The Tenuous Line of Sanity by Frank Siegrist - HTML preview

Rita smiled ruefully. Then she decided to share her thoughts with Jack. Maybe he would understand - after all, he was such an unusual guy!

« When I was a little girl, I once had a chat with a neighbour across the garden fence. He was an older, retired guy, and to me as a little girl he seemed very wise. He told me he saw God in every single blade of grass… As a little girl, I was very impressed. I myself liked to lie in the grass and watch the little beetles climbing up the grass stems and so on… »

« That’s called ‘pantheism’, » Jack interjected.

« Whatever… » said Rita. « Anyway, it seemed very deep and wise to me at the time. But the following Saturday my neighbour lit a big, stinky cigar and started up his noisy lawnmower. And then he cut away all those godly grass-blades. He stuffed all the oily heaps of grass into garbage bags and left them on the sidewalk for the garbage truck to pick up. Somehow, as a little girl, I saw a contradiction in that. A contradiction that obviously doesn’t bother adults… »

« Oh, » said Jack, « and this contradiction still bothers you even now that you’ve become an adult yourself? »

« Yes, » said Rita, « I guess I stopped believing in God that day… »

« That’s okay, » said Jack, « I don’t believe in Him either. But we can still be nice people even without believing in Him, can’t we? »

« But it would be NICE to believe, wouldn’t it? » asked Rita.

« Sure… » sighed Jack. « But we can be nice just for the sake of being nice, can’t we? We don’t need God for that. Let’s be nice just for the sake of being nice! »

« Starting with each other! » exclaimed Rita.

« Exactly! » said Jack, clinking his glass at hers, even though there was only apple-juice in it.

There was a kind of magical moment between them. Rita was sure Jack felt it too.

But Jack being Jack - with his lack of spontaneity and his social clumsiness - chose this very moment to put his glass down on the table with determination and declare: « Well, I guess I should go back now! »

Rita smiled sweetly: « Impossible, the night watch has locked up the main entrance by now. »

« I can just knock, or ring the bell, can’t I? » asked Jack, quite surprised that Rita said such a thing so calmly, as if she had known about it all along. If that was so, why hadn’t she warned him earlier?

« The night watch won’t let you in, » she claimed, calmly.

« Well, Mr. Spörr opened up for me the other night… » said Jack.

« Yes, because he knew you, » said Rita. « Besides, he was expecting you. But today’s night watch doesn’t know you. He can’t just let you in. And he won’t want to call up the head nurse at home or anything like that. He’s only supposed to do that in case of REAL emergencies! »

« So what am I supposed to do? » asked Jack helplessly.

« You’re staying here, » answered Rita, stating the obvious.

Jack looked around. Rita’s place was a kind of studio apartment. There was a small bathroom, but the kitchen was part of the main room. There was no other room. There was a big bed in the corner with a wardrobe next to it, and the kitchen and dining area were filled with the small table at which they were sitting. There was no sofa or anything like that anywhere - it would have taken up too much space.

Rita saw Jack looking around and said: « Don’t worry, you’ll sleep in the bed! »

« And you? » asked Jack stupidly.

« In the bed too… » Now she blushed a little: « You know, we women often share a bed with each other, it’s no big deal for us. Maybe it’s different for you men. But this one’s definitely big enough for two, it’s really no problem… »

Jack stood up, feeling a bit lost. Rita stood up too, went to the fridge and started getting out some food - butter, cheese, milk. She took half a loaf of bread from a wooden box on the counter.

« Would you like to eat something? » she asked. « I know you’ve had supper, but I haven’t! »

« No thanks, » said Jack. It came out a bit too briskly to his own ears. He hoped Rita didn’t notice how ill at ease he was.

Rita got a plate, a knife and a cup for herself and sat down at the table. Jack hesitated, then sat back down too.

« You’re sure I’m not bothering you? » he asked.

« Of course not, » she said, « I’m glad for some company! »

But then there was silence as she was eating and he was watching her eat, not knowing what to say.

He felt a bit the same as during working hours at the hospital when nobody told him what to do. Sometimes he could chat with Burri or Mr. Zbinden, and sometimes he could wash up some left-over dishes in the nurses’ kitchen, but sometimes he just really didn’t know what to do when there were visiting hours or something and Burri and Mr. Zbinden were « taken », or they were being examined by the doctor, or whatever, and all the dishes in the nurses’ kitchen were already neatly stacked up to dry, and nobody had rung the bell needing to go to the toilet… And if he just so much as stood for a minute too long at the window in the common room, the head nurse was sure to appear behind him and ask him in her brisk, business-like manner if he had nothing better to do - and if he really didn’t know what to do, then that was just proof once again of his lack of motivation and initiative!

Rita too was thinking about how another man in Jack’s place would have been more proactive. It’s risky to take a man to your place like this, late in the evening, when you aren’t sure what you want from him. If he’s too proactive, you would at some point have to give in to him, whether you really wanted him or not, just to avoid a fuss and a row that might wake up the whole house! But then of course you might also live through moments of such intensity that even a bomb going off under the bed wouldn’t make a difference anymore!

The next morning might still be awkward, though, even after the most delightful of nights. He might just get up and be in a hurry to go, leaving all the traces of the night for you to clear up…

Jack wasn’t like that. At the hospital he hadn’t managed to bring new life to the ward. It’s not that he didn’t work at all - he did. But he didn’t bring fresh energy with him!

And he didn’t bring fresh energy with him this evening either. He was just sitting there, feeling lost, and probably nothing would happen. He had never touched Rita, and he probably never would.

If there had been iron bars between them, you could have taken him for a gorilla in a zoo - a big, strong, beautiful and noble creature, capable of moving mountains, but just sitting there and doing… nothing!

Rita gathered up the last crumbs in her plate, then she got up and put the plate away. Jack got up too and brought the milk to the fridge.

« Can I go to the toilet? » he asked.

« Sure, » she answered and pointed out the door to him.

When he came back, she was standing at the kitchen sink, brushing her teeth. He sat back down at the table, not knowing what else to do.

Then Rita went to the toilet too, and when she came back, she locked the door to the corridor. The outside world was locked out now, but Jack was inside.

She switched on the small bedside lamp and switched off the bigger lamp above the table. Now the room was bathed in nothing but the subdued glow of the small bedside lamp. Rita took off her lab coat, then she started pulling off her tights. She laid them over the chair. She sat down on the bed, moving her toes on the carpet.

Jack took off his shoes. He remembered that Dr. Stucki, the surgeon, changed clothes in the same anteroom as his helpers before an operation. Seeing someone in underwear is nothing special.

As he unbuttoned his trousers, he hoped his undershorts were clean, at least.

When he bared his legs, all the little hairs on them stood on end. He looked down at himself as he moved towards the bed, and he saw the muscles move under his skin with restrained power. He found that quite elegant and it gave him confidence in himself.

Rita slipped to the other side of the bed and held up the cover for Jack.

Jack sat down on the bed, lifted his legs and stuck them under the cover and lied down. Slowly he relaxed.

« You can switch off the light, » said Rita since the lamp was on his side.

He reached out for it and found the switch. It clicked and the room went dark.

Jack was lying right next to Rita, but nobody could see him. He was going to let himself go now, trustfully, and drop off.

But Rita spoke. Her voice rang out loud and clear. It was right next to him, but in the dark it oddly seemed to fill the whole room.

« I don’t have any brothers or sisters, » she said.

Jack didn’t say anything. She had started talking, so it was up to her to continue. Which indeed she did:

« I was a good child, never made any fusses. Early on I learned to please grown ups. It was the most sensible thing to do, since there were only grown ups around me. My parents said I was an easy child without any problems. I guess I still had problems, though. Just nobody shared them with me. »

Jack remained quiet.

Rita continued: « My parents said I was a sensible child. But maybe, from my point of view, all this actually wasn’t so sensible. I should have realized that life can’t consist only of pleasing other people… »

Jack still didn’t answer.

« I had a cousin, » Rita continued, « who was an only child like me. Whenever our families came together, we were supposed to play together. But I was such a sensible child that I stayed at the table with the grown ups rather than going off to play with my cousin. My cousin was shy, didn’t like visitors and disappeared in his room right after finishing his meal. But one day our mothers made a more direct effort to bring us together. ‘You have practically the same age,’ they said, ‘you can play together!’, and they pushed us towards each other. My cousin twisted his arms behind his back, twisted his legs and twisted his face too. My mother laughed at this exaggerated display of shyness, and since I was a good child eager to please adults, I imitated her and laughed as well. But when my cousin saw me laugh, that apparently gave him an idea. »

Dear reader, me the Ghost, telling you this whole story, I’m just as annoyed as you are! Are we going to have to hear the whole story of Rita’s cousin now? Originally I had taken interest in Jack with the hope of learning something about God and the ultimate answer to the ultimate question, and all he had to say about that was « let’s be nice for the sake of being nice »! What a bloody meaningless philosophy, just turning around in circles and not giving any real answers to anything!

And would or wouldn’t something physical happen between Rita and Jack now? Who knows?

I assure you, there’s just one way to find out - keep watching! And that means hearing out Rita’s story about her cousin, unfortunately…

« He snapped his fingers, » continued Rita, « saying ‘Ding!’ at the same time, and his face instantly transformed. It lit up, became red, his cheeks puffed up, his lips pursed and his eyes shone! He made all kinds of stupid, but also poignant faces, and I laughed. Then he snapped his fingers again, and ‘Ding!’, he was quite his old, shy self again. »

Jack was wondering why Rita was telling him all this, but the only way to find out was to let her continue.

« It was up to me now to let go a bit and stop being so damn sensible, » continued Rita, « but you know, that’s not easy at all. A role you’ve played for the biggest part of your life sort of becomes part of you. You can’t let it go so easily… »

Aha, thought Jack to himself, Rita had been going on all along about how he should ‘let go’, and now she was explaining how she had managed herself, long ago, as a little girl…

« I needed some kind of guarantee that if I really ‘let go’, I could jump right back into my former role if I needed to. Just like a rabbit that comes out of its rabbit hole to eat some tasty herbs but remains alert and ready to jump right back in if it should perceive the shadow of a falcon from above or something… »

Rita was becoming downright poetic, Jack thought to himself. This wasn’t the way she usually talked. Or maybe it just sounded different because there was nothing but the sound of her voice in the darkness and no visual distraction of any kind?

« And this ‘Ding!’-snap-your-fingers thing was just such a guarantee, you see? I just snapped my fingers too, went ‘Ding!’, and there I was on all fours, barking like a dog! My mother laughed at first, but then I saw her frown from the corner of my eyes and knew she was worried about me making holes in my stockings, so I quickly went ‘Ding!’ again and turned back into my old, serious and sensible self. And I stood up, frowning the same way she had, all astonished at finding myself on the floor like that. »

Rita sighed. She didn’t expect Jack to go ‘Ding!’, did she?

No, she didn’t. She went on with her story:

« Our mothers left us to ourselves then, confident we would remain sensible enough, after all. My cousin went ‘Ding!’ again, and this time he turned into a friendly man who seemed to know me but was surprised at finding himself in these surroundings. ‘I’m Roro,’ he declared seriously. He quickly glanced to the side where our parents were once again sitting at the table in the dining room, then he said in a kind of confidential tone: ‘Shouldn’t we rather go upstairs?’ And then he added in a whisper: ‘My spaceship is waiting for us!’ We went upstairs to his room together, and I introduced myself as ‘Rara’. My cousin’s room wasn’t just a room, it was also his spaceship. We sat down on his bed and got ready for takeoff. Takeoff was pretty rough and we bounced quite a bit on the bed, but then the flightpath steadied out and soon we were drifting through space smoothly. Roro explained that he was the representative of a whole race of people from a distant planet. All the members of this race had the ability to swap bodies with each other in an instant, by going ‘Ding!’ One body was always on Earth, but the others were on their home-planet. The person on Earth wasn’t always the same one, though, because it depended on who had taken that body just then. I asked him if it wasn’t possible that more than one of them would be on Earth at the same time, but he explained the path between Earth and the home-planet was blocked right now - the spaceship couldn’t get through. So there was just one body blocked on Earth. It couldn’t be joined by the others, and it couldn’t get home either. Later I learned more about this problem - there were insurgents on the home-planet and they had captured the airstrip. There was no way for the spaceship to return home! »

« Wow, » said Jack, « your cousin was quite a story-teller! »

« He sure was! » said Rita. « Apparently there was a big fight on his home-planet. There wasn’t much hope of recapturing the airstrip anytime soon. As we were drifting through space, we could see his home-planet from afar, but of course we couldn’t go land there. So we flew on, and eventually we saw another planet. Roro said it was an unknown planet, although he had seen it several times before already and it seemed friendly… »

« That was your planet, then, » said Jack, « right? »

« Exactly! » said Rita. « Of course I told him that was my planet! »

« And you had the same problem as Roro, I bet, » said Jack. « You couldn’t return to your planet either because there were insurgents on it too, and so one body of your people was condemned to stay on Earth too… »

« Exactly! » said Rita. « And that gave our meeting on Earth a whole new meaning - between our two planets no spaceships could fly because of the captured airstrips, so no contact was possible between our two worlds and our two people except through the two bodies that were left on Earth! »

« I see, » said Jack, « so the relationship between you and your cousin wasn’t just the relationship between two persons, but rather between two races, between two worlds! »

« That’s right! » said Rita.

