Sol Stein - Other people

When we arrived in front of Koch's apartment building, I didn't get out of the car immediately. "Thank you," I said, putting my hand on Bill's hand.

"I'll wait for you," he said.

"Oh it could be such a long time."

"You won't get a cab to take you to Westchester. It'd cost a mint. Besides you won't find cabs cruising in this neighborhood that late. I'll wait. You don't need any more trouble."

Koch answered the door wearing a grey, cable-stitched cardigan instead of his usual jacket or suit.

"Come in, come in," he said, looking at my face for signs of distress.

I followed him into his consulting room. Out of habit I headed for the couch until his voice stopped me. "No, no, please, sit here so we can talk."

He gestured not to the chair beside his cluttered desk but to two armchairs at the other side of the room. The chairs were too close. I wished there were a coffee table between us.

"I'm sorry to come so late," I said. "I'm keeping you up."

"It's all right."

"I needed to talk to you." I was used to talking to him as an unseen presence behind me, not a face in front of me like other people.

I looked at my fingernails. I didn't know where to start.

"I guess one always thinks of rape as happening to someone else," I said.

"Yes," said Koch. "Like death."

Suddenly I wished I hadn't come to him.

"Take your time," he said.

When I didn't say anything, he said, "Would you rather lie down? As usual?"

Oh what a relief to be able to lie back on that couch with its familiar leathery smell, with my eyes closed. "I could sleep," I said.

"Sleep if you wish."

I thought I couldn't do that, fall asleep with the old man watching me. I was keeping him up. Yet, tired beyond belief and drifting, I tried not to think, to wash my mind of people and buildings and just see a horizon, the sky meeting the ocean, an infinite expanse of tranquil blue. Suddenly the blue of the ocean was dark and roiling with dangerous white-capped waves coming toward me.

I must have screamed.

I was sitting up on the couch, panting, sweat on my face.

"Tell me," he said. "Lie back down."

"I can't."

"You're afraid."

Oh I was, I was.

"Afraid of what?"

Though I felt drenched in sweat, my mouth was dry, parched.

"What woke you?"

"The water," I said, lying back down, exhausted.

"What water?"

"The water you drown in."

He was silent for a moment. I could hear his breathing. No, it was my breathing. My chest was heaving as if I'd been running.

"Tell me about the water."

And so I told him. "When I was very young, three or four. Mommy and Daddy took us — my parents, I mean, took my sisters and me — to Texas, to visit Uncle Jim in Texas. I remember the long, long train ride to St. Louis and then another train south. Texas seemed like a desert, with dry gulleys and small crevasses in the ground, and I had to hold Daddy's hand when we explored. I remember thunder very loud and then the rain came down, tons of water all at once. We were out walking far from my uncle's place, and suddenly we were drenched, and I remember Uncle Jim yelling at my father, and my father told my mother to carry me and he took my two sisters — they were bigger — and then there were like small rivers where minutes before there'd been just dry runnels, my mother stumbled, dropped me, then scooped me up and I wanted to be with my father, but he was up ahead with my sisters, and suddenly it was so bad we couldn't see him, I was frightened of my parents getting separated, and of all the rushing water. I was sure somebody was going to die, and I didn't want it to be me, or Daddy, or my mother and then just as suddenly as it had started, the rains stopped, and there was just the water rushing over the ground so fast, looking for places to run in, and we were trying to stay out of those places, and then, thank God, we saw up ahead Uncle Jim who had run to bring the pick-up truck, and he had already gotten my sisters aboard, and my father was running toward us to get my mother and me. Four people died in that area in the one flash flood, three of them from one family, but we were okay, wet and shivering and breathless when we got into the house, but okay. I couldn't get it straight in my head that the earth could suddenly turn into rivers."

Dr. Koch said nothing. I could hear a clock ticking.

"What are you thinking now?" he finally said.

"If I am awake…"

"Yes?"

"If I am awake, I cannot drown."

"To be asleep is dangerous to life."

"Yes," I said.

"Hence insomnia."

I remembered my mother singing me to sleep that first night after the flood at Uncle Jim's house. I remembered desperately not wanting to go to sleep.

"That is a terrible fright for a child," he said.

"For anyone," I said. "My mother talked about it for years."

"That didn't help. Yet think of when your insomnia came on badly."

"When I was away from home for the first time."

"When you didn't have Mommy or Daddy to pull you out of the water."

"It sounds ridiculous."

"All of our recurrent nightmares are ridiculous in one sense, and revealing in another. I am so happy."

"Happy?"

"For you. Now that this has come out, it should be better at night. You have let the genie out of the bottle. Sometimes the shock of something else, what happened to you today, helps open the gate of memories. Your insomnia was for a purpose, in the curious logic of the unconscious, it was for your safety so you would not drown."

"There's a difference," I said.

"About what?"

"I didn't drown. I was just afraid of it. I was raped. I didn't imagine it"

"You will not have insomnia about rape."

"How do you know?"

"Because it is not a source of severe anxiety for you. While rape can be very traumatic for some, for you, well, you are strong."

I am not strong.

"May I say how I think you should think about it?"

I know how I think about it.

"Why do you seem upset now? You should be relieved."

I am furious.

"I know how you feel about it. Awful. Terrible. Those are just large canvases of feeling. You must think about it like an unpleasant sex experience that must be brushed out of the mind."

I could kill that man. "You don't understand!" I was sweating all over again.

"Oh I do, I do. All this past year I have felt your strength grow, your security, I think now is perhaps the time for us to begin, gently, slowly, discussing something I have wanted to explore with you before this came up."

Stick to the subject. You are supposed to be helping me.

"I want you to relax. Here, sit up. That's it. Look at your knuckles. Open your hands."

He took one of my hands and opened my fingers. Don't do that. I don't want to be forced to do anything.

"Now," said Dr. Koch, giving me back my hand, "you have reached a turning point. Your talking about the flood, it will be a catharsis for the insomnia. You can turn from the demons of the night to the opportunities of the day. You see, my dear, I have long thought that if you were an artist, say, or a dancer, something like that, a person trying to release a talent from your soul, you would know what vocation is."

What the hell are you talking about?

"If you had a special talent with your hands even, you would know what a craft is. You would feel driven."

I feel driven to claw your face right now.

"You would know the meaning of work in the highest sense given to man. But alas, because of circumstances, you lack even an economic stimulus. Your family is well-to-do, work is a hobby for you. Neither money nor talent drive you toward a vocation."

I deliberately picked up the fragile ashtray and slammed it to the floor.