“I think about them… dominating me.”
“I see.” The therapist retrieves his notepad and pen from his desk, and begins to write. “Please, do continue. And leave nothing out. I want you to tell me everything.”
SESSION FOUR
“What do you see when you look at him?”
“I don’t know.” The boy shakes his head as he stares up at the television monitor, his oily hair tucked behind his pink and jugged ears.
“Go on,” the therapist says. Perched upon his tatty armchair, its arms worn with three decades of scuffs from his own restless fingers and discolored by his own sweaty palms, he watches the boy on the couch as he shrugs and shifts, watches the boy on the television monitor as well, the video feed snaking from the camera mounted on a nearby tripod. “Tell me what you see.”
“I see… I see all my pimples.” The boy laughs, but there’s no joy in it, he’s as tender as a fresh bruise. The therapist stifles a sigh, but he withholds from speaking further in the hope of teasing out more of the boy’s perspective regarding his sorely diminished self-image.
The patient is thin as bones, little more than a skeleton beneath a light shirt and short pants, the only decent meat on him likely dangled between his clasped legs fuzzed with the spectral light down of late pubescence. It is only their third session together, and the boy’s mother is already growing impatient for results. But you can’t make a man out of a milksop overnight, or even in a month’s time, no matter how much you’re paying for it, no matter how good the therapist’s reputation. More extreme measures will have to be taken.
“I see….” The boy stops to bite at a hangnail, his mouth glossed with fresh spittle where he’s been licking at his lips. It is a coquette’s gesture, an inadvertent seduction; the therapist masks his revulsion and stews in silence. “I see someone who’s not happy with himself.”
“Yes, yes,” the therapist murmurs from behind him, and shifts in his own seat. “What else do you see?”
“Someone who is a great disappointment. To his family, his community. Someone who’s afraid of his own shadow. But also…”
“Go on.”
The boy swallows, hard, the knob of his Adam’s apple hefted and released like a door latch. “I also see someone who wants to be better than he is.”
The therapist reaches out to clasp his shoulder, and together they watch his hand on the monitor as he gives the boy an avuncular squeeze.
He will fuck the manhood into the boy himself if he has to, and the therapist’s groin stirs at the thought, his cock aroused from its dormancy. He will fuck him if he has to. Lead the spotted weakling across the room and fold him in half over the desk, a clatter of belt buckles as he thrusts himself inside, six inches of steel shoved up the hinged boy’s backside. The patient will cry out but the therapist will shove a hand inside the boy’s mouth, ride him from both ends until the boy gags and vomits to near-suffocation, thighs running viscous and sweaty and red in a most violent and spectacular deflowering.
“Good,” the therapist says, and removes his hand from the boy’s shoulder. “That’s good.”
SESSION SEVEN
“What do you see when you look at them?”
“I see… two men having sex.”
The patient sits on the couch, facing the television monitor. On the screen are two men, hairless and muscular. One of them is quite fair, while the other is swarthier, both on a platform bed at the center of a wood-paneled room that brings to mind a suburban basement or perhaps a hunting lodge. The blond man is larger and on top, where he ruts away at the darker one with the impassive and mechanical regularity of a windup toy. It is a scene from Cabana Boys 3, one of many pornographic films the therapist keeps on file, locked away in a lower desk drawer so that when his shiftless daughter wanders down here to his street-level office (the rest of their home in the townhouse’s four stories overhead), she won’t stumble across this most verboten material, she of idle fingers and prying eyes. It is only meant for him, and his patients. It is the third film he and the boy have watched together.
“And does it arouse you?” the therapist asks, and fingers the remote control in his hand.
“I don’t know… I don’t think so.”
“Be honest. No secrets.”
“Sure,” he says after a while. “I guess.
“What is it you see that excites you?”
The boy only shrugs, but the therapist waits. He’ll wait for the rest of the session if he has to.
“Well,” the patient finally answers, “I think it’s the way the one on the bottom is sort of stuck. He can’t get out from under, right? It’s supposed to be something fun he’s doing, but notice his face. He looks miserable, as if he’s just waiting for it to be over. He’s surrendered himself to the other man. And he’s given up trying, even though he appears to be in pain.”
“Interesting,” the therapist says, and jots a few notes upon his pad. “And where do you see yourself in this scenario? What position do you derive your pleasure from?”
“I guess I see myself as the one who surrenders himself,” the boy says, and he winces as if thus conditioned.
“Yes. Of course.” The therapist pauses the film and rises from his armchair. He takes the drawer key from his breast pocket as he walks over to his desk. He bends down and unlocks a lower drawer, not the one containing the pornography but a second that holds a very different kind of stimuli.
He removes the black box and takes it back over to the couch, where he kneels at the boy’s feet to plug the EST machine into the socket.
“What is that thing?” the boy asks, pointing to the black box and its many small dials and controls as the therapist fits the grounding clamp onto two of the boy’s fingers.
“It’s an electrical stimulation device. As you continue to watch, you’ll receive a very small jolt of electricity when you become aroused. Just a slight uncomfortable sensation that will have a cumulative effect, rather than an acute one.”
