Mortal Fear (42 page)

ERIN> Are you still here, Max?

MAXWELL> Yes.

ERIN> You havent scared me off yet. Lets go.

MAXWELL> Go?

ERIN> Im ready to hear the rest of your story.

MAXWELL> But we were discussing you.

ERIN> You told me a secret, I told you one. Its your turn again.

MAXWELL> Such children we are. Very well. Where was I?

ERIN> Incest. Your father married a woman in America for her money and position, while his sisteryour motherran off to Germany and gave birth to you during the war.

MAXWELL> Skip ahead six years. Richard had achieved his childhood dream. He was a prominent psychiatrist in one of Americas greatest cities. His wife had money but he earned plenty of his own. Yet he had one regret. The Gorgon had no intention of inhibiting her social life with the drudgery of rearing a child. So Richard lost himself in his work, and became more renowned and controversial with each passing year. His approach was simple. He encouraged people to accept their natures. He used Freud and Jung and the rest to legitimize so-called aberrant behavior. I find a humorous parallel with a maxim of the computer industry: Thats not a bug, its a feature.

Richard relieved his rather exotic sexual needs away from home in a variety of ways, but he managed to stay clear of both the press and the police. When Catherine appeared on his doorstep (the old family brownstone, now fantastically refurbished) with a six-year-old boy at her side, he was stunned. I was a mirror image of him. Dark-haired, pale-skinned, classically beautiful. Mother explained the similarities with the fiction that I was Richards nephew. To explain my fatherless existence, Catherine told a harrowing tale of an impulsive marriage to a young German soldier who was quickly killed on the Russian front, then three terrible years in a displaced persons camp with Uncle Karl. The D.P. camp was real enough. The cold there lodged in my bones like tumors of ice. Catherine also revealed that I suffered from hemophilia, the same type Richard had. This made the Gorgon vaguely suspicious, but since hemophilia is passed down through females only, her suspicions were allayed.

When Richard and Catherine were finally alone, Mother confessed the truth. There was never any German soldier. I was Richards son, though I did
not know it. Half mad from exhaustion, Mother told Richard shed managed to survive only by vowing to deliver me to him before she died. In her eyes Richard saw the glazed apartness that had lighted his fathers eyes shortly before he shot himself.

Sweeping aside the Gorgons opposition, Richard took us into his home. Tension between the two women grew quickly, and one cold morning Richard found Catherine dead in her bed. Shed taken an overdose of morphine from his medical bag. She lay in state in the house for two days, resting in a bronze coffin, her delicate hands folded across her still breasts like those of a fallen martyr. I did not leave her side except to urinate, and I ate no food at all. Nor did I sleep. When Catherines body passed into the crematorium, I collapsed and had to be admitted to the hospital.

When Richard announced that he would legally adopt his nephew, the Gorgons lack of opposition surprised him. He didnt realize that Iwithout Catherinewas the answer to the Gorgons prayers as well as his own. I freed her forever from the pressure to bear a child. Yet things did not turn out quite as she hoped.

In me, Richard had gained more than a son. For what was I but a genetic reconstitution of himself and his sister? The male and female halves united in one being. I was his father reborn. He educated me in the manner he had enjoyed before the Crashprivate tutors focusing on the hard sciencesand I did not disappoint. As I surpassed each new expectation, Richard came to realize that his sister had been right. No other woman could have loved him as she did, or given him such a child. He came to believe that fate was acting through our bloodline to bring about a higher order of humanity. Without even being conscious of it, he began to eulogize Catherine as a saint.

As the years passed, the Gorgon grew more resentful of me. From the beginning shed had suspicions too
deep to put a name to, and one night, after consuming a staggering amount of gin, she stumbled upstairs to Richards private bedroom and confronted him. She disparaged my mother in a long tirade. Shed done this before, but for some reason, on this night, Richard snapped. He told the Gorgon the truth. At first she misinterpreted, shouting that shed always known I was a bastard, that Catherines dead German soldier was a lie to hide her whoredom. When she finally comprehended the true state of affairs and began wailing about that demon child, Richard lifted her off her feet, carried her to the second floor landing, and threw her over the rail to the marble floor below.

