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Fiction from Web del SolIn the Basement of the Psychoanalysis MuseumPatrick Keppel
Continued
We were greeted in pitch darkness by a tall, thin woman in a stiff, midnight blue suit--our guide whether we wanted one or not, a performance artist, I imagined; in fact, a faint white and bluish light shone down on her, and on my wife and me as well, so that it seemed as though we were all standing on a stage. Her black hair was tied back in a tight bun, so that she was mostly a face, a glossy blue mask with intense dark eyes and high sharp cheekbones. She stood very rigidly erect and spoke in a very formal if soft tone, more like a scientist or a doctor than a tour guide. Understandably overwhelmed by the strangeness of the scene, I didn't catch what she said at first, then gathered she'd already begun explaining the first exhibit. ". . . So that at times one is prevented from performing the simplest acts," she concluded matter-of-factly and gestured with her palm to our right. The room was pitch black, but at her sign there was a faint hum of electricity, and a hazy cone of eerie reddish and bluish lights shone down from somewhere. There seemed nothing there at first, but soon our eyes adjusted, and we could see certain familiar objects slowly materializing, as through a purple gauze. It was a bathroom, or a portion of one--a narrow, milkwhite sink with an unusually complex network of silver pipes curling beneath like thick vines to a chessboard tile floor, and a small, cracked mirror hanging slightly askew just above. The faucet was on full, and I could faintly hear and see a steady stream of white water; in fact, the more I watched the more I felt I could feel the water, flowing warm and soft over my hands. This was my first indication of the unique powers of the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum, but I barely had time to acknowledge what was happening before the first performance/exhibit began.
A man, more haze than flesh, emerged out of the darkness and approached the sink. Weary from labor, he obviously wanted to wash his hands, which were quite large (and rough, I imagined). However, just as he was about to place his hands in the soothing stream, he saw something in it, some reddish white mass spinning slowly around and around as though on a spit. He stood back aghast, transfixed. After a few moments he considered trying again, but every time he made the slightest motion toward the sink, the mass (a hologram, I believe) seemed to intensify, becoming redder and if possible more animal than before, its turning ribs more distinct. Then a woman remarkably similar in looks and bearing to our tour guide approached from behind, clearly interested in using the sink as well. She waited behind the man for a moment, never letting on she was there, but then finally, seeing the man was having such a hard time, she grew impatient and disgusted and turned away into the darkness. The man stood there frozen, mesmerized, no longer even trying to wash; and so the first performance ended, evaporated, faded to black.
The spell broken, my mouth fell open. I was stunned, impressed. I glanced at my wife, who was grinning broadly. She must have felt it too, the strange power of the performance, which made us feel wholly sympathetic with the man, not in the way people normally toss out the word, but in its strictest sense; we were completely as one with him in his plight, our consciousnesses merged, his terror ours. Who was this actor? I thought, I must get his name. Then the tour guide extended her palm again indicating the way to the next exhibit, which I could just barely see hovering like a patch of fog in the far corner. We slowly made our way over, and out of the white mist emerged a little grove of seven tall poles, on each of which was impaled a full set of teeth.
"Sometimes when people are under great stress their teeth fall out," our guide explained with jarring disinterest. We stood there looking at the display, waiting, but this time no actors emerged into the spotlight. Soon it was clear that there wouldn't be any performance this time, and my wife and I turned to one another and smiled. Well, it was clever and interesting, we were thinking, more of what one would expect from a place like this, but what a letdown after the previous exhibit. Perhaps a little too quickly we turned and nodded to our guide to show we were ready to move on. For an instant I thought I saw her come out of her character when the faintest trace of a smile played at the edge of her lips--evidently she too knew it was a weak exhibit--but at once she recovered her professional sheen, turned silently on her heel, and led us further on into the darkness.
Now, it's quite possible that some of you have perceived the trap I was falling into at precisely this moment. Lulled to sleep, my defenses down, I must have seemed easy prey to the museum's depraved proprietors. I should have suspected something the moment I noticed how long the walk to the next exhibit was taking, as well as how increasingly dark it was getting all around us. But instead I did precisely as they'd no doubt designed; I turned inward and thought about the previous exhibits, especially the latter, which in my mind at least had sparked an unfortunate connection.
