The Greatest of Vices

By William Francis Jack

Professor Matthew Eastman walks into his office one afternoon and suddenly discovers that he's "forgotten" a year of his life. It is now 2005, but he doesn't remember anything from 2004. A therapist pulls him through his life, crisis-by-crisis and sin-by-sin, until they reach 2004. That was the year when he began researching a Russian novel that includes elements of black magic. That book, "The Master and Margarita," slowly takes over his life and steers him towards where he doesn't want to go, an affair with a student that he doesn't want to remember.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365623141

Book preview

The Greatest of Vices

THE GREATEST VICE

William Francis Jack

Thirteenth Edition Copyright © William Francis Jack 2017

Copyright Cover Photo © Millicent Jack 2015

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-387-23313-7

Guilt has a thousand voices,

all of them lies.

Leonard F. Peltier

Chapter One

2005

The last thing I remembered, or the first thing I remembered, was walking along the Mississippi, the low bluff on the Minneapolis side, where the road descends from the Franklin Street Bridge high on the bluffs, down to river level. If you stepped back from the river about 200 feet, you would be standing at the bottom of the tall, vertical bluff that leaves a long strip of flat land at the river’s edge, now a skinny park, and earlier Little Bohemia until they tore down the shacks. In the spring, you can find the last icicles of the season in the crevices of the wall of this bluff. My late wife and I used to walk along that road.

I leaned against the stone rail that runs along the river. The water that day was hypnotic, the way its tiny waves danced. You could watch the churning waters slow after their falling and their turning at Saint Anthony Falls, which was to the left, just out of sight, the Mississippi now running West to East, thereby confusing visitors and residents, all but the riverboat captains who needed West on one side of the river and East on the other side.

Everybody knows the Mississippi flows north to south. Put that damned compass back in your pocket!

I was standing at the river’s concrete rail while others passed, a young man and woman in matching winter jackets made of some new miracle fiber. They were sharing each-other’s back pockets. A thin young man in oppressive black latex leggings sped past, gliding along on roller skates and using Nordic walking poles, the roller skates being necessary because workers in thick tan uniforms had plowed and swept the sidewalks and streets, and being of dark colors, the ice on them had melted.

A moment later, the dancing waves on the river calmed and it was strangely quiet. There was no one, left and right, even though it was in the middle of a the day, no cars on the road, no one on the walking path or ski trail. There was, strangely, no rumble of traffic from the Franklin Street Bridge nearly overhead, no city’s hum from upriver. It was quiet.

A sparrow flew low, so closely that I heard its wings flutter and it brushed my left shoulder. And then what?

It was a momentary thing, a sensing that water was all around me, and it was undulating like flashes of silver and blue from an underwater wall of triggerfish, and it felt warm, strangely, and I write strangely because, of course, Minnesota river water is not at all warm in winter in Minnesota and the river struggles mightily just to keep one narrow, crooked finger mobile, with the help of dredgers that leave shadows of two-headed dragons on the ice.

But this was warm water.

Then, it was at that moment, that I snapped. My life spliced and I found myself in my office, absolutely dry, up-river about one mile and on the other bank, and my head pounded and my ears were plugged, as if from flying, or swimming.

What had happened? Had I dozed off while leaning on the rail? Had I been dreaming and had now just awakened, or had I been awake and then began dreaming?

I felt the blood pulsing at both sides of my neck and I could see my veins pounding on my forearms. I sat at my desk, office door closed, head in my hands. What had happened? Of course! I had walked a very long way, and people suffering from dehydration can hallucinate. I went out to the drinking fountain and returned with a mug of water, which I chugged. I looked at my wall calendar, its photo of the Winter Palace; I didn’t recall seeing that photo; that’s what happens when a person is too busy to notice things of beauty. I looked at the year. It was 2005.

But, no, it was 2004. Who was the joker who had switched my calendar? Oskar, the Mad German, my nemesis, probably. I checked the time and date at the lower right corner of my computer monitor. It said 2005. My digital watch said the same thing.

