"As soon as possible"—-that could be days. Nathan wasn't going to stay here for days. He could smash a window with the metal statue of Oggún, show the transit company the power of his orisha, and then be out in the tunnel. Out in the tunnel. He could never get back walking through the tunnel. Nit tsurik. There was no way back!
It was important that he look normal, that people could not see what was happening to him. He was not sure why, but he had a vague notion that if he was identified as a claustrophobic, apprehended having an attack, he would be confined in some way and never be free again. He stood up and walked to the other end of the car. He walked up to a woman with bright green hair and a ring through her left nostril. He could see on her chest above her cotton top the beginning of a butterfly tattoo. She was probably from the neighborhood. "Don't you just hate getting stuck like this?" he said to her in a strained imitation of a conversational tone. The woman looked at Nathan, who was clutching a strange doll half-wrapped in shredded newspaper. "They say 'as soon as possible,' " he continued, a smile pressed on his sweaty face. "When is that supposed to be?"
"Exactly," she finally answered. "Probably three years."
"Really?"
Perhaps he had been too earnest. People were noticing. If people see that you have completely lost control, they take you and put you in a straitjacket. Can you imagine how a straitjacket feels? You can't even move your own arms. Why would they do that? That would be the worst thing they could do. Can you imagine what a straitjacket feels like when you are trapped in a tunnel with no air? Then they lock you up somewhere in a small room. You never can get back your life once you've been caught like that. Nit tsurik.
He had to talk to someone to establish his normalcy—an imitation of inner calm from which real inner calm could be derived. If he were forced into a normal conversation, he wouldn't be free to lose his sanity.
He walked up to a man in a light-colored suit, shoving his right hand in his pocket so that his beads wouldn't show. "Some service," Nathan said, and then, trying to smile, he added, "You pay your taxes and..."
The man nodded nervously. Nathan realized that he sounded like the man who was picking through the garbage in front of his shop. "1 pay my taxes! I pay my taxes!" He had probably been a normal person at one time. Now he picked through garbage and shouted about paying his taxes and thought he was being conversational.
He had to get off of this train!
The train lurched. It rolled slowly. It stopped. And then it was speeding toward Union Square, where the doors opened and Nathan again experienced almost instant recovery like a jackhammer that suddenly stopped. He walked the four blocks back to Tenth Street and went to his shop.
"Good to see you made it," said Carmela with an engaging smile. Nathan was thinking he would kill a dog, a pigeon, wear a tattoo, whatever he needed to do.
A shrub of dark curly hair and the bubble-gum good cheer of hot pink French glasses frames, looking almost like a gum bubble had burst on her face and was still stuck at the top, were all that was visible of Dr. Simone Kucher from the softly upholstered chair on the other side of her desk. Her twelve o'clock patient had finally left and her lunch had arrived: a salad of mixed field greens; chicken salad with low-fat mayonnaise, bean curd, and broccoli; mixed fruit and low-fat yogurt; two fat-free blueberry muffins; and a low-cholesterol chocolate bar. Dr. Kucher was dieting.
Barely over five feet, round, and soft looking, as though she were made of some fluffy low-cal pudding, she had cheeks so fleshy that it was hard to see if her eyes were open or shut behind her glasses. But when her interest was caught, the glow of slate-colored almonds showed through the lenses so distinctly that it seemed there had been no eyes there before. When listening to a patient, she nestled catlike into a black overstuffed leather chair and held a yellow pencil like the needle on a barometer over a yellow pad, where she occasionally scribbled notes. Sometimes the pen would just slide slowly out of her thick little fingers and make the dull sound of a bubble bursting in oatmeal as it plopped on the empty sheet. This had happened during the previous session. But now she had her diet lunch and one more patient and then home on time for the Mets game.