Jack wondered whether Rita would have told him this whole story in broad daylight. Probably not, he decided. Or even if she had, he wouldn’t have understood it. There was something special about talking in the dark like this.

« What happened when your parents came to fetch you? » asked Jack. « Surely they wouldn’t understand that they were bursting in on an interplanetary congress? »

« No, they didn’t, » admitted Rita, « but my cousin and I told them we had a lot to tell each other, and so I was allowed to stay overnight! »

« Just like I’m staying overnight with you right now! » commented Jack.

« Exactly, » said Rita. « For the first time in my life I wasn’t alone when I had to brush my teeth. We did it together, and our foaming mouths were a great laughing occasion! Afterwards we even took a bath together… »

« Oh… » said Jack. « How old were you? »

« A bit too old for this to be completely normal, you know? But not so old that it would have been kinky either. Anyway, at first we just filled up the bathtub, but the water was always either too hot or too cold, and in the end the bathtub was full to the brim with a tower of foam on top! And before we undressed, my cousin went to fetch his waterproof torch. So then we switched off the light in the bathroom, of course, and at first I was just a bit uncomfortable, knowing that we were here alone in the dark while all the grownups were outside. But then, for undressing the dark was still quite helpful… »

« I can imagine, » grumbled Jack.

« It’s not like you think! » scolded Rita. « We were just kids! There weren’t any naughty thoughts on my mind! I was just a bit shy, that’s all! »

« Of course… » said Jack.

« We climbed into the bathtub, » continued Rita, « and my cousin switched on the torch under the water. It was magical! Our heads were floating above a carpet of foam illuminated from below! It was as if we were above the clouds or something! »

« Wow! » said Jack. « I wish I had childhood memories like that! »

« We were like at the beginning of time, at the beginning of creation! » said Rita. « In the eternal darkness there was just this one luminous cloud out of which our two heads had appeared! Maybe our two heads were even part of the same creature whose body was still taking shape in the fuzzy innards of the cloud! »

« Wow! » said Jack once again.

« I’ve never felt the same connection with anyone else again ever since. Fingers sprang out of the flaky surface of the cloud, discovered each other, touched gently… Eventually the sun rose! My cousin let his torch rise out of the foam, and it made a bright disc of light on the side of the bathtub! »

Rita sighed, Jack was silent.

« After a while our skin became all wrinkly in the hot water. We left the torch in the water and stood up. Yes, yes, before you ask, we looked at each other a bit then, dimly illuminated through the foam from below! But it was just honest curiosity, you know, nothing kinky, I swear! My cousin got me a towel, we got dried and put on our pyjamas, and only then did we switch on the big light in the bathroom, emptied the bathtub, hosed down the foam… »

Rita paused a moment. Then she asked, in a voice that almost trembled a little (or maybe Jack just imagined it): « Jack, do you have any sympathy for my little story? »

« Because that’s all of it already? What happened to your cousin? »

« Oh well, » said Rita, « he just grew up. He works at a bank now… »

« But surely you didn’t just have this one bath together, did you? »

« That was the only bath, yes, but of course there was more to it than that. He had a lot of plush toy animals on his bed, and they were all real too. I mean, they were real animals on his home-planet and they just had these kinds of substitute bodies here on Earth that couldn’t move on their own. When they moved or talked here on Earth, it was through my cousin’s arms and my cousin’s mouth, but he swore they were real animals! »

« And you believed that too? » asked Jack.

« Yes, on some level I did. That was the secret universe that we shared. And in that universe we were each the representative of a whole tribe of people, and our plush animals were really alive! »

Jack didn’t reply straight away, so Rita added: « It’s ridiculous, I know… Just child-play… »

« Well no, » said Jack, « I don’t think it’s ridiculous! Our personalities are complex, we are not always the same person. At work you are a nurse and you defer to the doctors, even though you know the patients better than they do, seeing more of them than they do. So in secret you may disagree with the doctors and not respect them as much as what you make them believe. With your parents you are yet someone else, you will always be their little girl, you probably regress a little every time you see them… We are different people in different circumstances. Of course these are all just facets of our ‘true’ self, but really, it’s not so wrong to see ourselves as a whole tribe of different people, and depending on who we are with, another member of that tribe is in the spotlight… »

« It’s nice of you to say that! » said Rita earnestly.

« It’s true, you know! We are different people all the time! Sometimes we are forced to change, as you are when you need to defer to the doctors even though you might secretly disagree with them. Sometimes we change because certain facets of our personality need to be protected from certain people… We do all this quite unconsciously most of the time. And sometimes it would be nice if we could do it consciously, take control consciously. And that’s what you and your cousin did with your ‘Ding!’-thing. If he hurt you or something, he could just go ‘Ding!’ and another member of his tribe would come to the fore, and you could discuss your feelings with this other guy! I think it’s great! »

« And what about the plush animals? » asked Rita.

« The same thing, » said Jack. « I guess they represented different parts of you too. The sweet little rabbit would be the sensitive you, the wise owl the more longer-term thinking one, and so on! These different facets of you have disagreements. What better way to untangle these disagreements than to attribute a separate ‘personality’ - represented by a plush animal - to each part of the bigger personality! »

« You’re sweet to interpret it that way! » said Rita.

A moment later she said: « But if it’s so great, why can’t we do it anymore when we’re adults? »

« Yeah, I don’t know… » sighed Jack. « As adults, we need years of therapy to untangle the different threads of our life, while as kids we could just go ‘Ding!’… »

« Sometimes I wish I could go back to my childhood… » said Rita. And then she added: « You know, you are the first person I told about this, apart from my cousin with whom I shared it long ago… »

Rita had opened up to Jack. It was his turn to open up now, to show her something secret of himself too. Of course he didn’t know what. Should he tell her about his toilet-complex? Hell no, that was so unpoetic compared to the story she had told him about the secret universe she had shared with her cousin…

Before he could think about this problem any longer, she leaned over to him, whispered « Thank you for understanding me! » and gave him a little kiss on the cheek!

He felt a tingle going through his entire body!

He was still shy, but he reached out for her under the cover and touched her bare arm. She didn’t object. As he moved closer to her, she moved closer too. He put his arm around her, and she snuggled up to him. He caressed her shoulders, her elbows, her back, the small of her back. Her undershirt had slipped upwards a bit, and his hand reached bare skin. His hand slipped under the undershirt and he caressed her naked back. She wasn’t wearing any bra, Jack hadn’t noticed when she had taken it off…

Rita felt a warm surge of pride - she had gotten through to him at last! She had pierced through his aloofness! This would-be-doctor had at last taken notice of her, the simple little nurse! She didn’t know if he would remember her later, when he had really become a doctor. Maybe she would just be the little nurse he had had an adventure with as a student… But right now she was the centre of his attention, and she intended to make the most of that!

He had listened to her patiently, respectfully and taken her seriously. She wanted to give him pleasure now, and she knew how to.

He was inexperienced, she could tell. After his orgasm, she whispered into his ear to rest, and he gratefully obeyed. Later in the night he moved again, and when he realized she was awake too, he touched her again. She decided to guide him so he would give her pleasure too, and he let himself be guided eagerly. His annoying habit of never initiating any move by himself seemed to have vanished - she had pierced through that to reach the ‘real’ Jack at last! He happily tried out things by himself, not insisting when not encouraged, but going ever a bit further when he felt she liked it!

And finally she heard herself urge him on, and - however cliché that sounded - she was hissing « Oh my angel, oh my angel, yes, yesss! yeeeeessss!!! »

And somehow he knew, at that moment, not to change anything he was doing anymore, not the rhythm, not the intensity, not the depth, but just to keep going, just to keep going until… she came!

And after her explosion of pleasure, which he undoubtedly felt her having, he became very, very gentle.

And she was very proud that SHE had brought all this out of him!

 

The next morning was not as awkward as she had feared. When her alarm clock went off, he did give her a little kiss, but just a gentle one on the cheek, not a possessive one with the tongue and all that. And then he willingly got out of bed and got dressed without playing the gorilla or otherwise fooling around just because he was still naked and proud to make a show of having « had » her in the night, as some men did. While they had a quick breakfast, she actually regretted having to work today, since it would have been nice to share a slow, quiet morning with Jack.

She had worried all along about how she would explain to Jack that he should drive to the hospital on his motorbike alone and that she would rather take the bus as usual. The real reason was that she didn’t want everyone to see them arriving together, because she didn’t want everyone to guess they had spent the night together. But you can’t explain that to a man without offending him. So she had thought of saying she had too much stuff to take with her or something like that, since you can’t take bulky luggage on a motorbike…

Or maybe it would be okay to arrive on the motorbike together provided it was early enough that the others weren’t there yet.

And really, they were ready with breakfast and toothbrushing and everything well on time, so she decided it would be okay to go on the motorbike with Jack.

The fast, short drive on the motorbike was refreshing, and Rita actually enjoyed it! She held on tight to Jack and even sort of started daydreaming about how it would be to live with a man like this, rather than just having an adventure with him…

When they arrived in front of the hospital and Jack pushed the bike under the bike-stand, she still warned him not to be too familiar with her in front of the others, because « work is work »!

« Of course, » Jack said airily. He wasn’t the type to brag about having « had » her, she could see that. But did that mean he had more serious intentions? And would she want that, or would that turn out to be an even bigger problem? Rita wasn’t sure…

Jack parted with Rita at the entrance to the hospital with a wink of the eye and went up to his room to change. When he came to the ward, he worked even less efficiently than other days. He strolled through the corridors like an enlightened disciple who had just been blessed by his guru, and whenever he came across anybody, he greeted them joyfully and made kindly remarks. He willingly did all the jobs he was given, but misunderstanding the gist of them as usual. When the nurses scolded him for that, he accepted the criticism good-naturedly rather than defensively, but it made just as little of a mark on him as ever, just like all the other days when he had been more thick-headed and had claimed the instructions had been incomplete or whatever. He grinned broadly, made fun of his own clumsiness and assured them he was sorry without looking sorry in the least.

Rita herself was quite incapable of being stern with him today. She rather felt like laughing herself, even though she knew the work wouldn’t get done that way - so in the end she left Jack with the other nurses as much as possible.

Jack really was a strange guy, Rita mused. She had never had an affair with anybody she met at work regularly before. There had been some interns whom all the nurses had had a crush on, and she had felt attracted too. But they had seemed far out of reach, coming from another world, an academic world… Jack too came from an academic world, but somehow he himself didn’t seem aware of this. His naivety, his clumsiness and total lack of arrogance really invited criticism, especially since he came from a supposedly superior world! Maybe he wasn’t even worse than others who came to do a practical in nursing. But he looked more lost than the others, and he probably felt more lost too, for whatever reason. And that was why all the nurses kept criticizing him and complaining about him to the head-nurse! It was unfair, really…

But there was a level-headedness to him that you might not see at first. He questioned things that deserved to be questioned (for example that patients like Mr. Zbinden ought to be entertained so that they would have a peaceful end of life, while in actual fact they might rather need to be given a chance to tell their own story, pass on their own legacy, rather than just to be « entertained »…), and when something completely out of the ordinary happened (like when he was taken as a hostage by three gangsters, for example), he reacted with absolute coolness! This was something Rita admired a lot, because she knew she lacked this kind of level-headedness herself, however competent a nurse she had become - she had learned to follow rules unquestioningly, and she was very good at that. Jack, on the other hand, didn’t seem to grasp rules, but when necessary he knew how to improvise!

And so Rita, who had found him the most annoying guy in the universe at first, had eventually fallen for him!

She knew now how he needed to be treated - either you let him muddle around in his own way, and he might come up with an extraordinary solution to a problem you didn’t even know you had, but without ever doing what was expected of him, or you led him by the rein like a nag so that he would do what was expected of him. There wasn’t any middle way, unfortunately!

