by Jane Smiley
Charlie, who had stood up and stretched, walked out the back door.
“Yes, Mom,” said Simon, “but even so, was I supposed to go out and do anything after watching that movie, or just go home and worry?”
“I didn’t think it was scary enough,” said Stoney. “I don’t think audiences today would be scared by any movie from that period. Like I said, it’s comprehensible. It’s not real. The governments involved aren’t run by madmen—”
“Like North Korea,” said Zoe.
“Speaking of the atomic bomb,” said Cassie, “you’ll never guess who Delphine and I have been working out with all these years without knowing.”
“Yes, that was interesting,” said Delphine.
“What?” said Isabel.
“Well,” said Delphine, “there’s a man about my age at the gym, but in much better shape. He’s the trainer for the old ladies, really. Tall. High cheekbones. Perfect health.”
“Glowing,” said Cassie.
“So today he was shaking his head, and he looked upset, so of course we asked him what was wrong, and it turned out that he was retired army, and he was quite worried about the fact that so few people in the army or the State Department speak Arabic, or Iraqi, or whatever, I don’t even know what it is, that’s how ignorant I am, too. And Cassie said, ‘Do you speak a lot of languages?’”
“And he said, ‘I speak Russian, German, Czech, some others. You know what I did in the White House? I had an office right next to the President’s office, and I was the voice of the red telephone. If he had to call the Soviet Union and speak to the Kremlin, I did the talking.’”
“Wow,” said Isabel.
“But here’s the amazing part,” said Cassie. “He said, ‘All those years I worked in the White House, I met every important person who passed through, and I explained to them what my job was, and they were all interested, and they were all pretty nice, too, except I hated one guy. I took an instant dislike to him, and I never changed my mind.’”
Delphine said, “I said, ‘Who was that?’”
Cassie said, “And he said, ‘John Erlichman.’ And I said, ‘John Erlichman! I knew John Erlichman!’ And he said, ‘John Erlichman came into my office the first day, and he sat down and he looked at me, and he said, “So, Colonel, how are you going to feel when you are replaced by a computer?” He was not a nice man.’ I thought it was amazing what a small world it is, that he should have such a clear memory of John.”
“How did you know John Erlichman?” said Stoney.
“Oh, goodness. When I was the editor of the UCLA Bruin in 1946, Erlichman was in charge of circulation and H. R. Haldeman was in charge of advertising. They were the only frat boys we had on the paper. They really didn’t fit in, and they weren’t nice boys. Of course, they’d already been in the service by then. At least, Haldeman had been in the Marines, because he had that buzz cut. Frank Mankiewicz did sports. He’d been in the army, I think. You know who I mean, Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary. And he was McGovern’s campaign manager or something like that. Then there was NPR.”
“His father made All About Eve,” said Max, “and his uncle wrote Citizen Kane with Welles.”
“Yes,” said Cassie. “Herman and Joe. Herman died when Frank and I were still friends. Once, I went over there to find Frank for some reason, and Herman let me in, and I said, ‘Hi, Herman, how are you? How’s Sarah?’ and he said, ‘Who’s Sarah?’ and I thought he was senile. I said, ‘Your wife, Sarah,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know who you meant. Everyone has always referred to her as “poor Sarah.”’”
Everyone laughed, and Simon said, “Your editorial board was the center of the universe.”
“Well,” said Cassie, “not that. But when we graduated, I went to work for Helen Gahagan Douglas, and John and Bob Haldeman went to work for Nixon, and they screwed us, but ultimately they went to jail. We didn’t. They’re both dead now, of course. They died early, painful deaths.” She smiled. “And we didn’t. I didn’t, and the colonel didn’t. The colonel looks like he’s going to live forever.” Her smile widened. “When I think of the Iraq war, I try to remember what happened to John and Bob.”
“There’s a happy ending that no one seems to have learned from,” said Stoney. “And look at this movie we were watching. The governments make a mistake. They try to fix it. It’s reassuring. And then think of stories you’ve heard that really terrified you. They aren’t movies. They aren’t art. They can’t be comprehended.”
