“Ihad thisdream,” Keller said. “Matter of fact I wrote it down, as you suggested.”
“Good.”
Before getting on the couch Keller had removed his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. He moved from the couch to retrieve his notebook from the jacket’s inside breast pocket, then sat on the couch and found the page with the dream on it. He read through his notes rapidly, closed the book, and sat there, uncertain how to proceed.
“As you prefer,” said Breen. “Sitting up or lying down, whichever is more comfortable.”
“It doesn’t matter?”
“Not to me.”
And which was more comfortable? A seated posture seemed more natural for conversation, while lying down on the couch had the weight of tradition on its side. Keller, who felt driven to give this his best shot, decided to go with tradition. He stretched out, put his feet up.
He said, “I’m living in a house, except it’s almost like a castle. Endless passageways and dozens of rooms.”
“Is it your house?”
“No, I just live here. In fact I’m a kind of servant for the family that owns the house. They’re almost like royalty.”
“And you are a servant.”
“Except I have very little to do, and I’m treated like an equal. I play tennis with members of the family. There’s this tennis court in back of the house.”
“And this is your job? To play tennis with them?”
“No, that’s an example of how they treat me as an equal. And I eat at the same table with them, instead of eating downstairs with the servants. My job is the mice.”
“The mice?”
The house is infested with mice. I’m having dinner with the family, I’ve got a plate piled high with good food, and a waiter in black tie comes in and presents a covered dish. I lift the cover and there’s a note on it, and it says, ‘Mice.’ ”
“Just the single word?”
“That’s all. I get up from the table and I follow the servant down a long hallway, and I wind up in an unfinished room in the attic. There are tiny mice all over the room, there must be twenty or thirty of them, and I have to kill them.”
“How?”
“By crushing them underfoot. That’s the quickest and most humane way, but it bothers me and I don’t want to do it. But the sooner I finish, the sooner I can get back to my dinner, and I’m very hungry.”
“So you kill the mice?”
“Yes,” Keller said. “One almost gets away but I stomp on it just as it’s getting out the door. And then I’m back at the dinner table and everybody’s eating and drinking and laughing, and my plate’s been cleared away. Then there’s a big fuss, and finally they bring my plate back from the kitchen, but it’s not the same food as before. It’s… ”
“Yes?”
“Mice,” Keller said. “They’re skinned and cooked, but it’s a plateful of mice.”
“And you eat them?”
“That’s when I woke up,” Keller said. “And not a moment too soon, I’d have to say.”
“Ah,” Breen said. He was a tall man, long-limbed and gawky, wearing chinos and a dark green shirt and a brown corduroy jacket. He looked to Keller like someone who had been a nerd in high school, and who now managed to look distinguished, in an eccentric sort of way. He said “Ah” again, and folded his hands, and asked Keller what he thought the dream meant.
“You’re the doctor,” Keller said.
“You think it means that I am the doctor?”
“No, I think you’re the one who can say what it means. Maybe it just means I shouldn’t eat Rocky Road ice cream right before I go to bed.”
“Tell me what you think the dream might mean.”
“Maybe I see myself as a cat.”
“Or as an exterminator?” Keller didn’t say anything.
“Let us work with this dream on a very superficial level,” Breen said. “You’re employed as a corporate troubleshooter, except that you used another word for it.”
“They tend to call us expediters,” Keller said, “but troubleshooter is what it amounts to.”
“Most of the time there is nothing for you to do. You have considerable opportunity for recreation, for living the good life. For tennis, as it were, and for nourishing yourself at the table of the rich and powerful. Then mice are discovered, and it is at once clear that you are a servant with a job to do.”
“I get it,” Keller said.
“Go on, then. Explain it to me.”
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? There’s a problem and I’m called in and I have to drop what I’m doing and go and deal with it. I have to take abrupt arbitrary action, and that can involve firing people and closing out whole departments. I have to do it, but it’s like stepping on mice. And when I’m back at the table and I want my food-I suppose that’s my salary?”
“Your compensation, yes.”
“And I get a plate of mice.” He made a face. “In other words, what? My compensation comes from the destruction of the people I have to cut adrift. My sustenance comes at their expense. So it’s a guilt dream?”
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s guilt. My profit derives from the misfortunes of others, from the grief I bring to others. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“On the surface, yes. When we go deeper, perhaps we will begin to discover other connections. With your having chosen this job in the first place, perhaps, and with some aspects of your childhood.” He interlaced his fingers and sat back in his chair. “Everything is of a piece, you know. Nothing exists alone and nothing is accidental. Even your name.”
“My name?”
“Peter Stone. Think about it, why don’t you, between now and our next session.”
“Think about my name?”
“About your name and how it suits you. And”-a reflexive glance at his wristwatch-“I’m afraid our hour is up.”
Jerrold Breen’s office was on Central Park West at Ninety-fourth Street. Keller walked to Columbus Avenue, rode a bus five blocks, crossed the street, and hailed a taxi. He had the driver go through Central Park, and by the time he got out of the cab at Fiftieth Street he was reasonably certain he hadn’t been followed. He bought coffee in a deli and stood on the sidewalk, keeping an eye open while he drank it. Then he walked to the building where he lived, on First Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth. It was a prewar high-rise, with an Art Deco lobby and an attended elevator. “Ah, Mr. Keller,” the attendant said. “A beautiful day, yes?”
“Beautiful,” Keller agreed.
Keller had a one-bedroom apartment on the nineteenth floor. He could look out his window and see the UN building, the East River, the borough of Queens. On the first Sunday in November he could watch the runners streaming across the Queensboro Bridge, just a couple of miles past the midpoint of the New York marathon.
