Part 43 (1/2)

”Does he have a direct number there?”

”All individual transfers are done through me at the switchboard, ma'am. Please hold on.” Candy looked at the switchboard directory, got the number, Started In again, and transferred the call, just as Judith Prietht slouched wearily back into the cubicle.

”What's happening, Candy?” Judith made a smile and changed her shoes for the slippers beneath her counter.

”Just fine,” Candy said, still staring at the lights in the console, reaching again for her Tab.

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP-SESSION IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D., THURSDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER 1990. PARTIc.i.p.aNTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MR. RICK VIGOROUS, AGE 42, FILE NUMBER 744-25-4291.

DR. JAY: So as I see it we have three major and not unrelated themes for discussion. Dream. You. Lenore.

MR. RICK VIGOROUS: Preferably the latter. What did you do to her in here, today? She looked simply awful at lunch.

DR. JAY: No pain, no gain. Enormous, enormous strides, today. Breakthrough positively looming on the emotional horizon. And of course there is the Lang issue.

RICK: The Lang issue?

JAY: The young man from your dream?

RICK: Why is he an issue outside the confines of the dream?

JAY: Who said he was?

RICK: You did.

JAY: Did I? I don't really recall explicitly saying that.

RICK: What an a.s.s-pain you are.

Dr. Jay pauses.

RICK: I officially demand to know how and why Lang is an issue. JAY: You said the Lang dream made you wake up screaming.

RICK,. Streaming.

JAY: Watch me exercise self-control.

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: p.e.n.i.s problems, still. Am I right?

RICK: Listen to this. I'm amazed. Last time I was here you said ”p.e.n.i.s shmenis.”

JAY: But I sense intuitively that Lang has become for you the Other, no? The Other in reference to whom you choose to understand Self, in all its perceived inadequacy?

RICK: I don't know. What, did Lenore mention Lang to you?

JAY: Why did you bring this person back to Cleveland with you, if he upsets you so?

RICK: I really do not know. We met in our old fraternity bar. Things were strange. Affinities seemed to be jutting out everywhere. He simply seemed to fit in. To click.

JAY: So you brought him within your network.

RICK: I hate to sound like a mutual acquaintance of ours, but somehow I felt I had little choice. It was as though a context was created in which it would have been inappropriate not to bring him inside.

JAY: Inside?

RICK: Into the nexus of my professional and emotional life.

JAY: I see. And what about Lenore? Is Lenore ”inside,” to continue your use of a term positively dripping with Blentnerian connotations? RICK: I hope that she will be someday.

JAY: A conspicuous hmmm. And you, Rick. Are you ”inside,” in the context of Lenore's network?

RICK: Don't be s.a.d.i.s.tic. You know I can never be that.

JAY: The Screen Door of Union, et cetera.

RICK: Make my ears stop rumbling.

Dr. Jay pauses. Jay pauses.

Rick Vigorous pauses. Vigorous pauses.

JAY: Rick, friend, has it never occurred to you that you might actually represent the genetic cutting edge?

RICK: The what?

JAY: I invite you to think about it. We as a species used to have tails, no? A full coat of thick body-hair? Prehensile toes? Far keener senses of taste, small, hearing, et cetera than we possess today? We eventually lost all these features.Tossed them aside. Why was this?

RICK: What are you trying to say?

JAY: Rick, we didn't need them. The context in which they had an appropriate function dissolved. They had no use.

RICK: What are you trying to say?

JAY: I suppose I am trying to bring into the focus of our emotional attention the following features of the contemporary society we both enjoy. Genetic engineering. Artificial insemination. Quantum leaps in the technology of s.e.xual aids and implements and prostheses. Perhaps what most of us perceive as the centers of ourselves are simply no longer needed. And we both know that the absence of function, in nature, means death. There is nothing superfluous in nature. Perhaps you are the next wave, Rick. Have you ever thought of that, in the quiet times? Perhaps you are to this Lang what the first upright man was to the crouched, hunched, drooling simian. A sort of G.o.d. A prototype, seated on nature's right hand, for the nonce. A man for the future.

RICK: I think I'd prefer to be the drooling simian, thank you very much. JAY: And why is that?

RICK: I'll bet you can puzzle it out.

JAY: It has to do with Lenore.

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: Rick, I put a vital question to you in the gentlest and most diplomatic terms possible. Do you think you are truly what Lenore Beadsman wants? What she really needs?