by Paul Theroux
"It's the same one," I told Dr. Mylchreest.
An old dream that I had been dreaming since arriving back in the United States—my public phone booth period; I thought of it as "the suitcase dream," but now I saw the point of it. I was involved in a murder. I did not do the chopping but I had wordlessly agreed when the other people—three men—asked me if I would help. It was my car, I knew the owner of the suitcase, I even had a sense that I knew the victim. No one had a name in this dream. The unsuspecting victim was snatched and killed, then chopped in half and crammed into a suitcase.
The crime itself was a small part of the dream. The rest was our driving, the men and I, with the leaky suitcase on the back seat: up the turnpike, at the pickup window of a drive-in restaurant, in a rest area, in heavy traffic, a long red light, a child with a diseased face staring out the rear window of the car in front, a big slavering dog barking at the suitcase. We were stopped by a policeman. "What's in the bag?" He did not notice the smear of blood on the handle. But each time the question was asked, I was farther and farther from the car. I was like a ghostly spectator. I always got away.
When I woke up in fear and dread, I was gasping, drenched in sweat, my hair soaked. I was furtive in the dream; awake, I was sick with guilt, and it stayed with me, a sense of woe like nausea.
Then I needed Dr. Mylchreest, to tell her the dream. What would I have done without her? I used to think that with Alison; even in the worst moments I had not been able to imagine life without her. When my life had been whole, I would have used such a dream in my writing. Now I had no writing and no wife; I had Dr. Mylchreest. Flaubert's lover, Suzanne Lagier, told him, "You are the garbage pail of my heart, I confide everything to you."
"Try to identify the men, Mr. Medved."
"I might have been in high school with them."
All my dreams seemed to be high school dreams.
"That's helpful."
"I hated high school. I had some friends, but I was fearful."
"Go on."
"Of ignorance. Stupid people always seemed capable of terrible cruelty. And intelligent people were mocked. It was as though a bright person was a homosexual. Homosexuals were mocked in the same way."
"You've made an interesting comparison."
"Oh, God," I said.
Her lovely face said nothing, but behind it the flash in her eyes revealed a tumult of speculation.
"You think because I am making that comparison that I am unconsciously saying that I might be gay. Don't you see that I am stating it like that so that you will understand?"
"There are so many ways to describe something, and yet you choose those words."
"There are many ways," I said, trying not to shout, "but this is the clearest comparison. My imagination was my secret. At my school, if a secret got out, if any detail were known—a liking for something odd, a funny middle name, anything—you were subjected to unmerciful mockery. No one was gay—no one admitted it. But there must have been many. So they had to listen to mockery about faggots, homos, queers. If you were smart, you were 'Einstein.'"
"What about the victim?" Dr. Mylchreest asked. "In your dream. Do you want to talk about it?"
"I have a feeling it's a woman. I sense that I know her."
"But you say that you are the driver of the car. You were not the one who killed her. Correct?"
"It's as though I did it."
"Yes?"
"The point is that when I wake up I feel guilty, not because of what I've done, but because of what I know."
"The guilty feeling doesn't go away?"
"No. I sense the crime has not yet taken place. I feel it is going to happen, and only I know where and when. If I puzzle out the dream, I could save someone's life."
"Yes?"
But Dr. Mylchreest did not seem to be seeking more information about the murder victim in my dream.
I said, "If this is precognition, it could be very serious."
She did not respond to this. She had become motionless and deaf. I felt awkward, like someone still talking on a telephone line that had been cut off, and I realized that my hour was up.
"I'd like to stay a bit longer."
"That is impossible."
"Is there someone waiting?"
"It's five past five, Mr. Medved."
"I'd appreciate it if you called me Pavel."
"As you wish. Pavel."
"I'd like to see you three times a week instead of two," I said, and the words sounded to me like those of a man wooing a virgin in an old-fashioned courtship.
"It might be difficult, but I'll look at my appointments."
The lamps outside were large and blurred by whirling snowflakes, which wrapped them in great yellow gusts that slanted towards the wet street.
"It's snowing."
"Yes."
She wanted me out of there, and her urgency made me linger. I fastened my attention on her body—her lips, her legs, her hands, her eyes. I did not want to leave. I clung to her.
"Your time is up," she said, and she had never looked prettier to me, though I could only think that she was waiting there for the next man, like a hooker in a room turning tricks.
3
Driving back to the Cape, I was weary, sorrowing in a new way. In those few minutes of her urging me to leave, Dr. Mylchreest had uncovered a tangled feeling within me. She had not simplified it, only unintentionally exposed it, and left me with the open wound. It was new and raw, still bleeding. I could not hug the pain away. The pain was love.
I saw clearly that I could survive the loss of my other life and everything that I had known if I had her, Dr. Mylchreest. I desired her with a love that overwhelmed me because I was wounded and she was a whole woman, practical, attentive, intelligent, and lovely. I had the sense that I could awaken a sexual impulse in her and that in time, when I told her who I really was, she would understand the necessity for my deception. Then we would live together: I saw the house, the bed, the books, the wine, the table set for two. I would resume writing. She would commute to Boston and keep office hours. We would be complete. And it was possible. The decision was hers: she was at the age when the door was about to shut for good—we might still have some children.
