In the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum

Patrick Keppel

      I am writing this as a public service to all those who somehow don't feel fully alive unless they are seeking out those remote corners of every city in which some disturbed individual, or worse some group of them, has set up a unique exhibition of the grotesque. These exhibitions are free of charge and enjoy a cult following; they are the city's decadent little secrets, passed along in slurred whispers at 3 a.m. in cloudy cafes. Those of you who have seen the razor sharp teeth of the thousand or so discarded dolls crammed into Limbos; the dirty bones and vials of relics apparently exploded into orbit around the shrunken brown head of St. Infantasy, Martyr; or the deathpale worms poking their heads out of the black soil of The Earth Room, know the jarring pleasure each affords. Granted, most of these exhibits are in themselves quite harmless, except in that they are usually (but not always) hidden in some dark, dingy alley in the most desperate sections of the city where vagrants and criminals abound.
         But really now, truly listen: There is one exhibit you must make certain to avoid no matter how the sound of it may intrigue you; in fact, I realize the danger of my even bringing the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum to the public's attention. For this reason, no doubt it's fortunate I cannot direct anyone to its precise location, though on the other hand if I knew where it was I wouldn't now be writing; I'd have had the authorities close it down at once. But this is all beside the point, since I'm quite sure the monstrous proprietors of this museum move their nasty little chambers all around. Sometimes as I'm walking alone down some street, any street really, I'll see something--a dead animal, say, or a gushing hydrant, or twin beds--which brings it all back, and I know it's nearby, pulsing in its lurid light, just underneath. Do I then investigate, poke around the ashes of the neighborhood for shreds of clues, ask coded questions of passersby? Not on your life! I run and hide, I flee at once to my room and pull the shades, lest somehow once more that hideous exhibit find me, and before I know it I find myself wandering lost and terrified through its dim, distorted corridors. Oh, you may laugh at this, say I'm being extreme, and I am, I know I am, but that's just it--I wasn't so before. Oh, beware thrill seekers! The Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum is not worth the risk. My experience there was a nightmare from which I am only just now beginning to wake. And while it is true that everyone's experience there would differ widely--such is its genius, as I will try to explain --I'm not certain that anyone, anyone at all mind you, emerges from it unscathed.
         True, I went there at what was for me the worst possible time. I was not well; I was losing weight, not sleeping, talking to walls. In short for the first time in my entire life I found myself utterly alone. For seven years my wife Elizabeth and I had enjoyed what many who appreciated our obvious compatibility had called a fantasy marriage, but they didn't know the half of it. Who indeed could even have imagined, much less penetrated, the dense fabric of our secret life together? Between us we fashioned a whole world, a whole language, created and re-created it daily. We animated everything around us, not just our childhood dolls or toys or every part of our bodies, as all lovers do to some extent, but even the most insignificant, most inanimate things, and constantly so, relentlessly. Knives, scissors, vacuums, ice scrapers--everything we touched had a soul and sang along with us, celebrating our joy at "passing together through this vale of tears we call life," as the justice of the peace, prophetic old hag, had read at our elopement. When a pen came up missing, we turned the place inside out to find it, listening all the while for its tinny shriek: "Help! I'm over here!" and we'd say "Where? Where? Tell us where," and after a long pause it would answer with a sob, "I don't know." It was really terrifying sometimes; for all we knew our beloved object was lying in a gutter somewhere miles away, half-buried in slush, freezing to death, maybe crushed! Sometimes we'd find it months later in some forgotten corner of the closet, dusty and worn but alive, and then what a celebration we'd have. We'd kiss it, use it to draw countless hearts and exclamation points, and store it from then on in a red velvet box with the string of pearls. Some perceptive individuals, perhaps sensing this invisible world resounding just beneath the surface of our public lives, used to say what wonderful parents we'd make someday, but we were in no hurry to prove them right. What need had we for children when as it was our apartment rang with little voices, all clamoring for our attention, and getting it too, every time without fail?
         But then, but then--all at once the joyful singing stopped. Well, not all at once; during the usual period of lies and subterfuge they sang on tape, or were merely ventriloquized. But before that, before I actually discovered my wife had forsaken our world for another, she showed not one sign of dissatisfaction, none at all, nothing of significance anyway. You may believe this or not, I don't care. At first I was shocked to realize that our mutual friends were avoiding me, but now I've learned well that the world despises a loser, no matter how blameless--especially if he is blameless (such people do exist you know). At one point it was of vital importance to me that Elizabeth had agreed (and, incidentally, without coercion) to sign a written statement that I had done "absolutely nothing wrong." Thankfully, we never drew up such a document--imagine having that around!--but none of that matters to me now. I only mention it to describe how my state of mind may have contributed to my dreadful experience in the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum--not that this fact absolves its proprietors. No, not in the slightest.
