Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (15 page)

The phallus was waiting for him. It sat in front of the one-way mirror as if it were a video. Nothing scandalous was happening in the waiting room — a patient was vacuuming — but Hartl was watching with an unpleasantly amused expression.

“Good peep-show.”

He let it go. Hartl was not the person he would have wanted, but there was no one else to be had. His colleagues had not exactly jumped at the chance to run number seventeen (Pavilion 17, A&T: alcoholism and toxicomania, women's inpatient division) for a full three months.

“Here, I've written out the point system for you, but the nurses know it by heart. I would ask that you adhere to it strictly.”

“Yeah, I've heard of it. Your system is legendary.”

With a decided lack of interest, Hartl stuck the paper in his pocket.

“I can't say it's my sort of thing. I'm more into Gestalt and, I mean, imagination interests me. I won't trust old Makarenko twice.”

“I'm afraid you'll have to adapt to the traditions of number seventeen,” he interrupted Hartl a bit more peremptorily than he had wanted to. “I especially insist on the point system.”

He was painfully aware he was wasting his breath. Hartl will shake things up, the durga had said. With the same sexually charged irresponsibility he displayed in taking on a completely unfamiliar department, Hartl would unleash a circus of spectacular chaos.

“I'm not much of a believer in speculative methods,” he added in a flush of indignation toward Hartl. “Or in systemic treatment, by any means. Our work here is based on discipline.” The division would fall apart before he returned.

“Oh yeah, where's the can? The men's, I mean.” Here was a topic that interested Hartl. The answer was: nowhere. The department was old, converted years back in slapdash fashion, and with only one man on two whole floors there was no justification for a men's room. He shared with six nurses, one social worker, and two cleaning women. This minor detail had long since stopped bothering him.

“And it hasn't stopped you producing testosterone?” Hartl joked. “But then there's something to be said for being shut up with thirty girls. I bet your balls get a good massage.”

There was a shriek out in the hallway. Probably the new one being admitted, but the nurses could handle it. He ostentatiously snapped his briefcase shut.

“So where exactly are you traveling to?” Hartl asked. “India, I know, but why? Yoga? Fantastic stuff, yoga. I did a course last summer, great for the imagination! So you aren't against my doing some yoga with the girls?”

Near his solar plexus a weak spasm of indignation was growing stronger, like a small fist squeezing shut.

“I have nothing against physical exercise; I often run sessions that have elements of yoga in them, but there's no evidence it's good for anything else.”

A bearded fifth-grader, she said? A bearded fifth-grader!

There is a prevailing myth that each field is its own mirror, that a profession is a giant defense mechanism. At least the Hartls like to see it that way. Marriage counsellors are homosexuals and divorcés. For therapy, children go to the childless and to those who themselves are failed parents. The crude cloak of myth dismisses alcohol treatment as a carnival of secret lushes. It was nonsense. He had not touched alcohol for fifteen years and he had never taken drugs, even though all his colleagues had at least tried them.

His magnum opus bore the title
The Problem of Dependency and Overcoming It.
The dry, methodical sheen of his style, as well as the mountains of collated data and statistics had made it the leading work in the field.

As far as patients are concerned, Hartl was simply in error. He, on the other hand, was aware of the risks in his position. With patients he was always politely and strictly aloof. On principle he addressed them as “ladies,” even those going through the wild phase of detox where, swathed in cloth, they tossed and turned on a caged bed. Never did he mix with them or the nurses. He went carefully through life, like a cat on a picket fence. He was a confirmed
bachelor and the few relationships he did have — which incidentally were none that pressing — were conducted as far as possible from the clinic walls.

From time to time he would feel a strange and secret fascination for one of the ladies. It was always the same type of woman, within a noticeably narrow band of variation. She was a Durga, the ferocious mother of the gods. The goddess of violence, darkness, delirium, and depravity.

