Dr. Von Hauser welcomed Caroline and Michael into his office with a slow exaggerated nod, tipping his head enough to expose a shiny scalp beneath thin greasy strands of hair. Michael stood uncomfortably just behind his mother, embarrassed by every aspect of the situation. The doctor was nearly six and a half feet tall, wore slacks tailored five inches too short. Michael could not tell whether it was the man or the room that smelled so intensely of mothballs. There was a clock on the wall showing birds instead of numbers and the respective song of each different bird rang out when its hour arrived.
“Very good to meet you, Michael,” was the first thing the doctor said, even before making eye contact with his subject-to-be. “This should be a quick and painless experience if we’re lucky.”
“Sure,” said Michael between tongue-clicks. He felt like he was in a movie, though not in a superficial way like when he saw a beautiful sunset or made out with girls. He read a few titles on the bookshelf during the awkward silence and it appeared as though the collection had been limited to old cookbooks with titles like Home Sweet Home and The Family that Dines Together, the only exception being a copy of Catechism of the Catholic Church.
It was so far a mystery to Michael as to what had changed his mother’s opinion about hypnosis. Perhaps it was that she felt a stronger aversion to pornography than she did those things she had once attributed to the occult. In any case his mother now appeared almost more comfortable than he had ever seen her before, as if they were in a dermatologist’s office instead of with the most stereotypically sinister man either of them had ever met. Von Hauser motioned for the two of them to sit on the chaise lounge on the opposite side of the room. The doctor remained standing. He opened a notebook that was clearly brand new, flipped through blank pages until he arrived at one in the middle with writing on it.
“Michael Flynn,” said Von Hauser, neither looking at the notebook nor at Michael. “So. What brings us together today?”
Michael looked to Caroline expectantly, but she offered him no escape. Von Hauser gave an “Mmm?” and Michael responded, “Pornography.”
The doctor recomposed himself after a moment of confusion. “Yes, I see that in my notes,” he said. “I do have to warn you, Mrs. Flynn, it is not standard practice to accept patients of such a young age, though your insistence on the phone, as well as the fact that this will be fairly standard hypnotherapy, allows me to proceed with a clearer conscience.”
“Thank you,” said Caroline.
“I will, however, have to ask you to leave me alone with your son for the time being. The interview should take less than an hour and there is ample reading material in the waiting room to help you pass the time.”
Caroline arose with her purse, kissed Michael on the cheek and left the room. When the door closed behind her Dr. Von Hauser took two steps toward Michael, peered down at him with an air of nervous curiosity. “I’ll be up front with you, Michael. It is not standard practice for us to begin treatment right away. Normally we would take this time to get to know each other. I would ask you how often you find yourself looking at pornography. I would ask what you fantasize about and what kind of pornography you are attracted to viewing. These questions would allow me to better judge whether or not you are a good candidate for hypnotherapy. Whether or not you are actually addicted to pornography. Whether or not your mother may be overreacting slightly.”
The doctor reached out toward Michael with a bony finger, pushed against the front of Michael’s head apprehensively. Michael jerked his head away from the finger and cringed in cranial discomfort “I’m not addicted to porn,” he said while massaging his head.
“No matter,” said Von Hauser, “You are here as you should be. Besides, I have other questions to ask you.” This time he began to read directly from his notebook. “First of all, you are sixteen years old?”
“Yes.”
“And aside from school, what do you do with your time?”
Michael smiled. “I look at porn.”
Van Hauser shoved his finger into the same spot. “Aside from school, what do you do with your time?”
“I don’t know. A lot,” Michael conceded, his head aching. “I read, I write. I like music. I like to watch movies. Hang out.”
“You read books?”
“Mostly articles and stuff like that. Informative stuff.”
“Internet articles, yes?”
“I guess so. Yes.”
“You say you like music. Are you a musician?”
“Yes, I can play the piano a little.”
“And you’re a writer too?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“And would you also guess that you are a filmmaker?”
“No. I wouldn’t say that I am a filmmaker.”
“And you like to look at pornography.”
