Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

“Come off it, Doc-you know perfectly well that a physician is not only permitted, but required to breach confidentiality when lives are endangered. You can’t testify in court without a waiver from Childs, but neither can you withhold information that may help us capture him.”

“It’s been thirty-five years, Agent Pender, and my memory isn’t what it once was.”

“Mine either,” said Pender. “I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. But I can give you chapter and verse of every case I ever worked, and I’m willing to bet you can, too.”

Luka sank down until he was chin deep in the steaming water, with his long white hair fanning out around his head. “Agent Pender, are you familiar with the old joke about the gay man who tells his friend that his mother made him a homosexual?”

“‘If I buy her the yarn, will she make me one, too?’”

“Precisely. And Simon Childs’s mother and grandfather couldn’t have done a better job of making a counterphobic phobic if they’d knitted one from a pattern. The way Simon tells it-or at least the way he told me, back in 1963 (I remember the year, because it was right around the time my friend Jack Kennedy was assassinated)-he was already suffering from multiple specific phobias by the time he and his sister were abandoned by their mother at their paternal grandfather’s proverbial doorstep after their father died-drowned drunk after driving his car into the bay, if I remember correctly.

“First and foremost, understandably enough, little Simon was afraid of drowning. So his grandfather took it upon himself to cure him of his weakness by beating him, holding his head under water, then alternating beatings and dunkings, until Simon had learned to master his terror. Next came fear of the dark, which the grandfather cured by beating him, then locking him in the basement, then beating him some more. After nyctophobia, however, came cynophobia, the fear of dogs (specifically, his grandfather’s two attack-trained Dobermans, as I recall), which the grandfather cured by making him sleep in the kennel-and beating him, of course.

“Subsequent phobias, including the fear of heights, spiders, and mirrors, were cured along similar homeopathic principles, until by the time he reached puberty, Simon told me, he wasn’t afraid of anything. He was equally in denial about his feelings toward his sister, whom his grandfather obviously adored-or indulged, at any rate. But Simon had so internalized his sibling rivalry that he had, in a sense, internalized his sister. It’s a syndrome that’s seen more often with identical twins-not at all healthy, needless to say.”

“Is that why he was in therapy?”

“No-apparently he and a neighbor boy had been caught in flagrante, so to speak, by the grandfather. According to Simon, the two boys had formed something they called the Horror Club. Obviously it was related to the entire gestalt of Simon’s polyphobia and compensatory counterphobia. The boys used to watch horror movies on late-night television, then masturbate together. Of all the reasons for Simon Childs to go into treatment, this adolescent experimentation with homosexuality was about the least important. Except of course to the grandfather. Who killed himself a few weeks after Simon began therapy-I never saw young Childs again after that.”

“Do you happen to remember the other boy’s name? From the Horror Club?”

“I’m afraid not-why?”

“Childs has probably gone to ground somewhere in the Bay Area. We want to cover all the bases.”

“All I can tell you is that his family lived next door to the Childs house in the autumn of 1963, and…No, wait-it’s coming to me. Simon called him-there’s an expression for a timid soul…nervous something? Nervous Norman?”

“Nervous Nellie.”

“Yes, that’s it-Nervous Nellie. Short for Nelson, if memory serves.”

“I don’t suppose you have a last name for me?”

The old psychiatrist sighed. “Now I know how Jesus felt. The more miracles you perform, the more they want.”

For the first Tuesday evening in nearly a month, Jim and Gloria Gee had their house, and equally important, their computer, to themselves.

Inviting her old college roommate to stay with them had been a mistake-Gloria admitted that freely. (Gloria and Linda had roomed together as undergraduates at Stony Brook, before going on to different law schools, Linda to Fordham, Gloria to Georgetown.) But by the time the Gees realized how much the sessions of the Swingin’ Tuesdays Club had come to mean to them, Linda was already installed in the spare room. Although they considered themselves quite the liberated couple-flat-out wild, by Chinese-American standards-neither of them felt liberated enough to participate in a cyber-orgy with Linda just down the hall.

So this evening, they were eager to make up for lost time. Gloria, an attorney for a consortium of Taiwanese exporters, was already out of the shower by ten, squeaky clean, oiled and depilated, when Jim, who was well advanced on the partner track at a powerhouse D.C. law firm, arrived with the tabs of Ecstasy he’d picked up from one of the mail-room boys. While they waited in their living room for it to take effect, Gloria brushed the glossy, ass-length black hair that was her pride and joy; Jim, already stripped down to his red bikini briefs, set up the web-cam and logged on to the STC web site.

The session was already well under way. Five of the six segments of the split screen displayed photo-icons of the five couples logged on (including a promising pair of newbies who went by the screen names Hot and Hotter). As the Gees’ own photo-icon appeared in the upper left portion of the split screen, the bottom portion of the screen filled with welcoming chatter.

Hi our friends of the mysterious Orient, typed Plumpie, of Piers and Plumpie, the dedicated fiftyish couple who hosted the site-they had to be dedicated: it was three in the morning in Amsterdam. We missed you.

We missed you too, typed Gloria, aka Dragon-Girl-for some reason, it always seemed to be the women who did the typing.

How touching, typed the female half of the couple known as Wolfman and Wolfwoman. Let the games begin.

Like many other cyber-sexuals, the Gees were a predominantly male-voyeur-female-exhibitionist couple. Gloria was turned on by the presence of the camera and often made love with her eyes closed, while Jim usually kept one eye on the screen, even when he was having an orgasm. Gloria didn’t mind-it made her extra hot to think of other men watching Jim making love to her with the same hunger that Jim felt, watching them screwing their wives.

Tonight was good for both of them. Not only had they built up a head of steam during their three-week hiatus, but the new kids were indeed hot and hotter-mixed race, he hung, she stacked. The sense of connection between the two couples was immediate and undeniable; each couple had selected the other’s video stream for viewing-it was almost like a private four-way, especially under the influence of the Ecstasy.

Around one in the morning, however, just as two couples, presumably from the West Coast, were logging on to fill the slots vacated by the easterners and Europeans, Jim froze in mid-hump.

“No,” Gloria ordered him, thinking he was about to ejaculate prematurely-or at least prematurely as far as she was concerned. “Not yet, I’m not there yet.”

“Did you hear that?” he whispered into her ear, shrinking inside her.

“What?”

“I think somebody’s breaking in. You call nine-one-one; I’m going to get the gun.” He rolled off her, sprang to his feet, stuffed himself back into his red bikini briefs, adjusted his package self-importantly, then dashed out of the living room, bent double in a ridiculous commando crouch.