Except in bed, that is - in bed he was perfectly capable of two-way communication and he had been a very agreeable partner, both passionate and attentive to her needs! He was probably capable of this because there are just the two of you in bed. It’s an intimate realm that you don’t share with others - there aren’t any rosters and rules and organizational matters. It’s just you and your partner, and that worked for him. As soon as there was a surrounding organization, though, he failed…

So maybe he would be too tiresome as a life-long partner, Rita mused. But he was a fascinating person nevertheless, and she was proud she had gotten to know the ‘real’ Jack behind the aloof and self-defensive facade, which was all the other nurses ever saw of him.

Towards the end of the working day, Rita got worried again - what would happen now? Would he come and seek her out, was he hoping he could take her back to her place again, would he embarrass her in front of her colleagues?

Really, it wasn’t a good idea to mix work and romantic affairs! Too many worries!

In the end she decided to seek him out herself so she could choose the right moment for that, before he would try to do it himself and choose the wrong moment! First she looked at the roster to see when he had days off and if any coincided with one of her own days off. There was a good chance that some of them did, because more or less officially she was in charge of practicals like his…

Indeed, she saw that Monday was a day off they had in common. She had planned to go horse-riding that day. Well, she would have to call that off if she wanted to spend the day with Jack, wouldn’t she?

When she caught him in the corridor, she quickly said: « Before I forget, we both have a day off on Monday. Are you free? Would you like us to do something together? »

Was she being too pushy? Had he already gotten what he wanted from her and would he reject her now?

No, his voice was sincerely delighted (even though he kept it down, for which she was grateful to him): « Why, yes, that would be nice! Where would you like to go? »

« Oh, I don’t know… » she said, suddenly feeling stupid that she invited him when she had nowhere special to invite him to.

But he asked her helpfully: « What do you usually do on your days off? »

« Well, » she said, afraid she might put him off altogether with what she was going to say now, « I planned to go horse-riding on Monday… »

« Really? » he asked. « I know how to ride a horse too, you know? A bit, in any case… So if you aren’t doing dressage with a group of professionals, maybe I could come too? »

Rita was surprised! This guy really was full of hidden talents!

« But how well can you ride? » she asked, getting doubtful again. She had made friends with a couple of horse-breeders, and they had seen how she rode and were happy to let her take one of their horses. It was mutually beneficial, since all their horses needed to be exercised and they sometimes lacked time. But of course they wouldn’t let just anybody sit on their horses… And Rita didn’t know how well Jack could ride, so she couldn’t just vouch for him, could she?

Jack shrugged his shoulders. He said: « Well, I learned all the usual stuff, you know? I even learned to jump over cavalettis and things like that! Just tell me who these people are and I’ll go and see them tomorrow since I finish early tomorrow afternoon! »

« That could work, » Rita admitted, biting her underlip, still not completely sure. « Maybe they’d have time to see how well you ride, and then maybe they’d let us go out together with two of their horses on Monday… »

She explained that it was the last farmhouse before the end of the village on the Gurnigel street. Jack promised he would go to see them, and Rita once again secretly admired him for taking this challenge.

So the next day Jack set off to find the last farmhouse before the end of the village along the Gurnigel street.

Spring was in the air. Jack felt a bit nervous, but the fresh air was invigorating! Everything would go well, he decided.

This must be it, the farmstead behind that barn. Jack was standing a bit lost in what looked like a kind of farmyard. While wondering where he would find an entrance door with a bell, a dog nearby started barking and barking and barking.

Hell, this was just like Burri on Jack’s first day on the ward! Jack had been standing around all lost then too, and that Burri just wouldn’t shut up! There had been a wasted little man peacefully sleeping, another long, skeletal man with a wobbling underlip getting his genitals washed… And while Jack had been taking all this in, there had also been that little dwarf with sickly, glistening eyes sitting on his soiled bed-clothes who just wouldn’t stop drawing his attention: « Hey you! Hey you! Wa-wa-washing now! »

Since Jack had been wearing white clothes, Burri had just seen another caregiver in him, just one more. That Jack was new and consequentially felt lost - not knowing which washcloth was for which patient and which body-part - was beyond Burri…

Just like this dog who wouldn’t shut up either!

Well, at least Jack knew how to treat dogs. Whatever relationship you build up with an animal, it’s usually one-to-one, without the added complexity of socially agreed norms - most animals don’t label you the way humans do, with corresponding expectations (expectations that Jack somehow never managed to fulfill). They just see you the way you are at that very moment and start from there. Animals don’t usually judge you according to a lab-coat you’re wearing or a title you possess or whatever. They usually aren’t aware of these things. They just treat you according to what they see in the present moment, that’s all. And for Jack that was much more manageable.

He called over to the dog: « Come here! Come here! »

The dog looked a bit perplexed, pointed his ears towards Jack, then eventually lowered his head and came over, his rear-end wagging wildly. He was wagging more with his rump than with his tail, because his tail was hanging down rather than erected. Of course - the tail held erect while wagging was for people he knew, not strangers like Jack!

Jack spoke kindly to him and let him sniff at his hands and legs without trying to pat him straight away. Such familiarities might come later, in case Jack passed the sniffing-test.

Eventually the dog uttered a satisfied grunt and moved away again.

Then Jack noticed a woman had appeared on the landing of a little wooden staircase that led to an entrance door. She was watching Jack, somewhat amused, somewhat questioningly.

« Oh, hello there! » said Jack. « I’m looking for Mrs. or Mr. Niederhäuser! »

« That would be me! » said the woman. She was middle-aged but looked quite fit and just a little bit masculine as well.

Jack didn’t quite know how to begin. He didn’t want to bring up Rita straight away. He didn’t want to pull her into this in case he didn’t do well on the horse (if they let him sit on one at all).

« I heard there were horses for rent here? » As soon as he said it, he realized this was quite the wrong thing to say - you don’t just « rent » a horse the way you would rent a car!

Indeed, the woman said: « We don’t just rent out our horses, you know… »

He seemed totally out of touch with normal procedures around horses, or indeed horses themselves, to even say such a thing! On the other hand, she had observed how he had called the dog over to him and how the dog had reacted - he evidently had experience with animals, so she was more inclined to forgive him his faux pas.

« No, I meant… » he stumbled.

« We could offer you a riding lesson, if you like, » said the woman.

« Well, » said Jack, feeling uncomfortable, « I was thinking more about going for a ride… »

« Not unaccompanied, of course! » he quickly added.

« Well, » said the woman, « first we’d need to see how well you can ride. An individual riding lesson would still be a good start! »

« Sure, yes, why not… » answered Jack, hoping they wouldn’t want to book him for such a lesson in a week or more, when it would be too late for the ride with Rita.

« I’ll see when my husband would have time for you, » said the woman. She came down the little stairs, stretched out her hand to Jack and said: « I’m Mrs. Niederhäuser! »

Jack shook her hand and said his name too.

« Well then, Jack, just come with me! » said Mrs. Niederhäuser.

They went behind the barn where the entrance to the stables was. A man was busily saddling a horse tied to the wall of the stables. It seemed like a somewhat nervous horse, Jack noted uneasily…

The man pulled the saddle belt tight, and the horse irascibly lifted one of its hind-legs in a jerky way and made a kicking movement into the air behind itself where luckily nobody was standing.

Jack eyed up the horse reverentially. If this was the kind of horse they had here, he wasn’t so sure anymore that he should really go on a ride with Rita on Monday!

Mrs. Niederhäuser introduced Jack to her husband and told him that Jack would like to go for a ride at some point.

« Well, sure, » said Mr. Niederhäuser shaking Jack’s hand. « I was just getting ready for a ride with Alaska here. If you don’t mind, we could take her for a quick round on the dressage ring, then we’ll see what we can offer you! »

Mr. Niederhäuser looked Jack over and asked: « Are you dressed casually enough to sit on a horse? »

Jack was wearing a pair of jeans, and they weren’t all that new, and some sturdy shoes that weren’t brand-new either.

« Sure… » he said somewhat uneasily, not because he was worried about his clothes, but rather because of the horse!

« Okay, » said Mr. Niederhäuser, then let’s go! » and he handed Jack the reins.

Jack took the reins and patted the horse’s nose with the other hand. It pushed against his hand and blew warm air at it from its big nostrils, because it would have liked to get a carrot or a piece of apple or something.

It would go okay, Jack decided. This horse was spirited, but not nasty or anything.

He followed Mr. Niederhäuser to the dressage ring, leading the horse by the reins. It followed him willingly enough. He led it to the middle of the dressage ring, and slipping the reins around his arm, he went to its side to feel if the belt was still tight enough and lower the stirrups. He looked over to Mr. Niederhäuser who nodded, so he got on. Then he adjusted the length of the stirrups to feel comfortable and finally shortened the reins, ready to go.

« Okay, » said Mr. Niederhäuser. « Just go round the dressage ring at an easy pace, and don’t cut the corners! »

Jack tightened his legs, pushing his heels ever so slightly into the belly of the horse, and it willingly strode off. The dressage ring was more square than circular, and Jack saw what Mr. Niederhäuser meant about cutting the corners. But Alaska was very obedient. A little pressure from Jack’s foot against her belly was enough to remind her that cutting the corners would not be tolerated.

When you behave towards a horse as though you were its boss, the most likely outcome is that it will really accept you as its boss. If, on the other hand, you are not too sure about being its boss, it might decide that it would rather like to be the boss itself, and then you’re in trouble!

It’s probably the same with people, Jack mused. The problem with people is that they have lots of cultural norms, and you need to master those if you want to convince someone that you’re the boss. For some people these norms are very reassuring and they get along better with human beings than with horses. For Jack it was the opposite.

Sure, with a horse you can’t rely on cultural norms to convey your authority. It’s more of a touchy-feely thing, it’s more instinctive. And that’s what Jack liked!

Mr. Niederhäuser asked Jack to make a few classical figures, loops and serpentines and such. All this was no problem. Then Mr. Niederhäuser asked Jack to start trotting. Jack moved his feet further back against the horse’s belly and gave a little impulse. That’s the standard order to start trotting, and indeed, Alaska trotted a few steps and Jack adapted to the new motion of the huge muscles below him, but then she decided to test Jack and was going to slip back into a walk. And here Jack’s instincts set in. He felt Alaska’s intent even though she was still trotting, and instead of moving his body with hers as the big muscles in the horse’s back shook him up and down, he moved ever so slightly AHEAD of her moves, showing her clearly that he meant for her to keep going and would definitely take measures if she didn’t. All this happened quite unnoticeably for anyone watching, but of course Mr. Niederhäuser knew Alaska’s tricks, and he could tell Jack was one step ahead of them.

Jack did a few figures trotting, and eventually Mr. Niederhäuser felt Alaska had warmed up enough to do a little canter.

Now this is more delicate. Most horses love to canter, but maybe not so much on a dressage ring, but rather out in the open somewhere. So maybe you need to push them a bit, or maybe you rather need to hold them back because they just accelerate out of control otherwise. If you don’t know the horse, you can’t be too sure what to expect.

Jack moved his outer leg backwards and gave the order to canter. He gave Alaska a bit of free rein so that she would be able to stretch her neck a bit. This was perhaps a bit risky with a spirited horse, but on the other hand Jack didn’t want her to have any excuses for NOT cantering. At the same time he moved his inner leg forward a bit so that it would hinder her trot somewhat, and he leaned well back in the saddle.

And really, she cantered off smoothly!

Mr. Niederhäuser nodded appreciatively. These two, Jack and Alaska, seemed to get along fine!

He asked Jack to do a loop at a canter. The first one was a bit elongated, because Alaska was reluctant to go around a tight circle at a canter, but for the second one Jack was more insistent and it became beautifully round.

Mr. Niederhäuser asked Jack to go back to a trot. Jack tightened the reins and leaned forward a bit, ready to take the horse’s rhythm as soon as it slipped back into trot, and that worked out well too.

Mr. Niederhäuser let Jack and Alaska do a round or two at a trot and then asked him to slow down to a walk.

As soon as Alaska was walking again, Jack gave her a long rein. That way she could move her head freely and get her breath back at her ease.

« Not bad at all! » said Mr. Niederhäuser. He unfastened the rope that closed off the dressage ring and told Jack to come. Jack made for the middle of the dressage ring, made the horse stop and patted her neck. Then he took his feet out of the stirrups, getting ready to jump off.

« No, no, » said Mr. Niederhäuser, « just stay on the horse! I’m getting Kendu ready and then we’ll go for a little round! »

So Jack followed Mr. Niederhäuser out of the dressage ring atop his horse. Mr. Niederhäuser was a tall man, but when you followed him like this on horseback, seeing him from above, he seemed tiny.

