The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  “You must close your eyes,” Per said. “I will say.”

  Alex closed his eyes. There were low beams everywhere, projecting hooks and nails, the occasional animal splatter on the floor.

  A little hand came up to take his own.

  “I will bring you. You mustn’t look.”

  He was surprised how terrified he was, how much faith it took to go forward in the dark with only that little hand to guide him. He could feel each separate finger of it, tugging him on, could feel the muscles leading up, and the bones, the pumping blood, all the way to the hollow cave where his heart was.

  “You must look now.”

  They were in some sort of hay mow, low-ceilinged and dark. A rusting tractor was parked in the corner of it, ancient, with spiky metal wheels and a chassis that looked like the skeletal remains of a prehistoric animal.

  Per still had Alex’s hand.

  “I think it must come from under the sea,” he said strangely, as if sharing a secret. “Like a shipwreck.”

  The old farmer had appeared in his overalls and wellingtons, nodding and beaming at them.

  “Ja, ja!” he said. “Du kan driva det!”

  He went around to the front of the tractor and pulled at an old crank with a violent jerk. The engine sputtered and coughed, then miraculously rumbled to life.

  The farmer pulled at the throttle until the roar filled the mow. Per stood with his eyes wide with wonder, one hand still clutching Alex’s.

  “Vi ser? Du kan driva det!”

  Before Alex knew it, the week was over. Afterward, it seemed just a long string of missed opportunities and bad decisions. How many times had he actually dared to hold the boy? How many times had he just looked at him squarely and drunk him in, the perfection of his little body, his heart-stopping Nordic delicacy—Ingrid’s genes, all Ingrid’s, though maybe a few of his lurking in there, in those sudden ghostly intimations he saw of himself—as if he were a godling come down from Valhalla? To the very end he had seemed always at a remove, not quite Alex’s in any visceral way. Alex had imagined their meeting differently, that there would be nothing that separated them, that they would seem to share the same skin. Instead he had found this whole other life, this bolus, this egg. From him, but not him. That seemed the nub of the problem, this having and not, this urge to possess a thing that in the very urge turned somehow alien.

  In the last days, Ingrid’s friend Anna had come by. Ingrid had mentioned her in her letters but not that she was alone: her husband, Erik, the burly Good Samaritan who had given Alex his coat, had left her for another woman. He had wanted children, it seemed, and Anna could have none. Instead she had become for Per what Alex had failed to be, his second parent. It seemed a Freudian fantasy made real, to be surrounded by beautiful, nurturing women who tended to your every need. What use could Per have for an Alex next to the likes of Anna? Alex had looked on as Per folded himself into Anna’s arms in a way he never had into Alex’s and had felt torn between pain and relief, wanting this closeness for Per but also for himself.

  “Do you have a work in Canada?” Per had asked.

  “Sort of. I’m a teacher. Like your mother.”

  This hadn’t carried quite the weight Alex had hoped it would.

  “But not on a farm?”

  “No, no.” Every day since their farm visit Per had drawn pictures of his tractor, over and over, as if trying to snare the spirit of it. “But my parents have a farm. And my sister.”

  Per had considered this. “So we can visit, then.”

  “Yes, of course.” Alex had felt gratitude flow through him. “Of course we can visit.”

  Silence. Dr. Klein cleared his throat. Alex peeked at his watch: still twenty minutes to go. Time enough to start in on this saga, if he had a mind to, but then there was no point, really. He had made his decision. He would go over again at the first opportunity, for a month, for three; forever, if that was what happened. There was the issue of Ingrid, of course, but that was something apart. “It’s for the two of you to manage,” she’d said. There hadn’t been any talk this time of the man she’d been expecting delivery of from God’s courier. For that matter there hadn’t been any Bible readings, any speaking in tongues. There hadn’t been any church.

  From the tractor incident Alex suspected that Per, at least, was a freethinker. I think it must have come from under the sea.

