Wilmer awoke from his dreams of pelagic bliss to find himself impaled on the beams of three flashlights. Before he had time to get alarmed and jet backward, the fourth man stepped forward and spoke.
“My name is Dr. Roebuck,” he said in a deep, therapeutic voice. “I assume that you have some good reason for being where you are now. Perhaps you would like to share that reason with me.”
Wilmer’s hesitation was brief. Years of psycho-therapy had accustomed him to unburdening himself to the medical profession. “Come over by the sea horses,” he said. “I don’t want the others to hear.”
Briefly—since his throat was sore—he explained the situation to Dr. Roebuck. “So now I’m a squid,” he ended.
“Um.” Dr. Roebuck rubbed his nose. He had had some psychiatric training, and Wilmer did not seem particularly crazy to him. Besides, he was aware that a patient who is aggressive, anxious, and disoriented may actually be in better psychological shape than a person who is quiet and cooperative. Wilmer wasn’t anxious or aggressive, but he was certainly disoriented.
“When’s your doctor coming back?” he asked.
“Week from next Friday.”
“Well, we might wait until then. You can’t stay here, though. Could you afford a few days in a nursing home?”
Wilmer made a sort of gobbling noise.
“What’s the matter?” asked Roebuck.
“Don’t know. Air’s dry. Throat hurts.”
“Let me look at it.”
With one of the cops’ flashlights, Roebuck examined Wilmer’s throat. “Good lord,“he said after a moment. “Good lord.”
“Matter?”
“Why, you’ve got—” it had been a long time since Roebuck had taken his course in comparative anatomy. Still, there was no mistaking it. “Why, man, you’ve got gills.!”
“Have?” Wilmer asked uncertainly.
“Yes. Well, I don’t suppose that makes much difference. Can you afford a nursing home?”
“Got ‘nu ff money. Can’t go.”
“Why not?”
“Live here. In tank.”
“Nonsense,” answered Roebuck, who could be stern on occasion. “You can’t stay here.”
“…not?”
“Because it would annoy the other fish.”
Against the cogency of this argument, Wilmer was helpless. He submitted to being led out to the police ‘copter and flown to the Restwell Nursing Home. Roebuck saw him into a bathtub of salty water, and promised to come back next day.
Wilmer was still in the bath next morning.
“Where am I?” he asked as Roebuck came in.
“Why in the Restwell Nursing Home.” Roebuck sat down on the corner of the tub.
“No, no. Where am I?”
“Oh. Still in a tank at the Municipal Aquarium, I suppose.”
“I want back.”
“Impossible.”
Wilmer began to weep. As he wept, he kept ducking his neck under the water to hydrate his gills.
“Let me look at those gills,” said Roebuck, after the third duck. “Hum. They’re more prominent than they were.”
“…I WANT MY SQUID.”
“You can’t have it. I’m sorry. You’ll just have to put up with this until Dr. Adams gets back.”
“So long to wait,” said Wilmer wistfully. “Want squid.”
He continued to ask for his squid on Roebuck’s next two visits, but on the fourth day the doctor found him sitting up in a chair, wearing a faded pink bathrobe.
“Out of the water, I see,” said Roebuck. “How are you feeling today?”
“O.K.,” Wilmer answered in a high-pitched, listless voice. “Joints hurt, though.” There was the hint of a lisp in his speech.
“Joints? Could be caused by staying in the water so long.
“Move over by the light… You know, this is most unusual. Your gills seem to be going a way.” Roebuck frowned.
“Gillth?” Wilmer giggled. “What are you talking about, you funny man? Jointh hurt. And boneth. Fix it, Mither Man.”
Roebuck frowned a little longer. Then, on a hunch, he ordered a series of skeletal x-rays. They showed an unusually large amount of cartilage for an adult skeleton, and a pelvis that was definitely gynecoid.
Roebuck was astonished. He knew how powerful psychosomatic effects can be; he would not have found it inconceivable that Wilmer’s libidinal identification with the squid would finally have resulted in Wilmer’s becoming completely aquaticized. But now the man’s gills were atrophying, and his skeleton was becoming that of an immature female! It wasn’t reason able. Some remarkable psychic changes must be taking place.
What was happening, of course was that Wilmer’s libido, balked by its primary object, the squid, was ranging back over the other objects he had almost identified with, trying to find a stable one. It was an unconscious process, and Wilmer couldn’t have told Roebuck about it even if the doctor had asked him. Roebuck didn’t ask him.
On Roebuck’s next visit, Wilmer wasn’t talking at all. His skin had become a flat, lusterless tan, and he crunkled when he moved. That phase lasted for two days, and then Wilmer took to standing on one leg and barking. The barking phase was succeeded by…
The trouble with these surrogate libidinal identifications, as Wilmer realized on a sub-sub-unconscious plane, was that each of the objects had existed in relation to somebody else. The little girl had had her mama and her pink parasol. The furry dog had had its owner and the lamp post. Even the brown paper parcel had been carried by the old lady. But the manure bun—Only the manure bun had been orbed, isolated, alone, splendidly itself.
On the day of Roebuck’s final visit, the day before Adams was due back, Wilmer did not bark or crunkle or lisp. He merely sat in the armchair, spread-out, shiny and corpulent, exhaling a faintly ammoniacal smell that Roebuck, who had had a city boyhood, could not identify.
Early next morning Roebuck got Adams on the visiphone. They had a long conversation about Wilmer. Both of them were a little on the defensive about the way the case had turned out. Adams called at the Restwell Home, but he couldn’t get Wilmer to speak to him. The psycho-therapist was just as much baffled by the symptomatology as Roebuck was.
Wilmer stayed on at the nursing home for a few days, both doctors watching him. There were no more changes. He had reached his nadir, his point of no return. There is nothing ahead for a man who has made a libidinal identification with a manure bun.
When it became plain that nothing more was going to happen, he was removed to a state institution. He is still there. He still just sits, spread-out, shiny and corpulent.
Whether he is happy or not is a question for philosophers. On the one hand, he has invested his libido in a thoroughly unworthy object. On the other hand, he has unquestionably invested it in something.
After Wilmer’s commitment, his apartment was cleaned out and redecorated. The building superintendent was a frugal-minded woman who disliked wasting things. She latched on to the bottle of syrup of Senta Beans.
She took the syrup for a couple of nights and then, since she couldn’t see it had any effect, threw the bottle into the garbage reducer. She does not connect the “grand old Martian remedy” with the disembodied voices she has begun to hear.
THE NUSE MAN
I don’t know why; really, the nuse man comes to call on me. He must realize by now I’ll never order a nuse installation or an ipsissifex from him; I consider them as dangerous as anything our own lethal age has produced. Nuse, which is a power source that the nuse man describes as originating on the far side of 3000 A.D., IS THE WORSE OF THE TWO, BUT THE IPSISSIFEX, A MATTER DUPLICATOR, IS BAD ENOUGH. AND THOUGH I LISTEN TO THE NUSE MAN’S STORIES, I CAN HARDLY BE CONSIDERED A SYMPATHETIC AUDIENCE. I SUPPOSE HE DROPS IN BECAUSE I CAN ALWAYS BE DEPENDED ON FOR A CUP OF TEA AND SOME TOAST AND MARMALADE.