“Standard strategies for deflecting public attention are considered to be in effect. Rapture by UFOs, disappearance into the correctional system, MKUltra-type programs have all proven useful as diversionary narratives.”
Supposing… OK, say a preadolescent boy was abducted circa 1960. Forty-some years ago. He’d be fifty by now, give or take. Walking among us though liable to disappear without notice, sent again and again into the cruel wilderness of Time, to overwrite destiny, to rewrite what others believe is written. Probably these wouldn’t have been local eastern–Suffolk County kids, better to snatch them from further away, thousands of miles from home, they’d be disoriented, easier to break.
Now and who, among the previously unsuspected hundreds in Maxine’s Rolodex, would fit a description like that? Long after she’s surfaced again, left Eric to get on with his early morning, back among the unpoetic demands of the day, she finds herself imagining a backstory for Windust, an innocent kid, abducted by earth-born aliens, by the time he’s old enough to understand what’s being done to him, it’s too late, his soul is theirs.
Maxine, please. Where has she picked up the cockamamie idea that nobody is beyond redemption, not even a murderous stooge for the IMF? Even allowing for Internet unreliability, Windust can be ticketed with a harvest of innocent souls that puts him easily into the company of more renowned Guinness Book murderers, except it’s all happened slowly, amortized one murder at a time, in faraway jurisdictions where neither the law nor the media will discommode him. Then you finally get to see him in person, the scholarly demeanor, the not exactly endearing fatality for wrong fashion choices, and you can’t get the two stories to connect. Against her better judgment, possibly because there’s nobody else to take it to, Maxine knows this has to be brought to Shawn’s attention.
Shawn’s out seeing his own therapist, so Maxine sits in the outer office looking through surfing magazines. He comes breezing in ten minutes late poised on some wave of blessedness.
“One with the universe, thanks,” he greets her, “and yourself?”
“You don’t have to get pissy, Shawn.”
From what Maxine can gather, Shawn’s therapist, Leopoldo, is a Lacanian shrink who was forced to give up a decent practice in Buenos Aires a few years ago, due in no small part to neoliberal meddling in the economy of his country. The hyperinflation under Alfonsín, the massive layoffs of the Menem-Cavallo era, plus the regimes’ obedient arrangements with the IMF, must have seemed like the Law of the Father run amok, and after enough of it Leopoldo came to see too little future in the haunted city he loved, so he gave up his practice, his luxury suite in the shrinks’ quarter known as Villa Freud, and split for the States.
One day Shawn was in a phone booth here in town, out on the street, one of those calls he really needed to make, everything possible was going wrong, he kept shoveling quarters, no dial tone, robots giving him shit, finally working himself up into the usual NYC rage, slamming the receiver against the unit while screaming fucking Giuliani, when he heard this voice, human, real, calm. “Having a little trouble, there?” Later on of course Leopoldo copped to drumming up business this way, hanging around places where mental-health crises are likely to occur, like NYC phone booths, after first removing any out-of-order signs. “Maybe a little ethical shortcutting,” Shawn figures, “but it’s fewer sessions per week, and they don’t always last the full fifty minutes. And after a while I began to see how much Lacanian is like Zen.”
“Huh?”
“Total bogosity of the ego, basically. Who you think you are isn’t who you are at all. Which is much less, and at the same time—”
“Much more, yes, thanks for clearing that up, Shawn.”
Considering Leopoldo’s history this does seem like a good moment to bring up the topic of Windust. “Does your shrink ever talk about the economy down there?”
“Not much, it’s a painful subject. Worst insult he can think of is to call somebody’s mother a neoliberal. Those policies destroyed the Argentine middle class, fucked with more lives than anybody’s counted so far. Maybe not as bad as getting disappeared, but totally sucks loquesea. Why do you ask?”
“Somebody I know who was in on all that, back in the early nineties, nowadays working out of D.C., still up to the same nasty kinds of business and I’m worried about him, I’m like the guy with the red-hot coal. I can’t let it go. It’s hazardous to my health, there isn’t even anything beautiful about it, but I still need to hold on to it.”
“You’ve developed a thing for, like, Republican war criminals now? Using condoms, I hope?”
“Cute, Shawn.”
“Come on, you’re not really offended.”
“‘Not really’? Wait a minute. This is a cast-iron Buddha here, right? watch this.” Reaching for the Buddha’s head, which of course, as soon as she touches it, will turn out to fit her grasp perfectly, as if designed expressly as a weapon handle. In the instant all unfriendly impulses are calmed.
“I’ve seen his rap sheet,” trying not to edge into Daffy Duck mode here, “he tortures people with electric cattle prods, he pumps aquifers dry and forces farmers off their land, he destroys entire governments in the name of a fucked-up economic theory he may not even believe in, I have no illusions about what he is—”
“Which is what, some misunderstood teenager, only needs to hook up with the right girl, who turns out to know even less than he does? This is high-school again? competing for boys who’re going to be doctors or end up on Wall Street, but all the time secretly yearning to run with the dopers, the car thieves, the convenience-store badasses…”
“Yes Shawn and don’t forget surfers. What, excuse me, gives you authority here? What happens in your practice, when you want to save somebody but lose them instead?”
“All I do is try for what Lacan calls ‘benevolent depersonalization.’ If I got hung up trying to ‘save’ clients, how much good do you think I’d do?”
“A lot?”
“Guess again.”
“Um… not so much?”
“Maxine, I think you’re afraid of this guy. He’s the Reaper, he’s on your case, and you’re trying to charm your way out of it.”
Oof. Isn’t this the moment to go stomping out the door with a dignified yet unequivocal over-the-shoulder fuck-you? “Well. Let me think about that.”
23
Brooke and Avi finally show up back in the States looking like they’ve spent the year at some strange anti-kibbutz dedicated to screen-staring, keeping out of the sun, and not missing too many meals, Elaine taking one look at Brooke promptly conveys her over to Megareps, a neighborhood health club, and negotiates a trial membership while Brooke loiters at the snack bar on the ground floor, contemplating muffins, bagels, and smoothies in a less than objective way.
Maxine isn’t that eager to see her sister but figures she has to do at least a drop-by. Turns out at the moment Elaine and Brooke are down at the World Trade Center eyeballing the unexplored shopping potential of Century 21. Ernie is supposed to be at Lincoln Center watching some well-received Kyrgyz movie but has actually snuck over to The Fast and the Furious at the Sony multiplex, so Maxine finds herself for an enchanted hour and a half in the company of her brother-in-law, Avram Deschler, who is minding a Tongue Polonaise of Elaine’s, which has been slowly cooking all day in the kitchen, filling the place with a smell initially intriguing, soon compelling. The matter of the federal visits can’t help but come up.