The Breast

by Philip Roth

  “And his note, which you answered so graciously? The note that made you so livid?”

  “More paranoia.”

  “And the recording of Hamlet?”

  “Ah, that’s Mr. Reality. That is real—and right up Debbie’s alley. Oh yes, I can feel the difference now, even as I talk I can sense the difference between the insane stuff and what’s truly happened. I do feel the difference, you must believe me. I’ve gone mad, but now I know it!”

  “And what do you think has caused you, as you put it, to ‘go mad’?” Dr. Klinger asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Any idea at all? What could have drawn someone like you into such a fully developed and impenetrable delusion?”

  “I’m telling you the truth, Doctor. I don’t have the least idea. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Nothing comes to mind? Nothing at all?”

  “Well, what comes to mind, if anything—what came to mind this morning—”

  “Is what?”

  “I’m grasping at straws—and I know how whimsical it seems in the circumstances. But I thought, ‘I got it from fiction.’ The books I’ve been teaching—they put the idea in my head. I’m thinking of my European Literature course. Teaching Gogol and Kafka every year—teaching ‘The Nose’ and ‘Metamorphosis.’”

  “Of course, many other literature professors teach ‘The Nose’ and ‘Metamorphosis.’”

  “But maybe,” said I, the humor intentional now, “not with so much conviction.”

  He laughed.

  “I am mad, though—aren’t I?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I was set back only momentarily. I realized that I had inverted his meaning as easily, and as unconsciously, as we turn right side up the images that flash upon the retina upside down.

  “I want to tell you,” I calmly explained, “that though you just answered yes when I asked whether I was mad, I heard you say no.”

  “I did say no. You are not mad. You are not suffering from a delusion—or certainly haven’t been, up till now. You are a breast, of sorts. You have been heroic in your efforts to accommodate yourself to a mysterious misfortune. Of course one understands the temptation: this is all just a dream, a hallucination, a delusion—even a drug-induced state of mind. But, in fact, it is none of these things. It is something that has happened to you. And the best way to go mad—do you hear me, Mr. Kepesh?—the way into madness is to start to pretend otherwise. The comfort of that will be short-lived, I can assure you. I want you right now to disabuse yourself of the notion that you are insane. You are not insane, and to pretend to be insane will only bring you to grief. Insanity is no solution—neither imagined insanity nor the real thing.”

  “Again I heard everything reversed. I turned the sense of your words completely around.”

  “No, you did not.”

  “Does it make any sense to you to think of my delusion as somehow fueled by years of teaching those stories? I mean, regardless of the trauma that triggered the breakdown itself.”

  “But there was no trauma, not of a psychological nature; and as I have told you, and tell you now again, and will continue to tell you: this is no delusion.”

  How to press on? How to break through this reversing?

  With an artfulness that pleased me—and bespoke health! health!—I said, “But if it were, Dr. Klinger—since I again understood you to say just the opposite of what you said—if it were, would you then see any connection between the kind of hallucination I’ve embedded myself in and the power over my imagination of Kafka or Gogol? Or of Swift? I’m thinking of Gulliver’s Travels, another book I’ve taught for years. Perhaps if we go on speaking hypothetically—”

  “Mr. Kepesh, enough. You are fooling no one but yourself—if even yourself. There has been shock, panic, fury, despair, disorientation, profound feelings of helplessness and isolation, the darkest depression and fear, but through it all, quite miraculously, quite marvelously, no delusions. Not even when your old friend the Dean showed up and had his laughing fit. Of course that shocked you. Of course that crushed you. Why shouldn’t it have? But you did not imagine Arthur Schonbrunn’s unfortunate behavior. You have not made up what has happened to you, and you did not make up what happened here to him. You didn’t have to. You are pretending to be a naïf, you know, when you tell me that such a reaction is simply out of the question for a man in Arthur Schonbrunn’s position. You are a better student of human nature than that. You’ve read too much Dostoevsky for that.”

  “Will it help any if I repeat to you what I thought I heard you say?”

