original writing
in English

by Soren A. Gauger

It would not be untoward of me to describe the little scene taking place around me at this very moment. I am riding my usual tram to the small office where I daily confront the patients who gather every morning and seep from one room to the next like a suppurating sore ... I am midway between home and office, a point where the tram encounters a bridge of considerable length and crosses it. A brick has been thrown through a window of the car I am riding in, causing the other passengers to erupt into a state of pandemonium. Taking advantage of this fortuitous disorder, I heave up the large and cumbersome box that has been resting at my feet and push it out of the window above my head. I then hurriedly reseat myself and adopt a calm expression, all the while listening intently for the kerplop that will signify the sinking of the box in the river flowing beneath the bridge. I do not hear the sound, yet dare not swivel my head. A pear-shaped gentleman delivers me a glancing blow to the occiput with his elbow. He is so devoured by the pedestrian conundrum of the brick that he has begun bellowing about the safety-risk facing his two toad-like infants and, clearly suffering from some form of psycho-histrionic disorder, frequently observed in overweight men of his age group, is flapping his arms about in a visual demonstration of his anxiety syndrome. A gentleman with pattern hair loss struggles to pacify him. A woman says something about the rising price of bread. I return to my thoughts. There has been no kerplop.

A large puddle awaits my foot as I step off the tram, but with a deft maneuver I manage to evade it. This evasion brings me into headlong collision with Ms. Colleen Moore. I feel the stiffened muscles in my face involuntarily soften. Our gazes connect for a fleeting moment, and she purses her lips ever so slightly before boarding the tram, leaving me in her vast wake. I collect myself and head for the office, my very first step lunging me into the waiting humiliation of that self-same puddle.

The staircase to my office is irregularly steep and narrow. The architect was a clear-cut case of Childhood Deprivation Disorder; if only I had been given six weeks with him I'm sure I wouldn't have patients snapping their frail joints on those treacherous stairs. By the time I wheeze up to my front door Mr. DeMire is already waiting for me, unconsciously tap-tap-tapping away with his right foot, the poor devil. Fumbling for the keys, I recall to mind — my memory no doubt aided by the invincible metronome of DeMire's leather sole — how that very same sound drove his wife to suicide, the sheer melodrama of a fifth-story window, no less, and how his tapping now had a double-entendre effect that might move the stoniest of hearts to sorrow. With a decisive and swift movement I bring my foot heavily down upon his, and the sound abruptly quits.

We shuffle together through the waiting room and into my office, the two being divided by a glass door that slides rather than swings. This brings us to a further architectural eccentricity: my perfectly circular office. At precisely the center point stands my great oak desk and double-padded chair where I place myself each day. Somewhere in front of that one finds the client's chair. A cursory inspection would lead one to conclude that it is not a seat of privilege. The seat is worn, its sober shade of maroon faded, the legs scratched up from decades of anxious picking and fiddling.

If I were to superimpose, one on top of another, all of my clients from the past twenty-four years, all sitting at once on that unmoored satellite just slightly outside of arm's reach (I command a rather considerable arm-span), would it be any surprise to find them all blur into their one harmonious chord, an all-consuming wretched grimace, a disfigured Cheshire Cat? Onto this seething morass hops Mr. DeMire, or rather the thirty-ninth installment of more or less the same DeMire. He blushes, stammers, scrapes at his teeth with a fingernail, overwinds his watch. I know his every gesture down to the smallest revolting peculiarity. When he visits my closet-sized washroom, he leaves spots of blood in the sink. Go on, I say, from where you left off on Tuesday. Despite my most earnest efforts my voice sounds flat and defeated. There had been no kerplop.

After the fire I guess I felt strangely calm. That came after my wife's suicide of course and my son's, erm, ardent, erm, dismissal of my role if I can put it in terms such as ... well then my co-workers had already signed the petition to have me ... what is the term ... dismissed, well and what is a man after all, Doctor, if not his family and his profession and his home? What could I even start talking about that wouldn't make ... well, I still met Claude for lunch and we could speak in French which might not seem to you like something, Doctor, but after all.

