King of the World

by Thomas Berger

  She said in his ear: “I had to fight quite a battle to get you, Georgie. Everybody else around here is Old Guard. If it were up to them, you’d get the dildo, and if that didn’t work, the knife. So I’m asking for your cooperation.” She straightened up and resumed her normal tone.

  Cornell kept brushing.

  “Femininity,” said the lieutenant, “is fundamentally a psychic and not a physical quality, though it takes its origins from biological and anatomical reality. Now, we in the new psychiatry believe that all human beings, of whichever sex, understand this, to put it in layman’s terms, in their heart of hearts, guts, soul, or whatever you want to call what we call the Center of Basic Awareness. The old school also believes in a kind of CBA, but locates it differently for each sex—in women, in the brain; in men, the gonads. Hence the typical psychiatric surgery: frontal lobotomy for a female, castration for a male.”

  Cornell had never heard of a woman who went literally mad, though he had known a great many he would have called eccentric—in fact, they all were—and he did not understand the word “lobotomy.” Nor was he interested in the lieutenant’s monologue. If he had told all under the influence of the drug, his situation was hopeless, and she was toying with him sadistically. The solace lay in cosmetic particulars. He brushed his hair so hard that tears came to his eyes, but they were superficial water: physical, not emotional.

  “We,” the lieutenant went on, “do not locate the CBA in any precise organ. It is contributed to by every cell of a living person.” She patted Cornell’s shoulder cap again. “Emasculation may make a man socially tractable, but except with the really dangerous sex criminal, we think society loses more than it gains thereby. Thereafter he is useful only for heavy labor. He is no longer a man but a thing. We think men have their place in the world as men. The human race could not get along without them.” The lieutenant chortled. “At least not until one sex able to reproduce itself is invented.”

  Cornell looked at the brush. The bristles were clogged with hair. He bent across and explored his temples with a forefinger. The hair was definitely receding. And his recent ordeal had accentuated his crow’s-feet.

  “Emotions emanate from the CBA, and that’s where the trouble starts. They start out fine and true and healthy, and somehow become warped while en route, so that when they reach the outside world of reality they are perverse, crippled and crippling. The answer is not to try to eliminate the CBA by locating it in a particular organ which is then excised. The CBA is not a thing in itself; it is rather a process.”

  The lieutenant cleared her throat. “This is a very complex subject, Georgie, and I’m sure your little head is spinning right now. Come over here, please.” She took his hand and led him to the bed. “Sit down, dear.” She drew up the stool for herself.

  “I have got permission to work with you in a program based on this new approach. There is opposition to it, as I indicated, and such cooperation as I receive from my superiors is rather grudging, I’m afraid. I can survive that because my conviction is firm. But what I can’t go on without is your cooperation, dear Georgie.”

  She took his hand again and sought his eyes. She was so young that there were those satiny patches across her tear sacs.

  For lunch Cornell was served a cheeseburger, french fries, and a chocolate milk shake. The tray was delivered by Lieutenant Aster. He had seen no one else for two days, and the door to the room was locked from the outside. When he washed or used the john, the lieutenant blindfolded him and led him to a lavatory consisting of a stall shower, basin, and toilet. She waited outside the door until he finished, and blindfolded him again for the return trip.

  Now she handed him the catsup bottle. Cornell upended it, and naturally nothing came out until he shook it vigorously; next his plate was swimming in gore. He screwed up his nose and chased it with squirming lips.

  “Oh, that’s good,” said the lieutenant, “that expression. You’re recapturing something authentic there. I’ll bet you did that when the teacher announced a test, or when something really ooky was served in the cafeteria, like baked halibut.”

  Cornell rather liked her by now, but he also had a contrary urge to resist her smugness. “That’s the same face I make to this day if the coffee is too hot or something is sour.”

