The Poser

by Jacob Rubin

  “Go.”

  “Owed money to people, apparently. Bookies. The mob. Intended to rob your mother and accidentally shot her. Life in prison, they’re saying.” He sighed. “The police found him weeping on the floor.”

  The pills glued me into a person on a bench. Otherwise the wind would have blown through my cracks.

  “This will be my last visit, probably. They encouraged us not to come until you’re well. It has a very good reputation, Giovanni.”

  “I trust you, Max.”

  He yawned urgently, or so it seemed. It took me a moment to understand he was crying. “You know what I thought when I first met you,” he said, “when we went to my rented room and you sat there on my chair, stiff as a board? I thought, how I would love to be this little brat. How he must see people and things! How he must read the world! I saw you onstage and knew it. To be Giovanni! Even when you were a mess, a downright mess after Lucy, I thought, how he must be feeling it, the boy who’s so sensitive to the world. How sweet it must feel, how deep! When you were Bernard, too, I felt it. As cold and mean as you were, I thought, this little rascal, he’s experiencing life from the inside. Me, all the rest of us, what are we in comparison? Even right now, boy, this very moment, looking at you across this picnic table, pale and sick, I can’t help but—but envy you, you’ve followed feeling to its very end. Oh, it’s terrible, I know. Like the audience, I wanted to feel it through you!”

  He laid his head on his arm, his arm on the table. He stayed that way for some time, making choked noises and then shot up, like one woken abruptly from a nap. “Really, this Orchelli—he’s supposed to be excellent.” He repeated that he would write before disappearing past the hedges. For a good half hour I sat there, listening to the birds.

  I thought of that visit as they led me up the stairs. The doctor. I was hoping to put it off indefinitely. The previous evening I had heard a very different account of the man while eavesdropping on George. “A very tricky character,” he’d said. “Very tricky. Well, no, calm yourself there, please. I think it’s fair to use the word trickster, yes. Always sending people to the basement.”

  I was brought to a dark corridor with two benches and a black wall. The nurse knocked on the wall twice until a bar of light appeared at its bottom, a bar that grew in height until the entire wall was transparent, revealing behind it an airy, well-appointed study. I trembled, sure some hideous magic was occurring, the kind where walls vanish and cruel sorcerers are met, but then I realized a curtain was being unrolled from the other side—that the wall was no wall really, but another window. A door had been hewed into it, which the head nurse opened, ushering me forward.

  At the front of the room stood two armchairs set at a distance too great to be intimate but too close to be unintentional. There was a crowded bookshelf, a set of diplomas on the wall, and a big desk whose only decoration seemed to be a framed hundred-dollar bill. On the other side of that desk was a floor-to-ceiling window affording a view of the south lawn and, farther away, the blue mountains. The door closed behind me.

  “Hello again,” a voice said. A man stood in the corner of the room, I saw only then, ratcheting the curtain back down.

  “Did Unheim send you? He did, didn’t he?!” If it hadn’t been for the pills, I would have screamed.

  The man was tall, of athletic build, dressed in jeans and a plaid workman’s shirt rolled to just above the elbows revealing hirsute and well-muscled arms. He wore his tar-black hair parted down the middle in a European style of an older time and possessed a tremendous Roman nose that skewered his otherwise boyish features like some private joke, or burden, of his ancestry. His front two teeth he kept exposed, perched on his bottom lip in such a fashion as to make him look vulnerable, if not downright imbecilic, yet his eyes were tender and retreated, brown as a bear. He soaked me with them and smiled as a wounded person smiles: that is, with an intensity of expression that is equal to the intensity of its hiding.

  “We met once before, but you were severely agitated, and do not, I don’t think, remember it. My name is Doctor Josef Orphels,” he said. The manner in which he walked toward me—it spoke of a man so confident in the mechanisms of his body that I immediately resented and feared him, backpedaling into one of those burgundy chairs. I was saying a number of things, each word a small bullet against the silence, the silence, which can be shot and shot and lurches on. None of it seemed to perturb or surprise Doctor Josef Orphels. A preternatural calm—the calm of a murderer, I thought—hung about his person. He eased into the other chair.

  “Who is Jesse Unheim?” he asked me.

  I said nothing.

  A few minutes later: “Giovanni, who is Jesse Unheim?”

  I had forgotten what surgery questions are, how tiresome and difficult it is to raise an acceptable shield against them. Answers, I mean.

  When he asked again, “Who is Jesse Unheim?” I said, “I don’t know.”

  “But you just mentioned him a few minutes ago.”

  I said nothing.

  “Giovanni?”

  “I, I think . . . It’s hard to know.”

  “What effect has the medicine had?”

  “A good effect,” I told him.

  “Please contain your enthusiasm.”

  “What?”

  “I’m joking,” he said, and flashed the kind of wry grin that immediately explains a face. A glint rang in his eyes, and the doctor-veil, that air of seriousness, was lifted, though it returned quite suddenly. “Giovanni, why do you think you’re here?”

