missing. To my mind the locked door between my apartment and the outside world
seemed to do away with most of those, but it was my mind, after all; wasn’t that the
point? And perhaps the problem?
I had it all mapped out. During the first session I’d explain what had happened. When
I came to the second one, I’d bring the items in question—sunglasses, Lucite cube,
conch shell, baseball bat, ceramic mushroom, the ever-popular Farting Cushion. A
little show-and-tell, just like in grammar school. That left two more during which my
rent-a-pal and I could figure out the cause of this disturbing tilt in the axis of my life
and set things straight again.
A single afternoon spent riffling the Yellow Pages and dialing the telephone was
enough to prove to me that the idea of psychiatry was unworkable in fact, no matter
how good it might be in theory. The closest I came to an actual appointment was a
receptionist who told me that Dr. Jauss might be able to work me in the following
January. She intimated even that would take some inspired shoehorning. The others
held out no hope whatsoever. I tried half a dozen therapists in Newark and four in
White Plains, even a hypnotist in Queens, with the same result. Mohammed Atta and
his Suicide Patrol might have been very bery-bery bad for the city of New York (not
to mention for the in-SHOO-rance business), but it was clear to me from that single
fruitless afternoon on the telephone that they had been a boon to the psychiatric
profession, much as the psychiatrists themselves might wish otherwise. If you wanted
to lie on some professional’s couch in the summer of 2002, you had to take a number and wait in line.
I could sleep with those things in my apartment, but not well. They whispered to me. I
lay awake in my bed, sometimes until two, thinking about Maureen Hannon, who felt
she had reached an age (not to mention a level of indispensability) at which she could
wear her amazingly long hair any way she damn well liked. Or I’d recall the various
people who’d gone running around at the Christmas party, waving Jimmy Eagleton’s
famous Farting Cushion. It was, as I may have said, a great favorite once people got
two or three drinks closer to New Year’s. I remembered Bruce Mason asking me if it
didn’t look like an enema bag for elfs—“elfs,” he said—and by a process of
association remembered that the conch shell had been his. Of course. Bruce Mason,
Lord of the Flies. And a step further down the associative food chain I found the name
and face of James Mason, who had played Humbert Humbert back when Jeremy Irons
was still just a putter. The mind is a wily monkey; sometime him take-a de banana,
sometime him don’t. Which is why I’d brought the sunglasses downstairs, although
I’d been aware of no deductive process at the time. I’d only wanted confirmation.
There’s a George Seferis poem that asks, Are these the voices of our dead friends, or
is it just the gramophone? Sometimes it’s a good question, one you have to ask
someone else. Or…listen to this.
Once, in the late eighties, near the end of a bitter two-year romance with alcohol, I
woke up in my study after dozing off at my desk in the middle of the night. I
staggered off to my bedroom, where, as I reached for the light switch, I saw someone
moving around. I flashed on the idea (the near certainty) of a junkie burglar with a
cheap pawnshop .32 in his trembling hand, and my heart almost came out of my chest.
I turned on the light with one hand and was grabbing for something heavy off the top
of my bureau with the other—anything, even the silver frame holding the picture of
my mother, would have done—when I saw the prowler was me. I was staring wild-
eyed back at myself from the mirror on the other side of the room, my shirt half-
untucked and my hair standing up in the back. I was disgusted with myself, but I was