When I first met Elizabeth seven years ago at the Architecture Institute, she was in a deplorable state. An abusive father and several neurotic lovers had led her at twenty-one right to the brink of a debilitating despair. She could barely sleep, much less assume a passable role in the waking world, which in general is quick, even anxious, to sweep aside those who cannot pretend they are having an easy time in it. How strange it was, then, wandering there alone on the frazzled outskirts of the well-ordered, self-policed city of rational men and women, to find she had attracted me, a more or less healthy, straightforward young man. It was a dream, it was too good to be true. I was kind, thoughtful, patient (her own description), but not blandly so; I knew how to pass in the careless, blind world, yet I had never forsaken my childhood passion to see beneath its surface, to know life in all its complexities, to crack its hidden code. We fell in love at once, but naturally for a while she resisted my attentions, until at last one raw February night a light flashed in her head, and she understood I was her only hope.
Within a week she'd asked me to move in with her, and I did so at once, carrying in with my toaster sincere promises that I'd take care of her, that I'd see her into the world until in time she felt comfortable enough to perform in it herself. She warned me that this was a gigantic task; she would be a lot of trouble, and after all that she might never get there fully. But I said I didn't care, that really I could see no better way to spend the present. Besides, she might be surprised to see how well I could do the job; in many ways I felt as though I had been born for it. She seemed elated with the declaration, if still somewhat skeptical, so at once I threw myself into the project with all my energy. I got her up in the morning (no small feat), walked her to the Institute, right up to her classroom door, then collected her there at night. After dinner I made sure she began her designs ahead of schedule. Oh, she was good at her work, everyone knew it, far more talented and ambitious than I was; in fact, watching her work made me realize something I'd suspected all along, that in the end I would have to be content merely to do the groundwork for someone else's plans, check their calculations and measurements, though of course these lowly tasks too are important in bringing any conception to reality. But I didn't envy her her success, not in the slightest. To the contrary I delighted in the prospect of being that invisible hand pushing her gently toward her inevitable and well-deserved fame.
In the meantime I chased off bill collectors, returned her library books, changed her oil. In short, I gave her life a structure, a benign order, it had never known. This is not to suggest we did not feel intense passion for one another, of course we did; in fact, some people felt it was just the opposite, that we were all passion and nothing more. We even had to learn not to let it spill over too much in public so as not to cause some repressed individual to sigh enviously, "Oh, it'll fade." But most people, I've found, cannot keep two ideas in their head at once. Our bodies and minds were in perfect sync, our relationship a self-reflexive operation: Without passion we could never have sustained our desire to complete the arduous labor on the mundane foundation of our relationship, and without this foundation we could never have built that fantastic structure, that constantly shifting, ever expanding dreamhouse in which we ecstatically dwelt for seven years.
True, at times early on Elizabeth simply couldn't believe the floor beneath her could be so solid and to test its resilience would lapse hard into fits of extreme depression. After a dose of my relentless care and attention, however, she would always revive, and with a swiftness that often surprised even me. Then in the middle of our first summer, one of these fits lasted an unusually long time, almost two whole weeks. One steamy night in July she woke up in a pale terror, tears streaming down her face. She'd had an awful nightmare; she was sitting in a restaurant when suddenly her teeth began falling out four and five at a time. In a panic she rushed to the ladies' room, where a woman who seemed to know instantly recognized the symptoms and dispassionately informed her she had "dyspnea." The woman said no more, but my wife knew that the condition was incurable, that when you were out of teeth, you were out of time. There was nothing she could do except to keep her mouth closed as much as possible in order to prevent the remaining teeth from loosening.
Well, I managed to calm her down, and the next day we laughed some about the dream. Dyspnea! We both thought it was one of those nonsense words our dreams piece together out of fragments, a grotesque distortion like a minotaur, until on a whim we decided to check the dictionary and to our surprise found it there whole, a real element of our waking language; it named a kind of breathlessness, as I recall, a symptom of hysteria. We spoke no more about the dream, but by evening Elizabeth seemed even more agitated, pensive, and self-absorbed than before. When after a few days all my usual methods of reviving her failed to take hold, even I began to doubt that I could really help her. But then she missed a period, and after a visit to the clinic we had our explanation. Elizabeth was relieved to have this biological excuse for her anxiety, we both were; she'd really feared she was cracking up for good this time. Of course, having the baby was out of the question. Our twin stars were just then piercing the evening sky; neither of us could abide having them eclipsed even temporarily. The jarring effects of the abortion lingered for days, but I did what I could, brought her flowers and tea, read her Anna Karenina in seventeen different voices, and vowed never to let her suffer again. Two weeks later, hours after our bodies had melted to sleep in joyful reunion, she woke me up and whispered we should get married.
