Joe Finch had his first session with Dr Thomas Armaita at midday on a Tuesday. When he’d left the house, Mary had been lying in front of the television with a glassy look on her face, watching a television special about obese people coming to terms with their self-image. It occurred to Joe that they would have a much easier time coming to terms with their self-image if they would just lose a substantial amount of weight first, and he said as much to Mary, but she barely even responded. It seemed that she was taking his death even harder than he was. The trip to the hospital involved a ride on the train towards the city, something that Joe usually tried to avoid. Sitting opposite him, in one of the four seaters was a young couple, no more than sixteen years old. Both were wearing school uniforms. Joe could tell they were a couple, at least in some loose adolescent sense of the word, because they were engaged in what could only be described as foreplay. The spotty-faced young man had his hand underneath the girl's blouse, and she in turn was massaging his crotch in a curiously mechanical fashion, as if she was trying to extract the last part of a tube of toothpaste. Joe tried to politely read his newspaper and ignore the spectacle but this became more and more difficult the longer it persisted. He glanced around the carriage for some kind of moral support from his fellow passengers, but nobody was paying any attention. Everybody was either reading newspapers, or staring out of the window. Soon enough, the young man tore the top few buttons from his companion's blouse and roughly pulled it over her head, although the feat was somehow accomplished without their lips ever parting.
'Excuse me?' Joe finally said, when it was clear that nobody else was going to speak.
They didn't appear to hear him, drunk as they both were on each other's pheromones. The young man deftly unhooked the girls bra from the back, with a skill that Joe didn't acquire himself until at least the age of twenty six, so Joe leant over and tapped him on the shoulder.
'Excuse me! Don't you think...'
But his voice trailed of as the girl began undoing the front of the boy's pants and to Joe's considerable distress began to slowly stroke him. Still there was no reaction from the rest of the carriage, so Joe got to his feet and pushed his way past the foreplay that was becoming increasingly more explicit. He threw his arms up in the air in disbelief and began to shout, so loudly that people would have no choice but to look at him, which they did.
'Don't any of you see this? What's the world coming to when a pair of teenagers can start copulating on public transport and nobody says a word?' he shouted, barely in control of his thoughts as the confusion and anger flowed from him.
There was not one sympathetic look from any of the passengers who were all staring at him. As he looked at them one by one they averted their eyes, in exactly the same way that Joe used to do when observing a crazy person who was causing a scene. He glanced behind him and noted that now the foreplay was over and the young lovers were engaged in frantic and sweaty sex. The train had reverted to silence and even more intense newspaper reading than before his outburst.
'What the fuck is going on?' Joe screamed, his voice cracking in genuine fear, but this time the other passengers ignored him completely and simply stared out the window, hoping he would get off the train soon.
The public hospital did nothing to settle Joe's mood. His hands were shaking slightly as he thumbed through one of the ancient magazines that were strewn haphazardly across the cheap plywood coffee table in the waiting room of Armaita's office. It was on the upper floor of the hospital, several floors higher than where Joe had been stored during his processing by the medical machine, and the view from out of the window gave him a slight sense of vertigo. It was covered by a Venetian blind, which cast thin bands of light into the room, which was otherwise lit only by a single fluorescent. As much as he hated to admit it to himself, he was nervous. There was only one other person in the room, a secretary seated behind an equally cheap plywood desk, and she appeared intent on doing absolutely anything but attending to him. From the nametag on her left breast, Joe could see that her name was Diana. This shook him even more than the revelation in the magazine he was reading that some talentless pop star was possibly having sex with some talentless actor despite the fact that one of them was possibly already involved with some talentless heiress. He was trying to remember why the receptionist should be familiar to him at all when suddenly it struck him.
'I'm sorry,' he said, and Diana looked at him in such a way as to suggest that he should be sorry for interrupting her, 'but do you happen to know a man named Gavrilo Yama?'
Diana shook her head.
'I can't discuss patients with you,' she said coldly.
'I don't think he's a patient. Maybe just somebody you know personally?'
'I won't discuss my personal life with patients.'