This was surely a dream.

I would shake it off. Had it really been 2005 and had I been gone for a year, somebody would have said something. I went to cnn.com and looked at the date. 2005. Damned dehydration: How long did the symptoms last? My 2005 Microsoft Outlook calendar was jammed with meetings and classes and appointments, as one would expect, yes, if someone had decided to become me. Yes, that was it. Identify theft. Could technology take it this far? Whatever was going on, it was truly out of my control and out of my line of vision. Somehow, this much I knew although I didn’t know how I knew:

The color white and the color blue, soft tones. The number four and the number five, in a thin serif font. And the feeling of a great vice, a great sin, both vague and unknown. Through white fog or steam, the profile of a tall man, probably young, possibly one of my students, his head turned to the left, like the statue of David.

I breathed deeply but my hands had a mind of their own and it didn’t include tapping the keys on the keyboard that I needed to tap. I stumbled through my e-mail folders, course lists, students’ grades, and, leaving my computer, I tore at my tiny office, knocking over stacks of papers and books, nearly toppling a file cabinet by opening all its drawers at the same time. Oskar the Mad German peeked in, shrugged, and walked away.

I hung my coat and saw a lump in the breast pocket. Hell, it was a dry bone, like that of a chicken leg. What the hell was going on? I had found nothing at the very moment that I needed to find something. I went back to my computer and did a Google search on my name, a thing that people do so they can check on their importance. No, just the usual references to Professor Matthew Eastman: Courses taught, books written, degrees conferred, and all the other things. I clicked on the link that led to my University profile page.

The photo showed a prototypical male professor: Tall, gray beard, slightly receding hairline, oval glasses with tortoiseshell frames, white shirt, slightly crumpled, and a bow-tie, appropriately uneven in its bows. Fifty-five years old, not panicking when the photo was taken.

I sat in my office that day. To make sure no one would see me or for some reason open my door, I crawled under my desk and crouched, like a compressed question mark, in its open space. A strange odor came from the center drawer of my desk. I reached overhead and pulled it open. An empty herring jar. What the hell was going on? I hated herring and why would I have a jar of them in my drawer? After all the lights had gone out and I didn’t hear any voices, I slipped out of the building.

There is a comic scene in The Master and Margarita, the Russian novel of magic realism that I had been researching. A Soviet bureaucrat curses angrily, To the devil! and he is literally taken to the devil, but his empty suit remains at his desk, signing all the useless papers. I had become that empty suit.

At home, I couldn’t sleep, then took two clonazepam tablets left over from the time of my wife’s death and I felt myself sliding down a hill on my back, and the pounding in my head ceased and my breathing slowed.

Three hours later I jumped up and screamed. It’s mine! It’s mine! I had dreamt that I had come home and found a family of gypsies living in my house. They had stacked my stuff against the east walls and had laid down many layers of oriental carpets and middle eastern kilims, all of them drab red and gray. On top of the pile, a man sat on a huge circular bed like a padishah. A cat stood at the edge of the bed, grinning, with two lines of white teeth showing and some kind of small fish hanging from his mouth. I ran from room to room but in each room I found the same bed and the same padishah and the same cat and the same fish and in each room I heard, from the next room, two or more people laughing.

I had awakened from the dream, shaken and shaking. It had seemed so vivid that my real bedroom in contrast was dark and dull.

What could I do and where could I go?

* * *

Chapter Two

2005

I did the only thing I knew how to do; I went to work.

I was walking on a stage in a play with a role I didn’t know and a script I couldn’t read. When would I slip up? When would people discover the truth, that their star Russian professor had gone crazy? It was Friday and so I didn’t have to teach any afternoon classes. I walked up and down the corridor. People greeted me, but they seemed to do it in a different way, as if they were reacting to something different in me.