  “Good!” She was undiscourageable. “There you have another link to a normal childhood. It’s a childish expression, Georgie, male-childish. A girl’s facial reaction by age seventeen is usually significantly different, showing not so much disgust as sullenness. An adolescent girl has the scent of her power and responsibility to come. She is growing impatient. A boy on the other hand is reluctant to mature and clings to the mannerisms of infancy. He will find them useful all his life.”

  Cornell sighed and salted the catsup on his cheeseburger.

  “I don’t get very hungry just staying in this room and listening to records, you know.”

  “I realize that, Georgie. It’s the best we can do at the moment in the way of a controlled environment.”

  She was sitting on the stool as usual, Cornell was on the edge of the bed, the tray in his lap. He must be careful not to slop catsup on his tartan midiskirt. He wore white ankle-socks and penny loafers, a simple white blouse, a gold locket on a long chain, and a bouffant wig. This outfit was an approximation of that which he had worn as an actual teenager, except that the current wig was platinum-blond, whereas in his real adolescence he had teased and sprayed his own auburn hair, which was too short now for such treatment. The wig was the only one Lieutenant Aster could provide. As she had frequent occasions to say, her resources were limited.

  “Under optimum conditions,” she went on now, “you would be with other patients undergoing the same therapy, but they would have to be at the same stage. Really, they should be at the same ages as you are at present, both in reality and in the therapeutic reprise.”

  The latter term was psychiatrist’s jargon, often abbreviated to “TR.” The TR was supposed to get you back to your CBA, as Cornell understood it. The lieutenant’s theory, that of the new school of psychiatry to which she belonged, was that emotional illnesses were not born but made somewhere along the line. She used the image of a highway, with toll stations representing the various stages of life: Young Manhood, Adolescence, Pubescence, Boyhood, Infancy.

  She intended to take Cornell back to the stage at which he had gone wrong, taken an exit, as it were, instead of continuing along the main route. She was extremely earnest and really rather sweet, but ironically enough Cornell had had more respect for his old therapist, the brutal Dr. Prine. Not that he yearned for anal treatment, but at least it seemed more serious than this playacting. Both methods of course had the same aim: to reconcile him to being a slave.

  “How’s the shake?” the lieutenant asked brightly.

  It was extra-thick, a semisolid sludge. He pushed the straw aside and spooned a taste.

  “Authentic?” she asked.

  He did not like to disappoint her, but she was, presumably, seeking the truth.

  “It’s actually a malted, Lieutenant. What I always drank was a milk shake, and never so thick.”

  She snapped her fingers in chagrin. “Georgie, I goofed. I’m sorry. I gave you the wrong one. Here, you’ve barely touched it.” She seized the cardboard cylinder and left the room.

  Cornell took a bite of tepid cheeseburger and spongy roll and soon spat it into his paper napkin. It was absolutely beyond his powers to eat one greasy, red french fry. He cleared a space on the vanity table and deposited the tray there.

  He squatted on the floor next to the portable record player the lieutenant had brought him the day before, along with a wire rack of some 45’s that had been current a decade and a half earlier: “Chewing Along,” by a group called the Chiclets; Millicent Duff, singing “Butterscotch Hop”; etc. As a teenager he had really preferred semiclassical, rendered by big orchestras with swelling strings, like Thelma Verner’s “Rocky Mountain Rhapsody.”

 
He found and plucked out “Jumpin’” by Mae MacMurray. That he recalled only too well. One boy used to play it incessantly, at a volume that made it impossible to sit in the high-school rec room and read the fashion magazines. Cornell and he had once had a hair-pulling contest over this matter, and naturally it was Georgie who ended up on the headmistress’s carpet.

  He had just snapped the record in two when Lieutenant Aster returned.

  “Here you go,” she said with her customary enthusiasm, handing him a container. To take it, he had to rid himself of the fragments of record, and she saw them.

  “Oh, too bad! Which one is it? I’ll see if I can get another. Though it won’t be easy. I had to look all over the junk shops for those. Have you noticed how the popular tastes of boys change drastically every few years?”