  “Because I’ve gone crazy, I think.”

  “Do you remember coming here?”

  I had to coax the voice out of me like a cat from under a car. I was still using Richard Nelson’s. A tired, failed version of it. “I don’t think so.”

  This Doctor Orphels inquired more about the medication. Side effects and so on. I answered at a stymied pace, favoring economy over veracity, using “yes” and “no” interchangeably. He sat with a regal stiffness, doing without the notepad and pen I was made to believe these doctors used. I wished for him to have them. If he did, perhaps he’d look at the pad now and then and spare me, for a moment, this look of empathy. Worst of all, however, was his comfort in silence.

  My longtime ally, my partner all those years in Fantasma Falls, silence had betrayed me. At night, it gathered and swarmed, pulling at my hair, my toes, my fingers until I was sure I would stretch to nothing. And I would hum or clap just to produce noise, like shooting a flare gun against the swallowing dark.

  “In combination with the medicine I would like to start regular therapeutic sessions. Do you feel ready?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  I thought “no” would speed us sooner to the end of questions. Seeing my mistake, I said, “Yes.”

  “Yes what, Giovanni?”

  “What are you asking?”

  “Do you feel ready for a session?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But you said no a moment ago.”

  “I made a mistake with a word.”

  “But they have opposite meanings.”

  I said nothing because he hadn’t asked a question.

  “Do they not?” he said.

  “What does it matter what they mean?”

  “Isn’t that precisely what matters?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why do you think you’re here, Giovanni?”

  “Here?”

  “At the Institute.”

  “Because I’ve gone crazy, I think.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  I started clapping, a technique helpful in warding off the silence.

  “How do you experience this craziness?”

  “It’s the, the bursting,” I said.

  “Giovanni, why are you clapping?”

 
; “Stop it, please!” I wrung my hands like they were someone else’s. I bucked and squirmed, wriggled like a man in a straitjacket. “You are him, aren’t you?” I said, “Jesse Unheim in disguise!” I said, “Hug me then, brother!”

  And this so-called doctor, this impostor so summoned, rose. With that almost military gait (high knees, all business) as though he himself were a subordinate there to introduce an even greater eminence, he strode toward me, so I knew it was Unheim—Unheim, finally—because no psychiatrist would dare stand a foot away from his patient, as this stranger did now, in jeans and a plaid shirt, casting his eyes at wild me in that burgundy armchair. It was happening, as it had a hundred times in my dream. “An old friend,” Lou says. The steps can be heard, and a figure in a tuxedo appears, lumbering through the slatted shadows. A skeleton.

  I stood. “Hug me!”

  But when I opened my eyes, it was the doctor’s face, not a skeleton’s, appearing a foot from mine. He had that strong European nose, an altogether European face, which, weighed and blessed as such faces are by real history, carries more consequence than those made here, in our imaginary country. And those teeth, those absurd teeth perched on his lip, like a child who’s never learned to close his mouth at the wonders of the world.

  “I’m not Jesse Unheim,” he said. He studied my eyes one at a time like a lover in a film priming himself for a catastrophic kiss. Then he grinned as he had earlier. That wry grin, it appeared on my face, too.

  “I’m not Jesse Unheim,” I agreed.

  A twinkle came into his eye. He gave my shoulders a fraternal squeeze and returned to his chair. “Feeling better?” he asked once in it.

  I looked at my hands, amazed they were connected to my arms. “I believe I am, yes.”

  “Who’s Jesse Unheim?”

  The mountains, through the window, looked like a child’s cutout: two blue humps collaged against the sky. A shadow lay over the birch trees. That was the gift of the window. It freed me from the beauty. “I’d rather not say at the moment.”

  “That’s fine,” the doctor assured me.

  I said, “To your previous question, Doctor, the answer is yes. I am ready for these sessions. I am sure of it.”

  THIRTEEN

  We met the following afternoon, seated at that unnatural distance, our backs rigid against our chairs.

  “When can I be released?” I asked.

  “You’re registered for a hundred days’ stay. You’ve been here for seven. That leaves ninety-three.”

  “Days that I am forced to stay here?”

  “I wouldn’t use a word like that. But yes.”

  “This is legal then?”

  “Giovanni, you assaulted a man. While the victim agreed to drop the charges, the judge refused to release you without a guarantee of treatment. No More Walls satisfied him as a place for you to receive that treatment. Still, we oughtn’t think of it in those terms. Our aims are higher.”

  “Is the story of this place true?” I asked.

  “Which story’s that?”

  “A man with syphilis knocked down all the walls.”

  “That it was syphilis has not been proven. It is true he wanted all walls removed.”

  “And yet walls remain,” I said.

  “An admirable goal but nearly impossible to execute: a building with no walls. When it comes to Mr. Lewis’s philosophies, you’ll be pleased to know we remain quite faithful. None of our forty occupants are restrained unless it is absolutely necessary. We believe people must be given the freedom, both mental and physical, to explore the breadth of their condition.”