My calendar told me it was my day to teach Nineteenth Century Russian Literature at nine o’clock in the morning. I muddled around my office and found my syllabus and course books, but I didn’t know what I would say. My forehead was burning as I walked over to Falwell Hall, a tired brick building shedding, and without warning, its cornices and other adornments. I had given the building a nickname: Miss Haversham. The classroom had windows that were stuck shut by too many layers of drab governmental paint, and no heat thermostat. It was about ninety degrees in the room and water streamed down the outer sides of the windows. I was hoping familiar students’ faces would jar me back into reality. They didn’t.

I set my books on the desk and looked out at around fifty students who sat, theater style, in the center and rear rows. Most hid behind laptop screens. Others looked down. Perhaps they didn’t remember that the spaces under the tables were open and so I could see them resting their mobile devices of various sizes on their knees. My forehead still burned – I should have called in sick, but then I remembered what professors do when they don’t know what else to do. Are there any questions about the readings? The syllabus told me that we were studying Crime and Punishment.

No one raised a hand.

So you’re ready for an oral pop quiz? I will keep track of points earned.

Three hands shot up. I have a question, Professor. Why did that painter guy confess to the murders if he didn’t do it?

Well, who knows? No raised hands. Silence. People have given many reasons. What are some of them?

Maybe he was guilty of something else and so he confessed to this one, said a young lady in Pendleton plaid.

I heard a snicker.

"That is exactly the reason that is most given. Any more?"

He was a nut case, said a young man in a black sweatshirt.

Precisely, I said, and the class was on its way.

* * *

So my job was to tread softly in 2005, pretending as if I remembered 2004. My syllabus on my computer took me to the right rooms at the right time for the right class. I discovered how easy it was to navigate in a university on automatic pilot. Sadly, I didn’t know the names of my students.

* * *

Which hurt more, my days or my nights? I slept fitfully that night and I remember waking up because of the brightness in the room. It was a clear night and there was a full moon. I pulled the shade, tried to fall back asleep and failed. Some hours later I did fall asleep and I, who rarely dreamed, saw a wide ray of moonlight leading to me with shadows of two figures walking away in the distance. I awoke, suddenly sitting up and leaning my head against the bed board. I reached over and turned on the lamp, its stem two pewter art deco Siamese cats.

* * *

Who would catch me, and for what? I spotted her from behind in the Foreign Languages Department’s Action Center, as it was called even though there was little action there. A woman in blue, with a holster. I was afraid. A phrase from The Master and Margarita came to me: The greatest of vices. The officer made me nervous, and envelopes and journals slipped from my fingers and splayed across the floor. She turned, squinted. Collecting my mail, I couldn’t return to my office without passing her, and I heard her talking with Jesus Johnson. I was safe, this time. Someone had run off with his collection of Mariachi CDs: Vicente Fernández, José Alfredo Jiménez Ranchera. The best of them! Jesus said.

The female police officer was standing sideways, looking at me far too long.

Say, you’re not considering that I stole his collection? I asked. In my newly-acquired deviousness, much of it taken from Raskolnikov, the murderer in Crime and Punishment, I had quickly decided that expressing such a fear would account for any anxiety in me that she might perceive. Crazed Raskolnikov. My students called him Rascal because they were tired of reading Russian names they couldn’t pronounce and therefore couldn’t remember.

Clever. Cunning. Defenses. Rascal’s contest with Criminal Magistrate Porfiry, because Rascal had killed an old pawnbroker and her simple-minded half-sister, Lizaveta, just to prove that he was a superman, an übermensch in the style of Nietzsche, not bound by the laws that bind mere humans, not subject to bourgeois feelings of guilt. Criminal Magistrate Porfiry rambles on and then casually lets Rascal know that he, Porfiry, discovered that Rascal had been at the scene of the crime the day previous. They joust, except Rascal doesn’t know when he prevails, when he doesn’t prevail. It’s as if he’s been cleaved, one person, now two. And at that moment it came to me...Yes, I too have been cleaved, but I had lost the second part of me.

You look familiar, said the officer.