         It all began on the first of November, exactly one month to the day after my wife had departed this world. I remember it was a terribly dense, grey Saturday morning, the kind that convinces you at once that you will never be resurrected. I cowered in bed far longer than usual, occasionally glancing up at the brass hook poking out of my ceiling, and supposing for the hundredth time that it was strong enough to suspend the heaviest houseplant, but probably not a body. As usual this train of thought led me to the humbling fact that I could not in any case tie even the simplest good knot. It would have to be a "good" one, I figured, one you had to master, one sanctioned by the Boy Scouts of America or taught on the docks by some old salt ("Aye, there you go, laddie, a 'cuckold's neck' that is"); but the former I had not been permitted to join for fear they would have allowed me to drown, and the latter I'd only read about, having lived my early years in the heart of the country, hopelessly landlocked. On the other hand, research, premeditation (consulting The Book of Knots, say) was out of the question, and as this was my usual exit from such semi-dark musings, at last I just groaned and rolled myself out of bed to make coffee.
         It was deathly quiet in the kitchen. The spoons, the mugs, were lifeless in my hands, merely functional, corpses of metal and porcelain. How they used to dance through the air to my beloved just waking to our weekend! I gave a couple of short sobs, then winced at the sound; I hated when they bubbled to the surface like that, but even more so this time, because the very moment they spilled down my chin and onto the counter, the man next door erupted in one of his uncontrollable fits of shrieking laughter. Victor had Tourette's or something and so almost never went out, cowed, I assume, by thirty-odd years of ridicule. As such he was even more alone in the world than I was, but the few times I'd seen and spoken to him, even hoping to befriend him, he'd shrugged me off, pretending he hadn't heard. Of course, he couldn't help himself, he wasn't laughing at me; he even kept the television on loud to muffle his outbursts (no doubt previous tenants had complained), or else to make me think he was just entertaining himself like anyone else. Still, it was naturally disturbing to notice how often his funhouse cackling coincided with my worst moments; perhaps my miserable little cries dribbling through the thin walls made him nervous, or even compassionate, and this was his only way of showing it.
         But that awful grey morning it was only too obvious that Victor was the whole world, and that in its eyes I was a terrific fool. I sobbed some more, louder this time, and Victor laughed again. "Stop it!" I cried finally, but the world found this particularly hilarious; its triumph sent me reeling across the room as far from the wall as possible. I curled up in a ball and covered my ears with my palms, but the cackles bled through the cracks in my fingers. I tried desperately to think of something else, anything else, and that's when I heard them, those voices in the distance, drawing nearer, a chorus of boys singing over and over: Kyri-e Ele-i-son, Kyri-e Ele-i-son, Kyri-e Ele-i-son . . .
         Then I saw them, emerging in hazy black and white as in an old film, black-robed boys in procession along a sandy strand, the leader holding aloft a giant spear of a crucifix, the last (and smallest) swinging a censer like a bell. The scene was familiar, but I couldn't identify it, so I kept replaying it over and over, rewinding the film, examining it for clues, expecting that at any moment the boys would wander into the tiny dim room in my mind where their names or purpose were uselessly stored. A light would flash, no doubt a disappointingly faint one, a mere flicker, but you know how it is, I had to have it anyway. Sometimes I felt them eerily close, just on the other side of the wall from full recognition, but no matter how carefully I led them on they always took the wrong turn. At last I sensed they'd wandered too far and were hopelessly lost, and so abandoned the search. But it had served its purpose; I had calmed, and so had Victor.
         I got up and warmed my coffee, smoked a cigarette. Outside a cold rain was spitting down from the sky, dragging the last of the autumn to the dirty pavement, mercenaries on a mop-up which I knew would last the rest of the day and deep into the night. I knew for certain now that it was the day I'd dreaded for some time, the day I wouldn't know how to survive. I had tried to prepare for it, or else stave it off, by cultivating a desperate variety of interests. I wrote letters, especially to people I hadn't seen for years. I kept a journal of my dreams (frightful things, mostly about intruders ransacking my home, or lurking in closets). I set up a darkroom, watched my diet, read German fairy tales, played myself in chess, studied basic alchemy, plumbing, phrenology. They seemed sturdy enough nets while I was weaving them, but of course on this heaviest of all days, none of them were of the slightest use. I plummeted through each of them as through cobwebs and by afternoon hit rock bottom with a terrific thud. As a last resort I switched on the television and made a quick circuit of the channels, pausing only at a panel discussion of the abortion issue, which started out quite civilized but of course rapidly degenerated into a vicious scream session, one side hurling "piles and piles of dead babies," and the other slinging "rusty, bloody coat hangers in back alleys."
