by Keith Korman
Copyright © 1995, 2011 by Keith Korman
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-614-1
By the same author
SWAN DIVE
ARCHANGEL
For Those Who Stood
With Me
Through the Coldest
Watches of the Night
Homo sum
Humani nihil a me alienum puto
I am a man.
Nothing human is alien to me.
—Publius Terentius
Contents
BOOK I THE PATIENT DOES NOT EXIST
1 Frau Direktor
2 Variations on a Theme of V
3 No More Fairy Tales
4 Herr Kinderweise
5 The Enduring
6 The Wise Man Dies in Childhood
BOOK II THE PATIENT’S SYMPTOMS
1 A Meeting of Minds
2 The Sphinx
3 The Stag King
4 The Institution
5 The New Victim
6 The Siege Engine
7 Inside the Room
8 A Parade of Chamber Pots
BOOK III THE DREAM
1 Speech with the Queen
2 The Twiddle
3 The Letter
4 The Ritual
5 Consultation with a Fantasy
6 Emma
7 Mind Traveler
8 Shadows
9 The Patient Exists
10 Labor Pains
11 Strangling the Gurgler
12 Regression of the Laughing Horse
13 Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream
14 The Cave Where the World Was Born
BOOK IV TRAUMA
1 Echoes in the Dungeon of Years
2 The Black Velvet Dress
3 Cinderella
4 A Dinner Party
5 Noises in the Dark
6 The Master of Her Face
7 A Wolf at the Door
8 The Inescapable One
9 The Queen of Sparta with a Hot Rear End
10 The Abyss
BOOK V WISH FULFILLMENT
1 Shock Treatment
2 The Sleeper Must Awaken
3 Torn Apart
4 Face to the Wall
5 Dark Passage
6 Train of Thought
7 The Slayer
8 The Summons
9 A Candle in the Wind
BOOK I
THE PATIENT
DOES NOT EXIST
Chapter 1
Frau Direktor
Frau Direktor put down her pen and turned away from the unfinished letter. Beyond her office window, new snow fell onto the street below, muffling the scrape of horse-drawn sledges and the rattle of carts on the icy cobblestones. The pen felt awkward in her hand,- her fingers had grown thick and clumsy, as though swollen from the effort of writing…. Once more she stared at the stubborn page, damning herself to force a line or two from her tired brain. Just a little further. Anything. Just to finish and be done. Put the thing in an envelope and lick it closed. Find a stamp and take it to the corner…. God, how she hated to beg.
Herr C. G. Jung
Bollingen Tower
Bollingen Zee, Schweiz
January 10, 1933
Dear Beloved,
How many years since we have spoken? I’ve lost count. The time has passed so quickly. Though I never thought I would be able to live without you, I have thrived nonetheless. Now I must beg a favor. But first, rest easy,- all is well here at the Clinic. We recently received our quarterly payment from the Ministry of State Medicine, and so our near future is certainly assured. It is gratifying to know we enjoy the confidence and support of those above….
What lies! Nothing could be further from the truth. But how else could she get a letter out of the country without attracting attention? Rumor had it the authorities opened all the international mail. Perhaps they did, perhaps they didn’t —- how could one know? But if they did, they would find no complaint, no grumble of discontent, no hint of trouble in this awful, awful place. Ach, even to address him as her beloved. How obscene. Having loved did not make you beloved. No, the rose had died, no petals left upon the stem. He had seen to that. Her one and only — who found her lost in an asylum room, who unlocked the door and led her gently out. Who cast her away in the end … So when he read her calculated lies, he’d know at once things had gone from bad to worse and the days of her clinic numbered by those who kept watch in far-off Moscow.
So what should she tell her precious Herr Doktor to make him do what she so needed? To accept one of her children into his care. The one child she would manage to spirit out of the city. The last survivor of all her hope and devotion. And if Herr Doktors ever watchful Frau Emma should come upon her letter first? Cold, spiteful Emma, keeping a man she never really wanted. Then all would be in vain….
The evening wind played havoc with the papers on Frau Direktors desk,- the unfinished plea turned over by itself. The sound of horses’ hooves clattered through the frosted panes of glass. In the black years of her madness, the clippety-clop of hoofbeats would have set her teeth on edge, sent her cowering to some dark, safe place. But Herr Doktor had mended her of that. Or tried to. The window opened easily,- she forced herself to look below. Still battling the renegades of bedlam after all these years. Gritting her teeth against the innocent sound of horses’ hooves upon a street of stones, simply because once upon a time it used to drive her mad.
Raving.
When other young women sat primly at garden parties, she ranted in empty rooms, shut up in the prison of her mind. But a Frog Prince had laid a kiss upon her brow, turning her into a butterfly that flew between the bars.
