Seize the Day

by Saul Bellow

  “You have to realize,” said Tamkin, speaking of his patient, or his client, “that the mother’s confession isn’t good. It’s a confession of duress. I try to tell the young fellow he shouldn’t worry about a phony confession. But what does it help him if I am rational with him?”

  “No?” said Wilhelm, intensely nervous. “I think we ought to go over to the market. It’ll be opening pretty soon.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Tamkin. “It isn’t even nine o’clock, and there isn’t much trading the first hour anyway. Things don’t get hot in Chicago until half-past ten, and they’re an hour behind us, don’t forget. Anyway, I say lard will go up, and it will. Take my word. I’ve made a study of the guilt-aggression cycle which is behind it. I ought to know something about that. Straighten your collar.”

  “But meantime,” said Wilhelm, “we have taken a licking this week. Are you sure your insight is at its best? Maybe when it isn’t we should lay off and wait.”

  “Don’t you realize,” Dr. Tamkin told him, “you can’t march in a straight line to the victory? You fluctuate toward it. From Euclid to Newton there was straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers. On my own accounts, I took a licking in hides and coffee. But I have confidence. I’m sure I’ll out-guess them.” He gave Wilhelm a narrow smile, friendly, calming, shrewd, and wizardlike, patronizing, secret, potent. He saw his fears and smiled at them. “It’s something,” he remarked, “to see how the competition-factor will manifest itself in different individuals.”

  “So? Let’s go over.”

  “But I haven’t had my breakfast yet.”

  “I’ve had mine.”

  “Come, have a cup of coffee.”

  “I wouldn’t want to meet my dad.” Looking through the glass doors, Wilhelm saw that his father had left by the other exit. Wilhelm thought, He didn’t want to run into me, either. He said to Dr. Tamkin, “Okay, I’ll sit with you, but let’s hurry it up because I’d like to get to the market while there’s still a place to sit. Everybody and his uncle gets in ahead of you.”

  “I want to tell you about this boy and his dad. It’s highly absorbing. The father was a nudist. Everybody went naked in the house. Maybe the woman found men with clothes attractive. Her husband didn’t believe in cutting his hair, either. He practiced dentistry. In his office he wore riding pants and a pair of boots, and he wore a green eyeshade.”

  “Oh, come off it,” said Wilhelm.

  “This is a true case history.”

  Without warning, Wilhelm began to laugh. He himself had had no premonition of his change of humor. His face became warm and pleasant, and he forgot his father, his anxieties; he panted bearlike, happily, through his teeth. “This sounds like a horse-dentist. He wouldn’t have to put on pants to treat a horse. Now what else are you going to tell me? Did the wife play the mandolin? Does the boy join the cavalry? Oh, Tamkin, you really are a killer-diller.”

  “Oh, you think I’m trying to amuse you,” said Tamkin. “That’s because you aren’t familiar with my outlook. I deal in facts. Facts always are sensational. I’ll say that a second time. Facts always! are sensational.”

  Wilhelm was reluctant to part with his good mood. The doctor had little sense of humor. He was looking at him earnestly.

  “I’d bet you any amount of money,” said Tamkin, “that the facts about you are sensational.”

  “Oh—ha, ha! You want them? You can sell them to a true-confession magazine.”

  “People forget how sensational the things are that they do. They don’t see it on themselves. It blends into the background of their daily life.”

  Wilhelm smiled. “Are you sure this boy tells you the truth?”

  “Yes, because I’ve known the whole family for years.”

  “And you do psychological work with your own friends? I didn’t know that was allowed.”

  “Well, I’m a radical in the profession. I have to do good wherever I can.”

  Wilhelm’s face became ponderous again and pale. His whitened gold hair lay heavy on his head, and he clasped uneasy fingers on the table. Sensational, but oddly enough, dull, too. Now how do you figure that out? It blends with the background. Funny but unfunny. True but false. Casual but laborious, Tamkin was. Wilhelm was most suspicious of him when he took his driest tone.

  “With me,” said Dr. Tamkin, “I am at my most efficient when I don’t need the fee. When I only love. Without a financial reward. I remove myself from the social influence. Especially money. The spiritual compensation is what I look for. Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That’s the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real—the here-and-now. Seize the day.”

  “Well,” said Wilhelm, his earnestness returning. “I know you are a very unusual man. I like what you say about here-and-now. Are all the people who come to see you personal friends and patients too? Like that tall handsome girl, the one who always wears those beautiful broomstick skirts and belts?”

  “She was an epileptic, and a most bad and serious pathology, too. I’m curing her successfully. She hasn’t had a seizure in six months, and she used to have one every week.”

  “And that young cameraman, the one who showed us those movies from the jungles of Brazil, isn’t he related to her?”

  “Her brother. He’s under my care, too. He has some terrible tendencies, which are to be expected when you have an epileptic sibling. I came into their lives when they needed help desperately, and took hold of them. A certain man forty years older than she had her in his control and used to give her fits by suggestion whenever she tried to leave him. If you only knew one per cent of what goes on in the city of New York! You see, I understand what it is when the lonely person begins to feel like an animal. When the night comes and he feels like howling from his window like a wolf. I’m taking complete care of that young fellow and his sister. I have to steady him down or he’ll go from Brazil to Australia the next day. The way I keep him in the here-and-now is by teaching him Greek.”