I experienced the hot neck and the perspiration that Rascal felt under the back of his shirt. Surely they would need a search warrant to go through my office. Had this officer seen me before? Yes, that had been her question just then. I don’t recall seeing you, ma’am, I said. When would I crack? I wasn’t made out for this.

Oh, you were on TV last year, right?

2004. Sure. I knew nothing about being on TV. I knew nothing about 2004. I hope you enjoyed the program, I said.

She looked down over her glasses. It was the news. Something about animal rights.

Oh, yes, I remember, I said. But I didn’t.

She pressed her back against the wall as she walked past me. She hadn’t liked whatever it was that I had said or done.

My heart beat hard all that day and in the evening too. I recalled reading that screenwriters Levinson and Link had modeled their Detective Columbo after Criminal Magistrate Porfiry Petrovich...nonchalant, preoccupied, asks questions about cigars and food recipes, takes it all in...turns when leaving and drops his prosecutorial bomb. He points out the inconsistency or shows the proof. He has nailed his subject.

* * *

My first five days lasted about six months, it seemed. I could bluff my way in a classroom with students, but what about my colleagues? They gave me a wide path in the hallways and I could see from the sides of my eyes that they were looking towards me, but why? Were they part of a devious ruse? Curious spectators? Who knew what I didn’t?

Little had changed in a year if, that is, a year had passed. Who would tell me if it had? Who would conclude that I had gone crazy? It probably would be someone I saw every day, meaning from my own department. The Action Center was still laid like a square. Sitting in the middle, behind a corporate-style fabric barrier normally reserved for legal secretaries, sat Joanna Mae, the portly queen of Eritria, the Executive Administrative Assistant who wanted to be called Secretary. I’ve been a secretary for nigh on twenty-five years. Nobody’s going to call me nothing else. She sat like a traffic cop in the middle of the intersection of many streets. When no one was looking, she was writing a romance novel – One of hers had already been published.

I would test her. Things seem about the same around here, right? I asked on the third morning.

Nothing changes around here until somebody dies, honey, she answered.

She was safe. I trusted her, but what about my other colleagues? Could they tell? Had they caused it? Had I grown a brain tumor that had just reached critical mass?

I studied the terrain, searching for landmines. Language professors’ offices lined three sides of the rectangle. Short and scowling Chairperson Ana Antalek occupied one corner as well as the adjacent office. Joanna reminded me of the story. Being a Hungarian, no one in the Department could claim favoritism, although colleague Oskar Himelbaum, already my enemy, accused the Russian Department of just that. I explained to him that Hungarian was not a Slavic language but was, in fact, a Finno-Ungric language, the joke being that when the hordes invaded from the East, they had cleaved a tribe and its language, half of them fleeing westward with the consonants, to Hungary, and the other half fleeing northward with the vowels, to Finland. No, if I could hide the things I had lost, she would be no problem. And Oskar could perceive little, except how much kraut was placed on his plate.

Oskar didn’t find any humor in the Hungarian-Finnish joke, or in anything. He loathed me, perhaps because I was a non-native speaker of the language and literature that I taught, or perhaps because he represented Das Vaterland, and I represented Russia and both of us knew all about World War II, or perhaps because he simply didn’t like me. Or perhaps he saw through my ruse. Who knew about me and 2004? Who could explain?

Not Italian Professor Enzo Tartini. We chatted at the mail room entrance. I learned little and gave away nothing, I thought. His office stood next to Ana’s. I was remembering things that were not essential, or perhaps in them lay a clue. The other side of the square was for French Professor Damian Fournier, whose Judy Garland records had been stolen last year, I now remembered, but were recovered, undamaged, when police searched the home of a lonely male who had stolen hundreds of books and tapes and records from libraries around the State. Damian acted no differently towards me. If I could continue my ruse, he would present no problems.