  “It was hard with the church,” Ingrid admitted, when he asked. “Perhaps not as you think, that they would chase me away or say this or that is a sin, but because of something in me. It’s difficult to explain it. Something stubborn, perhaps, as you said once. Always wanting to have my own way.”

  It amazed him that these bits of him stayed with her, that she took him that seriously. It amazed him that she, like him, was afraid. Of what he might want, of what he would take. Of how he would judge her.

  “Perhaps it’s better now,” she’d said. “We do as we wish. We worship in our own way.”

  In our own way. He could hardly object to that. Wasn’t it what he did himself? A day didn’t go by, really, when the matter didn’t come up, when he didn’t have a chat of one sort or another with the God he no longer believed in.

  Well, Peter, I always suspected the two of you had a lot in common. It’s not such a big step up from being a father figure, when you think of it.

  (Blushing) I suppose this is where I ought to be saying something like, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” Though I won’t claim it hasn’t crossed my mind. I’ve always pictured him as a three-pack-a-day-er like myself, to tell you the truth, with maybe a big fat Montecristo and a highball on the weekends.

  Alex heard the doctor’s lips smack.

  “Maybe it’s time we started to move on from Liz.” As if Alex had been the one to keep harping on her all these months. “You seem a bit clearer now. You seem to have worked through some of the guilt.”

  My ass I have, Alex thought. That wasn’t his point at all; his point was that he’d never felt any, not really. But then wasn’t that a good thing, in Freudian terms? Wasn’t the whole goal of analysis to get beyond guilt? Yet somewhere, Alex was sure, Freud had said the opposite, that guilt was all that kept the world from merest savagery. The thin, gossamer thread that held the whole rotten fabric of civilization intact.

  “I do feel that a bit. That I’m clearer.”

  Throw the dog a bone.

  By now Alex was resigned to the fact that though poor Dr. Klein wasn’t much to write home about, at least he was his own. All the mind games that Alex played with him, all the duplicity and outright lies, the crises he brought in like oblations, the little chess match of transference confirmed and denied: Dr. Klein deserved better than that, really, was just a young professional trying to make his way. Alex wasn’t certain at what point these protective impulses toward the doctor had arisen in him, this dangerous undercurrent of empathy or remorse or whatever it was, but surely the little matter of having got a glimpse at his medical school files had had something to do with it. So the man was human after all, he’d had to admit then. Or maybe his softening was just another form of one-upmanship. Take that, Mr. Poker Face, he was saying, Mr. Bug-Up-Your-Bum, Mr. For-All-I-Know-Makes-Jokes-About-Me-Behind-My-Back-At-Cocktail-Parties-To-Impress-Women. At least Alex had a sympathetic nervous system. At least he had a heart.

  He wouldn’t get far, of course, with this line of argument.

  The files had come to him through a sordid little romance he had got involved in during the dying days of his tenants’ association with a perky Franglo from Laval named Marie, his María substitute, though with maybe half María’s statistics and much less than that of her ethics. This was when the association had begun to function mainly as a dating service, all the fight gone out of it and people continuing to hang around the way they did at the end of parties, to see who was left. Marie had invited him over once on some pretense and had complained of her boyfriend, a come-on if ever there was one, and after that the
y had lain on her bed a few times in various states of dress and undress, touching each other’s private and semi-private parts while Marie, a real chatterbox, kept up a running monologue of coy indecision, should I or shouldn’t I. After a couple of weeks she had shuffled Alex offstage to go back to her boyfriend—either because Alex had fulfilled by then her need to feel newly desired, or because he hadn’t—without having once surrendered her honor, and they had gone on greeting each other politely in the elevator afterward like the near-strangers they actually were until Marie, too, as almost everyone else in the association had done, reached a settlement and moved out.

  Before all that, however, Marie had run a mission for him. It turned out she was an archivist for the College of Physicians, which happened to have its offices around the corner.

  “We’ve got files on every doctor in the province,” she said, probably while he was sucking on one of her little breasts or easing a hand into her crotch. “You’d be surprised at some of the stuff.”

  “Maybe you could run a check on my psychoanalyst.”