  This was a complete surprise! “What, do you know Greek?”

  “A friend of mine taught me when I was in Cairo. I studied Aristotle with him to keep from being idle.”

  Wilhelm tried to take in these new claims and examine them. Howling from the window like a wolf when night comes sounded genuine to him. That was something really to think about. But the Greek! He realized that Tamkin was watching to see how he took it. More elements were continually being added. A few days ago Tamkin had hinted that he had once been in the underworld, one of the Detroit Purple Gang. He was once head of a mental clinic in Toledo. He had worked with a Polish inventor on an unsinkable ship. He was a technical consultant in the field of television. In the life of a man of genius, all of these things might happen. But had they happened to Tamkin? Was he a genius? He often said that he had attended some of the Egyptian royal family as a psychiatrist. “But everybody is alike, common or aristocrat,” he told Wilhelm. “The aristocrat knows less about life.”

  An Egyptian princess whom he had treated in California, for horrible disorders he had described to Wilhelm, retained him to come back to the old country with her, and there he had had many of her friends and relatives under his care. They turned over a villa on the Nile to him. “For ethical reasons, I can’t tell you many of the details about them,” he said—but Wilhelm had already heard all these details, and strange and shocking they were, if true. If true—he could not be free from doubt. For instance, the general who had to wear ladies’ silk stockings and stand otherwise naked before the mirror—and all the rest. Listening to the doctor when he was so strangely factual, Wilhelm had to translate his words into his own language, and he could not translate fast enough or find terms to fit what he heard.

  “Those Egyptian big shots invested in the market, too, for the heck of it. What did they need extra money for? By association, I almost became a millionaire myself, and if I had played it smart there’s no telling what might have
happened. I could have been the ambassador.” The American? The Egyptian ambassador? “A friend of mine tipped me off on the cotton. I made a heavy purchase of it. I didn’t have that kind of money, but everybody there knew me. It never entered their minds that a person of their social circle didn’t have dough. The sale was made on the phone. Then, while the cotton shipment was at sea, the price tripled. When the stuff suddenly became so valuable all hell broke loose on the world cotton market, they looked to see who was the owner of this big shipment. Me! They investigated my credit and found out I was a mere doctor, and they canceled. This was illegal. I sued them. But as I didn’t have the money to fight them I sold the suit to a Wall Street lawyer for twenty thousand dollars. He fought it and was winning. They settled with him out of court for more than a million. But on the way back from Cairo, flying, there was a crash. All on board died. I have this guilt on my conscience, of being the murderer of that lawyer. Although he was a crook.”

  Wilhelm thought, I must be a real jerk to sit and listen to such impossible stories. I guess I am a sucker for people who talk about the deeper things of life, even the way he does.

  “We scientific men speak of irrational guilt, Wilhelm,” said Dr. Tamkin, as if Wilhelm were a pupil in his class. “But in such a situation, because of the money, I wished him harm. I realize it. This isn’t the time to describe all the details, but the money made me guilty. Money and Murder both begin with M. Machinery. Mischief.”

  Wilhelm, his mind thinking for him at random, said, “What about Mercy? Milk-of-human-kindness?”

  “One fact should be clear to you by now. Money-making is aggression. That’s the whole thing. The functionalistic explanation is the only one. People come to the market to kill. They say, ‘I’m going to make a killing.’ It’s not accidental. Only they haven’t got the genuine courage to kill, and they erect a symbol of it. The money. They make a killing by a fantasy. Now, counting any number is always a sadistic activity. Like hitting. In the Bible, the Jews wouldn’t allow you to count them. They knew it was sadistic.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” said Wilhelm. A strange uneasiness tore at him. The day was growing too warm and his head felt dim. “What makes them want to kill?”

  “By and by, you’ll get the drift,” Dr. Tamkin assured him. His amazing eyes had some of the rich dryness of a brown fur. Innumerable crystalline hairs or spicules of light glittered in their bold surfaces. “You can’t understand without first spending years on the study of the ultimates of human and animal behavior, the deep chemical, organismic, and spiritual secrets of life. I am a psychological poet.”

  “If you’re this kind of poet,” said Wilhelm, whose fingers in his pocket were feeling in the little envelopes for the Phenaphen capsules, “what are you doing on the market?”

  “That’s a good question. Maybe I am better at speculation because I don’t care. Basically, I don’t wish hard enough for money, and therefore I come with a cool head to it.”

  Wilhelm thought, Oh, sure! That’s an answer, is it? I bet that if I took a strong attitude he’d back down on everything. He’d grovel in front of me. The way he looks at me on the sly, to see if I’m being taken in! He swallowed his Phenaphen pill with a long gulp of water. The rims of his eyes grew red as it went down. And then he felt calmer.