  “No need. What you thought you heard, you heard. That is known as sanity. Come off the lunatic kick, Mr. Kepesh—and the sooner the better. Gogol, Kafka, and so on—it is going to get you into serious trouble if you keep it up. The next thing you know you will have produced in yourself genuine and irreversible delusions exactly like those you now claim to want to be rid of. Do you follow me? I think you do. You are a highly intelligent man and you have a remarkably strong will, and I want you to stop it right now.”

  How exhausting to hear it all backwards! How ingenious insanity is! But at least now I knew. “Dr. Klinger! Dr. Klinger! Listen to me—I won’t let it drive me crazy any more! I will fight myself free! I will stop hearing the opposite! I will start hearing what you are all saying! Do you hear me, Doctor? Do you understand my words? I will not participate any longer in this delusion! I refuse to be a part of it! You will get through to me! I will understand what you mean! Just don’t give up! Please,” I pleaded, “don’t give me up for lost! I will break through and be myself again! I am determined! With all my strength—with all my will to live!”

  Now I spent my days trying to penetrate the words I heard so as to get through to what actually was being said to me by the doctors, and by Claire, and by Mr. Brooks. The effort this required was so total, and so depleting, that by nightfall I felt it would take no more than a puff from a child’s lips to extinguish for good the wavering little flame of memory and intelligence and hope still claiming to be me.

  When my father came for his Sunday visit, I told him everything, even though I was sure that Claire and Klinger would have let him know by phone the day it happened. I babbled like a boy who’d won a trophy. It was true, I told him—I no longer believed I was a breast. If I had not yet been able to throw off the physical sense of unreality, I was daily divesting myself of the preposterous psychic delusion; every day, every hour I sensed myself slowly turning back into myself, and could even begin to see through to the time when I would again be teaching Gogol and Kafka rather than experiencing vicariously the unnatural transformations they had imagined in their famous fictions. Since my father knows nothing of books, I told him how Gregor Samsa awakens in the Kafka story to discover that he has become an enormous beetle; I summarized for him “The Nose,” recounting how Gogol’s hero awakens one morning missing his nose, how he sets out to look for it in St. Petersburg, places an ad in the newspaper requesting its return, sees “it” walking on the street, one ridiculous encounter after another, until in the end the nose just turns up again on his face for no better reason than it disappeared. (I could imagine my father thinking, “He teaches this stuff, in a college?”) I explained that I still couldn’t remember the blow that had done me in; I actually became deaf, could not hear, when the doctor tried to get me to face it. But whatever the trauma itself may have been—however terrifying, horrifying, repellent—what I knew was that my escape route was through the fantasy of physical transformation that lay immediately at hand, the catastrophe stories by Kafka and Gogol that I had been teaching my students only the week before. Now, with Dr. Klinger’s assistance, I was trying to figure out just why, of all things, I had chosen a breast. Why a big brainless bag of dumb, desirable tissue, acted upon instead of acting, unguarded, immobile, hanging, there, as a breast simply hangs and is there? Why this primitive identification with the object of infantile veneration? What unfulfilled appetites, what cr
adle confusions, what fragments out of my remotest past could have collided to spark a delusion of such classical simplicity? On and on I babbled to my father, and then, once again, joyously, I wept. No tears, but I wept. Where were my tears? How soon before I would feel tears again? When would I feel my teeth, my tongue, my toes?

  For a long while my father said nothing. I thought that perhaps he was crying too. Then he went into the weekly news report: so-and-so’s daughter is pregnant, so-and-so’s son has bought himself a hundred-thousand-dollar home, my uncle is catering Richard Tucker’s younger brother’s son’s wedding.

  He hadn’t even heard me. Of course. I may have broken through the idea that I was a breast, but I still seemed required virtually to give a recitation, as from a stage, if I wanted to make myself understood. What I believed was a normal conversational tone tended, apparently, to come out sounding like somebody muttering across the room. But this wasn’t because my voice box was buried in a hundred-and-fifty-five-pound mammary gland. My body was still a body! I had only to stop whispering! I had only to speak out! Could that be part of the madness? That when I believed I was speaking aloud, I was speaking only to myself? Speak up then!

