Mansion Sketch .8

Mansion Sketch .7

Mansion Sketch .6

Mansion Sketch .5

Mansion Sketch .4

Mansion Sketch .3

Mansion Sketch .2

Mansion Sketch

"Peacock Therapy," part three

III.

Throughout the following morning—walking to Montauk High, squeezing down crowded hallways, sulking in first period study hall—Corbin had tried his best to keep his mind from straying back to the peacocks, or otherwise evoking a recrudescence of the image. The route from his house to the school a mile and half away ran along the same expressway that let onto the gravel thoroughfare to Peacock Grove. As he approached this turnout, Corbin practiced the first aversion technique Dr. Phillpots had showed him: he rapidly clenched and released his fists, inhaled deeply, and held his breath, so that a tingling began to work its way up his neck. This tingling permitted him to pass the turnout without surrendering to the urge to bolt down it, despite catching the far-off echoes of a peacock’s “nee-ooOWWw!”

In study hall, Corbin’s eyes wandered from the “Common Law and Constitutional Courts” chapter of his American Civics Now! textbook to a poster tacked up on a chalk-dusted corkboard in the corner. The infographic poster featured an array of Jurassic fossils, fine-print columns, and the title “Archaeopteryx: Very Early Bird,” all orbiting a central meter-tall painting of this interstitial creature. The painting’s vibrant cobalt feathers made Corbin nervous; he decided to deploy the second method he had learned from Dr. Phillpots, the covert conditioning technique of calling up negative counter-images to associate with the peacocks. He closed his eyes and imagined that the act of looking at a peacock provoked hot urine to spread across his crotch, as onlookers snickered. The prickling dread of this vision pushed him to return to his reading assignment.

By third period computer lab, Corbin’s worries began to pullulate. Neither the fist pumping exercise nor the urine vision were sufficient anymore to quell his desire to escape back to the peacocks. So he reverted to his own method of systematic desensitization: he pulled up a cache of peafowl picture files from a cloud drive and made hard copies on the color printer once the lab monitor stepped out. He also slipped a pair of steel sheers from the supply cabinet into his bag. At lunch twenty minutes later, he crouched on a dirt patch under a hawthorn tree, behind the cafeteria’s cement patio, and laid the pictures out around him. He pulled out covert feathers from the Grove and placed them beside the pictures. He then picked up one of the pictures, a photo of a peacock perched on a headstone outside a conical Yazidi shrine, and began cutting around the painted eyes at the tips of its raised train. 

“Nice strokes. Very smooth,” a breathy female voice spoke in Corbin’s left ear, raising the hair on his arms. The shears stopped cutting. Bending over him was Patricia Foxcroft, a sixteen-year-old sophomore Corbin had often watched with curiosity from the back of art class. Patricia had assiduously cultivated an arch goth couture: she wore licorice-black lipstick; her raven fringe lay straight across her pale forehead, over her sharply manicured eyebrows; an iron ring dangled from the leather choker around her neck; the silk laces on her knee-high boots matched those running up the back of her paisley-overlay corset dress and down her fingerless elbow gloves. Corbin caught the scent of anise as she knelt next to him and lifted one of his pictures between her long fingers. 

“Peacocks. Love peacocks. Did you know sometimes the males will fake orgasms with the females to attract more mates?” Patricia asked. She replaced the picture on the dirt and took up one of the covert feathers. Corbin opened his mouth to answer but said nothing. Patricia continued, “Actually, I’m planning on getting a tattoo of one of these, right here.” She bent the feather into a curl and held it against her bare thigh, above her boot collar. “What do you think?”

“Um, yeah, that—yeah,” Corbin stumbled.

“I wanted to ask you, your name is Corbin?”

Corbin nodded.

“Good. Well, Corbin, I heard from this bitch Aubrey that they caught you trespassing in a rich neighborhood, to get at the peacocks there, like you’re obsessed with them. Is that true?” The edges of Patricia’s mouth thinned into a smirk as she looked down at him with dark-magenta-rimmed eyes.

“Um, well, I—”

“Catch!” An object landed with a wet thud on a picture near Corbin’s knee. Corbin leapt to his feet, gripping the shears about the screw, when he saw what the object was: a bluebird carcass in the active stage of decay. It had been pulled up from the damp grass that had grown entwined with it. A family of sexton beetles scurried out from its ribcage, which was poking through clumps of ichorous gore and beige tufts. Half a dozen cerulean feathers remained fluttering from its stiff wings. Ants swarmed in the right eye socket. Corbin winced from the heavy putrescent odor.

“Oh shit!” Patricia covered her nose and doubled over laughing in the direction of her friend, Jasmine, who had thrown the decomposing bird. Jasmine stood a foot shorter then Patricia and wore an oversized Sex Spiders of Leng t-shirt that hung down to the cuffs of her black jean-shorts.

“What’s wrong? Don’t you love birds?” Jasmine sneered. Patricia snorted through her fingers.

Corbin held up the shears. “Stay away,” he warned.

As Jasmine put up her hand in defense, she raked her palm over the shears’ tip. “Ow! What the fuck?” She showed her scraped palm to Patricia as it began to bead with blood.

