Headhunter (36 page)

PART TWO

WHAT'S UP, DOC?

No, it was not funny; it was rather pathetic; he was so representative of all the past victims of the great Joke. But it is by folly alone that the world moves, and so it is
a
respectable thing upon the whole. And besides, he was what one could call a good man.

                                                                                                        —
Joseph Conrad

One Mind's I

Vancouver, British Columbia.

October

Rain. Rain. Rain. 

Pain. Pain. Pain.

It feels like a ghost 

Come back

To haunt me once again. 

Slow days. No gain. 

I don't think I'm up to this!

I spent the night in her old chair sitting next to a shuttered window.

Now that my mother's in the ground I really must sell her house. Outside, an October wind in barren trees moaned so mournfully.

I just sat there most of the night, staring at the pictures. 

While the pictures lay on her tabletop.

Staring back at me.

OBSESSIONS
—
It is not uncommon for neurotics to develop a special concern about some danger or problem. If these exaggerated concerns become very intense they are called obsessions. For example it may be necessary for a person to climb out of bed countless times a night to check the gas valves on the stove. Or like Howard Hughes, someone may be so concerned about the slightest contact with dirt that he is compelled to wash his hands constantly or to become a recluse. Neurotic obsessions
are
thought to conceal some wish that is often either of a destructive or sexual nature. This wish is usually quite obscure in most obsessions and hidden in symbolic distortion.

What do I know about
death? 
Well, let me see.

I know that the true way of defining the end of life is "as a
state where time no longer exists." Time needs activity by which to measure it, so without activity there can be no time.

I know that the human obsession with death is called
thanatophilia.
And I know that a person who fears death in an abnormal sense is termed a
thanatophobe.
If the shoe fits wear it.

Father. Brother. Mother. Son.

Starting over: how many times? Is not
will
the very core of character? Is the rudder of the ego not a person's
will?
All the past and all the future, Do they not determine the now?

The course of Life surely depends upon the deftness of the helmsman. So, sail away!

I must remember to pick up my suits from One Hour Martinizing. Also I need more Gillette Atra blades. Is it just my imagination or do they really put the sharp razor blades in the first and last position with duller ones in between?

I dreamt about you last night, Cathy—about the accident. When I awoke I found I had my pillow grasped tightly in my arms.

Again I saw the gravesite, but I couldn't go near the grave. It was raining and all the mourners were standing under black umbrellas. Your mother was crying and I wanted to hold her, but somehow I couldn't join in. I stood at the periphery of the graveyard getting soaking wet. I was the only one present without protection from the rain. God, sometimes I get so lonely. So fucking tired of life.

I felt like that this evening so I spent some time in the sky. You should have seen Jupiter! So magnificent and alive with cloud activity. With a camera-shot through my telescope I caught Saturn at a good angle for the rings. Tomorrow night after shift I think I'll develop and blow up the film. Maybe I'll put a picture up on the bedroom wall. I could use the company.

When you're tired—alone—and afraid of the future, what else can you do? Maybe see a shrink!

Am I having an anxiety attack or is anxiety attacking me? Tonight is Halloween.

I lay the pictures—there are three pictures now!—out on the developing table beside my photo enlarger. I had just finished blowing up the shots taken in the sky. I found my hands were shaking and my body had gooseflesh crawling. It took me more than an hour to overcome the urge. But I did it. Once again I managed to keep my
MONSTER
! in its cage. Next time I might not be lucky. Next time I might not win.

I fear that next time I might just blow those three pictures up.

God save me from that.

November

Well, I saw Dr. George Ruryk today and this is what he told me.

First of all ask yourself: where do my thoughts come from? We've all heard of complexes. "Stop treating the child that way, you're going to give him a complex." "That man suffers from an inferiority complex." "I tell you the guy is weird. He's got some sort of Oedipus complex." "She's got this Electra complex. She wants to fuck her father." So what is a complex?

