by Edward Lee
“Go on. I’m your psychiatrist, Mr. Barrows. The more you tell me, the more I can help.”
Barrows’ shoulders slumped. “She caught me eating her Kleenex out of the wastebasket. In truth—”
“Yes?”
“—whenever she had a cold or the flu…I loved it.” He rubbed his face in his hands. “All that Kleenex. All that snot and phlegm.” It was like a treat, like a midnight snack.
When Barrows looked back up at Untermann, it was shamefully, between his fingers. But the curt, elegant face remained unchanged. It remained inquisitive, calculating. Not shocked.
He sat back up straight in the leather chair. “How come you’re not disgusted?”
“For the same reason an oro-facial surgeon is not ‘disgusted’ by a critical burn victim. The same reason a dentist isn’t disgusted by an abscess. Your job is ministering to the intricacies of finance, Mr. Barrows. My job treating bizarre and often repellent mental disorders. To me, however, they’re neither bizarre nor repellent. They’re merely disorders.”
Barrows was amazed at her professional detachment…so then he sought to challenge her again, not with lies this time, but with a simple question with which to gauge her response.
“Let me ask you something. May I?”
Coils of faint smoke drifted upward. “Yes, but I’ll only answer if I deem it to be productive toward your therapy.”
All right. By now Barrows couldn’t deny a flirting attraction to her, and this seemed a sorry notion indeed. I’ve just told this woman that I eat phlegm that I pay bums to spit in my mouth. I’m sure she’s just dying to go to the opera with me…
“Earlier,” he faltered to begin, “you said…that you’ve heard worse…”
“Oh, my God yes,” she casually replied. “Mr. Barrows, you’ve come in here thinking that you’re an unspeakable person because of your dritiphily, but believe me, that’s nothing compared to some of the patients I’ve treated.”
“Really?” he said, incredulous.
Dr. Untermann reeled off her list as casually as if reciting scores at a miniature golf match. “I’ve treated zoophiles and scatophiles and pedophiles. I’ve treated Munchausen Syndrome where women really do love their kids but can’t help bringing them to near-death. I’ve treated women with Helsinki Syndrome, who fell in love with the men who tortured them in ways that beggar description. I had a strange ‘pica’ case where a teenage girl unconsciously collected dog stool—she’d carefully dry the stools and consume them—and I had a sexual-septicist once—a man obsessed with masturbating with a handful of his own feces. When I was at Georgetown, one of our case studies was an accountant who would collect used condoms from the alleys in Washington, D.C.’s red light district and eat them; he was operated on over a dozen times because the condoms would inflate with his own waste and cause massive and potentially fatal intestinal blockages. We had another man addicted to eating ‘toe-cheese,’ and yet another man—a Virginia rancher—who could only attain erection by sucking the drool off the lips of cattle.” She exhaled more smoke, unperturbed. “Then we have what we call the ‘packers.’”
“Puh-packers?” Barrows dared.
“Men and women who, behind closed doors, are habituated to filling their rectal and reproductive cavities with—well, with just about anything you can imagine. Hamsters, fish, billiard balls, live snakes, live bullfrogs, wines bottles, garden slugs. You name it. One man from Annandale, Virginia, would blow mealworms into his urethra through a plastic tube. A fourteen-year-old girl from—she was a military dependent from Walter Reed—would insert the tip of a turkey baster into her own urethra in order to repeatedly aspirate air into her bladder. Some people simply like to be filled, Mr. Barrows, for reasons that can never be clinically perceived.Then we’ve got the more common aberrations—the collectors: the gym teachers who collect dirty socks, the custodians who collect used tampons, the fetishists who break into houses and collect undergarments soiled by the so-called ‘skidmarks.’ Pedicurists who keep their clients’ toenail clippings. Doctors who collect pus-drenched bandages, and nurses who collect enema nozzles to secret away back to their homes, to sniff and lick.”
Barrows felt exhausted listening to this, and disgusted. But there was more….
“One of my colleagues at the Clifton T. Perkins Evaluation Center wrote an entire diagnostic paper on a dermatologist who would topically anesthetize appropriate prison patients and, with pliers, squeeze the ‘milk’ out of large moles, and lick it up. During my internship at the psych wing of the Fallaway Med Center, there was a nun who constantly volunteered for duty in places like Calcutta, Karachi, and the Sudan. Her sister superiors alerted us to her problem: she was cleaning the ears of the dying with Q-Tips and sucking off the wax.”