         It was awful. I paced up and down my apartment, smoking, wringing my hands, then all at once stopped in a kind of paralysis, a quiet terror. For months I'd been teasing myself about that brass hook above my bed, and although I wasn't really considering suicide right then either, suddenly I understood for the first time in my life how it happened. For a while you had these moments in which you felt horribly trapped, immobile, suffocating, quite a lot of them at first and then perhaps less frequently but more and more intensely, until one day you just couldn't wriggle free, you didn't even try; you were already dead, so it was just one minor detail to take care of, like locking the door before you went out.
         Naturally I was alarmed at this revelation and began to scramble for alternatives. I grabbed my coat and rushed out the front door, but was blown back by all that cold rain; and besides, where could I possibly go that my despair wouldn't follow, squat on my shoulders? At a bar perhaps my demon would get distracted and mingle with the other depressed souls, but there was no guarantee of that, and my misery wanted no company. Back inside I figured I should call someone and snatched up the phone, but the dial tone stretched out like a long black line separating me from the world. The only person in town whom I knew for certain would not make a withering excuse was M., the brother of a friend of mine who lived upstate. But M. was in severe depression himself. At the age of thirty he'd suddenly found himself caught in the web of a number of obsessive compulsions, sexual in nature and adolescent in origin, which prevented him from becoming the productive member of society his generally friendly manner and high test scores had always presumed. After losing himself (and the greater part of his inheritance) in a few religious cults, he had finally surrendered to the urging of concerned friends and relatives and sequestered himself in the gentle, careful environs of Weber Sanitarium. What's more, though I had seen quite a lot of M. the year or so he'd lived here, I hadn't yet told him of my situation. I didn't want to upset him, I'd told myself, since it seemed likely that M. in his extreme, childish way had considered my wife and me the most stable couple in the world, perhaps even substitute parents for the ones he'd long ago lost to divorce, and that news of our split might make him reason in despair that if we hadn't made it, then it was hopeless for him.
         But this miserable afternoon I couldn't help but admit there was more to my not telling him than some conveniently benevolent desire to protect him from the harsh realities of the world. I'd always used to try to encourage him by say- ing that he was not so very different from a lot of people, that in fact if I myself were to lose the structure my wife supplied me I'd no doubt soon join him there in the loony bin. Of course, this was rather easy encouragement, perhaps even somewhat disingenuous, since at the time I never dreamed such a loss was possible. How could I face him now that it was so, now that the distinction between us was rapidly blurring? True, I had not as yet developed the disabling compulsions he had, but I didn't doubt that I was a high risk for one or two. Actually now I wish I had called M., since he has been the only one who has truly understood and sympathized with my experience in the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum. But at the time I could only believe it was better to keep my distance from M. for a while, lest before we knew it we'd begin to feed and shape each other's manias.
         Of course, I considered calling M.'s brother, D., who was after all like a brother to me too, or any of my other old friends scattered across the country, but although they all had on numerous occasions made it clear to me that I should not hesitate to call at precisely times such as this, I didn't feel I could stand interjecting my misery into their happy Saturdays. I thought too of calling my real brother or else my sister, but as our parents had spent a great deal of their marriage ignoring their problems, we were rather uncomfortable talking to one another about ours. I'd invariably allow myself to become terse when they couldn't give me what I wanted, even angry. Besides, I'd come to despise that moment at the close of any telephone call when the tiny voice at the other end clicked away into the unreachable past, the dead receiver echoed in its cradle, and once more I was enveloped in dark, oppressive silence.
         In short, I was exhausted, drained from the intense effort I was putting into every single day, every hour. Now I wanted more than anything for something to come to me, for someone to tell me what to do. For a while I even convinced myself that precisely that would happen, that at any moment I'd hear a ring or else a knock at my door, simply because I so wished it. I sat down in the chair and waited, and waited; the caller, the visitor, was just now dialing, was walking up the steps, and here they were . . . "Now," I said aloud, "N-N-Now!"