But who could explain things? 2004? 2005? Next to Damian’s office was the office of Spanish Professor Jesus Johnson, whose full name had been Jesús Lopez De Vega Garcia, but when a neighbor played for him the comedy bit in which Mel Brooks and Carl Rainer ferret out a Nazi hiding in Argentina as the owner of a coffee plantation:

We crushed France in 27 days! All of France crushed! No, no, I mean the coffee beans! They can be crushed and ground in 27 days!

Jesús ran as far as possible from his real name and chose Johnson because there were very many of them in the Minneapolis phone book. I caught him looking at me strangely and the moment I made eye contact, he turned away. Maybe making eye contact was not the way to proceed. But he smiled at me, sincerely. He wouldn’t ferret out that which wasn’t there. I was safe.

I was like a spy, dropped from a plane and told to blend in with the population below, to navigate the ground, to hide who I really was, except that I didn’t know who I was. I put my hands in my pockets and smiled thinly. I trembled. No one had given me nylon stockings or condoms to pass out to the natives.

Oskar, the German professor? Yes, he didn’t like me but I was safe. He was incapable of carrying off any semi-complicated ruse and his brain was too muddled to notice anything different in me. The office of this Oskar Himelbaum, Professor of German language and literature, and a genuine German, stood a long way down the hall from the Action Center. He and I occupied the hinterland. My office was east of his.

I mentioned to Joanna that I could use a taller bookcase. There was little room in my office, made worse by my tearing up the place, and she reminded me that Oskar and I were supposed to have offices of the same size, but the wall moved itself over to one-third of my office, the wall-moving party held when, I then remembered, I was in Moscow, standing on the Sparrow Hills, studying the place below where Adolph Hitler would have constructed his victory arch. Oskar had three windows. I had one.

Thinking of all this, I felt like things were going back to their normal abnormal. Then someone would ask a question and the bottom of my world fell out, the way a grain conveyer dumps its cargo onto railroad cars – fills one, shuts, and them dumps it, fills another one. Meanwhile I had to find out who I was and what I straddled, and I was breathing somewhat freely until Ana asked me if I will continue working with her and the committee that I worked on in 2004. "How do you feel about it?" I asked and I had taken myself off another hook – She would fill in the blanks.

I had a new colleague and his office was opposite mine. Who was he? Damian and I talked about Oskar and in the process I learned that the new resident was David Chapman, professor of Polish which was first taught in 2002. He was a meek Englishman who had studied Polish while serving in the British Foreign Service and had taken up brandy at the same time and his skin and nose showed it, poor man. He taught a survey course on Polish culture. Was Polish that popular? Maybe it was because of all the Poles who lived in Northeast Minneapolis. His office was usually occupied, and then I noticed that his visitors were mostly male, mostly muscular males, and I noticed that Joanna asked his students to sign in. I asked why. She looked around the Actionless Center and then whispered, My son collects signatures of University athletes. I figured out this one all by my own self. Word got around that varsity athletes could get an easy three-credit B for taking directed study, one-on-one, in Polish culture.

Damian was passing by and he caught the tail end of our conversation. Did you sign that crazy petition? he asked out of the French blu.

There are so many crazy petitions around here, to which one are you referring?

I had succeeded again but drew no joy from it.

The petition that Herr Doctor Oskar began circulated last winter, said Damian. A petition to eliminate the Polish language and culture classes, which, he said, were unnecessary, and to get rid of Professor Chapman, who was a pervert and a drunk and also unnecessary. Nobody signed the petition and somebody circulated a petition asking Oskar to withdraw his petition, remember?

I nodded. I am glad for the outcome.

But in 2005, after having taken an inventory of each person in the Department, I still had nothing, no indication that I had done something wrong, much less awfully wrong, or had done nothing at all and I didn’t remember what it was. As the days passed, my guilt increased, as did my fear.

* * *

[Dostoevsky is] the only psychologist

from whom I have anything to learn.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Was this hell? You die but you don’t feel it, and you return to your life although it’s on a different page, and you are returned at a point far beyond when the passion for it had left you and all had become routine...Dead man walking?