It has not always been like this. Before I opened a practice I had various consultations with my conscience, more than the occasional misgiving. Did I really want to hold myself accountable for the most miserable refuse of the social system? Naturally, no. Yet here I was, milling about in the meantime between idle jobs, complaining to anyone who would listen that I was a trained and qualified psychoanalyst. A mender of strayed and punctured souls, I would wax lyrical. And above all, I had to do something.

But I was terrified I would lose something of myself amongst the assembly of madmen that would become my daily company, to say nothing of my bread and butter, and even more of the transformation of my own psyche that becoming a psychoanalyst would entail. I dreaded the moment when the placid and velvety texture of the analyst's voice would defrost and slowly seep into my own, until requesting a bus ticket and urging Mr. DeMire to tell me about his son (once again) would be one and the same smooth modulation.

My son ... my son never wonders about me, I guess he doesn't wonder about things generally, oh, I'm well past the point where I can be counted upon to tread lightly about the topic of my son one can't go on being charitable for all one's life after all ... He called me last week to tell me about his new job as a photographer's assistant and I said that's perfect for someone so duplicitous and then there was a long pause such as I'm accustomed to having when on the phone with my son and we, erm, mutually agreed to end the conversation. I have had nightmares since about the whole thing ... Do you like hearing people's dreams, Doctor?

I nod my head and remember, as I always do when I nod my head, the first scrap of paper I wrote on and filed away, simply: "A nod of the head is either a gesture of agreement or an admission of guilt, or the last, helpless movement before the blackness of sleep." Why do I mention this ... Ah, yes, because it marked the debut of what was to become a twenty-three-and-a-half year succession of little notes farmed from the steadily eroding treasuries of my innermost psyche as it once was and yet may be again. My theory ran like this: a personality can only be said to exist insofar as it has an outlet, much like a kind and virtuous God can only be said to exist if, amongst the petty tyrants and mercenaries praying to their gods of punishment and retribution there exists a solitary prayer (even one will do) to sweet Mercy. My notes were emphatically not, therefore, symbolic gestures, but rather fragments of a meek and huddled reality, shivering in the chill draft of the analyst's comforting smile. A little bell clangs in the back of my mind. How does it feel.

Well, I'm less, erm, vulnerable, if I have the right expression, to the nocturnal attacks of anxiety that simply ... seep through the body, as well as what I call the falling sickness and a general brittleness in the fingers and teeth. But then something will confront me suddenly and without warning, the hernia and flash of a light bulb when I haven't any spares in the cupboard or the insufferable drip of a faucet, even when plugged up tight with toilet paper, the resolute tap-tap-tap

, he mimicked, providing unconscious syncopation to the rhythm of his eternally restless foot. I vow to myself to carpet the spot of floor under the patient's chair prior to DeMire's next visit. Meanwhile, the off-kilter rhythm has reminded me of a jazz melody popular some ten years ago, and I am helplessly thrust back to the Indian-red interior of an acquaintance's apartment, where the song in question is playing in the background and skipping strategically in order to delete the verses I have forgotten. The women's skirts ride just above the knee, in accordance with the fashion then, and their hair-configurations tower and spiral madly up from their foreheads, as though to foreshadow the Babel-like confusion that would descend upon me when I approached one of them sweatily clutching some elaborate cocktail. I was on my own and therefore I thought it prudent to strike up some of the old conversation. After a survey of the premises had occupied me for an hour or so, my gaze alighted upon a svelte woman in an evening dress, also on her own. Her slender, bare arms were propped up nonchalantly on a ledge behind her, and I don't think I will ever see anything more lovely than those arms, like swan necks reeling back in the mythic, righteous act of taking. My knees, suddenly the arbitrarily-chosen center of gravity, launched me forward, and from halfway across the room she happened to catch my eye. I noticed her full lips pucker ever so slightly. I hesitated, swooning, as if struck by a trance, which provided just enough time for a swarthy Mediterranean-type in a tan suit and shiny shoes to writhe in-between us, thrusting forward a hairy palm to shake and offering ejaculations of greeting to the disarmed target. Thus it was from afar that I first heard her sigh out her name: Colleen Moore.