Fuck, Barrows thought.
“Stercoraceous syndromes are actually even more common,” she continued. “People obsessed with human excrement—their own or that of others. Adolf Hitler was said to be a stercoramanic; he liked to defecate on women’s faces—poor Eva Braun, hmm? A reverse syndrome involves the opposite, clearly Freudian: people who can only become sexually aroused while being defecated on. The actual shit-eaters are called coprophiliacs or cacophiles—hence the children’s colloquialism caca. You’d be surprised how many feces-eaters there are in the realms of modern mental disorder.”
Barrows’ head began to feel light from shock.
“We’ve even had a few vomit-eaters,” the elegant woman added went on, “like the derelict you saw at the bus stop. People who can find no sense of actualization without the self-abasement of consuming the puke of strangers—they’re called ‘refluxomanics,’ by the way. And though I’ve never actually met a phlegm-eater before, I’ve read several case files regarding them. So you needn’t feel exclusive, Mr. Barrows. There are, indeed, other people sitting in the same boat as yourself.”
Barrows needed a drink. Bad. Phlegm-eater, he thought. There it was, a single, simple term. “But you also called it…what?”
“Dritiphily—from the Middle English noun drit, meaning something akin to human filth. You see how obscure the base word is? It doesn’t even actively exist in our language any more. But obsessive-compulsive symptomologies do indeed exist within a broad range of clinical verges. Utterly minor to the utterly outré. Your regrettable affliction—your dritiphily—is the most extreme manifestation of the poor soul who must count to ten every time they see a red truck, or must step on every third crack in the sidewalk.”
Even Barrows, in his overall shock, had to take exception. “Paying rummies and sick street whores to spit in my mouth isn’t exactly stepping on sidewalk cracks.”
“Outwardly, no. But inwardly, it’s all rooted in the same inception,” the staid woman replied. “We simply have to identify that inception—in your particular case, Mr. Barrows—and then we’ll disclose the proper avenue of your—”
“My cure?” Barrows said hopefully.
“Yes.”
She turned her hand, raised her rice-paper wrist to cast a glance at her watch. “We still have plenty of time. I think we should go on.”
“All right,” Barrows agreed. “Please.”
“So what have we done thus far? We’ve identified the more intricate manifestations of your dritiphily. We’ve established, through your own self-revelation, that you are habituated to eating phlegm, and that this ingestion is the only thing that permits you to achieve sexual arousal. Yes?”
Barrows didn’t like the sound of that, but he kept reminding himself what he was here for. Hence, his reply: “Yes.”
“Normal childhood, normal upbringing,” she said more to herself. “Not at all uncommon. The bad childhoods, the abnormal upbringings—those are the environmental breeding grounds for the Henry Lee Lucases, the John Wayne Gacys, the Jeffrey Dahmers. But you’re a successful investment financier, not a psychopath, not a serial-killer.”
Thanks, Barrows thought.
“Instead, your anomaly is rooted in between those notion
s. It’s hidden. It’s secreted away somewhere. Think of a well-crafted clock, but with the tooth of one solitary gear broken. We will find that cog, Mr. Barrows, and we will fix it.”
“You make it sound easy,” his voice grated.
“It may be. How badly to do want to be cured?”
He looked up quickly. “I’ll do anything. Pay…anything.”
“You’re accustomed to throwing money at your problems,” she acknowledged. “But that may not suffice here. Your mind is not a carburetor simply in need of a new gasket. But as your current psychiatrist, I’d be negligent in not informing you of some potential ‘quick fixes.’ There are, for instance, some rather radical treatments not endorsed by the APA, available in South America. Cariothiazine infusions which alter the chemistry of your brain, acupuncture, various aroma- and thermal-therapies. Narco-synthesis and bio-feedback cycles. I’ll admit, sometimes they work, but I can’t recommend them.”
Barrows sat closer to the edge of his seat, wringing his hands. “I’ll try anything, and…I’ll pay. I’ll pay a lot.”
“So you’ve said. One thing I can recommend a bit more than the latter would be an aversion-therapy clinic in Köping, Sweden. Believe me, they’ll cure you of anything—the hard way.”
“I’ll do it!” Barrows nearly shouted at her.