They stopped in front of the stables and Jack waited, sitting on Alaska, for Mr. Niederhäuser to get Kendu ready. It didn’t take long, even though Kendu wasn’t one to keep still either while being saddled. Or perhaps he was just eager to go.

Mr. Niederhäuser jumped into the saddle and said: « Okay, let’s go! »

As they walked up the driveway, Jack looked down at the pebbles crackling under Alaska’s hooves and felt they were really far away… This wasn’t soft turf like on the dressage ring. These were stone-hard pebbles, and it wouldn’t feel so nice to fall off the horse here!

They got to the road and walked one behind the other, Jack following Mr. Niederhäuser, on the right side of the road.

When a car drove past, Jack’s fingers clamped the reins involuntarily till his knuckles got white. The roof of the car didn’t even reach Jack’s knee. It was a strange feeling to tower above everything like this. It wouldn’t do to fall down in front of a passing car! Luckily Alaska didn’t seem to mind the car and didn’t start jumping around or anything like that…

Jack was level with the traffic signs, and as they passed a stop-sign, he had to watch out so as not to bang his head against the metal sheet sticking out from the pole at just his height!

They went through the village, easily overtaking anyone on foot even though the horses were just doing a leisurely walk.

Some more cars passed, but by now Jack had got used to these lowly metal boxes creeping along the ground, their drivers encapsulated within, stuck in a two-dimensional world, while he himself was towering high above them!

They left the road and stepped onto a little path that went off between the fields.

« Okay, tighten the reins a bit, we’re going to trot! » Mr. Niederhäuser called back to Jack.

Jack didn’t tighten the reins all that much. On the contrary, as he gave Alaska the order to trot, he even shifted his hands forward a bit so that her head would be a bit freer. Alaska seemed to appreciate this and immediately started trotting a nice, regular trot. They moved with a nice elastic bounce, in total harmony with each other!

They passed a farmhouse and a dog ran at them, barking. Kendu was startled and sprang to the side. The dog, emboldened by his success, came to stand in Jack’s way. But there was no element of surprise anymore, so Alaska wasn’t fazed. And instead of following the rhythm of her body, Jack now drove it actively and led her directly, head-on, towards the dog. The dog stood his ground for a second but eventually gave way with a yelp.

In the meantime Mr. Niederhäuser had gotten Kendu back under control and got back in front of Jack.

« Well done, Jack! » he called back, and Jack felt proud.

They trotted a while longer until they eventually got to the road again where they switched back to a leisurely walk. And soon they were walking up the driveway, back to the stables.

They got off their horses, tied them to the stable wall, unsaddled them - Mr. Niederhäuser showed Jack where to put the saddle - brushed down the horses and eventually led them back to their boxes.

« This went rather well, » said Mr. Niederhäuser. « So yes, you can come on a longer ride with us, if that’s what you had on your mind! »

Jack said: « I’m doing a practical at Riggisberg hospital, and it was the nurse Rita who told me about this place. I was wondering if I could accompany her when she goes for a ride on Monday… »

« Oh? » said Mr. Niederhäuser. « I see! »

He looked thoughtful for a second and then said: « Yes, she usually takes Kendu, and you could take Alaska again… I just have to see if Alaska isn’t needed elsewhere… »

He motioned for Jack to follow him and took him into a small room adjoining the stables.

« This is our office, » he said with a grin and leafed through a big book where all the appointments were apparently written down.

« Yes, Alaska’s free! » he said. « So let’s write down that you’re taking her! »

Then he added: « Rita knows about this, right? You’re not going to spoil her outing, are you? »

« Of course! » answered Jack.

« She’s always very proper, brushes the horse, cleans the stall, puts everything away where it belongs… And a good rider too! That’s why we let her go on her own. I’m sure she’s a very good nurse too, isn’t she? »

« Definitely, definitely… » murmured Jack.

« She pays us forty franks for a two-hour outing. Is that okay for you too? »

« Yes, that’s fine! » said Jack.

« Okay, » said Mr. Niederhäuser, shaking Jack’s hand, « so we’ll see you on Monday! Have a nice weekend in the meantime! »

« Thank you! The same to you! » answered Jack, even though he knew his own weekend wouldn’t be all that especially nice since he would be working…

But he was definitely looking forward to Monday!

He walked back to Riggisberg hospital in a very good mood!

 

The next few days really weren’t all that special, and Rita definitely seemed to avoid him. He still got a chance to tell her, when he caught her alone at some point, that he would come with her on Monday and she said: « Ah yes, that’s great! » But he couldn’t tell if she was really enthusiastic or just pretending to be. « So we’ll meet there! » she added, as if she were already dismissing him. Maybe she was just afraid of being caught talking intimately with him.

Jack shrugged off the negative feeling he got from her. They would have plenty of time on Monday to work things out again between them!

When Jack arrived at Niederhäuser’s farm on Monday, Alaska was already standing outside in front of the stables, fully saddled. Kendu was standing next to her, getting brushed by Rita.

« Good morning! » Jack said joyfully. He didn’t walk over to her to kiss her or anything. He understood that Rita might not want that in front of the Niederhäusers.

« Hi, » said Rita, « so it seems you’re riding Alaska? »

« Yes, she’s the one I tried out last time… » he answered, immediately feeling a bit stupid for having formulated it like this. « She’s the one I rode last time, I mean… Well, it was just a little round, but anyway… »

« I see, » said Rita noncommittally as if she were offended.

« Why? » asked Jack. « Is there something special about Alaska? »

« I don’t ride her, » was all Rita said.

Alaska was pawing the ground with one of her front-hooves, and as Jack approached, she started seesawing nervously with her head. She was just eager to go, Jack decided. He held out his hand to her and she laid her nose into it and blew hot air at it from her huge nostrils.

« She likes you, » Rita commented.

Sure, thought Jack to himself, why shouldn’t she like me?

Rita got Kendu ready, untied him and led him away from the wall to the middle of the yard where she adjusted the stirrups and mounted him. Jack led Alaska next to Kendu, tightened her belt, adjusted the stirrups and mounted her too. They were ready to go.

Rita had some difficulties to get Kendu to go, maybe because Alaska was the boss of the horses and she would normally have gone first. But this wasn’t possible now, since Jack didn’t know the way. It had been no problem when Mr. Niederhäuser had ridden Kendu, Jack remembered. Well of course, he mused - Mr. Niederhäuser was the real boss, higher up in rank than either horse!

Rita finally managed to make Kendu move, and Alaska willingly followed him.

When Rita turned in her saddle and looked back, Alaska was following with big, strong steps and Jack was happily sitting in the saddle, holding the reins quite loose.

When Rita had once ridden Alaska, Alaska had kept wanting to go faster than she was supposed to, and Rita had kept tightening the reins, only to make Alaska even more nervous and dance around on the spot, since Rita wouldn’t let her go forward at the speed she liked… It had been quite an uncomfortable experience which could have ended with Rita being thrown off.

Jack didn’t seem to have this problem with Alaska at all. He held the reins quite loose, and Alaska wasn’t nervous at all.

Yes, Rita admitted to herself, Jack had a kind of talent with certain « difficult » individuals. He had shown that on the ward too, getting along quite fine with the likes of Burri, even though he did everything « wrong » (like showing anger towards a mentally challenged patient instead of controlling his emotions, or holding Alaska’s reins loose instead of keeping her in check).

Rita and Jack followed the road in single file for a little while, but soon they could turn onto a path between the fields that wound its way up a hill. And as if this were the most natural thing in the world, Jack prodded his horse somewhat so that he could catch up with Rita and ride next to her rather than behind her.

Horses like to follow each other in single file, which is fine when you’re at the edge of a road where cars have to pass you. But as soon as you’re on a path without traffic, humans would like to walk abreast so that they can talk, and for horses this is unnatural, so it’s a bit difficult to make them do it. And yet Jack managed easily, even though Alaska was a « difficult » horse in Rita’s mind…

After a bend that took them to the other side of the hill, Riggisberg hospital became visible. It was on a hillside above the village, and it looked very peaceful in the sunshine. A big, bright red parasol was visible on the terrace. It didn’t mean anything to Jack, but Rita explained it belonged to a patient from another ward. He was quadriplegic and spent his days on his wheelchair on the terrace under the parasol.

Jack didn’t know what to say to this. Everything looked so peaceful from here. « Is he happy? » he wanted to ask, but that would have been an idiotic question!

As if Rita had guessed what Jack had wanted to ask, she said: « He isn’t even so unhappy, you know? » And then she added: « Happier than before, in any case… »

« Before what? » asked Jack stupidly.

« Before his suicide attempt that made him quadriplegic. And now he isn’t suicidal anymore, » Rita explained.

« Hm, that’s a bit hard to understand… » said Jack.

« Isn’t it? » said Rita, as if the whole story irritated her.

Of course it irritated her, Jack mused. She was such a sensible, dependable girl, always doing what’s right. How could she not be irritated by something as irrational as that?

« So what’s his story, then? » asked Jack.

« Oh, I don’t know any of the details, » said Rita. « But they say the challenge he created for himself made his life worthwhile again. »

« What challenge? » asked Jack.

« The challenge of facing life as a quadriplegic, » answered Rita.

« That makes no sense to me! » said Jack.

« To me neither, » answered Rita coldly.

« So supposedly his life was too boring before, and now, thanks to this challenge, he is interested in it again? » asked Jack rhetorically.

« I don’t even know what kind of ‘challenge’ that’s supposed to be… He can’t do anything by himself anymore! Everything needs to be done for him! » said Rita indignantly.

« Well, » said Jack, « I guess that’s precisely the challenge - finding meaning in it when you can’t do anything on your own anymore… »

« But that’s an idiotic challenge! » Rita called out so angrily that even her horse got startled and turned its ears backwards to hear what was going on. « Whoever needs a ‘challenge’ like that to find his life worthwhile must be a bloody idiot! »

Jack didn’t answer at first. He was thinking.

« I guess that explanation about the ‘challenge’ isn’t correct, » he said finally.

« Maybe, but do you have another one? » asked Rita irritably.

« I would need to know more about him, wouldn’t I? » said Jack calmly.

« Sure, sure, » said Rita, « Well, I can tell you about the rumours: a son of rich parents, everything served to him on a platter, life too easy, no challenge until he created one for himself! »

« And what’s he doing in Riggisberg? » asked Jack.

« The fresh mountain air is good for him, I suppose, » answered Rita.

For a while they rode on in silence. Rita was annoyed with this philosophical problem that just wouldn’t fit into her world-view, and Jack was thinking.

Could it be that life really just consists of rising up to arbitrary challenges, like in a game? Is any challenge of any kind good enough to give life meaning?

Is it meaningful to overcome hurdles that you placed there yourself?

Maybe it’s meaningful when it’s a sport you practice to stay fit or to prepare yourself for other hurdles that you didn’t place there yourself…

But ultimately there is no point in overcoming hurdles that you placed there yourself if there is no further goal beyond that, Jack decided.

Me the ghost, watching the scene, I got interested. This was the ultimate question popping up once again - what’s the point? If you say the point of sport is to stay healthy, then what’s the point of staying healthy? And if you say the point of staying healthy is to have a good life, then what’s the point of a good life? And what do you mean by ‘good life’ anyway? What’s the point of the point of the point? What’s the ULTIMATE point?

« I got it! » Jack suddenly called out (and me the ghost, I was hoping for enlightenment!).

« Got what? » asked Rita, wondering if he meant a horse fly or something.

« An alternative explanation! » said Jack.

« Really? » said Rita doubtfully. She hoped he wouldn’t embark on a nerdish monologue she wouldn’t be able to follow anyway.

« I guess that guy was under a lot of pressure. Surely his father was a great man in some way. In any case he was rich - that’s what you said. »

« Yes, and so what? » asked Rita.

« So he was supposed to become like his father. Have a great successful career just like him. His whole life was planned ahead of him. What he should be interested in and what he should study so he could continue in the footsteps of his successful father… »

« And becoming quadriplegic eased the pressure, is that what you mean? » asked Rita, disgusted.

