Post
by Fardels » Tue Jul 28, 2015 11:49 am
I always watch them when they enter my office. Especially Holden. How they walk in frequently tells you what kind of session you’re going to have. It was easy with him, usually. When he uses his slink, it means he figured out a new way to try to piss me off. When he shuffles, that means he’s feeling sorry for himself.
Today, I couldn’t tell. He bounced in, shot me a big grin, and piped up, “Hiya, Herbie!” I just smiled. We established long ago that my name isn’t Herbert and also that he didn’t particularly care – to him, I’m Herb. “Herbie” was new… either he was genuinely in a good mood, or trying out some new irritant.
The standard process is to ask them to rate their feelings on a scale from one to ten – appetite, initiative, anxiety, and so forth. Holden always says he’s a five. When he’s being slinky, sometimes he adds decimal places – his anxiety is 5.375, and so forth. This time, when I asked about his appetite, he said it was 3.1412. I was way ahead of him on this one, so I asked if he wanted apple or blueberry. We grinned at each other; that happens maybe four times a year.
“How are you doing this week,” I asked… conversationally. I try to do that anyway, but I didn’t want to spoil whatever was going on – we were on some kind of roll.
“Screw that. I want to talk about the story.”
“Uh, okay. You actually read the chapters I asked you to?”
“Are you kidding me? I read the whole thing. I went back and read the chapters I was supposed to read before, and then I read ahead. Iwanako is fantastic.”
“Wow.” I knew he hadn’t read the material before, so I was astounded. He actually pronounced the name correctly – last week, it was “Wookienako, or whatever”.
He pushed the hunter’s cap back on his head. “Is she real?”
“Who, Iwanako? I don’t think there’s anybody by that name running around doing what the story says, but yeah, I think some of it’s real. I mean, the author has put in a lot of terrific detail, so it’s coming from somewhere.”
He leaned forward in his chair and grinned again. “Yeah. Gotta be. Old Iwanako – she knows. She isn’t a phony, unless she wants to be.”
“What is it she knows, Holden?”
“All that stuff she’s talking about, that’s what’s she knows. Like the parent things, I mean her parents and my parents could form a club, the goddam Missing Persons Society or something. Mothers are all slightly insane. And the teachers. That Mutou, boy, did he depress me! I don't mean he was a bad guy- he wasn't. But you don't have to be bad guy to depress somebody- you can be a good guy and do it.”
“Un-hunh. And what do you mean she’s only phony when she wants to be?”
“Come on, everybody is. I mean, I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”
“So when she gets talked into helping with the paint or doing the makeup or trying to work with Shizune, that didn’t strike you as phony?”
“Well, sure. But she didn’t know what she was in for. The first time, you go along with things. Besides, that Rin is frigging clever. It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to. Once Iwanako figured it out, she avoided it.”
“You mentioned Shizune. True enough, she and Iwanako didn’t like each other at first, but then she wrote the note…”
“Boy, that note. She just made it goddam clear that she was more worried about the school than Iwanako.”
“No, wait. Read the note again. I thought it was clear that she did care about Iwanako, even though they didn’t like each other initially. I mean, she didn’t have to send the note at all.”
“Nah, the Student Council there is just like the ones at my schools. They get somebody in who’s good at it. If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.”
“So you think Yamaku is like the schools you attended?”
“You ought to go to a boys' school sometime. Try it sometime. It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.”
“So there’s no difference between Yamaku and your schools?
“Well, there’s one. I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they're only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something.”
“What did you think about the ‘Bathory’ chapter?”
“Jesus, that was the best part. I would have taken the needle out of my arm and stabbed her with it a few times.”
“Well, our time is about up,” I sighed. Well, I had gotten a reaction. I had gotten lots of enthusiasm, so much that he missed the point of the story. But that’s about average for him I guess. Or maybe I’m missing it.
He rose from the chair. “Hey, so where’s the rest of the story?”
“Not written yet, Holden.”
His face fell. “So there’s no ending?”
“Not yet.”
“Too bad. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
Well, we agreed on something.