Joe decided not to push the matter. The Diana from his dreams was a far older, far gigglier fool than this particular specimen, so he decided it was nothing more than coincidence. At that point the door to Armaita's office opened and an elderly man emerged, glancing suspiciously at Joe as he did so. He was closely followed by Armaita. He was not exactly as Joe had expected. He had been anticipating a man in a three piece suit with glasses and a small triangular beard and certainly somebody older than the man who looked at him now. Basically he had been expecting Sigmund Freud to walk through the door. This man was younger, taller, and far better looking than he had expected. In fact, he barely looked forty, and was dressed casually in a pale blue business shirt, with no jacket and no tie.
'I'll see you next week, Abraham,' Armaita said to the old man, who was still busy leering at Joe as he shuffled out of the door.
Armaita then turned his attention to Joe, who felt himself sitting up straighter under the younger man's gaze, much to his annoyance.
'Mr Finch? If you'd like to come through. Any messages, Diana?'
Diana shook her head, her lips pursed like she was sucking a lemon. She may have had no messages, but Joe had a message for her and it was a particular profane one. He decided not to voice it in front of his psychiatrist, and instead followed Armaita into the room in silence. The room was also not as he had expected. There was no leather upholstered couch to recline on and on the wall there were no framed diplomas. There was just a desk and two comfortable chairs, as well as a dreary watercolour painting of a pastoral landscape. There was, Joe noticed with a certain satisfaction, a wall of leather bound volumes with excessively long titles that fitted with his preconceptions nicely. Armaita sat down in the chair behind the desk and took up a notepad in his left hand as he motioned for Joe to sit opposite him. The psychiatrist regarded him with a slight smile, or perhaps it was just a natural upturning at the corner of his mouth. Either way, Joe found it instantly infuriating.
'My name is Thomas Armaita. You may call me Thomas if you wish.'
'So how does this work, Thomas?' Joe asked.
'There are no set rules here, Joe. We can talk about whatever you'd like to talk about, or if you'd prefer a more structured approach I can accommodate that as well. I don't believe in directing my patients to adhere to any rigid formats.'
'Well quite frankly I don't want to talk about anything. I’d rather not be here at all.'
'And why do you think that is?'
'Because I don't believe you can help me.'
Armaita considered this, nodding in such a way that suggested he was considering this as a valid point, despite the fact that it was perfectly clear that he had already formulated a response from years of previous experience.
'Do you believe that you don't need help, or do you believe that I personally can't help you whilst perhaps some other psychiatrist could?'
'I don't know.'
'I'm sensing some resistance here, Joe.'
'Really? What I'm trying to transmit is contempt for the whole bogus notion of psychotherapy in general. I'll try harder.'
'Talking can help, Joe,’ Armaita says sympathetically.
'No, invasive surg
ery can help,’ replies Joe. ‘Cutting my head open and ripping out this tumour can help. What are you going to do, reason with it?'
'Your emotions are more indicative of your physical state than you may think, Joe.'
'Can you please stop using my name at the end of every sentence? I'm well aware that I'm the person you're addressing. There's nobody else here.'
Armaita raised his arms defensively in front of him, but it was yet another of his carefully planned pieces of body language that reflected nothing of what he really thought. Joe was unable to suppress his own body language quite so expertly and he noticed that he had involuntarily folded his arms across his chest in a defensive manner. He put them back on the arms of his chair, but it was obvious that Armaita had noted this self-conscious correction. Joe gave Armaita a point on the tally he was keeping in his head. Armaita was unfortunately out in front by quite some way, due mainly to the fact that he had a magical smugness shield that Joe's insults were unable to penetrate.
'So what now, do we talk about my sex life and you tell me I'm attracted to my mother?'
'Do you want to talk about your sex life?'
'What is the obsession with psychiatrists and sex anyway?'
'You brought up the topic, J...' Armaita stopped himself from repeating Joe's name. 'So perhaps it’s something that's on your mind. I assume you have been talking to Dr Pontius about these things. He holds similar views to you, but the truth is that these days the old Freudian school of thought has been thoroughly discredited. That is not to say that the sexual life of a person cannot be a good indicator in certain cases.'
'In what cases?'
'Well there can be several ways of compartmentalising sexual desire. Some people repress feelings that they see as shameful, others displace the desire with an over-dependence on food as a source of pleasure, whilst some simply regard sexual intimacy as a kind of competition that needs to be won, rather than a mutual expression of affection between two consenting partners.'
'So presumably the testicles of an affected male patient are replaced by the repressticles, digesticles and contesticles, respectively?'