« Yeah, but it’s not just that, you know, » said Jack. « I imagine this guy could never have a dream or a goal or an idea of his own without people somehow relating it back to his father. Whatever he said, people would always comment: ‘Wow, just like his father!’. Or on the contrary, they would say: ‘How can you say such a thing? Your father would never have said something like that!’. »

« Well, » said Rita, « then he should just have moved to another town or even another country where nobody knows his father. Or changed his name or something! »

« Yes, you’re right, » said Jack, « he could have escaped from the comments of colleagues and such. But not from his own family. That’s much harder. They would still know where he moved to. They would still fill his ears with their expectations wherever he went. And anyway, he had probably internalized those expectations long ago - he thought he wanted all those things that in reality others wanted for him. He never had a chance to wonder what he himself really wanted for himself. »

Jack paused, then he continued: « You know, as his father’s son, maybe he wasn’t even all that different from his father. Perhaps it would have helped if he had been COMPLETELY different - there would have been a big fight around the time of puberty where he would at last have stood up to his father and the rest of the family and told them he didn’t want to become the next director of the family business but rather be an artist, and that would have been that. But maybe he was still too similar to his father for something like this to happen. If you go completely against the existing groove, you might end up destroying that groove and making your own mark. But if your path is too close to the groove that is already dug into the ground, you’ll just keep slipping into it and you won’t be able to make a mark of your own. Do you see what I mean? »

« Groove? » asked Rita.

« Okay, forget the groove! » said Jack. « That was just an image! All I meant is that if you’re somewhat like your father but not quite, you might have a harder time finding out who you really are than if you’re completely different from your father. »

« Because if you’re completely different, you’ll destroy everybody’s expectations? » asked Rita.

« Exactly! » said Jack. « If you’re completely different, you’ll destroy everybody’s expectations, and then you’re free to go your own way. While if you’re somewhat similar but not quite, you keep doing more or less what’s expected of you but not quite, and your family will just never quit comparing you to your father instead of letting you live your own life! »

« Okay, okay, » said Rita, « I think I got it! So you think this guy was in the latter case - not different enough from his father to settle the matter once and for all, but not identical enough to be content to just stand in his shadow either. And that’s why he was so miserable that he tried to kill himself! »

« Exactly! » said Jack.

« But why would he be happy now? » asked Rita. « That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me! »

« Well, » said Jack, « because now there aren’t any expectations anymore! His family has given up on him! So now he can at last just be himself! »

« But his family haven’t given up on him! » exclaimed Rita. « They come and visit him regularly! They even seem quite the loving kind! »

« Okay, okay… » admitted Jack. « Maybe my theory is wrong… »

Then, after a pause, he said: « But maybe my theory still isn’t wrong! On the day of the suicide attempt, he killed the young man he was supposed to be! What was left… »

« They love him as he is now, I tell you! » said Rita.

« Yes, » said Jack, « They love him, but they don’t expect him to be like his father anymore. They love what is left of him. And what is left of him is just his true self. The rest - all the dreams they had for him, all the expectations - all that was destroyed through the suicide attempt. So now he is happier than before because he can at last be himself! »

« But if they love him for what he really is now, surely they could have loved him for what he really was before too, » said Rita.

« Yeah, » said Jack, « but they weren’t forced to acknowledge who he really was. While now that all the dreams and expectations are shattered, there just really isn’t anything else left. »

After a short silence he added: « Perhaps they just came to visit him in the hospital out of a sense of obligation at first. Perhaps their son was dead to them now that he was a cripple who would never become like his father. But then they realized that this cripple still had something to offer. Something they would never have expected. Better this than nothing at all, right? Better this than just a vegetable, right? So for the first time in his life they were open to who he really is! »

« Okay, » said Rita. « Maybe you’re right, and that’s why he’s happy now, while earlier, before he was a cripple, he just couldn’t find happiness… »

They rode on silently for a while again and finally Rita said: « You know what? Your theory isn’t completely crazy, actually! And I like it better than the other one about the ‘challenge’! »

Jack blushed a little. He hoped Rita didn’t see it.

And me the ghost, following this whole conversation, I was disappointed - they had nicely dodged the fundamental question once again, namely: what’s the point of all that? What’s the point of being happy, of feeling accepted and so on? What’s the point of experiencing all that? In short - what’s the point of life?

Rita and Jack and their horses had practically reached the top of the hill. The path flattened out. The mellow Spring sun had turned quite hot and Jack felt sweaty. He wished for a fresh wind gust! Now would be a good time for a bit of trotting, wouldn’t it? Maybe even for a little canter…

But Rita didn’t seem to think of that and Jack didn’t dare to suggest it. He looked into the distance and fantasized about having a flying horse, a Pegasus! They would take off from this hilltop now and soar above the fields in a stiff breeze!

From up here you could look down at the village and beyond that at the hospital - with its big red parasol on its terrace - on the slope of the next hill.

In the opposite direction you could see a bare, almost hemispherical hill with a single tree on its top. That looked kind of neat, like a landscape feature in a model railroad layout… In the fantasy world of this model railway, such a hilltop would represent a destination for weekenders. There would even be a little train station at the foot of it just for this purpose.

Jack fantasized a bit about how neat the world would be if it was really like a model railroad layout… Then he told Rita: « That’s a funny-looking hill over there, with that single tree on top! »

« We call it the gallows’ hill, » said Rita.

Jack hadn’t thought of it that way.

Without another word, Rita urged her horse forward and trotted away. Jack followed suit and was glad for the fresh air as they moved faster.

« Ready for a little canter? » Rita called back.

« Yeah, sure! » Jack answered.

« Okay, let’s go! » Rita called back. « But stay behind me - I don’t want the horses to start a race! »

« Sure! » answered Jack and off they cantered.

Staying behind was easier said than done. As soon as Alaska had started cantering, she inched forward towards the horse ahead of her. As soon as she saw her chance, she would overtake, that was clear.

Alaska went faster and faster, her hooves thundering. No doubt Kendu heard those thundering hooves behind him and started going faster too. If Alaska tried to overtake, Kendu wouldn’t let her, they would start a race head to head, and probably Rita wouldn’t be able to stop him anymore either. Both horses would carry off their riders till kingdom come! Or more likely till the next big road where they would all end up in front of the grill of a passing truck!

So Jack had fucked up once again - he had managed to make everyone believe that he could ride a horse, even the Niederhäusers who were professionals…, while in reality he fucking couldn’t! He had passed entrance exams to medical school, as if he were fit to become a doctor, while he couldn’t even fucking remember how to fold a sheet to make a bed! He might as well loosen the reins completely and let the horse do its thing, hoping it would tire out before reaching a busy road!

But then a little voice in the back of his mind said something different: you brought in three thugs single-handedly! You seduced one of the nurses and fucking fucked her, and she fucking enjoyed it well enough to be here with you on an excursion today! So you fucking aren’t such a loser and you’ll show this fucking horse that you’re the fucking boss!

Jack saw clods of earth flying past - they came from Alaska’s hooves. One such clod even hit the underside of his foot hard enough that he could feel it through the sole of his shoe!

Okay, this was enough! Pulling on the reins like an idiot wasn’t going to do the trick, he knew that. You can’t win over a horse through brute strength, because a horse will always be stronger than you. On the other hand, the reins were connected to a bit the horse held in its sensitive mouth. As a rider, you might not be able to overpower a horse, but you can still annoy it pretty much.

So that’s what he did - he leaned well back in the saddle (even though at speed you would much rather feel like leaning forward, huddling up and shrinking into a crouch to protect yourself, but that would only free the horse’s hindquarter from your weight even more, encouraging it to go even faster!), he said « Hooooooooo! » in a deep voice to make sure the horse knew what he wanted, and then he pulled with all his might! But not on both reins at once, since he knew he wasn’t going to win that way. He pulled on one side first, and as soon as Alaska gave in to the pull by turning her head (but still galloping, albeit in a twisted position), he gave a yank on the other side!

Was she going to stop or was she going to dance on the spot, buckling her back like a rodeo horse to throw Jack off?

Well, apparently she was too surprised by Jack’s sudden intervention to think of playing the rodeo horse and she really stopped.

Jack hoped nobody had seen him stop his horse in the midst of a gallop like this, because it was certainly brutal. A good rider wouldn’t have let things get out of hand in the first place and would have kept the canter under control at a nice, comfortable and easy-going speed.

But once things were out of control, you had to crack down hard, or else the horse would never respect you again. Jack knew that instinctively, so that’s what he had done.

Rita was still cantering ahead of them. Maybe she hadn’t heard Jack’s « Hoooooo! » and was unaware of what had just happened behind her…

So now what?

Jack patted Alaska on the neck and told her she was a good horse. And before she could get too nervous about seeing the other horse happily cantering ahead of her, he leaned back once again and gave her the order to canter too.

Predictably, she went off like a rocket!

Well, she had been a good girl, she deserved a bit of leniency now, so Jack stood up in his stirrups and leaned well forward above her neck, the reins not too tight and fluttering in the wind!

Rita had reached the top of the hill. She slowed down and looked back. Jack was far behind her, but he was galloping like a madman to catch up. Rita couldn’t imagine what had happened!

She stopped and turned Kendu around to watch Jack and Alaska coming. Kendu was getting nervous with Alaska galloping towards him at top speed like this. He lifted his head and whinnied!

Alaska came closer and closer, foam flying from her mouth, but then Jack started reining her in, slowed her to a trot and finally to a walk…

« What on Earth happened to you? » asked Rita.

« Sorry, I lost a stirrup and had to stop…, » lied Jack, catching his breath.

« You should have called out! » said Rita, « and we would have stopped together! »

« Yeah, » said Jack breathlessly, « but I was afraid calling out would just spur Alaska on, while I needed her to stop… »

Jack looked a bit pale, Rita noted. But he had still managed to stop his horse while another horse was cantering in front of it. Horses like to keep up with each other and hate to be left behind, so this had been quite a feat! And what’s more, he hadn’t done that with just any horse, but with spirited Alaska!

Nevertheless she wasn’t going to burst in song over this, even if she really was impressed - after all, this was the same clumsy Jack who never seemed to remember the folds when making a bed! On the ward, she was still his boss, so she didn’t want him to become too full of himself!

They rode on in silence for a while. Later they trotted some more and then Rita asked Jack if he was fine with his stirrups now and if it would be okay to do another canter. Jack said it would, so they did. And this time Jack stayed in control. He had shown Alaska he was boss and she respected him now. It’s natural for horses to have a boss. Even wild horses who have never had any contact with human beings still have a boss (unless they are the boss themselves, of course!), because they form a hierarchy naturally - it’s in their blood.

Eventually it was time to turn back towards the homestead, and they didn’t trot or canter anymore. It’s better not to hurry when you’re on the way home with a horse, because it might be hungry and in a hurry to get home to its manger, and that could add up to too much hurry! Besides, horses should also have time to cool down before being led to their stalls. It wouldn’t be good for them to stand all still in there while still being sweaty - they could catch a cold!

When they reached the stables, they dismounted, unsaddled the horses, brushed them down, cleaned out their hooves and eventually led them to their stalls. Then they went to find Mr. or Mrs. Niederhäuser in the house to pay for the excursion.

Mrs. Niederhäuser met them at the door, asked them in, asked them how the ride had gone and told them they could come again any time, provided the horses were available.

She shook both their hands and they were off again. Rita turned to Jack and said a bit shyly: « I have to do some cleaning up and washing and such, but you could come to my place for tea later, if that’s okay with you? »

« Sure, » said Jack, « what time would be good for you? »

« Around four o’clock? » Rita suggested, hoping she would have cleaned up her place by then.

« Perfect! » said Jack.

« Do you still remember where I live? Will you find it again? »

« Yes, I think so… » said Jack, but she reminded him of the street-name and house-number anyway, just in case.

So then they parted ways. Rita took the bus to her place, and Jack walked back up to the hospital where he had his room.

He took a shower, relaxed a bit on his bed, then dressed up nicer than he had been for the horse-riding excursion. On a sudden impulse, he decided to buy some flowers for Rita. It wasn’t terribly hard to find a flower-shop in Riggisberg - he asked at the reception of the hospital and the lady there explained very kindly that there was a small flower-shop on a side-street behind the bank. The hard part was how he would take the bouquet with him on the motorbike. It certainly wouldn’t fit into the top-case without bending, and he wasn’t going to take his huge backpack either (in which the flowers might still get messed up anyway). In the end he decided he could slip the bouquet into the collar of his motorbike-jacket along his back, with the heads of the flowers looking out at the nape of his neck… He hoped that would work!

The flower-shop was small and the inside looked a bit like an artist’s atelier or something. There was handicraft furniture with a lot of flowers in buckets waiting to be bought - no ready-made bouquets that Jack could just pick up and bring to the checkout! But the lady there was very nice and helpful. She gently asked Jack what sort of occasion he wanted the flowers for without being too indiscreet, and in the end they settled for some red roses amid some other flowers and a fir-tree branch or two to make it all look harmonious. She packed it all up nicely and securely (though Jack didn’t explain his plan to carry it stuck in the collar of his jacket!), and when she finally named a price, it had added up to quite a sum!

