by David Gordon
For a moment I did nothing. I felt like my arms and legs had turned to marble. Then I jumped up and ran to the balcony naked. I pushed through the curtains, which wrapped around me in the wind, like a veil I had to tear through or a cloud that had come between me and the moon, and I felt myself panic for a second and it all began to feel real once more. I looked over the balcony’s edge. I saw nothing. Not nothing. I saw dark water beating on dark rocks and throwing up moonlit foam. I saw white foam drooling over jagged black rocks. I saw dark cliffs black with trees. I saw the vast black ocean, starred with silver sparkles under a vast black sky. I saw waves. I saw white stars. I saw the moon.
29
I WON’T BORE YOU with the details. The cops came and at first they weren’t sure they believed me. Yes a Ramona Doon had checked in, and yes she was missing, but dead? They treated me like a befuddled boyfriend who’d been ditched, until a body washed up with the dawn tide at which point they freaked out and held me, at a far less glamorous hotel, for the inquest. Although the corpse was too mangled by the fall, and too softened by the sea, for easy identification, a Doctor Parker, who had reported a woman missing in Pasadena, eventually arrived and informed the authorities that her real name was Mona Naught. He had been treating her at his psychiatric clinic for years, until she ran away. She had been, at best, depressed and troubled. At her worst she was delusional and most definitely a threat to herself. This was not her first try. The coroner returned a verdict of suicide and sent us home.
I had called Lala from a landline and left her a message canceling therapy. This time I was the one out of town on shady business. She didn’t call back. I also called Lonsky. He took the news as he took everything, his oceanic calm unchanged, the depths revealed only by a long sigh, after which he instructed me, in his usual rumbling baritone, to listen sharply to what the cops said and report in as soon as I returned.
30
AT FIRST, WHEN I TURNED Lonsky’s corner, I thought the flashing lights were for me. I was somehow in trouble for something. Then I saw the ambulance parked alongside the cop car and the fire truck further down the street. Maybe Lonsky’s mother had suffered a heart attack. I parked and joined the loose group of spectators on the sidewalk. The neighbors watched from their own lawns and porches.
“What happened?” I asked a fellow audience member, a Korean kid in shorts and a baggy T-shirt. He shrugged.
“Somebody was saying the dude’s too fat for the thing.”
The dude had to be Lonsky of course, but there were any number of things he might be too fat for. Had he gotten trapped in the house somehow? Fallen through a weak floorboard? Was this a jaws-of-life situation? Against my will, I pictured his mountainous flesh floundering among the shards of a shattered toilet.
“What thing?” I asked. The kid shrugged again.
But the answer was soon revealed. A small team of firemen and EMTs emerged from the house guiding a gurney on which a foam mattress was balanced with a sheet of plywood beneath it. Atop the gurney was Lonsky, in red silk pajamas, lashed to the mattress with thick straps. A napkin was loosely knotted around his neck and he seemed to be clutching a wooden spoon in one hand. Slowly the contraption was wheeled onto the porch, carefully held in balance by men on both sides.
“Oh shit,” the kid muttered respectfully, under his breath.
“What’s on his face?” I wondered aloud.
“That shit’s batter, yo!”
Indeed, Lonsky seemed to have chocolate frosting smeared around his mouth and cheeks. He licked his lips thoughtfully as more firemen laid planks over the steps. Madams Lonsky and Moon brought up the rear of the procession, Mrs. Moon weeping openly, Mrs. L. stoic, smoking a cigarette and scolding a fireman for stomping a flower with his boots. At one point the gurney’s wheel slipped off the ramp and, as the onlookers gasped, Lonsky listed dangerously to one side. But the men heaved and, groaning together like galley slaves in a storm, they righted his lurching bulk. As they rolled down the walk, Lonsky spotted me.
“Kornberg,” he called. “Kornberg!”
I approached the gurney, but was stopped by a cop.
“Hold it.”
“He’s calling me. He’s my um…” I hesitated.
“Kornberg!” Lonsky yelled, and now the float halted as he waved his spoon and rolled from side to side. “Let my assistant through! He’s my protégé!”
“That you?” the cop asked. “You that guy’s protégé?”
“I guess,” I said and crossed the lawn.
“Mr. Lonsky,” I said. “What’s wrong? Are you ill?”
“Kornberg,” he called, and as I came closer, I saw that he was not tied down simply for balance. His face was distorted, red and wet with tears. I saw their traces in the dried frosting. “Kornberg…”
“Yes sir?”
He waved me closer still. His throat was ragged. He whispered. “Who killed her?” Everyone looked curiously at me.
“Who killed who, sir?” I asked.
Suddenly he howled, like a wounded beast, like a lion pierced by a spear. “My love!” He lunged at me, tearing the button from my shirt and nearly upsetting the cart as he struggled with his keepers. I gaped in shock. “Find the killer, Kornberg,” he moaned. “Avenge my love!”