Dr. Kucher was not a lifelong baseball fan. She had discovered baseball only two seasons earlier with the excitement of the Mets winning the World Series. She became enthralled with the champion Mets, failing to understand that this was an aberration. True Mets fans, such as Nusan, tested themselves against the frustration of untimely losses. But Dr. Kucher expected the Mets to win, which they were doing again this summer. In time, she would probably realize that she was not cut out to be a Mets fan and switch to the Yankees. For now, if work kept her away from a game, she set the timer and recorded the game. Then she had to get home without hearing anything about the game so that it would be new when she played her tape.
"Nyahn, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah...," she said over and over with her fingers in her ears as she made her way out of her office and out of the building.
"Have a good evening, Dr. Kucher."
"Nyahn, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah ..."
Then she had to find a taxi that was not playing a radio. Then past the doorman and into her building. "Welcome home, Dr. Kucher."
"Nyahn, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah ..." She hobbled in with the furious waddle of an angry duck.
Don't talk to anyone in the elevator. "Nyahn, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah..."
Into her apartment. Safe!
She was taking few new patients over the summer. But if they pronounced her name right—Kooker— she would meet with them. Anyone calling her Kootcher was out.
This Nathan Seltzer, referred by NYU, had unhesitatingly said Dr. Kooker. Nathan found Dr. Simone Kucher through New York University on the mistaken theory that NYU could provide a reliable therapist in the neighborhood. Kucher's office was on the Upper East Side.
Dr. Kucher did not want this new patient. She was bored with her patients. They kept her from baseball. She had a patient who wanted help having orgasms with men other than her husband. The patient's husband saw other women, so she wanted to see other men but was unable to achieve an orgasm with them. She insisted that her husband was somehow causing her to fail. A twenty-three-year-old man was convinced that he could manage his stock portfolio more profitably with the aid of therapy. Another man in his twenties was convinced that he was "not cool" and he wanted to be. First, Dr. Kucher pointed out, they would have to come up with a definition of cool. But to herself, Kucher noted that anyone who went to therapy to become cool never would be. She had three different women who complained that they "loved too much," though the claim seemed to Kucher somewhat exaggerated.
The most interesting recent case she had was a man who was sexually aroused by women in waitress uniforms. He had decided that he needed to come to terms with this fetish because Schrafft's had closed, Horn & Hardart was gone, and there were very few uniformed waitresses left in New York anymore.
So when she asked Nathan what he hoped to achieve with therapy and Nathan answered, "I wanted to keep from losing my mind in the subway," Dr. Kucher's pencil was already at forty-five degrees and due to plop on the yellow pad.
"What do you mean by 'losing your mind'?"
"Bonkers, insane, can't breathe, about to explode and die ... what else? I think I am becoming a claustrophobic, I guess. I'm becoming some kind of nutcase."
Kucher wrote something on a pad. Nathan wondered if she was writing the word "nutcase."
"Tell me about it."
"I never felt claustrophobia until last week." He described the attacks, and Kucher took notes in a light hand.
"Well, first, Nathan, I have to ask you some questions, just to learn something about you. Are you ready?"
"Sure."
"Have you ever had any kind of phobia before?"
"No. Nothing."
"And your family. Any phobias in your family?"
"Phobias?"
"Irrational fears."
"You k
now. Typical Jewish family Fear of paying full retail prices." Kucher wasn't smiling. "My parents had an irrational fear that I would marry a shiksa."
The patient was afraid of the question. Who cares? What is wrong with Gooden, anyway? He has good stuff Why does he blow the game in a late inning? She wondered if this patient was a Yankees fan. Most of her patients were. Wealthy neurotics root for the Yankees. "Did you marry a shiksa?" said Dr. Kucher, still taking notes but the pen slipping almost parallel with the paper.
"No."
"Where is your wife from?"
"Guadalajara, Mexico."
"Did you find it difficult to separate from your mother?"
"I'll let you know."
"How do you mean?"
"We haven't separated. She lives upstairs from me, and I see her every day. I think she can tell what kind of food we eat through the floorboards."
