"How do you do that?"
I felt foolish talking about the void living in the hollows of my shoulders, but there was really no other way for me to describe it. It felt good to see the intensity with which the doctor listened to my explanations.
"But none of that matters," I said after finishing up the metaphorical description of my psyche. "What I really want to know is what Star thinks I did all those years ago."
"Why didn't you ask her?"
"I didn't think it mattered until Rollins started looking into my past."
"How can you be sure that he's even doing that?"
"I got that from a friend but I can't say who."
Again the doctor was silenced.
Finally he said, "Why don't we get you to lie down on the couch, Mr. Dibbuk?"
"What for?"
"In classic psychoanalysis the patient lies down and closes their eyes. From this position it is felt that there is a readier access to the unconscious."
"Just relax, Mr. Dibbuk," Dr. Adrian Shriver said to me.
I was on my back on a brown backless couch he had against the wall opposite his window. My eyes were closed and my hands were at my side.
"Okay," I said. "I'm pretty relaxed."
"Tell me about your days in Colorado."
"It's like I said. I was a hard-drinking, hard-loving, hardworkin' young man. Sometimes I'd drink so much that I'd lose whole days, not remember anything I said or did. I had &ends but I wasn't close to anybody. I used to make calls back home in my blackouts and blame my parents for all kinds of things."
"What kind of things?"
"I don't know. I don't remember."
"Tell me about a day that you do remember," Shriver said.
This question intrigued me. There was a day in my mind, a day that captured the feeling of Colorado for me.
I woke up early on a Sunday morning. The bed smelled of a woman—her perfume and bodily scents. I turned over but there was no one next to me. I went to an open window and gazed out on silvery green leaves shivering in the breeze and filtering the morning sun. I was naked and the house was completely unfamiliar.
The bedroom was on the second floor and the house was set in the woods, on a mountain. There were no neighbors. Outside there was a corral with four beautiful chestnut horses exulting in the wind.
On the bureau was a note.
B,
Thank you for saving me and for such a lovely evening and the ride home. It was wonderful meeting you. I'm off to church now. Maybe we'll see each other again sometime.
H
I supposed that I was B and that H was some woman I had met in a bar. I didn't remember any of it. There was a picture of a young couple on the bureau; a straw-blonde and a ruddy-cowboy kind of guy. I wondered if she was Helen or Henrietta or Holly.
My car was parked on a graded dirt path that passed in front of the big house. I drove for miles trying to find my way back to some kind of city, or at least a paved road. There were, there always were, two quart bottles of whiskey in the trunk of my car. And so when the sun went down and I ran low on gas, I popped the trunk and pulled out the booze.
My memory after that gets a little fuzzy. Some of what I remember might be a dream or a nightmare. I was drinking in the woods, singing to myself and moving between the darkness of pine shadows and the thrilling luminosity of the three-quarter moon. I got lost out there and then some men who were also rambling in the dark saw me and cursed me. They chased me but I was fueled by eighty-six proof.
They split up and I pressed myself into a depression on a rocky hillside.
That was all I had ever remembered before and it wasn't often that I thought about it. But that day on the analyst's couch I saw myself in the moon-cast shadow of stone with a pear-sized rock in my hand. A man passed in front of me. He had a gun, a pistol, and he was searching for me. I leaped out from my hiding place just when he was beyond me. I hit him with more strength than I had ever known. The hardness of his skull, the softness of the tissue underneath, was a familiar feeling . . .
When I opened my eyes, I was holding on to Dr. Shriver by his shoulder and his neck. He was trying to stay in control mentally while attempting to push me off too.
"Take it easy, Mr. Dibbuk," he shouted. "Take it easy."
"What?" I asked.
"What are you asking me?" he replied.
"What did I say?"
I let go and sat down on the brown divan.
"You were just coming from a woman's house," he said, rolling his neck to work out the kink I had put there. "And then you were drinking in the woods."
"That's all?" I realized that I was rocking back and forth. I tried to stop but could not.
"Yes," Shriver said. "All of a sudden you sat up and grabbed me."
I was panting. My heart felt too large for its cavity. It was as if I had just killed someone in actuality.
"I got to go," I said, standing up quickly.
"Tomorrow then?" Shriver said.
"What?"
"Tomorrow. You should come back every day until we get to the bottom of this, this trauma."
"Trauma? I didn't say a thing about any trauma."
"Something happened to you, Ben," he had not used my first name before then, "something that caused this deep alienation in you. Talking to this woman has brought it out. If you want to find out what that means, you need to be here on this couch. I will make myself available to you every day, weekends too. You're in a very precarious place."
"Aren't you scared?"
"Of what?"
"Didn't I just jump up and grab you by the neck? And here you say we need to get deeper. Shit, man. We get any deeper and I might throw you through that window."
"And if we don't try," he said with gravity, "you might jump out of that window."
"One day," I said. "I'll come one more time and we'll see."
"Same time," Shriver said. He went to the door and opened it for me.