  Alex had said this as much to shock her as anything, but she didn’t bat an eye.

  “Why, what’s his name?”

  The next day she showed up at his apartment on her lunch break with copies of whatever she’d been able to get her hands on, transcripts, assessments, even a scaled-down copy of his medical diploma. Alex was horrified, then elated, then torn. It had to be a violation of the highest order—legal, moral, therapeutic—to burgle confidential files on your analyst. That didn’t stop him from looking, though. In the end, the stuff didn’t add up to much—there was nothing about Klein’s psychoanalytic training, for instance, since the psychoanalysts apparently kept their own, probably more heavily guarded archives. And yet a portrait emerged, a sort of Frankenklein that Alex was able to cobble together out of the bits and scraps he had at his disposal. For one thing, he finally learned the doctor’s Christian name, or his Jewish one: Daniel. Such a plain, four-square name, entirely serviceable and beyond reproach, not at all the sort of geeky one—Faivish, say, or Herschel—that Alex would have imagined for him. He learned the grade point average that had got Daniel into med school at McGill, 3.6; he learned the courses he had taken there year by year, and that he had made the dean’s list three years running. It wasn’t until he had to leave the books and start his rotations among actual humans that things got spottier. There was a “conscientious and thorough” from a supervisor at the Royal Vic and a “well-prepared” from one at the Jewish General, but then also a “does not take well to criticism” and, more damningly, a “seems to have problems with authority.”

  Very interesting, Alex thought.

  “I can’t let you keep copies,” Marie said, with what seemed the same coquettishness with which she doled out her sexual favors. “It would be too dangerous for me.”

  Out of this patchwork of half-remembered statistics and descriptive adjectives Alex had somehow fashioned for Dr. Klein an entire life. A childhood in Ville St. Laurent—Klein’s undergraduate transcripts gave a home address there—with a doting mother and a father who was maybe in the less profitable end of the shmatte trade; afternoons spent in the basement rec room with his stamp collection or science kit to avoid the murderous childhood politics of the street. His faultless name probably hadn’t done much to save him, in the end: “Duddy,” the kids took to calling him at school, which he hated, though he couldn’t escape the A’s he got in all his subjects, or that he belonged to the chess club, or that he dressed badly and had bad hair. By university, however, none of this mattered. “My son the doctor,” his mother, a total stereotype, meaty and given to cooking at the slightest provocation, went around saying to anyone who’d listen. Meanwhile Daniel and his father, the brooder, didn’t talk. “It’s not enough to be a doctor. He has to be fucking Freud.”

  All of this seemed so familiar to Alex that he felt as if he had lived it. In fact, he had. Duddy Klein was himself: problems with authority, averse to criticism, but sufficiently skilled at hiding his deficiencies to pass as conscientious, thorough, well prepared. Where he and Duddy differed was that Duddy had taken the high road, had harnessed all his childhood sense of injured dignity and made himself into a mensch. A doctor. A success. The Jewish girls who hadn’t given him the time of day back at parochial school sidled up to him now at the Hadassah Bazaar. “A good haircut and a new suit,” they thought. “That’s all he needs.”

  Which, today, for some reason, he had.

  Tick, tock.

  You might not believe it, but I get a bit of that myself sometimes. That sort of Jungian mumbo-jumbo about my shadow side or whatever, just because some journalist happened to run into me at a cocktail party and I didn’t treat him like he was the best thing since sliced bread.

  I guess that’s what I mean, Peter. People used to just call it a personality. Now they’ve got labels for everything, so instead of just being eccentric, say, you’re manic-depressive. Not that I’d call you manic-depressive.

  Well, we won’t get into that!

  Alex had to wonder if there was any difference, really, between his little chats with Peter and these sessions with Dr. Klein. In both cases he just seemed to be making things up as he went along, whatever sounded good, whatever he could twist into a version of himself he could live with. None of it mattered then, none of it implicated him. Or maybe one version was just as bogus as any other. Maybe the postmoderns were right, and there was nothing there: it was all just a blaze of synapses, one of whose little jobs was to make up this thing, this person-ness. He was starting to think that consciousness wasn’t some lighthouse of self-knowing but merely a little cave where you made up stories about yourself, whatever it took to hide the shit and the slime, the utter mollusk you were in your deepest nature. He wondered what was down there, under the shit, what kind of bedrock he might strike.