“I don’t suppose that the $30,000-per-month in-patient fee would bother you. But I’ll be honest in informing you that all too often these rather Pavlovian aversion techniques only eradicate one disorder to expeditiously replace it with another.”
“Great. I go from eating phlegm to eating shit? No thanks,” Barrows gruffed. He sat back, hands held out uselessly. “What then?”
“Your best chance for a successful recovery?”
“Tell me!”
Her long fingers idly rolled the cigarette then crushed it out. “Your best chance for a successful recovery stands with what you’ve previously frowned at. Maintained—and expensive—psychotherapy,” she said. “Certainly, I’m aware now that you’re a man of considerable income, and, especially due to the nature of your profession, you may think that I’m merely recommending the option that would most benefit my own financial interest. Therefore, to reduce any such trepidations, I’d be happy to give you a list of other psychiatrists who would be happy to render a second opinion.”
To hell with it, Barrows thought. Her staunch demeanor and cool locution told him enough: She’s it. Where else can I go? Fuckin’ Sweden? Goddamn South America? Besides, at the very least, she was attractive; Barrows, in fact, caught a quick fantasy in his mind: Sucking down a big green loogie and fucking her right there on the desk. Maybe if he put a gun to her head, she’d spit in his mouth. “That won’t be necessary. I want you to treat me. Please.”
“Fine,” she said crisply and leaned forward. She began writing on a small tablet. “For the first month, our sessions will be five days a week, seven if necessary. You’ve told me that you typically embark upon your…need…when you leave work, correct?”
“Yes.”
“So I’ll schedule you for, say, six p.m.? Will that suffice?”
“Yes,” Barrows agreed.
“Instead of stalking down James Street every day after work, you’ll be coming here.” She finished writing, handed him a small slip of paper. “Here’s a prescription for a drug called Hydroxyzine. Ten milligrams four times a day. It will help ease the physical aspects of your dependency. In the meantime, I’ll schedule you at Harborview for a physical: blood tests, histamine counts, and the like, and also your first atropine injection, which helps take the edge off too. Then we’ll set you up for a written battery—MMPIs, TATs and TEDs, the Baley Scales and the Rorschachs—these are tests which might seem frivolous to you, but their conclusions will help me get a better fix on the more systematized aspects of your psychological make-up.”
“I’ll do it,” Barrows said without pause.
“Try to control your urges. You’ll probably fail for now, and that’s all right.”
He took the prescription, looked at it as if gazing upon something dear. For a moment, he wanted to cry.
After all these years, he’d found someone who would help him.
Time to start going back to church, he thought.
Dr. Untermann’s regal face appraised him, and she smiled. “Have no fear, Mr. Barrows. You’ve made the first, most crucial step. You’ve come for help. And I’ll help you. So many other never do that. We’ll see this thing through…and fix it.”
Barrows felt choked up as he stood. “Thank you…” His gaze drifted from her face to the wall behind her, which was covered with degrees and certificates. “You must be…pretty good.”
“Not to sound pretentious, Mr. Barrows, but as for treating cases such as yours, I’m probably the best in the country. Go home now. Think about what we’ve discussed, and envision the end of your affliction.”
“I will.”
“Tomorrow at six, then?”
“Yes…”
“And get that prescription filled tonight.”
“I will.”
She lit another long slim cigarette: long and slim and refined like herself. “Goodnight, Mr. Barrows.”
Misty-eyed, Barrows left the office. Part of his psyche, of course, urged him to head right back down to his hunting grounds and search for the strange, tender morsels of his need.
But not tonight.
Because as he made his exit from the frosty, handsome woman’s office, he realized he was leaving with something he’d never had in the last two decades.
He was leaving with hope.
««—»»
It was like heroin. It was like high-grade crack or freshly distilled crystal meth. Extreme obsessive-compulsive disorders affected the same neurotransmitters that the most highly addictive narcotics affected. Marsha. Untermann had seen enough victims to know not only this but the ultimate implications.
You always start a patient off with a positive purview—that was essential—but the rest was never easy. Sometimes it was impossible, and Dr. Untermann knew impossible when she saw it.
She knew that Barrows wouldn’t make it.
Her black Bally high heels clicked along the clean cement of the parking garage beneath the twenty-story mirror-faceted Millennium Tower, and it was a nice, new black Mercedes 450 that she slid into. She lit another cigarette—a beastly habit, she knew—but didn’t yet start the engine and leave for her lakeside Fremont condo. Instead…
She thought.