“I—sorry.” Corbin backed away and pinched the bridge of his nose. His sinciput was stinging again, signaling a return of the image. He turned and started off sprinting in the opposite direction, back toward the expressway. He was still gripping the shears, but he had abandoned the rest of his things at Patricia and Jasmine’s feet.

“Hey, get back here!” Jasmine yelled, but her voice was already faint in Corbin’s head.

Corbin ran until his chest burned. As he ran, his feet carrying him instinctively toward his destination, the shears hard in his hand, he watched, in his mind’s theater, moth-sized snowflakes flutter down around the peacock perched on the frozen lip of a tiered fountain. The peacock raised its full fan. It shuddered in its empyreal radiance.

Seven minutes later, Officer Mandy found Corbin face down in the roundabout. Pinned under his arched torso was a desperately squirming peacock. She noticed blood on the lawn, in sprayed droplets and trickling rivulets, near the peacock’s saddle.

Officer Mandy had been jolted awake in the microcar half a minute prior by savage squawks like none she had ever heard from the peafowl. She bounded out of the microcar toward the squawks. Most of the other peafowl were huddled at the edge of the roundabout, poking their heads between the citrus tree branches to peer out at their distressed comrade under Corbin.

At first it seemed Corbin had attacked the peacock. When Officer Mandy pulled him over by the shoulder, though, she discovered that the peacock was gripping his throat with its talons. As soon as the uninjured peacock yanked its train free, it sprung off Corbin’s chest and took flight in a low trajectory toward the other peafowl. A slit opened by the peacock’s spur ran down Corbin’s sternothyroid muscle. In his internal jugular gaped three puncture holes gouged by the attacker’s toes. Blood pulsed out of Corbin’s body. Officer Mandy reached for the roll of gauze in her belt’s trauma kit as she speed-dialed the paramedics on her phone’s CB handset attachment. While she pressed the damp wad against the wounds and waited for the ambulance, she noticed Corbin’s shears laying a yard away in the grass. He had dropped them there before reaching for the peacock.

Corbin would remain in a hemorrhage-induced coma for the next thirty-one hours. Soon after he awoke, following a successful transfusion, he was less relieved to learn that he would suffer no long-term impact from his injuries than he was to find that the urge to visit the peacocks had passed. The intruding image was gone.

A green peacock is said to have once killed a man in Bangkok, since a blood clot caused by the head gash it had inflicted resulted in its victim’s death—and peacocks at public parks have been known to wound small children and damage vehicles—but in its ferocity, the attack on Corbin was unique. Not only was the responsible peacock in this case not euthanized, though, but once identified and fitted with conspicuous bronze anklets, the residents of Peacock Grove celebrated it as their prized defender. Sir Galahad, as the peacock was known thereafter, spent its remaining days strutting between languors among the citrus trees and dips in the tiered fountain and posing for pictures with adoring residents and their guests, only occasionally charging at them in truculent fits of wrath.

(c) 1.15.2018

"Peacock Therapy," part 3.2

III.

Throughout the following morning—walking to Montauk High, squeezing down crowded hallways, sulking in first period study hall—Corbin had tried his best to keep his mind from straying back to the peacocks, or otherwise evoking a recrudescence of the image. The route from his house to the school a mile and half away ran along the same expressway that let onto the gravel thoroughfare to Peacock Grove. As he approached this turnout, Corbin practiced the first aversion technique Dr. Phillpots had showed him: he rapidly clenched and released his fists, inhaled deeply, and held his breath, so that a tingling began to work its way up his neck. This tingling permitted him to pass the turnout without surrendering to the urge to bolt down it, despite catching the far-off echoes of a peacock’s “nee-ow-ow!”

In study hall, Corbin’s eyes strayed from the “Common Law and Constitutional Courts” chapter of his American Civics Now! textbook to the poster tacked up on a chalk-dusted corkboard in the corner. The infographic poster featured an array of Jurassic fossils, fine-print columns, and the title “Archaeopteryx: Very Early Bird,” all orbiting a central painting of this interstitial creature. The painting’s vibrant cobalt feathers made Corbin nervous; he decided to deploy the second method he had learned from Dr. Phillpots, the covert conditioning technique of calling up negative counter-images to associate with the peacocks. He closed his eyes and imagined that the sight of a peacock compelled hot urine to spread across his crotch as onlookers snickered. The prickling dread brought on by this exercise finally pushed him to return to his reading assignment.

By third period computer lab, Corbin’s worries began to pullulate. Neither the fist pumping exercise nor the urine vision were sufficient anymore to quell his desire to escape back to the peacocks. So he reverted to his own method of systematic desensitization: he pulled up a cache of peafowl image files from a cloud drive and made hard copies on the color printer once the lab monitor stepped out. He also slipped a pair of steel sheers from the supply cabinet in his bag. At lunch twenty minutes later, he crouched on a dirt patch under a hawthorn tree, behind the cafeteria’s cement patio, and laid the pictures out around him. He pulled out two covert feathers from the Grove and placed them beside the pictures. He then picked up an image of a peacock perched on a headstone outside a Yazidi shrine and began cutting around the painted eyes at the tips of its raised train.

