between doctor and patient is exemplary. Almost sacred. For one thing—”
“The sacred has nothing to do with it. After all, my clients are paying for a service.”
“So.” Akiko speaks with a new bitterness. I perk up my ears. “In that way you are like a grocer. Grocers have clients. As do whores.”
“More a whore than a grocer.”
“Is that so?”
“Love, after all, is involved.”
“Yes. I suppose that is so. Everything but kissing?”
“You hate me, then?”
“Do I have reason to?” She feigns indifference.
“You think I am a monster.”
“It never occurred to me,” she laughs. “Some monster! With only a single horn.”
Suddenly I am overcome with weariness.
“I’m exhausted,” I say, and standing with unexpected difficulty, make my way to the couch. Crossing the living room is like crossing the Sahara without water. The living room is dark, uncluttered, spotless; it is as if no one lived anywhere near it. As soon as I lie down I feel dizzy and heavy. I fall into sleep like a corpse into mud, wondering: What happens when a doctor sleeps with a patient? And the patient keeps paying the doctor for the other things they do together, the journey into pain and loss and mysterious crimes too terrible to recollect. Is the doctor, then, the patient’s whore?
23
I KEEP SHUDDERING. Something momentous has happened. Akiko points out that all the crows in the city have vanished. She has become watchful, strange. She finds a fish, one of her favorites, floating belly up in the pond. She brings up the shell again. The one she found broken, after I brought home that crazed shopgirl, Lucy. From an old collection, she tells me, and precious, because taken live from the sea a century ago. A thing now illegal because the species is nearing extinction. A perfect thing, until … Somehow the tips of its delicate prongs have been snapped off. As if, but this is impossible, someone deliberately snapped them off. But this is impossible.
“I was keeping it safe,” she says. “A perfect thing. I mean a thing of perfect beauty. Beauty vanishes …” I feared she was about to use that terrible word: betrayed. And then it seemed to me that perhaps I had seen Lucy lift the thing from its box and before my eyes snap … Yes. I believe I recall seeing her look deeply into my eyes before pocketing—
“—the prongs,” Akiko is explaining, “that keep the shell from being tossed about by the currents of the sea. The prongs that root the creature to the sand.”
So that it may sleep as we all wish to sleep, undisturbed.
Had she really said that? Is this what I heard?
It is one thing to cover up one’s own clues and another to remember to cover up someone else’s clues, someone as erratic, as crazy, really, as Lucy.
“Let’s go out!” I suggest to Akiko, to break the fog roiling into every nook and cranny of the house, “and shake off this dark mood. If we make a run for it, we could get to the theater in time. I have tickets; I actually have tickets—” I rifle through my wallet. “You know I sometimes get these little gifts—”
I have a need, such a need, to bring it all together, to ease the moment’s terrible dis-ease. When Akiko agrees, I am greatly relieved. Yet the tickets had come from an old client of Spells; how these things haunt one’s life! Yet there it is: things get solved but never really satisfactorily.
24
THE LITTLE THEATER on Third Street is not far from the Crucible, so called, where all the night butterflies poison the air with their breathing and beating of wings. Going into the Crucible is like stepping into a pool of boiling milk, and as we drive through I see one, a chimera, surge into our lights before vanishing. Perhaps this is also David Swancourt’s world; it is too soon to know. And I realize that, in fact, there is so much about him that I do not know.
The play is intimate, so intimate, and our seats so close to the stage, that it comes across as being
“The sacred has nothing to do with it. After all, my clients are paying for a service.”
“So.” Akiko speaks with a new bitterness. I perk up my ears. “In that way you are like a grocer. Grocers have clients. As do whores.”
“More a whore than a grocer.”
“Is that so?”
“Love, after all, is involved.”
“Yes. I suppose that is so. Everything but kissing?”
“You hate me, then?”
“Do I have reason to?” She feigns indifference.
“You think I am a monster.”
“It never occurred to me,” she laughs. “Some monster! With only a single horn.”
Suddenly I am overcome with weariness.
“I’m exhausted,” I say, and standing with unexpected difficulty, make my way to the couch. Crossing the living room is like crossing the Sahara without water. The living room is dark, uncluttered, spotless; it is as if no one lived anywhere near it. As soon as I lie down I feel dizzy and heavy. I fall into sleep like a corpse into mud, wondering: What happens when a doctor sleeps with a patient? And the patient keeps paying the doctor for the other things they do together, the journey into pain and loss and mysterious crimes too terrible to recollect. Is the doctor, then, the patient’s whore?
23
I KEEP SHUDDERING. Something momentous has happened. Akiko points out that all the crows in the city have vanished. She has become watchful, strange. She finds a fish, one of her favorites, floating belly up in the pond. She brings up the shell again. The one she found broken, after I brought home that crazed shopgirl, Lucy. From an old collection, she tells me, and precious, because taken live from the sea a century ago. A thing now illegal because the species is nearing extinction. A perfect thing, until … Somehow the tips of its delicate prongs have been snapped off. As if, but this is impossible, someone deliberately snapped them off. But this is impossible.
“I was keeping it safe,” she says. “A perfect thing. I mean a thing of perfect beauty. Beauty vanishes …” I feared she was about to use that terrible word: betrayed. And then it seemed to me that perhaps I had seen Lucy lift the thing from its box and before my eyes snap … Yes. I believe I recall seeing her look deeply into my eyes before pocketing—
“—the prongs,” Akiko is explaining, “that keep the shell from being tossed about by the currents of the sea. The prongs that root the creature to the sand.”
So that it may sleep as we all wish to sleep, undisturbed.
Had she really said that? Is this what I heard?
It is one thing to cover up one’s own clues and another to remember to cover up someone else’s clues, someone as erratic, as crazy, really, as Lucy.
“Let’s go out!” I suggest to Akiko, to break the fog roiling into every nook and cranny of the house, “and shake off this dark mood. If we make a run for it, we could get to the theater in time. I have tickets; I actually have tickets—” I rifle through my wallet. “You know I sometimes get these little gifts—”
I have a need, such a need, to bring it all together, to ease the moment’s terrible dis-ease. When Akiko agrees, I am greatly relieved. Yet the tickets had come from an old client of Spells; how these things haunt one’s life! Yet there it is: things get solved but never really satisfactorily.
24
THE LITTLE THEATER on Third Street is not far from the Crucible, so called, where all the night butterflies poison the air with their breathing and beating of wings. Going into the Crucible is like stepping into a pool of boiling milk, and as we drive through I see one, a chimera, surge into our lights before vanishing. Perhaps this is also David Swancourt’s world; it is too soon to know. And I realize that, in fact, there is so much about him that I do not know.
The play is intimate, so intimate, and our seats so close to the stage, that it comes across as being
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