“Yes. Sometimes I look at porn.”
“Very good.” Von Hauser closed his notebook, walked over to place it on his desk next to a collection of ceramic terriers. He reached into a drawer, closed it, and walked back to Michael, concealing an object in a cupped hand. “Now, for these next few questions I need you to answer without thinking. Even if the answer makes no sense, just say the first thing that enters the mind.” With his arm outstretched the doctor pushed play on a tape recorder that he held against the same area on Michael’s forehead where his finger had been.
Michael heard nothing after the click of the play button, though he felt a vibration coming from the recorder. It entered his head and surged lightning sharp down to his toes, shot back up and escaped from his mouth in a weak and high-pitched moan.
“Very good,” Said the doctor to the boy who was almost paralyzed on the couch. He hit fast forward on the tape recorder, then stopped it and played something audible this time. Michael heard a low rumbling frequency far below the range of the small speaker. This time his response sounded more like an airy belch, though it came from his vocal chords and not his stomach. His body quaked but it was not entirely unpleasant and it seemed to reenergize his limbs.
“Very good,” said the doctor. “No more questions.”
For the first time Dr. Von Hauser made direct eye contact with his patient. Michael noticed that one of the doctor’s eyes was unresponsive and drooped down and to the left. Also, Von Hauser’s face had turned red hot. “Stand up!” he shouted, and when Michael didn’t move he shouted again. “Stand up, you little cocksucker!”
Michael obeyed. He thought of running but did not run, weak and confused as the interview had left him.
“Now straighten up! Stand like you’re not jerking it shamefully, put your shoulders back! Inflate your torso like a balloon. You’ve been suffocating your brain for too long. You’ve been smothering your own heart.”
Again Michael obeyed. Standing tall, he could feel his spine crack and pop in his lower back. He felt relief, like a flow of energy that had previously been inhibited was now moving swiftly up his spine. Even so, he was a little off balance in this new posture.
“Use your feet!” continued the doctor, “They are yours and will not work unless you make them work! You are a tower, Michael, and your feet are where you begin.” Von Hauser’s voice softened and continued to as he began to repeat, “You are a tower, Michael, up through the clouds and down below the ground.” Michael could sense the doctor as he began to walk around, addressing him from all angles. “You are a tower, Michael, up through the clouds and down below the ground.” Von Hauser repeated until Michael’s eyes had glazed over, his eyelids nice and heavy. “If there were no ground, you the tower would be impossible. You are a tower, Michael, and the ground is you. You are up through the clouds and the ground is you.” From behind, Von Hauser pushed Michael gently. Michael leaned into the balls of his feet and hardly budged. “You see? You are a tower, Michael, and the ground is you. On the ground there are people. On the ground there are laws. Focus on the laws, Michael. Though you look down on the ground where there are laws you are not above the laws. Neither are you below them, nor beside them. On the ground there are laws and the ground is you.”
The doctor led Michael to sit once again. “On the ground cries a baby, Michael. The baby is you. A woman holds the baby. She is holding you.” Michael felt tears forming at the corners of his eyes, felt his chest tighten with raw emotion. “She wipes your tears and cleans your snot, but that is for her. For you there are no tears. There is no snot. How could there be? The snot is you. You are a baby crying. But look closer to where there is no crying and there is no snot. There are these things but these things are you. Only there will you find yourself as a baby. Below a tower that is ground you are a baby who cries but is not crying.”
Michael was releasing short intense sobs now, his face all wet and contorted.
“Now,” said Von Hauser, “You are being smothered. You are a tower exploding. Bit by bit you are crumbling. Bit by bit, shooting and falling and crumbling to the ground that is you. You are a baby being smothered by a tower that is you. You are rubble on a silenced baby, but you are a tower that was and a baby that cried. On the ground above the clouds you are a tower that was and a baby that cried. You are a tower. You are a baby. The woman remembers you so. You are up through the clouds and the ground that keeps you grounded.”
“I am a memory,” said Michael, his face still contorted.