... interesting than staying at the shelter for arson victims or listening to Claude complain about the stiffness in his legs, which ... erm ... he presumes to be, well, a signal or more of an omen, really, of a general stiffening of the joints and ... well, a general paralysis, which is just another way of saying death, isn't it. So Claude's been in bad spirits and there can be nothing more depressing than a gloomy Frenchman do you know what I'm saying.

From that time forward my notes became more and more preoccupied with that phantom woman, who I am calling Ms. Colleen Moore. At least everything started with Ms. Moore, as if she were a center point from which my otherwise barren thoughts would drift in steady elliptical orbits, always to swing back to the same invariable with a magnetic irresistibility, a seemingly counter-geometrical veer towards the heart of the matter, that is to say ... it should be abundantly clear at this juncture that I was losing control of the central control mechanism ... that is, I now had three competing parties inside myself: the psychoanalyst, the self that kept seeing a certain woman's face in his periphery and writing absurd drivel that she would never lay her eyes upon, and the final self that could only stare at the whole grotesque bagatelle in abject horror. For years I juggled this trinity! It may be true that a man can persuade himself to endure any atrocity, no matter how appalling, if he finds a germ of necessity in it. I suppose this is where my dog starts to come in.

Come in, she cried, and so when I opened that doom-laden door which I firmly believe I was bound to open and which in a certain sense I have been perpetually reopening like some kind of brain-damaged Sisyphus every day for the past five years, when I opened that door there was my wife naked and clutching her belly in laughter and what's more the spotty backside of some flabby Casanova in an act of prostration to some god that was surely covering his eyes to avoid seeing our mutual triptych of humiliation: the physical, the circumstantial, and mine, the cumulative. And then what was there to do but to close the door and walk off.

My dog was born in the wrong skin. A monstrous semblance of a creature that whelped at the slightest injury to a paw. I have wondered if perhaps my apartment had had a floor-length mirror, if the beast would have seen its own terror-inspiring form and made the abstract leap of faith that it was one and the same as the reflection ... but these are mad hypotheses. I bring up my dog because one fine day, having been pushed to the very limits of revulsion with myself ... or, if I may clarify, with the periodic notes I had been writing and storing in the desk drawer ... I solemnly resolved to be finished with the entire business once and for all. This was how I began ... erm, well ... — I suppose I began to snip up the notes into pieces, mixing the bits with the dog's dinner, and then feeding it all to him. The process was a slow one, because the dog would refuse to eat more than a certain percentage of paper as compared to meat, but then I thought a slowness to be appropriate ... even necessary ... to the act I was performing. Why, to throw it all in a hastily prepared fireplace would have been ...

... an attic, filled with deflated balloons and vague whispers and indistinct outlines of furniture the floorboards creaking and tilting from side to side like the deck of a ship aware of a terrible parchedness in my throat and the knowledge that any attempt to speak would emerge as a dry croak towering piles of gray rubble imminent blindness a foregone conclusion rain incessantly tapping on the roof with impossible rhythm and is it any better to wake up

When the dog had devoured it all, our relationship began to change. He began looking at me with a smile that betrayed a strange wisdom, that spoke of a figurative digestion of the materials he had swallowed. Those eyes seemed to follow me wherever I was in the room, profoundly sad eyes, eyes that reached inside the marshy, malleable muck of my soul and pulled out the seeds, which I, imagine, I, was therefore confronted with in all their shriveled indignity. A dog!