  And so I did. At the top of my lungs (my two good lungs!) repeated to my father the story of my breakthrough.

  And then it was time to take the next step. One foot in front of the other. “Dad,” I said, “where are we? You tell me.”

  “In your room,” he answered.

  “And tell me, have I turned into a breast?”

  “Well, that’s what they say.”

  “But that’s not true. I’m a mental patient. Now tell me again—what am I?”

  “Oh, Davey.”

  “What am I?”

  “You’re a woman’s breast.”

  “That’s not true! What I heard you say is not true! I’m a mental patient! In a hospital! And you are visiting me. Dad, if that’s the truth, I just want you to say yes. Listen to me now. You must help me. I am a mental patient. I am in a mental hospital. I have had a severe mental breakdown. Yes or no. Tell me the truth.”

  And my father answered, “Yes, son, yes. You’re a mental patient.”

  “I heard him!” I cried to Klinger when he came later in the day. “I heard my father! I heard the truth! I heard him say I’m a mental patient!”

  “He should never have told you that.”

  “I heard it! I’m not imagining it either! It didn’t get reversed!”

  “Of course you heard it. Your father loves you. He’s a simple man and he loves you very much. He thought it would help if he said it. He knows now that it can’t. And so do you.”

  But I couldn’t have been happier. My father had gotten through to me. I could be gotten through to! It would follow with the others soon enough. “I heard it!” I said. “I’m not a breast! I’m mad!”

  How I strain in the coming days to be my sane self again! I dredge at the muck of my beginnings, searching for what will explain—and thus annihilate—this preposterous delusion. I have returned, I tell the doctor, to the dawn of my life, to my first thousand hours after the eons of hours of nothing—back to when all is oneself and oneself is all, back to when the concave is the convex and the convex the concave … oh, how I talk! How I work to outsmart my madness! If I could only remember my hungering gums at the spigot of love, my nose in the nourishing globe—! “If she were alive, if she could tell me—” “Yes? Tell you what?” asks Klinger. “Oh,” I moan, “how do I know?” But where else to begin but there? Only there there is nothing. It is all too far back, back where I am. To dive to that sea bottom where I began—to find in the slime my precious secret! But when I rise to the surface, there is not even silt beneath my fingernails. I come up with nothing.

  Perhaps, I say, perhaps, I tell him, it is all a post-analytic collapse, a year in the making—the most desperate means I could devise to cling to Klinger. “Have you ever thought what fantasies of dependence bloom in your patients merely on the basis of your name? Have you realized, Doctor, that all our names begin with K, yours and mine and Kafka’s? And then there is Claire—and Miss Clark!” “The alphabet,” he reminds me, a language teacher, “only has twenty-six letters. And there are four billion of us in need of initials for purposes of identification.” “But!” “But what?” “But something! But anything! Please, a clue! If I can’t—then you. Please, some clue, some lead—I have to get out!”

  I go over with him again the salient moments in my psychological development, once again I turn the pages in the anthology of stories that we two had assembled as text for the course conducted by us, three times a week for five years, in “The History of David Alan Kepesh.” But in fact those stories have been recounted and glossed so exhaustively so many times that they are as stale to me as the favorite literary chestnut of the most retrograde schoolteacher in America. My life’s drama, as exciting in the early years of therapy as The Brothers Karamazov, has all the appeal now of some tenth-grade reader beginning with “The Necklace” and running through to “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Which accounts for the successful termination of analysis the year before.

