See if that does any good.
Then Drea locked up, climbed into his battered Toyota, and headed south on Georgia Avenue to the Federal City Wine Cellar. Gorshin had left his office—appropriately located in Foggy Bottom—early, and was already overflowing his usual chair while glancing over his shoulder at the evening news. Tonight the Sony's screen exhibited a huge red valley tucked beneath the towering mountains of Mars.
"For some reason,” he commented as Drea sat down, “that reminds me of Caitlin."
"Why don't you ever stay home with her?” Drea asked, inserting his lips into his first goblet of Mondo Rosso. “She is your wife, after all."
"Not anymore. She left me last year. Didn't I tell you?"
"No. You also didn't tell me you were sending U. Pierson Clyde to my class so I could do your job for you."
"He's an interesting guy, isn't he? I mean, as loons go."
"Don't evade the issue. You're the one being paid to shrink his head, not me. Then why do I have to read his stuff?"
"Look, I'll buy you a case of Mondo Rosso. Deal?"
"Deal."
Gorshin asked if he had any other interesting students this year, and Drea told him about Inshallah Jones, whom he described as “a remarkable young black man."
"Young male African Americans," Gorshin said reprovingly, because Drea hadn't used the currently okay designation, “have terrible castration issues. It's on account of those old African American women who raise them. That's why they explode in violence if you look at them crooked. Or even if you don't."
"Without those old women they'd all be dead before the age of one."
"Yes, and better off, too,” said the Dr. Mengele of the Wine Cellar. “I'm just saying, keep an eye on him."
Drea sat gazing at Gorshin, noticing for the first time that despite the breadth of his fat face, his eyes were so close together that only his nose stopped them from overlapping.
Why did Drea associate with him? Had a mere busted marriage and a dead-end career and a grown son who preferred not to speak to him so completely emptied his life that he had to fill it with Gorshin and cheap wine? Was he that lonely?
Well, of course they had. And of course he was.
"Believe me,” he said at last, “I intend to keep an eye on him."
If he'd been marking his own conversation, he'd have scrawled Awfully weak on this poor excuse for a comeback.
Like all members of the Academic Community, Drea filled his days by drinking coffee, a schedule interrupted only by occasional hours wasted in class and necessary trips to the bathroom.
The day after he returned the Creative Writing bunch their papers, Drea was in the student center drinking a cup of caffeine-and-saccharine-flavored mud at his favorite table overlooking the glassed-in swimming pool. He liked to sit there, eyeballing the sort of shapely young women who, perhaps warned by a website called gropingprofs.edu, never took his classes.
"Can I sit down?” asked a voice, and without waiting for an answer, U sat down.
He'd shed his young-broker attire and donned casual clothes, in which he appeared even more of a lank, flaxen-haired nonentity than before.
"Please do,” Drea muttered, with what he thought was irony. It went unnoticed.
"You, uh, uh, asked me about the dragon, Dr. Dread,” U said, and instantly turned scarlet.
"My name is Drea, Philbert Eugene Drea. Dr. Dread is merely what people call me."
U turned even brighter, a kind of neon, and for the moment appeared to be completely deprived of the power of speech. Drea sat there in silence, enjoying the discomfort of this blushing nut who'd invaded his private space.
"I consider the name a compliment,” he said finally, and gave U a Dan Rather-type smile, stretching without elevating the corners of his mouth.
Uncertainly U smiled back. The flood of scarlet ebbed from his face and his tongue became functional.
"I, I, uh, uh, can't tell you where the dragon came from, Dr. Drea, because I really don't know. I've explained that over and over and over to my therapists, and every time I do they try to make me say something that just isn't true."
"I am not interested in true truth, I am interested in fictional truth—” Drea began. But U, like a Gorshin in training, promptly overwhelmed him with a flood of chatter.
"See, Dr. Drea, I used to do codeine."
"Just like Jamie Cassandra. What a surprise."
"It wasn't good for me."
"No, I don't suppose it was."
"It practically wrecked my life. My wife Brittany left me on account of it."