“The one that immediately comes to mind for me,” said Max, “is that family in Washington, D.C. And this is a true story. My friend Gus Lieberman went to their temple. Do you remember him, Zoe? He lived at the bottom of the street here when we first moved in. He told me about it when we were walking the circuit one day, oh, maybe ten years ago now, but I’ve never forgotten it. There were a husband, wife, three daughters, and one son. The daughters were in their teens, and the son was maybe twelve. The mother and the son went to New York for a few days to visit some relatives. In the meantime, they had hired painters to paint the exterior of the house. It was a nice neighborhood. The father was a lawyer or something. Anyway, one of the daughters was home sick from school, and the painter and his assistant raped and murdered her. While they were at it, one of the other daughters came home for lunch, and so they raped and murdered her, too, but she had managed to call the third daughter, who called the father. When the two of them rushed home to save her, the painter and his assistant caught the father and murdered him, then raped and murdered the third daughter. Then they apparently took their equipment and left. The mother and son found everyone when they got home from New York that night.”
“Oh my God,” said Isabel.
Everyone else was silent for a moment, and Charlie came back in. He said, “What’s up?” He seemed, to Paul, as if he was making an effort to be patient. Paul said, “That’s a gruesome story, but maybe it would be comprehensible if we knew more about it. If we knew about the trial of the painter and his assistant, for example. If they said what their motive was. Maybe it’s not truly incomprehensible, just that there isn’t enough data.”
“I think the war in Iraq is incomprehensible,” said Elena.
“Yes, Mom, we know that,” said Simon, but not impatiently. Really, Paul thought, there was something intriguing about Simon’s temperament.
“But I spend a lot of time trying to comprehend it. I feel like the fact that I can’t comprehend it and others can means that most of the people in the nation are suddenly incomprehensible to me.”
“Okay,” said Max, putting his arm around her, “but let’s not talk about that particular case, at least not yet.”
“Wasn’t the Rwandan massacre incomprehensible?” said Zoe. “A plane was shot down, and that seems to have been the signal for all the Hutus to drop what they were doing and kill their neighbors with machetes. To me that’s way more incomprehensible than Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler spent years cultivating his infrastructure with movies like Triumph of the Will and that sort of thing. And then, when he did start massacring the Jews and all the others, he did it secretly, behind walls and in ghettos and outside of Germany. But with the Rwandans, it was like a massive infection, or a poisoning. They weren’t doing it, and then they were.”
“But how does that make you feel about humans?” said Stoney.
Zoe sniffed thoughtfully, then she said, “It doesn’t make me feel one way or another. It’s too incomprehensible.”
“Well,” said Delphine, “my guess is that we don’t understand Rwanda because we’re ignorant about preexisting conditions there. I heard overpopulation was a problem, and tribal enmities left over from the colonial period. And wasn’t there a war there before? Sometime in the sixties? But I must say, that one thing I noticed when I first came to the U.S. was that after the civil-rights movement the whites got more openly fearful, and you could see, during those years when there were riots in Watts and all, that they couldn’t help feeling that bla
ck people were going to switch over just like that, all at once and in the course of a few days, and start killing as many white people as they could, but in fact black people never thought like that. So it had to be guilt on the part of the whites and a sense of powerlessness on the part of the blacks that prevented it.”
“I still find it incomprehensible,” said Zoe.
“What about Jeffrey Dahmer?” said Stoney. “Was he comprehensible? If he never said how it felt to be him, if he couldn’t explain what was going on inside his head in a way that other people can grasp, then how are we going to be able to comprehend that sort of thing?”
“Why do we want to?” said Simon.
“Because it exists,” said Stoney.