It had sounded funnier in his head, and when he said it, Armaita barely reacted. Reluctantly Joe chalked up another point for his opponent. In fact, Armaita's expression had become completely serious, and Joe had the horrible feeling that with his pitiful attempt at humour he had somehow given away more of himself than he wanted to. His suspicion was confirmed almost immediately by the next question.
'How is your sex life?' asked Armaita.
'My sex life? My sex life is deceased, Thomas.'
'For how long?'
'Three years. Approximately.'
'And why do you think that is?'
'Well the post mortem concluded natural causes but I suspect my wife of foul play.'
The questions were coming so fast he could barely think before answering them.
'What do you mean, foul play?'
Tell him it's none of his fucking business! Tell him to take his questions and shove them up his arse! Tell him anything except the truth.
'She's having an affair with a colleague of mine,’ Joe said with a sigh.
'Do you have any proof of this, or is it merely a suspicion on your part?'
'It's not just a suspicion. I can't prove it but I know it's true.'
'When did this start? When did you first know that it was true?'
'Recently.'
'How recently?'
Joe paused. He was answering the questions with so little hesitation that it scared him, but now he had reason to pause. How recently was a pertinent question and one that was sure to make him look crazy. The point was, despite the unfortunate timing of his realisation, he was not crazy. Not about this in any case. Mary was having an affair with Harry. That was an incontrovertible fact.
'You see, Thomas, I don't want to tell you because I know you're only going to attach some kind of significance to it if I do.'
'When did it start, Joe?'
'The day I had my stroke.'
Joe decided that there must be a word for what Armaita looked like after that revelation. Smug, a word that up until that point in their dialogue had been adequate, was no longer up to the task. Even throwing some adverbs in front of it didn't really explain the magnitude of the man's appearance. Joe settled on using the descriptor 'fuckwit' and leaving it at that. Of course it had occurred to him that his knowledge of the affair could be nothing more than a symptom of his stroke, or that the pressure his tumour was even now exerting was affecting his mental processes. But this was different. This wasn't the same as the woman losing her teeth, or the teenagers on the train, or even the implausible dream world. Those things he could recognise as being possibly nothing more than figments of his imagination. What he knew about Mary and Harry was something different from hallucinations or dreams. It was knowledge. The definition of knowledge implied that it was true, so therefore it was true. Mary and Harry were having an affair.
'That is significant, Joe.'
'It doesn't prove anything. It's circumstantial.'
'Let me ask you then, is there any physical impediment for the lack of sexual activity between you and your wife?'
'The only physical impediment is that we both became very physically unattractive as we grew older. I'm not interested in her and she's not interested in me,’ Joe said, as if that settled the matter, but it didn’t.
'And do you resent her for this?' said Armaita.
'For this? No.'
The words slipped out of his mouth, tumbling along in the avalanche of things he shouldn't have told this stranger. The answer was immediate and inevitable.
'Then what do you resent her for?'
Joe got to his feet angrily, and for the briefest of seconds he felt like slapping Armaita across the face, but he didn't. He had allowed himself to become cocky. He had convinced himself that the man was not the same as his daughter and that he didn't contain that same horrible light of truth that had given him his affliction in the first place, but he had been wrong. Dr Armaita was a far subtler beast. His tactics were more subversive and less direct. He revealed himself slowly, so interminably slowly that it wasn't until the truth was free and floating around the room like mustard gas that Joe had even become aware of the extent of the damage he was doing to himself. By that stage it was too late. And like mustard gas, the effects of it would be felt for years to come. It almost made Joe glad that he didn't have years left. Armaita was looking at him, his hands clenching and unclenching against the armrest of his chair, and it took Joe a few seconds to realise that he was intimidated. He was standing over the man, glowering at him with what could only have been a manic expression on his face, and it was only with some effort that he managed to calm himself enough to sit back down in his chair.
'I don't want to talk about this. Can we talk about something else?'
Armaita seemed relieved, and Joe was gratified to see that not only was his something-beyond-smugness gone, but his regular gentle-enough-to-use-every-day smugness was still intact.
'Well what we're really here for is to talk about your condition, Joe, and how you're coming to terms with that,’ stated Armaita.
'What condition is that?'
'You've been told that you're going to die. That's not something that people deal with well.'
'That's simply one opinion. Medical science doesn't know everything, nor do psychiatrists.'