Could I check with someone? I tried fancy and not-fancy tricks with colleagues. Do you think I’ve put on weight since last year? When was the last time you and I had lunch, January of last year?" I would tell no one, not even Dan, my best friend, until I had figured out what was going on with myself. Out of concern he might have me admitted to a hospital for psychological testing by psychiatrists who like to commit people because it shows that they are doing their job and merit their large salaries. No, not even Dan. He taught Russian History and we began working at the University on the same day, more than twenty years ago. We met weekly for lunches. I would have to be cautious, awfully cautious. He knew me better than anyone.

It’s your turn to pay for lunch, Dan told me.

Right. Where should we go?

The Faculty Club, of course, he said.

The menu appeared to be the same as it was in 2003, but with slightly higher prices than my mind wanted to tell me: Was this a good sign or a bad sign?

We opted for the buffet, just like always, as Dan reminded me. We joined a line and passed down a long table and we looked at lettuce salads and Jell-O through a curved glass panel with finger prints, and down further, we selected Ranch or French dressing for our lettuce salads, and slices of undistinguishable meat to place on a crumbling bun. I suggested a corner table, away from the sunlight because brightness bothered my eyes.

Do you remember the time last year when we got food poisoning from the Thousand Island Dressing? he asked.

Who can forget such pain? I answered.

Have you prepared anything for the class we will team-teach?

I’ve tried but I admit I haven’t done much. Yet.

Dan leaned into me. "Matthew, we haven’t planned to team-teach...not last year, not ever. We never mentioned the possibility. What is wrong? And we never got food poisoning here...not on Thousand Island Dressing, not on anything."

He’d caught my leg in his bear trap. You’re the only person I can talk to, and I don’t know how to begin, I said, as if I was a child about to fess up to something. I’m lost, Dan. This is 2005. How can that be? Jesus, it’s like my brain is a hard drive and someone over-wrote 2004. I don’t remember it.

The year?

"Yes, the whole damned year! I have forgotten everything, every thing."

Tell me honestly, Matthew. Have you been drinking, taking strong antidepressants since your wife died – They can work weird effects.

"Come on, Dan. You know I drink rarely and, no, I am not taking any strong medications, but please tell no one. I am lost, or rather, I have lost myself. I don’t know how to keep going, or even if I can keep going. Christ, it’s driving me crazy."

He took off his glasses, pinched his temples, and put the glasses back on. In 2004, you were the same person that you have been, and are. You need to get help, as soon as possible. This is, well, astounding. It might even be something physical. He swallowed his last phrase, as if trying to erase it.

A tumor or disorder, I know. I’ve thought of that. I have no other symptoms. The memory lapse concerns 2004 only.

Why don’t you talk to a therapist. Perhaps they –

I loath therapists.

I loath doctors, but I would go to one if my elbow was falling off. You look like shit, Matthew. You need to find out what’s going on with you. This could be a delayed reaction to Kate’s death.

I tried to keep my attention fixed on Daniel and the Faculty Club, but through all of this, I perseverated under my breath. Using a trick I had learned in a speed-reading course, I put my hand to my throat and I felt my vocal cords vibrate. I was literally talking to myself, but silently:

The color white and the color blue, soft tones. The number four and the number five, in a thin serif font. And the feeling of a great vice, a great sin, both vague and unknown. Through white fog or steam, the profile of a tall man, probably young, possibly one of my students, his head turned to the left, like the statue of David.

* * *

I, who considered therapy a scam that helped only those who believed in past lives and re-birthing, and magic. I found my way to Joan Lyndall, a psychologist and University colleague, a Scot, her voice hanging onto consonants, performing magical tricks with vowels meanwhile. I had never been in therapy. I expected little. Sure, I might gain some insights after a decade or two of weekly sessions, but I didn’t have time for that, no time for that at all. I was going crazy. No, I had already gone crazy. I needed someone to show me the way back to me.

