Psychology and Other Stories Read online

  PSYCHOLOGY AND OTHER STORIES

  C.P. Boyko

  Psychology and Other Stories

  BIBLIOASIS

  Copyright © C.P. Boyko, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Boyko, C.P.

  Psychology and other stories / C.P. Boyko

  Short Stories.

  ISBN 978-1-926845-51-7

  I. Title.

  PS8603.O9962P79 2012 C813’.6 C2012-901701-9

  Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  The author would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, which provided financial assistance during the writing of this book.

  What we can call by no better name but accident or idiosyncrasy certainly plays a great part in all our neural and mental processes, especially the higher ones. We can never seek amongst these processes for results which shall be invariable. Exceptions remain to every empirical law of our mental life, and can only be treated as so many individual aberrations.

  William James

  Contents

  Part I

  Reaction-Formation

  Part II

  Eat the Rich and Shit the Poor

  Part III

  Paddling an Iceberg

  Part IV

  Signal to Noise

  Part V

  The Inner Life

  Part VI

  The Blood-Brain Barrier

  Notes on Sources

  for Richard Linklater for Robin, Glen, and Hank, three friends I made in the psychology department and for Hubert T. Ross, my therapist

  PART I

  REACTION-FORMATION

  At first this struck me as ridiculous. But nevertheless, like all the rest, it had to be carefully analyzed. When I came to look at it more closely it seemed to have some sort of meaning after all.

  Freud

  “I HAD A DREAM LAST NIGHT,” said the doctor at last, then lapsed again into pointed silence.

  Archie shifted uneasily on the couch. “Oh?”

  “Yes. I dreamt that I had to go somewhere, somewhere far away from where I felt safe and comfortable and appreciated, and after a long and arduous journey I arrived at the designated place only to discover that the person I was supposed to be meeting … was there waiting for me. It was very gratifying, and I did not feel at all foolish or maltreated.”

  “I’m sorry I was late,” said Archie for the second time.

  “No,” corrected Dr. Pringle. “You’re not. If you were sorry to be late you would not be late.”

  “I guess that’s true.” He had hoped the session would not go this way. “I guess I must be resisting something?”

  This mollified Pringle, to Archie’s relief. His question could just as easily have prompted another of the doctor’s transparent wish-fulfillment dreams: one in which, for example, he, the doctor, was skillfully digging a hole or erecting a wall or something without any clumsy oaf coming along to take the shovel or the trowel out of his hands.

  “I don’t have to tell you that you’re only harming yourself,” said Pringle. “You need all the time I can give you. You know that I see most of my patients three times a week. And they haven’t half the complexes you have.”

  “What about the Gerbil Man?,” Archie asked, using Dr. Pringle’s code name for his prize patient—a fellow psychoanalyst who believed that invisible rodents were nibbling on him at the most inopportune times.

  “As a matter of fact,” said the doctor with strained modesty, “I’ve made rather something of a breakthrough with him.”

  Archie let the doctor talk; he had no choice. Most days he was quite content to have Pringle go on about his other patients: it took some of the heat of scrutiny off himself, and occasionally some of what the doctor said was actually interesting. Today, however, Archie felt strangely anxious to speak. He was, he realized, happy.

  Archie extended his legs, careful not to appear restless. He was, for once, thankful for the more traditional arrangement of the furniture in this office, which Pringle borrowed from a local colleague for this one hour each week. In Pringle’s own office upstate, the couch faced his desk and consequently one had to take care to look interested or attentive when he talked about his colleagues or his other patients. The doctor did not return this courtesy when Archie talked about his own life, preferring to stare out the window or make notes or mutter to himself. Once, waving Archie on, he had even taken a phone call. Apparently, Dr. Pringle did not think that it was important that he see his client, but that his client see him. “It aids the transference,” he had once said. So, to compensate for the unfavorable position of his colleague’s couch, instead of simply turning it around, Pringle brought with him a framed photograph of himself, which he hung on the wall opposite Archie at the start of every session and removed at the end. In the picture the doctor looked startled, as if the photographer had snapped it without first explaining to him what photography was.

  “And this,” Pringle was saying, “is exactly what one would expect to find in a subject with such a perfect manifestation of castration anxiety produced by an affection-withholding mother and an emotionally absent father.”

  As something seemed to be expected of him, Archie said, with as much thoughtfulness as he could cram into two syllables, “I … see.”

  “I fully expect to be able to write the case up now in another six months or so.”

  “That’s … smashing.”

  “But enough about him,” said Pringle with sudden violence. “Why are you resisting treatment?”

  Archie supposed he did arrive late rather often. Most of the time this was just good sense: the doctor himself was almost never punctual. But perhaps this was, after all, only an excuse. There always remained the remote possibility that, like today, the doctor would be on time; and if he, Archie, nevertheless insisted on coming late, thereby risking Pringle’s bitter inquest into his deeper motives, he really must be resisting some facet of what Pringle called the treatment.

