by John Doble
It happened so long ago you’d think I’d just forget it. But I haven’t, I can’t; it’s nested in my mind, coiled and twisted into my memory like a serpent I can’t get rid of. I remember it at odd moments: when I’m eating breakfast or riding the train to work. Once I thought of it while I was making love. And each time I do, it remains as awful, as sinister and stunning as it was that night. But for reasons that keep changing. Different, elusive reasons I never fully understand.
It was the winter of 1973, and I was still in college. The country was at war in Southeast Asia, and in the summer, there were riots in the cities. Events that were deadly serious, yet with an unreality about them too. As if they weren’t all they seemed to be, not something to take at face value. I remember anti-war protests that felt as serious as a rock concert: the air filled with music and the smell of marijuana, kids wearing red bandanas, waving Viet Cong flags, and chanting rhymes about how Ho Chi Minh and the National Liberation Front, the NLF, were going to win, like children sticking their tongues out or saying dirty words at dinner to see what reaction they could provoke. Even the young black rioters interviewed on television seemed to pretend to feel angry when what they really felt was scorn, and perhaps a queer sort of pride that someone was paying attention. It was theater, a way of showing off. It wasn’t real, not to the kids on campus, or the ones in the ghetto, maybe not even to those who told the police to shoot to kill. But of course it was all real. And serious, deadly serious. I just didn’t see it, didn’t understand.
It was a Thursday night; we were in a college hangout called the Waystation, an old stucco building that had been there since the Revolution. Once it was a carriage house on the road from Philadelphia to Baltimore. The stage, then the train, would stop while passengers got out to stretch or eat a meal. I used to think about them, trying to imagine what they were like: gentlemen farmers, merchants, salesmen, immigrants, perhaps an occasional congressman who knew Henry Clay. No one knew who used to sit in that room, their boots drying in front of a fire, with a mug of ale and a trencher filled with stew. But now the place was run down, seedy-looking; there was talk of tearing it down. The outside was cracked and peeling; hunks of stucco had been patched so often, they looked like tumorous sores. Inside, the great fireplace had been long ago bricked over and the planks on the floor were stained and worn, more gray than brown, with dust so thick you could move it with your shoe. People said it was owned by a speculator, that the university wanted the land for a new dormitory, and that only the price and some protestors from the historical society were holding things up. But students, being students, had made the place their own despite, or because of, the dirt and wear, the off-color draft beer, and the jukebox that played so loud it rattled your rib cage.
It was nearly nine o’clock and I was at the bar. The room was crowded; it was always crowded on Thursdays. Students and former students and those who never were, mingled with a handful of faculty members, the younger ones, and a couple of “townies” looking for girls who believed in free love. They sat around cheap metal tables with red Formica tops, on chairs with rusted chrome legs and red plastic seats, laughing and talking and arguing about politics, philosophy, religion, and sex. And below the surface, beneath the loose talk and the laughter, lay a reality that few of them knew or cared about. I was like the rest of them. Jeffrey was not.
“People can be divided into two types?” Jeffrey was saying. “The weak and the strong?”
We were talking about psychology, my field of study, and a paper I was writing, and he was repeating what I’d told him about a personality test. The test had been developed after World War II by a group of psychologists who, shocked by what happened in Nazi Germany, had tried to understand how doctors and lawyers and bankers and businessmen—a population of law-abiding, God-fearing, ordinary people—could have taken part in it all, or at least stood there, watching it unfold, without trying to stop it, without crying out in protest. The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the “banality of evil” to describe men like Adolph Eichmann who could be kind to children and animals, yet be part of a totalitarian machinery that murdered twelve million people: six million Jews from across the continent, and also homosexuals, gypsies, Russians, Ukrainians, and other East Europeans; civilians: old men, women, children. The psychologists had developed a test to discover what kind of person could do such things. In the psychology literature, it is called the “F-scale”—the “F” standing for fascist. Elegant in its simplicity, the test consists of only five questions with which a person either agrees or disagrees. An extreme response, strong agreement or disagreement, on all five items, reveals, according to the test-makers, that a respondent has an authoritarian bent or fascist tendencies, and, inferentially, that he might well fall in behind someone like a Hitler or a Mussolini. Jeffrey had asked me what the five questions were and, when I’d told him, he latched onto one of them.