"You were married to a spaniel?” Drea jested. But U rushed on, unheeding.
"Even her leaving didn't make me stop. It was my toothbrush did it. I was standing in my bathroom one morning about six months ago, I guess I was there for a couple of hours, and I couldn't find my toothbrush. That was when I realized I needed help, and checked myself into rehab at Georgetown Hospital."
"A shocking experience."
"I mean, it was staring me in the face, yet I couldn't find it. Well, after they detoxed me, the people in rehab recommended long-term therapy and sent me to a lady shrink. She asked me just what you did, where did the dragon come from, and when I couldn't tell her she tried to make me admit that I invented it during a drug-induced psychotic episode. But she was wrong. It was thinking about the dragon that started me taking codeine. The addiction was the effect, not the cause."
"So you switched from the drug lady to Gorshin."
"Yeah, and at first I thought I'd found the right shrink at last. He agreed with me that drugs were just a symptom of deeper problems. He thought—"
"Castration,” Drea muttered.
"What?"
"He thought the underlying cause was castration anxiety."
"How'd you know? He thinks I'm the dragonet, and the Earth is the womb—Mother Earth, you know—and in bursting through the shell I'd be escaping from the castrating influence of mother love. He says I want to escape and achieve autonomous phallic maturity, but at the same time I'm afraid to, and the conflict is what's causing my anxiety. But he's wrong too."
"Gorshin is right only at long intervals, when the laws of probability catch up with him. Did you know he's been married six times? Six. Most people become immune to the bug after one or two exposures, but with Gorshin it's like the flu, it comes back every February.... Why, specifically, is he wrong this time?"
"Well, Mama died when I was three hours old, and I don't see how she could've done much castrating in such a short amount of time."
"Who raised you?"
"Oh, a bunch of nannies, a Ukrainian au pair named Olga, Daddy until he died, some of his mistresses, my Uncle Uriel, two or three Catholic boarding schools, and whatnot."
To Drea that sounded about right as a breeding ground of lunacy. He asked if U would like a cup of coffee, but he said no, caffeine made him hyperventilate.
"The truth is,” he went on, his eyes taking on the thousand-yard stare of introspection, “it really baffles me, not knowing where the dragon came from. As a kid I always liked scaly critters, because they were kind of outcasts and rejects, like me. I loved dinosaurs—wanted to be an Allosaurus when I grew up, and eat people. I used to keep pet snakes in a toilet at St. Mark's until the Prefect of Discipline found out and flushed them. Later on, when Brittany wanted us to get matching tattoos as a sign of eternal commitment, I suggested twining rattlers. But she insisted on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Now she's gone, and I've got the Sacred Heart on my left deltoid and I'm not even a Catholic anymore."
In spite of himself, Drea had gotten interested in this nave recital. He asked when the dragon business started.
"When? Whenever the Loma Prieta earthquake happened. Ninety-five? I don't remember. Anyway, they kept showing the scenes over and over and over on TV, and suddenly I just flashed on the fact that a dragon had caused it, a dragon down under the Earth. Of course, my first thought was that's ridiculous. But the idea kept coming back
to me, and it kind of grew, because it seemed to explain so much—earthquakes and floods and global warming and the Asteroid Belt and so forth.
"I began to feel like for the first time in my life I'd discovered something terribly basic and terribly important. The existence of an embryo dragon implied a mother, so I started calling the little guy a dragonet, and I dreamed about him. I saw the dragonet coiled up inside the Earth like a baby snake in its egg, and from time to time it moved, and when it did, the Earth shook.
"When the big tsunami hit Asia the day after Christmas ‘04, that was when I went on codeine. Because on the twenty-fifth, Christ had his birthday, and on the twenty-sixth, Antichrist tapped the Earth with his egg tooth. I mean the real A.C., the one that's going to finish us all off. Then the next year global warming caused that big hurricane that wiped out New Orleans. That's what all those screwy old prophets of the Last Days dimly foresaw—devastation, the Four Horsemen, the dragon breaking out of the Earth. They thought God would bind him for a thousand years, as in Revelation 20:2, only there isn't any God. So all those dead people, they're just a down payment on what's going to happen."