“Are you sure?” He appears dubious, and understandably so. But the therapist will start him off slowly, break him in. He’s done it so many times before. “How will it know when I’m… aroused?”
“That’s simple.” He hands the boy the trigger wand. “You’re going to click this button yourself, every time you feel excited. It’s entirely self-administered. Nothing to worry about, I promise. “
“Oh, okay.” The patient’s face flushes with relief. “So, I just press, right here?”
The therapist nods. “Go on. Give it a whirl.”
He presses the button, and jerks in place upon the couch. “Ah!” he says, and lets out a little chuckle. “Funny feeling. It’s like… licking a 9-volt battery. But all over my body.”
“See? It’s hardly anything at all. Now. Shall we continue?”
SESSION ELEVEN
The boy is wan. Dark and angry rings about his eyes, hair tumbleweed dry, skin drawn where it isn’t pocked with acne, he has narrow brown veins singed into his temples and along his chest, his fingers ash gray from the work of the EST machine. Lying on the floor with his limbs splayed in corpse pose, he resembles nothing so much as a deactivated robot awaiting some fresh jolt of energy, for its circuitry to be emboldened to action. Between the electroshock and the ipecac, the last few sessions have taken their toll. This, of course, is all part of the process. There are a number of significant hurtles they need to cross to reach satisfactory conversion.
“You’ve done such important work already,” the therapist says, and he dims the lights. “You must know that to be true. Now. Roll onto your stomach, please.”
The film begins. A man and a man, this time on the deck of speedboat, one on his knees with his head nestled in the other’s crotch as he undoes the man’s zipper.
The therapist lies on top of the boy, presses him down against the carpet’s rough weave with
his cock against the cleft in the patient’s buttocks. Does the boy enjoy this particular form of intimacy? He says nothing to indicate otherwise.
“Do you feel aroused?” the therapist whispers in his ear.
“No,” the boy says, barely audible, the side of his face mashed against the thick carpet, though he can still view the monitor.
“Do you feel anything whatsoever?”
“Only uncomfortable. And… nauseous.”
“Do you need the toilet?”
“No. Not this time. But I’d rather not look, all the same.”
After a few minutes the men onscreen both spend themselves upon the concave belly of the receptive fellow, and the therapist stands, adjusting himself before he replaces the videotape cassette.
Another film, this time of a naked woman, her puckered nipples hard as glass as she plays with herself, a French manicured hand traveling from her waxed and hairless sex up her torso and past her swollen breasts to her sneering mouth, lipstick smearing upon her lips like blood as she rubs herself above and below. Soon, an unclothed man enters the picture, shot from the chest down, faceless and with a brutally erect cock. He immediately slaps her across the face. It is one of the therapist’s favorite scenes.
“Go on,” he says to his patient. “Feel at yourself down there. Don’t be shy. Take hold of your manhood. It is your mantle. Your birthright.”
The boy sits up and undoes his trouser buttons. He begins to masturbate. Breath erratic, he tugs at himself for some time, though his reddening face soon distorts into a steadily worsening contortion of anxiety, colored by no small amount of discomfiture and possibly—no, definitely—rage. He slows and, finally defeated, abandons the endeavor altogether, folding his arms across his chest in refusal.
“I can’t,” he says, the very picture of frustration. “I can’t do this.”
“That’s because you don’t know yet what it is to desire a woman. But you will learn.” The therapist leans down, his lips grazing the back of the boy’s head and his dark halo of curls, close enough to kiss. “Look. How he takes her? His callous hand at her throat, while he calls her debasing names. Is she not a dirty cunt, a stupid whore? She knows she is these things. See? There. Her startled expression of fear? It masks her pleasure to be penetrated, to be possessed. She knows that is her true worth. To bring a woman low, to break her: that is a real man’s calling, his essential desire. That is what we aspire for.”
The therapist leans over the boy, reaching down to cradle the boy’s limp appendage. The boy gasps and writhes beneath his hand.
“Shhh, it’s alright. I’m not going to take anything. Settle down. I’m a doctor, remember? So. Keep watching the woman. Keep watching her fear.”
The boy stills, frozen, his eyes fixed on the monitor and the humiliated woman upon it. Eventually, he begins to harden beneath the therapist’s steady stroking.
“See?” the therapist says.
SESSION THIRTEEN
The patient sits on the couch, the lights dimmed. Beside him is the therapist’s daughter, a foot away but separated by so many things, a world apart. The doctor has enlisted her and her wiles, her physical presence really, and compelled her to obey. It is all in service of the patient. For the boy must be guided in such matters, to learn how best to be at ease around a potential mate, and who better to participate in the process than the therapist’s very own in-house assistant?
The girl is seventeen, almost a woman really, and looking more like her mother by the day. How beautiful his wife was in her own youth, the therapist thinks, and blanches at the thought of her current state, her body gone to the dogs in the years following childbirth. Perhaps he will find himself a new and younger wife, once their daughter leaves for university. He makes a note to weigh the logistics further in his free time.