A complex is a group of ideas that dominate your thoughts and color your experiences. You come to see everything in relation to those ideas. If you're in love, for example, the slightest thing, like just a whiff of perfume, will bring immediately to mind all the ideas and feelings that make up your "love complex." A complex is to psychology what Force is to physics. But here comes the rub!

What happens if a particular complex is for some reason totally out of harmony with the rest of the conscious mind? Perhaps its ideas are unbearably painful. Perhaps it is of a sexual nature incompatible with the person's rigid views and principles.

What happens is that a conflict arises—a struggle commences and ensues between the rebel complex in question and the rest of the personality.

Perhaps the complex can be modified by the mind so that it is no longer incompatible with the rest of the personality.

Perhaps the mind can weigh the merits of each opponent and consciously choose to abandon one in favor of the other.

Or perhaps this is impossible and there must be a fight to the finish.

If there must be a fight then the common method used by the human mind is the sledgehammer of repression.

In using repression, conflict is avoided by banishing one of the opponents to the cellar of the mind. From there the exile is no longer allowed to achieve normal expression, and the victor of the fight is left in control of the field of consciousness.

But here, Dr. Ruryk said, comes the second rub!

Though the complex is shut up downstairs in the dark and denied its normal function, it is not annihilated. It continues to exist within the deeper layers of the mind, festering, while prevented from rising to the surface by the constant resistance of the guard at the door, namely the mind's force of repression.

Have you ever put tarmac on a driveway before the winter snows set in?

Well if you have—and if you failed to kill every last living seed on the ground before doing so—come spring the tarmac will crack and up through its surface will sprout a small plant shoot.

Same with the human mind.

But in a much more devious way.

For a repressed complex can only influence the conscious mind indirectly. This is because of the "censor"' guard standing watch at the cellar door. It must slip out in disguise.

The uglier the monster, the more circuitous its route.

So, Dr. Ruryk said, back to your inquiry about an obsession with death.

Assume something has happened which has caused remorse in a person's mind. Perhaps you know such an individual?

(Yes, I think I do.)

Now say this remorse is painful to that person's mind. Perhaps it's guilt over a death. To deal with this upset to equilibrium the complex related to this remorse is repressed by the conscious mind. But that complex still tie.. press itself. So how does it manifest?

Sometimes the mind uses symbolism to express these repressed and dissociated ideas: here you have the man who thinks that he is Napoleon. The man with the delusion.

Sometimes the mind uses the device which we call projection. Here the repressed complex is no longer regarded by the personality as being part of its own self. The complex has been projected onto another person—and thus conflict is avoided.

If the complex is projected onto a real person, then a delusion of persecution by that individual may result. And in self-defense the patient may try to kill that other person.

If the complex is projected onto an imaginary person, or one who is long since dead, then the repressed set of ideas appears as an hallucination. The patient sees ghosts. Or hears commanding voices telling him what to do. Perhaps a voice from Hell.

What you must realize. Dr. Ruryk said, is that any one of our instinctive drives may give rise to a conflict in the mind.

Freud said that most cases of repression arise from the instinct of sex.

Perhaps he was right.

But right or not, the fact remains that the origin of a mental aberration is not to be found in any disturbance within the mechanics of the mind.

It is to be found in the material from life fed into the brain of any particular human being.

Therefore to answer the question of whether or not you yourself may go insane, ask yourself:
Do I have monsters lurking in the cellar of my mind?

But there's a final rub!

For if you do they've been repressed, and you won't even know they're there until they break out of the dungeon.

That's what Dr. Ruryk said when I saw him early today.

He suggested that if I was interested in pursuing the matter further I might wish to sit in on a psychology seminar given by one of his former students. He told me her name is Genevieve.

I might just do that and find out where it leads.

Of course I didn't tell Dr. Ruryk about my problem with the heads.

