Edward Lee - Grimoire Diabolique

“No.”

“Your ‘affliction’ only increased, and you hid it from your wife until—”

Barrows loosened his collar. “Yes, until she caught me red-handed. She got the flu one week. She…”

“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.”