  He said honestly, “I don’t know.”

  Dr. Pringle barked with laughter. “Of course you don’t. That’s what I’m here for. Well,” he sighed. “Tell me about your week.” A glottal film of detachment entered the doctor’s voice.

  Archie took a quavering breath and said, “Well, you know, it’s silly but I think I’ve finally …” Not wanting to say something as puerile as “made a friend,” he finished: “finally met someone.” But this, he realized with embarrassment, made it sound like he’d met a girl, a potential lover.

  “Ah ah ah,” said the doctor. “Dreams first.”

  Archie hated Parcliffe at first. Everything was different here.

  At Templeton the boarders had outnumbered the day boys by three to one; here, because the nearby town was so much larger, the ratio was inverted, and consequently it was the boarders, not the day boys, who were the second-class citizens. At Templeton, poverty had been disgraceful; here at Parcliffe, for some reason, it was chic. Even the masters dressed shabbily and let their hair grow long, like refugees or filthy beatniks. Here at Parcliffe there were no tennis courts, no swi
mming pools, and no one played chess. At Parcliffe, instead of a semiprivate room, tenth formers were stuck in dorms; so, instead of the one roommate that his age and status should have entitled him to, Archie had three. And all three were asinine simpletons.

  In fact, as Archie told his mother on the phone one week, all the boys at Parcliffe were either stupid or stuck-up. He tried to say this in the same lightly bitchy tone that she and her friends used when complaining about their exes, their analysts, or the filthy beatniks that had moved in next door. But he must have done it wrong.

  “Darling, is it really so horrible as all that? Have I done perfectly the wrong thing?”

  This should have been his cue to say something stoical, but her sympathy unmanned him. He held his eyes open, so the tears would evaporate.

  Parcliffe Academy had been modeled on the English public school, but without any slavish adherence to verisimilitude. Little was known about Henry Parcliff, its founder. There was the rumor that, prior to the more lucrative inception of academies, he had made his living dowsing for water, coal, and gold with a forked stick. Aside from this, one fact could be inferred about Parcliff: he had never been within miles of an English public school. The school that took his name had probably been fashioned from what he remembered of a few English memoirs or Bildungsromans read in his youth. His intent, no doubt, had been to suggest the chilly, aristocratic (and expensive) atmosphere of those schools, but with as few strokes (and at as little cost) as possible. He must have found that the easiest way to do this was to give things impressively English-sounding names. Thus, Parcliff’s school was christened Parcliffe Academy; its teachers were called Masters; its dormitory residences were called Houses; teacher’s pets were called Prefects; grades were called forms; final exams were called A-levels; French was called Latin; and baseball was called cricket.

  This scheme allowed the boys’ parents to say to their friends things like, “My Arthur has just scored a beta-alpha on his Tenth-Form A-levels,” which sounded more lovely to their ears than its American translation (“My boy just passed grade ten with a B average”). They could also say that their boys “up at” Parcliffe were on the rowing team and in the First Eleven at cricket. This, indeed, was a privilege bestowed upon every parent—included, as it were, in the price of tuition—because participation in both these impressively English-sounding sports was mandatory; and, by the same sort of linguistic legerdemain that made every hall monitor a house prefect, every cricket team was called a First Eleven.

  Cricket, indeed, was a perfect example on a small scale of the school’s philosophy of style over substance, or nomenclature over reality. The cricket played at Parcliffe (unbeknownst to any of the boys who played it there) bore only the most superficial resemblance to the bona fide article. It was nearer to baseball than perhaps any other sport, but it was not very much like baseball. The returning boys knew the rules, or claimed to (though it soon became clear that there was as much scope here for interpretation as in biblical exegesis); the new boys were put in the harmless outfield positions and assured that they would “pick it up.”

  Archie, who at Templeton had been excused from all team sports as a conscientious objector to their symbolic bellicosity, watched the game closely at first—demonstrating his active interest in the proceedings by hunkering down into a limber half-crouch; occasionally slapping his hands together with rugged alacrity, like a lumberjack preparing to climb a tree; calling out scrupulously generic encouragement to his teammates; and expressing his chagrin, when the opposing First Eleven stole a wicket or scored a base, in the catchphrase then popular at Parcliffe: “Suck my cock,” or simply, “My cock.” Like a scientist working in the best Baconian tradition, he began by merely collecting data, without presumption; but soon this approach yielded, under a prolonged barrage of bewilderment, to wild conjecture. Desperately he tried to impose upon the scene of intermittent bedlam before him some underlying logic or rationale, some hypothesis that could guide his behavior or at least streamline his options should the ball come near enough to him and to no other player that he was forced to interact with it. But when this did not happen and continued to not happen, he found himself unequal to the effort of sustained attention. His mind began to wander.

