Barrows found no use in this either, and he was not a man to beat around the proverbial bush. His voice roughened. “I usually make a million dollars a year but I have to eat phlegm off the street. That sounds crazy, but I’m not crazy. I need help. You’re the expert. Don’t patronize me. Help me.”
Her bosom rose as she leaned back in her plush chair. “You’re a dritiphilist, with erotomanic undertones. You eat phlegm and masturbate after doing so—that’s not quite the same as someone who’s an asthmatic or even a schizophrenic. There’s no magic pill for dritiphily.”
“Long-term psycho-therapy?” he frowned. “Is that it?”
“Possibly. But don’t scoff so quickly at behaviorilist science. Freud was quite right in many of his tenets. Most psychological anomalies have a sexual base. And Sartre was right too. Existence proceeds essence. It is our existence, Mr. Barrows, which makes us what we are. Conversely, the inexplicable trimmings of that existence are what cause our mental problems.”
Barrows sighed in frustration.
As the sun set in her Pioneer Square window, the shiny dark-gray hair seemed to glow from behind, like an angel’s aura. But this is one cold bitch of an angel, he thought.
“Let me guess,” Dr. Untermann posed. “You had a normal childhood.”
“Yes.”
“You were raised by loving and well-to-do parents.”
“Yes.”
“And you received an excellent education.”
“Private school and Harvard Yard.”
The woman didn’t seem the least bit impressed. “And this affliction of yours—it started in your late-teens?”
“I was twenty…”
“And your first sexual—or I should say copulative—experience came shortly before that?”
“Nineteen…” Barrows’ eyes narrowed. She was hitting each nail directly on the head, which made him feel better. “You know a lot.”
“Obsessive-compulsive disorders have many objective lay-lines.” She seemed casual suddenly, even bored. “They’re all different but they’re all the same in certain ways. You probably married shortly after college?”
“Immediately after.”
“But you didn’t love her, did you?”
Barrows stalled. At first he was offended that she make such an accusation, but then he remembered that it was true.
“No,” she went on. “You married her because you thought that wedlock—a normal incident—might guide you back to normalcy yourself.”
Irritated, he shirked in his seat. “Yes.”
Dr. Untermann lit another long, thin cigarette. A blur of creamy smoke appeared between her lips then vanished in a blink. “Tell me about the circumstances of your divorce.”
Barrows challenged her. “I’m not divorced,” he said. “I’m still happily married.”
“Mr. Barrows,” she immediately sighed, “if you want to pay me $450 per hour to lie, then go right ahead. I’ll take your money. But that’s hardly productive now, is it?”
His smirk made his face feel hot. He felt like a naughty child. This ice-queen is a real piece of work. “Guess not,” he admitted.
“Your marriage did not return you to normalcy, did it?”
“No.”
“Your ‘affliction’ only increased, and you hid it from your wife until—”
Barrows loosened his collar. “Yes, until she caught me red-handed. She got the flu one week. She…”
“Go on. I’m your psychiatrist, Mr. Barrows. The more you tell me, the more I can help.”
Barrows’ shoulders slumped. “She caught me eating her Kleenex out of the wastebasket. In truth—”
“Yes?”
“—whenever she had a cold or the flu… I loved it.” He rubbed his face in his hands. “All that Kleenex. All that snot and phlegm.” It was like a treat, like a midnight snack.
When Barrows looked back up at Untermann, it was shamefully, between his fingers. But the curt, elegant face remained unchanged. It remained inquisitive, calculating. Not shocked.
He sat back up straight in the leather chair. “How come you’re not disgusted?”
“For the same reason an oro-facial surgeon is not ‘disgusted’ by a critical burn victim. The same reason a dentist isn’t disgusted by an abscess. Your job is ministering to the intricacies of finance, Mr. Barrows. My job treating bizarre and often repellent mental disorders. To me, however, they’re neither bizarre nor repellent. They’re merely disorders.”
Barrows was amazed at her professional detachment… so then he sought to challenge her again, not with lies this time, but with a simple question with which to gauge her response.
“Let me ask you something. May I?”
Coils of faint smoke drifted upward. “Yes, but I’ll only answer if I deem it to be productive toward your therapy.”
All right. By now Barrows couldn’t deny a flirting attraction to her, and this seemed a sorry notion indeed. I’ve just told this woman that I eat phlegm that I pay bums to spit in my mouth. I’m sure she’s just dying to go to the opera with me…
“Earlier,” he faltered to begin, “you said… that you’ve heard worse…”
“Oh, my God yes,” she casually replied. “Mr. Barrows, you’ve come in here thinking that you’re an unspeakable person because of your dritiphily, but believe me, that’s nothing compared to some of the patients I’ve treated.”
“Really?” he said, incredulous.
Dr. Untermann reeled off her list as casually as if reciting scores at a miniature golf match. “I’ve treated zoophiles and scatophiles and pedophiles. I’ve treated Munchausen Syndrome where women really do love their kids but can’t help bringing them to near-death. I’ve treated women with Helsinki Syndrome, who fell in love with the men who tortured them in ways that beggar description. I had a strange ‘pica’ case where a teenage girl unconsciously collected dog stool—she’d carefully dry the stools and consume them—and I had a sexual-septicist once—a man obsessed with masturbating with a handful of his own feces. When I was at Georgetown, one of our case studies was an accountant who would collect used condoms from the alleys in Washington, D.C.’s red light district and eat them; he was operated on over a dozen times because the condoms would inflate with his own waste and cause massive and potentially fatal intestinal blockages. We had another man addicted to eating ‘toe-cheese,’ and yet another man—a Virginia rancher—who could only attain erection by sucking the drool off the lips of cattle.” She exhaled more smoke, unperturbed. “Then we have what we call the ‘packers.’”
“Puh-packers?” Barrows dared.
“Men and women who, behind closed doors, are habituated to filling their rectal and reproductive cavities with—well, with just about anything you can imagine. Hamsters, fish, billiard balls, live snakes, live bullfrogs, wines bottles, garden slugs. You name it. One man from Annandale, Virginia, would blow mealworms into his urethra through a plastic tube. A fourteen-year-old girl from—she was a military dependent from Walter Reed—would insert the tip of a turkey baster into her own urethra in order to repeatedly aspirate air into her bladder. Some people simply like to be filled, Mr. Barrows, for reasons that can never be clinically perceived.Then we’ve got the more common aberrations—the collectors: the gym teachers who collect dirty socks, the custodians who collect used tampons, the fetishists who break into houses and collect undergarments soiled by the so-called ‘skidmarks.’ Pedicurists who keep their clients’ toenail clippings. Doctors who collect pus-drenched bandages, and nurses who collect enema nozzles to secret away back to their homes, to sniff and lick.”