“I feel so silly,” the girl whispers to the patient with a smile, but her father overhears.
“What did I tell you?” he admonishes her, his mood already soured after considering his wife’s uninviting shape. “You are not to use words of any kind. And you say you want to attend the upcoming dance at school, yes? Or was that just another passing fancy of yours?”
“I do, Father,” she says, and lowers her head. “Forgive me.”
“Then no speaking whatsoever.” He softens his face as he turns his attention back to the patient. “Now,” he says, “look at her closely. And tell me what you see.”
“I see…” The boy giggles, and she smiles once more, but her eyes dart to her father’s face, unsure of whether even this gesture is permissible. “I see a beautiful girl.”
“Yes,” the therapist says. “And what does she smell like?”
The boy, uncertain, leans in and sniffs at her neck, then pulls away, eyes wet and wide. “Like a delicious shampoo. Like lavender, perhaps.”
“And what does she feel like?”
No one smiles, no one laughs, and the patient slowly reaches out to her, his pale and burnt fingers drawn forward as if on silken strings. The girl watches as he lets his hand rest upon her knee.
“Warm. She feels warm.”
“Her waist,” the therapist says, directing him, and the boy’s hand slides up to her midsection. “Now… allow your hands to roam her.”
“Father—”
“Silence!” he commands, and the girl shudders as if struck. The patient hesitates, then has his fingers spider up her body, sliding for a few moments across her stomach before they find their way beneath her shirt. She gasps and turns her face away, her expression anguished as he moves from her belly to her breasts, which he holds in both hands atop her brassiere as he leans in once more to sniff at her. He nuzzles against her neck, kisses her there with little pecks, forces himself against her as if attempting to burrow his way beneath her skin.
Finally, she can take no more. The girl leaps up from the couch, pushing the boy away as tears bloom at her eyes. She covers her face and storms from the office, slamming the door in her wake so hard that the doctor’s degrees rattle in their oaken frames upon the wall. It seems that she won’t be going to the school dance after all.
“I’m so sorry,” the patient says, but the therapist shakes his head. “I shouldn’t have—”
“Not at all. You did well. Very well. Did you feel how exhilarating it is? To be the dominant one, as nature intended it, to feel the power over woman that is your fulfillment as a man?”
“I did. I really did.” The boy grins, for the first time revealing a single sharp canine tooth, and the therapist can see a genuine spark of hope in his patient’s eyes. The treatment is working.
“I’m so pleased.” He pats they boy on the knee. “You mustn’t allow a girl’s reticence to stand in your way. When it is a matter of his entitlement, a real man doesn’t rely on permission, on a girl’s fleeting whims to take shape. You must never apologize for pursuing what is rightfully yours. You must only seize it.”
SESSION NINETEEN
“We need to discuss what happened last night.”
“Did I do something wrong?” the patient asks, and licks furiously at his lower lip, his hair damp from the steady snow falling outside the townhouse. By all appearances, the boy has become far more sturdy these past few sessions, as if he’s suddenly growing into his body, shoulders squared back instead of stooped. Still, his eyes flit nervously across the room, past the therapist and toward the office door.
“My daughter is very distressed. She’s told her mother that she found you at her window, that she awoke in the night to discover you watching her as she slept. This after she repeatedly observed you following her home.” Things are still on course, and indeed the boy is well on his way to total conversion. But the therapist caught his own mistake too late, and now the patient has imprinted himself upon his daughter like a newly birthed gosling. Adjustments will need to be made at once.
“Oh.” A bash
ful smile, a flash of that sharp canine. “That.”
“When we utilized her in session, she was intended to be a stand-in, a demonstration of womanhood, in the representative sense. She was never meant to become the actual object of your desire. During the last session, you said you would keep your distance from her. You gave your promise.”
“I… suppose I just got so excited that I finally found myself attracted to a girl. That I really wanted to be with her… physically.”
“Yes, and your youthful enthusiasm is a powerful device at our disposal. But now we must redirect your attentions to other girls, other young women.”
The boy nods, though he seemed unconvinced. “And how are we supposed to do that exactly?”
“With the help of another kind of professional.” The therapist writes the information down on a slip of scratch paper. “Call that number. She’ll be expecting you.”
He takes the slip of paper. “Who is she?”
“Her name is unimportant. It’s what she has to offer of her body that is of significance.” The boy eyes the paper in his hands with reverence, a key to a magical new realm. “No need to conform to the conventions of polite society, not with this one. You may treat her as you’d like, as one would treat an animal. Use her as you wish.”
“Oh yes?”
“Her capacity for degradation is near limitless. I myself know from personal experience.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” The boy stares down at the floor, taps the edge of the paper against his dagger of a tooth before raising his eyes once more. “Thank you for everything.”
SESSION TWENTY-TWO
“What do you see when you look at him?”
He watches the patient watch himself on the monitor, no trace of the therapist captured in the video feed save the shadow of his right hand, which he quickly guides from the frame.
THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI Page 5