I was fourteen then, and I saw it happen. The shouting had drawn me to the head of the stairs. Richard was terrified, not that I would report him to the police, but that he might have lost me forever by committing murder before my eyes. I remember my reaction to this day. I said, Its about time you did something about that shrew, Uncle.

Do you think me cold, Erin?

ERIN> Its almost like a film. I see it all happening in my minds eye. Is it real? Really real?

MAXWELL> Absolutely. That night, Richard took me into his study to try to explain what had happened. For once, he found himself at a loss for words. He realized he had reached the point where he must risk alleither gain a son or lose me forever. He told me the truth. He was not my uncle but my father. Uncle AND father. He told me of the forbidden union between himself and his sister, how through that sacral/ sexual union an immeasurable strength and talent had been createdme.

We had always felt an intense kinship, partly because we were so similar, but also because of our shared
disease. During that hour in the study our bond was consecrated. We vowed to stand together on the matter of the Gorgons accidental death, and from that moment forward shared a conviction that we were beyond moral constraint. I was reborn that night, Erin. Incest and murder were my nativity.

ERIN> You were fourteen when this happened?

MAXWELL> Yes. I had wished this thing to be real for so long, and suddenly it was. It had never seemed possible that Id been sired by some anonymous German soldier too stupid or unlucky to survive a war. Of _course_ my father was a renowned psychiatrist. If I was a little too ready to see myself as the
bermensch
Richard claimed I was, fate has proved him right. Three years later I entered medical school.

ERIN> So you _are_ a doctor. I had a feeling you were.

MAXWELL> Yes. But I do not wish to speak about that.

ERIN> What do you want to say?

MAXWELL> I have a perverse impulse to tell you of my failings. My wounds. My darkest journeys.

ERIN> Why focus on your failings?

MAXWELL> Do you understand the essential difference between man and woman? Woman can simply BE. She gains identity through existence itself, through the biological imperative. She merely waits for completion, as you do. But man must BECOME. He must create himself. He must tear himself away from his mother, sever the umbilical, and project himself into the world BEYOND that wholeness. Man must exile himself from comfort and completion. You see that, dont you?

ERIN> I suppose so.

MAXWELL> It can be a dark journey. I was no normal adolescent, Erin. I saw Elvis Presley as a
cartoon Dionysus for bourgeois America. When the Beatles burst on the scene I ignored them. Too chipper, too happy. But then the world changed. The Rolling Stones, the Doors, Hendrix. I immersed myself in the drug subculture. Richard had always been a libertine, and by profession was an expert on pharmacology. Hed traveled down the hallucinogenic highway before Leary ever heard of LSD. He shepherded me in this, as in all things. I was the right age for Vietnam, but my hemophilia disqualified me from the draft, as it had my father before me. I was wealthy, in an Ivy League school, on the fast track for medicine. But in one area I remained unfulfilled. The area which EROS exists to explore.

ERIN> Sex?

MAXWELL> Yes. We are all slaves to our childhoods, and I was no exception. Because my hemophilia was my only limitation, it grew to terrifying scale in my mind. I strengthened my body through ceaseless swimming, a sport in which the chance of sustaining a bleeding injury was very low. My mention of Cellinis
Perseus
was no idle comment. It was truly my goal, and through years of swimming I attained it. If you saw me in clothes, you would notice only exquisite proportion. But if you saw me naked, you would understand.

My body attracted women, but whenever matters progressed to an overtly sexual level, I found myself put off by their carnality, by their very vitality. I felt revulsion, fear, nausea, and did not understand why. My fathers erotic exploits proved that sex was possible for men like us. I masturbated, albeit carefully, and for two semesters in college I had a male roommate who would suck me to climax whenever I needed relief. He disgusted me, but it accomplished the goal. Still, I feared what might happen in the unguarded thrusting and writhing of real sex.

