1. Rondeau Psychiatrique pour Violoncelle et Trois Instruments à Cordes, Vaguement Rhythmé avec le Pathos d’un Hibou Vieux

“… I hardly left the house for six weeks,” he said, “and when I did I panicked. It was all sweat, trembling knees, dizziness.”

Robby Callahan, thin as a twig, stopped shaking. “You’re kidding. You too?”

“It was a difficult time, a dark time.”

“And what happened? I mean you’re not like that now, are you?”

“What happened? Girls. And basketball.”

Robby was smiling when he left; his step might almost have been described as buoyant.

Next came Theodore Wurmser, a sales manager whose foot was not yet on the ladder’s first rung, the lowest but by no means the least important. He had yet to even entertain the possibility that he was not so awful a person as he thought, not the very worst. He hadn’t learned to compare down, not up.

In their first three sessions he had made Wurmser see the connection between his mother and the women he paid to whip him. They had worked through the hydraulics of self-punishment, why only pain brought relief or gratification, and why the standards before which he always fell on his knees and breathless were so many targets set up so that he would miss his aim. Wurmser’s had been a month-long education, the most interesting and intense of courses. But none of it had done him any practical good, and he said so, though gently and with regret. After all, he had become Wurmser’s most intimate friend.

“You’ve shown me why I’m a monster. Thanks to you I can comprehend my monstrosity; I can even tell how I got to be a monster—but, let’s face it, I’m still a monster.”

“You’re not a monster.”

“No?” Wurmser’s eyebrows went up. A stand had been taken, a judgment propounded—and one, moreover, in his favor. This was unprecedented.

“You’re no more a monster than I am.”

“You?”

He looked toward the window. “It was three years ago. Wintertime. In Bari. That’s a small city in Italy. I was at a conference.”

Wurmser leaned forward on the leather couch. “What are you saying? Are you saying—?”

“Oh, it was easy to arrange, even in a provincial town. In fact, the people I dealt with seemed not to think it all that unusual. But, of course, you’d know.”

Wurmser squirmed with excitement. “But—”

He held up his hand. “I understand. You’re surprised.”

“What do you mean? I’m floored. You never said.”

“I’m saying now.”

“Just the once then?”

“Once was enough, Theodore.”

Wurmser fell back on the couch. “Not for me.”

“No.”

“How did you stop? Why did you start?”

He leaned forward, forearms on thighs, man-to-man. “It’s not like there are two oases with a desert between them, you know, one for everybody else and the other for you, Theodore. It’s a continuum, a spectrum.”

Wurmser furrowed his brow, concentrating on the implications of the metaphor, picturing the two oases, the empty desert. “More or less, you’re saying? Everybody?”

“Exactly.”

“Then it’s just a matter of… less?”

“If that’s what you want; if that’s what you’ll work for. Yes, that’s just what I’m saying.”

After lunch it was Sheila Kramer, twenty years old, who had cut her wrists in her dorm room. The first session had been a broken dam, full of passion and false breakthroughs detonating like holiday pyrotechnics. Sheila was bright, a psychology major who had not skipped a single page of the assigned reading.

Now it was the second session and she was already there when he got back from the diner. He had seen it often enough, the impatience, the hope for a cancellation.

“I had thoughts again this week. You know, those thoughts… ideation.” She brought out the last word as gingerly as if serving him a soufflé.

He looked straight in her eyes before speaking.

“When I was in high school I tried to hang myself.”

“What?”

