One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  Afterwards, William realized that she was right. He had always believed in magic. His boyhood hero had been the comic character Superboy, the teenager who would grow up to become Superman. Superboy could fly, was invulnerable to everything except radioactive rocks from his native planet, had super strength and speed, and X-ray vision that enabled him to see through anything except lead. This was as unlike William as it was possible to be, but it was easy for him to identify with Superboy because his hero had an alter ego, a secret identity as an ordinary boy named Clark Kent. Clark appeared to be just like William. He was a geek who wore glasses, which, like William’s, were unnecessary. Clark not only had perfect vision, he had super eyesight which could see right out into outer space, and, of course, the already mentioned X-ray vision. William wore glasses to conceal the secret behind his alternate blinking; Superboy wore them so that no-one would recognize him. At one level William knew this was silly, that no-one would fail to be recognized just by putting on glasses; he realized it was a literary convention, as in Shakespeare when a character puts on a cloak to assume another identity and everyone else is fooled. But on another level it was magical. Put the glasses on, you’re Clark Kent. Take them off, you’re Superboy. By the age of ten William had constructed for himself a complex belief system. He was terrified of death because he feared total annihilation. He didn’t believe in life after death, Heaven or God. It wasn’t for want of trying to; he was so frightened of nothingness he would have believed in the Devil if he could and would readily have settled for going to Hell when his time came. At least he’d be somewhere. Although William knew that Superboy’s powers were owing to him coming to Earth from another solar system, and that he himself wasn’t an alien (in spite of what certain of his classmates said about him), he nevertheless cherished a hope that he might one day wake up as Superboy. He would sometimes lie in bed at night and pray to the God he didn’t believe in to make him wake next morning to find himself transformed into the Boy of Steel. He would make rash promises of what he would do if this prayer were granted. He would dedicate himself to helping others; he wouldn’t use his X-ray vision to look through girls’ dresses, or at least, if that proved too difficult to adhere to, not through their underwear as well. It never happened. His integrity was never tested. Every morning when he woke he would stare at the wall in front of him, hoping to see through it to his father shaving in the bathroom next door, but he never ever did. When he got out of bed and tried to spring into flight his body remained resolutely earthbound.

  Jean had no time for magic. ‘It doesn’t exist,’ she told him. ‘Alter your thinking and you won’t have a problem. My therapy will show you that magical thinking is illogical, that catastrophes occur – or not – independently of your actions, that the way to deal with intrusive thoughts is to argue against them, not fight them with silly rituals. We’ll start next week by confronting one of your fears. Now, what are you afraid of?’

  ‘Death,’ said William.

  ‘Uh-huh. Well, that’s a big one to begin with. Have you anything smaller we can tackle? Any cleanliness issues here?’

  ‘Dog poop,’ said William.

  ‘Dog poop! Great! I’ve worked a lot with dog poop.’

  William thought she made it sound like a material she used for artistic purposes, the way some people carved statues out of ice or made things out of driftwood. But he resisted the urge to laugh and promised to return for practical therapy.

  The following week Jean met William at the door of her office wearing her outdoor coat. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go find us some dog shit.’

  In the lift she smiled at him and said, ‘I know a real good area for poop. It’s only a couple of blocks from here.’

  In the street, as they walked along, Jean’s head swivelled from side to side, eyes sweeping the sidewalk. ‘There’s some!’ she suddenly yelled. Sure enough there was a small pile of the stuff fifty feet ahead. Normally William would have crossed the road at this point, but as he stopped dead, Jean linked her arm through his and said, ‘Come on, it’s OK, I’m with you now. I’m going to get you through it.’

  That alarmed William even more until he realized she was talking metaphorically.

  ‘What’s your anxiety level out of ten?’ she asked as they shuffled towards the shit.

  ‘I guess around five,’ he said. ‘It’s not that big a pile and I’ve seen it so I know I’m not going to step in it.’

  ‘And what are your thoughts? What exactly is the problem with dog shit?’

  ‘That it might contaminate me. That I might touch it, I guess, and get some horrible disease, you know like the one that makes little kids go blind when they eat it.’

  He stopped and retched. ‘What’s the matter?’ said Jean.

  ‘I can’t believe I said that, about kids eating dog shit. It’s a horrible idea. I’m up to level nine and it’s still rising. Is there anything above a ten?’

  The pile was on the outside of the sidewalk, next to the kerb. William was glad that Jean was between him and it. Even so he shrank from it, hugging the shop front on the inner side of the sidewalk, as though the kerb were a precipice he might fall off. He also feared a passer-by might accidentally barge into him and send him cannoning into the dog dirt and he anxiously scanned the faces of oncoming pedestrians to check that they were looking where they were going. Fortunately this was before the universal popularity of mobile phones and most of them were. In future years, with everyone phoning on the move, he would speculate about the likelihood of them all walking around in dirty shoes.

  Eventually they were past the dog doo and William stopped to mop his brow. ‘Well done!’ Jean told him and he allowed himself a small congratulatory smile.

