II.
“So
Corbin, you ever fool around with the girls?” Dr. Phillpots inquired 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 the 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. 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 spinning 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. “So, let’s talk about what
brought you here. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
The
leather chirped as Corbin shifted in his seat again. His eyes began boring into
the vaguely botanical spirals of the Tabriz rug spread out over the office’s
mesquite 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-hm.
I talked to your parents for a long time, on the phone. What I understand from
them is that 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 so damn interesting about these
peacocks?”
“T-they,
um,” Corbin started. He pinched down hard on the object in his pocket, a plastic
lenticular hologram of a peacock attached to his keychain, but it was too
late—the question had already triggered a return of the image.
Corbin’s
tear ducts ached as the image poured out from a focal point above his frontal
sinus, spreading across his sinciput to its peripheral rim and blotting out Dr.
Phillpot’s office. The image shuddered in its empyreal radiance, electrifying Corbin’s
visual cortex. This was the image: on the frozen lip of a tiered fountain
encrusted with icy fangs, an incongruous peacock perched. Even as moth-sized snowflakes
fluttered down around it, the peacock thrust out its scintillating breast and raised
its fan with all the poise of a dancer’s arabesque.
To banish
the image, Corbin gripped the bridge of his nose with his right hand while furiously
rubbing the hologram in his pocket with his left. At last the image melted
away.
“Is
something the matter?” Dr. Phillpots asked.
“No.” Corbin
worked to regain focus. “So, but, um, the peacocks, they, um … I need to be like,
near them, ‘cause of this image of a peacock I see, like, in my head? That
keeps coming back?”
“Really?”
Dr. Phillpots’ renewed interest caused him to tilt his eyes over the rim of his
glasses. “What do you mean by ‘need’?
Does this image make you do things?”
“No. It’s
not like that. It’s like—the image goes away when I’m near the peacocks? Before,
I could just, like, look at pictures of peacocks, that would make the image go
away. Like, take the image out of my head and put it in the world, outside. But
now, that’s not enough. I need to be close to the real thing now. Or something.”
Corbin cast his eyes back down into the convolutions of the Tabriz rug. “It was
the same way with the other two, before, but I found a way to get rid of those.
I don’t think there’s a way to do that with the peacock. Or, at least, I’m
afraid—I don’t know. Never mind.”
“The other
two? Oh, wait.” Dr. Phillpots thumbed through his scraps until he found the
note he was seeking and laid his index finger on it. “Your parents told me about
this also. They said there were two other incidents, before this thing with the
peacocks. Let’s see—a doll and a record player, is that it? You set the doll on
fire and smashed the record player?”
Corbin
shook his head. “No. A witch in effigy and a phonograph.”
Although
the two older images no longer possessed the occulting power of the peacock,
having both been in some way extinguished through the apotropaic magic of their tokens’ destruction, Corbin could still
recall them.
In the
first, the effigy of a witch was burning in an Italian village’s Spring Equinox
rite. The witch glowered down from her broken wicker throne atop a daïs of stacked fascines. She had been pieced
together out of a throw pillow with a crudely painted-on face, evening gloves stretched
over sticks for fingers, a gray macramé
shawl for hair, and a peasant dress propped up by a broomstick. Curtains
of flames rose around her, consuming the fascines’ branches in a bursting
bonfire, quickly reducing the witch to a charred skeletal figure.
Incited by the oppressive recurrence of this image, Corbin
had managed to build an approximation of the effigy from components found in
his parents’ closet and attic. He had then dowsed the effigy in lighter fluid
and set it aflame atop a pile of pine-needles and balled up newspapers. His
parents returned later that evening to find a smoldering black mass in their
driveway.
The second image was of a phonograph placed on the ledge
of a bell tower’s open belfry arch. Arrayed along the ledge beside it were five
lit candles. Behind it the bronze-alloy bell hung from its headstock. The brass
horn of the phonograph emitted a warbling instrumental version of the L’Internationale that echoed down through
the night. Pistol shots aimed at the phonograph hit the belfry arch. A shot
struck the turntable, which knocked the phonograph from the ledge. It tumbled
end over and end and smashed to pieces against the bricks below.
To recreate this image, Corbin used his parent’s credit
card to purchase a replica Victor Victrola phonograph from an online specialty
retailer for several hundred dollars. When it arrived, he brought it out onto
the roof and placed it on the rain gutter. He then climbed down into the yard
and began firing quarter-inch bearing balls at it with a wrist-brace slingshot.
Eventually, a ball struck the horn, causing the phonograph to tip over and smash
apart on the concrete patio below.