  “Let me see if I can give you an answer that will satisfy you,” said Dr. Tamkin. His flapjacks were set before him. He spread the butter on them, poured on brown maple syrup, quartered them, and began to eat with hard, active, muscular jaws which sometimes gave a creak at the hinges. He pressed the handle of his knife against his chest and said, “In here, the human bosom—mine, yours, everybody’s—there isn’t just one soul. There’s a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. ‘If thou canst not love, what art thou?’ Are you with me?”

  “Yes, Doc, I think so,” said Wilhelm listening—a little skeptically but nonetheless hard.

  “ ‘What art thou?’ Nothing. That’s the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts—Nothing! So of course you can’t stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody instead. You can’t be that strict to yourself. You love a little. Like you have a dog” (Scissors!) “or give some money to a charity drive. Now that isn’t love, is it? What is it? Egotism, pure and simple. It’s a way to love the pretender soul. Vanity. Only vanity is what it is. And social control. The interest of the pretender soul is the same as the interest of the social life, the society mechanism. This is the main tragedy of human life. Oh, it is terrible! Terrible! You are not free. Your own betrayer is inside of you and sells you out. You have to obey him like a slave. He makes you work like a horse. And for what? For who?”

  “Yes, for what?” The doctor’s words caught Wilhelm’s heart. “I couldn’t agree more,” he said. “When do we get free?”

  “The purpose is to keep the whole thing going. The true soul is the one that pays the price. It suffers and gets sick, and it realizes that the pretender can’t be loved. Because the pretender is a lie. The true soul loves the truth. And when the true soul feels like this, it wants to kill the pretender. The love has turned into hate. Then you become dangerous. A killer. You have to kill the deceiver.”

  “Does this happen to everybody?”

  The doctor answered simply, “Yes, to everybody. Of course, for simplification purposes, I have spoken of the soul; it isn’t a scientific term, but it helps you to understand it. Whenever the slayer slays, he wants to slay the soul in him which has gypped and deceived him. Who is his enemy? Him. And his lover? Also. Therefore, all suicide is murder, and all murder is suicide. It’s the one and identical phenomenon. Biologically, the pretender soul takes away the energy of the true soul and makes it feeble, like a parasite. It happens unconsciously, unawaringly, in the depths of the organism. Ever take up parasitology?”

  “No, it’s my dad who’s the doctor.”

  “You should read a book about it.”

  Wilhelm said, “But this means that the world is full of murderers. So it’s not the world. It’s a kind of hell.”

  “Sure,” the doctor said. “At least a kind of purgatory. You walk on the bodies. They are all around. I can hear them cry de profundis and wring their hands. I hear them, poor human beasts. I can’t help hearing. And my eyes are open to it. I have to cry, too. This is the human tragedy-comedy.”

  Wilhelm tried to capture his vision. And again the doctor looked untrustworthy to him, and he doubted him. “Well,” he said, “there are also kind, ordinary, helpful people. They’re—out in the country. All over. What kind of morbid stuff do you read, anyway?” The doctor’s room was full of books.

  “I read the best of literature, science and philosophy,” Dr. Tamkin said. Wilhelm had observed that in his room even the TV aerial was set upon a pile of volumes. “Korzybski, Aristotle, Freud, W. H. Sheldon, and all the great poets. You answer me like a layman. You haven’t applied your mind strictly to this.”

  “Very interesting,” said Wilhelm. He was aware that he hadn’t applied his mind strictly to anything. “You don’t have to think I’m a dummy, though. I have ideas, too.” A glance at the clock told him that the market would soon open. They could spare a few minutes yet. There were still more things he wanted to hear from Tamkin. He realized that Tamkin spoke faultily, but then scientific men were not always strictly literate. It was the description of the two souls that had awed him. In Tommy he saw the pretender. And even Wilky might not be himself. Might the name of his true soul be the one by which his old grandfather had called him—Velvel? The name of a soul, however, must be only that—soul. What did it look like? Does my soul look like me? Is there a soul that looks like Dad? Like Tamkin? Where does the true soul get its strength? Why does it have to love truth? Wilhelm was tormented, but tried to be oblivious to his torment. Secretly, he pray
ed the doctor would give him some useful advice and transform his life. “Yes, I understand you,” he said. “It isn’t lost on me.”

  “I never said you weren’t intelligent, but only you just haven’t made a study of it all. As a matter of fact you’re a profound personality with very profound creative capacities but also disturbances. I’ve been concerned with you, and for some time I’ve been treating you.”

  “Without my knowing it? I haven’t felt you doing anything. What do you mean? I don’t think I like being treated without my knowledge. I’m of two minds. What’s the matter, don’t you think I’m normal?” And he really was divided in mind. That the doctor cared about him pleased him. This was what he craved, that someone should care about him, wish him well. Kindness, mercy, he wanted. But—and here he retracted his heavy shoulders in his peculiar way, drawing his hands up into his sleeves; his feet moved uneasily under the table—but he was worried, too, and even somewhat indignant. For what right had Tamkin to meddle without being asked? What kind of privileged life did this man lead? He took other people’s money and speculated with it. Everybody came under his care. No one could have secrets from him.