The Doctor's chrome and Naugahyde office masqueraded in exposed brick drag like a new hotel in Philadelphia. From the bullet-shaped bulb in the center of the Doctor's face hung half-moon eyeglasses, the fingerprinted lenses pearled and flashed. He looked past the office cash register--his moral equivalent of a home pay phone--through the open double doors which looked and felt like old varnished oak, but moved as heavily as a cell door, clanging rather than latching, and into his household where a party gently raged. At the bullseye of his party, he watched his Friday-night guests gather like ducks running after each other in the boardwalk's duck shoot.
The Doctor wandered in, holding his stemmed glass as one holds a pistol: trigger-finger cupping the bowl, thumb and fingers gripping the stem. He peered over the eyeglasses as if to avoid the nose that might remind you of a fat brown child squatting in the mud. He was mostly bald, but, as if to make up for his head's topological bareness, his neck was a windjammer of fully rigged loose skin.
Naturally, most of the Doctor's guests looked nothing like him: they were radicals who could again afford long unfashionable hair. Radical, the Doctor wished he was, but could not be, and wished it even more when his look met the two eyes of his evening's ageless lust: the white student looked directly at the black student and if you'd thrown dust between them, light might have appeared. Their gaze was provoked by his definition of psychiatrist: "A physician who never signs death certificates." His comment came after he'd started discussing one of his cases: a family who enticed children into their suburban ranch-style home with candy, then made them engage in a family argument. After the children were convinced, either with more candy or several good strops of daddy's belt, to yell, scream and cry, they all made up. And pederasty followed reconciliation--something like couples who follow their arguments with lovemaking.
"Why don't they molest their own children?" The white boy's blue eyes showed respect for the Doctor's sublime indiscretion of discussing a current case. His bleached flax hair looked like a second opinion of his skin, the loose fitting blond pastel clothes made you understand why artists and pornographers must have nude models.
"Or each other?" questioned the black boy whose crystal white eyes blinked nervously, finally breaking their laser-like gaze.
The Doctor cleared his waiting throat, forming it around the distant, tasteful words, "Hell if I know. My pure speculation is that the other children were simply surrogates; they were, in effect, molesting their own children. It's odd how repression manifests itself in people," he concluded, his lips twitching. He went on quickly, "To help them bring out their stunted, inarticulate feelings, we conducted primal scream therapy with the whole family. Also regression therapy by baby-bottle sucking, both widely accepted therapeutic events. It seems that they screamed in whole sentences run together--as it turns out, several 99-year sentences." The Doctor guffawed, spilling his drink. "The photographs of their open mouths became exquisite with the actual scream played beside it. We have video equipment on order."
The rectangular black face moved its heavy sculpted lips. "You have a fascinating profession."
"Not profession," the Doctor growled harshly, but under his breath. Then his tentative, genial smile and half-closed indulgent eyes returned. "No, I'm nothing more than a professional amateur, if you will." He reached out to massage the black boy's elbow, physical forgiveness and flattery from the Doctor who thought that as long as the boy sounded as if he sold the world's finest items without being touched by the contaminants, the very contents, of that sexual bazaar, as long as he could look at him and bask in his mutable beauty, then he didn't have to really listen.
At the center of the whole shooting match, the Doctor felt like a sterile artist whose technique had become his sex. The Doctor knew his party had surrendered to the infinite perfectibility of neurotic rich people when a very sick woman with large curls and much gold clanking in the cavern between her breasts rushed up to a newly arrived guest at the door: "Stanley! Darling, do come in." Then she cried, "Wait!" Her large, slightly buck teeth flashed back toward the audience, alerting them, "You can't come in unless you promise to fuck me." She spread-eagled to bar his entrance. Try this some time; it is possible to make a room-full of people who had been discussing movies roar with laughter. Poor Stanley, all dolled up in hes receding hairline and light tan suit, was scandalized, but had the presence of mind to take his wedding band off.
