My poor father. My poor, poor father. Pity spread through my body, paralyzing me. My father had lived and died in terrible pain. My mother might be lost forever. Anna Granite had not saved me.
The phone rang. I stared in the direction of the ringing. It was my mother. It was one of those instances you read about in Reader’s Digest; she had been psychically penetrated by the strength of my thoughts and was now trying to reach me. I stood up. Except how would she know my number? I sat down. There were lots of ways! I leapt up and headed for the phone, which immediately stopped ringing. “Shit!” I slammed my fist on the wall and the ringing began again. I dove at the phone with tears in my eyes, barely able to control my voice as I answered hello.
“Hi,” said the thin little voice. “It’s Justine Shade. Remember me?”
Justine looked at the Medicaid billing forms before her, fearful that she had filled them out incorrectly but unable to tell how. When she looked at the numbered instructions, boxes to fill in and various codes, she could not see them as specific abstractions with easily understood meanings which began and ended when you put the obvious information in the box. The grid of green ink that made up the form seemed rather the opening of a hellish labyrinth at the end of which sat checks in envelopes made out to Dr. Winkgard. She steeled herself and filled in a code of numbers; immediately the numerals sent out invisible threads attaching them to a machine of paper that ground along on a cloud of thoughts, the now totally abstract thoughts of whoever had come up with this method of defense against a cruel and exorbitant medical system.
Her mind had been moving in this psychotic direction all morning, and it was beginning to alarm her. Even worse, it seemed as though other people could see the distressed twistings and turnings in her head. Patients would approach the desk to request an appointment or to pay their bill; she would look at them and she would suddenly see their facial expressions and body movements as though through the tiny end of a telescope, leading to an infinity of personality, and then beyond personality to a place out of which the personality grew in a thick tough stalk, a place unreadable by even her grossly heightened perceptual mechanism. She would look at the appointment book, and see there a list of names symbolizing people, people who were each as complex as the one standing before her and yet reducible to a list of squiggles in an appointment book anyone could buy in any stationery store. Shaken, she would fill out an appointment card and hand it to the patient and see on her face a vague expression of discomfort and puzzlement, as if she’d registered Justine’s weird consternation. When one of them asked her a question and sensed her groping confusedly for an answer, he looked past her to Glenda and said, “Perhaps you could tell me, Mrs. Winkgard?” And Glenda’s voice sailed forth, cheerfully acknowledging the chaos that so stupefied Justine, then sweeping it into a corner with the brisk broom of her voice, neatening and simplifying, answering the question.
Probably it was obvious to everyone, on a deep level, that Glenda was a conduit for the forces of order, rationality, and strength, and that she, Justine, was a mere appendage, useful only insofar as she was a conduit for Glenda. Further, it seemed that this had been true all her life and would probably always be true, no matter how many articles she wrote or how old she got. And it was only ten thirty! How was she going to get through the day?
She turned to Glenda, who was sitting beside her doing some paperwork, her furrowing dewlaps giving her the appearance of a masticating little animal. Surely Glenda would realize that something was wrong with her soon; she thought she’d better comment on her condition so that she wouldn’t appear too far gone to have noticed it herself.
“Glenda,” she said as casually as possible, “do I seem to be acting weird today?”
“No. Are you feeling well?”
“I don’t feel sick. I just feel strange.”
Glenda put aside her paper and looked at her alertly. “Strange how?”
“Well . . .” She almost said, “Like I’m going up on LSD” and decided that although it was the most accurate description, it wasn’t the wisest and instead said, “I feel like I’m on nitrous oxide, you know, laughing gas? Have you ever had it? It makes your thinking a little distorted. I keep going off on mental tangents, and everything seems to be connected to something huge and complicated.”
“Ah,” said Glenda, “it sounds like an anxiety attack.”
Justine looked at Glenda gratefully. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”
“No.” Glenda said this as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. “You are perhaps just a little tired and nervous, and I need to take care of you today.” She patted Justine’s shoulder. “Don’t worry.”
“Maybe it is just anxiety.” Justine cautiously felt around the benign explanation, as if it were a chair that might collapse if she sat in it. “I did have kind of a peculiar date last night.”
“Peculiar good or bad?”
“I don’t know.”
She had met Bryan at a Japanese restaurant where they had shared a plate of jewel-like sushi and shiny purple seaweed. She noticed that when he held his tiny cup of sake, he cupped both hands around it for warmth, a gesture she usually saw in women and which she found inexplicably touching. She noticed he didn’t eat very much, that he seemed to have little interest in food. His long, black hair fell across his eyes and she wanted to smooth it back. He saw her looking at him and he looked at her, his face infused with a complicated expression of craftiness, interest, and eager excitement. He looked as if he were being drawn into a game that he wasn’t sure he wanted to play, and that while this seduced him, it also made him look for a way to give the appearance of full participation while he was in fact scrutinizing her from the sidelines as she charged around after the ball by herself. This expression was frightening but it was also flattering to her because it suggested an extreme and personal reaction.