“Junior year. My brother found me. He was supposed to be at a party but he was a bit of a narcissist and he’d come back because he’d forgotten his pocket comb…”

—

2. Minuet en Ré Mineur pour Basson Ayant un Goût de Pain d’Épice, sous la Forme d’un Four

In the seventy-sixth year of her age, Margarete Voss, the wealthiest woman in our town and its greatest benefactress, felt her death approach and sent for me, Father Martin Kabelau, to hear her confession. Everyone knew her tale and not just in our province. Throughout the whole country every child of five had heard it from a mother or an auntie. As everybody knows, that story concludes with a happy reunion, without witch or wicked stepmother and with a heap of gold coins. We local folk, however, knew what happened next: how the gold was used to purchase a fine house in town; then, after the melancholy woodcutter’s death, how clever Johannes had been about buying up land and how he rose to the rank of Junker. We knew that Margarete, a comely heiress, was wooed by many and won by the prosperous glove-maker Albrecht Voss, a decent, upstanding man. Though childless, the couple lived happily together until Albrecht died. After that the Widow Voss dedicated herself to good works. She founded our local orphanage and was the constant refuge of the poor.

After Frau Voss told me what she had never told anyone else, she bid me not to keep it to myself. “After I die I want you to break the seal of the confessional,” she enjoined me. “Write it all down, Father. Do it tonight. I know that our story has been told far and wide. Well, people ought to know the whole truth. They are enchanted by the story and don’t see how terrible it is. Out of shame and fear Johannes and I let that happy ending stand, and the consequence has been that people only think how clever my brother and I were, how resourceful and brave. Enchanted by the cottage of cake and the trail of bread crumbs, the chicken bone and the golden coins, it’s easy for them to blame witches and overlook the real sources of this world’s evils, which are poverty and hunger. No one sees how abandonment and terror deform the souls of children like me and poor brother Johannes, for whom I pray every day.”

So I am only doing what the good and, I fervently pray, forgiven Margarete Voss asked of me, though I do not expect to be thanked for it or even believed. The story as it is known is far too popular.

Margarete told me that she had come to understand that the witch was simply a senile old woman, miserly out of want and deranged by loneliness. “How often,” she said, “do crones nuzzle children and say, ‘Oh, I could just eat you up’?” Nor was the cottage made of sweets, of course, just well furnished with them. The gold coins, however, were real enough, and the oven too. Frau Voss swore to me that she and her brother did indeed believe themselves imprisoned, and that they were going to be eaten. She really did push the old woman into the hot oven and padlock its door.

It is about the fate of their stepmother that the story lies. As we all know, the tale says simply that after they escaped with the gold and found their way home, the children’s father greeted them with tears of remorse and told them their stepmother had died. This, Frau Voss informed me, was convenient rather than true. Their father had not rushed to meet them with tears of shame. He was out in the woods searching for them, as he did every day. Their stepmother was as alive as ever and, while not in the least pleased to see them, was delighted with the gold, as the children knew she would be. With the witch’s carving knife, Johannes had this time scored trees to mark the way. And as they walked home, the children made a plan.

“There are heaps more coins at the witch’s cottage,” Johannes told his stepmother.

“This is only as much as we could carry. Gold is so awfully heavy,” complained Margarete.

“Take me there,” demanded the stepmother, just as they had foreseen. “Come. There’s still plenty of light.”

They found their way easily, thanks to Johannes’s trail. As soon as they reached the cottage, the stepmother demanded to know where the heap of gold coins was.

“The witch kept them in the oven,” said Johannes, as Margarete quietly undid the lock.

When their stepmother stuck her head in to grab the coins, “in there with the ashes and bones,” as Margarete put it, “Johannes gave her a good strong push and I quickly fastened the lock.” Then they lit the wood and fled into the darkening forest as the woman’s pleas turned to maddened screaming. By the light of the full moon they could see the fresh white marks on the dark trees.

Their weak father had returned to the hut and was desperate to find his wife. When they told him all that had happened and what they had done, he was profoundly shocked. From then on he was afraid of them. He hardly spoke at all, and for the years remaining to him, did whatever they told him.

—

3. Largo Gonflé pour Contrabasse, Clarinette, et Harpe – Assez Lent, Comme un Ballon Encalmé

According to his mother, the hospice nurse had said, “Well of course, it happens sometimes. It’s not unusual.” But that was on the nurse’s first visit, when his mother was only mildly alarmed. When the nurse stopped coming, his mother panicked and phoned him.