Then, at a college party, I mistakenly walked into a bedroom where a drunken girl had passed out. As I stared at her closed eyelids, the near-motionless
breasts beneath her sweater, I felt my pulse quickening, a twinge of tumescence. I closed the door, moved to her, and pushed my hands clumsily under her sweater as my heart thundered in my chest. Terrified that someone would come in, I groped beneath her clothing for a few moments, soiled my trousers, then fled from the house. It sounds pathetic, doesnt it?

ERIN> Ive heard stranger things.

MAXWELL> Naturally I found a way to put myself into a similar situation again, only this time I removed the girls pants and actually penetrated her. The third time, the chosen girl awakened and I ran. She was unable to identify me, but the experience frightened me enough to make me stop. It also forced me to diagnose my own neurosis. All my life, I had been carrying around a psychosexual template of my dead mother in my head. It was my last vision of her, lying motionless in her coffin, pale and perfect, waiting for the flames of cremation. These women I had touched were but gross reflections of the anima in my mind. Of course, diagnosis and cure are different things. An acrophobe who knows he is afraid of heights cannot suddenly shed his fear. My anima remained with me, and it had faces I had yet to perceive.

ERIN> In four years of college you never once fell in love?

MAXWELL> Love? My mind was in chains! Whenever I thought I was making progress, another incident would occur. In medical school, seven other students and I were paraded into an operating room where an anesthetized young woman was about to be given a hysterectomy. We were to practice vaginal examinations, using her as our patient. This is common practice in teaching hospitals, if your husband hasnt told you. As I stood in line, watching my fellow students force their gloved fingers into the pale, still body, I felt fury at the institutional violation of this defenseless woman. But then I sensed a terrific pressure beneath my lab coat.
When my turn came to examine her, my hands were trembling. This was so out of character that the attending physician remarked on it. I bumbled through the exam, then raced into a rest room to relieve my distress. As I did, I visualized the anesthetized woman, the most perfect image I had yet encountered of my mother. I knew then that I was not yet freethat I might never be freeof her.

ERIN> Your father never sensed your problems?

MAXWELL> Of course he did! Richard blamed himself completely! For eulogizing my mother long after her death. For not having the courage to marry the woman he loved. If he had, he knew, he might have given me the gift hed been granteda sister with whom I could share all. Worse, by denying me that sister, he had also crippled the powerful gene line that had been concentrated in me. He begged me to turn outward, to search for someone who might fill the need he had not provided for, and give me heirs worthy of our genes.

ERIN> Did you?

MAXWELL> I tried. But I was meant to walk a different path, Erin. Summers during college, I began to travel abroad with my father. I had been to Europe, of course, but never to the East. And the East was Richards great passion. He was obsessed with the fertility cults of the Indus Valley cities, the bloody rituals of sex and death around which Indian culture had developed. Hed been raised by an authoritarian father, a paragon of the sky cult of Christianity, which of course had been grafted onto the sky cult of Germanic warrior culture. Yet he had seen his father break, and commit suicide under the stress of bad fortune. Richard sought a greater strength. Thus was he drawn to India, the great fount and faithful preserver of the Mother principle.

In India my illusions were stripped away. The strong ruled, the weak served or perished. I found women there who would do anything I wished for pitiful sums. The fact that I would be miles away the next day allowed me to overcome my anxieties and
couple with them, but always there was a problem. Indian women are dark of skin and hair. They did not fit my template, ethereal Catherine lying in her martyrs coffin.

Back in America, my sexual problems continued, but they did not interfere with my academic advancement. I was like a man aflame. Even as my genius was proclaimed from the heights, I was hiring prostitutes to lie passive in white gowns while I gently mounted them. I believe I was going slowly mad. Even those whores, who had seen so much depravity, were frightened by something in me. One lost her composure during the act and attacked me, and I had to be hospitalized for clotting factor therapy. Suicidal thoughts possessed me. It was then that Richard intervened. He stuffed me with amphetamines, whisked me off to India, and changed my life forever.

ERIN> What was different about that trip?

MAXWELL> I found someone.

ERIN> A woman?

MAXWELL> Yes.

ERIN> Like your mother?

MAXWELL> No. I found a woman who was death in life. Do you understand? Christianity preaches eternal life through death, but that is a false and exhausted dream. It is on the road of death that we find life eternal.