"I was serious."
*"So was I."
"Would you care to elaborate?"
"I sank Atlantis," he said, "personally."
"It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies. There were bridges of opal, and crimson pennants and a milk-white river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu, as delicately constructed as musical instruments, all swaying with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Green tenor sax play at sunset.
"The Greek, of course, was a patient of mine—paranoiac. The etiology of the thing is rather complicated, but that's what I wandered into inside his mind. I gave him free
rein for awhile, and in the end I had to split Atlantis in half and sink it full fathom five. He's playing again and you've doubtless heard his sounds, if you like such sounds at all. He's good. I still see him periodically, but he is no longer the last descendant of the greatest minstrel of Atlantis. He's just a fine, late twentieth-century sax-man.
"Sometimes though, as I look back on the apocalypse I worked within his vision of grandeur, I experience a fleeting sense of lost beauty—because, for a single moment, his abnormally intense feelings were my feelings, and he felt that his dream was the most beautiful thing in the world."
He refilled their glasses.
"That wasn't exactly what I meant," she said.
"I know."
"I meant something real."
"It was more real than real, I assure you."
"I don't doubt it, but..."
"—But I destroyed the foundation you were laying for your argument. Okay, I apologize. I'll hand it back to you. Here's something that could be reaclass="underline"
"We are moving along the edge of a great bowl of sand," he said. "Into it, the snow is gently drifting. In the spring the snow will melt, the waters will run down into the earth, or be evaporated away by the heat of the sun. Then only the sand will remain. Nothing grows in the sand, except for an occasional cactus. Nothing lives here but snakes, a few birds, insects, burrowing things, and a wandering coyote or two. In the afternoon these things will look for shade. Any place where there's an old fence post or a rock or a skull or a cactus to block out the sun, there you will witness life cowering before the elements. But the colors are beyond belief, and the elements are more lovely, almost, than the things they destroy."
"There is no such place near here," she said.
"If I say it, then there is. Isn't there? I've seen it."
"Yes... You're right."
"And it doesn't matter if it's a painting by a woman named
O'Keefe, or something right outside our window, does it? If I've seen it?"
"I acknowledge the truth of the diagnosis," she said. "Do you want to speak it for me?"
"No, go ahead."
He refilled the small glasses once more.
"The damage is in my eyes," she told him, "not my brain."
He lit her cigarette."
"I can see with other eyes if I can enter other brains."
He lit his own cigarette.
"Neuroparticipation is based upon the fact that two nervous systems can share the same impulses, the same fantasies..."
"Controlled fantasies."
"I could perform therapy and at the same time experience genuine visual impressions."
"No," said Render.
"You don't know what it's like to be cut off from a whole area of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can experience something you can never know—and that he cannot appreciate it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court of biological hapstance, in a place where there is no justice—only fortuity, pure and simple."
"The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe."
"I'm not asking the universe to help me—I'm asking you."
"I'm sorry," said Render.
"Why won't you help me?"
"At this moment you are demonstrating my main reason."
"Which is ... ?"
"Emotion. This thing means far too much to you. When the therapist is in-phase with a patient he is narco-electrical-ly removed from most of his own bodily sensations. This is necessary—because his mind must be completely absorbed by the task at hand. It is also necessary that his emotions undergo a similar suspension. This, of course, is impossible in the one sense that a person always emotes to some degree. But the therapist's emotions are sublimated into a generalized
feeling of exhilaration—or, as in my own case, into an artistic reverie. With you, however, the 'seeing' would be too much. You would be in constant danger of losing control of the dream."
"I disagree with you."
"Of course you do. But the fact remains that you would be dealing, and dealing constantly, with the abnormal. The power of a neurosis is unimaginable to ninety-nine point etcetera percent of the population, because we can never adequately judge the intensity of our own—let alone those of others, when we only see them from the outside. That is why no neuroparticipant will ever undertake to treat a fullblown psychotic. The few pioneers in that area are all themselves in therapy today. It would be like driving into a maelstrom. If the therapist loses the upper hand in an intense session he becomes the Shaped rather than the Shap-er. The synapses respond like a fission reaction when nervous impulses are artificially augmented. The transference effect is almost instantaneous.
"I did an awful lot of skiing five years ago. This is because I was a claustrophobe. I had to run and it took me six months to beat the thing—all because of one tiny lapse that occurred in a measureless fraction of an instant. I had to refer the patient to another therapist. And this was only a minor repercussion. If you were to go ga-ga over the scenery, girl, you could wind up in a rest home for life."
She finished her drink and Render refilled the glass. The night raced by. They had left the city far behind them, and the road was open and clear. The darkness eased more and more of itself between the falling flakes. The Spinner picked up speed.
"All right," she admitted, "maybe you're right. Still, though, I think you can help me."
"How?" he asked.
"Accustom me to seeing, so that the images will lose their novelty, the emotions wear off. Accept me as a patient and rid me of my sight-anxiety. Then what you have said so far will cease to apply. I will be able to undertake the training
then, and give my full attention to therapy. Ill be able to sublimate the sight-pleasure into something else."
Render wondered.
Perhaps it could be done. It would be a difficult undertaking, though.
It might also make therapeutic history.
No one was really qualified to try it, because no one had ever tried it before.
But Eileen Shallot was a rarity—no, a unique item—for it was likely she was the only person in the world who combined the necessary technical background with the unique problem.
He drained his glass, refilled it, refilled hers.
He was still considering the problem as the "RE-COORDINATE" light came on and the car pulled into a cutoff and stood there. He switched off the buzzer and sat there for a long while, thinking.
It was not often that other persons heard him acknowledge his feelings regarding his skill. His colleagues considered him modest. Offhand, though, it might be noted that he was aware that the day a better neuroparticipant began practicing would be the day that a troubled Homo sapiens was to be treated by something but immeasurably less than angels.
Two drinks remained. Then he tossed the emptied bottle into the backbin.