         I played this game for the better part of an hour, each time actually picturing the individual who was coming to rescue me from these depths, often someone I'd never seen before, offering me a whole new world to explore, a new life. The postman with his bag of special deliveries, the political canvasser, the woman upstairs with her broken thermostat, the wrong number who by total chance had lived across the street from me that summer seven years ago, and who had watched with great interest from her attic room window as I sat on the porch steps piecing together "that poor broken woman with the dark circles" (Elizabeth! So it wasn't a dream then? It did happen the way I remembered it!)--none of them came when called, but that hardly discouraged me; in fact, it wasn't long before I'd systematized the game. Once I'd conceived my savior I gave him or her precisely seven minutes to make themselves known, and while the clock ticked down to that moment of transformation, I imagined exactly what I'd say, and what they'd say, and what future meetings would hold, pleasant or not. Every now and then the picture would get hazy, or else simply complete, and there was nothing to do but wait out the last fifty seconds or so; and then suddenly Victor would let loose a shriek, and into the breach would wander that procession of choirboys with their dreamy chant. Each time I repeated in vain my previous attempts at identifying the boys, if only to dismiss them more quickly--I didn't want them blocking the way when my visitor arrived--but then all at once they themselves tripped the wire, and all was light and revelation.
         They were from a film after all, The Lord of the Flies, which I'd seen a portion of many months before on one of those long nights my wife's absences had begun to seem suspicious. The book I'd read in early adolescence, just after my pious phase during which I was secretly preparing myself for the priesthood: kneeling in that cavernous church in the dim blue dawn, even on Saturdays, alone except for the dozen or so old, worn sufferers and penitents scattered in the shadows; clutching my red missal and fingering my beads, clenching my teeth and thinking hard to myself as the bell was ringing, "There it is, right there, the Body and Blood!" Perhaps the book put an end to that era, scared me off with all that "savagery within." Remember that awful business? Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Poor Piggy, he didn't have a chance. No, it was better not to be thrilled with blood, but then what else was there, I wondered way back then and often since, except the bland world that seemed so drained of it?
         Anyway, although recognizing the source of the procession hardly rescued me from my present despair, for me there's always something somewhat satisfying, if not sedative, about making pieces fit, any pieces. Suddenly I felt extremely tired and without a single other thought about my mystery callers or visitors, I dropped off into a dead sleep right there in the chair.
         Now, I'm not at all fond of afternoon naps; for me they're always fitful and usually haunted by the most disturbing dreams. I hate the feeling of waking in total darkness, terribly disoriented and often twice as weary as I was before. This is especially so if the nap is suddenly interrupted as it was that day by the ringing phone. I scrambled, or rather was lifted, out of my bed (at some point I must have drifted there from the chair like a ghost), not at all aware of who I was or where, thinking only "Disaster" and then "Catastrophe" and then "What, what, what?!" until finally I answered it and heard the soft, gentle voice of my wife Elizabeth at the other end.
         She wanted to see me right away; she had something important to tell me, or to show me, something she knew I'd like. I paused, allowing that warm sound to fill my chest cavity, the old familiar tone. Of course, I breathed at last, of course I'd meet her wherever she liked. She gave me an address, then I hung up the phone, and instead of the usual awful silence I heard a gentle buzzing, a rising murmur, throughout my apartment. It's over, I thought; she's coming back! And the place erupted in cheers.
         "We're alive! We're alive!" they shouted, the potholders and the pillows, the envelopes and erasers. I spread my arms wide as though to embrace them all. I put on my coat and was just about to leave when I was called back by the toaster, who unlike other toasters was sort of plump and slow, and not really all that good at toasting, but lovable in his simple way. "What is it?" I said, but he'd forgotten, and everyone laughed, and I smiled and took a few steps toward the door, and then oh yeah: "Go get 'em, Cal!" Moved, I tapped him on his broad shoulder, said I couldn't have done it without him, and get ready to toast his brains out. Everyone laughed again and cheered. I waved and hurried out the door.
         I was delirious, I couldn't believe what was happening. I barely remember riding the train downtown. Before I knew it I was looking up and down Brian Street for "a dark alley that veined in from the right side."
         You should know right away that the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum was not really a basement at all; that is, there were no upper floors to the museum. Oh, there were stairs all right, hundreds of them, but the museum itself was all basement. Do you follow me? I don't suppose you do. I scarcely understand the place, though I spent hours there--the most terrifying hours of my life. It all began happily enough. My wife and I had always enjoyed museums, especially those secret exhibitions I mentioned earlier, and we were elated to have stumbled upon this one, happy to stroll into it arm in arm, celebrating our reunion. Oh, there was no need to say anything, no need to make it official with an apology; my Elizabeth was back, and all was forgiven.

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