It was a spectacle Keller tried not to miss. He would sit at his window for hours while thousands of them passed through his field of vision, first the world-class runners, then the middle-of-the-pack plodders, and finally the slowest of the slow, some walking, some hobbling. They started in Staten Island and finished in Central Park, and all he saw was a few hundred yards of their ordeal as they made their way over the bridge into Manhattan. Sooner or later the sight always moved him to tears, although he could not have said why.
Maybe it was something to talk about with Breen.
It was a woman who had led him to the therapist’s couch, an aerobics instructor named Donna. Keller had met her at the gym. They’d had a couple of dates, and had been to bed a couple of times, enough to establish their sexual incompatibility. Keller still went to the same gym two or three times a week to raise and lower heavy metal objects, and when he ran into her they were friendly.
One time, just back from a trip somewhere, he must have rattled on about what a nice town it was. “Keller,” she said, “if there was ever a born New Yorker, you’re it. You know that, don’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“But you’ve always got this fantasy, living the good life in Elephant, Montana. Every place you go, you dream up a whole life to go with it.”
“Is that bad?”
“Who’s saying it’s bad? But I bet you could have fun with it in therapy.”
“You think I need to be in therapy?”
“I think you’d get a lot out of therapy,” she said. “Look, you come here, right? You climb the Stair Monster, you use the Nautilus.”
“Mostly free weights.”
“Whatever. You don’t do this because you’re a physical wreck.”
“I do it to stay in shape.”
“And because it makes you feel good.”
“So?”
“So I see you as all closed in and trying to reach out,” she said. “Going all over the country and getting real estate agents to show you houses you’re not going to buy.”
“That was only a couple of times. And what’s so bad about it, anyway? It passes the time.”
“You do these things and don’t know why,” she said. “You know what therapy is? It’s an adventure, it’s a voyage of discovery. And it’s like going to the gym. It’s… look, forget it. The whole thing’s pointless anyway unless you’re interested.”
“Maybe I’m interested,” he said.
Donna, not surprisingly, was in therapy herself. But her therapist was a woman, and they agreed he’d be more comfortable working with a man. Her ex-husband had been very fond of his therapist, a West Side psychologist named Breen. Donna had never met the man herself, and she wasn’t on the best of terms with her ex, but-
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll call him myself.”
He’d called Breen, using Donna’s ex-husband’s name as a reference. “But I doubt that he even knows me by name,” he said. “We got to talking a while back at a party and I haven’t seen him since. But something he said struck a chord with me, and, well, I thought I ought to explore it.”
“Intuition is a powerful teacher,” Breen said.
Keller made an appointment, giving his name as Peter Stone. In his first session he talked some about his work for a large and unnamed conglomerate. “They’re a little old-fashioned when it comes to psychotherapy,” he told Breen. “So I’m not going to give you an address or telephone number, and I’ll pay for each session in cash.”
“Your life is filled with secrets,” Breen said.
“I’m afraid it is. My work demands it.”
“This is a place where you can be honest and open. The idea is to uncover those secrets you’ve been keeping from yourself. Here you are protected by the sanctity of the confessional, but it’s not my task to grant you absolution. Ultimately, you absolve yourself.”
“Well,” Keller said.
“Meanwhile, you have secrets to keep. I can respect that. I won’t need your address or telephone number unless I’m forced to cancel an appointment. I suggest you call in to confirm your sessions an hour or two ahead of time, or you can take the chance of an occasional wasted trip. Ifyou have to cancel an appointment, be sure to give me twenty-four hours’ notice. Or I’ll have to charge for the missed session.”
“That’s fair,” Keller said.
He went twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, at two in the afternoon. It was hard to tell what they were accomplishing. Sometimes Keller relaxed completely on the sofa, talking freely and honestly about his childhood. Other times he experienced the fifty-minute session as a balancing act; he was tugged in two directions at once, yearning to tell everything, compelled to keep it all a secret.
No one knew he was doing this. Once when he ran into Donna she asked if he’d ever given the shrink a call, and he’d shrugged sheepishly and said he hadn’t. “I thought about it,” he said, “but then somebody told me about this masseuse, she does a combination of Swedish and shiatsu, and I’ve got to tell you, I think it does me more good than somebody poking and probing at the inside of my head.”
“Oh, Keller,” she’d said, not without affection. “Don’t ever change.”
It was on a Monday that he recounted the dream about the mice. Wednesday morning his phone rang, and it was Dot. “He wants to see you,” she said.
“Be right out,” he said.
He put on a tie and jacket and caught a cab to Grand Central and a train to White Plains. There he caught another cab and told the driver to head out Washington Boulevard and let him off at the corner of Norwalk. After the cab drove off he walked up Norwalk to Taunton Place and turned left. The second house on the right was a big old Victorian with a wrap-around porch. He rang the bell and Dot let him in.
“The upstairs den,” she said. “He’s expecting you.”
He went upstairs, and forty minutes later he came down again. A young man named Louis drove him back to the station, and on the way they chatted about a recent boxing match they’d both seen on ESPN. “What I wish,” Louis said, “I wish they had like a mute button on the remote, except what it would do is it would mute the announcers but you’d still hear the crowd noise and the punches landing. What you wouldn’t have is the constant yammer-yammer-yammer in your ear.” Keller wondered if they could do that. “I don’t see why not,” Louis said. “They can do everything else. If you can put a man on the moon, you ought to be able to shut up Al Bernstein.”
Keller took the train back to New York and walked to his apartment. He made a couple of phone calls and packed a bag. At 3:30 he went downstairs, walked half a block, and hailed a cab to JFK, where he picked up his boarding pass for American’s 6:10 flight to Tucson.
