“Soon everyone will be perfect,” said the young man. He always strove for sarcasm but never attained anything other than petulance.
His name was Roger St. Cloud, he was twenty-two years old, militarily unsuitable because of some problem with his inner ear, the only son of well-to-do parents — his father had a controlling interest in Monequois First Savings — and a classic bundle of insecurities and neuroses masked by a juvenile nastiness of manner. The clothing he wore — sneakers without socks, filthy chinos, a ratty turtleneck sweater — was intended to infuriate his parents, and it succeeded. It was the positive relish with which Roger’s parents rose to every bait the boy tossed them that made Dr. Godden’s work so much more necessary and at the same time so much more difficult. If he could get the parents in here for regular treatments it might have some good effect on the son, but of course they’d never agree to anything like that.
Well, for the purpose at hand what was needed was not the parents but the son. Dr. Godden said, out of the sense of duty that had been troubling him of late, “While we wait for Ralph, is there anything you’d like to talk about?”
Roger shrugged carelessly, which always meant yes, always meant there was something he felt about so strongly that the feeling embarrassed him and therefore had to be denied. “Had another dream,” he said.
“The dragon?” That was the dream about his mother.
“No, none of the usual. A new one.”
“Ah? What was it?”
“I was walking down a rifle barrel. It was like a tunnel, you know? But it was a rifle barrel, and I was walking toward the bullets. I could look back the other way and see daylight at the hole. It was very realistic, with the shiny metal color and everything. It was cold in there. Then I looked back and there was an eye down at the far end looking at me. It was my father, and he said, ‘You’ll never get away.’ But he was big, he was normal size for the rifle, so he couldn’t get at me. But he kept looking in, his eye there, and I shouted, ‘Get out of the way! You’ll be killed when the gun goes off!’ But he wouldn’t believe me. Then there was a boom, like an explosion. Not like a rifle shot at all. A real explosion. And I looked and there was a bullet coming toward me. It looked like a train in a tunnel, except it filled it all the way around, there wasn’t any place to squeeze in and let it go by. And the front was all fat and squashed. I started running away, but I was slow, it turned slow-motion, you know, the way they do. But the bullet was slow, too, it was just behind me but it couldn’t catch up. And my father’s eye was still up at the other end, he wouldn’t get out of the way. I kept hollering at him, but he wouldn’t get out of the way.”
In the course of telling all this, Roger’s voice had lost its usual whine, his expression had calmed, and he had shown briefly who it was he might have been if things had been different. But now his face twisted back into its usual expression, the whine came into his voice again, and he shrugged negligently, saying, “That’s when I woke up.”
“Not hard to interpret, that dream,” Dr Godden suggested.
“Easy. I’m afraid of getting caught and I’m afraid of getting killed.”
“And you re also afraid that if you do get caught your disgrace will also ruin your father.”
Roger shrugged.
The door burst open and Ralph lumbered in. A tall, heavyset, very strong man of thirty-two, he gave an appearance of flabbiness and weakness that was totally misleading. His strength was hampered by clumsiness, his appearance altered by the way he stooped and shambled, but within the self-negating mannerisms was a strong and capable body waiting to be unleashed.
“I ran,” Ralph said, panting, and thudded over to drop heavily onto the sofa beside Roger.
“You always run,” Roger commented.
Ralph never took offense at Roger’s comments. Why should he, when he believed he deserved them? Ralph believed that he was stupid, and that stupidity was a crime. Any asset he might have, such as a strong body or a handsome face, had to be denied because it would be improper for him to enjoy anything while still committing the crime of stupidity. What had driven Ralph to Dr. Godden was a girl friend who had made it a condition of their continued relationship. but what had driven him to the set of mind that he lived by Dr. Godden hadn’t as yet been able to learn. It was somewhere in the early years, and Ralph’s blankness on that period was itself a strong indication that Dr. Godden was on the right track.
Now, Ralph’s reply to Roger was only a sheepish grinning, “I’m always late.” Then he sat there and panted.
Dr. Godden looked at them, his assistants, and he found himself envying the man Ellen knew as Parker. When Parker made a plan he knew the parts of it would be carried out by professionals, solid reliable men who did this sort of thing for a living. Dr. Godden would have preferred to work with professionals himself, but according to Ellen these people did have loyalty among themselves and in the normal way of things wouldn’t steal from one another. Honor among thieves apparently did exist after all.
So it was Roger and Ralph. Dr. Godden had gone through the list of his patients, had sounded a few of them out very gently and obliquely, and it had come down at last to Roger and Ralph.
Roger had been easy to convince; perhaps, from the sound of last night’s dream, he’d been too easy. But if Roger had any hidden doubts or apprehensions, Dr. Godden prided himself he’d be able to contain them at least until the night’s work was over. Ralph, burly and cumbersome and self-doubting, had taken longer to persuade, but in the end his trust for Dr. Godden had swung it, and now he was committed without question.
The same basic argument had been used on both of them; it would be therapy. To Ralph: “Here’s a chance to prove you are capable after all. With this accomplishment behind you, there’s no telling how much we’ll be able to unlock, how much more of you we’ll be able to free.” And to Roger: “You’ll never find a better opportunity to express all your independence and revolt at once. Do this, act out all your aggressions and resentments in this one action, do it successfully, and you’ll be well on your way to the independence we both know you need for self-fulfillment.”
Dr. Godden’s own reasons were more mundane; he needed money. With a rapacious ex-wife bleeding him white for alimony and child support payments, with a second wife who didn’t know the meaning of the word economy, and with Mary Beth — a patient now become mistress — becoming more expensive every month, Dr. Godden had been teetering at the brink of financial chaos for over a year now. And to top it off this man Nolan had reappeared, demanding money to keep his mouth shut, threatening to open up that business in New York again, to let the local medical society know his credentials weren’t entirely in order.
Fred Godden never intended to get into trouble or to break the law, things just happened around him. Like California, where he’d started out and where the brother-in-law of a patient had gotten him involved in that abortion business. He himself had performed no abortions, he’d only served as a middleman, but when that one girl died the investigation dragged in a lot of wriggling fish, Dr. Fred Godden among them. The authorities had never quite accepted the idea that the dead girl — and three others they’d found — had all coincidentally come to him as psychiatric patients shortly before their abortions, but they hadn’t been able to prove anything. Still, it had seemed wisest to leave California, particularly since his first wife had chosen the blow-up as an excuse to divorce him, just as though it hadn’t been her free-spending that had driven him into the racket in the first place.
In New York he had developed a new practice and a new wife, but his taste in women seemed doomed not to change, and wife number two spent just as frantically as had wife number one, so when one of his patients came up with the drug suggestion he was ready for it.