Extreme obsessive-compulsive disorders—OCD’s? Especially the really radical ones?
The trichotillomanics, the aphasics, the dysgeusaics? The success rate was actually so low, it was scarcely worth treatment. It was actually less than the seven-percent success-rate for crack addicts. Much less.
The same went for the disorders akin to dritiphily.
Dr. Untermann had learned much in her nearly thirty years of abnormal clinical psychiatry. She’d learned that some things weren’t worth trying to treat.
She heard the footsteps even before the figure turned the corner. She powered down the driver’s side window.
“I got a lot this time,” a sand-papery voice told her.
“I’m pleased.”
Dirty hands passed in the parcel. Untermann took it and handed the figure a $100 bill. “Thank you,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”
Her purveyor said nothing in response. He simply took the money and walked away. The back of his coat read KING STREET GOSPEL HOMELESS SHELTER.
Untermann gave a hot sigh when she opened the parcel: a paper bag containing a plastic Zip-Loc bag, the one-gallon size. She unzipped the bag, inhaled the aroma, and nearly swooned; the bag was heavy with various vomit. Gritty. Fuming.
Like chunky, pink oatmeal.
No, some things weren’t worth trying to treat. But capitulation was a treatment of its own, wasn’t it? Sometimes you just had to surrender to the incontrovertible truth.
Be who you are,
she thought in the ultimate Freudian nod. She flicked out her cigarette. Accept it, and adapt.
That’s what she had done. And it worked. The verity of the soul, however unseemly at times, must always be embraced. Not ignored or fought against.
Embraced.
And now this fox financier, this man Barrows. Smart, successful, rich. And more than pleasing to the eye. When Barrows learned that there really was no cure for his disease, he, too, would capitulate…and the two of them would embrace each other.
Her nipples suddenly stood out beneath the lacy cotton bra and sheer Biagiotti cashmere blouse. Her sex moistened; her teeth ground. In her mind, she saw Barrows forlornly straying the city’s most malodorous streets and alleyways, searching for those all-too-precious nuggets, scraping them up and sucking them down like so many melted diamonds. She saw his trembling lips jacked needily open as unwashed derelicts and dirty, wan whores hacked up veritable collops of meaty phlegm into his mouth. His own uniqueness was all too similar to Untermann’s own.
I’ll show him how to adapt, just as I have adapted…
I’ll teach him how to function, unscathed.
We’ll be who we both really are. Not in social fallacy but in truth.
Two human beings one in the same.
Together.
Dr. Untermann finally started the car and drove out of the parking garage. The bag sat beside her in the fine leather passenger seat. She couldn’t wait to get home—
Oh, yes…
—to eat.
— | — | —
GRUB GIRL IN THE PRISON OF DEAD WOMEN
Sure, hon, I got some time. I’ll tell you the whole thing while you make up your mind. And this is no bullshit, either. You can read about it in the papers.
You know about Grubs, right? No? Shit, man, you from overseas or something? I’ll make a long story short. “Grubs” are what they call us, same way they call black people niggers. Nice tag, huh? But I guess we are a little on the pasty side. But, look, don’t get freaked out. I heard somewhere there are over ten thousand of us total. It all started with that ramjet thing, I don’t know, a couple of years ago. Christ, I’m sure you heard about that. NASA and the Air Force were testing some new kinda plane, remotely piloted, they called it, flying it a hundred miles off the coast over the Atlantic. It was a nuclear ramjet or some shit, could fly indefinitely without fuel, no pilots, ran by computers. The idea was to have these things flying around all the time real high up. Cheap way to defend the nation. “The ultimate deterrent,” the President said when they announced that they were gonna spend billions developing this flop. What they didn’t announce was that plane kicked out a trail of some off-the-wall kinda radiation wherever it flew. The government wasn’t worried about it ’cos it flew so high, the shit would go right out of the atmosphere. Well, something fucked up during one of the test flights, and one of these things wound up flying up and down the east coast at treetop level on something they called an “emergency urban alert bomb mode” for something like five days before they could veer it off course over the sea and shoot it down. Thing was flying over cities, for shit’s sake. And I was one of the ones lucky enough to get rained on by this thing.