“People can be divided into the weak and the strong? Now I’m supposed to tell you whether I agree with that or not? And depending on my answer, you can tell if . . . what’s the jargon you used? If I have an ‘authoritarian personality?’”
It occurred to me later that I may have upset him, that what he did was a defense, a way of protecting himself from what he felt as an attack. But none of that occurred to me then. All I saw was that he was distorting what I’d told him, deliberately oversimplifying. I was sorry I’d brought the subject up.
“It’s not my test,” I explained again. “I didn’t make it up. It’s a standard test that has been used for decades. And that’s only one of a series of questions. Someone has to answer all of them. Then, depending on all the answers, a psychologist can make a guess, an educated guess, about a tendency that might be part of someone’s personality.”
He smiled in that self-satisfied way of his, breathing deep and laughing once, so that his shoulder rose and fell. As if to suggest that life was so simple, so easy to understand, if only you saw it the way he did. But then, of course, the smile also suggested, that was too much to ask.
“How easily you dispense with human complexity,” he said and then sighed affectedly. “Well, I do agree. Strongly.” He seemed bored by the conversation. “Most people are weak, a few aren’t. Now what? A psychologist—or a would-be psychologist—would say I’m what—a book-burner? That I want to exterminate people? Run a concentration camp?”
A TV was suspended above the bar and someone had turned it on. I looked up and watched a powerful man in a red t-shirt and shorts slam an orange ball through an iron hoop. There was no cheering, no applause. The volume was turned down. It was the music, the loud, driving rock and roll music dominating all sound in the overcrowded room that caused the televised giant to run down the floor, waving a dark brown fist.
“Jeffrey, why are you ridiculing what I told you? Making it sound silly, like so much nonsense?”
I was trying to cut through his playacting, hoping that one question, one honest question, would change things between us. But he was like everything else around me: the jukebox, the furniture, the mirror behind the bar. Even if I had opened the door and let in enough air to clear out the haze and cigarette smoke, it would all still be there, it would all be the same.
“Is that what I was doing?” he said.
I felt anger build up inside me. He was patronizing me, treating me like a fool. Yet, naively, I persisted.
“Jeffrey, there are probably plenty of psychologists who might criticize that question, maybe the whole test. But their criticisms would be thoughtful, analytic. They wouldn’t take it so . . . personally.”
He signaled to the bartender that we wanted another round.
“Suppose I prove it?” he said. “Right here. Tonight. Suppose I prove that all your little textbook questions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. If I did that, what would you think?”
As the bartender set two mugs of beer in front of us, I realized he aroused my curiosity. But instead of his question, I thought about him, about how well I knew him and what it was I knew.
Pale and thin, with dark curly hair, Jeffrey was not imposing to look at. A graduate student in photography, he was outstanding in his field, at least that’s what people said. He’d had two shows and was already selling his work. He had few friends; I suppose I counted as one of them. But if not well liked, he was always treated with a certain deference or respect. In part, I’m sure, because of his talent. But there was another reason too.
During that winter of protests and marches, it seemed as if he always wore his old army fatigues. And though he never talked about it, I had somehow learned what he’d done: He’d been a first lieutenant, won a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He led reconnaissance missions into Laos at a time when American troops weren’t in Laos, at least according to the government. There was a day in the jungle when he surprised a North Vietnamese soldier and killed him with his bayonet. And an afternoon, years later, when—though I never heard him talk about the war, never criticize its wisdom or morality—he, along with a few hundred others, threw his medals over the White House fence.
His left hand was deformed, the tips of his thumb and forefinger missing. I’d heard it was caused by a land mine. It was gruesome looking, a reminder of a war I detested. But it was something else—a badge, a mark, something I secretly envied. For it was proof that Jeffrey had been tested. And come through.
In contrast, I was in my first year of graduate school. I was twenty-three. My goal was to teach at a university. And though I never achieved it, I was, and am, generally content with my life. Except around Jeffrey. Then I’m aware of something else, a pinprick of a feeling, that I don’t measure up, not to him. And that I never will.
“Prove it?” I said. “What do you mean you’re going to prove it?”