Four men lay across his limbs while another slid a needle into the meat of his arm. He thrashed wildly, like Prometheus bound. Then he seemed to subside into himself and, as his servants strained to slide him into the ambulance, the great man drifted into sleep. Huffing, the EMTs shut the door while the sweat-drenched firemen mopped themselves off. The ambulance slowly pulled out, a bit low on its wheels, and the onlookers wandered away.
Mrs. Lonsky looked me over, tapping ash from her smoke. “I suppose you’d better come in,” she said. “Solar left your pay.”
PART III
PORTRAITS OF SOME LADIES
31
THE CASE OF THE CLUELESS HUSBAND
(FROM THE FILES OF SOLAR LONSKY, DETECTIVE)
THE SUBJECT OF THESE NOTES, to whom I shall refer as K., first arrived at my office seeking employment as my assistant, though even in our first meeting, which took the form of a job interview, I was readily able to discern his true motives: he was coming to me for help, for relief from his own psychic pain. His wife had recently abandoned him. He was a failed novelist who had subsisted as a used bookstore clerk before ultimately failing at that as well. Well past the age when most men have established careers, homes, families, and positions of respect, he continued to flounder like a child, lost in his life, barely able to dress like a grown-up or seek a job without spousal prompting. Yet he seemed to have no idea why his wife might leave him. On the contrary, childish, grandiose, self-centered, and riven by hysterical fears and deep unconscious struggles that rendered him helplessly, perhaps hopelessly, neurotic, he blamed her and felt like an innocent victim. He had no glimmer of what might actually be going on, least of all within himself.
I decided to take his case. My reasons were several: First, as a student of human nature (and by nature here I mean the grand landscapes, ever-changing climates, and infinitely wondrous wildlife of the unconscious and still mainly uncharted mind), I could not pass up the opportunity to observe this extraordinary specimen at close quarters. Second, I was fond of him, despite his numerous shortcomings. He represented a rare type, a dying breed, the intellectual bohemian idler, the supposed man of “books and art and ideas,” who appeared, if only by virtue of his incompetence, to remain apart from the world, untouched by the love of money, status, fame or even normal respectability, and who asked only to dream on, but who awoke in shock to find himself in the wrong century, the wrong country, the wrong world. Certainly, the wrong class. Lastly, though I am not technically speaking a doctor, nor a believer in spirits, I do try to ease the pain of my fellow humans as they pass through this plane; being of service to the sick is my code. Thus I could not turn him away, for whether he knew it or not, he came to me as a patient, crying out silently a
nd unconsciously for my help. After all, he arrived asking to become a detective, when he had never before in his life considered doing any such thing. Why? To solve the mystery of himself. To find what had been stolen from him: his wife. And to discover by whom.
In “A Difficulty in The Path of Psycho-Analysis” (1917), Freud introduces the concept of the Third Wound to describe the repeated assaults that scientific knowledge had inflicted on human conceit: first, Copernicus discovered that the sun does not revolve around the earth and that man is not in fact the true center of the universe. The second blow was delivered by Darwin: man is not set apart from the animals, nor formed by a creator in His image, but is in fact a creature among others, a variation on a theme, and no longer the center of life on earth either. The final, vanquishing blow, was of course Freud’s own: his discovery of the unconscious—that immense internal sea, full of fears and wishes, memories and fantasies, whose depths remain largely unsounded—revealed the truth, that our inner world is as alien as the universe without. “[I]ts inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.”
Man, it turns out, is not even at the center of his own mind. The greater part of our own life happens, one might say, behind our backs. “The ego is not master in its own house.”
Never had this insight of Freud’s seemed truer than when I met K. for our second session. I had set him the task of surveilling and observing a woman who I believed possessed the key to an important mystery, which I will not undertake to describe here (see The Case of the Mystery Girl). Arriving to make his report, I was amazed to see him struggle as he tried, somewhat desperately, to present himself as an eager professional, grasping a notebook and pen, ticking off irrelevant details as his unconscious leaked relentlessly through the cracks. While his words and tone were literate, reserved, even prudish, the dirt under his fingernails and the leaves in his hair, even the faint air of canine feces about his person, spoke of an almost savage state of regression. The partially unzipped fly and bunched underpants visible over his rear waistband were due, no doubt, to squatting for hours in the dark. But the fact that they remained uncorrected, left deliberately if unknowingly on display—what purpose could they have but to assert his sexual identity to another, more powerful male, to “present”? Then of course there was the blond lady’s wig peeking from his knapsack, symbolizing the wife perhaps, the burden of a repressed Other who would not remain hidden, or else the wish for a burial, the death of the troublesome mate. Or was it his own feminine side, creeping from the darkness, the “woman within”? Of the meaning of the water bottle in his rucksack, which I found upon later inspection to contain urine, I will not even venture a guess. Suffice it to say, the man was keeping secrets, from me and from himself.