“I think it’s a fetish,” said Paul. “I think there’s a brain mechanism and that it’s the mechanism of the fetish. Here’s a clue. There are people who go to doctors and have healthy limbs amputated. They’re called ‘apotemnophiliacs.’ Most of them, if not all of them, have a specific memory from early childhood of seeing an amputee and becoming preoccupied with that idea or image, then harboring and developing that image as an image of themselves. Pretty much all of them say that they just would feel more right, more truly themselves, if they had an amputation.”
“Jeez,” said Charlie.
Paul lifted his ponytail off the back of his neck and smoothed down his beard. Zoe was looking at him and smiling, as if she were his presenter, and he smiled back at her. Possibly he had not been especially friendly during the day. He said, “I think it’s a kind of conditioning. You know how birds like ducks and geese fix on the first creature they see after they hatch from the egg, and then follow that creature? If it’s the mother duck, all well and good, but they might also imprint on a human. All animals do it. They have to, in order to survive. It’s a powerful mechanism, and it works by fixing a pattern of response in the brain. That’s called a conditioned response. But sometimes the conditioning works idiosyncratically. Like, the kid sees an amputee and he’s frightened by the strangeness of that person, and he imprints it. Apotemnophiliacs talk about coming home after seeing the amputee and trying it out—tying up the leg, or wearing the arm inside the shirt. Pretending to be an amputee. And what that does is confirm the imprinting by repeating the stimulus, and what you might call deepening the groove where the associations the child feels with the amputee exist in the brain. When you have a fetish, you attribute power to that fetish. If you read about fetishes, most of them are sexual, like bound feet or high heels. What the person gets from it is a fixated feeling that results in sexual release of some sort. Let’s say a Chinese man of a certain era contemplates the shoe for a bound foot. Obviously, if he’s grown up in a foot-binding culture, he is impressed by everything associated with the bound foot—the femininity of the victims, which would include his mother, their evident pain, the difference between them and others, his position in relationship to them. Maybe the way they walk evokes some primal sense of them being alien creatures, and all sorts of strong feelings cluster around that. So, when he looks at the shoe or holds it in his hand, it has a lot of mixed associations that have power for him. He might sexualize those feelings if he is encouraged to do so, or if those feelings are highly sexualized in his society. Same with breasts or red lips or navels in our culture, or ankles in Victorian English culture. Or whips and high boots. All that stuff.” He looked around. He could see that they were waiting for him to get to the point. He cleared his throat. “But fetishes are clearly a form of conditioned response that interferes with any actual relationship with another person. You can tell. A man who loves a woman has a certain kind of body language. He looks at her face. His eyes move from place to place. His attention shifts. But if he has a breast fetish, say, his gaze fixes on her breasts. She might be talking, but he doesn’t even hear her. He’s imprinted on those breasts, and he’ll stay imprinted until he has an orgasm. He doesn’t love her. There’s no actual relationship, with give and take and some version of responsiveness. Instead, he’s made her breasts an idol.”
“Or her social status. Or her legs. Or her money,” said Isabel. “People my age do that all the time. They come into the office and say they’re going to marry a tall blonde or a girl from the Upper East Side or someone who was Miss North Carolina last year.”
“A lot of things that seem incomprehensible get more comprehensible when you understand the idea of the fetish as a form of imprinting. A fetish is a religious idol. Why did Moses get so angry when he came down from the mountain and the Israelites were worshiping false idols? Because they were ceding power to inanimate objects rather than actually having a relationship with God.”
“Remember those stories about John Ashcroft that were in the paper a while ago? He was anointing himself as attorney general. He was pouring oil on his head or something like that,” said Elena.
“He was abasing himself,” said Paul.
“I thought he was elevating himself,” said Elena.
“But that’s the point of a fetish,” said Paul. “The conscious act of abasement makes you feel a certain way—simultaneously powerless before the idol and powerful in the sense that adrenaline and endorphins begin to pump. My guess is that the adrenaline is related to the imprinting and the earlier fear. It’s a modified flight instinct. From what I’ve seen in my practice, people raised with a lot of fear, in very strict families, get many rewards from abasement, not the least of which is that they avoid the promised beating, and might even be praised for humbling themselves before the power of the parent.”