In the departure lounge he remembered his appointment with Breen. He called and canceled the Thursday session. Since it was less than twenty-four hours away, Breen said, he’d have to charge him for the missed session, unless he was able to book someone else into the slot.
“Don’t worry about it,” Keller told him. “I hope I’ll be back in time for my Monday appointment, but it’s always hard to know how long these things are going to take. If I can’t make it I should at least be able to give you the twenty-four hours’ notice.”
He changed planes in Dallas and got to Tucson shortly before midnight. He had no luggage aside from the piece he was carrying, but he went to the baggage claim area anyway. A rail-thin man with a broad-brimmed straw hat stood there holding a hand-lettered sign that readNOSCAASI. Keller watched the man for a few minutes, and observed that no one else was watching him. He went up to him and said, “You know, I was figuring it out the whole way to Dallas. What I came up with, it’sIsaacson spelled backwards.”
“That’s it,” the man said. “That’s exactly it.” He seemed impressed, as if Keller had cracked the Japanese naval code. He said, “You didn’t check a bag, did you? I didn’t think so. Car’s this way.”
In the car the man showed him three photographs, all of the same man, heavyset, dark, with glossy black hair and a greedy pig face. Bushy mustache, bushy eyebrows. Enlarged pores on his nose.
“That’s Rollie Vasquez,” the man said. “Son of a bitch wouldn’t exactly win a beauty contest, would he?”
“I guess not.”
“Let’s go,” the man said. “Show you where he lives, where he eats, where he gets his ashes hauled. Rollie Vasquez, this is your life.”
Two hours later the man dropped him at a Ramada Inn and gave him a room key and a car key. “You’re all checked in,” he said. “Car’s parked at the foot of the staircase closest to your room. She’s a Mitsubishi Eclipse, pretty decent transportation. Color’s supposed to be silver-blue, but she says gray on the papers. Registration’s in the glove box.”
“There was supposed to be something else.”
“That’s in the glove box, too. Locked, of course, but the one key fits the ignition and the glove box. And the doors and the trunk, too. And if you turn the key upside down it’ll still fit, ’cause there’s no up and down to it. You really got to hand it to those Japs.”
“What’ll they think of next?”
“Well, it may not seem like much,” the man said, “but all the time you waste making sure you got the right key, then making sure you got it right side up.”
“It adds up.”
“It does,” the man said. “Now, you got a full tank of gas. It takes regular, but what’s in there’s enough to take you upwards of four hundred miles.”
“How’re the tires? Never mind. Just a joke.”
“And a good one,” the man said. “ ‘How’re the tires?’ I like that.”
The car was where it was supposed to be, and the glove box held the car’s registration and a semiautomatic pistol, a.22-caliber Horstmann Sun Dog, fully loaded, with a spare clip lying alongside it. Keller slipped the gun and the spare clip into his carry-on, locked the car, and went to his room without passing the desk.
After a shower, he sat down and put his feet up on the coffee table. It was all arranged, and that made it simpler, but sometimes he liked it better the other way, when all he had was a name and address and no one on hand to smooth the way for him. This was simple, all right, but who knew what traces were being left? Who knew what kind of history the gun had, or what the string bean with theNOSCAASI sign would say if the police picked him up and shook him?
All the more reason to do it quickly. He watched enough of an old movie on cable to ready him for sleep, then slept until he woke up. When he went out to the car he had his bag with him. He expected to return to the room, but if he didn’t he’d be leaving nothing behind, not even a fingerprint.
He stopped at Denny’s for breakfast. Around one he had lunch at a Mexican place on Figueroa. In the late afternoon he drove up into the hills north of the city, and he was still there when the sun went down. Then he drove back to the Ramada.
That was Thursday. Friday morning the phone rang while he was shaving. He let it ring. It rang again just as he was ready to leave. He didn’t answer it this time, either, but went around wiping surfaces a second time with a hand towel. Then he went out to the car.
At two that afternoon he followed Rolando Vasquez into the men’s room of the Saguaro Lanes bowling alley and shot him three times in the head. The little gun didn’t make much noise, not even in the confines of the tiled lavatory. Earlier he had fashioned an improvised suppressor by wrapping the barrel of the gun with a space-age insulating material that muffled most of the gun’s report without adding much in the way of weight or bulk. If you could do that, he thought, you ought to be able to shut up Al Bernstein.
He left Vasquez propped in a stall, left the gun in a storm drain half a mile away, left the car in the long-term lot at the airport.
Flying home, he wondered why they had needed him in the first place. They’d supplied the car and the gun and the finger man. Why not do it all themselves? Did they really need to bring him all the way from New York to step on the mouse?
“You said to think about my name,” he told Breen. “The significance of it. But I don’t see how it could have any significance. It’s not as if I chose it myself.”
“Let me suggest something,” Breen said. “There is a metaphysical principle which holds that we choose everything about our lives, that in fact we select the very parents we are born to, that everything which happens in our lives is a manifestation of our will. Thus there are no accidents, no coincidences.”
“I don’t know if I believe that.”
“You don’t have to. We’ll just take it for the moment as a postulate. So, assuming that you chose the name Peter Stone, what does your choice tell us?”
Keller, stretched full length upon the couch, was not enjoying this. “Well, a peter’s a penis,” he said reluctantly. “A stone peter would be an erection, wouldn’t it?”
“Would it?”
“So I suppose a guy who decides to call himself Peter Stone would have something to prove. Anxiety about his virility. Is that what you want me to say?”
“I want you to say whatever you wish,” Breen said. “Are you anxious about your virility?”
