Chapter 41
BENJAMIN
It took two and a half days to mow Dr. C’s dad’s place and dig out a huge stand of bamboo and cut back some blackberry bushes that left scratches all over my arms. The place looks like a horror movie set, all stone and vines and with a turret on one corner.
Dr. C sat on a creaky plastic lawn chair the whole time, looking at old leather-bound books while he slathered oil on his legs. I sweat. He tans.
“Getting the idea?” he says when I finished mowing the back.
“My mom always said she had to tire me out when I was a toddler so I wouldn’t get into trouble.”
I say it thinking he’ll laugh. Adults like toddler stories. But Dr. C doesn’t laugh.
“I’m not draining your energy just to make you compliant.
I’m allowing you to learn discipline and practice deferred gratification.
Which isn’t to say you know nothing about deferred gratification, because you’re better in that regard than many of my boys.
But we need to balance out your sporadically nasty temper. ”
He smiles at that last part. Whatever. At least he hands me a can of Coke. It tastes amazing. I drink half the can without taking a breath.
“Good. Let’s go inside.”
There’s a real estate sign out front. It says SOLD, but it’s not completely sold, Dr. C told me.
There’s still something called a closing going on.
I keep waiting to meet Dr. C’s father. I picture an old bald man who looks like Professor Xavier from the X-Men in a really old-fashioned wheelchair with a blanket over his lap, sitting in some dark library next to stained glass windows.
There are so many rooms in this house, it’s possible.
Since we got here, I haven’t seen a single person, but it doesn’t mean they’re not here.
We eat lunch—cold turkey and American cheese sandwiches sitting on a back patio. One apple for each of us, which he chews extra loud, but I try not to show him it bothers me, because anything that bothers me becomes a lecture, which I can do without.
Then Dr. C points to the big toolbox we took out of the back of the Jag. He tells me to take it down to the basement and I go down there, a step at a time, ahead of him. It’s spidery and cold, and it smells like a wet cave. The only lights are bulbs with long fuzzy strings.
“Open it up. Get out your wrench set.”
I take a guess and pull out what I think are the wrenches.
“You might need a screwdriver, too.”
The box has a bunch of them.
“Are we building the shed?”
“No shed.”
He points to a thing that looks like a weight lifting machine in the corner.
“You’re taking this apart so we can move it before the new owners show up.”
There’s a light string we didn’t pull yet, close to the machine. I pull it.
“You ever seen anything like that?” he asks.
“Only in movies.” I don’t say what kind of movies.
Truth is, I’ve seen something like this only once.
There’s a sort-of saddle and levers and a few parts that make it clear muscle building isn’t the goal.
Anyway, I know he doesn’t like porn movies so I shouldn’t have said anything about movies to begin with.
“You remember the conversation we had during our first week of sessions, in my office?”
I nod.
“Use words,” he says—like I’m a toddler and he’s my mom.
“Yes. I remember.”
“We talked about . . . ?”
“Experimentation.” I hope I’m picking the right word. “Life instead of fantasy.”
“Yes. And we deconstructed the ‘men as visual creatures’ myth. Both genders respond to visual stimuli equally. No matter, it’s a canard.”
I try not to laugh. He uses that word a lot. Canard. I looked it up. It means duck.
“Visual is nothing compared to actual,” he says, stroking a metal pole that connects the saddle thing to an overhead frame attached to some other parts that are hanging down, with circle things at the end. Not handcuffs. I look closer. Yes, handcuffs.
“Men are stubborn in their misunderstandings of women,” he lectures in that pompous way that almost sounds British, except he’s not.
“If you want them to do exactly what you want, it’s better to understand them.
Not obey them—I never said that. Get inside their heads.
Physical control is one thing, but mental control is much more powerful.
Many of my patients have extremely simple desires.
Domination. But there are many ways to dominate.
Make it a game. Make her do what you want.
Make her forget what she wants. Make her forget that she has any choice in the matter.
Isolate, confuse, dismiss, refute. That, my friend, is better than any physical restraint in the world. ”
A few feet away is a gigantic cardboard box I’m supposed to put all the disassembled parts into. Lots of bolts and nuts. Lots of screws. The dildo thing attached to the saddle is only one part of the job.
“I’ll be upstairs getting dinner ready,” he says. “Mac and cheese?”
