Donald Antrim - The Verificationist

Sherwin Lang, bleary, tall, dissolute Sherwin, fogged on beer among those disconsolate post-Freudians, swayed from side to side, unsteadily rocked. His face flushed red seemed longer and broader, more round and immense than it usually does; even his eyes, staring out wildly, had hardly any white showing. Rebecca lowered her finely made hand toward him — much as I, earlier in the evening, had reached with my own, larger and rougher hand for hers. Rebecca’s arm in its blue gingham sleeve stretched down toward Sherwin; and the man’s long arm, in black, scratchy wool, extended upward; and once again there was the impression — exactly as there had been when I made my move and lifted Rebecca from the ground — there was the impression of a great, barely traversable gulf between up here and down there.

Across this divide reached the arms of the girl and the man. Their fingers touched, their hands joined together. Sherwin started to rise. His face looked amazed. He went up on tiptoes. His pointy, mean-looking shoes left the floor, and Sherwin dangled above the tables spread with their blue cloths. His feet kicked and his body twirled this way and that as if pushed by wind. But there was no wind. We were indoors with the windows shut. The hospital’s upper stories were approaching from the north, heading toward a late-night rendezvous with the Pancake House & Bar, though no one else noticed this. Everyone was focused on Sherwin in the air. The analysts and the students, even the lovesick teenagers, pushed back their chairs, slid sideways out from cramped booths, and came together in discrete, curious gangs near the fish tank or the candy display; they all gazed up and pointed at the hanging man; and it was, I thought then, as if these people had only that moment truly realized what was going on. But as we all know, awareness takes time.

Manuel and Maria and Peter, and the analytic trainees and Sherwin and Leslie, and Dan Graham and Terry, Elizabeth and Mike, and the lovesick youngsters and the waitresses wearing blue — the group, in other words — had begun to consciously acknowledge, as a group, as a society, that several of its members were in fact buzzing around, throwing up, chatting about life, and bumping into pots and pans overhead.

If only I could’ve wrapped my arms around Rebecca. That would have been sweet. There aren’t many opportunities, as one gets on in life, to hug the young. The way things were going, with everybody watching us and pointing, and with Sherwin taking pains to come drunkenly aboard, Rebecca and I were not likely to get much privacy. It was a shame to lose this opportunity to snuggle with her.

Here came Lang. Damn him. I watched him learning to fly. It was a discouraging sight. Lang was clearly horrified at what was happening to him. He swung in the air beneath Rebecca. Perspiration caused his hair to flatten and adhere to his forehead. Fear and unhappiness could be read in his expression and his physical comportment (if Sherwin’s movements could accurately be called that; “writhing” might be a better choice), in, it seemed to me, looking down from Bernhardt’s arms, every aspect of Lang’s Self and his being. What was the trouble? Rebecca tugged and pulled, and yet Lang remained, at least from my perspective, quite far beneath her, rising only slowly through the middle distance between the floor and the hanging garden of pots and skillets, between the people on earth and the people above the earth.

Down below Sherwin, analysts and the waitresses milled around like people doing — what? It was as if someone had gotten up from a booth and, in a startled and alarmed voice, exclaimed, “Look up there!” then pointed at something terrible. An airplane with flames trailing from the wing? A crash about to happen? The spirit of the party was changing, though it was hard to identify the nature or trajectory of the change. Was everyone waiting for a tragedy? (Another and perhaps more far-reaching question might be: What, specifically, was the tragedy that everyone was waiting for?) Dan Graham, wearing those cumbersome orthopedic shoes that feature one rubber sole piled thicker than the other, clumped between the tables and chairs, then stood leaning against the fish tank, puffing a filtered cigarette. He considered Lang. Dan looked, as always, lonely. Or he looked, I should say, wise. Smoke rose into the air and pooled beneath the ceiling. The reservoir of Dan’s smoke grew; it was like an upside-down puddle, endlessly replenished from below by the man’s exhalations, and by the gray, wet-looking stream that flowed from Dan’s cigarette’s tip. Was it a good idea for a man of Graham’s size to rest his weight against a glass tank filled with water? Dan is a reasonably — no, more than reasonably — a thoroughly bright, insightful professional; he’s published on topics relating to privacy and degradation in the analytic setting, and, more to the point in connection with Lang, on working with the recalcitrant substance abuser; certainly Dan’s patients like and respect him; and I would have been interested in hearing his opinions on Sherwin’s ascension, though I was not, I admit, thrilled with the prospect of dragging Dan up for a chat; he weighed, I would estimate, somewhere in the region of two hundred and thirty, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds.