They didn’t refer to their recent heinous intimacy. They talked instead of their childhood experiences, their jobs, her article, and his travels in Southeast Asia. He said he felt greatly attracted to the people who lived in the Patagandrian rain forest.
“They’re small and feline and they please me aesthetically,” he explained. “There’s a sense of delicacy and propriety about everything they do, even the con men. It’s partly because their culture is so old, I guess. They have such a strong sense of who they are, individually and in relation to other people. They don’t have our kind of demented identity problems.”
“Well, if you’re talking about a very traditional culture, it’s not so hard to find a sense of identity within such parameters,” said Justine, happy to disagree so early in the evening. “The more open and diverse a culture is, the less you can rely on the culture to define you, and you have to define yourself. That’s harder.”
“I don’t just mean their culture though. The way they live puts them in direct contact with the most fundamental human needs—food, sleep, shelter. When you talk to those people about supermarkets, they’re astonished that anyone would do something like that, going to buy packaged food instead of hunting for it. It’s not just a stupid macho thing. They understand the importance of ritual and how it has to be played out in a context of practical need. They don’t see how any man with any pride in his masculinity could live such a physically easy life as we do.”
“Did you explain to them that men here have ways of shoving their masculinity down the throats of other people?” she asked drily.
His eyes narrowed and his lower lip dropped a centimeter, like the mouth of a cat using his scent organs to test the wind. His face registered that he had taken in the scent and understood it; a smirk flickered in his eyes. “People in this country,” he continued, his voice bemused and contemptuous, “have it so easy they don’t even know what life is anymore. No one has real problems here, so they have to make them up.”
“What do you mean by real problems?”
“Like hunger and—”
“Bryan,” she said, “lo
ok out the window. There’s a guy sleeping on the subway grating. On my way over here I passed two people begging for change. You don’t think they have a problem with hunger?”
“Oh, well yeah, but I’m talking about the vast majority of people here.”
“Anyway,” she said, “there are other problems besides hunger and shelter. Can you really believe that there’s no such thing as psychological pain?”
He shrugged. “Well, really, if you want to know the truth, what I like about Southeast Asia is that you can get a gorgeous twelve-year-old to suck your cock for two bucks.” His voice was like a tickle on the middle of your back where you can’t reach it. “Just kidding,” he said.
She decided to change the subject. “So you like Anna Granite’s stuff.”
“Yeah, I do.” He abandoned his orphanlike method of drinking from the sake cup and upended the little bottle, draining it in a gulp. He signaled the waiter for more with a gesture of satirical politeness.
“Why?”
“Mainly because it’s a lot of fun. She writes about stuff that’s serious and it engages you mentally, but at the same time it’s so exaggerated and goofy that you can see the ridiculousness even while being swept up in it. And I especially like the cartoony renditions of the art world, being an artist myself.”
“You’re an artist?”
“Yeah. I just do that shit at the magazine for money.” He grabbed the sake as it floated towards them on a tray, ignoring the sleek waiter’s indignant look.
She was relieved to find that his conversation, heard in sobriety, suggested that he had actual thoughts, feelings, and sensitivities, that she might be curious about him. It was also obnoxious, but she was willing to let that pass. She imagined them sitting together in restaurant after restaurant, talking about everything that had ever happened to them, telling each other things they had never told anyone.
“I like you,” she said. She was surprised by the sweet tone of her voice.
He smiled, and she saw an expression of tenderness in the center of his eyes. “I like you too.” He reached across the table and took her hand. His tender look was subsumed by a strange, forward gloat. “You’re like a little girl,” he said softly.
“No. I’m really not.”
“I think you are. Not a nice little girl though. You’re like one of those little monsters who tortures other kids on the playground. I can just see you now making some poor fat kid cry.”
She stared at him, shocked, flattered, and slightly frightened. She felt him looking through the layers of her adulthood, peeling away the surface until he found hot little Justine Shade of Action, Illinois, posing on the playground—he was right!—she had never really left. The child Justine pouted flirtatiously as he eyed her.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Let’s go to a bar.”
They went to a dark bar with rotting wooden booths and two big pool tables around which men stalked in various attitudes of predatory langour. Cigarettes drooped from their casual lips, their stomachs protruded majestically. Justine watched their deliberate movements and inhaled the reassuring odor of french fries boiling in grease. Bryan was talking about a pathologically violent boy who had lived next door to him when he was ten years old.
“The girls in the neighborhood were terrified of him, and with good reason. I think he might’ve actually raped a couple of girls. I was with him once when he tricked a girl into climbing down into this hole he’d dug and threatened to bury her unless she stripped and danced naked for us. He even tried to force me to fuck his little sister at knife point.”