“I never thought I was,” Keller said. “Of course it’s hard to say how much anxiety I might have had back before I was born, around the time I was picking my parents and deciding what name they should choose for me. At that age I probably had a certain amount of difficulty maintaining an erection, so I guess I had a lot to be anxious about.”
“And now?”
“I don’t have a performance problem, if that’s the question. I’m not the way I was in my teens, ready to go three or four times a night, but then who in his right mind would want to? I can generally get the job done.”
“You get the job done.”
“Right.”
“You perform.”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“What do you think?”
“Don’t do that,” Keller said. “Don’t answer a question with a question. If I ask a question and you don’t want to respond, just leave it alone. But don’t turn it back on me. It’s irritating.”
Breen said, “You perform, you get the job done. But what do you feel, Mr. Peter Stone?”
“Feel?”
“It is unquestionably true thatpeter is a colloquialism for the penis, but it has an earlier meaning. Do you recall Christ’s words to the first Peter? ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church.’ Because Petermeans rock. Our Lord was making a pun. So your first name means rock and your last name is Stone. What does that give us? Rock and stone. Hard, unyielding, obdurate. Insensitive. Unfeeling.”
“Stop,” Keller said.
“In the dream, when you kill the mice, what do you feel?”
“Nothing. I just want to get the job done.”
“Do you feel their pain? Do you feel pride in your accomplishment, satisfaction in a job well done? Do you feel a thrill, a sexual pleasure, in their death?”
“Nothing,” Keller said. “I feel nothing. Could we stop for a moment?”
“What do you feel right now?”
“Just a little sick to my stomach, that’s all.”
“Do you want to use the bathroom? Shall I get you a glass of water?”
“No, I’m all right. It’s better when I sit up. It’ll pass. It’s passing already.”
Sitting at his window, watching not marathoners but cars streaming over the Queensboro Bridge, Keller thought about names. What was particularly annoying, he thought, was that he didn’t need to be under the care of a board-certified metaphysician to acknowledge the implications of the name Peter Stone. He had very obviously chosen it, and not in the manner of a soul deciding what parents to be born to and planting names in their heads. He had picked the name himself when he called to make his initial appointment with Jerrold Breen.Name? Breen had demanded.Stone, he had replied.Peter Stone.
Thing is, he wasn’t stupid. Cold, unyielding, insensitive, but not stupid. If you wanted to play the name game, you didn’t have to limit yourself to the alias he had selected. You could have plenty of fun with the name he’d borne all his life.
His full name was John Paul Keller, but no one called him anything but Keller, and few people even knew his first or middle names. His apartment lease and most of the cards in his wallet showed his names as J. P. Keller. Just Plain Keller was what people called him, men and women alike. (“The upstairs den, Keller. He’s expecting you.” “Oh, Keller, don’t ever change.” “I don’t know how to say this, Keller, but I’m just not getting my needs met in this relationship.”)
Keller. In German it meantcellar, ortavern. But the hell with that, you didn’t need to know what it meant in a foreign language. Just change a vowel. Keller = Killer.
Clear enough, wasn’t it?
On the couch, eyes closed, Keller said, “I guess the therapy’s working.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I met a girl last night, bought her a couple of drinks, went home with her. We went to bed and I couldn’t do anything.”
“You couldn’t do anything.”
“Well, if you want to be technical, there were things I could have done. I could have typed a letter, sent out for a pizza. I could have sung ‘Melancholy Baby.’ But I couldn’t do what we’d both been hoping I would do, which was have sex with her.”
“You were impotent.”
“You know, you’re very sharp. You never miss a trick.”
“You blame me for your impotence,” Breen said.
“Do I? I don’t know about that. I’m not sure I even blame myself. To tell you the truth, I was more amused than devastated by the experience. And she wasn’t upset, perhaps out of relief that I wasn’t upset. But just so nothing like this ever happens again, I’ve decided I’m changing my name to Dick Hardin.”
“What was your father’s name?”
“My father,” Keller said. “Jesus, what a question. Where did that come from?”
Breen didn’t say anything.
Neither, for several minutes, did Keller. Then, eyes closed, he said, “I never knew my father. He was a soldier. He was killed in action before I was born. Or he was shipped overseas before I was born and killed when I was a few months old. Or possibly he was home when I was born, or came home on leave when I was very small, and he held me on his knee and told me he was proud of me.”
“You have such a memory?”
“I have no memory,” Keller said. “The only memory I have is of my mother telling me about him, and that’s the source of the confusion, because she told me different things at different times. Either he was killed before I was born or shortly after, and either he died without seeing me or he saw me one time and sat me on his knee. She was a good woman but she was vague about a lot of things. The one thing she was completely clear on, he was a soldier. And he got killed over there.”
“And his name-”
Was Keller, he thought. “Same as mine,” he said. “But forget the name, this is more important than the name. Listen to this. She had a picture of him, a head-and-shoulders shot, this good-looking young soldier in a uniform and wearing a cap, the kind that folds flat when you take it off. The picture was in a gold frame on her dresser when I was a little kid, and she would tell me how that was my father.
“And then one day the picture wasn’t there anymore. ‘It’s gone,’ she said. And that was all she would say on the subject. I was older then, I must have been seven or eight years old.
“Couple of years later I got a dog. I named him Soldier, I called him that after my father. Years after that two things occurred to me. One, Soldier’s a funny thing to call a dog. Two, whoever heard of naming a dog after your father? But at the time it didn’t seem the least bit unusual to me.”
“What happened to the dog?”