Sherwin kicked and squirmed. A man hanged from the neck might struggle in the same fashion. Dan’s lit cigarette stuck out from the corner of his mouth; the cigarette appeared to be growing there, a permanent, jittery, burning appendage rooted in Dan’s beard. Ashes broke off and crumbled across the front of Dan’s flannel shirt.

Then a woman — it sounded like Maria, yes, of course it was she; who else could it have been? — cried out, “Tom has gone too far this time! He’s gone too far ! He’s absolutely gone too far !”

What was Maria blaming me for? Was everything my fault? Why was everything always my fault?

It wasn’t like I’d spit water on anybody. I hadn’t pulled a chair quickly, quietly from behind someone sitting down.

It was Bernhardt who had usurped our food, then squeezed the air out of my chest and gotten an erection that he shoved again and again against my back. I could feel it there, Bernhardt’s hard-on rubbing away, poking me, as people on the ground pointed up at Lang in his strange coat, Lang drunkenly flying toward Rebecca’s embrace.

Watching Sherwin clutch the waitress’s hand, I was put in mind of hapless men carried aloft on anchor lines trailing from balloons or airships torn from their moorings, swiftly ascending.

If Sherwin were to release Rebecca’s hand, if he panicked and fell, would the charismatic, womanizing psychiatrist then plummet to his death amid bread crumbs and soiled napkins dropped like so many ladies’ handkerchiefs on the Pancake House floor?

Or might he, following the style of some exhibition diver executing a circus stunt, get lucky and cannonball past Dan Graham’s head, into the tropical aquarium bubbling beside the cash register?

“Hold Rebecca’s hand! You can make it! Don’t look at the ground!” I called to Lang. He twisted desperately.

Rebecca cautioned the thrashing man, “Stop fighting! You’ll make me drop you! There’s nothing to be afraid of!”

In fact there was something to be afraid of. There was Leslie Constant, barging furiously through the crowd.

“Come down here, Sherwin Lang! Don’t fly off without me! Don’t you dare leave me all alone down here with these horrible child psychologists! Come back to the table and drink another beer, will you? Sherwin! Let me bring you a cold ale! You bastard ! You don’t know how to treat a woman! I don’t care if you do have a medical degree! All American men are exactly alike! That’s right ! You don’t any single one of you know how to spoil your women! You’re all so fucking cheap ! I pity American women for having to live with you their whole lives ! You can’t even buy a girl dinner —you have to go to some breakfast place where there’s nothing to eat except fried bread ! All this sugar makes me ill ! Do you hear me? Do you hear me, Sherwin? And it’s always someone else picking up the check! Isn’t that true? Don’t fly away from me, Doctor Lang! Oh, you’ll do anything to get out of spending money ! Sherwin, don’t leave me! Don’t go away— oh, you !” And so on, cursing and shoving her way between people, jostling them aside, finally plowing between Maria and Escobar, out into the open circle beneath her brilliant, drunken, levitating paramour. Leslie was a little shaky, off balance on a pair of startlingly tall navy-blue spike heels that went very nicely with her knee-length navy skirt and white silk blouse. I had not noticed the shoes earlier, when Leslie had been sitting with legs tucked beneath her table. Had she been drinking beer at the same rate as Sherwin? Was Leslie drunk? The fact that this woman was a native of the British Isles argued, to my mind, in favor of the possibility. Probably I should not say a thing like that about the English or anyone else. It’s a slur and, as such, expresses the kind of derisive stereotype that will surely be found offensive by some, no doubt about it; but the fact remains that the English, the Irish, and, I suppose, the Scottish and the Welsh — am I leaving anybody out? — stereotypically or not, have a long, colorful history of problems with alcohol. Who can study their literature, much less look at their art, and deny this?