And now, incredibly, she stood in an office of her very own. Waste-basket overflowing. Pencil points broken. But hers. All hers … Frau Direktor of the Rostov Children’s Psychiatric Institute. Rostov-on-Don. U.S.S.R. The house of the last chance when all other doors had closed. The pompous lines she had written reproached her:
I must confess it still pleases my vanity to hear the Clinics two interns call me Frau Direktor, pronouncing that imperial title with your erect Germanic K — as I heard it so often in that place where we began….
To one who knew her, that overbearing prose would only show how completely topsy-turvy matters had become. Why bring up “that place where we began” except to reveal her own fear? All the important words in the paragraph lay exposed for him to see like some word-association test they had done a thousand times. Confess. Vanity. Title. Direktor. As if to say: I confess, my title as director is all just vanity. I direct nothing. Not like That Place where we began.
No, not like that great European institution at the turn of the century. Where their exalte
d Herr Direktor ruled the lives of hundreds of patients and a phalanx of staff. Like a field marshal or a god,- where the professors and the doctors were his captains, the nurses and orderlies his soldiers. And the lowly interns, beholden pages, bowing and scraping for the merest nod from on high. The lot of them appearing the very model of proper Swiss behavior. All in the polished marble corridors of a Zurich sanatorium for the mentally diseased in the year 1905, the very walls exuding order and security. Respectability. And permanence.
Nothing like her own clinic. Nearly three decades later, the Rostov Children’s Institute, despite its daunting name, was merely a rundown four-story town house in a damp part of town, where people threw stones at their windows just for the hell of it and bargemen stumbled down the street drunk, shouting abuse. Several of the clinic’s windows had been broken and still needed mending. The hallways wanted paint too. Her ‘Institute” had no grand staff — just one orderly, one nurse, two interns —- and only a dozen children. Nothing whatsoever like that place where she began … The pen came to her fingers and flowed across the page:
And it has always been my hope that what we once started would never really end. But that we would somehow pass on to others what we had learned. So in this way we may never die.
There! The key words. End. Die. Pass on. Hope. He’d have to be stone deaf or stupid not to perceive what had come to pass. For the Institute had been put on notice. Their pimply orderly had failed to report to work. Their dining room workers had gone as well, and with them the food deliveries. That meant someone had to spend long hours buying food piecemeal in the markets, a tiresome and consuming job. Yesterday a moving van had stopped at the Institute’s front door,- the stout driver and a pair of porters in blue jumpers asked if the furniture and brass fixtures were ready to be removed. Frau Direktor sent them away, saying there must be some mistake. No, she knew…. There was no mistake. Obviously the police were coming to get her.
The pen moved of its own accord,- the lines crawled across the page….
That is why I am referring a colleague to you. One of my old Zurich patients is in need of therapy. The patient is suffering from a troubling relapse and has begun acting like a child again. You remember, the kind of behavior we all wish to escape.
What nonsense! She had no “Zurich patients” — when last in Switzerland, she had been the patient, no one else. And once more, the code words. Trouble. Child. Suffer. Escape. Colleague. Zurich. Therapy. What could be plainer than that? My colleague is escaping with a child in need of treatment…. But which intern should she send? And which child?
She addressed an envelope and found a stamp,- she took her coat from the stand and went outside. The snow had thinned,- tiny drifts shivered on the clinic’s steps. The post box on the corner stood alone under a shaft of light. The metal grate squealed and snapped as the letter went inside. She scanned the blind windows in the buildings for any sign of life or watchful eyes, peering closely — but saw nothing. The lighted windows of her clinic’s living room shone into the dark. Beyond the shabby curtains her interns, Maximilian and Madame, waited to begin their regular end-of-day discussion. Frau Direktor and her interns held their meetings in that old dilapidated living room when the children lay in their first lap of sleep. Later they might wake with night terrors and call the adults from their beds, but in the evening the staff seized this first sigh of slumber, when the house was quiet.
She took off her coat and hung it on the stand,- the light from the living room spilled redly across the floor. The walls were covered in pink satin wallpaper with a red rose motif, the budding flowers like drops of blood. The pink satin had curled, yellowing like an opium addict’s skin. Frau Direktor had come to see her town house as the rotting husk of some mysterious plant, and her helpers as its complex living seeds, waiting only for the gentle rain and warmth to split their shells.