This was at first a fugitive thought. But it grew, and before our next session it dominated everything I did, everything I thought. It was as though I had discovered that I had a serious illness and at the same time realized that only one person on earth could cure me.
It was love, I knew, because it was pure pain, like the worst hunger combined with the worst loneliness, a wasting disease that gave the sufferer an intimation of death. Its pathology was partly a form of madness. I had to have her any way I could, and I saw that it was worse, more desperate than being without my wife. It was my next step. I had no idea it would happen so quickly, and it frightened me and made me sick when I considered the agony of being in the same room with Dr. Mylchreest. I wanted to hold her, hug her, kiss her, bury my face against her. I wanted to devour her, actually to eat her, and for her to demand it, to lie naked and murmur, "Take me."
I had last felt this way in high school, desperate and frustrated and helpless. I knew it would frighten her if I told her how I felt, and so I concealed my feelings towards her, but in the sessions after this I talked about sex—dreams, impulses, episodes from the past, many of them invented. A common theme was that I was highly charged sexually and that my marriage had been awkward as a result—my wife unwilling.
"I needed it, not just for reassurance, but because I think of sex and work as being the two most powerful human drives."
This was a blatant appeal to Dr. Mylchreest's Freudianism.
She said, "And what response did you get?"
"Most of the time, not a lot," I said. "I am an incredibly passionate person."
She smiled and said something like "Anyhow."
It was her intrusive accent. She was trying to say "Annie Hall." She asked me if I had seen the movie. I said yes. She r
eminded me of the scene where Woody Allen tells his psychiatrist that Annie is frigid: "She only wants to make love three or four times a week." At this moment Annie is telling her psychiatrist that Woody is rapacious: "He wants to make love three or four times a week."
I resented Dr. Mylchreest's using this insubstantial and jokey movie to respond to the serious point I had made. How would she like it if I compared her to one of the New York psychiatrists in a Woody Allen movie? But I resisted. I could be hurt, but I was too deeply in love with her to be discouraged.
"And polymorphous perversity," I said. "I often feel a strong urge to experiment."
"Yes?"
I was watching her closely, those eyes with their own life.
"I cannot be indiscriminate, though. Very few people in my life have moved me. I have very rarely been in love."
"When you have been in love, what has attracted you?"
"Strength, beauty, intelligence, honesty, character. It is partly physical, but it is more a kind of knowledge—looking deeply into a person's soul. There is no other word for it."
"And this feeling, does it make you happy?"
"It makes me sick."
"Go on."
"I'm sick now."
"Yes?"
"Doctor, I love you. I can't bear to be without you."
She was not fazed. She said, "This is natural, a consequence of the therapy relationship."
"I mean it."
"Of course. You are transferring. We can work through this transference love." She smiled and glanced at her watch. "Next time."
In my love I could not separate myself from Dr. Mylchreest—there was no boundary between us, we were the same person. My time was up. I felt ashamed, humiliated, but what did it matter? I was convinced of my love, but though I dragged myself away, I knew I was incomplete in leaving her. I was eager to return and yet dreading it for the way I suffered when I was with her, sitting near her when I wanted to be on her, tearing at her clothes, pounding deeper into her.
It took my mind off my separation, yet it was another problem and an unexpected one. I had been numb before, not knowing what had happened to me. Now I knew the solution: to love Dr. Mylchreest and be her lover. She was my salvation. I had left Alison. It was illogical to go back. I needed to continue, to move on and find my missing half. Dr. Mylchreest was my other half, my other life. With her I was complete.
At the next session I said, "I have the strongest urge to make love to you. I can't bear the thought of living without you."
"Let's talk about that."
"But I want to hear what you have to say."
She smiled in a superficial way and said, "I am your therapist. Any relationship other than a professional one is out of the question."
"Are you saying that you are not attracted to me at all?"
"That's interesting. Do you often wonder whether women you don't know are attracted to you?"
"No. Only the few I've loved."
"What qualities do you imagine they see in you?"
"Please stop asking me therapist questions. Doesn't it mean anything when I say that I love you?"
She frowned, and when she did I saw how easily she assumed the expression, as though this disapproval came naturally to her and was part of her face. She said, "You must consider what you are saying and where you are. You are my patient. I have been careful. You know nothing about me."
"I know more than you think."
Though I was bluffing, I could tell from the way she tried not to show it that she was worried.
"You need to work through these feelings, Mr. Medved. If you do, and understand them, you will know more about yourself."
"I know everything about myself. I want to know more about you."
That pleased her, as though after all I were admitting my ignorance.
"You are the only friend I have," I said, and it sounded pathetic to me. "I'd like to take you to the Boston Symphony next week, and then to dinner."
"You must stop fantasizing about this."
"You encouraged me to fantasize."
"To understand your fantasies, not to give them reality," she said tersely, as though snapping a handbag shut.