Dr. Kucher was still writing notes. "Can you tell what food the people below you eat through the floorboards?"
"Below us? No. Why?"
"So why would your parents be able to? Same kind of floor, right?"
"Right.... It's not a big thing."
"You brought it up."
"I just meant we are close."
"I am hearing too close."
"Really? No. It's—it's good."
Dr. Kucher heaved a sigh... and a slight burp. Probably from the salad. "And no phobias of any kind in your family."
"None."
"No fears of any kind?"
"Fears? I mean, my uncle Nusan has this fear of starving. He hoards food. But he is a Holocaust survivor. So that's not very surprising, is it? My brother, Mordy, is afraid that most food has been poisoned by multinational corporations. But he may be right. Maybe he goes a little overboard. But that's because he has been stoned for the last thirty years. It makes you paranoid."
Dr. Kucher's yellow pencil was now vertical as she feverishly wrote notes.
"And my mother is afraid of bridges. She thinks they may fall down. And maybe they will. The Williamsburg Bridge doesn't look too good to me, either." Nathan thought for a moment and then laughed lightly. "Once the bridge falls down, the problem is my father's."
"Why is that?"
"My father is afraid of water."
"All water?"
"I don't know. He's afraid of the East River. It's something that happened to him in Poland when he was a child. But I never found out what it was. I know I am making everybody sound crazy, but they are perfectly normal people. Why? Do you think any of this stuff is hereditary?"
Dr. Kucher did not answer. She was writing notes, bearing hard on the blunting pencil point, turning pages in fast jerks, filling the long pages of a yellow paper pad. "Just a minute." She straightened her pink glasses. Nathan, on the other side of the desk, could not see enough of her face. "What was that? Heredity. Yes, it's possible. Tendencies, anyway"
"So you think I can inherit what Hitler did to my uncle?"
"Not exactly. But Hitler didn't make your mother afraid of bridges."
"No."
"Anything else? Grandparents?"
"Didn't know them. I always hear that my mother's father killed himself. Jumped. I guess he wasn't afraid of heights, anyway." Nathan could see that everything he said impressed Dr. Kucher, though nothing made her smile.
"Is there anything new in your life?"
"New?"
"Upsetting changes?"
"No, not really." A staged sigh of boredom.
"Are you feeling guilty about anything?"
"What kind of anything?"
"Anything at all."
"No."
"Really? It's hard to imagine a guiltless person."
"I guess I could come up with something if I had to."
"Like what?"
"I haven't taught my daughter how to swim. The Talmud says you have to teach your son to swim, and I wonder if I am not teaching her because she is a girl."
Kucher's writing fingers were exhausted, but she pushed on as fast as she could. "Were you disappointed that she was a girl?"
"No," Nathan insisted in a defensive tone of voice.
"Do you think you are passive-aggressive?"
"How do you mean?"
"Some people cannot face their own anger and so they repress it but find other ways of getting back at the person toward whom they feel the anger." (Like that bitch on the co-op board, Kucher was thinking.) "Perhaps without even realizing that they are doing this."
"And you think I do that?"
"I don't know. I am just here to help you discover yourself," Dr. Kucher explained. "It is sometimes very difficult for someone to know themselves. Claustrophobia is a type of anxiety attack. You could get it in a number of situations or possibly only in subways. It could even be only in certain subway lines. We have to work on this step by step. It could be the result of something in your present life, but it could also be some suppressed childhood experience. Try to remember your dreams. Dreams can hold clues. A person with a phobia may experience the world as a dangerous and hostile place."
Nathan thought. "I can't think of any dreams right now, and I don't know that the world is a hostile place...."
"But..."
"But dangerous, yes. Do you have any children?"
She didn't answer, though she was thinking, You don't need kids to see how bad it is out there!
"Well, when you have children, you suddenly realize that there is danger everywhere."
She looked at her watch. The session was over. They would schedule another one. "In the meantime, try to remember your dreams."
"All right."