Well, what had Jack expected? This wasn’t a ready-made bouquet from a supermarket, but a custom-made bouquet done up by a professional florist! So he took out his money and paid good-heartedly, thanking the florist profusely before leaving the shop.

Slipping the bouquet into the collar of his jacket wasn’t as easy as he had imagined, especially since some of the roses had thorns you could feel even through the thick layer of packing paper in which the bouquet had so expertly been wrapped up! In the end he managed and decided now really wouldn’t be a good time to slip with his motorbike and fall on his back!

He arrived at Rita’s place a bit early, but by the time he had parked his bike, fastened the helmet to it and gently, gently slipped the bouquet out from the back of his jacket without tearing or twisting or squashing it, then bending down to look at his face in the rearview mirror a couple of times to see if his hair wasn’t too badly undone by the helmet he had worn…, it wasn’t too early anymore to go and ring at her door!

He felt very self-conscious walking down the corridor with the bouquet in his hands. Luckily Rita opened the door at the first ring before the heart-thumps in his chest that seemed to rise to his neck became too unbearable.

« Hello, here I am! » he said. « And I brought you this! » and he held out the bouquet.

« Oh, how sweet of you! » exclaimed Rita and took the bouquet happily, sending waves of relief through Jack’s body (he had never offered a bouquet to anyone before - except maybe to his grandmother once or something… - and hadn’t been too sure this was the right thing to do)!

Rita had changed too, of course. She was wearing some nicer trousers and a blouse, and maybe even a touch of makeup, but no sexy skirt or anything like that, Jack was saddened to note…

Rita found a big jug that would have to do as a vase, unwrapped the bouquet and set it in the jug, spreading out and rearranging the flowers automatically. « You’re sweet! » she repeated.

There was some tea, as promised, and some cake. They sat down at the rickety table to eat and drink it.

« You’re so full of surprises! » Rita said. « First it turns out you play the piano, then that you can ride horses as well - and besides you also ride a motorbike… What else can you do? »

« Oh well, » said Jack laughing, « I know a bit about medicine as well… Or in any case I’m learning! »

« Do you have any brothers or sisters? » Rita asked.

« One brother, a twin-brother, actually… An identical twin - he looks just like me! »

« Really! » exclaimed Rita. « And what does he do? »

« He studies law… » said Jack, though he wasn’t sure Joe was really still studying law at this point, actually. He had started various things and then given up, and in between he had done some odd jobs like working in a fast food restaurant and some other things Jack didn’t even know about. It was hard to keep track of what his brother was doing nowadays!

« Oh, » said Rita who had only heard the part about Joe studying law and not all the rest of Jack’s thoughts (about what Joe might really be doing nowadays…), « you really are an intellectual family! »

« Do you think that kind of thing runs in families? » asked Jack earnestly.

« Oh definitely, » said Rita. « Nobody in my family ever went to university. That’s not to say we aren’t doing well or what, but it’s a different world… »

Jack was a bit at a loss about what to say to this. Finally he said: « You know what they say about architects? There are two kinds of architects, at least here in Switzerland: those who studied architecture at university, and those who went to a technical school. They say that architects from the technical schools build bridges that hold up. They couldn’t explain how they hold up, but they do. The architects from university, on the other hand, build bridges that collapse. Being academics, they can always explain what went wrong and why they collapsed, but collapse they do! »

Rita laughed dutifully. It was nice of Jack to bring up a joke like this, of course, but…

« There is some truth in it, you know, » said Jack, « university doesn’t necessarily prepare you for real life as it should. That’s why there were those initiatives to send students off to do some practicals like the one I’m doing here. And as you can see, I’m really not doing so well… »

« You’re doing fine! » said Rita warmly, laying her hand on Jack’s. « And you’re not such an out-of-touch student as you let on! You have plenty of practical skills too! Like horse-riding! »

« Yeah, » said Jack, smiling too now. « And I have a motorbike! That’s not exactly a lofty, intellectual thing either! »

« But it sure is a lot of fun! » said Rita.

Jack hadn’t looked at it that way. He owned a motorbike because his parents wouldn’t pay him a car…

« And I was going to ask you, » Rita went on, « if you would take me up the Gurnigel? I know it could be done on foot as well, but I never had the courage to do it. And it would be more fun by bike! »

« Why, sure! » said Jack, a bit surprised. That explained why Rita was wearing trousers, he thought to himself. She had been planning on asking Jack to take her up the Gurnigel all along!

So they put away the tea things and then left the house together. Rita was more excited than she would let on. To Jack it felt a bit incongruous that his having a motorbike rather than a car would actually be an attraction rather than a handicap!

They sat on the bike and Jack drove off. They drove into the village and then towards Gurnigel street, and after that they just followed the signs. The road twisted and turned a bit, and at first Jack felt Rita counterbalancing. But by and by she seemed to realize she just had to hold on tight to Jack’s back and lean to one side or the other together with him and the bike. By the time the first needle-sharp turns came, she was quite comfortable with leaning, even though she felt her stomach rise to her throat when it seemed her knee was about to scrape the road (which of course it wasn’t really - it was just an impression)!

They reached the top of the Gurnigel pass and had another cup of tea in the restaurant up there, admiring the view.

« Wow, I’m glad I asked you to take me up here! » said Rita. « By car I just get sick in the curves, but with the bike it’s different - you kind of swing through the curves, you take them actively! »

Jack was about to explain the physics involved, but wisely decided against it.

« Yes, » he said, « driving a motorbike is very different from a car! You really FEEL the road, you feel the dampness and coolness when you rush through a tunnel, you smell the fields on the side of the road, or the rain coming… In a car, on the other hand, you’re locked up in a little box and don’t experience any of that… »

« Yes, » said Rita, her eyes shining, « the motorbike-experience is much more immersive - that’s the word, I think! In that sense it’s a bit like horse-riding! »

« That’s right! » said Jack, although he had never looked at it that way.

« You know, when you go horse-riding by yourself and it’s just you and the horse, you get to see a lot of wild animals! The smell of the horse is so strong that they don’t smell the human on top. I’ve seen deer from really close, watching us go by, completely unaware of my presence, it seemed… foxes as well, sometimes a hare… It’s fascinating, all these animals we share our world with and that we normally never see! »

Jack’s riding experiences were mostly limited to the riding hall. He had rarely ridden outside, and when he had, it had been in noisy groups of chatting and laughing riding school pupils - all that human-made racket would definitely warn off deers and hares and foxes, so he had never seen any!

Rita, on the other hand, was a really passionate horse-rider! She was advanced enough that she could go on her own, just herself and the horse, and undoubtedly she also went at the crack of dawn sometimes, when wild animals were up and about! Jack felt a bit envious - she had never gone to university and undoubtedly had never heard about Maxwell’s equations, but she had experienced things that Jack, as a student living with his parents, would never have been able to afford…

« You look thoughtful, » Rita commented.

« Yes, sorry, » said Jack, and he decided to be honest about his thoughts: « I was just thinking it would be cool to go riding with your own horse like that, whenever you feel like it! Up till today, I had never had the chance to go riding outside of a riding school class, you know? »

« But you’re a really good rider! » Rita said warmly. « Anybody would be happy to entrust their horse to you! You can find some arrangement like I did with the Niederhäusers! »

« That would be a bit hard where I live, » said Jack truthfully. « You need to live closer to the countryside for that… »

Now it was Rita’s turn not to know what to say. Should she say they would surely go horse-riding together again some time? But where would they do that? He wasn’t going to stay in Riggisberg. He would go back to Lausanne to his studies, and she would eventually go back to Austria…

« Now you’re the one looking thoughtful, » commented Jack.

« Yes… » she admitted, and she too decided to be truthful about her thoughts: « I was just thinking that it’s a pity we’re not both staying longer in Riggisberg, going horse-riding on our days off, and… » she trailed off.

« I thought the nurses would all be happy to see the last of me! » said Jack.

« Don’t say that, » answered Rita and laid her hand on Jack’s once again.

Then she said: « I think we should drive back down now, before it gets dark or what! »

« I have a headlamp on my bike, you know! » answered Jack.

« Sure, » said Rita, « but it will be nicer to drive in daylight! »

Jack agreed and they left the restaurant and got back on the bike.

The drive down was much scarier than the drive up. Rita felt like screaming - it was like a rollercoaster!

When they got back to her place, she was all flushed in the face.

She said: « That was a lovely outing! I guess we’re all done with tea now, but what about an orange juice or something? »

« Yes, that would be nice! » answered Jack and they went back to Rita’s small flat together. As soon as they were inside, she drew him to her and kissed him. Then they moved towards the bed, and as they went on kissing, she let Jack unbutton her blouse, just the top at first so he could kiss her neck and chest as well, but then the rest too…

There wasn’t the same excitement of discovery as the first time, but there was somehow more lust, at least on Rita’s part. Maybe it was the rollercoaster ride on the bike that had done that to her - in any case her body suddenly felt starved for his!

He didn’t disappoint her - he took her with feverish passion!

And soon she climaxed, unable to hold herself back!

He hadn’t climaxed himself yet, but he turned gentle and loving nevertheless, for which she was very grateful. They rested in each other’s arms tenderly for a long time, and when he had surely lost all hope of getting his own climax, she decided to take care of him too and spoiled him properly. It felt right to do that and it even gave her pleasure to please him like this just for his own sake. A whorish pleasure, she wondered? No, she decided. It would only have been whorish if he had somehow expected her to do this and she had relented. But he hadn’t expected it at all!

Afterwards they lay in each other’s arms a little longer, but soon Jack was quite happy to get up again. Men are like that - once they’ve come, they’re quite happy to get up and take a shower and get dressed and all that. Sometimes this feels wrong to the woman, but Rita felt quite fulfilled by this point, so she didn’t mind at all.

It was early evening by this time, and Rita still had to prepare the summary about one of the patients she had to present to the visiting doctor the next day… She told Jack as much as they were drinking the orange juice she had promised him earlier. He asked her if he could help her, but she declined. He didn’t insist and said he’d better get back to the hospital then and try to study some histology.

He gave her a little kiss under the doorframe and left.

She hadn’t really wanted him to stay overnight, but she still felt a pang of loneliness when he was gone. She wondered whether she was falling in love or what. She decided to resist the feeling.

 

In the next few days, she couldn’t help smiling at Jack warmly ever so often, even at the risk of one of the other nurses seeing it. She also stopped feeling annoyed by his clumsiness and started seeing it as rather endearing.

Jack’s last day in Riggisberg was approaching fast. They wouldn’t have time for another horse-riding excursion, she realized.

She would have liked to meet him on his last evening, but she was going out with a couple of girlfriends that evening and couldn’t easily cancel that. And the next day, the day of Jack’s departure, she was going to work a full shift. But she promised him that she would free herself for a few minutes to come and say goodbye.

And inevitably that day came and she knocked at Jack’s door. He opened up and asked her in.

His big backpack - that he would wear on the motorbike - was standing all packed on the little desk. The bed was unmade and the bedsheets were piled up in a bundle, ready for the cleaning lady to take away. Jack was ready to go.

The day before, which had been his last shift, he had said goodbye to all the patients. Mr. Zbinden had only shaken his head sadly. But he would soon leave the hospital anyway and go back to his family who would take care of him. He was happy to go, especially now that Jack was leaving too, he said. Jack felt moved.

Some of the patients gave Jack a tip, telling him it had been very pleasant with him. They didn’t know he was worthless as a caregiver and that he drove all the nurses up the wall by not remembering the schedule or the folds for making a bed. All they knew was that he sometimes had time to chat with them and that he wasn’t as brisk as the other caregivers and nurses when he brought them to the toilet or washed them or whatever.

Even Mr. Uhler wished him success for his remaining studies, squeezing his hand hard with his own good hand.

Burri was surprised to hear that Jack was leaving, but he told him he would leave too when his foot had healed (stupid foot, shouldn’t have fallen down, stupid Burri), and he would go back to his nursing home. He told Jack he should come and work there later on. Jack said he would see, and that he had to finish his studies first, but Burri repeated several times that he should come and work there afterwards, definitely.

Jack had been moved by this too.

« So, this is it! » said Rita with a sigh.

« Yes, » said Jack, « I said goodbye to all the patients yesterday. I got all moved by some of them. They seemed to have liked me more than I deserved… »

« Yes, » said Rita, « the patients all liked you here! Don’t say you didn’t deserve it! You’re a good person, and you do deserve it! You’ll be a good doctor later on! Never mind what the head-nurse thinks of you! She just hates doctors anyway! »

« It’s nice of you to say that, » said Jack.

