In Session, (20):
The Lay Psychiatrist confronts the Killer
“… there’s a fat man in the bathtub with the blues
I hear you moan, I hear you moan, I hear you moan.” (Little Feat)
What have the gods done with fun? There’s no man with the blues like a big man with the blues, wallowing in a tub the size of a stock tank, the room stinking of testosterone and a disinhibiting blend of cannabinoids, now a ghost that can’t pull itself back together. “I don’t want to work today,” he said out loud, and suddenly he got really alert and looked around like a cat.
“This is the moment,” he said.
One of his rules was that if you are going to do something anyway, don’t mind doing it. He had to work today so resisting it was a waste of energy, which is a waste of life. He was out of the tub and dripping like a sculpture of Zeus in the rain. He opened his arms to embrace the day now streaming in the yellow framed window.
“Hello Sunshine.”
That was before the first client came in. “You’re the Layman?” he asked. “I was referred.”
“By the woman who poisons her husbands, if memory serves.”
“That’s right, and I’m not tempted to marry her, we’re just on the same bowling league. She thinks you can help me stop killing.”
His face was set hard, and he never blinked. The Layman looked back and fluttered his eyelids, a shock induction, following which he moved contraband across the border. The killer felt his Adam’s apple as if making sure it was still there. From just below it, in the throat chakra, the scent of pulp fiction escaped into the atmosphere.
The Layman’s exquisite olfactory sense picked up old, dogeared copies of Jim Thompson novels. “You’re a killer,” he said, “referred by a killer. Am I specializing in killers now or what?”
“I don’t think two killers in a practice your size is over-representation,” the killer said. “And I come here to get some help on how to make things right with the people I killed.”
He gave no indication he was in on the joke, so the Layman laid out the flaw in the logic through which the killer had tried to escape.
“Some things you can’t ever make right,” he said.
He caught the scent of another paperback, “Of Mice and Men,” and of Lenny, who killed by accident by squeezing too hard on fragile things, and had to be put down.