“He became impotent. Shut up, will you? What I’m getting to’s a lot more important than the dog. When I was fourteen, fifteen years old, I used to work afternoons after school helping out this guy who did odd jobs in the neighborhood. Cleaning out basements and attics, hauling trash, that sort of thing. One time this notions store went out of business, the owner must have died, and we were cleaning out the basement for the new tenant. Boxes of junk all over the place, and we had to go through everything, because part of how this guy made his money was selling off the stuff he got paid to haul. But you couldn’t go through all this crap too thoroughly or you were wasting time.
“I was checking out this one box, and what do I pull out but a framed picture of my father. The very same picture that sat on my mother’s dresser, him in his uniform and his military cap, the picture that disappeared, it’s even in the same frame, and what’s it doing here?”
Not a word from Breen.
“I can still remember how I felt. Like stunned, likeTwilight Zone time. Then I reach back in the box and pull out the first thing I touch, and it’s the same picture in the same frame.
“The whole box is framed pictures. About half of them are the soldier and the others are a fresh-faced blonde with her hair in a page boy and a big smile on her face. What it was, it was a box of frames. They used to package inexpensive frames that way, with a photo in it for display. For all I know they still do. So what my mother must have done, she must have bought a frame in a five-and-dime and told me it was my father. Then when I got a little older she got rid of it.
“I took one of the framed photos home with me. I didn’t say anything to her, I didn’t show it to her, but I kept it around for a while. I found out the photo dated from World War Two. In other words, it couldn’t have been a picture of my father, because he would have been wearing a different uniform.
“By this time I think I already knew that the story she told me about my father was, well, a story. I don’t believe she knew who my father was. I think she got drunk and went with somebody, or maybe there were several different men. What difference does it make? She moved to another town, she told people she was married, that her husband was in the service or that he was dead, whatever she told them.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“How do I feel about it?” Keller shook his head. “If I slammed my hand in a cab door, you’d ask me how I felt about it.”
“And you’d be stuck for an answer,” Breen said. “Here’s a question for you. Who was your father?”
“I just told you-”
“But someone fathered you. Whether or not you knew him, whether or not your mother knew who he was, there was a particular man who planted the seed that grew into you. Unless you believe yourself to be the second coming of Christ.”
“No,” Keller said. “That’s one delusion I’ve been spared.”
“So tell me who he was, this man who spawned you. Not on the basis of what you were told or what you’ve managed to figure out. I’m not asking this question of the part of you that thinks and reasons. I’m asking that part of you that simply knows. Who was your father? What was your father?”
“He was a soldier,” Keller said.
Keller, walking uptown on Second Avenue, found himself standing in front of a pet shop, watching a couple of puppies cavorting in the window.
He went inside. One whole wall was given over to stacked cages of puppies and kittens. Keller felt his spirits sinking as he looked into the cages. Waves of sadness rocked him.
He turned away and looked at the other pets. Birds in cages, gerbils and snakes in dry aquariums, tanks of tropical fish. He was all right with them. It was the puppies that he couldn’t bear to look at.
He left the store. The next day he went to an animal shelter and walked past cages of dogs waiting to be adopted. This time the sadness was overwhelming, and he felt it physically as pressure against his chest. Something must have shown on his face, because the young woman in charge asked him if he was all right.
“Just a dizzy spell,” he said.
In the office she told him that they could probably accommodate him if he was especially interested in a particular breed. They could keep his name on file, and when a specimen of that breed became available-
“I don’t think I can have a pet,” he said. “I travel too much. I can’t handle the responsibility.” The woman didn’t respond, and Keller’s words echoed in her silence. “But I want to make a donation,” he said. “I want to support the work you do.”
He got out his wallet, pulled bills from it, handed them to her without counting them. “An anonymous donation,” he said. “I don’t want a receipt. I’m sorry for taking your time. I’m sorry I can’t adopt a dog. Thank you. Thank you very much.”
She was saying something, but he didn’t listen. He hurried out of there.
“ ‘I want to support the work you do.’ That’s what I told her, and then I rushed out of there because I didn’t want her thanking me. Or asking me questions.”
“What would she ask?”
“I don’t know,” Keller said. He rolled over on the couch, facing away from Breen, facing the wall. “ ‘I want to support your work.’ But I don’t even know what their work is. They find homes for some animals, and what do they do with the others? Put them to sleep?”
“Perhaps.”
“What do I want to support? The placement or the killing?”
“You tell me.”
“I tell you too much as it is,” Keller said.
“Or not enough.”
Keller didn’t say anything.
“Why did it sadden you to see the dogs in their cages?”
“I felt their sadness.”
“One feels only one’s own sadness. Why is it sad to you, a dog in a cage? Are you in a cage?”
“No.”
“Your dog, Soldier. Tell me about him.”
“All right,” Keller said. “I guess I could do that.”
A session or two later, Breen said, “You have never been married.”
“No.”
“I was married.”
“Oh?”
“For eight years. She was my receptionist, she booked my appointments, showed clients to the waiting room until I was ready for them. Now I have no receptionist. A machine answers the phone. I check the machine between appointments, and take and return calls at that time. If I had had a machine in the first place I’d have been spared a lot of agony.”
“It wasn’t a good marriage?”
Breen didn’t seem to have heard the question. “I wanted children. She had three abortions in eight years and never told me. Never said a word. Then one day she threw it in my face. I’d been to a doctor, I’d had tests, and all indications were that I was fertile, with a high sperm count and extremely motile sperm. So I wanted her to see a doctor. ‘You fool, I’ve killed three of your babies already, why don’t you leave me alone?’ I told her I wanted a divorce. She said it would cost me.”
“And?”
“We were married eight years. We’ve been divorced for nine. Every month I write an alimony check and put it in the mail. If it was up to me I’d rather burn the money.”