« I really mean it, » said Rita. « You’re a good person! » she repeated and hugged Jack. He hugged her back and then they kissed, but Rita wouldn’t let the kiss become too passionate. There wasn’t time and she would have to get back to work before anyone noticed she had slipped away. Drawing away from him, she paused to sniff at his neck (so she would remember his smell later on, she told herself), and a tear came to the corner of one of her eyes.

Unfortunately for her, Jack saw it and said empathically: « Don’t cry! We’ll keep in touch! »

In reality she wasn’t afraid he wouldn’t keep in touch. On the contrary, she knew that SHE was the one who wouldn’t keep in touch. Jack wasn’t the man for her, she knew that. It wasn’t just that he was an academic and she wasn’t. She could have imagined marrying a doctor, but not of his kind. Perhaps a doctor with a more managerial personality. The kind who would eventually manage a hospital or a clinic. But Jack wasn’t going to be that kind of doctor. She knew exactly what kind of doctor he would become - the kind who comes to see the patients, who has nice bedside manners, listens to them and their complaints and then orders exercise for them, or for the volume of their urine to be measured, or whatever, blissfully unaware of how this would be done in practice and the workload it would represent for the ever understaffed and harried nurses…

Jack was capable of building up one-to-one relationships. But anything bigger, requiring logistics and organization, was totally beyond him. And that’s what Rita’s life was about. She was an efficient and organized person. She wouldn’t be able to live with a man like Jack, even though she was - she admitted to herself - very taken in by him. Just like all those patients who were sad to see him leave…

She pulled away from him, but then she leaned forward one last time, gave him one last kiss on the mouth, and before his lips could answer she drew away for good, and with one last whispered goodbye she went out the door and was gone.

For a second or two, Jack stood there like a statue, feeling stunned. What a strange goodbye! Didn’t she believe him when he said he would keep in touch?

Eventually he shrugged off the feeling that he had just been dumped and went back to his packing. In fact his backpack was ready. One last look through the room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, then he fastened the straps of his backpack and shouldered it and went out the door of his room that stopped being his room at that instant. He left the key in the lock and went down to the reception area where he asked to see Mr. Aebi, the personnel manager. The reception lady answered: « Just a moment, I’ll check if he can see you. »

She disappeared through a back door and came back a moment later to say with a smile: « He’s here and he can see you! Just step through the door right here! »

Jack thanked her, knocked on the door and hesitantly opened it since it was such a thick door he wouldn’t have heard any answer even if there had been one.

Mr. Aebi was sitting at his desk. With his calm, deep voice he told Jack to just come in and please sit down.

Jack stepped into the office, shut the door behind him and came to sit down in front of Mr. Aebi’s desk. « Good morning… » he said.

« Yes, good morning! » Mr. Aebi answered. « So your practical is coming to an end… »

« It ended yesterday, I had my last shift yesterday… » Jack corrected.

« Quite, quite, » said Mr. Aebi.

At that moment the door behind him opened and the head-nurse burst into the room. Seeing Jack sitting in front of Mr. Aebi, she said: « Oh, sorry, Mr. Aebi! I didn’t know you had a visitor! » She came to his desk and gave him a piece of paper. He looked at it and said: « Sure, we’ll discuss this later. »

As Mr. Aebi turned his attention back to Jack, the head-nurse, instead of leaving, went to sit down in another chair at the side of the desk. She shook her head in a careless manner, sending her bangs flying.

« Jack finished his practical today, » Mr. Aebi explained to the head-nurse.

« Yesterday, » corrected Jack. « I’m driving home today. »

« So, what was your feeling? Are you satisfied? Did you benefit from it in any way? »

Before he could answer, the head-nurse answered for him: « Nothing changed, really. Jack hasn’t managed to adapt and settle in. We’re all quite… »

Jack interrupted her, and looking Mr. Aebi in the eye, completely ignoring the head-nurse, he answered: « Yes, it was very interesting for me. I witnessed a surgical operation, I got to know the patients… »

Mr. Aebi turned to the head-nurse who was busily chewing on some chewing-gum once again and said: « We are a service provider, after all. He wasn’t much help to us, but if he feels he benefited from his stay here, I think this is a service we provide too, and so… »

« Of course, » said the head-nurse, sportily shaking the bangs out of her eyes once again, « we are happy that he benefited and hope that he really learned something! »

Jack should have felt angry. After all the bums he had wiped, all the messes he had cleaned up, all the shit he had gone through, THEY were the ones who had helped HIM?

But he suddenly decided he should rather feel pity for these two. The tall personnel manager with his big beard and deep voice was middle-aged and surely had a boring wife at home, nothing like the juicy young nurses he had to manage at work but who were sexually off-limits for him!

Jack, on the other hand, had fucked one of those juicy young nurses!

And what about the head-nurse? Her pitiful efforts at looking boyish and young were surely futile - nobody wanted to fuck her anymore, least of all her husband (if she had one) who must surely be tired of her annoying mannerisms!

Unless she was a lesbian, of course. In that case she was definitely the « butch »-kind who was attracted to fresh young girls! And then she would surely gladly have seduced one of the juicy young nurses too, but they were just as off-limits to her as they were to the wise old bearded man next to her!

Jack, on the other hand, had fucked one of those juicy young nurses!

So let these two poor old buggers discuss among themselves how much they had helped him and how little he had contributed to their fine, service-providing hospital! Let them patronize him if that helped them feel better! He was the one to fuck juicy young nurses! They could just look on and pretend they weren’t jealous!

« So here’s the paper I need you to sign, » said Jack, handing a form to Mr. Aebi. « I need it as a proof that I completed this practical. »

Mr. Aebi looked through it with an earnest mien, then he questioningly looked over towards the head-nurse who just shrugged her shoulders. So he signed and stamped it earnestly and handed it back to Jack. In the meantime the telephone rang and the head-nurse answered it as though this were the most natural thing to do (wasn’t this Mr. Aebi’s office rather than hers, Jack wondered?).

« Thank you, » said Jack, starting to get up from his chair.

« Did you hand in the key to your room? » asked Mr. Aebi.

« I left it in the lock, » answered Jack.

« Okay, that should be in order, then, » said Mr. Aebi.

« Well then, thanks again for everything, » said Jack, standing up for good and shouldering his huge backpack. Mr. Aebi politely stood up behind his desk too.

« Goodbye, Mr. Aebi, » said Jack.

« Yes, goodbye, » said Mr. Aebi, « drive carefully! »

« Sure thing! » answered Jack and made for the door.

He felt the head-nurse looking at him, but you could never be sure with those bright, almost transparent eyes.

« Goodbye, » he said specifically to her.

But she didn’t hear him, it seemed. She was engrossed in the phone conversation.

« Yes, goodbye, » answered Mr. Aebi one more time, waiting for Jack to close the door behind him.

Jack almost said goodbye a third time, because shouldn’t there be at least a little wave from the hand on her part as well? But then he just went « bah! » to himself, closed the door and left.

It was a beautiful day outside, perfect for a long motorbike ride! He sat on his bike, arranged the backpack behind him so it would be tight against his back and wouldn’t move in the curves, then he started the engine, gave a few spurts of gas…

Before he clutched in, he looked back at the hospital and specifically at the wall where his window had been. He spotted the window of his former room straight away - it was wide open and the wine-red carpet was hanging over the window-sill. Apparently the cleaning ladies had already taken possession of it and were making it ready for the next trainee or intern or whoever was going to use it. With that reddish carpet hanging over its sill, it looked as though it were sticking its tongue out at him!

« Bah! » said Jack to himself once more, clutched in and drove off.

In spite of the head-nurse hating him and not even saying goodbye (and his former room sticking its tongue out at him like this!), all in all this still hadn’t been a bad practical, he told himself. His parents had been off his back for once - since he had been able to live at the hospital for the duration of the practical - , and he had promptly made use of this new freedom by having an affair with one of the nurses!

And that wasn’t all! He had made a breakthrough in horse-riding, gained a lot of confidence, and yes, he had single-handedly brought in three gangsters as well!

Yes, this practical had definitely been rich in new experiences, even if becoming an excellent caregiver wasn’t part of them… He was appreciated by the patients, though, and that, in the end, was more important than what the nurses thought of him!

There was a sad feeling too, though.

He had promised Rita that he would stay in touch, and he definitely intended to. But even so, he wouldn’t see her again for a long time…

On one hand she was the nurse-he-had-an-affair-with, which made him proud and gave him self-confidence and allowed him to look down on the head-nurse and the personnel manager and not take their condescending manner seriously.

On the other hand, she was Rita-his-one-time-girlfriend. He remembered her warm smile above the tea-cup she had been holding, or how she had snuggled up against him on the motorbike - a very different feeling from how the heavy backpack was stuck to his back now… He remembered her story about her cousin and the world of living plush-animals she had once shared with him… and her description of real wild animals she came across when she went horse-riding on her own…

And all this made him feel like crying!

It was as if there were two sets of feelings about her - there was the pride of having fucked her, felt by his cold-blooded and utterly selfish reptile-heart, and then there was the love and tenderness and yearning felt by his warm-blooded mammalian heart. It was strange how both these sets of feelings could co-exist within him!

Not a dilemma between the head and the heart (he had claimed such a dilemma didn’t even exist at all), but rather a dilemma between different levels of his self. His head still came into the equation, of course - the head is where all these different feelings come together and get synthesized into something rational.

And the rational synthesis of all his feelings was that this hadn’t been a bad practical at all, that he needed to look forward now and concentrate on his studies, because surely he was going to become a great doctor just like Rita had said!

 

Me, the ghost, I decided this was a good time to leave Jack the student and move a couple of decades forward again to where I had left off earlier.

Before doing so, I watched Jack riding his motorbike a while longer, musing on what I had learned about him. This practical had definitely been a turning point for him. Instead of philosophizing about toilet seats and posters of chimpanzees sitting on them, he had now learned that there were better things to do, namely seducing girls! He hadn’t been able to do this earlier because he hadn’t known how to, so philosophizing about toilet seats and making theories about the respective merits of CRT-TVs versus LCD-TVs had been the only way to occupy his mind…

But all this changed when those three thugs broke into the hospital and took Jack as a hostage. This had given Jack the opportunity to become a hero, and this in turn had made one of the nurses take an interest in him. And this had led to a huge boost in self-confidence that was now going to allow him to face his challenges efficiently.

Because there definitely were challenges.

Jack and his brother Joe probably suffered from some form of Asperger-syndrome or something, and this made it very hard for them to pick up and interpret social cues.

Of course nobody ever told them what social cues they had missed and how they should have reacted to them, because nobody is even aware of them, since normal people pick them up and react to them unconsciously and automatically. Rather, Joe and Jack were reproached with details that weren’t even relevant, for example with the folds of the bedsheets they still hadn’t learned to make in the correct order. A normal person might not have learned those folds more quickly either, but a normal person would have known how to show willingness to learn, or how to defuse the tenseness surrounding the fact that they still hadn’t learned. This was the kind of thing Joe and Jack had great difficulties with, and that’s why they kept being accused of not showing enough interest, of not making enough of an effort, of being too aloof and distant.

Joe and Jack were identical twins and had the same problems, but Jack was luckier than Joe - a few lucky twists had boosted Jack’s self-confidence and this had started a virtuous cycle of appearing less aloof (and thus less annoying) to other people, which in turn begat more positive experiences and thus yet more self-confidence.

Joe, on the other hand, had no such luck, and whatever he tried somehow never quite worked out, so that eventually he ended up being declared an invalid and getting an invalid’s pension.

 

Of course, me the ghost, before becoming a ghost, I had had my own problems too. I hadn’t been lucky like Jack. I had been more like Joe. But I had still not become an invalid! I had still graduated from university and eventually become an airline pilot! I was still better than Joe, wasn’t I?

On the other hand, I had killed a plane-load of people… That wasn’t so great either. Joe had become a proper loser, an invalid. But at least he hadn’t harmed anyone else in the process.

So maybe Joe was still better than me, even if he was an invalid. Besides, unlike me, he was still alive, and there was still hope for him that he could somehow still find his way and accomplish something in his life (something more worthwhile than killing three hundred people, I mean…)!

So I decided to keep an open mind and watch what Jack and Joe did or didn’t accomplish two decades after Jack’s practical in Riggisberg.

But first I had a quick look at what the guru from Oregon and his faithful disciple Annie were up to, just out of curiosity.

