Burning Time (2 page)

“Want to go for a ride?” He indicated the machine parked behind him with a wave of his hand.

She tossed her blond hair and looked him over as if she might really be considering it. Finally she said, “Sure, why not?” and followed him to the motorcycle.

She didn’t become uneasy even when the ride took her way east into the dry mountainous area of the North Country. She wasn’t frightened when he stopped far off the road, miles from the last passing car. It wasn’t until he
grabbed her unexpectedly from behind and wrestled her to the ground, pulling at her clothes, that the sharp jolt of adrenaline shot through her. And even then she wasn’t terrified. Boys had jumped on her before, lost control and bullied their way into her. Sometimes a girl gambled and lost. It was an old story.

When he started mumbling and hitting her and shoving himself into places in her body nothing had ever been before, it got to be different. Suddenly he was not like a person anymore. She couldn’t talk to him, or fight back in any way. His face was frozen in rage and every part of him was a weapon. He moved her around, twisting her body one way and then another on the rocky ground, trying new things to make her scream louder, beg him to stop. They were little things at first. Then he broke her arm at the elbow, cracked her ribs, and crushed her cheekbone. He kept at it for a long time.

Finally he staked her to the darkening desert ground, her legs together and her arms out straight like a flattened Christ. Until then she thought she would survive. He had a knife, but he didn’t stab her. All the time he was hitting her he had it with him, sometimes in his hand. He made motions with it, but he didn’t stab her. Now she thought he would do it, make all the cuts he threatened to make. She was so afraid of the knife she could hardly breathe.

Then suddenly he seemed to forget the knife. He started doing something else, getting things, muttering to himself. He lit some kind of torch, and a blast of light shot up into the sky. The explosion of heat and light lasted only seconds. Then the flame was extinguished.

He said something that she didn’t hear because she was screaming so loud. He put his foot on her stomach to stop her bucking, and lowered the glowing brand exactly in the middle of her heaving chest. It made a hissing sound as it
seared her skin off, eating the soft tissue of her breasts in some places all the way to the bone. Her screams and the smell of burning flesh rose all around.

After she lost consciousness, he untied her and left Ellen Roane nude in the gully, as the desert temperature dropped steadily, and her wounds began to weep.

Jason Frank, MD, psychoanalyst, writer, and teacher, stood at the podium for several seconds before speaking. An inch shy of six feet, he looked like a member of the Kennedy clan in his gray pin-striped suit. He had a determined jaw and mouth, straight nose, light brown hair cut short, and wryly humorous brown eyes. He was thirty-eight, and had a forceful intensity that made both the crazy and the sane pay attention to him.

The hundred or so members, trainees, residents, and hangers-on of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Center who had come to hear him speak paid attention to him now.

“Can anybody remember the music in
Death of a Salesman?”
he asked to begin his lecture on Listening. “What instrument is played?”

The attractive Ph.D. who had offered him her apartment and her body within the first five minutes of meeting him the previous night crossed her legs the other way and tapped her pencil on her knee.

“An oboe?” she asked.

Even though there was a smile on her face, the
rat tat
tat
with the sharp point on her expensive pantyhose indicated to Jason she was still annoyed by his rebuff.

He shook his head, as he had last night. He waited for a few other wrong answers before giving the right one.

“The flute. If it had been an accordion you might well remember it. Why the flute?”

Jason allowed the audience to speculate for a few minutes before he made his point. “It’s vital to see and hear everything because everything has meaning,” he told them. “The background details, both visual and aural, of a projected self are like a symphony orchestra playing in a very special concert. As analysts, we have to be able to identify the individual instruments to understand the nature of the harmony, or cacophony, that’s being played out in each personality.” He smiled.

For example, the young Ph.D. courted rejection from a visiting speaker to fuel her paranoia and deep hostility to men. Someone else might only have seen a pretty woman looking for love. But Jason wouldn’t have been tempted anyway. He was more than happy with his beautiful wife.

