‘At least with astrology,’ said Dr Mann, looking coldly at me, ‘one still tries to predict something important. With Zen one drifts into Nirvana without thought or effort.’
‘One doesn’t drift into Nirvana,’ I said helpfully. ‘The drifting is Nirvana.’
‘A convenient theory,’ Dr Mann said.
‘All good theories are.’
‘Gold stocks and General Motors have risen an average of two points a week so far this month,’ Dr Felloni said, nodding.
‘Yeah,’ said Jake, ‘and you’ll notice that Waste Products, Inc., Dolly’s Duds and Nadir Technology are all rising.’
Dr Mann and I continued to look at each other, he with warm red face and chill blue eyes, and I with what I intended to be cheerful detachment.
‘My stock seems rather low these days,’ I said.
‘Perhaps it’s gravitating to its natural level,’ he replied.
‘It may yet rally.’
‘Drifters don’t rally.’
‘Yes, they do,’ I said. ‘You just don’t understand Zen.’
‘I feel blessed,’ Dr Mann said.
‘You’ve got eating, let me have my Zen and sex experiments.’
‘Eating doesn’t interfere with my productivity.’
‘I rather imagine it increases it.’
He flushed even more and pushed back his chair.
‘Oh shit,’ said Jake. ‘Will you two stop it. Tim, you’re sitting there like a fat Buddha attacking Luke’s Buddhism, and Lu –’
‘You’re right,’ Dr Mann said, sitting now as stiffly in his chair as his lumpy clothing and body would permit. ‘I apologize, Luke. The rolls were cold today and I had to attack something.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I apologize too. My martini was diluted and I had to hit back.’
The waitress was at the table again and Jake was getting ready to order dessert, but Dr Felloni spoke loudly to the general table:
‘My own portfolio has risen fourteen percent in the last three months despite a market decline of two percent.’
‘Pretty soon you’ll found your own foundation, Renata,’ Dr Mann said.
‘Prudent investment,’ she replied, ‘is like prudent experimentation: it sticks to the obvious.’
For the rest of the lunch, the conversation was all downhill.
Chapter Five
After lunch I paid my ransom at the local parking lot and drove off through the rain for the hospital. I drove a Rambler American. My colleagues drive Jaguars, Mercedes, Cadillacs, Corvettes, Porsches, Thunderbirds and (occasional slummers) Mustangs: I drove a Rambler. At that time it was my most original contribution to New York City Psychoanalysis.
I went east across Manhattan, up over the Queensborough Bridge and down onto the island in the Eastriver where the State Hospital is located. The ancient buildings appeared bleak and macabre. Some looked abandoned. Three new buildings, built of cheerful yellow brick and pleasant, shiny bars, make the hospital appear, together with the older horror houses, like a Hollywood movie set in which two movies, ‘My Mother Went Insane’ and ‘Prison Riot’, are being filmed simultaneously.
I went directly to the Admissions Building, one of the old, low, blackened buildings which, it was reliably reported, was held together solely by the thirty-seven layers of pale green paint on all the interior walls and ceilings. A small office was made available to me there every Monday and Wednesday afternoon for my therapy sessions with select patients. The patients were select in two senses: one, I selected them, and two, they were actually receiving therapy. I normally handled two patients, meeting each for about an hour twice a week.
A month before this, however, one of my two patients had attacked a hospital attendant with an eight-foot-long bench and, in being subdued, had received three broken ribs, thirty-two stitches and a hernia. Since this was slightly less than he had inflicted upon the five attendants doing the subduing, no charges of hospital brutality seemed justified, and after his wounds healed, he was to be sent to a maximum-security hospital.
To replace him, Dr Mann had recommended to me a seventeen-year-old boy admitted for incipient divinity: he showed a tendency to act as if he were Jesus Christ. Whether Dr Mann assumed all Christs to be masochistic or that the boy would be good for my spiritual health was unclear.
My other QSH patient was Arturo Toscanini Jones, a Negro who lived every moment as if he were a black panther isolated on a half-acre island filled with white hunters armed with Howitzers. My primary difficulty in helping him was that his way of seeing the world seemed to be an eminently realistic evaluation of his life as it had been. Our sessions were usually quiet ones: Arturo Toscanini Jones had very little to say to white hunters. Although I don’t blame him, as a non-directive therapist I was a little handicapped; I needed sounds for my echo.
Jones had been an honors student at City College of New York for three years before disturbing a meeting of the Young Conservatives Club by throwing in two hand grenades. This act would normally have earned long tenure in a penitentiary, but Jones’s previous history of ‘mental disturbance’ (marijuana and LSD user, ‘nervous breakdown’ sophomore year – he interrupted a political science class by shouting obscenities at his professor) and the failure of the two hand grenades to maim anything more valuable than a portrait of Barry Goldwater, earned him instead an indefinite stay at QSH. He had become my patient under the questionable assumption that anyone who throws hand grenades at Young Conservatives must be sadistic. That afternoon I decided to let myself go a bit and see if I couldn’t provoke a dialogue.
‘Mr Jones,’ I began (fifteen minutes had already passed in total silence), ‘what makes you think that I can’t or won’t help you?’
Sitting sideways to me in a straight wooden chair, he turned his eyes at me with serene disdain: ‘Experience,’ he said.
‘That nineteen consecutive white men have kicked you in the balls doesn’t necessarily mean the twentieth will.’
‘True,’ he said, ‘but the brother who came up to that next Charlie with his hands not protecting his crotch would be one big stupid bastard.’
‘True, but he could still talk.’
‘No suh! We Niggahs gotta use our hands when we talk. Yessuh! We’re physical, we are.’
‘You didn’t use your hands then when you spoke.’
‘I’m white, man, didn’t you know that? I’m with the CIA investigating the NAACP to see if there’s any secret black influence on that organization.’ His teeth and eyes glittered at me, in play or hatred I didn’t know.
‘Ah then,’ I said, ‘you can appreciate my disguise: I’m black, man, didn’t you know that? I’m with –’
‘You’re not black, Rhinehart,’ he interrupted sharply. ‘If you were, we’d both know it and only one of us would be here.’
‘Still, black or white, I’d like to help you.’
‘Black they wouldn’t let you help me; white, you can’t.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘That’ll be the day.’
When I lapsed into silence, he resumed his. The last fifteen minutes were spent with us both listening to the regular rhythmic shrieks from a man someplace in the Cosmold Building.
After Mr Jones left I stared out the gray window at the rain