Diablerie (12 page)

"The tugboat," I said. "It doesn't have anything to pull."

"Does that mean something to you?" Shriver asked.

I remembered then that I disliked the analyst's smirk. It always felt as if he was making fun of me.

"I ran into a woman at a party my wife took me to the other night," I said. "She remembered me from nearly twenty-five years ago. Said that we had done something, implied that it was something illegal. I told her to get away from me."

"Did you know her?"

"She knew my name. I guess she could have asked someone that, but it didn't seem like a setup. It seemed like she really remembered me."

"And do you know what she was talking about?" Shriver asked. "No."

"Not at all?"

I shook my head.

"What were you like twenty-five years ago?" he asked.

This was what he'd always wanted, I thought: to get me to talk about the earlier years of my life. I had gotten great satisfaction out of stymieing him, keeping my past secret. It struck me then as a petty contentment.

"I was a drunk," I said. "When the sun shined I did day work in construction or some other manual labor. At night I'd drink long and hard. I'd pick up women or pick fights and wake up with a headache either way."

"And you don't remember this woman at all?"

"No, sir."

" 'Sir'? Why call me 'sir'?"

"But she thinks that I did something and I think she told the people at
Diablerie.
"

"Diablerie?"

"It's a new magazine that my wife's working for. They say they're playing to the upscale market but they're really just a sensationalist rag."

"And what does your wife have to say about this?" Shriver asked, comfortable in this world of seeming paranoia.

"She hasn't said a thing."

"Then how do you know that this woman . . ."

"Barbara Knowland."

"The one they arrested for those serial killings?" Even Shriver was surprised by this.

"Yeah," I said, and then I launched into the story of how I ended up on the other side of the closet door while Mona tasted Harvard Rollins's dick.

"You were actually in the closet watching this?" Shriver asked, wondering, I could tell, whether to believe me or not.

I nodded.

"How did this make you feel?"

"I don't know. I was surprised that she liked his nasty talk. She never liked it with me."

These last words perplexed the good doctor. He stared at me, as isolated from my mind's inner workings as he had been when I was trying to keep him out.

"Don't you feel betrayed?"

"Yes," I said. "By her knowing that Harvard Rollins is checking up on some crime that Barbara Knowland is blaming me for."

"What about her sexual betrayal?" Shriver asked, more for his benefit than mine, I felt.

"I don't know. I think it bothers me, somewhere deep inside. But you know, I have a way of making feelings go away."

"How do you do that?"

I felt foolish talking about the void living in the hollows of my shoulders, but there was really no other way for me to describe it. It felt good to see the intensity with which the doctor listened to my explanations.

"But none of that matters," I said after finishing up the metaphorical description of my psyche. "What I really want to know is what Star thinks I did all those years ago."

"Why didn't you ask her?"

"I didn't think it mattered until Rollins started looking into my past."

"How can you be sure that he's even doing that?"

"I got that from a friend but I can't say who."

Again the doctor was silenced.

Finally he said, "Why don't we get you to lie down on the couch, Mr. Dibbuk?"

"What for?"

"In classic psychoanalysis the patient lies down and closes their eyes. From this position it is felt that there is a readier access to the unconscious."

"Just relax, Mr. Dibbuk," Dr. Adrian Shriver said to me.

I was on my back on a brown backless couch he had against the wall opposite his window. My eyes were closed and my hands were at my side.

"Okay," I said. "I'm pretty relaxed."

"Tell me about your days in Colorado."

"It's like I said. I was a hard-drinking, hard-loving, hardworkin' young man. Sometimes I'd drink so much that I'd lose whole days, not remember anything I said or did. I had &ends but I wasn't close to anybody. I used to make calls back home in my blackouts and blame my parents for all kinds of things."

"What kind of things?"

"I don't know. I don't remember."

"Tell me about a day that you do remember," Shriver said.

This question intrigued me. There was a day in my mind, a day that captured the feeling of Colorado for me.

I woke up early on a Sunday morning. The bed smelled of a woman—her perfume and bodily scents. I turned over but there was no one next to me. I went to an open window and gazed out on silvery green leaves shivering in the breeze and filtering the morning sun. I was naked and the house was completely unfamiliar.

The bedroom was on the second floor and the house was set in the woods, on a mountain. There were no neighbors. Outside there was a corral with four beautiful chestnut horses exulting in the wind.

On the bureau was a note.

B,

Thank you for saving me and for such a lovely evening and the ride home. It was wonderful meeting you. I'm off to church now. Maybe we'll see each other again sometime.

H

I supposed that I was B and that H was some woman I had met in a bar. I didn't remember any of it. There was a picture of a young couple on the bureau; a straw-blonde and a ruddy-cowboy kind of guy. I wondered if she was Helen or Henrietta or Holly.

My car was parked on a graded dirt path that passed in front of the big house. I drove for miles trying to find my way back to some kind of city, or at least a paved road. There were, there always were, two quart bottles of whiskey in the trunk of my car. And so when the sun went down and I ran low on gas, I popped the trunk and pulled out the booze.