Breen fell silent. After a moment Keller said, “Why are you telling me all this?”
“No reason.”
“Is it supposed to relate to something in my psyche? Am I supposed to make a connection, clap my hand to my forehead, say, ‘Of course, of course! I’ve been so blind!’ ”
“You confide in me,” Breen said. “It seems only fitting that I confide in you.”
A couple of days later Dot called. Keller took a train to White Plains, where Louis met him at the station and drove him to the house on Taunton Place. Later Louis drove him back to the train station and he returned to the city. He timed his call to Breen so that he got the man’s machine. “This is Peter Stone,” he said. “I’m flying to San Diego on business. I’ll have to miss my next appointment, and possibly the one after that. I’ll try to let you know.”
Was there anything else to tell Breen? He couldn’t think of anything. He hung up, packed a bag, and rode Amtrak to Philadelphia.
No one met his train. The man in White Plains had shown him a photograph and given him a slip of paper with a name and address on it. The man in question managed an adult bookstore a few blocks from Independence Hall. There was a tavern across the street, a perfect vantage point, but one look inside made it clear to Keller that he couldn’t spend time there without calling attention to himself, not unless he first got rid of his tie and jacket and spent twenty minutes rolling around in the gutter.
Down the street Keller found a diner, and if he sat at the far end he could keep an eye on the bookstore’s mirrored front windows. He had a cup of coffee, then walked across the street to the bookstore, where there were two men on duty. One was a dark and sad-eyed youth from India or Pakistan, the other the jowly, slightly exophthalmic fellow in the photo Keller had seen in White Plains.
Keller walked past a whole wall of videocassettes and leafed through a display of magazines. He had been there for about fifteen minutes when the kid said he was going for his dinner. The older man said, “Oh, it’s that time already, huh? Okay, but make sure you’re back by seven for a change, will you?”
Keller looked at his watch. It was six o’clock. The only other customers were closeted in video booths in the back. Still, the kid had had a look at him, and what was the big hurry, anyway?
He grabbed a couple of magazines at random and paid for them. The jowly man bagged them and sealed the bag with a strip of tape. Keller stowed his purchase in his carry-on and went to find himself a hotel room.
The next day he went to a museum and a movie, arriving at the bookstore at ten minutes after six. The young clerk was gone, presumably having a plate of curry somewhere. The jowly man was behind the counter, and there were three customers in the store, two checking the video selections, one looking at magazines.
Keller browsed, hoping they would decide to clear out. At one point he was standing in front of a whole wall of videocassettes and it turned into a wall of caged puppies. It was momentary, and he couldn’t tell if it was a genuine hallucination or just some sort of mental flashback. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.
One customer left, but the other two lingered, and then someone new came in off the street. And in half an hour the Indian kid was due back, and who knew if he would take his full hour, anyway?
He approached the counter, trying to look a little more nervous than he felt. Shifty eyes, furtive glances. Pitching his voice low, he said, “Talk to you in private?”
“About what?”
Eyes down, shoulders drawn in, he said, “Something special.”
“If it’s got to do with little kids,” the man said, “no disrespect intended, but I don’t know nothing about it, I don’t want to know nothing about it, and I wouldn’t even know where to steer you.”
“Nothing like that,” Keller said.
They went into a room in back. The jowly man closed the door, and as he was turning around Keller hit him with the edge of his hand at the juncture of neck and shoulder. The man’s knees buckled, and in an instant Keller had a loop of wire around his neck. In another minute he was out the door, and within the hour he was on the northbound Metroliner.
When he got home he realized he still had the magazines in his bag. That was sloppy, he should have discarded them the previous night, but he’d simply forgotten them altogether and never even unsealed the package.
Nor could he find a reason to unseal it now. He carried it down the hall, dropped it unopened into the incinerator. Back in his apartment, he fixed himself a weak scotch and water and watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel. The vanishing rain forest, one more goddam thing to worry about.
“Oedipus,” Jerrold Breen said, holding his hands in front of his chest, his fingertips pressed together. “I presume you know the story. Unwittingly, he killed his father and married his mother.”
“Two pitfalls I’ve thus far managed to avoid.”
“Indeed,” Breen said. “But have you? When you fly off somewhere in your official capacity as corporate expediter, when you shoot trouble, as it were, what exactly are you doing? You fire people, you cashier entire divisions, close plants, rearrange human lives. Is that a fair description?”
“I suppose so.”
“There’s an implied violence. Firing a man, terminating his career, is the symbolic equivalent of killing him. And he’s a stranger, and I shouldn’t doubt that the more important of these men are more often than not older than you, isn’t that so?”
“What’s the point?”
“When you do what you do, it’s as if you are seeking out and killing your unknown father.”
“I don’t know,” Keller said. “Isn’t that a little far-fetched?”
“And your relationships with women,” Breen went on, “have a strong Oedipal component. Your mother was a vague and unfocused woman, incompletely present in her own life, incapable of connection with others. Your own relationships with women are likewise blurred and out of focus. Your problems with impotence-”
“Once!”
“-are a natural consequence of this confusion. Your mother herself is dead now, isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“And your father is not to be found, and almost certainly deceased. What’s called for, Peter, is an act specifically designed to reverse this entire pattern on a symbolic level.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“It’s a subtle point,” Breen admitted. He crossed his legs, propped an elbow on a knee, extended his thumb and rested his bony chin on it. Keller thought, not for the first time, that Breen must have been a stork in a prior life. “If there were a male figure in your life,” Breen went on, “preferably at least a few years your senior, someone playing a faintly paternal role vis-à-vis yourself, someone to whom you turn for advice and direction.”
Keller thought of the man in White Plains.