Was I dreaming? No. Brimming with pure joy I leapt out of bed and to Elizabeth's immense delight ran ecstatically around the apartment, turning on all the lights, waking up the spoons and forks, the umbrella and the broom, shouting them the good news and accepting their various congratulations, their first words ("It's about time!" said the clock, an understandably impatient sort). And thus were they all welcomed to life, to our blossoming world in which even the least among them was beloved.
So, yes, it was a difficult time, but a good time too, a time of celebration--at least that's how I see it and always will until I die, no matter what my wife says or does to distort it. Oh, never try to save a marriage by asking for explanations; just take your memories and go. It's unbearable to see your history, even its most basic facts, twisted and reshaped like soft clay in order to plug the gaping holes in some monstrous present delusion. For now my Elizabeth contends she never did love me with a passion, neither then nor even now, not really, not with her whole being. She says she saw early on that despite her sincere desire to believe in them, all my benevolent "structures" cast more of a spell on me than on her. For instance, as she "remembers" it, she never even really asked me to move in with her in the first place (!); somehow I had just assumed that this was the obvious first step in "my project." Her pregnancy was thus particularly painful for her--was I so blind that I couldn't see how miserably I'd failed her? And yet there I was, promising still more! But after all that was over, she decided what the hell, it wasn't so bad; in fact, the constant attention was rather nice at times, and I wasn't a fool. Maybe our life together would lack the passion, the magical, mysterious connection she'd always dreamed of, but it was sweet. And wasn't that what mature people did after all, give up their dreams? To her surprise, there were times during the next seven years when she came very close to loving me in this ideal way, but she insists it never really happened.
Then the very month her first building was going up downtown--the event that should have been the crowning achievement of our mutual project--Elizabeth let these old doubts creep in and suck the life out of our glad, spirited world overnight. Almost immediately--what a coincidence--she happened upon that great mythological being who she felt spoke "the wordless interior language" she'd always longed to hear. It didn't matter if he really was a con-man, as everyone including her sometimes thought; he was the "truth," she said, and that was that. As for our world, of course she appreciated it; it was wonderful and charming, a marvelous, complex creation, but it just wasn't enough. It was a living thing, almost a child, but it wasn't really hers. . . .
Anyway, during the past few months I'd played this fiction over in my head so many times that I'd almost started to believe it myself. It was a nightmare that plagued me night and day--the whole last seven years a lie, a cruel joke, a mistake! No wonder then that there in the darkness between exhibits in the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum I became so haunted by doubt. Could it really be that it was all over now? Had my wife really come to her senses and taken it all back? I stole a glance out of the corner of my eye to see if the staked teeth had triggered the same association in Elizabeth's mind (they must have!), but by now the darkness was so impenetrable I could see neither her nor our guide. Nervously I reached out my hand to find Elizabeth's but grasped only cold damp air. "Elizabeth," I whispered, but received no answer. "Wait, where are you two?" I laughed out loud, then added weakly, "Hello?"
Silence, not even the hum of electricity. I cursed under my breath. I've always hated to be lost under any circumstances, but what with my pangs of doubt, I felt doubly anxious. I knew that once I'd found them we'd all have a little laugh over it at my expense, then suspected that this was happening by design, part of the "experience" as these people like to say. Well, I was in no mood for a funhouse; I had a serious matter to discuss with my wife. I took a few faltering steps in the dark and recalled the queasy feeling I used to have all of a sudden when my older brother would give some secret signal to his friends and at once they'd all scatter in different directions; it wasn't a game with rules, not "hide-and-seek," but simple childish cruelty, "Ditch Cal" period. But Elizabeth would never. . .
In short, I began to panic. May I remind you it was pitch black in there? I retraced my steps as best I could, very steadily at first, fearing that at any second I'd bump into something or fall down some stairs, which I'm sure the museum's sadistic proprietors would have found very amusing from wherever they were watching. But after a while I grew desperate and just started to run headlong into the black, every once in a while calling out my wife's name and "I'm over here!"
I ran like mad for what seemed an eternity, then all at once, as though I'd emerged out of a bank of black fog, the darkness just ended, and I found myself in a large room which was empty except for three rows of long tables. Though the place was but dimly lit, I could tell it was a cafeteria, probably in the basement of an old elementary school, because for a moment I felt the porous cement walls and dirty tile floor resounding with the clamor of childish voices they'd absorbed over the years. It was the kind of place under normal circumstances I could have remained for some time, blurring my eyes and imagining I was really back there in those old days long buried. And I believe for a split second I did feel compelled to find my usual table, sit down in the now far too small chair and watch other tiny familiar spirits materialize; peek through the crack into the teacher's lounge where both beloved and feared sat as though undressed in a cloud of cigarette smoke, dreading the next piercing bell; or crouch in the dark corner where they herded us during tornado warnings, the black winds howling outside. . . .