It’s all pretty funny, I keep telling myself. It’s a story I’m going to tell when I get back to school. The fancy car that he finally let me drive for the last twenty miles into Fond du Lac. The Addams family mansion. The superhero fuck machine in the basement.
And no, he didn’t come on to me, I can already see myself saying after people start laughing. It wasn’t like that.
So what was it like?
It was like spending a week with a supervillain who wants to tell you about all the minivillains he trained.
The Christopher Webers and the John Darbys and the Benvolio Rizzos—yeah, that guy.
The one who picked up girls at bus stations and left them all in dumpsters, and yet, even though he did the same thing over and over, the cops took eight years to smoke him out.
He keeps telling me that I’m smarter than them. He keeps telling me that everything I’ve ever been criticized for is actually my superpower. I get bored easy. I don’t care if a girl is upset or crying. I get mad when someone talks shit about me. I think I’m better than most people.
“You are, Benjamin. There’s nothing wrong with thinking that.”
We’re up in the dining room now, eating mac and cheese on these fancy gold-rimmed plates at a big table under a chandelier. It’s dope, but it would be a lot more dope with better food.
He starts lecturing me about all of the famous, successful people who are the way we are, and I nod and try to look interested, which is easier because I can nod while I’m eating and he doesn’t get mad and say, “Use your words.”
I’ve heard this lecture twice now.
Stock traders. Surgeons. Pilots. The best of them are like us.
CEOs. Chefs. Top salespeople. The best of them are like us.
It took me this whole road trip to realize he doesn’t want me to be good.
He wants me to be the right kind of bad—which isn’t really bad, he keeps saying.
It’s just different in a way that most people won’t ever understand.
He compares it to how people used to think of other people with different brains.
Even if they were good at things—good at math or artistic or whatever—they were still locked up or mistreated. But the world was changing.
“Someday, Ben, you’ll give a TED Talk about the societal contributions of people like you and me. But not yet. For now, we hide our lights under a bushel.” He looks at me and sighs. “That’s from the Bible. You haven’t read the Bible, have you? Just as well.”
He tells me we need more time together—that things can’t be rushed. I must find my extra and come to appreciate my gifts. He doesn’t think I’ll make as many mistakes as some people do. He has to give me space to learn.
He says, “Kittens must catch their own mice.”
Half the time I get what he’s saying and half the time I don’t. I haven’t seen any mice scurrying through the mansion, thank god, because mice, rats, and cockroaches all give me the creeps.
We finish dinner and he makes me do the dishes, both washing and drying.
He wraps each one in bubble wrap and puts them into a cardboard box, so now the cupboard is a few plates less full.
I still keep thinking his father is going to come down in an elevator at some point, maybe with a maid pushing his wheelchair.
We’re getting ready for bed—I’m in a room with a twin bed that smells dusty, but I don’t care—when he says, “I can’t stand this place. We’re leaving tomorrow.”
“Your dad’s not here?”
“No. My father’s not here.” After a minute he says, “He’s in a nursing home.”
I thought the whole point was fixing up the yard and clipping bushes and stuff to make his father happy, but I guess it’s really only to sell it, and it’s almost sold.
I was supposed to be here for two weeks.
But maybe we’re done. My shoulders are killing me from the yard work.
There’s no swimming pool and I haven’t seen a lake. I’m okay with heading back, actually.
“We’re going to Oshkosh, tomorrow,” he says. “Have you been to Oshkosh?”
I start shaking my head and then I remember he doesn’t like that. “No. I’ve never been.”
“There’s an interesting lighthouse out there, called the Asylum Light. We’ll sail past it.”
It’s the first time he’s mentioned sailing at all.
I guess he must own a boat, same way he owns the Jag, which would be nice.
He starts to tell me about the history of some institution for the insane, going back over 150 years, but he must notice my eyelids getting heavy because he laughs and says, “It’s just history.
The same story, told over and over. Just remember, it’s better to be the jailer than the jailed.
It’s a good thing I met you when I did, Benjamin. ”
He’s standing in the doorway and he reaches for the light switch, which makes an extra-loud thunk when he pushes it, because the house is so old.
“Tomorrow will be more fun than today was, I promise. No mistakes this time.” He wags his finger at me again. “You’re going to like sailing. It’s a great way to meet girls.”