Donald Antrim - The Verificationist

“Psychotic break with sudden onset of schizophrenic episodes, uh, possibly hostile behavior leading to a gradual dissolution of coherent identity, necessitating antipsychotic medicalization and … let’s see … lifelong hospitalization?” guessed Konwicki’s nervous star pupil, Bob.

“Complete reorientation of sexual identity and a basic repudiation of socially binding mores and conventions, including the marriage contract?” predicted a second-year candidate (female, brunette, named Katharine) specializing in gender assignment as a function of social class.

“Watch and learn,” said Konwicki.

It was, it must’ve been, after nine at night. Wind blew against the northern windowpanes. The wind carried the clouds that drifted off the river. No one was eating anymore. A family that had been sharing a booth near the door was gone. I had not noticed them paying their bill. Their table was a mess and so was the floor around it; small children had been there. The two teenagers in a corner by the restrooms were, I saw, still nestled down in brooding, reclusive, adolescent communion. The boy put money in a miniature jukebox on the wall beside the table; then the girl and he leaned heads forward across the tabletop to study selections. He rotated the jukebox knob. They breathed into one another’s faces. I imagined that this boy and girl were Rebecca’s sexually experienced friends, waiting for her to punch out at eleven so they could all escape into the boy’s car. Sexuality notwithstanding, the teenagers looked like children to me, which is to say they looked chubby and unformed, whereas Rebecca had become, in my eyes, a woman. I stared at her bone structure, the shadowy, depressed temples and thin nose and boyish, squared jawline; and I was afraid I might giggle with pleasure, and she would misunderstand my feelings and not be flattered. She smelled to me like woodsmoke and some kind of unfamiliar soap and — faintly, not at all unpleasantly — vomit. It was impossible to kiss her without everyone seeing. I could hear, as we sailed beneath the foam-tile ceiling, fragments of conversation, little comments people made about therapy, about Krakower Institute business, about each other and about the two of us, me and Rebecca transported off the ground in Bernhardt’s arms.

It was the commentary from my own booth that I found most interesting and threatening.

“Look at them up there, Manuel. This can’t be a good thing. Tom should act his age and be more professional. He should know better. He only wants to eat her pussy,” said Maria.

Manuel replied, “What has Tom done? He has reached out his hand in friendship to a young person. Perhaps it is true that our friend enjoys a fantasy of passionate cunnilingus with a beautiful girl. Men in cafes are known to dream of the waitress.”

“This place is a far cry from a cafe, Manuel. And that girl is a teenager. She’s in high school.” Maria sounded angry and mean; she cried out, loudly enough for everyone, including Rebecca, to hear, “Tom is going too far! He’s going too far!”

Manuel answered — brilliantly, I thought—“Tom is a man.”

“I think it’s sick.” Maria went on, “The whole older man — younger woman thing gives me the creeps. Tom may be a man, but he’s also married to a wonderful woman.”

“He must create his own choices in life. Maria, you know this. You counsel people in their, how do you say, relationships. We must not tell Tom how to be a man.”

“The girl will be the one who gets hurt, Manuel. She’ll have to live with this after Tom has forgotten all about her.”

“I don’t know. I think that maybe you are, I think the word is ‘generalizing,’” said Manuel. This was, of course, a vague and ineffectual rebuttal, and therefore a possible concession to Maria’s vision of psychosexual reality. She sensed the European’s uncertainty about ordinary domestic interpretations of the power structures in love. She played her trump card.

“What would Jane think?”

“That is none of our business.”

“I might just make it my business,” said Maria.

Hearing this, I had a real desire to vacate the premises, as they say. Maria, it seemed plain, was enraged over my seduction of Rebecca, a woman half Maria’s age. But was that all there was to it? Was Maria also distressed over Rebecca’s seduction — expressed symbolically as flying, vomiting into the iron pot, showing me the little dog, and so forth — Rebecca’s seduction of me? Was Maria declaring a vestigial attachment, an expectable reluctance to watch her former lover function erotically in a context that excluded her? Did I, in other words, have a chance, someday soon, of sneaking with Maria down the windowless, creaking stairwell, through the cellar and past the old boiler, into the Krakower Institute book and manuscript vault?

There was no way to find out. Talking sweetly to Maria would cause Bernhardt to crush my ribs.

It was, I felt, under the circumstances, best to remain safely above things, to keep Rebecca close, and travel, if we could and her stomach might allow this and her boss would not fire her, up through the ceiling and into the sky, out of the pancake restaurant and away beneath the stars, over the misty city with its river coursing through and its hospital roof shining above everything like a pharaoh’s grave.

How far could we go? How high? I gave Rebecca’s hand a tug, and her body obeyed. She rested against me. We were snuggling. I could smell the vomit on her breath, faintly, and her black hair’s fireplace scent; and I could smell Bernhardt, of course, his clothes and cologne and his breath; and the bitter cigarette exhaust clouding the room above Dan Graham. Ceiling lights in smoky air looked yellow and greasy; and the lights gave off a perfume of their own — the sugary funk of electrical wiring cooking its rubber insulation. I smelled coffee and something acrid baking in the kitchen. Roaches? I had Bernhardt behind me and Rebecca in front of me. We were all pressed together. Rebecca was tall and long. She was a good fit. I did not, I realized at that moment, know her last name. I made a mental note to ask her later. Her hair was fantastically thick, and I could not see through it to Brueghel’s dog.

Bernhardt’s arms were untiring. I admired the man. Admiration was not something I’d ever felt for Richard. I said to him, “Richard, your panama hat is digging into the back of my head.”

“Sorry, Tom.”

“It’s all right. If you angle your head. A little.”

“Is that any better?”

“Well…”

“How about if I go this way?”

“That’s good. Much better. Are you comfortable with your neck twisted that way?”

“No problem, Tom.”

“Great.”

“I’m not squeezing too hard, am I?” Bernhardt asked me. I frankly thought Richard was squeezing a bit assertively, but as he had been considerate enough to inquire regarding this matter, I felt I should mind my manners and answer, politely:

“No.”

“You’re sure, Tom?”

“I’m positive. It’s nice.”

“You feel secure?”

I took a raspy breath. “Pretty much.”

“Because in my opinion, Tom, that’s the most important thing there is in life. A feeling of security.”

“I agree, Richard”—wheezing.

“You speak up and let me know if there’s anything I can do that will make you cozy,” offered Bernhardt in his low, low voice; and once again I felt the thing that must have been, I was certain of this, the man’s erection against my back.

Yes. There it was. There was no getting away from it.

On the other hand, was it truly, actually Bernhardt’s erection? Given that Bernhardt was holding me in a bear hug, and that Bernhardt’s stomach and the fronts of his legs were utterly mashed into my back and the backs of my legs, it was also and therefore the case that I was — in bodily, purely “physical” terms — at least half a foot higher off the ground than he.