But I shook it off. This was no time for idle retrospection; I had to find the museum's exit, where no doubt my wife was already waiting, perhaps impatiently. I hurried instinctively to the far right corner and to my immense delight--what a discovery that all cafeterias were the same!--immediately came upon the stairs.
I ran up them three at a time, breathing heavily, Get out of the basement, Get out of the basement, but at the top of them stopped dead in amazement. What a jarring contrast! Suddenly I found myself at the edge of a huge, lavish hotel lobby or department store, crowded with busy well-dressed people and divided in the center by a silver and glass escalator. I shook my head in disbelief and was even somewhat amused by it all, ready to forgive and even praise the museum's proprietors; their basement was after all a clever social comment, a haunting reminder of the desperate dissatisfaction this cheery, careless buying and selling tries (and inevitably fails) to screen.
Oh, if it had only been that! Because just as I was about to step into this lobby, I saw them, that hideous couple descending slowly, very slowly down the escalator. They stood out in the crowd in their dirty ill-fitting clothes, the man tall and skeletal with long, thinning, dirty blond hair, the woman short and dumpy with a head of matted, greyish black curls. Their blotched red faces were hard and mean, but when they saw me their eyes lit up with recognition and disgust. They bared their stained, crooked teeth and whispered to one another conspiratorially, descending, descending, never once taking their eyes off me. I stood frozen in horror until at last they reached the bottom of the escalator and separated, the woman creeping with purpose off to the right, the man taking long strides right toward me, bent on tearing me to pieces.
Now, I realize that at this point my story strains credibility--how could I possibly have believed that what was going on was not just a tasteless trick, albeit a remarkably complex one? I assure you I've considered this very question countless times ever since, and the only answer I can make is that one should never underestimate the obsessive craft of artists and psychiatrists; they among all people will never give up until they have thought of everything, until they have closed up every exit by which you might escape their experimental worlds. Individually they are bad enough; together they are simply demonic. For instance, only later did it occur to me that what was so mesmerizing about the couple on the escalator was that they were such grotesque doubles of my wife and me--about a dozen hard years older, cynical, manipulative, stripped of the gloss of our education and careful manner, but unmistakably us nonetheless. Only a very skilled performance artist could observe a person for just ten minutes and then execute a distortion of his character which the subject could recognize only from very deep within. Further, I'm no psychobiologist (though I have since read extensively on the subject), but I suspect the use of some hallucinogen, some invisible gas in the air which takes effect some time after they've begun to show you their collection of "exhibits," which they know from exhaustive testing will strike at least one dissonant chord in every man and woman. Whatever the reasons, at this point in my nightmarish experience I was totally incapable of even considering what was real and what was a product of my blasted open imagination. I'd even forgotten about finding my wife (more on her possible complicity in all this later; after all she too must not be underestimated). I only knew then that I was being hunted and that I had to run for my life.
I flew down the stairs and through the cafeteria until I came to what I supposed to be the door of the teacher's lounge. Inside a handful of smartly dressed people were milling about, discussing something in low, serious tones. When they didn't seem to notice me standing there breathlessly, I did feel some relief that somehow I'd stumbled upon the museum's exit, but at that point I could hardly be sure. Then I noticed another door slightly ajar to the right, and to my surprise and elation spotted my friend M. sitting by himself in a small, littered classroom. I went over and tapped him lightly on the shoulder. He looked up with bleary eyes--they had him loaded up with anti-depressants again--then finally recognized me and smiled faintly. Evidently the Weber doctors had brought their boarders on a little field trip to the Basement of the Psychoanalysis Museum, and now M. was filling out some questionnaire about his experience there (What were you thinking when the lights went out? etc.). I glanced over my shoulder at the men and women buried deep in their sober discussions and shuddered. "Let's get out of here," I said through my teeth. M. looked at me quizzically, blearily; under medication it was very hard for him to process and respond to any information, much less a request as wild as this. I started to blurt out that someone was trying to kill me, but then stopped. M. had struggled very hard to trust his various therapists; it might be too much of a jolt for him to hear that they were careless people, if not downright diabolical. "It's all right," I went on, struggling to sound calm, "just tell them you went with me."