I began the practice of locking him in the kitchen, until his sniveling howling got to be too much to bear. I stopped taking him out for walks during the day, out of fear that the passers-by would have even a tiny glimpse of what I saw in his condemning eyes. In short, I had not destroyed the papers at all, I had merely given them a new form, granted them an unspeakable autonomy, a new life, which was after all my life, and the dog's life, none of which I could control. Above all, I vowed not to do anything rash.

... spreading all over the shoulders and upper arms like a fire blazing out of control or an endless network of puddles of blood when I'm wide awake or dreaming or dreaming that I'm wide awake which all amounts to the same thing come to think of it ...

And so there I was, shirt-sleeves rolled up and up to my elbows in blood, which I had painstakingly drained from the dog into an orange plastic bucket that I normally keep under the sink to catch the water that has leaked from a pipe since the very first day I moved into my apartment, a leak I have come to see as a necessary condition of life. The disposal of the blood was a simple enough matter, it just went down the bathtub drain. But the body of the dog was to prove more complex. I first cut it into pieces with a serrated blade, and wrapped each of the bits in plastic, twice over, so as to be sure, and then placed it all in a brown cardboard box.

But then how to get rid of the box.

Gradually, the transparent and flaky shards of a plan assembled themselves on the drafting table of my mind. I would take the box aboard the 8:10 tram, the one I normally take to work (nothing suspicious in that ... all kinds of people take boxes onto trams for a multitude of reasons), and hire a man to cast a brick through the window as it was precisely reaching the midpoint of the bridge. I would take advantage of the ensuing mayhem, and unnoticed, heave the box out the window. Which leaves us only the affair of the kerplop, or rather the uncanny silence substituting for the anticipated kerplop. A silence that the wretched DeMire, my blood-sucking client, was parroting as he cradled his head in his big hands. With an impatient wave of the hand I sent him out of the room.

I remained in my office until nightfall, shifting papers from this pile to that, trying to calm the twitching of my hands. Then I made my way out to the street with a perfect air of tranquility. I mimed considering taking the tram home but then, with a shrug of the shoulders that would have been sure to convince any chance observers of my carefree motives, elected to walk home instead.

At the center of the bridge I stopped, as though struck by noticing the moon for the first time. Indeed, the shimmering lunar reflection on the surface of the water was not without its peculiar beauty. And as my gaze fell towards the river, I saw the box. It had fallen onto a ledge and was balanced precariously over the river's swiftly-running waters. All I would need to do was to swing a leg over the guardrail, give the thing a sure kick, and I would have no more of its torments. I glanced over my shoulder to be sure that the bridge was free of pedestrians.

I have often asked myself since, what if Ms. Colleen Moore hadn't stepped out of the mist at that moment. This belongs to the species of question that one asks oneself in the dead of night merely to feel the strange ecstasy of a chill run down one's spine. But the fact is that it was Ms. Colleen Moore, who had also chosen to walk home over the bridge on that enchanted evening. I lifted my gaze from the box and returned to my contemplation of the moon and its reflection. I heard her footsteps slow down as they approached, then falter and altogether stop. I swiveled to find her less than a few feet away, and smiling reassuringly at me. For an instant my instinct was to ignore her, I had the urgent matter of the box to be thinking about, not a second to waste, but then it hit me: wasn't it her in the box? And the dog? And I? And after all, weren't she and I in fact standing there on the pavement, intact?

We exchanged a few words, our breaths visible in the crisp night air, and then I found myself suggesting that we go for a stroll, which took us off the bridge, down the street, and in the direction of the moon.


© Twisted Spoon Press
© Soren A. Gauger

ISBN 978 80 86264 18 9
180 pp.
135 x 200 mm
softcover with flaps
1 duotone, 1 halftone ill.
short fiction
€13.50

Price includes shipping
by airmail worldwide

Order in the US:
Amazon
Powells
SPD

Order in the UK:
Amazon UK
The Book Depository
Central Books

Copyright © 2009 Twisted Spoon Press