“You do?” I whispered. Breathing was hard, and plates on the table looked nauseating beneath overhead light.
“Yes, Tom. We do,” confided Bernhardt, applying another squeeze. I had the sense that Bernhardt was using me, that night, as a fragile, middle-aged totemic object signifying childhood and — if I know him, with his fondness for D. W. Winnicott, the Squiggle game, and various improvisational-play theories that owe a lot to so-called radical avant-garde theater and the whole “process over performance” approach to role playing and creative living in general — Bernhardt was using me, as I was saying, as a human totem signifying childhood and the depression that grows with the healthy child’s capacity for love and hatred in mature relationships. I know that Bernhardt employs dolls, sandboxes, crayons, and various stuffed animals in his practice with adults, often with remarkable results. Now I was the doll, Bernhardt the big man holding me; and the world, because I floated above it, became magical and safe.
I was sweating. I felt cared for. My hand opened. The cinnamon-raisin toast, the few slices of toast, dropped, broken and inedible, to the floor.
“That’s better,” growled the voice in my ear, the menacing, nurturing, comforting voice of the adult.
I placed my hands over Bernhardt’s. It is true that my arms were pressed beneath Bernhardt’s arms wrapped tightly around me. Nonetheless, my poor arms were free, more or less, from the elbows down; in other words, I was able to move my hands a small distance, to wiggle my trapped arms, and to reach up and hold those hands holding me.
My palms were dusted with crumbs. I wiped the crumbs on Bernhardt. People were watching, the entire crowded, silent restaurant. I understood, gazing sadly at my colleagues’ faces, that this was an occasion for embarrassment. But why? For what reason?
I felt woozy. It was as if I were far, far off the floor. I closed my eyes and hyperventilated — a dozen short breaths. I did not ask Bernhardt to set me down. Standing unsupported was, I felt, out of the question; and I had the impression, anyway, that I was drifting upward, rising farther and farther from the ground.
It was then, while Bernhardt squeezed and I held him — it was then that I began my ascent toward the ceiling. Up I went. I have to confess that I felt, ascending, a bit scared. I am not as a rule happy or comfortable on rocking boats or on airplanes thrown by turbulence, or on the average amusement-park ride, or even cruising in an automobile on a hilly lane; and I can say from experience — I think people who endure motion sickness will concur — that the first sensations of nausea are invariably accompanied by a swift and debilitating panic, a flush of hotness and fear that grows intense and then becomes a chief symptom of the illness. It is true — and on this point, as well, I believe fellow sufferers will agree — that the worst motion sickness occurs when one is helpless to predict or control the rising and the falling, the dipping and soaring and that sudden, excruciating ascension of a speeding car or tossing plane, or the awful pitching and rolling on board a rusty boat. The worst sickness comes when one is a passenger.
Bernhardt squeezed and up I went, up toward the Pancake House ceiling, drifting higher to float over the heads of clinicians and waitresses gathered around tables piled with waffles, uneaten bacon, biscuits. How I wished I had been sensible and ordered eggs over easy. But it was too late, the pancakes were inside me, and I was hovering beneath the ceiling, up beneath pendulous, institutional lights, and the air against my face felt warm and still, and friends’ faces below me appeared pale and minuscule, and I could smell Bernhardt’s soap and his dry skin, those bad clothes and the man’s breath like too-sweet flower petals brushing my face, filling my nose and my mouth with rotten perfume. I felt the big man’s arms wrapped around me. I held on as best I could, reached up with my hands and clasped his tightly in mine to keep from floating too high or, alternatively, from losing balance and falling forward across chairs and tables. Outside, the wind stormed in off the silver river that flows through our city; and I imagined, briefly and stupidly, that if I could only sail over near a window, I might be carried out of the Pancake House, back toward town and, with any luck, home — up and away over the delightful covered bridge and the book factory and surrounding neighborhoods crowded with porno theaters, tattoo parlors, all those intriguing and dangerous barrooms — straight back to Jane.