  Freykynd the Elvin Warrior, who wielded his dagger like a sword, observed from a safe remove the goblins performing their strange and barbarous rituals …

  At Templeton in the dorm they had played a sort of game after lights out. Perhaps, he thought, it originated in a reflexive flouting of authority: to go to sleep when they were told to would be to surrender a portion of their priceless autonomy. So, instead of sleeping, they talked. It didn’t matter what one said, as long as one made one’s voice, the voice of revolt, heard. (On second thought, perhaps the game had even deeper roots in a simple fear of the dark?)

  As the game and the night progressed, the boys’ eloquence waned, and words deteriorated into mere noise—grunts, animal calls, belches. The goal, at least as Archie saw it, was to be one of the last to make a sound—but not the last, because if no one replied you never knew whether your witticism (or sound effect) had been deemed unworthy of reply or whether you were the only one still awake. The best outcome, the clearest victory, was to say something, ideally after several minutes of silence, and be greeted with a chorus of groans, laughs, or weary and defeated shut UP alreadys. Then at last you could sleep, secure in the salience of your individuality.

  They did not know this game at Parcliffe. One night, five minutes after lights out, Archie moistened his lips, raised his hands to his face, and blew a great sloppy mouth-fart into his palms. He held his breath, trembling with mirth, in the absolute silence that followed. When the silence continued, the twitching worm of suppressed hilarity in his guts became a twitching worm of apprehension. Why was no one saying anything? They couldn’t be asleep, surely, not all of them, not already! The only explanation was that they did not think it was funny. Well, it wasn’t meant to be brilliant—only an opening move, something to get the game started, like pawn to king four.

  He pretended to be asleep, praying that no one had traced the sound to its origin. He lay there on his bunk, stiff with shame and loathing, for an hour before the dense, rotating knot of his thoughts finally began to break up and fly apart. He was given a moment’s respite in which he was almost no one and nowhere; then his eyelids became transparent and the nightmares began.

  He sat in the crowded dining hall, eyes on his book, and listened disdainfully, despite himself, to the stupid boys around him telling jokes.

  “What’s the difference between Master Perkins and a rock?”

  “I’ll buy.”

  “Perkins smells like shit.”

  “How can you tell Fatty Roberts from a bouquet of roses?”

  “How.”

  “Fatty Roberts sucks your cock.”

  “Oh, hey, um, hello?”

  Archie looked up. He recognized the boys who stood over him as Ambrose Tench and somebody Greaves from the Ninth Form—a year below him. (Tench, with his slouching posture and close-set eyes, Archie had already transported into the Kingdom of Yllisee as a minor character, Harpnox the Man-Bear, a dim-witted shopkeeper whose every line of dialogue was “snuffled.”) Like everyone else at Pervcliffe, these two did not, apparently, know his name. He felt a pang of refreshingly pure hatred.

  “Yes?”

  “You are a catamite, aren’t you?”

  Though he did not recognize the word—that was the point—he did recognize the game. He and Lyle had played it at Templeton. The idea was to find some scurrilous word in the dictionary, then try to get other boys to admit that they were, for instance, steatopygous coprophiliacs or anencephalic monorchids or whatever it might be. The trick was to pose the question casually, as if only seeking confirmation of some humdrum, well-known fact.

  “Oh, you know, I used to be,” he said, “but then your bloody union fees just got out of hand.”

  The boys stared at him, face
s slack as masks. “Yes, well, uh, all right …” They giggled uncertainly and moved off in search of their next victim.

  “Clever clever,” said a voice Archie recognized.

  He was brought out of his reverie by some commotion. Instantly he was overwhelmed by the dread, so familiar to him from his nightmares, that some specific but mysterious action was required of him, and that if he flubbed it he would be exposed before everyone as the fraudulent and altogether inadequate specimen that he was.

  He looked up; there was the ball; he ran to meet it.

  It seemed he would never reach it. His legs were heavy and uncooperative, as if he were running through some invisible fluid—

  As he climbed to his feet, dazed and ashamed, the ball landed, with a prim pat-pat, on the turf a few feet away. It had not, after all, been his moment. He had run clear across the field and collided with Mawthorn who, with his eyes on the ball that was rightfully his, had not seen Archie coming.

  He began to help the other boy up, but dropped him like a leper when his teammates’ screams revealed to him that the ball was still in play! He lunged at it with simian abandon, snatched it up with both hands, drew back his arm and … Where? Where to throw it? The boys were all shouting at him but he was far beyond the reach of human language.

  He hesitated for only a moment. His arm knew what to do, if he did not. He fired the ball, as hard as he could, at the bobbing, unhelmeted head of the running batsman.

  He had time to admire his throw—its speed, its precision, the geometrical perfection of its arc, like the illustration in a physics textbook—before a twinge of disquiet tugged at his guts.

  Luckily, his arm had not taken into account the fact that its target was moving. The ball missed the oblivious batsman’s head by several inches, but came close enough that the infielder who had been running to catch it felt obliged to shout at the batsman to duck. The ball swooped to earth and rolled gracefully out of bounds. The opposing First Eleven had time to capture four more bases and break seven more wickets before it was retrieved.