I left the sagging two-story wooden building that held the Foreign Languages Department. The building was like me, old and falling apart, a barracks that had been constructed after the war to help house a couple thousand GIs who showed up at the registrar’s office in 1946, with GI Bill veterans’ checks in their hands. Mine was the only barracks remaining. Others had been razed. One bulldozer could do the job in a few hours, or else the buildings fell apart on their own.

I walked across the bridge to the West Bank Campus. The Psychology Department was on the fourteenth floor of the Social Sciences Tower. It was on the thirteenth floor, actually, but a metal square covered the number 13 on the elevator panel. Unlike other offices, Joan’s fluorescent lights were off and an incandescent lamp glowed in the corner. I asked her about a painting on the wall. I thought it might be Georgia O’Keefe. It wasn’t. It was a photo of a lotus, and she told me all about the symbolic meaning of the lotus, beauty rising up from the mud, etc.

She asked me if I was comfortable with therapy and I told her that I would be candid, that I saw little benefit in people hitting pillows with foam rubber bats and re-birthing one-another. I had come to her because I had run out of options, I told her. To be honest, I don’t expect much. A friend urged me to meet you.

In this room therapy comes from you, Professor, and so you may be as sarcastic or as cynical as you wish, and you can thus stretch out your therapy-time, minimize its effect, and delay its assistance. You can waste your time and my time, or you can work. Your choice.

This blunt, thin woman had black hair that showed enough gray to prove she didn’t use dye. Reading glasses hung from a plain black lanyard with a silver poodle design at its end. She was a few years older than I, and she was dead serious. I surrendered. She asked why I had come and I told her about the water and the guilt and my forgetting everything but then remembering some but rarely the essential.

She opened her middle drawer and took out a small red leather binder with Joan Lyndall embossed in gold, and with a tiny emblem that appeared to be a bird. I use hypnosis in my therapy. Her expression dared me to respond.

Who used hypnosis anymore, and who wanted to be hypnotized by a shrink? Not me. I thought that hypnosis was a thing of the seventies, I said.

In my field, everyone jumps onto one bloody theory, then jumps to another, but the earlier theories remain valid. I read the texts on hypnosis, including those by Anton Mesmer and James Braid. I believe that hypnosis can be can an adjunct to treatment.

"You said adjunct. That suggests you use other modes as well?"

I have seen successes, she said. "I am a crazed eclectic, they tell me. For the modern theories, I very much follow ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I find that its stepping back to watch yourself act and feel to be almost Zen-like, and I have found that it, in combination with hypnotic regression, works especially well with clients who have repressed their memories. This is you?"

It is. I had hoped that my eyes were telling her what I was afraid to utter. I was coming apart. We set up a therapy schedule, every Thursday. The next time she would lay out her treatment plan.

* * *

2005

I made it to my second session with her on time, fighting snow drifts and a nasty wind. I sat down in her clients’ chair, a leather club chair. My fingers were still red from the cold, and frost still framed the lenses of my glasses. I told her about the numbers four and five and the colors blue and white. She nodded as if she knew.

There is no magic, no tricks in hypnosis, she said. You relax....That’s all it is. You lean back in your chair, if you wish. I help you become even more relaxed, and then more relaxed still. I ask you to close your eyes. Envision a theater, one that you recall. You will walk into the lobby, then you open the doors to the concert hall proper. You select your seat. You will be conscious of each step. Do you know such a theater?

The Bol’shoi, in Moscow. It had left a deep impression on me each time I had been there.

"Good. You will imagine walking up the stairs, which, I am sure, are elegant, and down a hallway and into your seating area. You will sit down, you will look towards the stage, although you can’t see it. The theater will be dark, totally dark. The curtain opens and you watch the stage brighten slowly...majestically, you might say, and you tell me what you see. Understood? Ultimately you will be the person observing, the person being observed, and the space between them. Is that confusing for you?"

My armor slid off, one piece taking along with it the next piece until I was unprotected, naked. Please, help me. My mind...I...am all tangled up in this.