In an attempt to probe more deeply, I suggested to K. that he set aside his “notes,” and try a simple relaxation exercise as an aide-mémoire. He agreed. However, he vocalized his resistance by asserting that such techniques “never work” for him, insisting that he cannot be “hypnotized” because he tried once when quitting smoking, and launching into a long and largely pointless anecdote about acupuncture and a yoga class his wife once made him attend.
Nevertheless, it was clear that the larger part of him was eager, even desperate to be heard, for no sooner had I begun to talk him through a very simple deep breathing and visualization exercise of the sort recommended to tense air passengers than he fell into a kind of trance, revealing a deep and precise memory. He also left some drool on my chair cushion.
Our next meeting was hardly conducive to analysis, the fault entirely mine. I was indisposed, suffering a recurrence of the illness that has plagued me for most of my life, and which I cannot avoid addressing here in some detail in order to proceed with this report.
Much of the exploring and learning a young person does, particularly when he or she is bright, takes the form of mystery-solving. Why is the sky blue? How does gravity work? What causes fire? Can cats fly? What is in that book I’m not allowed to read, that drawer I’m forbidden to open? Even the most primal and immortal questions of all can be seen as mysteries. Freud and the Ancients offer their famous readings, but I saw Oedipus as the first detective story and with the first, best, and now most tired twist: Oedipus Detectus searches for a killer who turns out to be himself. Although our own crimes and secrets are in general less horrific (and our punishments less severe than poor Ed’s), the essential mystery we all solve is the same: Where did we come from? Where do we go? The child peeking through a keyhole at his mother taking a bath, or crawling on the floor beneath her skirt, or lying in bed hearing her parents wrestle in the next room, her father’s curses, her mother’s cry—each little gumshoe learns the shocking secret for himself, the truth they try to keep us from uncovering: We enter the world naked and bloody through a hidden opening in our mother’s body, where our father has secretly planted a seed. And each of us will leave this world as well, disappearing one by one, as in a late night horror show, until we too vanish forever. Sex and death stand behind everything, before the beginning and after the end.
Of course, my early career as a detective in training was a bit humbler. Early cases included: Who the Hell Keeps Taking the Paper? (the next-door neighbor), Where Does the Guy Up the Block Go in the Middle of the Night? (to visit the next-door neighbor’s wife while he’s out of town on business), and Where Is the Cat When He’s Not Here? (shockingly, it turned out that my cat, Patchy, had a whole other family, who let him in, fed him, and petted him, calling him by another completely different name, Mr. Boops.)
Although a bit disillusioning, these first ventures nevertheless inspired in my young mind a vision of the world as full of enticing secrets to be discovered. The next step, the lesson that opened up my interest in psychology, came a bit later, when I began to ponder the concept of lying. Reprimanded and severely spanked for my own mendacity, in the Case of the Vanished Chocolate Bar, I began to wonder how my mother could “tell” I was lying, she said, by the way I twitched and shifted. I remember the term she used and which fascinated me to no end: “You gave yourself away.” Why, I wondered, would I do that? Why would anyone? Nevertheless, as my mother astutely observed: “Everybody has a tell.”
So the man who arrived at my father’s place of business, the kitchen table, promising him that his debt would be paid on Friday when his check cleared, was deliberately lying, while the next man, who confidently assured my father that he would recoup all losses on the next game, which was a “lock” was, in his own mind, really telling the truth, despite being equally “full of crap.” Why? He was lying, not to us, but to himself! This was a life-changing insight: while truth and lies are opposing concepts, they are not set in their logical relationship. The honest person constantly puts forward the falsehood he believes, while the liar unknowingly reveals the truth. Within a few months, I was reading Freud, and soon I was skilled enough to see through most anyone, even my mother, the best gambler I ever saw, when she spoke the first of the only two lies she ever told me, an hour after my father, who had been yelling on the phone and smoking a Pall Mall as usual, suddenly clutched his chest and fell, crashing into the coffee table and burning the rug. I stared as his face became a mask, mouth open, eyes still. I peeked from my window as men took him away in what looked like a plastic garbage bag and loaded him into an ambulance. And when my weeping mother told me that he was now in heaven, watching over me, and could hear me when I prayed, I knew that she was bluffing. I knew she had nothing at all.
It is a truism that psychologists and therapists are first drawn to the field in order to solve their own problems. Perhaps only those of us who realize that we ourselves are unsolvable go on to be great: the powers of insight we develop are that much stronger, and, useless on ourselves, they snap into sharp focus when aimed at another.