but Toulouse-Lautrec, down at the end of the bar, looked away from the television set long enough to give the signal. Charley efficiently handed out the refills—Beer for the apostle of the class struggle, Jack Daniels for Mors Longa, Valpolicella for The Pope, Scotch-and-Water for The Leading Man, White Wine for Ms. Bewley, Perrier with slice of lemon for Toulouse-Lautrec, since he had had the Cognac the last time and claimed to be tapering off. And for me, Myers-on-the-Rocks. Charley never needs to ask. Of course, he knows us all very well.

  "Cheers,” said The Leading Man, and we drank up, and then an angel passed by, and the long silence ended only when a nasty rumble of thunder went through the place at about 6.3 on the Richter scale.

  "Nasty night,” The Ingenue said. "Imagine trying to elope in a downpour like this! I can see it now, Harry and myself at the boathouse, and the car—” "Harry and said Mors Longa. "'Myself’ is reflexive. As you well know, sweet.”