“A demonstration.” He waved his hand indicating the roomful of students. “With one of them.”
He nodded toward the back. “See that girl? In the corner, in the sweatshirt. The one who looks like she’s just been raped.” He smiled coldly at the description. “Where do you think she’s headed? A junkie, an alcoholic? Battered wife, unwed mother? All of the above? She’s perfect, exactly what I need.”
The girl sat at a table with two others. Above their heads, revolving slowly and illuminated from within, a half-dozen miniature horses, tan with shaggy white hooves, pulled a red beer wagon past green plastic trees. Around and around they went, in circles, forever. Or until someone stopped them.
Her companions looked like they came from an earlier era. A pretty blonde in a tight-fitting sweater who looked like a cheerleader or sorority member was listening intently to a broad-shouldered fellow with short hair in a varsity jacket. But the girl with them, the one he’d singled out, was a child of the times.
Her eyes did not shine from too much beer; rather, they had a glazed, indifferent, faraway look signifying drugs or depression or both. Her sweatshirt looked slept-in, or as if she took it off at night, rolled into a ball, and put it under her pillow. Her hair, long and stringy and a dull shade of brown, hung down over her shoulders and full, unfettered breasts, sprawling onto the tabletop like so many roots from a dying plant.
I wondered what she had in common with the other two, why they were together in the first place. The girl seemed left out of the conversation next to her. As if she were there by accident or as a favor to someone. The blonde would lean back and laugh or reach across the table and take the fellow’s hand. But her expression, the dull, vacant stare, never changed.
I felt a kind of tired sympathy for the girl. She was like so many others, too many for one person to care about. In those days, it seemed like the campus was littered with kids just like her: who’d dropped out or run away, whose search for something they couldn’t define led them to fill their bodies with drugs and live like vagabonds. Yet they were proud and defiant too, as if what they were doing was somehow true, or free, or spiritually authentic. I wished someone would tum off the music and turn up the volume of the basketball game.
“I need a strategy,” Jeffrey said. “I can’t just walk over and introduce myself. She’d have the advantage then, in spite of herself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re a man of science,” he said. “Think of it as an experiment. I’m about to conduct an experiment using that girl.” His sigh was too heavy to be genuinely felt. “I wish there was someone who was more of a challenge, but in the interest of time . . .”
A look of concern must have crossed my face because, in a mocking tone, he said, “Don’t worry, your liberal sensibilities won’t be offended. I have no intention of harming her.”
He was patronizing me again. I wanted to insult him and leave. Instead, I watched him reach for a piece of paper and on it, in large capital letters, print two words: “I KNOW.” He showed me the paper, then folded it in half.
“We begin,” he said.
Without glancing at her, he walked over to the jukebox near her table, dropped in a coin, and pushed some buttons. The girl did not notice him. Her expression, the dull, vacant stare, did not change.
On his way back and with seeming indifference, he bumped her chair and dropped the paper near her foot. She picked it up and waved it listlessly after him, then called out as he re-crossed the room. But he paid no attention and rejoined me at the bar.
“You must not look at her,” he said and obediently, I turned away. “That was to get her attention. Now we wait.”
It didn’t take long. A moment later she came up behind us and tapped him on the shoulder. But he did not respond.
“Hey” she said, tapping him again, “you dropped this.”
Deliberately, he spun around on his stool, and when I turned too, I thought of his description: a girl who’s just been raped. Her eyes were red, probably from marijuana. Her skin was blemished and sallow looking. And her clothes—a gray sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans—hung on her like they belonged to someone else, as if she’d found them somewhere, tried them on, and decided to wear them anyway, even though they didn’t fit. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. But her tired, drawn, worn-out appearance made her look years older.
“You dropped this,” she said, offering him the paper.
Jeffrey kept his hands folded in his lap, refusing to take in. In a tone that was nearly hostile, he said, simply, “I know.”
The girl started. She stood there a moment, her outstretched hand holding her offering, and smiled tentatively.
“Is this a joke?” she said. “Some kind of joke?”
He ignored her question. “You read it,” he said, and she colored slightly.
“It opened when I picked it up,” she lied.