“Why were you friends with him?”
“I had to be. I lived right next to him, and he would’ve killed me otherwise. He almost killed me anyway. He beat the shit out of me a couple of times, and once he pushed me out the third-story window and I had to go to the hospital—”
“Didn’t your parents get upset about this?” Justine vaguely remembered giggling outside the principal’s office with Debby as they listened to the distraught Mrs. Wolcott complain about the D girls pulling down Johnny Wolcott’s pants and spanking his butt.
He shrugged. “There wasn’t much they could do. My mother said I’d have to learn to take care of myself. Besides, he was fun sometimes.”
“I raped someone once, when I was a kid,” said Justine dreamily.
“Yeah?”
She hesitated; since the vanished Dr. Venus, she had never told anyone about Rose. She wasn’t sure why she’d started to tell Bryan; she suddenly wanted to reveal herself to this person who’d recognized the cruel child of Action, Illinois, and stated that he liked her. Nonetheless, as she told the story, which was still painful and sad to her, she disguised the truth of it by relating it with a smile on her face, as if she wanted only to excite him.
He received the story with greed in his eyes and his body in a posture of assessment. “You really were a mean kid,” he finally said.
“It wasn’t just meanness,” she said, confused. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t even know if it was really sexual.” She felt exposed, extended towards him, and a little sick at having displayed her private life for a relative stranger’s titillation—and yet she felt titillated herself.
“It sounds like a military maneuver,” he said. “You entered the city, you pillaged, plundered, mauled everything of value, and withdrew.”
“Nooo.” She ducked her head and giggled. What he said bore no relation to what she felt, but she was seduced by the idea of herself prancing through his imagination as a tiny porn queen while the truth of what had happened lay safely hidden in a pocket of misunderstanding. At the same time, she felt a compulsion to make him understand her, and she was disconcerted to realize that the more he refused to do so, the more desperate the compulsion would become. “Really,” she said, smiling. “It wasn’t like that.” And she told the story again.
Glenda handed her a warm Styrofoam cup of tea with oil glimmering on its surface. Justine sipped and was comforted as associations with safety and ordinariness were triggered by the sweet taste.
“Glenda,” she said, “have you ever had a real anxiety attack?”
Glenda looked at her and nodded; the expression that rose on her face spoke of a deeply disturbing experience, muted with time, and now about to take the tame form of an anecdote. “It happened when I was living in Miami shortly after my divorce from my first husband. I was staying in this sleazy rooming house with cockroaches and I was drinking pretty heavily. One day I made the mistake of calling my ex-husband while I was drinking. He had a woman living with him by then, and I heard one of my daughters call her ‘Mama.’ It was like a knife in my heart; when I got off the phone I almost lost my mind. I ran to the medicine cabinet and took tranquilizers, and when that didn’t help I followed them with sleeping pills. And Justine, when I lay down in my bed I could actually see demons, one black and one red, coming to turn my bed over. It went on for hours, with me fighting to keep them from doing it. And you know, I’m still not convinced that they weren’t there.”
“Have you ever read Hegel?” asked Bryan.
“I guess, I don’t remember.” She was feeling drunk; she felt herself slouched on the table in an attitude of belligerent indolence. “Why?”
“I was just thinking of an essay he wrote. I can’t remember the name of it. But it has to do with human freedom and its natural limits.”
She came out of her slouch to watch as this new vista of his mental processes displayed itself. She felt confused by the ease with which he alternately skimmed and dove into conversation, one moment leading her down into the tunnels and caverns of his psyche to show her the strange stones and stalactites studding the walls and then, without warning, springing up to run away over the barren surface, laughing like a hyena.
“His basic idea is that people crave freedom but that, because of the realities of their lives, they are inherently unfree. And that the only way people can have a sense of freedom is by taking the freedom
of others—enslaving others.”
“That doesn’t sound so original to me,” she grumped.
“So that every human interaction, whether on a national or individual level, is a war over who will be enslaved and who will rule.”
Justine pictured a bleak landscape occupied by two people, one of whom was groveling in the dirt while the other stood exulting in the vast black emptiness of his freedom. “That sounds hopelessly neurotic to me,” she said.
“Well then you must be pretty neurotic to do what you did to that girl in the bathroom. A toothbrush, God.” He smiled as he swigged his beer.
“Fuck you,” she said, and withdrew haughtily into her booth.
“Don’t you think it’s true?”
“I told you a personal thing about myself that’s actually sort of upsetting to me, and you act like it’s some fucking joke.”
He inhaled cigarette smoke and aggressively released it towards her. “It’s so cute when you have these little moments of self-respect and integrity.”
“You’re lucky there’s a table between us,” she said. “If there wasn’t, I’d smack your little face.”
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