The point system, which the nurses could recite in their sleep, was the result of ten years of effort. In detailed, logical, and equitable fashion he would dole out and then take away points for the patients' trifling daily accomplishments and infractions. An example: a correct answer at evening quiz time (“List at least five benefits of abstinence!”) was worth three points. An unmade bed was the same — in demerits. Every week the patients' council elected its own director, called the princess. If she did a good job of discharging her obligations, she got the largest possible reward: thirty points. Smoking outside the stated times and place (14:00-16:00, 20:00-20:30, hallway to the cloakroom) meant ten points off. Fifty points bought a day out.

The durgas, being clever to a fault, usually racked up points, took a day out, and never returned. They did not often become princess (if he could prevent it), for they felt no loyalty either to him or to the ladies. In a week they could turn the group's morale upside down. Childless and completely unmaternal, they were usually ravaged by countless abortions.

Durgas have narrow eyes, scrawny, foxlike snouts, and a curious oil-free, powdery filth. The votive abstraction of their faces reveals virgin martyrs rejoicing on their fiery beds, especially when they have secured a source of drugs. Often they are educated and very sharp, but they use their cleverness like snakes use their poison fangs. A black moon shines from their eyes. He imagined them to
have a winelike flavor. Their speech could be wily and quick. Yet they were as bitterly beautiful and neglected as an October grave.

He subjected himself to a similarly demanding discipline and a decidedly stricter point system. The system came from a book fate had sent his way at sixteen, which had influenced his life forever after. It was American and was called
Yoga in a Hundred Days.
(The titles
Italian in a Hundred Days, Chess in a Hundred Days,
and a score of others had been published in the same series, a fact he was of course unaware of.) The book laid out its exercise program with American thoroughness and an exalted faith in systems. Each activity was scored according to its difficulty. Bonus points were awarded for additional holding time.

It was then he began keeping daily score of the points he achieved. He had been doing it for nineteen years now, non-stop. Later he added positions the book did not contain, and plotted their points using coordinates: x-axis for the number of minutes practiced, y-axis for difficulty. He had a notepad where he would write his totals out each evening. It was the most intimate part of his existence, at least in the material world. He never showed it to anyone. He never spoke of it to anyone.

At sixteen he longed to go to India. At seventeen he promised himself firmly that one day he would.

Actually, his first inspiration was not yoga, but pure, bone-chilling Buddhism. To escape the snares of cause and effect, to evaporate into the pure void. Nothing less than the absolute itself was worthy of acceptance.

He shocked his parents, both tepid Christians, when he stopped eating meat (fleeing his mother's cooking and her fat, smothering love) and shaved his head bare. It was small and round
like a beggar's bowl. He decided to live as a Buddhist monk.

All he achieved was to suddenly look thirteen again. There was a constant draft on his bare head. He felt his brain was freezing over. Twice that winter they pricked his eardrums. It didn't even help his spirituality.

He let his hair grow back and never shaved off his beard, which had just started to sprout, somewhat late. But he did trim it into a tidy goatee. Meat was still out of the question, to the great regret of his mother, for whom cooking was an abundant, meaty source of joy.

Even today he can visualize his shivering bare head, and the memory of it causes him especial disappointment. His sacrifice did not help him attain Nirvana. He abandoned Buddhism and chose the way of yoga, that flowered path full of symbols. Ever since, he has preferred to keep his head warm, and from October onward will not go out bareheaded. He wears hats.

On that shining path, full of Lotuses and Lights, mythical beasts, nymphs, and miracle-workers, the Durga represents the frightening aspect of motherhood. She renounces and devours her children, despises the world of phenomena, and catapults out of reality like a pilot out of a burning plane. She is mischievous, capricious, and duplicitous by turns, and never lets herself be hoodwinked. Blood, raw meat, intoxicating drinks, and goats are sacrificed to her. She can be appeased by ritual suicide. Her laughter shakes the bones of the dead; no one can hear it without losing all certitude. A long, black tongue hangs from her mouth. Sparks of nothingness illuminate her in the darkness. Her mantra is
dhum
.