Jacob Rubin - The Poser

“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.