A drop of blood fell from the deepest scratch to his white shirt and spread.
Phil shivered, then made himself say it. “I was spending the time going crazy.”
The analyst nodded. “You do seem a bit wrought up.”
“A bit?”
“Well,” conceded the analyst with a shrug to excuse his own inadequate powers of description. Then he said, “Do not be surprised at going crazy, as you put it, Mr. Gish – may I call you Phil? It is the rule rather than the exception these days, though your admitting it is a bit out of the ordinary. For a full century now Americans have been living in one of those ages of collective madness and herd delusion, comparable only to the Dutch tulip mania, the witchcraft dread, the dancing madness, Trotskyism, and the Crusades. Until 1950 ours might have been called the Automobile Mania, but now the imagination can only grope for a name – I’m writing an unpopular book on the subject, you see. Not that this current social madness is a deep secret or anything to be startled at. What other results could have been expected when American society began to overvalue on the one hand security, censorship, an imagined world-saving idealism and self-sacrifice in war, and on the other hand insatiable hunger for possessions, fiercely competitive aggressiveness, sadistic male belligerence, contempt for parents and the state, and a fantastically overstimulated sexuality?”
The analyst’s voice rose stridently and his eyes popped, as if there were a personal element in his indignation. But the next moment he was his merry professional self.
“Now, Phil, let’s examine how this sick society has sickened you. It may surprise you but we shan’t be using any such modern techniques as electrosleep, deep brain photography or situational therapy complete with a bottle, a blanket and a blonde love-robot. We shall simply do what our great-grandfathers would have done – talk. Feel perfectly at ease. This desk is designed so we can be together, yet need not look at each other. Care to smoke? Good! Do! Now begin at the beginning. Tell me the story of your life.”
Phil swallowed. “Excuse me, Dr. Romadka,” he said, “but I’d rather not do that right now. I want to tell you about an experience, I mean, hallucination, I just had that convinced me I’m crazy, and then I want you to tell me about it. You know: interpret it or psych it or something.”
The analyst shrugged happily. “As good a beginning as any. Go ahead.”
So Phil told him what he had seen through the quarter-darkened window. He found himself ashamedly admitting under the analyst’s expert rein-twitching how he had long used his own window as an observation post, and when he got to describing the hallucination itself he found himself trembling with restimulated terror, but he did finally get it all out.
Dr. Romadka seemed as delighted as if he had been presented with a rare object of art. “Beautiful!” he commented. “I have seldom heard so magnificent a symbol for the murky sexual longings of this culture. A satyress, or satyrette, prepared to inflict both love and savage stampings. Mary would be enraptured with it, I’m sure, and insist on making one of her dolls in its image.” He sighed aesthetically, then recalled himself. “But, of course, Phil, I can’t expect you to be interested just now in the artistic product of your unconscious creativity. You want to know about causes, sources. Tell me, have you ever seen a horse?”
“Once in a circus,” Phil admitted.
“Greek mythology is one of your interests?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Recall seeing that TV showA Coltish Girl or the musical sexedyThe Horsy Set or the ancient filmFantasia?”
Phil shook his head. The analyst nodded thoughtfully. “You say the fur was distributed over the torso like a clinging, off the bosom chemise? And that the legs went straight down, like rods, to end in hoofs?”
“Not exactly,” Phil corrected and went on to describe the little heel bumps of the fetlocks and the slim pseudo-wrists of the pasterns.
“But otherwise she was formed exactly like a normal girl? – except for the faun ears?”
“No,” Phil said frowningly after a moment. “Her thighs were a bit heavy and powerful looking, as if made for galloping long distances. Her arms were sort of long, though it didn’t occur to me then. And the upper part of her body was thrown forward a bit, if you know what I mean, and it was balanced by quite a little rump. But not what you’d call hippy.”
“Magnificent!” the analyst crowed. “Phil, you not only have equipped your vision with accurate horse-legs, but you have made some of the necessary compensations in the rest of the anatomy that such a mode of locomotion would involve in a biped.” He sat there beaming a bit vacantly, as if lost in admiration for the creative powers of the all-resourceful unconscious.
“Yes, but what does it indicate about my mind?” Phil asked. He would have felt annoyed if he had not been so anxious. “What’s wrong with me?”
Dr. Romadka shook off his reverie with a smile that begged pardon for it. “What’s wrong with America?” he asked wryly. “It’s much too early for me to arrive at any conclusions, Phil, or rather to help you arrive at your own. Of course, the visual projection created by your unconscious has some interesting references.”
“What are they?” Phil asked. “I may not have made it clear but I’m worried about this. I can’t get it out of my mind.”
Dr. Romadka smiled, shrugged. “Perhaps a spot of interpreting would relieve you,” he agreed. “Though you must remember it’s just impromptu analysis, may be quite wrong. Here goes. The first things that come to mind are such elements as dread of sexual experience and the attempt to invest it with terror, effort to feminize yourself by conceiving a savagely-hoofed love object, an attempt to link sex with a trampling and punishing beast, perhaps as serf-punishment for your voyeurism – all of these fitting in nicely with the classical mythology about the nymphs and their natural love companions the goat-hoofed satyrs – also the horse-hoofed centaurs, who were frequently, you may remember, teachers of men.” The analyst frowned. “It’s barely possible you were visually projecting the desire to be taught about love. However,” he went on, “I imagine that as usual the hidden significances are the more important ones. May I make a spot guess about you?”
Phil nodded.
“Are you a white-collar worker in close competition with robots?”
“Yes,” Phil said, astonished.
“Hardly a brilliant deduction,” the analyst deprecated, but his eyes beamed. “In that case we must suspect another mythological ingredient. Do you know the Pandora story? There’s a special point about it. She was not an ordinary girl sent by the gods to bring mankind a box containing all ills. No, she was a metal maiden, forged by Hephaestus at the command of Zeus. In other words, an automaton, a robot – bringing in this case the ills of the Second Industrial Revolution caused by the introduction of electronic calculators and sensers.”
“But did Pandora have hoofs?” Phil said doubtfully.
Dr. Romadka waved away the objection. “Your unconscious probably fused in the Arabian legend of the clock-work horse. The unconscious is very artistic about these things, Phil. If you realized just how artistic, how fertilely creative, you wouldn’t be worried.”
“But how does all this tie in with sex?” Phil asked.
The analyst shrugged. “Must it? A visual projection, like a dream, can mean a thousand things. I warned you this was just impromptu analysis. We’ve carried it about as far as we can.”
“Look,” Phil said hesitantly after a pause. “There’s a lot to the things you said, and some of them really pushed buttons in my mind. But – I hope you won’t object – there’s one thing that’s still bothering me.”
“Go right ahead.”
Phil became even more diffident. Finally he said with difficulty, “Look, doctor, is there any chance that what I saw could be real in any way? Any chance at all?”