'I'm prepared to admit that the medical establishment is capable of making its share of mistakes, but I've spoken to Dr Pontius and he informed me that they took innumerable scans.'
'No, they took nine scans. Nine is a numeral,’ replied Joe.
Armaita was not put off.
'It's very important that you accept this thing. They can't give you an exact figure perhaps, and there are treatments, but your condition is terminal. You are going to die within a year, and the only way to ensure that you make the best of the time remaining to you is to ac
cept that and act accordingly. If there is conflict with your wife then...'
Joe found the strength of will to tear himself free from Armaita's practiced sympathetic gaze at the mention of his wife. Had he really insinuated that he resented his wife? Nobody knew that! He had only just come to that realisation himself whilst sitting in the fictional lounge room of Evan and Ada. How could he have now laid himself so bare to this psychiatrist, who appeared to be not only non-fictional, but perhaps even hyper-real?
'That word tumour bothers you, Joe, and so it should, but it's not something we can hide from.'
'Well perhaps it's not a tumour at all. Maybe my head is pregnant. It was bound to happen eventually when people like you keep fucking with it.'
Armaita scribbled a note in his pad, and from the pen movements Joe guessed that it could be nothing more than a single straight line. Perhaps, like himself, Armaita was keeping a tally of who was winning their little game.
'Did Dr Pontius talk to you about the effect the tumour might have on impulse control?'
'He mentioned it, yes.'
'And have you noticed this in your own behaviour?'
'I'm more liable to say what I think. I don't really care what other people think,’ admitted Joe, rubbing his thumb on the top of his hand.
'Well can you accept this behavioural change as a symptom that fits Dr Pontius' diagnosis of a brain tumour? Does that make it any more apparent to you that he is also correct about the terminal nature of that brain tumour?'
'That's like asking if I accept that people are either right or wrong as a singular characteristic of their personality. In that case, no. The Pope believes that one plus one equals two, but he also believes that he's infallible and every decision he makes is God's will being carried out on earth. In that regard he's a complete sociopath.'
Armaita certainly agreed with that assessment. He disliked religion almost as much as he disliked being wrong, but perhaps it was expecting a little too much for Joe to self-diagnose himself so early on in his treatment, so Armaita changed the subject.
'Tell me this then, have you been having any strange dreams?'
Joe groaned audibly.
'Please don't tell me you also believe in dream analysis.'
'Not in the conventional sense certainly, but there is something to be said for dreams being a subconscious reflection of anxieties,’ said Armaita, somewhat defensively.
'Let me save you a bit of time and tell you that I am anxious about dying. You don't need to hear my dreams to figure that out.'
'Indulge me.'
It was with a very conscious effort of will that Joe was able to resist the temptation to reveal all about his vivid experiences with his dreams. He could almost feel the sweat beading on his brow as he spoke.
'Well there was one...'
Armaita nodded encouragingly.
'Well in one dream I was riding a motorcycle across the Atlantic with Marlene Dietrich and we kept getting attacked by killer whales dressed as Klan members.'
'Joe, it is hardly productive to...' began Armaita, but Joe interrupted him.
'In another I was a smug bastard in a pale blue business shirt who was getting massively overpaid for pointing out the blindingly obvious.'
Armaita placed his hands together again, but it was a self-conscious gesture, obvious in its intended effect, and less effective because of it.
'Perhaps we should leave it there. We've covered a lot of ground and I think you need some time to digest what we've said here, but I would still like to see you three times a week,’ said Armaita, but it sounded more like an order than a request.
'I would love to, Thomas, but I'm afraid I'm busy those three times a week. It's my grandmother's funeral.'
'Joe...'
'Yes, she was a very large woman and we're doing it in instalments. Three times a week for the next six months.'
'Joe, you're wife has expressed serious concerns to me about your well being. And... and her own.'
'What do you mean? What did she say to you?' demanded Joe.
Armaita looked him directly in the eye as he spoke with full confidence in his control over the situation.
'She's concerned that you may pose a threat to her.'
Joe took the news like a body blow. Firstly, that Mary could even conceive that he was capable of hurting her physically, and secondly that she would express that fear to a psychiatrist, was unbelievable. It was a betrayal that felt even worse than her affair with Harry. Emotional betrayal was always far more painful than the physical variety.
'But I haven't done anything!'
Armaita nodded.
'Yes, and let's keep it that way, shall we?'
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