Jeffrey shook his head. ‘“You had to read it.” His tone was matter of fact. ”You have no self-control.”
The girl seemed to collect herself.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on here but this is yours, right?” She waved the paper and he nodded. “Well here,” she flipped it into his lap, “if it’s yours, take it.”
She went back to her table and Jeffrey stared at her. I was about to laugh at his “experiment” but he ignored me and stared at the girl.
She sat back down and pretended not to notice. But she knew he was watching. Self-consciously, she combed her hair with her fingers, then, after lighting a cigarette, made an attempt to join in her friends’ conversation. All the time, Jeffrey stared. Finally she crushed out her cigarette and stared back. Their eyes locked and for a moment she glared at him, chin up, challenging him. Then her face relaxed and she smiled, a tentative little half-smile, inviting him to respond. Instead, he spun around on his stool.
“Superstition,” he said. “Signs, omens, magical thinking—that’s what’s important to her. She doesn’t realize how important.” He sipped his beer and I thought of how a detective works, deductively, clue by clue, piecing things together. “She has no self-respect, anyone who looks like that . . . she probably hates her life, hates herself. But instead of doing anything about it, or trying to, she’s waiting for someone to come along and do it for her. A stranger, a magician, some phantom from the back of her mind who’ll ride in and whisk her up on his horse and carry her away to live happily ever after.”
I thought about Samuel Beckett and his play, Waiting for Godot, and about the cults and movements and religious sects that had sprung up, and about the desperate kids who had run away to join them. I was about to mention all that to Jeffrey, but he continued to explain and I did not interrupt.
“She’s starting to wonder if I’m him, the one who’s finally come. It’s a simple enough dynamic, it happens all the time.” He grinned, baring his teeth, and said, “Your crowd must have a name for it.”
I don’t know why I answered. I knew he was baiting me, treating me with the same contempt he felt for the girl. Yet for some reason, I felt the need to show I understood.
“A ‘conversion experience,’” I said. “Someone who’s predisposed to make a radical change. That’s a term that comes to mind.”
“Why do you people have to label the life out of things? ‘Conversion experience’.” He nearly spit out the words. “When what you mean is pathetic little people leading pathetic little lives, hoping against hope that someone will come along and change it all for them. And someone will. Inevitably, they will find someone.” He reached into his wallet for a ten-dollar bill. “But she’s not quite ready so I’ll help things along.”
He handed the money to the bartender and ordered that a small glass of ice water be taken to her.
“She’ll ask who sent it. The only thing you’re to say is, she already knows.” The bartender cheerfully agreed.
I watched in the mirror as he set the glass in front of her, said something, then shrugged. The girl looked up at Jeffrey. At his back.
At first she ignored the water. Then she wrapped one hand around the glass and began tapping it lightly. She glanced our way, saw he still wasn’t looking, raised the glass halfway to her mouth, leaned toward it and took a sip. She glanced up again and took another sip. Then she put the glass down and turned in her chair, as if making a final attempt to resist. Then, suddenly, as if overcome with a burning, unquenchable thirst, she grabbed the glass, lifted it to her mouth, and drained it, gulped it down. I told him what happened and he nodded.
“A good choice, don’t you think? Water? Necessary for life, yet so abundant, it’s free. Of course it could have been anything—ashes, an animal, wine that represents blood. They’re all incarnations of the same thing, aren’t they? And so, the form doesn’t really matter. It’s the belief that’s key. Of course, with her, I wanted the taking, the taking of something into her body.”
What he said was chilling; it was so calculated, so piercing, so merciless. Yet fascinating too, darkly fascinating.
“She wants to believe now, she wants to believe in me.” He motioned that we wanted another round. “But it’s far from over. She’ll probably come over. If she does, no matter what she says or asks you, you must not answer her. For me to do this without harming her, you cannot say a word.”
He was being condescending again and I got irritated. I sipped my beer and looked up. There was a commercial on the television, a time out in the game, and I wondered what the score was. Before I could find out, the girl was standing behind us.
“Hey,” she said, tugging his shoulder and spinning him around, “what’s going on?”
He stared at her and did not reply, and she took her hand off him. “I said, what’s going—”
“What do you think?” he interrupted.
“I have no idea!” Her tone was indignant.