The Doctor's mental eyes rolled toward heaven but his real ones twinkled merrily. Still twinkling, he turned to his two young charges and, barely moving his smiling lips, said, "I feel like a gadfly on the biggest flop in the galaxy. Why don't we leave these people to stare at themselves in my mirrored mantle. The fire is too warm here, I think. There's a colder fire outside--it's burning blue and friendly, let's go."
They left to walk through the damp winter cold of the woods around his house, finding their way by the light of the silvery moon. Reflecting the party lights, the snow seemed yellow instead of the usual calmly laconic blue of nightfall. From a vial he pulled out like a pistol from his pocket, the Doctor inhaled deeply. He wafted it toward the two young men, saying, "Have you ever dreamt to fly--or leap a tall building, or the Royal Gorge Bridge--and survive? Fly with this, it gives enough of the sensation of flying that you only want the dream."
They walked some distance down a gravel lane running through his acre of trees in this exclusive suburb. "Doctor," said the white 18 year old, "there's talk that the quality of the urban geography follows a downward curve declining arithmetically with age." Pause. Do you think this will ever be a slum?"
"Isn't that a pretty thought," replied the Doctor, his real eyes rotating at a rate roughly equal to Malthus' underground RPMs. He shrugged his shoulders enthusiastically and with a warm smile said, "Well let me just look at you boys!" He put a hand on each of their outer elbows and pushed them toward each other until they touched.
"That's funny," the back one declared, "that's what my pop always says."
"Diet?" the Doctor snapped. "Don't you ever call him `sir'?"
To mollify the Doctor, the white boy said, "If we were back inside we'd be talking about fucking movies--cheer up."
The Doctor brightened up. "Alright, no movies and say `sir' every now and again."
"Have you heard any good jokes lately, sir?"
"Ah, my boys," he said, swinging them around, taking their inner elbows and walking them down the path, "this weather, it's just like heaven to touch. This cold static white, so blue it looks like flesh that dies in it; it reminds me that we are all mortal. Now why doesn't that lessen my extraordinary fear. I'm even afraid of you. Do I have good reason to be?"
"Oh no, sir," replied the black one, too quickly.
Just as quickly the Doctor said, "An Arab is walking down the street and walks into a wall. Which part of his body hits the wall first?"
The two boys gazed at each other and the black one spoke to his white friend as if the Doctor had been forgotten in the same way an audience is excluded from the action in a play: "When this is over we renegotiate terms." White friend nodded. They turned back to the Doctor and said simultaneously, "His erection."
"No!" the Doctor exulted, "His nose!"
They chuckled politely.
The white one said, "Doctor, I saw you across the room as you came in tonight. You looked very good. Sir."
"Instead of `very good looking'? Well, no matter. Some enchanted evening, you might see a stranger, on the other side of a crowded room. Remember that boys, you'll be needing it at the lineups before long."
The black one nodded sharply down at his white friend. The Doctor had been leading them by the elbows, and at the nod, they jerked him up under the armpits and executed a 180 degree turn while the Doctor's feet spun beneath him. "I think we should go back and see if Stella and Stanley have had their fuck yet," said the black one.
The Doctor smiled bitterly for just a moment before recovering his genial, fatherly smile. Didn't want them to see that he had the power to be bitter, or was it all trick photography like Jeckyl becoming Hyde? Doctor chuckled softly, "Well, I see you've grown up right around your old dad. You don't use `sir' anymore because your bosses are all called by their first names. Times have changed--it's little ways like this that make us really know that times have definitely changed."
"Yes, Doctor, I think you're right."
"`Doctor'! I've heard that so often that I've forgotten my real name. But I'll bet you boys have it memorized from all those checks. `Doctor'! An M.D. does all that to you. All I really want to be right now is ho...ho...homo--" His lips oscillated involuntarily, like a jellyfish in waves searching for its next meal.