  He stuck the pieces into the rack. She was not interested in the breakage except as a pretext for making another presumably therapeutic comment. The lieutenant was obsessed with her project—as Stanley and the men of the Movement had been with theirs; and Harriet with hers. Cornell never had a personal association with anyone. Everyone he encountered was a monomaniac of some sort, working compulsively to affect someone else: to alter their personality, change their mind, catch them out, set them straight. Everybody else always knew better about sex, society, history, you name it—but always in a general way, with absolutely no acknowledgment of one single, particular, individual human being: by which he meant himself.

  The lieutenant persisted. “Last year’s songs, like last year’s clothes, are beyond the pale this year. But let enough time go by, and nostalgia sets in. When your generation of boys reaches its middle thirties, these tunes will be reissued. And if any of the original records are left, they will command high prices as collectors’ items.”

  Cornell took the milk shake from her. “Sorry you had to make another trip to the PX,” he said. “I wonder if it was worth it.”

  She shook her neat, dark head. “There couldn’t be anything more important than this, Georgie. If we succeed, think of the advance we will have made not just for you, but for all the thousands of sick boys. And never doubt we are progressing. This is only the second day, and already you have recaptured a particular taste that was peculiar to your teen-aged personality.”

  She lowered her bottom to the bed. Cornell was still sitting on the floor, his legs drawn in under the tartan skirt, the opening of which was secured by an oversized, ornamental safety pin. He had never owned a garment of this exact design, but other contemporaries had. For classes of course they had worn uniforms: navy-blue skirts and jackets with white blouses. One was proud to get into high school and out of the gray uniform of the lower grades, with its wide-brimmed flat-crowned hat and Mary Jane shoes. After classes ended at 4:00 you could wear your own clothes, purchased from your allowance. Cornell had had a lovely sweater in avocado nylon. That was before the fashion of wearing prominent breasts.

  He now decided to confess that he had broken the record.

  “Splendid, Georgie! You see, it’s really working. You are returning little by little to the emotions of that time. Now can you remember, recover, your reason for the anger against that boy, Was it because he monopolized the phonograph? Or was it that you disliked the record itself?”

  “Neither. It was simply because of the noise. I liked to look at magazines. There was no other place you were allowed to—you couldn’t take them to the dorm. The noise—he played it too loud—and also the repetition of the same song over and over and over.”

  The lieutenant’s fat, fresh face looked even younger when she frowned.

  “Hmm, repetition. Now, that may be significant. Each sex has a different response to ritual—note that I am extending the concept of repetition. In women—”

  There she went again. Cornell grasped the straw and was about to put it into his mouth when he noticed that the end was slightly crimped, the opening not a perfect circle. He squeezed it into shape: it was also damp. There was a high-fluid line inside the container; an inch or so of milk shake was missing. Someone else had begun to drink it!

  In quick disgust he lowered the cylinder so abruptly that some of the liquid slopped out onto the hem of his skirt.

  The lieutenant was as quick to notice.

  “Another memory!” she cried.

  “No,” Cornell said petulantly, “an observation. Someone else has been at this shake. It is a used drink!” He turned his sulky face away. “And the burger is cold, and I don’t think this treatment is going to work.” He seized a record from the rack and put it on the turntable of the little red-plastic phonograph. He worked switches and knobs, but the wretched thing wouldn’t work.

  “Swing the arm all the way to the right until you hear the click, then allow it to swing back on its own.”

  “I don’t want to listen to that stupid music anyway.” He rose swiftly and walked across the small room and stood in a corner.

  “Georgie,” the lieutenant said softly, reasonably. “I am sorry. I’ve done a bad job. Will you forgive me?”

  She was the first woman he had ever heard admit a mistake. There wasn’t anything anyway to look at in his corner but the joint of the plywood panels. What a funny room it was, with walls of new wood and a floor of concrete. Sometimes he heard the distant sound of vehicles. Were it not for the electric clock on the bedside table, he would not have known the time of day—not that he looked at it often, not that he did anything much when the lieutenant was gone but sleep. It occurred to him that perhaps she sprinkled sleeping powders on his food, or mixed them with the salt. He had become a total vegetable. Perhaps he should assert himself.

