Donald Antrim - The Verificationist

These two men stared at me for a moment, and Peter was clearly — how shall I say this? — disgusted. Finally he pronounced, “Contrary to popular belief, Bob, full-fledged multiple personalities are extremely rare, and should not be confused with personalities that are merely fragile and poorly defended, like chronic depressives and substance abusers who never manage to become adequately socially integrated. Those people typically conceive grandiose characters and world views, and then suffer tremendous psychic stress when the world around them fails, as it always must in the end, to honor or reward their solipsism. Our colleague is somewhat like that, I would say. But is he a true multiple? No, he’s something else.”

“Manic?”

“Possible manic tendencies, yes.”

“Schizoid?” asked the child-psych trainee, excited.

“There’s a fair chance of that.”

“Paranoid?”

“Paranoid, oh yes, without a doubt,” said Konwicki. This apparently was Bob’s cue to go into a kind of frantic seizure, rocking in his chair and making jerky, disturbing hand and arm movements, wild gestures that indicated a crisis of agitation and made me think of rabies.

“Winnicottian false self? Delusional fantasies of power and omniscience? Sexual deviancies?” shouted Bob like a maniac.

“I wouldn’t rule anything out, Bob.”

“Fantastic!”

One thing was certain: Peter and I were headed for an altercation of one sort or another. Maybe not tonight, but sometime before long. I was sure of it. I don’t want to say that I was hoping for something physical, because I am not a brawler and have no wish — that I know of — to harm another person or, alternatively, get roughed up myself. It could be problematic, too, to enter a fighting contest while being lofted in the air by another man. Kicking would be an option. Maybe Bernhardt, with his skin the color of canned salmon and his wrinkled red coat and that panama hat that never — as I think I have already mentioned, maybe more than once — comes off his head in public, so that one imagines him wearing it in the most absurd and private places as well, in his morning shower or beside his wife in bed at night, or even at the barber, who would, one imagines, snip gingerly at the stiff little hairs that find their way out from beneath the horrible hat (or, uglier yet, one pictures the hat as a kind of drooping straw covering for some lurid and unsightly growth or deformity on the top of Bernhardt’s head, a medical anomaly, or, ghastlier even than this, some moist, translucent parasite from the pages of science fiction, an alien thing planted on Bernhardt, living on him and connected, through the central nervous system, to his brain, controlling him and instructing him, via little tubes, to hold me and squeeze me and teach me to fly; instructing him, as well, to deny that the hospital in the mist is a spaceship or, more beautifully and more to the point, a golden, floating tomb) — maybe Bernhardt, as I was saying, Bernhardt, our giant, wheezing, pink-cheeked Group counselor, would appear, to Konwicki, intimidating. Konwicki is a little guy. He looks scrappy and angry and mean and tough. But it is well known that these feral men with their pressed-together lips and narrow eyes set beneath shiny foreheads, these men who look squirrelly and aggressive, with veins showing on forearms and biceps, men who seem perpetually hungry and absolutely resentful about everything good in life — these types, I have found, will show themselves to be submissive or at least wildly avoidant in moments of true conflict or threat from a big, fat, food-obsessed male.

This was my hope in the event of a battle for eminence, that night. In the meantime I could feel Bernhardt’s body pressing harder against mine. I mean I could feel, at points along the length of me, Bernhardt’s stomach and his legs and, there against the small of my back, what must have been his cock. Or was it his leather belt, or his bunched-up jacket, pushing against my back at the base of my spine? Feeling this, I came also to feel as if each part of Bernhardt — his legs and his arms and his chest and, from time to time, his abrasive, slightly blotchy chin nestling against the back of my head (all this taken together making up what you might call the length and breadth of Bernhardt) — I came to feel, as I was saying, as if each part of this man were touching each part of me, my legs and my arms and my stomach and ribs encircled by Bernhardt’s arms holding me off the floor. And then, on further consideration of these feelings brought about by the closeness of Bernhardt, his legs and belly pressing against me, these feelings brought through Bernhardt’s body into my own — on further consideration I came to feel, as the two of us stood still in our big, never-ending hug, breathing in time with one another while hardly daring to move, I came to feel like the man was no longer behind me; rather, he was lying on top of me, crushing me, I down on my stomach and he on his stomach, sprawled across my back, with his whole huge weight bearing down and his breath drifting sweetly through the air around my face, Richard’s breath tickling, rhythmically, metronomically, with each warm exhalation, the hairs on my ears, those almost undetectable hairs that stick out absurdly, the hairs of a man growing old and afraid.

Bernhardt was lifting me and Bernhardt was holding me. Bernhardt lay atop me. It was time, I felt, to get in some practice soaring and gliding, so I leapt off the windowsill and rocketed away from the cars in the darkened parking lot, away and upward in the only direction available to me, straight toward white tiles and ceiling lights and that strange, artificial hanging garden made from tin pots and wooden spoons and heavy iron pans, all the things used to cook pancakes.

“What can I get you, sir?” called a girl’s voice from below, and I looked down and saw our waitress, Rebecca, holding an order pad open in one hand and, in the other, a pencil poised to scribble. Did she think I was ready to put myself through another gruesome, paralyzing ordeal of choosing and ordering food? Rebecca stared up at me with that patient and slightly distant, more or less tolerant expression that waiters and waitresses everywhere use to defend against the subliminal, unexpressed appetites of finicky eaters — all the unassimilable longing, at table after table, for gentle sympathy and comfort. She waited. I hovered. Seen from high above, this girl became foreshortened in a way that made her look quite diminutive, younger and more childlike than in fact she actually was; and this weird visual effect and its corollary — Rebecca, the tall, black-haired high-school student, imagined as a toddler — made me think, as I drifted idly beside a small, upside-down omelette pan, of fairy-story scenarios featuring shrinking children and gigantic babies, ugly toads “kissed” into princes, and paupers crowned as kings, the whole inventory of enchantments and transformations that describe life in the realm of the unconscious.

“No food for me right this minute,” I hollered at the tiny little creature standing beneath me.

“Coffee? Beer? A glass of milk?”

Milk sounded appealing. On the other hand, milk sounded not so good. “No thanks.”

“Would you like to see a menu?” she called up to me, and I called back, “Later maybe. Now isn’t the best time.”

And because I had her alone, I said, “How would you like to come join the Young Women of Strength?”

Rebecca was looking directly up, and I could see her face and her hair spilling across her shoulders, the shapes of her breasts pushing against her Pancake House waitress costume.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a series of Wednesday-night alcohol-free socials at which girls aged fourteen to eighteen get together to talk about their plans for the future, without worrying about peer-group sexual pressures.”