Story: Safety

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Giles would meet with his therapist in his office on the most exposed floor of a tourist hotel -- what a strange place for therapy! The location might have been chosen to facilitate the "purging through dreams" that the therapy promised. A dreamlike location seemed guaranteed to hasten the whole process. That was the theory.

The worst part -- was it the worst? -- was stepping into that elevator. The entry door closed with an indecent whoosh. Ahead not only was the whole view exposed but management had taken the glass out in order to intensify the thrill. The chute leaned inward over the fantastically high lobby, which meant that anyone careless would fall and make a permanent splash. You had just enough time to recognize the danger but not enough to ward it off. And then you were there, on a very high floor, but still 20 stories from the top, and you were hanging over all those milling people, your brothers and sisters who were like yourself looking up at you. Later how would you ever get out of here?? You were even afraid to pry your fingers loose! But when the elevator wiggled to its stop the force of attraction more or less vanished. It too was somehow mechanically generated. He tumbled to the floor and rolled out of the elevator.

Among the therapist's many sayings -- for he was a man built out of healing cliches -- was the following: I don't ask you if you wish to be cured, I only cure you. His techniques were unpleasant. Also there was no evidence that they worked. You wouldn't even find brochures with testimonials. Most who consulted him were in no shape to ask for anything like an evaluation. The patients merely came and then went. Did they ever ask themselves if they were better? If so, how did they judge? In emotional terms, Giles today was only where he'd previously been but that outcome might have been the best of all the different possibles. Without this treatment he might have been worse. In any case he came back another time. When he fell out of the elevator there was no floor beneath him. The rumor was that the very space was digitized and that management did whatever it wanted with the result.

Abruptly Giles had that sensation he hated so much, of looking out the airplane window and seeing ocean above and sky below. It was that moment when you were upside down and simply supposed to trust that the pilots knew what they were doing to get you rightside up. A panic attack had come and enclosed him so that he couldn't move. Oh don't let this happen here! when I'm not even sure what "here" amounts to: here? He wasn't going to faint or cry -- he couldn't do anything. The wings slanted and righted and now he could see the lobby underneath him. Of course what guarantee did he have that it wouldn't disappear again? And this breakdown in trust was in fact the sum total of Giles' neurosis and had the same trapdoor structure that paranoia had, namely, that its fears were largely grounded and founded -- they were true -- but had to be considered sick and demented at the same time.

The flight attendant held him by the elbow. But no she was a tourist holding a matinee ticket and only wanted to get past him into the elevator. He knew the importance of giving the impression that he wasn't suffering or sick. He stood rigid like a strong and independent man, a soldier, a guy with no problems. He moved aside for her like a gentleman from a romance. The pretence actually made him feel healthy, though it was just pretend healthy, but you get points even for pretend. And so the minutes passed. And when he walked down the corridor he was able to pretend, like everyone else, that there was a florid hotel rug under his feet. Another one of the therapist's sayings: your feet aren't crazy, only you are. So let them walk you somewhere better. Giles walked. Even though he knew. He knew it would be manipulated. But another look out the window, a whoosh of the panic returning, no. No. He walked. His ex-wife mumbled in his ear as they walked. She spoke just loudly enough that he could hear she was speaking but not loud enough for the sense to be grasped. You know how that bothers me, he said but then corrected himself, rephrased the comment, since there was a need not to antagonize her, or anyone.

Darling, my ears are buzzing, I can't hear you.

A mumble like the substructure noise on a plane.

Why are you here? he asked. I am the one who is sick.

Oh Giles, you know what the therapist always says: I divide the world not into the sick and the well but into those who know they're sick. And those who don't.

Whatever relief or knowledge you receive here, I want it too.

It is no longer safe not to "know yourself". The airplane glides, the sky turns upside down. Your children look at you strangely. The car won't stay in its lane. Strangers scream at each other in the supermarket. You get home, sit in your kitchen chair and find yourself crying, without a reason but the truth is that the reason is plain, what is missing is the realization that you should always have had: "know yourself".

As the therapist says: Queasiness is the single path to health.

Giles looked down and the plane's window was underneath his feet. He closed his eyes and took another step. The lavatory door was locked, his wife was gone. Only a tourist with a ticket in her hand, walking briskly to the elevator. Women were the only thing in the world that he really liked.

As the morning progressed, the path stretched like a rubber band ahead of him and the office receded forever until suddenly, in its own mysterious time, it was simply there. It chose the moment in which it was to manifest itself, in space: another form of realization. I can see the sense in which space could be envisioned, Newton-like, as God's sensorium, the issue being that space cannot simply exist, outside anyone's consciousness (or why would there be space instead of non-space?) and yet that consciousness cannot belong to a puny human. Because space encloses us and transcends us. It transcends us but does not transcend consciousness. Ergo the consciousness belongs to one unimaginably large. And we are mere tokens on its gameboard.

So it was that when these dreams and visions invaded Giles' own space, he had no obvious way to turn them off, given that that mega-space of mutual claims that we call "reality" was by no means under his own control. God controlled it, he did not. And the dreams, those also were of God. He hoped so.

He stepped into the long foyer. Delectable slim girls -- that is, women -- were filing, almost dancing along the corridors, hidden by the svelte columns, they had a sort of private domain, and the women were running, running. Why would anyone run in an office environment? He kept trying to see their faces but couldn't. Way down at the end of the room was the emperor, no, the therapist, wearing an expression of undiluted delight, waiting for him. Giles' feet sank into the marquetry as though it were taffy, he could not get his footing. When he reached the blue rug in front of the dais, he wedged his foot down into what was no rug at all! It was sheer air, a 20 story drop and he screamed as he fell, It was a very quiet scream, more the thought of a scream. And the therapist cried out: you needed that! You needed that!

You must learn from suffering!

When he picked himself up, he found himself at the building's utter top, as though he had fallen up not down. He was shaking so much he couldn't move. The penthouse restaurant swung above the city like a kind of lighthouse beam. Businessmen in very expensive suits wee crashing the elevator. You typed the number of the floor you wanted and it told you which letter elevator to use, but the businessmen crowded in front and wouldn't let others get on. Giles shook like the last leaf of autumn and he still could not thrust himself forward.

Finally (in the late afternoon?) a lady with a kindly and familiar face put her arm around his shoulders and led him to the open door. Let this man get on, she said. Get out of our way. Perhaps she pushed him inside. So, with his back to the spectacular view he descended to the ground floor, let himself be kneaded into the lobby and somehow, through some unrepeatable maneuver that was like opening a can, got himself outside. Later he was seen walking along the atrociously crowded sidewalk, and he was going goodness knows where. Goodness knows.

Come back soon!

*

Poem: "I looked into the icon's eyes"

*

I looked into the icon's eyes
but they looked to my right -- I could-
n't turn I couldn't take my own
eyes off those eyes but wondered did

he see his father behind me?
so could I if not face to face
still feel the presence of my own
creation in the icon's space?

The self was not the center of
this gold place -- but felt an assuage-
ment rise, a great weight taken off
these shoulders lifting like a bridge.

*