  ‘I couldn’t have done it without you,’ he said.

  Next Jean took him to a small park that she said was covered in dog dirt. Indeed, even as they entered it they came across a Dalmatian squatting with raised haunches, straining away in the manner of dogs. William couldn’t help wondering if people looked like that when they went to the bathroom. He didn’t know that many years later on a beach on the other side of the world he’d have an opportunity to observe several hundred of them in action.

  In the centre of the park, where they’d negotiated themselves with enough sidestepping, hopping and skipping to qualify as skilled ballet dancers, Jean halted. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a silk headscarf. She asked William to bend down and tied it around his eyes. He couldn’t see a thing. For the first time since his childhood, he longed to have X-ray vision.

  ‘Now you’re going to walk back to the park entrance,’ she told him. ‘I will call out directions to you to make sure you arrive there safely.’

  ‘Does safely mean free of dog poo?’ he asked.

  ‘It does not. Dog poo offers no threat to your safety. I will merely be making sure you don’t trip over or collide with anything.’

  ‘I – uh – I don’t think I can do this,’ William stammered. ‘I’d be bound to tread in something nasty. I’m on a ten and still rising.’

  ‘If you can do this, you will have conquered one of your irrational fears without recourse to magical thinking.’

  That’s what you think, thought William. He was alternate blinking like crazy under the blindfold.

  ‘And I know you’re blinking under that blindfold, but that’s OK. Once you see that dog shit doesn’t harm you you’ll recover something of yourself. You’ll be free to walk the streets without its tyranny. I want you to take one step for me. I want you to embrace the idea of dog doo. I want you to wallow in it.’

  William’s feet remained rooted to the spot. He reminded himself of an elderly aunt who had Parkinson’s disease and whose feet would not move when her brain told them to.

  ‘Come on, one small step for man and all that.’

  William felt her hand grab his and she jerked him forward. The grass was soft under foot. If it was grass . . .

  It took William nearly an hour to t
raverse the small park. As Jean removed the blindfold he felt no relief. His head was pounding and he thought he was going to faint. But there she was, beaming him a cheerleader’s smile. ‘You did it!’ she said. ‘Fucking A, you did it.’

  Her enthusiasm leaped the small gap between them and surged through him. He was a little shocked by her profanity but could see she was just carried away by his triumph. He smiled back, trying to cover his pride. ‘I did, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘I did it and I survived.’

  William felt like he was walking on air until they hit the sidewalk again. Then his feet suddenly felt like lead. He looked down. He couldn’t see his shoes any more. They had been black. Now he had two enormous brown overshoes. That’s how much dog shit he’d stepped in.

  ‘You’re covered in the stuff!’ chortled Jean. ‘And you’re still alive. Nothing terrible happened, did it?’

  William wanted to say that this was terrible enough, but he felt it would be unfair to dampen Jean’s enthusiasm, although that was not so great it stopped her shuffling her position around him even as she spoke, which he realized was to get upwind of him.

  ‘Now I want you to go home and clean the shit off those shoes,’ she said. ‘Every last bit of it. I want you to come to me next week with those shoes looking like new.’

  On the way home, William found he had a whole car of the normally crowded subway to himself. He wasn’t bothered by people sharing their Walkmans with him. Even the smelliest-looking hoboes failed to include him in their requests for alms.

  Outside his apartment building he removed his shoes without touching them by levering them off against the front steps of the neighbouring building. After checking no-one was about, he used an empty beer bottle he found in the basement area to lift the shoes, one by one, into the trashcan. Inside the building he removed his trousers and socks, took them down to the basement and burned them in the incinerator. Next day he went out and bought a pair of shoes identical to those he’d thrown away. When he turned up for his appointment with Jean the following week his shoes looked good as new because they were.

  The problem with Jean’s method of dealing with his OCD was that no sooner had William got one compulsion under control than another appeared or an existing one worsened. William was now able to walk past dog poop without crossing the road (although he vowed he was never going to go into that park again), but his anxiety at the sight of out-of-line pictures grew worse in direct proportion to his dog-shit improvement.

  Jean attempted to exorcize this by making him sit in her consulting room with a picture slightly askew. Next session they had two pictures slightly haywire, the third, three, and for the fourth all four of the pastoral scenes were now inclined this way or that. The higgledy-piggledy effect was even greater for the fifth session when Jean turned up the heat by increasing the slant on each picture. The paintings were hanging every which way now and Jean made William sit there and take it. After ten sessions he was able to bear them all as far askew as you could get them to go. It had cost him more than a thousand dollars, but he could now have braved a large art gallery with careless staff.

  The therapy was going so well that William began to imagine a time when he might be cured of his disorder altogether. But you can never write off a thing like OCD. Just when you think you’ve got it licked in one area, such as dog poop, it pops up somewhere else, maybe in the way pictures are hung. This time it popped up in Jean.