He reached around for his beer and took a long, slow sip. “I know,” he said.
The girl took a half step backward. I could feel her unease.
“You drank the water,” Jeffrey said.
“That was from you?”
The transparency of her ploy made him smile.
“Okay, so I knew it was from you. I was thirsty. So what?” He watched her, saying nothing.
“I said I was thirsty.”
“I knew you were,” he said.
The girl began to laugh, a nervous little laugh, more to herself than anything. As if to hear a familiar sound, to convince herself she was really here and this was really happening.
“This is creepy,” she said. “This is really creepy. You’re creepy and . . . Jesus, now you’re gonna say ‘I know’ again.”
The music seemed to blast louder than ever.
“Is this a game? Is this some kind of game?” she said.
“In a way,” Jeffrey said.
“It is?” She was clearly surprised by his answer. Her shoulders hunched and she began stroking her neck. One arm dropped straight down, her hand dangling; the other settled across her breasts. She seemed to muster something and her tone was flip.
“Suppose I don’t want to play?” she said.
He shrugged and she turned to go back to her table. She took a few steps in that direction, then changed her mind.
“You weren’t going to stop me, were you? You’d just let me go back there. To them. Them.” Her tone made it clear how she felt about her companions.
“Why would I stop you?” Jeffrey said. “Why would I want to?”
For the first time the girl looked at me. “What’s going on here? What’s this all about?”
But following his instructions, I did not reply.
She looked down, as if deciding what to do. The stool next to him was empty and suddenly, like a child in a drugstore, she bounced up on it and spun around.
“Okay, I’ll play your game. What are the rules?” She laughed. “What are the rules? Does your game have any rules?”
“I don’t want you to sit there,” Jeffrey said.
She threw back her head and laughed, much too loudly to sound carefree as she wanted. “You think you’re so cool. Who cares what you want? Who gives a flying fuck?”
He watched her for a moment, expressionless, then, without a hint of irritation, shifted on his stool, turning his back on her, dismissing her, shutting her out. His manner was totally controlled and icy cold.
The girl didn’t know what to do. She sat there, gripping the chrome band of her stool with both hands, twisting herself back and forth like a child waiting to be told she was excused, that she could get up from the table and go out to play. Loudly, to provoke him, she said, “How’d you hurt your hand? Playing games with somebody else?”
He ignored her. Finally, when she realized he would continue doing so, she climbed down off the stool and came around to stand in front of him.
I thought of the way some parents discipline their children, giving or withholding love and approval, like a door that’s open one moment, then slammed shut, until the child does what it’s told. And when she obeyed him, when she’d climbed down and came around in front of him, he reopened the door.
“It happened in the war,” he said. “Do you know what a land mine is?” The girl nodded. “We were on patrol, one of my men stepped on a land mine. He was blown apart. Like a firecracker. I was next to him.”
I’m not sure why her manner changed so abruptly. In part, I’m sure, because of what he’d put her through: the way he’d humbled her, bent her to his will. And because his answer was so direct, so unexpected. But surely, too, because of what it was he said. We saw it on television every night, we marched and we signed petitions. But few of us were really affected by that war. Not really. Not in the way he’d been. But whatever the reasons, once he answered her question, her whole demeanor changed.
“My God, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I am so very, very . . .”
He shrugged. “The funny part is, it was one of ours.”
“Oh my God,” she said.
He sensed the change too and, in response, he became sympathetic, almost gentle. He shook his head, telling her without a word that it was all right.
“Things have happened to you too, haven’t they?” he said softly.
The girl nodded and her eyes filled with tears. It was as if, after all the back and forth, she had just decided to give in to him, trust him, to go along, no matter what that meant. She stood there, head bowed, like some disheveled prodigal ready to accept her penance.
“You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you?”
“So much,” she said. “So many things.”
“And it’s hard to explain, huh? Explain to anyone.”
“Whenever I try . . .” She broke off, crying. She turned her head until she’d regained control. He gave her his handkerchief and she wiped her eyes and nose. “Confusion, the confusion is terrible,” she said. “About things they don’t know exist.”
“And tired? Tired of everything?”
“Sometimes,” she began to tremble, “sometimes I think about . . .”