  Take Amanda.

  “I guess in some ways, with Liz, it was as if we were still back in high school. As if we were still trying to work out the problems we had then. Hating anyone who was like us. Or hating anyone who liked us.”

  The truth was, Amanda had done the world a favor: if he’d had to have one more conversation with her about third-wave feminism or the mise en abyme, he would have done the job himself. Meanwhile, he had succeeded where she had fucked up. He had survived. He was alive.

  There but for the grace of God.

  “I guess what I never saw was that Liz probably felt the same. That there was always a part of her that wouldn’t ever accept me.”

  Rake back the shit, Alex thought. All his agonizing over Desmond, all these years of carrying him around like his albatross: more shit. Desmond had been a blight, a scum-sucker, a bottom feeder. Alex had wanted him dead, he had wished it, and he had got his wish. A happy ending. All the rest was whitewash, his wily ego’s way of letting him have his cake and choke on it, too.

  Why stop at Desmond? There was still what went to the core: Per, his little contribution to the gene pool. If Alex had any real hope about the matter, it was that he would continue getting off scot-free, making his token dad gestures and then doing exactly as he pleased. Progeny without price, every man’s dream. In any event the kid would surely find a way to bash Alex’s head in with a hammer if he got half a chance.

  Alex was beginning to feel sick.

  I suppose in a Darwinian view it makes sense, doesn’t it? That the whole Freudian thing is just a sop. It turns out we wouldn’t just kill our fathers if we could, we’d probably eat them for breakfast.

  I’m starting to think that, Peter, to be honest. That Freud was really just Darwin stepping back from the void.

  The sound from the doctor’s chair was less a squeak this time than a groan.

  “I’m afraid our time’s up.”

  Alex rose heavily from the couch. Dr. Klein’s suit was a bit rumpled now and his hair was already falling back to its usual boyish disorder. Alex wondered why he had made such an enemy of him, why he hadn�
�t thought of him as on his side.

  Once, after a session, Alex had found himself trailing Dr. Klein as he left the hospital, and there had been such a sad cast to him seen from behind like that—the too tight blazer, short at the sleeves, the sag of cloth at his too flat ass—that Alex had felt as if he had seen his life in a glance, the little boy walking home alone from school, the books laid out on the kitchen table while his mother cooked and his dad, taking comfort from the thought that the world was going to Sheol in a hand-basket, watched the evening news. All of this had been months before Marie and Duddy Frankenklein.

  I’ll try harder, Alex thought, giving a last tug to his shoelace.

  Dr. Klein cleared his throat.

  “About our sessions.”

  He was standing in front of the door as if to bar Alex’s exit. For a minute, they were actually face to face.

  “I should tell you,” he said. “I’ll be leaving soon.”

  Alex wasn’t sure he had heard right.

  “On vacation?”

  “No, permanently.” His head moved in a strange bob, of restrained triumph, maybe, or simple awkwardness. “I’ve taken another position. In Toronto.”

  “Oh.” Alex still couldn’t believe he had understood. “You mean, we’ll be ending?”

  “I’ll let you know exactly when, of course. I can direct you to another therapist if you’d like to continue. That’s something we can talk about.”

  Alex’s blood was pounding. You’ll need to make a commitment, the doctor had said at the outset.

  “I don’t think I’ll be continuing.”

  “Well. As I say. We can discuss it.”

  Dr. Klein had stood aside. For more than a year Alex had been coming to him, an hour a day, five days a week. Forty-three dollars a session. He didn’t like to do the math. He could have sponsored a refugee. He could have fed several families in Bangladesh.

  Some question was on his lips, he wasn’t quite sure what it was, but before he could give it a shape the door had closed behind him.