“Your father’s dying,” she had begun, as if it were up to him to do something about it.

“He’s been dying for a year now,” he had replied coldly. “You said so in your last card.” There was his oath to consider, the one he had thrown at the both of them as he tore out of the house six years before, the vow that they would never lay eyes on him again.

His mother instantly changed tack. “But I need you.”

Is there a remedy for the authority, however undeserved, of maternal helplessness? Put aside all your grievances was the subtext, neutralize the acidic past, disregard the drunken rages, his belt, the bottles squirreled all over the garage, that night with the shotgun. All that was to be forgotten, along with the meanness, the humiliations, the foul language, the disgusting breath—likewise her acquiescence, her ridiculous church-going and rancid Augustianism. Everything happens for a reason, she was always saying, and once he had talked back: “You mean for a good reason?” She had slapped his face and called his father and together they poured store-brand detergent down his throat. Didn’t matter, never happened. He’s dying. I need you.

It was no wonder the hospice nurse abandoned her post. By the time he bought his bus ticket, his mother had already done her best to shift the furniture, pushing it aside to make more space in the living room. By the time he showed up at the ugly brown door with the three silly windows at the top, the old man’s body filled the room from wall to wall and the hospital bed lay in the front yard, already beginning to rust.

He stood in the doorway, peering at the monstrous thing in the living room. “God.”

“Watch your language,” she said. That was her greeting.

“What is it—elephantiasis?”

“Elephant what?”

His father’s hand was the size and almost the shape of a beach ball; his naked legs looked like sausages for Gargantua, all sickly pink and smooth as sea glass.

His mother rubbed one mottled hand fretfully over the back of the other. “Help me.” She looked not just thin but desiccated. He thought of a possum, killed by a car, that he had seen all dried out on a road the summer before.

He tossed his duffel bag over his shoulder. “I’ve got to sleep,” he said resentfully, and headed up to his old room. It had grown narrower, repository more of dust than memories.

In the morning he maneuvered the couch out the front door; in the afternoon, the breakfront and chairs. The old man was now even bigger, vast and necrotic, his fingernails the size and color of tombstones.

“Is it going to stop?” his mother had asked him with a kind of awe.

“What’s the doctor say?”

“He took samples of everything and said he’d run some tests and get back to me. That was last week. You want some macaroni and cheese?”

Did she see in him the child who once would eat nothing else?

The old man’s face was that of an enormous, debauched baby, whiskers thick as cornstalks, eyes squeezed shut.

The neighbors kept away.  This was because they couldn’t stand the old man either. They kept away just as he had, only not so far.

That evening, as he wasn’t paying attention to his mother’s church gossip, he noticed the old man’s body had risen a centimeter above the floor. A minute later his body shifted, turned slowly as a whale’s, and one huge arm cracked into the wall between the living room and the dining room, and he saw at once what was going to happen.

“We have to get out,” he said, not so loudly as to frighten her, but firmly.

“What?”

“Out. We have to get out of here. Look. It’s a supporting wall.” His heart was beating fast yet he felt oddly glad.

“You mean right now?”

“Ten minutes,” he ordered with the confidence of a three-star general.

They stood on the lawn amid the furniture, the hospital bed, the photo albums and good china, her collection of tiny spoons, the microwave oven. The sun was setting now. Neighbors stared over fences, between drapes, not wanting to be seen seeing. Somebody must have called the police because he heard a siren just before the roof caved in.

Great gashes were torn from the old man’s flanks; protruding splinters of glass and wood made him look like an immense pincushion. One foot dangled, half-severed by a falling beam. With the shock of the house’s implosion still reverberating through the crepuscular streets where in another life he had ridden his bike and shouted to his friends, his bloated father slowly lifted into the uncorrupted dusk.

Story by Robert Wexelblatt
Photography by Agnes Samour