"What is the point of fantasizing if you don't experience it?"
She said nothing. That meant she wanted me to reflect on what I had just said, the absurd echo of it. But I did not find it absurd.
She was smiling her insincere smile again.
"Next time," she said.
"I had the suitcase dream again," I said. "It was more specific. The woman is someone I know fairly well—not Alison. Instead of protecting her, I allow the others to kill her. She is dismembered and crammed in the suitcase. Although there are a number of close calls, even with police, we are not caught. The suitcase is found in a locker in South Station. I could show you the locker."
"Did you witness the woman being dismembered?"
"No. I turned my back on it. But I heard it, like a butcher hacking ribs with a cleaver, the knock of a knife on bone."
"And how did you feel when you heard it?"
I stood up and said, "Jesus, Dr. Mylchreest, I am an intelligent man. I've read Freud—not just the usual stuff but The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. I can prove by algebra that Shakespeare was the ghost of Hamlet's father—look, you don't even get it! I know particle physics. I have been to India and China and Patagonia. I am moved by metaphysical poetry. I collect Japanese prints. I own Hokusai's Red Fuji. I speak Italian and Swahili."
I stopped—not because I was short of examples but because I was out of breath.
Dr. Mylchreest said, "What do you conclude from this?"
"That I am a Martian. I am lonely here—not in this city but on earth."
"Obviously. Perhaps this is why you chose therapy."
"No, I don't need therapy. I need you—your love."
Her face was expressionless, as always, but her eyes were vulnerable—it was her youth. An older woman would have been hardened to this, but I could see that she was struggling to contain her emotion, to disguise it and take command of this session. But it was hopeless for me. The only way to succeed would be by embracing her, fumbling with her clothes while she feebly protested and allowed me to run my hands over her. I saw this all being enacted on the carpet of her office while she howled into my mouth.
"Please sit down, Mr. Medved."
I hated that—her flat tone, her irrelevant demand, a slightly curdled sound of pity in her voice. I did not want her to pity me, much less analyze me. I wanted her to fear me.
"The woman in the suitcase," I said. "It was you."
She tried not to wince. She said, "Go on."
"There is nothing more to say except be very careful, Dr. Mylchreest."
"Yes?"
"I am not here because I am lonely. I came because I was desperate, and I stayed because I fell in love with you. I will fall out of love—no one is more repulsive than a pretty woman who proves to be a deceiver."
"You did say that you were lonely."
"Of course I'm lonely!" I shouted. I had nothing to lose, I would never be back. "But it's not that I am alone now. I have realized lately that I have always been alone and that I was kidding myself, whistling in the dark, when I thought otherwise. Loneliness is the human condition. Loneliness is why everyone does everything they do."
"You came to me because you had a problem with it."
"I don't have a problem with being lonely!" I was howling again. "I want to know why I am alone. I am almost fifty years old and I have no one—not one person. Tell me why I'm alone. See, you have no idea!"
"We have been talking about the past—"
"I was always the way I am now," I said, defying her again.
She nodded, allowing the silence to penetrate the whole room, and then said, "I sense that this might be our last session."
"Yes. You are beginning to look pathetic to me. Like a murder victim."
I admired her for i
gnoring my saying this.
She said, "Freud always believed that literature was a way of approaching the unconscious. He said as much to Arthur Schnitzler. You know him, his play La Ronde"?
"You are confused. Schnitzler's play is called Reigen. Max Ophuls's film of it is called La Ronde."
She merely shrugged. "And Harry Stack Sullivan," she went on, "a brilliant psychoanalyst and also someone who wrote well about Herman Melville. And of course there is Simon Lesser's book, Fiction and the Unconscious."
"I knew Lesser at Amherst."
"His grasp of Freud was not great, but his understanding of literature was extremely subtle."
"I thought it was the other way around. He made such heavy weather of Dostoyevsky and yet he couldn't read Russian. It's obvious that Prince Myshkin in The Idiot has a problem, but is it—as Lesser says—homosexuality? He said that was everyone's problem. Flaubert. Hawthorne. Poe."
"And you think he was wrong?"
"Wouldn't it be truer to say that Lesser might have been explaining his own sexuality? That was such a dark secret in the 1960s."
"It's still something that people hide. I'm interested that you raise the question. Would you like to pursue this—homosexuality?"
"You think you are being subtle. You are making the clumsiest and most naive connection."
"Mr. Medved, you should not dismiss the reading of novels for psychological insight."
"I can't read anything when I am depressed. It's too demanding."
"What about novels directly relating to your state of mind?"
"Even worse."
She smiled, and this smile was the most final expression of a farewell.
"There is really nothing more I can do for you," she said. "Nothing more I can say. Now it is up to you."
So it really was over. She seemed to understand that a part of me was refusing to be involved and instead lurking in each session. This was no spectator, idly standing aside; it was the writer in me, not a casual onlooker but a passionate witness. Therapy could not work while this part of my mind scrutinized the process with such icy detachment, but that was the great thing about being a writer in therapy—of course you failed, because you needed your secrets, but you always had the last word.