Complex is to psychology what Force is to physics. Let's see where this goes. Eh, whadda ya say?

1954.

That would have been the year.

I remember my father standing at the drugstore counter with his change in one hand and whisky on his breath, talking to Mr. Thorson. I was walking toward the rear of the pharmacy where the comic racks were kept. It was the first Tuesday in the month so the new
Blackhawk
would be in. I remember I never made it to those racks.

To reach the comic stands at the rear of Thorson's Drug Store you had to pass a long shelf filled with adult magazines.
Life
and
Look
and
Ellery Queen
and
Saturday Evening Post.
The head was waiting for me buried in among these books.

The head was on the cover of a pulp magazine,
Real Man's Adventure.
As I recall, those words were printed in red. the same color as the blood which dripped from the neck, from the eyes and from the nose of that head stuck on a pole. Between the shreds of skin that hung down from the hacked-off skull you could just make out a trace of neck vertebra peeking through. But most of all what I remember is the eyes. Rolled back into their sockets, just a slivered moon of pupil showing beneath each eyelid, both eyes definitely staring right at me. I was seven years old.

For at that moment a very strange thing happened, and I was no longer in that store. It was as though I had been sucked right off my feet and transported through the door of that magazine cover. I recall clearly sitting in the front of that dugout canoe facing the Great White Hunter who was crouched in the stern. His khaki jacket was soaked with sweat and plastered to his chest. I remember bullets sewn into loops across the front of the jacket. I could see a St. Christopher's medal around the tense muscle cords in his neck. He wore a safari hat with a leopard skin band pushed back from his forehead. His index finger was on the trigger of the Remington in his hands.

And I knew we were surrounded.

There was a circle of severed heads ringed around our boat, each head stuck on the end of a pole fixed to the front of a dugout. The dugouts were manned by South American Jivaro Indians (I know that now), all conspiring to close off any chance of an escape. The Indians all had bronze skin and long black hair. Their bodies were naked except for breechclouts covering their loins. Each man was armed: a few with spears that were decorated with hanks of human hair, others with long hollow blowpipe tubes resting on lower lips, most with machetes three feet long with the sun glinting off sharp edges spattered with blood and gore.

Then something bumped our dugout and a hand touched my shoulder.

I could have died of fright.

For there was this grip trying to steady my trembling body before a blade swooped my head away.

"Easy, son," a voice said. "Just turn and look at me."

Though I tried to do as it said, I couldn't—that picture would not set me free.

Then I saw another hand reach over me to turn the copy of
Real Man's Adventure
face down on the stack of magazines below.

"There," my father said, squatting down on bended knees. "Out of sight, out of mind. That picture bothers you?"

"No," I remember saying, now back in the store. I was shaking my head from side to side.

"Well it bothers
me,"
my father said. "That's what it's meant to do. It's like your comic
Tales From the Crypt
but a little more realistic. Don't be afraid of fear, son. We all have to conquer it someday—one way or another. Now go on and pick out a comic. Your mother's got supper waiting."

I did what he said.

Then with his arm on my shoulder, the two of us left the store. But I do remember one final look back at that stack of magazines.

On the back cover of
Real Man's Adventure.
Charles Atlas was flexing his biceps and asking:
Would you like to look like me?

The plane went missing that December as my father was flying to Toronto. He had managed to stop his drinking long enough to land a job and was on his way back east for some sort of business upgrading.

For two months I spent every day sitting by the front door waiting for him to return.

It was the second week in February before they found the wreck of the aircraft. It had smashed to pieces on a Rocky Mountain peak. The papers said my father's head was severed in the crash. I cried for several days.

* * *

The second head was waiting for me on the first Tuesday in March.

My eyes must have seen it at once but neglected to tell my brain, for I distinctly heard the sound of a snake slither across the drugstore floor. I recall my sweat bursting from every pore as if I were in steaming tropical heat. And I know my mind was shrieking:
'I got to get out of here'.