“Instead of killing this man,” Breen said, “symbolically, I need hardly say-I am speaking symbolically throughout-but instead of killing him as you have done with father figures in the past, it seems to me that you might do something to nourish this man.”
Cook a meal for the man in White Plains? Buy him a hamburger? Toss him a salad?
“Perhaps you could think of a way to use your particular talents to this man’s benefit instead of his detriment,” Breen went on. He drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and mopped his forehead. “Perhaps there is a woman in his life-your mother, symbolically-and perhaps she is a source of great pain to your father. So, instead of making love to her and slaying him, like Oedipus, you might reverse the usual course of things by, uh, showing love to him and, uh, slaying her.”
“Oh,” Keller said.
“Symbolically, that is to say.”
“Symbolically,” Keller said.
A week later Breen handed him a photograph. “This is called the Thematic Apperception Test,” Breen said. “You look at the photograph and make up a story about it.”
“What kind of story?”
“Any kind at all,” Breen said. “This is an exercise in imagination. You look at the subject of the photograph and imagine what sort of woman she is and what she is doing.”
The photo was in color, and showed a rather elegant brunette dressed in tailored clothing. She had a dog on a leash. The dog was medium size, with a chunky body and an alert expression in its eyes. It was that color which dog people call blue, and which everyone else calls gray.
“It’s a woman and a dog,” Keller said.
“Very good.”
Keller took a breath. “The dog can talk,” he said, “but he won’t do it in front of other people. The woman made a fool of herself once when she tried to show him off. Now she knows better. When they’re alone he talks a blue streak, and the son of a bitch has an opinion on everything. He tells her everything from the real cause of the Thirty Years’ War to the best recipe for lasagna.”
“He’s quite a dog,” Breen said.
“Yes, and now the woman doesn’t want other people to know he can talk, because she’s afraid they might take him away from her. In this picture they’re in the park. It looks like Central Park.”
“Or perhaps Washington Square.”
“It could be Washington Square,” Keller agreed. “The woman is crazy about the dog. The dog’s not so sure about the woman.”
“And what do you think about the woman?”
“She’s attractive,” Keller said.
“On the surface,” Breen said. “Underneath it’s another story, believe me. Where do you suppose she lives?”
Keller gave it some thought. “ Cleveland,” he said.
“ Cleveland? Why Cleveland, for God’s sake?”
“Everybody’s got to be someplace.”
“If I were taking this test,” Breen said, “I’d probably imagine the woman living at the foot of Fifth Avenue, at Washington Square. I’d have her living at number one Fifth Avenue, perhaps because I’m familiar with that particular building. You see, I once lived there.”
“Oh?”
“In a spacious apartment on a high floor. And once a month,” he continued, “I write out an enormous check and mail it to that address, which used to be mine. So it’s only natural that I would have this particular building in mind, especially when I look at this particular photograph.” His eyes met Keller’s. “You have a question, don’t you? Go ahead and ask it.”
“What breed is the dog?”
“The dog?”
“I just wondered,” Keller said.
“As it happens,” Breen said, “it’s an Australian cattle dog. Looks like a mongrel, doesn’t it? Believe me, it doesn’t talk. But why don’t you hang on to that photograph?”
“All right.”
“You’re making really fine progress in therapy,” Breen said. “I want to acknowledge you for the work you’re doing. And I just know you’ll do the right thing.”
A few days later Keller was sitting on a park bench in Washington Square. He folded his newspaper and walked over to a dark-haired woman wearing a blazer and a beret. “Excuse me,” he said, “but isn’t that an Australian cattle dog?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“It’s a handsome animal,” he said. “You don’t see many of them.”
“Most people think he’s a mutt. It’s such an esoteric breed. Do you own one yourself?”
“I did. My ex-wife got custody.”
“How sad for you.”
“Sadder still for the dog. His name was Soldier.Is Soldier, unless she’s gone and changed it.”
“This fellow’s name is Nelson. That’s his call name. Of course the name on his papers is a real mouthful.”
“Do you show him?”
“He’s seen it all,” she said. “You can’t show him a thing.”
“I went down to the Village last week,” Keller said, “and the damnedest thing happened. I met a woman in the park.”
“Is that the damnedest thing?”
“Well, it’s unusual for me. I meet women at bars and parties, or someone introduces us. But we met and talked, and then I happened to run into her the following morning. I bought her a cappuccino.”
“You just happened to run into her on two successive days.”
“Yes.”
“In the Village.”
“It’s where I live.”
Breen frowned. “You shouldn’t be seen with her, should you?”
“Why not?”
“Don’t you think it’s dangerous?”
“All it’s cost me so far,” Keller said, “is the price of a cappuccino.”
“I thought we had an understanding.”
“An understanding?”
“You don’t live in the Village,” Breen said. “I know where you live. Don’t look so surprised. The first time you left here I watched you from the window. You behaved as though you were trying to avoid being followed. So I bided my time, and when you stopped taking precautions, that’s when I followed you. It wasn’t that difficult.”
“Why follow me?”
“To find out who you were. Your name is Keller, you live at 865 First Avenue. I already knewwhat you were. Anybody might have known just from listening to your dreams. And paying in cash, and all of these sudden business trips. I still don’t know who employs you, the crime bosses or the government, but then what difference does it make? Have you been to bed with my wife?”
“Your ex-wife.”
“Answer the question.”
“Yes, I have.”
“Christ. And were you able to perform?”
“Yes.”
“Why the smile?”
“I was just thinking,” Keller said, “that it was quite a performance.”