Well, we will work at getting untangled. You will soon grow accustomed to the way we do it. One more thing. We will not expect chronology. We go wherever your mind wants to go. Understood? And we must see if there are other periods of your life, your childhood especially, where you have buried things.

* * *

Who Looks Outside, Dreams;

Who Looks Inside, Awakens.

Carl Jung

She had set my own dread at my feet. My vision of therapy: You walk in with a massive head wound and the doctor wants to examine a bug bite on your ass, meaning that when you are dying from a recent problem, therapists want to grab you by the ear and drag you backwards through your life, getting further and further away from the problem. How long will it take? My question was stupid. There was no Un-Send button to press, like in gmail.

You, man, want to unravel a wad of thread, eh? You find one end, which is also one beginning, and you go from there, slowly and patiently. You think that the human mind, that your mind, is so simple that I can put a time limit on it? Good God...

I’m sorry. I realize I’ve asked a dumb question and that my ignorant demands have offended you.

"Disappointed is a better word, man. If we discuss War and Peace, you are the specialist and it is good for me to listen to you. It is my turn now. Understood? I believe you are experiencing a partial retrograde amnesia."

She had just done what I had expected. She had given my disease....sorry, my condition…a name designed to impress. I nodded, feeling myself an admonished pupil.

I walked into the theater, went up the stairs, opened the double doors and selected a seat. She had me relax, counting backwards, the way you would expect a hypnotist. Relaxing my body – I hadn’t known how tense it was. I sensed before me a glint at first, then a beam...well, yes, white with blurred blue edges. It was the moonbeam upon which Pontius Pilate and Yeshua walk in The Master and Margarita, centuries after one had the other crucified. They talk about philosophy. They considered what is the greatest of vices and, yes, it was not unlike the moonbeam I had seen that first night in my bedroom, but naturally, I had read that book so many times, and had written a journal article on it, and so it wasn’t surprising that some of its imagery would find a home in my subconscious. And, yes, hypnosis is a big factor in the book’s plot. At the end of the novel, the Russian secret police declare that all the tales about devils and talking cats and a man in a checkered suit floating in the air…All of it had been a matter of mass hypnosis: In addition to the above, a master of ceremonies walks around without a head, a bureaucrat disappears but his empty suit remains to sign his papers, a roomful of clerks unable to not singing a prisoners’ ballad – all of it from hypnosis performed by dark forces.

Pontius Pilate and Yeshua and the moonbeam. Why had that scene suddenly appeared, and so vividly, and why that scene, one of hundreds of scenes in one of the hundreds of books that I’d read?

Gods, gods, says the man in the cloak, turning to his companion. "What a vulgar execution. But tell me, please tell me. It didn’t happen. I beg you, tell me, it never happened.

Of course, it never happened, Yeshua answers. You imagined it.

That is all I need, the man in the cloak says in a broken voice and they walk higher and higher toward the moon. All that I need.

A crucifixion that in actual fact did happen, and now Yeshua (Jesus) lies, tells Pilate it hadn’t happened? And when asked, Jesus, God of goodness and truth, swears to this man of evil that the execution never happened, and at that moment Yeshua’s face shows all the marks of his execution? Insanity.

We have only just begun, said Joan. You will relax more, much more. The stage curtain opened.

I see it! I said. It’s gone now, but I saw it.

So she brought me up slowly. I know you were in a deep state. I could tell by the rhythmic flicks of your lashes.

It is truly strange. I saw a police girl.

I’m sorry. I don’t understand.

When I was in grade school, most of the students lived within a mile or so of the school. Instead of busses, we had lines for walking home in various directions. The students formed up into groups on the school parking lot and they walked off. Police girls and boys wore Sam Brown leather belts, and they herded us along like border collies.

And the signs, eh, Matthew?

"They carried red stop signs about a foot tall that were attached to a handle about six inches high. They had the students stop at an intersection, and the police girls or boys walked to the center of the intersection and held out their