“Nice strokes. Very smooth,” a breathy female voice spoke in Corbin’s left ear, raising the hair on his arms. The shears stopped cutting. Bending over him was Patricia Foxcroft, a sixteen year-old sophomore Corbin had often watched with wistful curiosity from the back of art class. Patricia assiduously cultivated an arch goth couture: she wore licorice-black lipstick; her raven fringe lay straight across her pale forehead, above her sharp eyebrows; an iron ring dangled from the leather choker around her neck; the silk laces on her knee-high boots matched those running up the back of her paisley overlay corset dress and zigzagging down her fingerless elbow gloves. Corbin caught the scent of anise as she knelt next to him and lifted one of his pictures between her long crimson nail-tipped fingers.

“Peacocks. Love peacocks. Did you know that sometimes the males will fake orgasms with the females to attract more mates?” Patricia asked as she replaced the picture on the dirt and took up one of the covert feathers. Corbin opened his mouth to answer but said nothing. Patricia continued, “Actually, I’m planning on getting a tattoo of one of these, right here.” She bent the feather into a curl and held it against her bare thigh, above her boot collar. “What do you think?”

“Um, yeah, that—yeah,” Corbin stumbled.

“I wanted to ask you, your name is Corbin?”

Corbin nodded.

“Good. Well, Corbin, I heard from this bitch Aubrey they caught you trespassing in the rich neighborhood to get at the peacocks there, like you’re obsessed with them. Is that true?” Patricia’s mouth curled into a smirk as she looked up at him with her dark magenta-rimmed eyes.

“Um, well, I—”

“Catch!” An object landed with a wet thud on the picture near Corbin’s knee. Corbin leapt to his feet, gripping the shears about the screw, when he saw what the object was: a bluebird carcass in the active stage of decomposition, pulled up from the damp grass that had grown into it. A family of sexton beetles scurried out from between the ribs poking through clumps of congealed gore and beige feather tufts. Half a dozen cerulean feathers remained clinging to the stiff wings. Ants swarmed in the right eye socket. Corbin winced from the heavy putrescent odor.

“Oh shit!” Patricia covered her nose and doubled over laughing in the direction of her friend Jasmine, who had thrown the decaying bird. Jasmine stood a foot shorter then Patricia and wore an oversized Sex Spiders of Leng t-shirt that hung over the cuffs of her black jean-shorts.

“What’s wrong? Don’t you love birds?” Jasmine taunted. Patricia snorted through her fingers.

Corbin held up the shears and warned, “Get back.”

As Jasmine put up her hand in defense, she raked her palm over the shears’ tip. “Ow! What the fuck?” 

"Peacock Therapy," part 3.1

III.

Throughout the following morning—walking to Montauk High, squeezing down crowded hallways, sulking in first period study hall—Corbin had tried his best to keep his mind from straying back to the peacocks, or otherwise evoking a recrudescence of the image. The route from his house to the school a mile and half away ran along the same expressway that let onto the gravel thoroughfare to Peacock Grove. As he approached this turnout, Corbin practiced the first aversion technique Dr. Phillpots had showed him: he rapidly clenched and released his fists, inhaled deeply, and held his breath, so that a tingling began to work its way up his neck. This tingling permitted him to pass the turnout without surrendering to the urge to bolt down it, despite catching the far-off echoes of a peacock’s “nee-ow-ow!”

In study hall, Corbin’s eyes strayed from the “Common Law and Constitutional Courts” chapter of his American Civics Now! textbook to the poster tacked up on a corkboard in the corner. The infographic poster, dusted with chalk, featured an array of Jurassic fossils, sweeping arrows, fine-print columns, and the title “Archaeopteryx: Very Early Bird,” all orbiting a central painting of this interstitial creature. The painting’s vibrant cobalt feathers made Corbin nervous, so he decided to deploy the second method he had learned from Dr. Phillpots, the covert conditioning technique of calling up negative counter-images to associate with the peacock. He closed his eyes and imagined that the sight of a peacock caused hot urine to spread across his crotch as onlookers snickered. The dread brought on by this exercise finally pushed him to return to his reading assignment.

By third period computer lab, Corbin’s worries began to pullulate. Neither the fist pumping exercise nor the urine vision were managing to quell his desire to escape back to the peacocks anymore. Thus, he reverted to his own method of systematic desensitization: he pulled up a cache of peafowl image files from a cloud drive and made hard copies on the color printer after the lab monitor stepped out. He also grabbed a pair of steel sheers from the supply cabinet. At lunch twenty minutes later, he found a dirt patch to sit on under a hawthorn tree, behind the cafeteria’s cement patio, and laid the pictures out around him. He pulled out two covert feathers from the Grove and placed them beside the pictures. He then picked up an image of a peacock perched on a headstone outside a Yazidi shrine and began cutting around the painted eyes at the tips of its raised train.

“Nice strokes. Very smooth,” a breathy female voice spoke in Corbin’s left ear, raising the hair on his arms. The shears stopped cutting.

Halloween Cartoon (complete)

Halloween Drawing (in progress)

"Peacock Therapy," complete part two

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)

"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)