Breen was silent for a long moment, his eyes fixed on a spot above and to the right of Keller’s shoulder. Then he said, “This is profoundly disappointing. I had hoped you would find the strength to transcend the Oedipal myth, not merely reenact it. You’ve had fun, haven’t you? What a naughty little boy you’ve been! What a triumph you’ve scored over your symbolic father! You’ve taken his woman to bed. No doubt you have visions of getting her pregnant, so that she can give you what she so cruelly denied him. Eh?”
“Never occurred to me.”
“It would, sooner or later.” Breen leaned forward, concern showing on his face. “I hate to see you sabotaging your own therapeutic process this way,” he said. “You were doing sowell. ”
From the bedroom window you could look down at Washington Square Park. There were plenty of dogs there now, but none of them were Australian cattle dogs.
“Some view,” Keller said. “Some apartment.”
“Believe me,” she said, “I earned it. You’re getting dressed. Going somewhere?”
“Just feeling a little restless. Okay if I take Nelson for a walk?”
“You’re spoiling him,” she said. “You’re spoiling both of us.”
On a Wednesday morning, Keller took a cab to La Guardia and a plane to St. Louis. He had a cup of coffee with an associate of the man in White Plains and caught an evening flight back to New York. He caught another cab and went directly to the apartment building at the foot of Fifth Avenue.
“I’m Peter Stone,” he told the doorman. “I believe Mrs. Breen is expecting me.”
The doorman stared.
“Mrs. Breen,” Keller said. “In Seventeen-J.”
“Jesus.”
“Is something the matter?”
“I guess you haven’t heard,” the doorman said. “I wish it wasn’t me that had to tell you.”
“You killed her,” he said.
“That’s ridiculous,” Breen told him. “She killed herself. She threw herself out the window. If you want my professional opinion, she was suffering from depression.”
“If you wantmy professional opinion,” Keller said, “she had help.”
“I wouldn’t advance that argument if I were you,” Breen said. “If the police were to look for a murderer, they might look long and hard at Mr. Stone-hyphen-Keller, the stone killer. And I might have to tell them how the usual process of transference went awry, how you became obsessed with me and my personal life, how I couldn’t seem to dissuade you from some inane plan to reverse the Oedipal complex. And then they might ask you why you employ aliases, and just how you make your living, and… do you see why it might be best to let sleeping dogs lie?”
As if on cue, the dog stepped out from behind the desk. He caught sight of Keller and his tail began to wag.
“Sit,” Breen said. “You see? He’s well trained. You might take a seat yourself.”
“I’ll stand. You killed her, and then you walked off with the dog, and-”
Breen sighed. “The police found the dog in the apartment, whimpering in front of the open window. After I went down and identified the body and told them about her previous suicide attempts, I volunteered to take the dog home with me. There was no one else to look after it.”
“I would have taken him,” Keller said.
“But that won’t be necessary, will it? You won’t be called upon to walk my dog or make love to my wife or bed down in my apartment. Your services are no longer required.” Breen seemed to recoil at the harshness of his own words. His face softened. “You’ll be able to get back to the far more important business of therapy. In fact”-he indicated the couch-“why not stretch out right now?”
“That’s not a bad idea. First, though, could you put the dog in the other room?”
“Not afraid he’ll interrupt, are you? Just a little joke. He can wait for us in the outer office. There you go, Nelson. Good dog… Oh, no. How dare you bring a gun to this office? Put that down immediately.”
“I don’t think so.”
“For God’s sake, why kill me? I’m not your father. I’m your therapist. It makes no sense for you to kill me. You’ve got nothing to gain and everything to lose. It’s completely irrational. It’s worse than that, it’s neurotically self-destructive.”
“I guess I’m not cured yet.”
“What’s that, gallows humor? But it happens to be true. You’re a long way from cured, my friend. As a matter of fact, I would say you’re approaching a psychotherapeutic crisis. How will you get through it if you shoot me?”
Keller went to the window, flung it wide open. “I’m not going to shoot you,” he said.
“I’ve never been the least bit suicidal,” Breen said, pressing his back against a wall of bookshelves. “Never.”
“You’ve grown despondent over the death of your ex-wife.”
“That’s sickening, just sickening. And who would believe it?”
“We’ll see,” Keller told him. “As far as the therapeutic crisis is concerned, well, we’ll see about that, too. I’ll think of something.”
The woman at the animal shelter said, “Talk about coincidence. One day you come in and put your name down for an Australian cattle dog. You know, that’s a very uncommon breed in this country.”
“You don’t see many of them.”
“And what came in this morning? A perfectly lovely Australian cattle dog. You could have knocked me over with a sledgehammer. Isn’t he a beauty?”
“He certainly is.”
“He’s been whimpering ever since he got here. It’s very sad, his owner died and there was nobody to keep him. My goodness, look how he went right to you! I think he likes you.”
“I’d say we were made for each other.”
“I can almost believe it. His name is Nelson, but of course you can change it.”
“Nelson,” he said. The dog’s ears perked up. Keller reached to give him a scratch. “No, I don’t think I’ll have to change it. Who was Nelson, anyway? Some kind of English hero, wasn’t he? A famous general or something?”
“I think an admiral. Commander of the British fleet, if I remember correctly. Remember? The Battle of Trafalgar Square?”
“It rings a muted bell,” he said. “Not a soldier but a sailor. Well, that’s close enough, wouldn’t you say? Now I suppose there’s an adoption fee to pay, and some papers to fill out.”
When they’d handled that part she said, “I still can’t get over it. The coincidence and all.”
“I knew a man once,” Keller said, “who insisted there was no such thing as a coincidence or an accident.”
“Well, I wonder how he’d explain this.”
“I’d like to hear him try,” Keller said. “Let’s go, Nelson. Good boy.”