In the small vestibule outside sat a startled-looking young woman with black hair and eyes. She watched me fearfully. She'd probably heard me screaming and the doctor shouting to calm me down.
On the street I was still thinking about that morning in the strange house in the Rockies. I was free and no one knew where I was. I called my boss, got his answering machine again, and told him that I had suffered some kind of trauma and that I had to see doctors for a week.
I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wandered around the Asian collection almost alone.
In the late afternoon I ambled over to Lincoln Center and ate in a large Chinese restaurant near there. I ate a lot because I hadn't eaten yet that day. When I finished, it was three. The blissful feeling of anonymity and freedom stayed with me all that time.
Darkness was up ahead, I knew. Death and demolition were my destination, if not my destiny—that is what I felt. But I didn't care. The void in my shoulders protected me from fear. It infused my mind with a feeling of momentary invulnerability. I wondered what Shriver would have thought about that?
"A paranoid defense system," he might have called it, or "delusions of immunity brought on by anxiety anchored in the feeling of profound guilt."
Whatever it was, I was feeling no pain. I recognized that for years I had secretly wanted to be where I was at that moment: free from the commitment to a meaningless marriage; released from the dreary repetition of binary code and the counting of other people's money.
I walked down Broadway slowly, stopping in stores and resting on the occasional bench. I reached Cooper Union's Great Hall at 5:45, just in time to be admitted to the talk I had looked up the day before in the Village Voice.
The doors had only recently been opened but the eight-hundred-seat hall was already half full. I took an aisle seat in the far back row on the right side. There I waited peacefully, like a man who had awakened in paradise that morning and who was still stunned by the rapture.
I watched the audience as they filed in. Hundreds of faces and I
didn't know one of them. It was reminiscent of my walk every morning from my apartment to work. I took the same route every day, passing thousands of commuting workers, but rarely did I see a face I recognized. I was unknown and I didn't know anyone—like a ghost haunting a city destroyed by deluge or plague and then repopulated by some alien race.
The lights went down at last and a spotlight struck the podium. A plump man in a light bluish suit walked up to the stage. He had white hair that was too long and dark shoes that clashed with the pastel hue of his clothes.
He introduced himself, but I forget the name, and then launched into a self-referential introduction.
This preamble was long and laborious. The speaker was a lawyer who specialized in death row cases. He knew a lot of famous and infamous people and mentioned all their names. He had been involved in many high-profile cases and there were many corrupt and racist prosecutors who had fallen to his legal scythe.
I didn't care about any of that.
He talked about the number of poor people and people of color in prison. He spoke about how the law was anything but equal and fair.
I didn't care about any of that either. I'd been a black man in America for five decades, almost, and nothing about that meant anything to me. Life for all Americans, whether they knew it or not, was like playing blackjack against the house—sooner or later you were going to lose.
The winners were my bosses' bosses' bosses. They lived in the Alps or Palm Springs or somewhere else where the world is run from.
Black people in prison, Iraqis blown up on job lines in Baghdad, or Vietnamese peasants in their rice paddies becoming target practice for passing American helicopters—we were all dealt a losing hand.
Finally the lawyer got tired of hearing himself crow and so he said, "And now let me introduce the person you've come to hear tonight: Barbara Knowland."
Fifteen hundred and ninety-eight hands came together for Star, the woman wrongly accused of aiding and abetting a serial killer.
With her peacock shawl fluttering behind her, Star ascended the stairs to the podium. She air-kissed the lawyer and stood aside for him to go down into the audience.
Star was carrying a folded square of paper that she placed on the podium. Then she went about moving the microphone down so that it would accommodate her shorter stature. She unfolded the paper, looked at it, looked up, squinting at the spotlight, and then down at the audience.
She took in a quick breath, as if she was about to speak, but no words immediately followed.
"My name is Barbara," she said at last. And everything else was exactly the same as that Sunday night at the launch party for Diablerie.
I was amazed at her ability to make even this, her own memoir, a tedious and repetitious task, a deadly dull chore without the slightest variation or added nuance.
I listened to her for half an hour, after which I felt that I could make the same presentation if only someone would lend me a peacock shawl.
After it was over, people gathered in the lobby to buy the book and to line up for her signature.
I bought a copy and waited in line.
Both Mona and Harvard Rollins were standing behind Star. This didn't surprise me, as the ad for the reading had said that it was sponsored by Diablerie.
The adulterous couple weren't holding hands or touching in any way but you could tell that they were drawn to each other. They weren't looking into the line or they would have seen me.
"Excuse me, sir," a young woman said. She had Elizabeth Taylor eyes and the plainest of plain faces. She was carrying a small block of yellow stickies and a blue felt pen.
"Yes?" I said.
"Do you want your book personalized?"
"Excuse me?"
"Do you want Ms. Knowland to put your name along with her signature?"
"No. No, her name will suffice."
The young white woman found my turn of phrase unsettling. She stared at me and backed away, bumping into the woman behind me in line.