“You are not a memory!” Von Hauser grabbed Michael by the arm and violently pulled him back up. This time Michael stood tall without instruction, his feet taking full advantage of the gravity over his body. “You are not a memory. You are a tower that is now rubble. Without moving a stone, you are a tower all the same. Before the puzzle exists a picture. You are the picture. The rubble is you but you are not rubble. You are up through the clouds and the ground that keeps you grounded. The woman says, ‘I remember a tower that smothered my baby.’ But you are not the memory. Bit by bit you are the tower. Bit by bit you are the baby. Bit by bit you are bit by bit. Bit by bit by bit by bit,” Von Hauser began repeating. Again he reached forward and pushed against Michael’s forehead. This time Michael did not resist. “Say it with me.”
“Bit by bit by bit by bit.” Although he was unaware of the doctor’s finger, Michael could feel the electricity in his brain flowing out of each lobe, gathering against his temple like the verge of an orgasm. “Bit by bit by bit by bit by bit.” Michael was lost in it. His tears flowed, though he was not crying. His eyes still closed, he watched stars forming in his periphery and then populating his entire field of vision. He began moving through them slowly. He thought of warp-speed-ahead. He thought of his screensaver. At this the doctor pushed harder on his forehead and his thoughts disappeared. He was in outer space with the aerial objects creating a collective hum as they whirred by, massaging his brain more intensely as the stars multiplied and condensed.
Michael found himself in chore clothes still clean: blues jeans stiff from liquid starch and boots without the slightest smear of pig shit on the tan leather, no sandbur in their laces at all. He tied them slowly with undexterous kid fingers, feeling a violent internal obligation toward the perfect bow knot. Tears and snot already dried up like glue on his flushing cheeks, the skin around the nostrils burned red-shiny-raw. He irritated it further with the coarse damp sleeve of his sweatshirt. With the shoestring loops lying incongruently over the sides of the tiny work boot, he could feel the frustration rise up, manifest first as a sort of puerile growl before bending upward in pitch toward a full-fledged scream.
Still, even in the midst of this outburst, Michael was well aware that he was dreaming, understood perfectly that the mudroom with the embroidered welcome sign – plus the deep and malodorous coat closet wherein his older brother used to hole up with the cordless, attempting mid-pubescent phone sex while Michael stood inconspicuously within earshot – wasn’t where his body was in this moment. He nonetheless grasped the moment’s urgency, abandoned the laces and began to search the muddy closet floor for a pair of gloves that were as close to matching as possible.
A car outside in the early a.m. had either found itself headed in the wrong direction or maybe just realized that there was nothing at all down Rural Route #3, and was turning around in the gravel driveway, headlights afloat across glass etchings in the front door window and all those rocks crackling under the rubber tires. Michael knew exactly who was in the car; although, in reality, Darwin Rolf looked nothing like this Indian kid with the slicked back hair and a can of generic soda, of whom he felt untraceably afraid. The girl, on the other hand, was exactly his sister without translation. The image of their faces dissipated as the vehicle backed out onto the road, heading toward the lake with the solitary camping spot and a supposed road kill cemetery.
Michael set out across the weedy front lawn, over which no moon made the dew drops glisten. The air was heavy with moisture too, and the smell of manure that trademarked Michael’s school clothes seemed a chemical component of the drifting fog. The other smell was a faint trace of garbage just burned as Michael approached the enormous trash heap that his father set fire to every Sunday afternoon. He stood at the foot of a mountain of shredded tractor tires, their steel belts frayed out in all directions, melted mattresses and box springs still glowing red hot, all objects somehow familiar, though entirely displaced in time. Michael stomped out the embers on a magazine that lay curled up at the pile’s edge. After shaking off the ashes, he peeled open the brittle cover toward a salvaged page at the magazine’s center: a two page spread of a woman being penetrated in every orifice by men whose likenesses were destroyed in the fire. She was gagging on semen and it trickled from the corners of her mouth. Michael looked around and behind before folding the pages and tucking them into his back pocket. He smeared black ash all down his clean pants without ridding it whatsoever from the palms of his hands.
