In Session 13
The Lay Psychiatrist dreams about big snakes
I woke up with the blues. It was dark out, too early to want to get up. My troubled mind was reflecting in a dream about being threatened by a big snake. A snake is a spinal column without any add ons. There is the base of a brain but not one with a light bulb in it. Or, the snake might be phallic, in which case there is a light bulb.
My two o’clock thinks he is being poisoned by his wife, and I can’t help linking the snake dream to this information.
At five till two I was standing at the second floor window of my building. From my office I can see the street entrance on Post, where the client was getting out of a hired Tesla Y. He was a rat faced man who hunched forward and walked with his fingers clasped in front of his breastbone, not extended upward as in prayer, but balled up together in anticipation of some villainous adventure.
He was a man who was evolving into a rat.
“My name is Hugo Slide,” he murmured, extending a hand gloved in gray wool, with the fingers curled toward me, like he thought I might want to kiss it. I ignored it.
“You can sit where you want,” I said, indicating the three chairs, seeing that he was already looking covetously at the overstuffed yellow one. He settled into it like a worm into a sunflower’s heart. “Do not be troubled if you treat me rudely,” he said. His voice was thin and without character. “I am used to arousing disgust in my fellow man as well as in females, one of whom is my wife. She has taken it into her mind to poison me.”
“You have some proof of this?” I asked.
From a side pocket of his black coat he casually produced a packet which was clearly labeled, Rat Poison. “I asked her to pack a lunch for me today and she put this in a paper sack and left it on the kitchen counter. She’d written on it in felt pen, ‘Hugo’s lunch.’”
“Hardly a surreptitious method of introducing it into your system,” I observed. “Rat poison which is left in plain sight is dangerous just to rats.”
“Precisely,” he said. I had not noticed before how small and dark were his eyes. He stood up and turned around. Through a hole in the back of his trousers extended a tail which looked like a buggy whip, and as if reading the metaphor by psychic power he snapped it with such fierce accuracy he knocked a passing fly out of the air. “Never know what hit them,” he said. “She wants to kill me because I am genetically altered.”
“Was this voluntary?” I asked. “You went to a clinic and asked to be changed into a rat man?”
“My unconscious tricked me into it,” he said. The tail recoiled back into his trousers like a retreating snake, causing me to wonder where it went, as there was no bulge. “Don’t go there,” Hugo said, and I assured him I had no intention of going there, but wanted to know how he’d been tricked.
“I thought the ad said, cheap generics, but when I got to the offices it was cheap genetics. But you know how it is. You go out for knock off viagra and get interested in more spiritual matters. There was a poster on the wall, with a handsome adventurer balanced on his hands at the edge of an abyss. ‘This man is part mountain goat,’ it read. ‘What animal enhances your natural abilities?’”
“Was it really cheap?” I asked, absently imagining myself as a rhinoceros.
“It was very reasonable, though I suspect rat genetics are easy to come by, but the way they market them sounds very attractive, such as heightened sense of smell, courage in a crisis, and the ability to navigate without a map in London or Rome. What did I know? They said it was a genetic line from specimens on the cutting edge of scientific research.”
“The use of, ‘specimens,’ didn’t give you pause?”
“Why? Does it?” he asked, looking intently at his hands.
“The business of fashion editing genetics is in its infancy,” I said. “You know a lot of those silicon breast implants leaked, and people were blinded by optical surgery when they used steel blades instead of lasers. But be clear. What exactly did you tell these people you wanted to change about yourself?”
“I just said I wanted to be an enhanced version of myself.”
“Yeah, well, you have to be careful what you wish for.”