He reached out and stroked her cheek.
“Don’t give in,” he whispered. “You’re closer to it than you think.”
She nodded, smiled through her tears, looked up at him and said, “I know, I’m going west—San Francisco. Actually, a little north, a town on the Russian River. The people there are so different, so laid back and mellow . . .”
She was hoping for his approval, hoping he’d say that was just the thing to do—start again, turn the page, a new beginning. Instead he wheeled and turned on her, snapped like a rattler, the door slamming shut.
“And that will change things?” His tone was insulting.
“It’s different there,” she pleaded. “People there have something going, something real, they’re not so hung up . . .”
They were words she’d said many times. To herself and to others. But now, even before she finished, it was clear she no longer believed in them.
“It’s over, isn’t it?” he said. “Your daydream. Your last, best hope. You thought running away would change everything. You’d go to a magic place where things are different. Where you’d be different. Transformed. But I made you see it, didn’t I? Made you see what a sorry little dream it is.” He chuckled once and his shoulders rose and fell. “Isn’t it strange how things work out? I never saw you before tonight and I’ve just changed your life.”
“What’s going on?” she said to me. “Please tell me what’s going on.”
Again I became aware of the music. Rock and roll, primitive, driving rhythms, so loud I could barely think. I began to answer, then felt his hand on my arm.
“What do you want to know?” he said.
“Your name,” she said. “Tell me your name.”
“My name’s not important. But if you want to know, I’ll tell you.” He did. Then: “And yours?”
Hers was a frantic struggle now, an attempt to salvage something, a shred of self-respect from the ordeal she’d been through. “I thought you knew,” she said. “I thought you knew everything.”
Jeffrey smiled at her cruelly, one side of his upper lip raised. “That’s exactly what you thought,” he said.
She staggered, as if punched in the chest. Then she said, “I know what you’re doing—playing cat and mouse. And I’m the mouse.”
He nodded.
“But why,” she pleaded. “What in God’s name do you want?”
“What do you think?”
She smiled knowingly and shifted her weight onto one foot, accenting her hip. She’s attractive, I thought. In spite of herself, she’s attractive. But his reaction was different than mine.
“Don’t make me insult you,” he said. She turned her head as if she’d been slapped. “Is that the only time you feel?” he said. “The only time you feel anything anymore? When you’re high or getting laid? By someone? Anyone?”
It came pouring out now, the invective, as if he’d been restraining himself all along and could no longer hold back. “And when it’s over, when you wake up in some strange bed or come down off your high, how do you feel? Disgusted with yourself? Empty? Used? Yet you keep doing it, don’t you? Again and again. It’s all you know anymore, isn’t it? It’s all that’s left.
“That’s why you came to me tonight,” he continued. “Why you let me do it. Because whatever else I may be, I’m real. And with me, you are too. It’s no exaggeration, is it? No exaggeration to say I make you feel alive! I woke you up from your stupor, your drugged-up daze. Humiliated you? Yes, I did . . . but you got something in return. Something precious, something you need—the feeling of being alive.”
“Stop it,” she said. “Please stop.”
I’d had enough. I got up to leave but she grabbed my arm and looked at Jeffrey. “You can,” she said to him. “You both can.”
He grabbed her shoulder and shook her roughly. “Do you want to know what this is all about?” he said. She nodded and again her eyes filled with tears.
“This was an experiment. You were the subject of an experiment.”
“A what?” She couldn’t believe what she’d heard.
He nodded at me. “We made a bet,” he said.
“What kind of bet?”
“That I could manipulate you.” His tone was casual, as if he’d just told her the time.
“To do what?” She began to cry. “I already said . . .” She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands. “You have no right to do this.”
“Why not? You enjoyed it. You enjoyed every moment.”
“Maybe at first,” she said.
“That’s the first truthful thing out of your mouth,” he said.
She nodded. Even in the midst of it all, she seemed pleased by his approbation. He continued. “We were having a discussion, an argument. In order to make my point, I had to find someone. I didn’t have much time so I needed someone easy, someone who’s slovenly without any dignity or self-respect. I chose you.”
She stood there, numb with disbelief.