My memory after that gets a little fuzzy. Some of what I remember might be a dream or a nightmare. I was drinking in the woods, singing to myself and moving between the darkness of pine shadows and the thrilling luminosity of the three-quarter moon. I got lost out there and then some men who were also rambling in the dark saw me and cursed me. They chased me but I was fueled by eighty-six proof.

They split up and I pressed myself into a depression on a rocky hillside.

That was all I had ever remembered before and it wasn't often that I thought about it. But that day on the analyst's couch I saw myself in the moon-cast shadow of stone with a pear-sized rock in my hand. A man passed in front of me. He had a gun, a pistol, and he was searching for me. I leaped out from my hiding place just when he was beyond me. I hit him with more strength than I had ever known. The hardness of his skull, the softness of the tissue underneath, was a familiar feeling . . .

When I opened my eyes, I was holding on to Dr. Shriver by his shoulder and his neck. He was trying to stay in control mentally while attempting to push me off too.

"Take it easy, Mr. Dibbuk," he shouted. "Take it easy."

"What?" I asked.

"What are you asking me?" he replied.

"What did I say?"

I let go and sat down on the brown divan.

"You were just coming from a woman's house," he said, rolling his neck to work out the kink I had put there. "And then you were drinking in the woods."

"That's all?" I realized that I was rocking back and forth. I tried to stop but could not.

"Yes," Shriver said. "All of a sudden you sat up and grabbed me."

I was panting. My heart felt too large for its cavity. It was as if I had just killed someone in actuality.

"I got to go," I said, standing up quickly.

"Tomorrow then?" Shriver said.

"What?"

"Tomorrow. You should come back every day until we get to the bottom of this, this trauma."

"Trauma? I didn't say a thing about any trauma."

"Something happened to you, Ben," he had not used my first name before then, "something that caused this deep alienation in you. Talking to this woman has brought it out. If you want to find out what that means, you need to be here on this couch. I will make myself available to you every day, weekends too. You're in a very precarious place."

"Aren't you scared?"

"Of what?"

"Didn't I just jump up and grab you by the neck? And here you say we need to get deeper. Shit, man. We get any deeper and I might throw you through that window."

"And if we don't try," he said with gravity, "you might jump out of that window."

"One day," I said. "I'll come one more time and we'll see."

"Same time," Shriver said. He went to the door and opened it for me.

In the small vestibule outside sat a startled-looking young woman with black hair and eyes. She watched me fearfully. She'd probably heard me screaming and the doctor shouting to calm me down.

On the street I was still thinking about that morning in the strange house in the Rockies. I was free and no one knew where I was. I called my boss, got his answering machine again, and told him that I had suffered some kind of trauma and that I had to see doctors for a week.

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wandered around the Asian collection almost alone.

In the late afternoon I ambled over to Lincoln Center and ate in a large Chinese restaurant near there. I ate a lot because I hadn't eaten yet that day. When I finished, it was three. The blissful feeling of anonymity and freedom stayed with me all that time.

Darkness was up ahead, I knew. Death and demolition were my destination, if not my destiny—that is what I felt. But I didn't care. The void in my shoulders protected me from fear. It infused my mind with a feeling of momentary invulnerability. I wondered what Shriver would have thought about that?

"A paranoid defense system," he might have called it, or "delusions of immunity brought on by anxiety anchored in the feeling of profound guilt."

Whatever it was, I was feeling no pain. I recognized that for years I had secretly wanted to be where I was at that moment: free from the commitment to a meaningless marriage; released from the dreary repetition of binary code and the counting of other people's money.

I walked down Broadway slowly, stopping in stores and resting on the occasional bench. I reached Cooper Union's Great Hall at 5:45, just in time to be admitted to the talk I had looked up the day before in the
Village Voice.

The doors had only recently been opened but the eight-hundred-seat hall was already half full. I took an aisle seat in the far back row on the right side. There I waited peacefully, like a man who had awakened in paradise that morning and who was still stunned by the rapture.

I watched the audience as they filed in. Hundreds of faces and I didn't know one of them. It was reminiscent of my walk every morning from my apartment to work. I took the same route every day, passing thousands of commuting workers, but rarely did I see a face I recognized. I was unknown and I didn't know anyone—like a ghost haunting a city destroyed by deluge or plague and then repopulated by some alien race.

The lights went down at last and a spotlight struck the podium. A plump man in a light bluish suit walked up to the stage. He had white hair that was too long and dark shoes that clashed with the pastel hue of his clothes.

He introduced himself, but I forget the name, and then launched into a self-referential introduction.

This preamble was long and laborious. The speaker was a lawyer who specialized in death row cases. He knew a lot of famous and infamous people and mentioned all their names. He had been involved in many high-profile cases and there were many corrupt and racist prosecutors who had fallen to his legal scythe.

I didn't care about any of that.

He talked about the number of poor people and people of color in prison. He spoke about how the law was anything but equal and fair.

I didn't care about any of that either. I'd been a black man in America for five decades, almost, and nothing about that meant anything to me. Life for all Americans, whether they knew it or not, was like playing blackjack against the house—sooner or later you were going to lose.