  William first noticed it when they were sitting outside at a pavement café on a breezy but not too breezy day. As he was in dog-poop remission, he and Jean were discussing scatology in literature. William made the point that some authors seemed, well, obsessed with shit to the detriment of their works. They kept on about it even when it was irrelevant to the lives of their characters. Jean argued back that shit was never irrelevant; everyone produced it every day and not mentioning it was a big omission. She reminded him about the great satirist Jonathan Swift’s scatological bent and suggested his obsession with excrement was an expression of his disgust with humankind. William, thinking she meant his obsession rather than Swift’s, replied that he liked people. It wasn’t people who disgusted him, just the excrement they produced. The discussion was just getting interesting when William realized Jean was no longer listening to him. She wasn’t even looking at him, but at the ground behind him and off to one side.

  ‘You know,’ Jean murmured, ‘I can see how it would get kind of annoying.’

  ‘What?’ said William. He turned to follow her gaze and lighted upon a paper napkin on the ground. ‘Oh. I wish you hadn’t mentioned that.’

  They both stared at it for a moment then Jean shook her head, focused on William again and said, ‘Now where were we?’

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘Shit is right!’ said Jean, swinging her gaze back to the napkin. ‘Do you mind . . .?’

  Before he could answer she was out of her seat and making for the napkin. She was a tall, gangling woman, but she moved with surprising speed. Even so, a bit of the breeze that was around that day reached the napkin before her and just as she bent to retrieve it, jerked it out of her reach. Jean tried again and the breeze once more teased it from her grasp. The situation was repeated a couple more times and William had the unedifying experience of everyone seated at the café’s tables stopping eating, drinking, conversing or shouting into their mobile phones to watch an awkward, lanky therapist chasing a paper napkin and intermittently swearing at it. She reminded William of a dancing giraffe, and indeed some of the café’s other patrons were obviously under the impression that she was dancing because he heard people at the next table discussing whether they should toss her some coins. Eventually Jean got the napkin with a two-footed tackle that landed her right on top of it and returned to the table flushed with embarrassment and exertion. She then sat ignoring William’s conversation and staring at the napkin with a horrified expression that told him she didn’t like having physical contact with it but didn’t know what else to do with it. William wouldn’t have minded, after all, he knew just how she felt, except that he was paying two hundred dollars an hour for this.

  Later on his way home he recalled how there had been an incident when Jean arrived at the café. William had been there first and sat with his back to the outer wall of the building, leaving Jean the seat opposite with her back to the street. But when she appeared, instead of sitting down, she asked William to vacate his seat for her and take the other one.

  ‘I thought I told you about this,’ he said. ‘It’s one of my things. I have to sit with my back to the wall.’ He gave a nervous little laugh. ‘In case of drive-by shootings, you know.’

  Jean didn’t laugh. ‘I know that, that’s why I’m asking you to move. It’s part of your therapy.’

  ‘Um, I’m not sure that I can.’

  Instead of arguing further Jean grabbed his arm and hauled him physically from his chair. She thrust him into the other seat. While William sat glancing nervously over his shoulder, she studied the menu and said casually, ‘You’ll thank me for it one day.’

  The day at the café had been a revelation to William. Afterwards other signs of what he’d observed piled up like speeding cars in freeway fog. At her office Jean was obsessive about the crockery. One day she screamed at William when he absent-mindedly picked up and drank from her coffee cup instead of his own. Another time he arrived early and caught her adjusting a picture frame with a spirit level. When he confronted her she said the client after him was excessively concerned with symmetry. But later William remembered that she’d often told him he was her last appointment of the day.

  Jean began to excuse herself halfway through a session to ‘wash her hands’ and would disappear for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Now when he mentioned Sheena, Jean’s sympathies seemed to lean more and more towards his former girlfriend. On one memorable day Jean went off to wash her hands the moment he arrived and didn’t reappear until just before it was time for him to go. It struck him as an exp
ensive – for him – absence.

  By this time William was beginning to suspect that Jean herself had OCD and even to wonder if he was helping her more than she was helping him. The only thing now, it seemed to him, that separated therapist and patient was that he was the one who paid. He considered whether maybe the time had come to call a halt to the whole thing.

  Next time they spent the whole session discussing whether or not a picture was straight and then, when Jean produced a spirit level from nowhere to prove that it was, arguing about what ‘straight’ actually meant since it was obvious the wall was out of true and that while the picture frame was in line according to the rules of gravity, because of the wonky wall it appeared upsettingly off-beam to the obsessive eye.

  William spent a tortured week agonizing about cancelling the therapy. He realized the only thing preventing him was the embarrassment of telling Jean. She had been so sympathetic and kind to him he didn’t want to repay her by calling her a nut. Fortunately this wasn’t necessary. When he arrived for his next appointment, the receptionist told him that all sessions were cancelled until further notice because Jean had builders in.

  ‘There’s a major problem with the walls,’ the woman said.

  William never went back. He would always be grateful to Jean for helping him get over his problem with shit, but if he’d wanted another OCD nut in his life, he would have stuck with Sheena.