"Easy does it, Doctor. Nothing's going to hurt you. We certainly can't."
"I know," the Doctor says warmly, faking it this time, "my boys are all right. Good strong lads. With lots of things on your minds. Like your girlfriends and future families. It's a good time to be just starting out in life--if you start from the right place."
"We certainly hope to, sir."
"Good," said the Doctor, lighting a big green cigar with large puffs and a flaming tip, "we'll go chase the sluggards out and call an end to this party."
Meanwhile, back at the ranch house, the Doctor's professional hostess had cleared away the littered glasses and floating cigarette butts. Just as the three man, elbow to elbow, crunched up the gravel and ice lane, it started snowing. "Oh! Merry Christmas every one," the Doctor said, squeezing their elbows just hard enough to cause pain.
They entered the heavy paneled front door, stepping onto the plush beige carpeting that ran to the large central stair, winding upward in a weighty white marble spiral. He have his wrap to the hostess, "Thank you Martha. Are Stella and Stanley still here?" he asked mischievously.
Martha, a thin black matron on the outer rim of middle age, stiffened capably, "I'm sure I wouldn't know, Sir."
"Thank you, Martha. Why don't you go on home now. Come back at 8:30 tomorrow morning. I'm going to work some tonight out in the carriage house and need to get out early. I'm going to sleep over there tomorrow as well. You'll have the whole house to yourself--just what you've always wanted. When you're done, take the rest of the day off. How's that, Martha?"
"Welll, Sir," she said with the gulp of exploited labor, "it's terribly early and tomorrow's Saturday, too. But if I get Wednesday off, I'd really appreciate that, Sir."
"Good, Martha, then we're agreed."
He walked down a hallway to the guest room and yelled, "Stelllaaaa!" He opened the door slightly, swinging it open in terrible disappointment. "They have gone. How boring." The Doctor turned to his young charges, "Well, it's a long drive in and snowing, I've got plenty of room here. You might as well stay over."
The ivory and ebony consulted with a glance, and the black one said, "Fine Doctor, we'll stay out here." He pointed down at the living room's plush brown carpet.
He accepted this, saying, "My office is through the double doors, the guest room is down that hall. It has a queen size bed," Doctor choked.
The black student smiled gently at the Doctor's little howler, "I'll sleep on the sofa, thank you."
The Doctor muttered unintelligibly, politely bowing out of the room.
The white boy walked to the guest room's bed, sitting on it as if to test its advisability, then stripped to his white shorts. He stood up and his bare arched feet mashed shadows in the plush pink carpet, like the impression guilt leaves in you mind. Guilt and humiliation leave the same sort of impression: one is a passive mortification and the other is an active one. The Doctor was a very active man. It had been a lifelong avocation for the Doctor. For instance, approaching his Chief in medical school for a charity, he was rebuffed by the Chief's large reptilian eyes. The Chief tugged his lab coat into position and demanded a statement of receipts and allocations before he would give. The young Doctor was confused, but then said, "You have every right to feel that way sir--how do we know where all the money goes anyway?" The Chief snickered, "No, I don't in fact feel that way, but I didn't want to let you get by without sharpening my needles, either." The Chief gave him a check for $15.
And thus, the Doctor's impressionable mind created, then, this narrative:
The blond boy's hair was short and swept back over his squarish head. In a kind of denunciation of his features' regularity, short blond curls popped out, rumpling the otherwise smooth plastic look of his hair, giving his entire face an aura of occasionally imbibed wildness.
His body was covered with a layer of hair so fine that even on his arms--those monstrously tan sheaths of muscle, vein, and sinew so dense that you couldn't have said whether there was a bone in them--only under the brightest light could you have seen the hair. And the Doctor liked to see it. He liked the bright lights of the third degree with its heat and vague shadowy white forms of the shouting police.