“God is who you thought your parents were when you were a very young child,” said Isabel. “One of my English teachers said that one day when we were reading Paradise Lost.”
“My clearest memory from being a very young child,” said Simon, “is that one day Mom said she was going to tell me about the birds and the bees, but she didn’t do it right away. I thought she was going to tell me that Melanie Orton, who lived next door, had something in her panties like a hummingbird, and that if I showed her my pee-pee, her hummingbird would come out and stick its beak down my pee-pee and extract what was in there.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Elena.
“No, I’m not,” said Simon, “but that doesn’t mean that you failed as a mother. It just means that what you told me wasn’t as interesting as what I imagined.”
Zoe said, “I want to hear the rest of what Paul is saying.”
Paul cleared his throat. “An idol is an idol. Religious feelings and sexual feelings are very closely linked and very powerful. The anthropological evidence for that is universal. If a child grows up in a strongly religious culture and is trained to think that all relationships are extremely hierarchical and power is exciting and fearsome, then, in my view, he will be more attracted to fetishes of all kinds, whether sexual, religious, or whatever.”
“Guns,” said Isabel. “Guns are an obvious fetish in the U.S.”
“And swords are a fetish in Japan. All knives,” said Charlie. “You-all are always harping on the U.S., as if this culture is the sickest of all—”
“It isn’t the sickest of all,” said Paul. “French culture is full of fetishes. So is every other culture. And it’s every culture’s fetishes that make the least sense to other cultures, especially if we try to impose them. But people can get over their fetishes. They do it by withdrawing the power from them, even finding a way to get bored with them. I had a client who was so addicted to cigarettes that she would light up in the morning before she even put her glasses on and smoke while she was sitting on the toilet. One day, she had to have abdominal surgery, and her mother showed up in her room when she was just coming out of the anesthetic and was feeling quite nauseated. Her mother lit up and blew smoke in her face and talked. By her mother’s third cigarette, she never wanted to smoke again, and her relationship with her mother was pretty straightened out, too.”
“You’re kidding,” said Isabel, and everyone else laughed.
“No,” said Paul. “No, I’m not kidding. But it was years ago, before widespread smoking bans.”
“But how does the idea of the fetish make sense of that Washington, D.C., mass murder?” said Cassie.
“I don’t know,” said Paul, “because I don’t know what was in the minds of the painter and his assistant. But it makes sense of Jeffrey Dahmer.”
“I saw a thing on Nova,” said Max. “It was about a mass murderer who had killed several young women by strangling them. There was nothing evident in his background to show why he’d done that. He was adopted, but he was raised in a loving home, was never beaten or abused, and never suffered any blows to the head. He was intelligent, and he was interested in why he did it, too. So he got together with a neurologist, who interviewed him and tested him. He said that he would just get this urge to strangle these girls and not be able to stop himself, and the neurologist actually listened to him, and he gave him a set of tests. One of them was a fine motor-muscle coordination test, where he had to do this.” Max placed both his hands, palm-down, flat on his knees, then made a fist with his left hand and turned it ninety degrees. Then he lifted his hands and alternately made a fist and turned each one and opened and flattened each one. He repeated this gesture a few times. He said, “The guy couldn’t do it. Basically, he couldn’t rub his head and pat his stomach simultaneously. I don’t remember all the tests, but they were fairly simple coordination tests.”
“He couldn’t play the piano, I’ll bet,” said Stoney.
“Bet not,” said Max. “Anyway, the theory of the neurologist was that fine motor coordination and impulse control are both located in the frontal lobe, and this guy’s frontal lobe was poorly developed, so when he had an impulse, which came from somewhere at the base of the brain, the frontal lobe couldn’t handle it, and so he was literally telling the truth. And then, when they gave him an MRI, they saw that there was less blood flow in the frontal lobe.”