He sneaked a look at his watch, suddenly eager to get home to her. He became distracted for a moment as a wave of guilt washed over him, then recovered his concentration. He had three hours before he could get out of there and head for the airport.

“Ah, I’m going to present three segments of taped interviews to show how the interviewing technique is informed by what I’ve noticed about each subject. These are consultations. I’ve never met any of the subjects before.”

Jason hit the button and the first interview began. He was seated opposite a youngish heavy woman. The woman fluffed up her hair for the camera and began to tell about her eating problem. She said she wanted to be a size eight
and had tried to lose weight for ten years. Then she gave a list of all the things she ate from eleven at night until one.

“And then what do you do?” Jason asked.

“And then I go into the bathroom and I force myself to vomit.”

In the tape there was a frozen moment as the two looked at each other, and suddenly the woman started to sob.

Jason shut off the tape and went to the blackboard that had been set up for him. He picked up a piece of chalk.

“What are the important things revealed in this interview so far?” Jason asked.

No one volunteered.

“Come on, I absolutely insist. This isn’t school. Get in there and tell me what the important thing is because everyone has patients like this.”

There was a minor shuffling before a hand was raised. Jason nodded.

“She overeats,” a young man said.

“She has bulemia,” a woman added.

Jason wrote,
Overeats, Bulemia
, and turned back. “What sorts of things does she eat? Let’s make a list of what she eats. What does her refrigerator look like?” He made the list.

“All right. What’s another important thing? I want you not only to tell me your observations about the things she mentioned, but also tell me things she hasn’t mentioned that are directly related to the things she has mentioned. That is, your inferences about what her life is like. So what’s the next important thing because we’re going to have to follow up on her.”

“Well, she’s crying,” offered a bearded man in the back.

Jason wrote
Crying
on the board. “Okay, what’s your hypothesis about her crying? Why is she crying?”

Now the answers came more quickly.

“Okay,” Jason said finally. “Let’s put the things together that we know.” He made the hypothesis. The subject was thirty years old, living alone, and desperately lonely. Something happened to her ten years ago that was connected with her eating. She was trying to fill herself up with food. Size eight had a special meaning to her. Other people were important to her because she cried when she made eye contact with him after her confession.

“All right, what should I say to her next?” Jason asked.

Everybody had a different answer. Ask about food, ask about loneliness. Ask about refrigerator.

He turned on the tape. “You’re crying,” he had said to the woman. He opted for feelings. And then her story came out. She was a good candidate for psychotherapy.

Next Jason presented the case of a somewhat untidy and disorganized sixty-five-year-old man who began his interview saying he hated the therapist he was seeing. He felt he wasn’t making any progress. Jason turned off the tape and pointed out that the patient identified his frustration as connected with his therapy, but they should not assume that was really what was bothering him.

“What did he reveal? What should I ask?” He wrote their answers on the board.

Then he turned on the tape. Jason asked the man to tell a little more about his therapy, and the man revealed that the therapist was focusing on what an angry person he was. As the interview progressed, Jason began honing in on the man’s memory. It was soon revealed that his subject was suffering from dementia. He was becoming senile, and that was the reason for his anger. Jason did not blame the therapist for not catching the illness behind his anger, but concluded that this patient could not benefit from psychotherapy.

He had left the third segment for last because it was his favorite. He pushed the button. A male in-patient in his fifties was brought in by an attendant. He was a small man with a lot of graying hair slicked back. He smiled broadly, gesturing frequently with his hands.

“Look at me. I’m in so much fucking trouble, when I go out these days, I have to go with my keeper.” He sat down with a flourish.

“So, what happened to you?” Jason asked him.

“Hallucinations. Hallucinations happened to me.”

“That’s a pretty technical term. What do you mean? Do you hear things?”

“No. It was like I was feeling things, spiders running up and down my body just like in the movies. I had D.T.’s. I don’t have to tell you what that is. Every fucking person knows what D.T.’s are. It was the worst thing. Have you ever been drunk?”