The white one walked out to the living room where his friend stretched from end to end of an enormous plush red velvet sofa. Once you've seen that big a sofa on a brown rug, the dark black youngster stretched all over it makes you come to a new sense of which colors go together. A good antidote to racism.
The squarish black face turned and because of the pillow crumpling his hair, you could see in a shock that his hair was cut to create the squarish manly appearance. His dark arm, with a pale palm up, moved to scratch his inner thigh up to the bottom of his black mesh underpants.
The white boy stroked back his hair with impatient narcissism, then said, "Want to talk?"
"About the old man?"
"Yes." Waiting.
"Harmless."
"That's not what I meant."
"We haven't argued with him yet over money to send us to Europe for our summer vacations." The black boy's shrewd voice, soft but abrupt, stopped you like a cobweb in the dark. "Or perhaps," he concluded softly, "it would be better to get our winter vacations in Jamaica now, and worry about summer on the continent later."
The white boy, showing he was no slouch when it came to opportunism, suggested, "Do we need him with us, if there is a way to get rid of him, to arrange for these things?"
"Ah not yet!" said the black one softly. "It's too soon since the last one. And we have to glide longer in between from now on."
In the Doctor's beige office with its short-napped rugs, the cash register rang tinnily. The Doctor had listened long enough; now what he meant to say was: "I won't squat in mud any more. I am the carpenter's son who breaks loaves and multiplies fish! There is only one revolution which will not destroy me, and that's my own." Instead, knowing that it would destroy him, he said to the young woman seated opposite him, "Go now, Sophy. Save me, my daughter."
Sweet Sophia darkened the moonlit wall, breaking it like the cheap spine of an old paperback mystery. The black boy pops off the couch when he sees his sister and the silhouette of his family. The white boy who is draped in moonlight, black shadows from erect nipples score his pale torso.
Sophia raised a gun. Her hair looked tortured and dishevelled as if by benign neglect, as if unraveled like a weighted string twisted tight, all that energy released in a brief family war. She wagged the gun meaningfully, and her brother moved with animal confidence, white muscle rippling like the coat of a black panther suddenly prey.
"Don't do that! Something's bothering you, but not this way, not now, there's someone who can help you." He smiled and glanced at his white friend. "Give me the gun."
And her hand relaxed, but it had already been too late: "Yes," the white boy said, "Doctor can help you." She snapped alert, shooting. Chips of white enamel flung from his mouth, teeth and oblongata shattered to nubs. The undertaker would have to suspend a bridge over his gums to elicit the corrupt compliments for his trade that hover like brimstone fumes over heavy American caskets. He didn't do anything for the missing oblongata.
Sophia took a deep breath, and faced her brother. Murder, like war, temporarily reduces the complexities of life.
"Stop now, I'm your brother, I can help you."
Turning toward her brother's dead lover, speech buried deeply, froths in a dark throat, "What? No complaints? No desire to join him. No begging on your hands and knees to be allowed to follow your lover? Or only distressed damsels did that? My brother," she flung out the words as one flings out used flypaper, "catching that white boy's disease. You should shame, you should get on your knees and beg forgiveness." Pronouncing it `forgiveness,' as if being saved once were for all time. "I never liked Momma's kind of religion, but it sure has its uses." He moved to face her. "Don't move a muscle," she reminds him.
"Am I so horrible that you've come to this? Why can't you just idly hate like everybody else? Wait," he says, beginning to sweat, "people can learn to hate without passion. Doctor can teach yo--"
Only one shot shatters the bridge of his--what else?--aquiline nose. His body slumps from the wall that has already absorbed all the deadly force without cracking. Sophia dropped the gun, wringing blood from her hands as if to wash away the pearly fingerprints. Who'd have thought them to have had so much blood?
"No 'sucker," she said turning to enter the office, "you can't teach me
to hate without passion."
T. Jackson Lyons says "I don't know if you're big on contributors' blurbs, but I detest the-as long as you spell my name right, who cares? The story doesn't live or die by my hand anymore."
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