Dr. Kucher was not standing up. She never stood up in front of the patient, never revealed her height. "Are you a Mets fan?"
"Yes!" said Nathan, for the first time truly impressed.
"So what's wrong with Gooden?"
Nathan took the subway downtown, without incident. Even when it slowed down in the tunnel approaching Grand Central, he felt nothing. With great pride he imitated the boredom of the other passengers. The therapy, apparently, was working.
Nathan did not always remember his dreams. But in the early evening, while listening to the pleasant, splashing, squeaky sounds of Sarah taking a bath, no doubt dreaming of swimming lessons in a real pool, he suddenly recalled a dream. It might have been from the night before:
He is lying on Sonia's massage table and she is working him with her long fingers. But she is massaging too hard. He realizes that her fingers are penetrating his skin. She reaches into his body and pulls out— an iron cross, an SS insignia, a swastika. Nathan feels mortified, not only that he has these things inside his body, but also that she has found them.
Then he realizes that someone else is in the room. It is Uncle Nusan, and he has seen Sonia pull these things out of him. Maybe he hasn't seen. But he is right there. Then Nusan says to him, "Get your tokhes off the table." Suddenly Nathan understands what he means. He is starting to understand Yiddish. He feels very excited about finally mastering the language. He wakes up.
Should he tell Kucher about the dream? Then he would have to explain a lot of things. Cristofina asked fewer questions.
In the next room, Sonia was reading a large, colorful book to Sarah, Sarah looking so small against Sonia, her little hands and big eyes. The two of them looked safe and happy and absolutely perfect. He had never seen anything more perfect. And he was sick with fear.
(Emma walks into the room and finds a tall, thin woman with long fingers and curly hair.)
EMMA: Who are you?
MARGARITA: I am Margarita Maza Juarez. (She waits for a moment but gets no response from Emma.) Wife of Don Benito Juarez, the exiled president of Mexico.
EMMA: Boyoboy.
MARGARITA: This is absolutely true.
EMMA: The exiled pres ... Exiled my tokh ... You know, you can get pretty far with a lie. (She raises an index finger and swings her hips for emphasis.) But there is no getting back.
MARGARITA: B
ut it is not a lie; I am Benito Juarez's wife.
EMMA: . . .
EMMA: . . .
"Oh, hell," said Sonia. She looked at her little girl, asleep and completely at peace. "What does Emma say to that?" If she could only figure that out, she was certain the entire play would fall into place. But she could never get past this moment.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Edge of the Planet
IT WAS ONLY MIDDAY and a few bombs had already gone off. An occasional burst of small fire in the distance made the women wince as they arranged chairs and tables on the roof. The air was already sul-furous with the smoke of gunpowder. It was like this every year. Worse every year. It was the Fourth of July.
For people living uptown, July Fourth was a day to leave town. To people downtown, it was a day to attempt to have picnics among the bombs and explosions and then to top it off with the big bombs—the fireworks display over the East River.
The grassy patches in the East River park filled with picnickers from the projects—the tall, uniform rows of brick buildings on Avenue D. They would leave their picnics for the street fair and then return to their picnic spots to see the fireworks. Most of the locals still there in the neighborhood—drug dealers, family people, shopkeepers, observant Jews, secular Jews, all three Sals, and boogalooistas alike— imperceptibly tensed their muscles with each detonation, trying to assess if it was the blast of a firecracker to celebrate the nation's birth or the flatter, popping sound of a handgun blasting the face off someone else at an automatic teller. Chow Mein Vega sometimes looked at his watch to mentally record the time of a particularly suspect pop. The children didn't seem upset by the explosions. In fact, they were causing a lot of them, and every year a few people were hurt. Two years before, a man on Third Street was killed because he did not understand that a bunch of explosives sealed in a metal trash can constituted a large and lethal bomb. Successful guerrilla armies have been armed with less gunpowder. But these people were not trying to overthrow anything. They just wanted to make very loud noises.
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