A few hundred yards from the burn-pile and despite the absent moon, a chicken coop stood barnyard red in bold contrast to its night-swallowed surroundings. Although not exactly glowing, the building seemed cut from scarlet, glued to black construction paper, incidentally familiar like a Bible school art project. Even the flaked off paint surrounding its base was plain as day in the obscure twilight. The animals inside were quiet, though their odor joined in on the pungent atmospheric collage.
Inside the coop the hens breathed in unconscious unison and the deep red glow of the overhead heat lamps added sheen to their rust colored feathers. Michael stepped quietly over the straw covered floor, making his way toward the back of the barn, anxiously aware of the pornography he was concealing, equally fearful of putting off his chores any longer. He was surprised, however, to find that instead of the usual feedbags and baled straw stacked in this back corner, there stood two sets of wood-framed bunk beds at a 90-degree angle to one another, against what appeared to be gray cement walls.
Just like back in the mudroom, Michael could feel his guts wring out emotional contradictions. The school bus would be coming soon and the chickens still needed to be fed, but here he was in the unfinished basement of a bygone home, not even in the same county as the farmhouse. He could see his round-bellied brother in basketball shorts sleeping away on the top bunk, snoring like he was going to choke to death at any second. The television in the makeshift living room around the corner from the bunk beds had been left on. It threw low-definition neon colors all over the dark musty place.
Michael turned to climb the uncarpeted staircase that led, as he remembered, straight up and out the house’s back door. But as he turned from the bunk beds, his brother’s snores became violent disturbing heaves. Michael looked back to find his brother suddenly upright, legs dangling over the side of the top mattress, teary eyed from the now subsiding coughing fit. “Where are you going, shit-for-brains?” asked Michael’s brother, breathing heavily, normally.
“I have chores to do,” answered Michael, becoming aware for the first time of his physical smallness in the downward gaze of his elevated brother.
“If you’re waiting for Christmas, it’s never coming,” the brother teased, his legs now swinging in alternate directions. Then he looked up toward the ceiling as if to anticipate possible footsteps in the kitchen above. Through the narrow windows near the basement ceiling dawn had begun its slow bluish creep. He looked back down at Michael and his legs stopped their motion. “I’m not the pervert,” he whispered. “You’re the pervert.”
There was movement across the upstairs kitchen linoleum and Michael thought of the face that had been floating next to his sister’s in the car back at the farmhouse. The footsteps were slow though they remained at the opposite side of the room from the back door at the top of the stairs. Up on the bunk bed his brother had returned to a sleeping position, only this time he stared in unblinking terror at the ceiling. Michael reached for the magazine pages in his back pocket and hastily stuffed them between the mattress and the bedframe of the bottom bunk and started for the staircase.
But as he ascended the stairs what at first he assumed were tears streaming down his face finally reached the corners of his nose. Michael gagged at the smell of chicken shit now smeared across his cheeks and still running out of the corners of his eye sockets. He tried to stop the flow with the palms of his hands but the pressure from inside felt on the verge of exploding. So, with a shaky thumb and forefinger, Michael carefully removed one eyeball at a time, surprised at the ease with which his anatomy allowed this procedure. Kneeling on a step halfway up the staircase, he felt around inside the ocular cavities with horrified curiosity, fingering the thin plastic scaffolding-like mechanisms that had been holding his eyeballs in place, allowing, it seemed, their placement and movement all this time. Dried feces and chicken feathers stuck to the plastic, were encrusted around and throughout the holes where his eyes had been.
Michael scratched at the plastic pieces with the fingernail of his pinky, moving blindly around inside one of the sockets, realizing that the pieces could be popped out of place and more easily rubbed clean against his blue jeans. But now Michael could clearly see it. Behind the mechanisms was a dimension that was a little like if all of outer space was just one planet. And in that planet, on one of the gravel roads outside of a farmhouse, the school bus drove by under a stormy sky, while a more familiar Darwin Rolf sat in the seat farthest back. He pointed out of the bus window toward a tree hanging over Michael’s head. On one of the low branches a field sparrow was singing its song in three second loops.