After his outburst U sat in silence while the filmy cataracts of self-absorption slowly cleared from his eyes, which were grayish or bluish, it was hard to tell which. He finished sadly, “I guess now you think I'm insane, too, Dr. Drea."
"Yes. But that's your business and Gorshin's—who, by the way, you ought to ditch instantly. There are rational shrinks, you know. My business is with your story, about one percent of which is worth saving. Can I make a suggestion?"
"Sure."
"Go home. Dig your story out. Try to forget about yourself for half an hour—forty-five minutes, if possible. Your hero is Jamie Cassandra, not Uriel Pierson Clyde, and for the sake of the story you need to devise a plausible scenario to explain what made Jamie believe in his dragon. Not your dragon: his. I hate to tell you this, but fiction consists in making things up. So go home and make something up."
"I don't want to say anything unless it's absolutely true—"
Drea's temper was none too certain at the best of times, and at this he lost it.
"A storyteller has no more to do with truth than a lawyer has. The lawyer's business is advocacy; the storyteller's is plausibility. Now,” Drea concluded, “go away. I'm getting old, and voyeurism is the only kind of sex I can really count on anymore. Will you look at that thong down there with the girl inside it?"
U got up, but seemed troubled. “I thought creative writing meant, you know, spilling your guts,” he muttered. “That's why I joined your class."
"Nobody wants to look at a pile of guts except Gorshin, who makes a fortune doing it despite being crazier than you'll ever be. Now scram."
U did. The thong started practicing two-and-a-half backflips, or whatever the proper term was. Drea got himself another cup of mud and settled down to watch.
* * * *
U was absent from the next class meeting, which was too bad because it contained some lively moments.
Drea passed xeroxes of Inshallah's “City of the Dreadful Night” to the other students as a model for their own work. Some gazed at the author with awe, others with hatred—such were the penalties of success. With Inshallah's permission, Drea had already sent the manuscript to an agent he knew, who didn't usually handle short fiction but might, he hoped, make an exception in this case.
"If you imitate Mr. Jones,” Drea told the class, “I'll flunk you straight off. Don't imitate, emulate. He seems to have found his voice—what I want you to do is look around for yours."
That launched the kind of free-for-all teachers dream of. The students peppered Inshallah with questions, and he rapped back with a fluent mix of psychobabble and street language. This was a guy who could make two syllables out of a four-syllable obscenity, yet include in the same sentence words like “polymorphous” and “subliminal"—properly used, at that.
His story, he said, had been drawn directly from his life, and he told about his young days in the Project, dealing drugs, dodging bullets, visiting the fortified home of a big supplier in Potomac Estates where people were filling plastic garbage bags with money and weighing it because counting took too much time. About how he stopped dealing after his brother Shabazz got shot and bled to death in his arms. About how the raging need to memorialize him burst out at last in the struggle to write.
It was great stuff. Gazing dreamily at his prize pupil, Dr. Dread, terror of the English Department, who spent his life stewed in wine and cynicism, wondered whether this moment of—well, of epiphany—gave meaning to his otherwise wasted life as a teacher.
And then, without warning, his critical faculty came to life. Inshallah was making it all up.
"The City of the Dreadful Night” wasn't any more original than its title. It just seemed so because of that machine-gun style its author had probably caught—in the same sense that you catch a cold—by listening to rap, deleting the drums and rhymes and spilling it on a page as prose.
His glasses were too expensive, his beard too sculptural, his cornrows too neat, he could spell, he spouted polysyllables, he'd read Kipling—this was no child of the Project. Then why was he lying? Couldn't he just say, Hey, I grew up in a condo in the Watergate, and let the story stand by itself?
Before leaving the campus after class, Drea stopped at the registrar's office and looked up Inshallah's records. He'd graduated from Bunche-Mandela, a pricey private school that specialized in grooming the children of black professionals for success. He lived with his parents in the so-called Gold Coast on the edge of Rock Creek Park, where caf-au-lait politicians, businessmen, city administrators, top-ranked bureaucrats and presidents of historically black colleges lamented racism while sipping double scotches beside their swimming pools.