They would have finished putting the children to bed by now, sitting in mismatched chairs, as they always did, heads bowed close as though telling secrets. Maximilian’s low voice came down the hall, the words blurred and indistinct…. The man was a lanky thirty-five-year-old bachelor, dainty and fastidious, with the scent of witch hazel and solitary meals about him. He was already an accomplished surgeon at the Leningrad Hermitage Hospital when he came to the clinic two years ago. Giving up the lucrative and respected Leningrad practice must have appeared odd to his peers, for by leaving the Surgery Unit of the Hermitage he gave up not only thousands of rubles in “insurance fees” when servicing elite members of the Party or the army, but also the well-laid path to all the better things in life: a larger apartment, quality food, good liquor, fine tobacco, unprocurable books to read — all the gifts an eminent surgeon might expect in return for removing a commissar’s gallstones or a Hero of the Revolution’s swollen prostate. His patients were those corrupt old men who refused to die, who would pay anything to keep the slender thread spinning out a little longer. And here a young man gave that up in favor of an obscure clinic that specialized in a peculiar branch of psychotherapy? Which few authorities believed in? It made Frau Direktor wonder. Many months passed at the clinic before Maximilian told anyone the real reason for his departure from the Hermitage Surgery Unit.
As a child of ten, he had suddenly been struck down by a repulsive affliction: a purplish growth the size of a ripe plum rose out of his forehead like a rhinoceros’s horn. Instantly he became the unpopular freak, a Quasimodo, who was picked on unmercifully throughout his school life. His otherwise prissy appearance, his long, delicate fingers, the way he minced about from place to place — add to these the rhino growth, and inevitably Max’s classmates used him in an endless dance of torture. The pleasurable torture of schoolboys, notoriously the most savage of mankind’s primitive tribes.
In Maximilian’s teens, a moderately competent surgeon removed the plum from the center of his forehead. After the operation his hair partly covered the incision,- a coin-sized circle remained, like a burn scar — not so unbecoming for a man. But the damage had been done. Young Max had been touched for life. While surgery saved him from endless years of looking repulsive, the lad still had to carve beauty from the beast within. Though only a mediocre student, Maximilian studied like a madman, eventually becoming a surgeon in his own right. Among the best the Hermitage Hospital had ever seen. Delicate. Precise. And flawless.
Even as surgery and the learning of surgery gave him a chance at a life in the world of men, now Max indulged the ache of his old wound, and a sick fascination blossomed within him. For he learned how to pick unmercifully into the bodies and organs of others. His long fingers probing the moist innards of a helpless body, feeling the yielding forms of the organs within. The power of it! The depravity! Arousal in the very guts of life. Stirring him to an erection. And when, as sometimes happened during a long and difficult operation, Maximilian needed to urinate, the inevitable obliging nurse appeared at his side, ready to help him — that is, by taking him out of his trousers and holding a glass beaker as he passed his water. Those unfamiliar with this odd operating room procedure might find this nurse-to-surgeon encounter either shocking or hilarious, but it had its practical side. The doctor eventually has to urinate,- must he leave the patient, hobble down to the lavatory, and stand at a public urinal —-perhaps beside an anxious relative, desperate to know how the operation is going? No: far simpler for a nurse to hold the receptacle and resterilize her hands. Much simpler than for a sawbones with his fingers in the soup to wash them off after handling his dirty spoon.
To this sensible surgical practice Max added the touchy problem of a spontaneous erection. And though needing to urinate might partially subdue his arousal, his swollen condition was still evident to the nurse handling him under the table. And even when he did go down, the poor fellow nearly always found it impossible to relieve himself. Pee-shy is the vulgar expression. Making the surgeon (once again) the source of high amusement among the Hermitage operating room staff.
For many years Maximi
lian cultivated an appearance of cool indifference. After all, he saved lives, and not just any lives but those of influential Party members and admirals awarded the Order of Lenin. Yet he was also slowly getting even, now, as a surgeon, he could laugh, laugh at his patients on the table as his fingers touched their brains. Laugh so wide his head nearly split at the ears, for his erection was a monstrous howl, roaring, See! I’m in you! In you all the way! And that he couldn’t urinate was simply a direct message from his hidden better self:
All this nonsense must stop, Max. Stop now!
In the end the young man had three choices. Discredit several nurses to keep them from gossiping. Graft himself to some dangerous functionary as that man’s personal physician, insuring a terrified silence in the operating room and far beyond. Or the final choice: leave the practice of surgery at the Hermitage forever.
For indeed, if Maximilian kept on much longer, his secret laughter was bound to slip out and his private monstrous howls of revenge would soon be perceived by people even more dangerous than himself. It had to end somewhere,- he heard a rumor about a clinic in Rostov that specialized in the neuroses of children. With considerable difficulty, he resigned his post. He had no clear plan…. First travel south, then offer his services as a doctor, and in return — in return, what? In many ways the Hermitage Hospital had been Max’s reason for being. For without the critical surgery of his youth and the skills he learned later, Max certainly would have twisted into something malicious. A worse man would have stayed and contrived to hide his secret laughter as he denounced one talkative nurse after another, while saving worthless old men from death. But the hospital’s usefulness had come to a close, nearly destroying him. Frau Direktor thought it a mark of good character that Maximilian did in fact leave the operating room,- a mark of his better self that he heeded the hidden message of his inability to urinate. He had read the message in the nick of time. And chose to try something different.