Jason turned off the tape. “Here I have a choice. I can play psychiatrist, but what do you think the guy will think of me if I play psychiatrist? What should I say?”

The audience offered suggestions.

Jason pushed the button and watched himself say: “On occasion I’ve been known to get drunk.”

The audience laughed.

“But you’ve never had D.T.’s. I can tell. One look at you, I sized you up. I can tell from what you’re dressed like. You’re a guy who drinks an occasional social drink. A middle-class guy. You’re a teacher, a shrink. You’re interviewing me here on TV. You must have some clout. I wonder who this film is being shown to anyway—but what difference does it make? I’m so fucked up, I’m in so much trouble I couldn’t give a shit. I had a seizure. The ambulance came.” The man smiled genially, mugging for the camera.

“So that’s your reason for being in the hospital?” Jason said.

“Well, between you and me, Doc, there’s a little more to it. They happened to find a little cocaine on me.” He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “Recreational. Nothing heavy. Nothing like crack. Nothing like that. Recreational.” There was a silence before he went on.

“And—they busted some of the people I was with at the establishment I was frequenting.” Long silence.

“By establishment I was frequenting I bet you want to know what that is. Well, it was a whorehouse. I was in a fucking whorehouse and I had a seizure and the cops came and they busted me and they busted some of the—So now I’m here in a mental hospital. And I’m not responsible for any of this. I’m crazy and I’m not going to get in trouble with the law because—”

The audience erupted into little pockets of laughter. Jason stopped the tape.

“… Well, now we have some interesting questions. The guy’s talking about drugs. He’s talking about prostitution. He says he’s not responsible for his actions. At what point is someone responsible for his actions? Is he crazy?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. The tape came on. The guy was still talking.

“Well, and there was an organization that put money into my business and somehow there were some questions in the minds of the cops about the legality of it all. I myself don’t remember all the details. My memory has been fuzzy ever since I’ve been on the sauce. But the cops. I can tell you what the cops are interested in. They’re interested in the whole concept of crime. Crime. What is crime? If you want my opinion. The Exxon
Valdez
is crime. George Bush is crime.”

“You think George Bush is a criminal?” Jason asked.

“He’s a criminal because he sells dope. He’s got an organization that sells dope for politics, starts wars for oil. These are the criminals. They steal money from the American people, big money. My organization isn’t involved with crimes like that. Nothing like that. A little prostitution maybe. Victimless crimes where people are not hurt personally. A little question of the law.” He spread his hands wide.

“And let me tell you about the law. Ever try and get a cop to help you when you got hurt, when someone broke a law in your neighborhood? You can’t talk to these people. They can’t speak English. They can’t even
type
. I’m not a criminal. The people I’m associated with aren’t criminals. They’re good family men. They care about their wives. They love their kids. And they’re involved with making this country great.” He paused for air.

“I bet you never think about who the real criminals are. Is it the ones who start the wars, steal our money, and ruin the ecology or is it somebody who helps horny men find a way out of their sexual tensions, huh? What’s good anyway? What’s evil?”

Jason switched off the tape for the last time and turned to his audience.

“Okay, what do we have here? This guy is getting us to think about what’s moral, what’s immoral. What’s legal and should be legal. Victimless crimes—what’s psychopathology? He says he’s crazy, but he doesn’t act crazy. He’s a ham. He loves being on the show, being entertaining. He’s uneducated but bright. He liked turning the tables on me, interviewing me. So what’s the story here? Is he immoral? Is he crazy?”

Forty-five minutes later Jason gathered up his things, and pushed out to the icy cold wind of Bloor Street.

It had gone very well. His audience loved it. He had
reason to feel elated and up. But instead he was exhausted and uneasy. For some reason this time when he watched the tape he was struck by the remark about the cops not being there when you needed them. And not helping when they were there, because they were too busy worrying about what the crime was.