By the time Drea reached the Cellar his sense of gallows humor had taken over. After all, he'd been right the first time: life really was a fraud. And so was literature. There was nothing to do but enjoy it, and of course drink. Full of Schadenfreude, he was slurping down Mondo Rosso and grinning like a satanic Happy Face when Gorshin came in and sat down.
He was looking happy, too. “Can't stay long tonight,” he said.
"Why not?"
"I'm getting married again. Marvelous woman named Leila or Delilah or something. Met her today in Georgetown Foods. In the meat department."
Drea congratulated him while Gorshin quaffed the single glass he said he would allow himself tonight. Then snapped his fingers.
"By the way. Almost forgot to tell you. Clyde's been hospitalized. At Georgetown. Mixed codeine and vodka, OD'd, almost died. Maybe a suicide attempt. What the hell did you say to him, anyway? He's out of the ER now and resting in the ICU. I'd look in on him, but Delilah and I are flying to Vegas tonight. Krishnamurti will cover for me."
"ER? ICU? Delilah? Vegas? Krishna—what the hell do you mean, what did I say to him?"
"Got to run,” said Gorshin, and did.
Next day, Drea phoned the hospital and, after interminable delays, got to speak for thirty seconds to Dr. Krishnamurti. The news was good: U was out of intensive care, resting comfortably, and could see visitors in another day or two.
"It would be good if you came to see him,” said the fluent accents of Bombay. “I believe he is quite isolated, which is unfortunate in so young a man."
"I suppose he's driven all his friends away, talking about his dragon."
"Either that or talking about his analysis,” said Krishnamurti dryly.
When Drea saw U again, he was wearing maroon PJ's and a blue terrycloth robe and sitting on a bench in a solarium on the ninth floor of Georgetown Hospital. A ray of sunlight penetrating the dusty glass made him look almost translucent; like drugs, suicide had not agreed with him.
"How are you?” Drea asked, shaking his lax and nerveless hand.
"Oh ... okay, I guess. Just don't ask me to coagulate."
"Er ... all right."
"I'm better, but I can't
coagulate yet. I can't coagulate my thoughts. It's my prescription. It's an anticoagulant. It's like I can think of A, or B, or J, but how they connect I don't know."
"I'm sure you'll be doing better soon."
"Jesus, I hope so. I feel like such a fool, almost losing my life worrying about a dragonet who may not even exist."
"You remember that, then."
"Oh hell, I remember everything—well, not your name, but everything else—only I can't coagulate. I can't draw conclusions. Why don't you sit down?"
It had been so long since Drea tried to comfort anyone that his machinery of empathy had frozen up. He was sitting at the end of the bench, trying to think of something to say, when U relieved him of the embarrassment of being nice by falling sleep.
Suddenly his head slumped to one side and he began to snore. Drea was used to having students nod off, so he just sat there for a while, resting. When a male nurse came by, wearing green scrubs and thick fur on his stumpy forearms, Drea stopped him and asked in a low voice if U was going to be all right.
"Yeah, until the next time he tries it,” said the nurse, and headed through a door marked hospital personnel only. From inside came the hum of a microwave and the odor of chicken-noodle soup.
* * * *
Next day Drea got a call from his agent pal.
"Absolutely brilliant,” he burbled. “That story by Allah whoever. Terrific! I won't make a dime on it, but I'll try sending it around anyway."
"Marvelous,” murmured Drea.
"Just one thing. This guy is black, right?"
"Absolutely."
"I just wanted to make sure. Sometimes, people find out somebody writing about the black experience isn't black, they feel cheated."
"Good thing Shakespeare didn't know that when he wrote Othello."
"When who wrote what?"
"Nothing."
Just before the next class meeting, standing in a blank tiled hallway outside the seminar room, Drea told the news to Inshallah, whose blue shades grew misty with emotion.
FSF, October-November 2006 Page 2