Dr. Phillpots had been tapping his
pen against his notepad in contemplation. “A witch and a peacock. These are pretty
potent symbols. Burning a witch in effigy is some sort of fertility rite, I
think. And a peacock clearly represents the male, uh, urge to mate. I don’t know
what the phonograph could be. Anyhow, this is what those questions at the
beginning were about. You’re entering puberty now. Possibly, these images are suppressed
sexual thoughts trying to get out. But, uh, where do you think they come from?”
“They’re from a Fellini movie,”
Corbin replied.
“What?”
“It’s called Amarcord. An Italian guy named Fellini made it.”
Dr. Phillpots squinted at Corbin in
a mild pique. “Yeah, I know who that is. I’m not sure I know this particular
film—how do you say it, ‘amour court’?”
“Am-ar-cord.”
“Okay.” Dr. Phillpots jotted the
title down. “But, what do you mean, they’re from this film? Your images are the
same ones as in the film?”
Corbin nodded.
“When did you see this film? I
assume you started seeing the images after.”
Corbin nodded. “The first image
started, like, the same night after I saw it. It was, um, right after school
started back, like, three months ago. It’s weird, I don’t know why I saw it? I
was walking home and they were playing it. I guess I just decided to see it by
myself cause, like, it only cost a couple dollars?”
Until that January afternoon, the Campanella
Sun Theatre had never caught Corbin’s attention on his way to and from Montauk High, a few blocks away. The sagging marquee
hung over warped French doors, beyond which only dark forms could be made out;
the marquee’s letterboards featured mismatched, seldom rearranged characters,
and the chase light sign had to make do with a third of its bulbs dead or
broken. That afternoon, however, Corbin had left school early and was meandering
along the sidewalk, indecisive about returning home, such that a “2$ Matinee”
flyer taped to a placard was enough to entice him in. A tall man in a canola-oil
spotted dress shirt seemed to be the Theatre’s sole employee. He grunted softly
as he handed Corbin his ticket stub.
Corbin entered
the narrow auditorium and found it empty. There hung over the raked rows of
seats the smell of rancid butter sprayed with antiseptic. Corbin’s sneakers
smacked when lifted from the lacquered floor as he walked down the center aisle
to sit. When the lights dimmed, he remained the only viewer in the house. The
audio strip of the 1974 print of Amarcord
crackled and skipped.
Curiously,
the picture seemed to contain a spheroid duplicate, seemingly laid within it at
a fainter register, as if one of the projector’s compound lens components possessed
both a spherical aberration and an optical filter for lower intensity light at certain
wavelengths. This effect made Corbin dizzy. The film itself captivated him in
its provincial pacing and parades of eccentric characters, perhaps because he
had never seen anything like it. None of the three images that would later
return to harass him stood out for him particularly during that viewing,
though.
“‘… Amarcord (the title meaning “I remember”
in the Northern dialect of Fellini’s hometown of Rimini) returns to the
director’s obsessions with the grotesqueries of the human form—specifically gargantuan
breasts, buttocks, and warts—and the boundless lust of the naïve adolescent,
this time through the genre stunts of the nostalgic memoir …’” Bending over his
desktop monitor, Dr. Phillpots scrolled down through the onscreen text, humming
to himself, before continuing: “‘… though often focused through the eyes of a
teenage boy in the bloom of his sexual awakening, a boy who chafes against the
ludicrous self-importance of his teachers and parents, as a kind of cinematic Entwicklungsroman, the film just as often
strays off onto tangents about the fantasies of street peddlers, the ancient
history of the town’s founding, the pompous processions and nighttime crimes of
the Black Shirts, the perplexities and paradoxes of family and death …’”
“What is that?” Corbin asked.
“Huh?”
“What you’re reading.”
“Oh, a thing about the film, I don’t know what it
is,” Dr. Phillpots replied. He clicked off the monitor and returned to his
chair. “What it sounds like, with the ‘sexual flowering of a juvenile boy’ or
whatever—it sounds like what I was talking about, though, don’t you think?”
Corbin frowned.
“Well, you can think about it.” Dr. Phillpots
looked at his watch. “We need to finish up pretty soon. I want to show you a
few things that I think will help before that. These techniques should stop you
from seeing the same image over and over—what we call an ‘intrusive thought.’ At
least, they should work well enough in the meantime, before our next session.”
The systematic desensitization,
aversion therapy, and convert conditioning techniques that Dr. Phillpots then showed
Corbin would turn out not to work well enough in the meantime, however.
9.30.2017 (c)