I didn't blame her. There was something off about me, something slightly sinister or even evil. I waited patiently, coming up behind the throng of mostly women—ladies who wanted to touch the woman who had seen and survived the daily, unspoken threat of all women's worlds: malevolent men with sharp knives and manacles who are only here on earth to destroy beauty.
I put my book down when my turn came. Mona noticed me then, but instead of saying something to me, she touched Harvard's shoulder. This gesture would have been heartbreaking if only I had loved her.
The faux detective was turning to see what she wanted when Star Knowland asked, "Do you want me to inscribe your name in the book?"
She hadn't even bothered to look at who stood before her.
"To one of my oldest and dearest friends," I said. "Ben."
Star's head shot up.
"What are you doing here?"
"I thought we should talk, so I came to buy a book and ask you if you'd have coffee with me."
"I thought you didn't want to talk to me."
"I was confused when I saw you. I really didn't remember."
"Do you remember now?"
"Only little pieces," I said. "And most of that might not even be real."
"I'm staying at the Fairweather until Monday," she said haltingly. "Call me . . . and we'll meet someplace." She signed the title page and closed the book, giving me the same stare that the homely woman with the beautiful eyes had.
"Ben," he called as I made my way out the front door of the hall.
It was Harvard Rollins. He caught up quickly and grabbed me by the right biceps.
"Yeah?"
"We need to talk," he said, looking around as if contemplating committing a crime.
"I know everything I need from you," I said.
I tried to move away but he held on to my arm.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Mona told me."
"Told you what?" he asked.
"She said we had to break up because you two were lovers now."
"What?"
"Yeah. She said that you were together at her mom's place and that she asked you to wear a condom but you just pushed her down on her knees and fucked her bareback." I smiled. "Then she said that you made her suck on your thing and that she couldn't have unsafe sex with me if she was having it with you too. Now if1 want to have sex with her, I have to wear a condom. . . to protect you."
There was just enough truth in what I said to make him question Mona. I liked that. I wanted to fuck with him.
He was bothered by my words but he had an agenda that would not be derailed.
"There's somebody I need you to meet," he said.
"I got an appointment."
Harvard's grip tightened.
"First you have to come with me."
It occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to get away from Rollins. He had been a New York City cop and could certainly subdue me. I thought about trying to sucker punch him but I doubted if I could catch the powerful ex-policeman unawares.
"Hey, you guys," someone said.
It was Cassius Copeland, walking over to our isolated part of the granite stairs.
He came right up to Harvard, a big smile on his dark face, proffering his right hand. Then suddenly, when he was in range, he jutted out with his left. He was holding one of those electronic stunning devices. Harvard saw it coming. He released me and made to lunge at Cass. But the stunner hit him in the diaphragm and then Cass socked him in the jaw with a short but powerful right hook. Before Rollins could fall, Cass caught him around the waist.
"Here, let me help you," Cass said, and he supported the weight of the dazed detective until he was sitting on the ground with his back up against the wall.
"Just wait here, Mr. Rollins," Cass said, "while me and Ben get US all a taxi."
Cass took me by the arm and led me away.
Rollins tried to yell something at us as we departed but the shock had debilitated his capacity for speech.
>
"You want anything else, Ben?" Cass asked me at a little Italian bistro on Sixth Avenue.
"No thanks."
I had ordered a creamy pasta dish with truffles that went for a hundred dollars a plate and Cass had eighty-year-old cognac. It's amazing what you can get in New York.
"How did you know I'd be there?" I asked the security expert.
"I didn't," he said. "I just Googled Barbara Knowland and saw that your wife's magazine was hosting her reading at Cooper Union."
"So you thought you'd check her out?"
"Sure," he said. "Why not? You know she's staying at the Fairweather, room eight twenty-nine."
"How did you get that?"
"Homeland Security, brother. I got some &ends up in there. With just an eight-digit security code you can follow about ten percent of the people in this country at any given moment. Hotel reservations, interstate travel rosters, ATM hits, and credit card purchases."
Cass was beginning to amaze me.
"She could have a heart attack up in there with no problem," he said.
"You'd actually do that for me?"
"Why not?" Cass asked. "You're my &end, right?"
"I need to know more," I said. "I've got to talk to her. She said she'd have coffee with me."
"Don't do that, Ben. Don't meet her anywhere she knows about beforehand."
"Why not?"
"Who was the guy Rollins wanted you to meet?"
"I don't know," I said.
"But it's somebody got to do with this thing Star's talkin' about. You better believe that. You make a meetin' with her and you'll have some serious uninvited guests."
"Yeah," I said. "I guess that's right. But who could it be?"
"Doesn't matter. You okay right now, man. Just keep cool. Let things settle down a little bit. I'll cover you at work. Let me look into this Colorado angle some more and then we'll talk."
Cass paid for the meal and I gave him the number of my hotel.
After that I wandered about until ten or so and then returned to my room.
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