"Peacock Therapy," part 2.1

II.

“So Corbin, tell me, do you ever fool around with the girls?” Dr. Phillpots asked as he tapped Corbin on the shoulder and pointed him to the leather wingback chair positioned against the canted bay window that looked out on the docks.

The leather groaned as Corbin eased into the chair. An identical chair sat opposite, with a textured glass table, featuring a bowl of mints, interceding. Corbin glanced anxiously at the ancient cuddy cabin boats tethered below, rocking in the twilight breeze.

“Or maybe you like boys?” Dr. Phillpots muttered as he searched his desk and gathered his notes, which consisted of a legal pad and a wodge of loose scraps. “I understand teenagers are more open these days.” When he returned and sat in the chair opposite, Corbin shook his head. Dr. Phillpots raised his peaked brows quizzically. His owlish pupils hung under a precipitous forehead and above a sharp nose balancing a pair of reading glasses. Salt and pepper wisps thickened at his temples to cover the helices of his ears.

“No? And no business with the girls, huh?” he asked. Corbin shook his head again. “Well, you’re young—let’s see.” He paused to look through his notes. “Fourteen. That’s young.” He studied the young man’s face for a moment. Corbin’s bangs hung down to his oily cheeks. His pursed lips concealed a web of gleaming braces. He had his left hand stuck in his jeans’ pocket, fiddling with something.

“Okay. I’m going to ask you a series of routine questions now,” Dr. Phillpots warned. “Just answer honestly.”

Corbin nodded.

“Ever do drugs, or drink alcohol?”

“No,” Corbin answered softly.

“No? What about smoking?”

Corbin shook his head.

“Okay, that’s good. Ever hear voices, or see things that aren’t there?”

“N-no.”

“Ever feel like hurting yourself or have suicidal thoughts, anything like that?”

Corbin paused before replying, “No.”

“What about hurting others? Any homicidal thoughts?”

Corbin shook his head.

“Excellent,” Dr. Phillpots declared. He lifted his wrist to show Corbin the face of his pin-lever watch. “Now here’s a puzzle for you: at noon, the minute hand and the hour hand are lined up, right? Twelve hours later, they’ll be lined up again. How many times do they cross—so that they’re lined up like that—during those twelve hours?”

“Um.” Corbin envisioned the clock hands whirling in the space between his eyes and the canted window panes. He tapped at the space to count each crossing. “Um, I think it would be—like, twelve? Because they cross every hour?”

“Close! Actually, it’s eleven. Each crossing adds a little bit more time to when the hands cross, past the hour mark. Every twelve hours, all those bits add up to an extra hour.”

Corbin frowned.

Dr. Phillpots scrawled a few notes on his legal pad and sighed. “So let’s talk about what brought you here. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

Corbin shifted in his seat, and the leather groaned and chirped. His eyes began boring into the vaguely botanical spirals of the Tabriz rug spread out over the office’s mesquite-wood floor. “I, um, wanted to see the peacocks in this place, a place where you’re not supposed to go? But I went anyway?”

“Mm. I talked to your parents for a long time, on the phone. What I understand from them is there was a lot more to it?” Dr. Phillpots peered down through his reading glasses at one of his scraps. “Let’s see: you were warned the first time by a security officer, but you went back anyway, and got caught. The officer called your parents to pick you up. Then you went back a third time, and got caught a third time. That time they were going to call the police and have you arrested, but your parents managed to convince them not to, by promising to put you in treatment. Did I get that right?”

Corbin nodded.

Dr. Phillpots tilted his head. “So what is it about these peacocks that’s so interesting?”

9.30.2017 (c)

"Peacock Therapy," part one

I.

Corbin Knopf, age fourteen, had tried his best not to think of the peacocks—the swaying stalks of their coruscating blue necks, the spray of their brush-tipped crowns, the convex pivot of their meters-wide, fanned trains, with elongated coverts flashing arrays of their painted eyes.

His parents had brought him to a psychiatrist after he had been caught trespassing a third time into the gated neighborhood of Peacock Grove. He had been stalking after the peafowl there that strut between the citrus trees in the Grove’s central roundabout and drag their trains along the lawns, shedding their precious covert stems. It began one afternoon when Corbin had slithered on his belly through a gap between the iron gate’s lower lip and the gully running along the shady gravel road to the Grove. He was seeking the source of the spectral ululations he had heard from a nearby artery and identified at once as the cry of his favorite bird.

Security Officer Mandy Nutate, sitting in the logo-stamped microcar parked catawampus to the Gatehouse, had watched with languid amusement upon first spotting Corbin. He was crawling on hands and knees to position himself among the peafowl. It seemed he wished to inch as close as possible to them without drawing their attention. This was as much to be among them in their unconscious meanderings as to avoid spooking them.

With his palm-sized camera, Corbin began snapping apparently hundreds of shots of the dozen or so peafowl. He crouched to frame the birds among the encompassing crescent of waxy trunks. The peacocks turned elliptically to the dull gray peahens in the center of their group and shivered out their trains’ fans at them. The larger peacocks would now and then jerk their iridescent displays and dip their beaks threateningly toward the other males who edged too close to their intended mates. Corbin held his finger depressed on the autofocusing camera’s shutter release, filling its memory card; his eyes were as wide and glassy as the camera’s lens.

Officer Mandy was content to watch Corbin without interfering while she sat draining her bodega-purchased Suplex-Soda. Her wage was too pathetic to inspire in her any special jealousy over her ambit. Besides, the looping cobblestone lanes and yawning front yards had lain vacant in the sloping sun all afternoon. The only entities in Officer Mandy’s sight were a dragonfly twitching on the microcar’s windshield, the peafowl, and Corbin.  

Then she noticed Corbin collecting the stray coverts left in the wake of the peacocks’ spurts; he carefully coiled them to stow in his red tote bag. She feared questions from the residents. Specifically, the twin girls from the hacienda-style manse just above the roundabout who often harvested these feathers upon returning from aerial contortion practice would ask if the gardener had composted them. She imagined the twins’ mother, if she were to learn what happened, peppering the neighbors with portents of an insidious feather snatcher economy plaguing the Grove. Officer Mandy snorted and resigned herself to cautioning the boy.

She jammed her Suplex-Soda in the cup-holder and heaved out of the microcar. When she scanned the roundabout again, though, Corbin was gone. She threw herself back into the driver’s seat and flipped the ignition switch. The electric engine sang in a high-pitched glissando as she swung the microcar onto the cobbled lane in pursuit. After triggering the front gate remotely, she found Corbin half-way down the gravel road. She pulled into the shoulder ahead of him and got out. He stopped short and looked down at his sneaker, drawing an S in the dust with its toe.

“Hi, excuse me! Hi. Let me see what you got in your bag there,” Officer Mandy demanded, marching at him, her hand reaching forward.

“No, why?” Corbin asked defensively, tightening his hold on the tote bag’s handles.

“I saw you take those feathers,” Officer Mandy stated, frowning. He was not budging. She sighed. “Well—you can’t just go in there uninvited. Did you know you were trespassing?”

Corbin nodded, his face etiolated.

“Uh huh. Don’t let me catch you in there again.”

Corbin nodded vigorously. He started off sprinting toward the freeway. Officer Mandy turned back to the microcar. She felt confident that would be the last of him.

The following afternoon, however, Corbin shimmied back in.  

9.15.2017 (c)

The Marriage of Opposites, complete