  He turned around, flipping his hands. “Forget about it.”

  Lieutenant Aster went to the rack of records, knelt, and began to pluck through the discs. She made a selection and put it on the turntable. A foggy, whiny but hard voice began to sing of “love, when push comes to shove, hard fist in a soft glove…”

  “Do you remember this one?”

  “Sarah Heathfield, ‘Boxing Glove Love,’” Cornell said, with a shiver. It had been a big hit during his senior year. By request, the orchestra had played it repeatedly at that prom to which he had been taken by Judith, with whom he had afterwards had that hideous experience he had told Charlie about—the near rape—which reminiscence had led to their quarrel, the subsequent arrest, his flight from jail to the Movement, the assignment to the Sperm Service, this treatment.

  Lieutenant Aster got to her feet and came to him.

  “May I have this dance?”

  She held out her hands. Cornell backed away.

  “I was never much of a dancer.”

  “I can’t believe that. All young boys love to dance. They even dance with each other.”

  “I was never much good,” said Cornell. “I was different in that way.” In fact he had loved to dance and seldom lacked a partner at the hops.

  She seized him gently but surely, raising his left hand with her right, her other at his waist.

  “Come on now, Georgie. Give in to the music.”

  He refused to move. She exerted force, still smiling.

  “No,” said Cornell. “You can’t make me.”

  “Aha, we’ve touched a nerve! Is it the song specifically, or dancing in general that bothers you? Are you an awkward boy?”

  “Lieutenant, I don’t want to be defiant, believe me, but I can’t stand always being just an object for somebody else to move around.”

  “I understand,” Aster said. “Now let’s dance.”

  She again sought to move him. He held her off and attempted to explain further.

  “Look, I’m just a man, and according to you I am sick besides, but I don’t feel ill. Does that mean I’m sicker than ever? I’ve always heard that if you’re just neurotic you know it, whereas a maniac doesn’t know she’s insane.”

  “All I know,” said the lieutenant, “is I’m crazy about you, Georgie. You’re the prettiest boy in school.”

&n
bsp; She eluded his defenses and, slipping both arms around his waist, pulled him against her soft belly and began to vibrate. He got a hand over each of her shoulder caps and pushed, an action which moved her trunk away but brought her lower portion even closer, her thighs squashed against his. He had a loathsome urge to slump so that their groins would be level, but checked it and stood straight and rigid.

  Suddenly one of her hands left his waist, went into his crotch, and squeezed his testicles—not hard enough to hurt, but enough to break his resistance.

  His arms rose, he breathed out, and she whirled him around. He was dancing, or at any rate in motion, stepping on her feet and his own, skirt flying out behind.

  Women are only children of a larger growth.

  LORD CHESTERFIELD, 1748

  11

  LIEUTENANT ASTER MAINTAINED a strong lead. Cornell was helpless, a captive of the rhythm. And as usual it was a nonsensical situation. His head was now bent into the hollow of her neck: were he straight he would be looking down on her scalp. Nevertheless he began to dance seriously; dancing was the only thing for which he had ever been praised—the only talent or craft, that is: he had frequently been called pretty, but that was a gift of fate, not an accomplishment.

  He was actually disappointed for a moment when the record ended and he opened his eyes. But seeing the silver bar on her collar—it was a wonder he had not cut his nose on it—he was back in sullen reality.

  “Sorry, Georgie.” She let him go. “I hope I didn’t hurt you. It was necessary to break that rigid seizure. Let me ask you this: when you danced with other boys, who led?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Of course you do. There is something about dancing that threatens you, isn’t there?” She took his hand and squeezed it with about the same amount of force she had applied to his crotch: not so much a punishment as a reminder. But his gonads were defenseless, while his hand was virtually invulnerable to her small fingers.