  And there, I thought, is my trauma! Success itself! There is what I couldn’t take—a happy life! “What is that?” asks Dr. Klinger, quizzically. “What was it you couldn’t take?” “Rewards—instead of punishment! Wholeness! Comfort! Pleasure! A gratifying way of life, a life without—” “Wait just a minute, please. Why couldn’t you take such things? Those are wonderful things. Come off it, Mr. Kepesh. As I remember, you could take happiness with the best of them.” But I refuse to listen, since what I hear him saying isn’t what he’s saying anyway. That is just my illness, turning things around to keep me insane. On I go instead, talking next about what patients will talk about sooner or later—that imaginary friend they call My Guilt. I talk about Helen, my former wife, whose life, I have been told, is no better now than when we suffered together through five years of that marriage. I remember how I couldn’t help but gloat when I heard about Helen’s continuing unhappiness from an old San Francisco friend, who had come to dinner with me and my lovely, imperturbable Claire. Good for the bitch, I thought … “And now,” Klinger asks with amusement, “you believe you are punishing yourself in this way for such ordinary, everyday malice?” “I’m saying that my happy new life was too much for me! It’s why I lost my desire for Claire—it was all too good to last! So much satisfaction seemed—seemed unjust! Compared to Helen’s fate, seemed somehow iniquitous! My Guilt!” I plead. “My dear sir,” he replies, “that is analysis right out of the dime store—and you know it as well as I do.” “Then if not that, what? Help me! Tell me! What did it?”

  “Nothing ‘did it.’”

  “Then why in God’s name am I mad?”

  “But you’re not. And you know that too.”

  The next Sunday, when he comes to visit, I again ask my father if I am a mental patient—just to be sure—and this time he answers, “No.”

  “But last week you said yes!”

  “I was wrong.”

  “But it’s the truth!”

  “It’s not.”

  “I’m reversing again! I’ve lost it now with you! I’m back where I was! I’m reversing with everyone!”

  “You’re not at all,” said Dr. Klinger.

  “What are you doing here? This is Sunday! My father is here, not you! You’re not even here!”

  “I’m here. With your father. Right beside you, the two of us.”

  “This is getting all crazy again! I don’t want to be crazy any more! Help me! Do you hear me? Am I being heard? Help me, please! I need your help! I cannot do this alone! Help me! Lift me! Tell me only the truth! If I am a breast, where is my milk? When Claire is sucking me, where is the milk! Tell me that!”

  “Oh, David.” It was my father, his unshaven cheek on my areola! “My son, my poor sonny.”

  “Oh, Daddy, what’s happened? Hold me, Poppy, please. What’s really happened? Tell me, please, why did
I go mad?”

  “You didn’t, darling,” he sobbed.

  “Then where is my milk? Answer me! If I am a breast I would make milk! Hold milk! Swell with milk! And that is too crazy for anybody to believe! Even me! THAT SIMPLY CANNOT BE!”

  But evidently it can be. Just as they are able to increase the milk yield of cows with injections of the lactogenic agent GH, the growth hormone, so it has been hypothesized that I very likely could become a milk-producing mammary gland with appropriate hormonal stimulation. If so, there must be those out in the scientific world who would jump at the chance to find out. And when I have had my fill of all this, perhaps I will give it to them. And if I am not killed in the process? If they succeed and milk begins to flow? Well, then I will know that I am indeed a wholly authentic breast—or else that I am as mad as any man has ever been.

  IN THE MEANTIME fifteen months have passed—by their calendar—and I live for the moment in relative equanimity. That is, things have been worse and will be again, but for now, for now Claire still comes to visit every day, does not miss a single day, and still, for the first half of each hour, uncomplainingly and without repugnance attends to my pleasure. Converts a disgusting perversion into a kindly, thoughtful act of love. And then we talk. She is helping me with my Shakespeare studies. I have been listening of late to recordings of the tragedies. I began with the Schonbrunns’ gift, Olivier in Hamlet. The album lay for months here in the room before I asked Mr. Brooks one morning to break the cellophane wrapper and put a record on the phonograph. (Mr. Brooks turns out to be a Negro; and so, in my mind’s eye—a breast’s mind’s eye, to be sure—I imagine him looking like the handsome black Senator from Massachusetts. Why not, if it makes This cozier for me?) Like so many people, I have been meaning ever since college to sit down someday and reread Shakespeare. I may even once have said as much to Debbie Schonbrunn, and she bought the record album because she realized that I now had the time. Surely no satire was ever intended, however much I may have believed otherwise when the Hamlet arrived the week after Arthur’s three-minute visit. I must remember that aside from the more obvious difficulties occasioned by my transformation, I am no longer the easiest person in the world to buy a present for.