“I didn’t intend to puncture your balloon, end your little West Coast dream. That wasn’t part of the plan. But now that I have,” he softened his voice, “I want to make it up to you.” He held out his hand, the mangled hand, stroked her hair and softly spoke her name. “Let me help you. Help you see what you’ve turned into. You still have time. It’s not too late, I can help.”
“How?” she sniveled.
“Go home and look in the mirror. Look at what you’ve let yourself become. Then do something about it. You can do it. I want you to. And when you have, come back. I’ll be here. I’ll wait for you.”
“Go fuck yourself” she said. Her words were fiery, but her manner was meek and defeated, there was no fight left in her. She went back to her table. A moment later, she picked up her coat and left the room.
“Jeffrey . . .” I began.
“Not now,” he said.
I lit a cigarette and looked up. Ten basketball players and two referees, out of sync with the music, were running back and forth, back and forth.
* * *
We waited almost two hours before she returned. In that whole time, we said nothing to each other. Not a word about what happened. I nursed my beers, careful not to get intoxicated, and waited.
If I hadn’t been there to see her when she came back, I would not have believed it, the change was that remarkable. Instead of a runaway, or a pothead, she looked like a student. The sweatshirt had been replaced by a pale blue, oxford cloth shirt with a button-down collar and a midnight blue, V-neck sweater. Her jeans, though faded, looked neat and clean, and came down over the tops of a pair of polished black boots. Pulled straight back and hanging in a ponytail, her hair looked freshly brushed and seemed to shine in the haze of the room. Though she still wore no makeup except a trace of lipstick, her face looked smooth and her skin clearer. Even the dullness in her eyes was gone; they were alert and lively.
“Hello,” she said, coming over.
Jeffrey smiled at her. “You look much better.”
“I feel better,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you’d really wait. I mean, I know you said you would, but I wasn’t sure.” She took another step. “Can I sit with you? Wanna buy me a beer?”
He shook his head and her body tightened. It was not the answer she’d expected.
“Why not?”
He reached out and caressed her cheek. “Because you don’t need me to. Not anymore.”
She stood there, letting him stroke her, then pressed her cheek against her shoulder, pinning his hand in place. He started to pull away but she reached for his hand, held it in both of hers, then, softly, lay a kiss on the tip of his damaged forefinger, then his thumb.
“I understand,” she said. “I think I finally understand.”
“I think so too,” he said.
She nodded and turned, and he threw some money on the bar. We were gone before she crossed the room.
As I started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, I told him he’d done a fine thing. He leaned back, his hands behind his head, and even in the dark I could see him smile.
“You still don’t get it, do you?” he said.
I did not say a word.
“A fine thing,” he said, sarcastically. “For Christ’s sake, I could have done anything I wanted with that girl. Anything.”
“But you didn’t,” I protested. “You could have, but you didn’t.”
“She’d have let both of us . . .”
“But you didn’t,” I said.
“I didn’t, I didn’t. But someone will. Others probably have. And others certainly will. She was easy for me, and she’ll be just as easy for someone else. . . . Maybe not tomorrow. But next week, next month . . .”
I drove in silence.
“But you,” he said, half-turning in his seat, “you were worse. More difficult of course. But worse, so much worse.”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“With you it was intellect, intellectual curiosity. You watched. Damn it man, you watched.”
He raised his voice. “How far would you have let me go? When would you have stopped me?”
‘I’m not going to harm her, don’t worry, it’s all going to be fine.’
“I did it to her all right, but don’t you see, I did it to you.”
I watched him reach for a cigarette, his first of the night, and light it.
“Jeffrey,” I said, “I want to tell you something. As a friend. Something you won’t want to hear.”
He stared straight ahead and I said something I used to believe. “I think you’re an angry person. Bitter. Maybe because of the hell you’ve been through. Jeffrey, I think you need help. There are people, professionals . . . I think you need to see someone.”
He looked at me and smiled and in that moment I came to hate him. “I know,” he said.
I turned on the radio and listened to two men analyze the results of the basketball game. I drove him home in silence, dropped him at his apartment, and did my best never to see him again.
© 2026 John Doble All rights reserved.
“The Mind Reader” was previously published in Lefty and Other Stories by Clemson University.
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