  “Yet I am forced to stay here.”

  “Giovanni, the purpose of these sessions—”

  “Is for you to massage me with questions until I’m lulled into a submissive state and divulge all of my secrets.”

  “Far from it,” he said. “I will be talking to you—asking questions and the like—to find out who you are. Not to correct who that person is.”

  “How often do we meet?”

  “Every afternoon.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Do you talk, too?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, about yourself?”

  “We’re not here for me, Giovanni.”

  “So your eyes insist. You have great doctor’s eyes. They are probing but not intrusive. You occupy your doctor’s chair with a kind of stiffness, so that I, the patient, am to recognize you are fit for your authoritative position without indulging it too much. Your smile reassures me that you are still human despite your duties. Do they teach all this to you in school?”

  “I’m a bit confused,” he said. “Yesterday you said you were ready for this, that you were sure of it. Now you’re being standoffish.”

  “I am ready, Doctor. Quite. It’s just, I’d like to know you a bit before I enter the vise of treatment.”

  “The degrees are on the wall. Feel free to inspect them. I received my first degree at the City University of Medicine. Thereafter, I received a degree in psychoanalysis from the New-Method Institute.”

  “A degree admits as much of a person as a gravestone, Doctor.”

  “Then with my gravestone you must be satisfied,” he said. “I wanted to talk about the terrors you mentioned yesterday. Can you describe them for me?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Might you try?”

  “I might,” I said. “I might not.”

  He smiled. “That’s very helpful.”

  “I think you’re as guarded as I am.”

  “Giovanni, every afternoon for the next ninety-three days you will be walked to my office. We can pass these afternoons in a kind of grudge match or we can begin the long process of treatment. The drugs, from what you told me, have helped. What you and I do here can help all the more. It is a long process—one that doesn’t always work—but you have clearly suffered. From what I understand you threatened a man with a gun.”

  “A fake gun.”

  “Even stranger.” He seemed to think for a moment. “What you said about me earlier—about my eyes, my posture in this chair—it’s a projection, I think.”

  “If that’s some sort of doctor’s term, I don’t know it.”

  “It means you are projecting your feelings onto me. You seem to think I am up to something, that I am playing a part, assuming a role, hiding behind some mask—but perhaps you are.”

  My heart quickened. “Is that your specialty, then—is that how you get strangers to open up?!”

  “Please. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m trying—I’m trying to finally talk and you accuse me of playing a part—”

  “My father was a psychiatrist, you know,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You wanted to know about me—I’ll tell you. My father started the New-Method Institute. The man was an expansive narcissist, a breed that doesn’t take to parenting, or rather, takes to it too strongly. A controlling man. A brilliant one, too. Micah Orphels.”

  “Your father?” I said.

  “He emigrated here from Austria, founded the Orphels Psychoanalytic Institute, one of the most influential in the world. Later, he would create the New-Method. Patients traveled across the country, some internationally, to see him. Pilgrimages. He was said to cure the incurable. But these people, they didn’t know who my father truly was. That old conundrum of celebrity. His closest friends were his patients, if that says anything. He’d have them over for dinner on Friday night. My mother would cook for all of them, and he’d criticize each one. My father would say, ‘Edgar, pass the salt,’ and if the man hesitated for just a second, he’d say, ‘Look at this unconscious hostility. So much deeply repressed anger you can’t simply pass the salt?’ That was our household. Nothing could be free of
reason.”

  “Oh? So he could be difficult?”

  “Quite.”

  “And . . . and was he that way with you?” I asked.

  “Of course. I was his firstborn, Giovanni. The brilliant child. I once finished second in a grade-school chemistry competition. My father sat me down and said, ‘Josef, I know you could’ve gotten first but you’re scared to, so you chose second. But I’m telling you, it’s okay to come in first.’”

  “He thought you’d done it on purpose?”

  “Everything, Giovanni, was on purpose.”

  “But why intentionally lose a chemistry prize?” I asked.

  “He told me I was scared to surpass him. ‘The consequences of oedipal ambivalence,’ he called it. According to my father, I was overly modest, self-effacing. I could outdo him but was scared to.”

  “Was it true?” I asked.

  “Reasons are persuasive. If a child’s served them at a young age, he eats them up. Everything that happened in my childhood was that way. My mother received the worst of it. If she was late meeting us, she was trying to undermine him. If she forgot her keys, she was expressing hostility. Everything was a symbol. So, yes, I believed him. What’s worse, there was some truth to it. I was scared to outdo him.”

  I smiled. “So did you start getting first place in your chemistry contests?”

  “I did very well in school, yes, but it was complicated. The more my father egged me on—to be what he knew I could be—the more I took it to mean he thought I was secretly incapable, that I needed him to nudge me. He developed this exercise in which I would insult him.”