 

Crossing the Atlantic in a Learjet is quite tedious. There were several stops to fuel up, and a longer stop in Iceland where Annie and her master spent a night in a hotel. It was quite an ordinary hotel, considering that they had landed at the airport of Reykjavik in a private jet...
They took a double-room. That was okay with Annie, because she didn't want to leave her master alone again. But as he was lying there on the double-bed in his “Katchera” cotton underwear, and still wearing his “Kirpan” in its sheath on a belt around his belly, Annie felt both motherly towards him as well as profoundly disappointed. He was just hoping for sex, as any other man in his shoes would (except that he wasn't even wearing any shoes anymore by then). He unsheathed and showed her the Kirpan, the small dagger worn by Sikhs as a symbol of their independence and their willingness to fight any oppressor (whether this oppressor oppresses the Sikhs themselves or any other person of any other race or religion)…
The Master wasn't really a Sikh, of course. He wasn't really a Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or Muslim either. He wasn't really anything, since he was the new prophet, The Chosen One through whom the real truth would shine onto the world at last!
He took elements of different religions and rearranged them, distilling them all into one final truth.
Or that's what Annie had once believed. Now she wondered if he just made a dreadful mess out of half-understood pieces of wisdom that he had taken up at random during his rise to masterdom.
The Kirpan was a beautiful little knife, no doubt about that, curved at its end, inlaid with gold. But Annie reminded herself that the master had stuck it into the body of one of his bodyguards not that long ago.
Yet she wasn't afraid that they would get arrested as murderers or fugitives from justice. The sannyasins back in America would take care of everything and hide any traces of what had happened. They would wonder about the dead bodyguards for sure, but they wouldn't want any secular police to get involved. Perhaps they would try to solve the mystery by themselves, but one word from the Master would be enough to soothe them. He would tell them that all was well, and they would accept this without further questions.
Annie was the one who still had questions. Annie was the one who feared that her master was breaking apart. And she knew he mustn't break apart. He was too important. She felt motherly towards him, but she also knew she would probably eventually have to sacrifice him before he could really break apart. Those were the thoughts that crossed her mind as she held the beautiful Kirpan in her hands.
But it wasn't time yet. So when he angled closer towards her and held out an almost timid hand to caress her arm, she let it happen, and then she let him have the sex he so obviously craved...

In the meantime, Joe had become Jack, and he was sitting in front of his patient John.
“I hear it again,” said John.
“What are you hearing again?” asked Joe in his role as Jack.
“The voice, of course,” said John.
Joe knew perfectly well how he was supposed to react. The next question was programmed: “Are you taking your medication?”
The answer could either be yes or no. If it was yes, Joe would have to increase the dose. If the answer was no, Joe would have to change the medicament for something injectable, so that he could administer it to the patient himself.
Joe understood now why Jack had become so sick of this profession. But he was not Jack. He was Joe. He hadn't been doing this for years and years. He was new and fresh. He thought he might as well try something new and fresh:
“What does it say?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon?” said John, almost as though Joe had said something dirty.
“The voice, what does it say?” asked Joe once again.
For a while John didn't answer.
“Well?” said Joe.
“Bad things...” said John.
“Like what?” asked Joe.
“Bad things! Horrible things! What more do you want to know?”
“I want to know what it says,” said Joe. “Since it's a voice, speaking in words, in sentences, I want you to repeat those words and sentences to me.”
John looked down at his feet, as if he wanted to count his toes or something, even though his feet were locked up in sneakers...
“It tells me that...”
“Yes?” said Joe.
“It tells me that I'm stupid, worthless, a piece of shit,” said John.
“Just like that?” asked Joe.
“Well...”
“When does it tell you that you're stupid, worthless and a piece of shit?” asked Joe.
“When I want to do something but can't,” said John.
“Like what?” asked Joe.
“Like..., like talking to a girl...”
“A girl you would like to try to seduce, for example?” asked Joe.
“Yes,” said John.
“Do you try to talk to her, and the voice interrupts you, telling you that you are stupid, worthless and a piece of shit?”
“No, no, it doesn't interrupt me.”
“So when does the voice start?”
“When I think the girl is pretty, and I would like to talk to her,” said John.
“Do you smile at the girl?” asked Joe.
“No,” said John.
“You don't smile, you don't talk, you don't do anything, but the voice just comes and tells you that you're stupid, worthless and a piece of shit?” asked Joe.
“Yes,” said John, “yes, that's how it is.”
“Do you agree with the voice?” asked Joe.
“I beg your pardon?” said John once again.
“Do you agree with what the voice says,” said Joe patiently, “do you really think you are stupid and worthless and a piece of shit?”
There was silence once again.
“So?” asked Joe.
“What does it matter?” John asked back. “Just make it go away, please.”
“Sure,” answered Joe. “But I'd like you to answer my question, please!”
“Well...,” said John, “I am insane, aren't I? I have a voice in my head!”
“So that means you are stupid, worthless and a piece of shit?” asked Joe.
“Doesn't it?” John asked back.
“What do you think?” asked Joe.
John was becoming fidgety.
“Please answer my question,” said Joe.
“Yeah, it does...” whispered John.
“Explain to me how this makes you stupid, worthless and a piece of shit,” insisted Joe.
“I am fucking insane!” shouted John, suddenly agitated.
“Does the voice tell you that you're insane?” asked Joe.
“No,” said John, “it tells me that I'm stupid, worthless and a piece of shit.”
“Okay,” said Joe, “and you agree with the voice because you're insane.”
John gave him a murderous look: “Yes!” he said.
“And the only reason you're insane is that you have this voice in your head, right?”
John didn't answer.
“What else makes you insane?” asked Joe.
“Just the voice,” said John.
“Okay,” said Joe, “so it's the voice's fault that you're insane, that's what you're saying, right?”
“But the voice isn't real!” John cried out.
“Yet you hear it,” said Joe.
John looked at him incredulously. Then, beginning to stand up, he said: “I think I should leave.”
“Where do you want to go?” asked Joe.
“To go and find a real psychiatrist,” said John.
“Please sit down,” said Joe with authority.
John sat down.
Joe summarized the situation: “The voice tells you that you're stupid, worthless and a piece of shit. But the only reason you're stupid, worthless and a piece of shit is because you have this voice inside your head telling you so. Is that about right?”
“No,” said John.
“Okay,” said Joe, “that's what I'm trying to understand. So why are you stupid, worthless and a piece of shit?”
“Because I'm insane,” said John stubbornly.
“We're turning around in circles,” said Joe.
“Okay,” said John, “I'm not stupid, worthless and a piece of shit, I just need stronger medication, is that right, doctor?”
“We'll see about that,” said Joe.
“What the hell do you want from me?” asked John, exasperated.
“I want to understand,” said Joe.
“There is nothing to understand,” said John. “I have this voice in my head, and I need you to STOP IT!!!”
“Did you ever tell the voice to stop it?” asked Joe.
“I beg your pardon?” asked John.
“Don't keep saying <<I beg your pardon>>,” said Joe, “Just answer my question.”
John flared up: “Isn't it enough that I would have a voice in my head? Do you want me to become even crazier by talking to myself?”
“Let's reenact this,” said Joe, ignoring John's flare-up. “See the hat-stand there? That's the pretty girl. You would like to talk to her, or at least smile at her, but the voice tells you that you're stupid, worthless and a piece of shit, right?”
“That's not all it says,” said John.
“Okay,” said Joe, “what else does it say?”
Silence.
Joe let out a sigh.
“How does it sound, that voice?” asked Joe. “Is it croaky like this: <<you're nothing but a piece of shit!>>, or is it deep and booming like this: <<you are totally worthless, my lad!>>?”
“No,” said John uncomfortably, “not like that. It's more sort of matter-of-fact and authoritative, like the guy reading the news on the radio.”
“Show me,” said Joe.
“I beg your...” began John.
“Yes,” said Joe, “you have my pardon. Please show me the voice!”
“He wants to speak to this girl,” said a voice worthy of a news flash, “but he doesn't dare, which is lucky, because he's stupid, worthless...”
John interrupted himself and his hands squirmed around each other.
“Go on!” ordered Joe.
“...and a piece of shit,” finished John with his normal voice and without conviction.
“And then?” asked Joe.
“What then?” asked John.
“Yes, what then?” repeated Joe, “What happens then?”
“Then I come to see you,” said John.
“I mean before that,” said Joe, “does the voice continue? Does it say more? Or does it just stop with the word <<shit>>?”
“It says more,” said John very uncomfortably.
“Like what?” asked Joe.
“I..., I can't repeat it,” said John.
“Just give me the gist of it,” said Joe.
“It says that this girl could never be interested in me, because I'm ugly, I'm a loser, I never finished my studies, I dishonoured my family...”
“You dishonoured your family?” asked Joe.
“By not finishing my studies,” said John.
“And that's why the girl could never be interested in you?” asked Joe.
“That's what the voice says,” answered John.
“But do you believe that?” asked Joe.
“That's what the fucking voice says!” repeated John angrily.
“I'll take that as a yes,” said Joe.
“What difference does it make anyway?” asked John. “I hear a voice in my head, and that makes me sick, whatever it says!”
Joe ignored him. He sighed, then he said: “Okay, let's reenact this thing, but this time I'll be the voice in your head.”
“I beg your...” began John.
“Yes, you have my pardon,” answered Joe. “So, let's begin: the hat-stand over there is the girl. She is very pretty, and she's looking at you. You could smile at her, maybe even say hello to her, but instead of that the voice starts up in your head, is that about right?”
John said nothing.
“Okay, here comes the voice,” said Joe, and he switched to the news-flash voice John had shown him earlier: “He wants to speak to her, but he doesn't dare, which is lucky, because he's so ugly, she would just turn away, offended that he would even set his eyes upon her. He's a big loser, he never finished his studies, he doesn't deserve to have a girlfriend. He would like to lay his hand on her soft cheek, he would like to follow the curve of her lips with his finger. But he can't touch her, she would never allow it. She would turn away very quickly if he tried to approach her. She would be offended if he even smiled at her, because he's a big piece of shit...”
John was looking at Joe with big eyes, his hands quite still now, mesmerized.
Joe reckoned he was on the right track, so he pushed on: “He's getting angry now. He wants this girl but he can't get her. He wants to grab her face, pull it against his and plant a big, wet kiss on her lips, force his tongue into her mouth...”
John didn't say anything. He was still looking at Joe with big eyes, so Joe felt he had to continue:
“What does he think, a dirty pig like him, that he could force his dirty mouth against her gentle lips? Oh, but he wants more than that! He wants to lay her flat on the ground, helpless, and force his big fat stinky dick between her soft lips...”
“Enough!” cried out John, standing up. Bizarrely, his eyes were moist.
“Okay,” said Joe, “I went a bit too far. Let's start again, and this time you hit back!”
“What do you mean, hit back?” asked John, looking both upset and confused. “You mean I should hit you?”
“I'm <<The Voice>>, remember?” said Joe, “you can't physically hit a voice!”
“So how should I hit back?” asked John.
“Well, you fight its arguments with counter-arguments!” said Joe.
“But the voice doesn't have arguments,” said John, “it just insults me!”
“Well,” said Joe, “it still claimed that you're a loser because you never finished your studies.”
“There's no counter-argument against that,” said John, “because it's true!”
“And what about all those people who never even started any studies? Are they all losers who don't deserve to have a girlfriend?” asked Joe.
John didn't answer.
Joe went on: “I think bricklayers, plumbers and electricians still have girlfriends, even though they never went to university, you know!”
“Not the kind I could introduce to my family, though,” said John sadly.
“To hell with that!” called out Joe. “They get girlfriends and you can have one too! That's what we're working on right now, so are you ready?”
“Ready for what?” asked John slightly bewildered.
“Ready to hit back!” said Joe.
“Well..., but are you sure we have to do this?” John looked at Joe as if he were wondering about Joe's sanity.
“Sure I'm sure, so let's go!” said Joe, and he started talking in the news-flash voice again: “What does he think, looking at that girl like that? Does he think he could have a girlfriend? Him? He's a nobody! He never finished his studies. He never finished anything. He's a loser. What does he think, fantasizing he would ever call a woman <<my love>>? He doesn't deserve any love! He brought shame on the family. It's good enough of everybody to let him live at all. Look at him standing there like a beaten-up puppy! What does he think he's doing here, standing in the same room as this woman, imposing his noxious presence on her like that? Why doesn't he get out of here instead of fouling up the air for everybody else?”
There was no reaction from John. Joe was beginning to run out of ideas, and he felt his sing-song voice was not provocative enough. He decided to turn nastier:
“He imagines how it would feel to put his filthy hands on her golden bare skin! He imagines she would whimper and ask for more while he rides her! Anybody can ride a woman, and every woman loves it! She can't get enough of it! She pulls him towards her, thrusting her pelvis up towards his hungrily, throwing back her head in an agony of pleasure when he penetrates her deeply! Everybody everywhere does it like that! She did it before she came here, she's doing it again as soon as she's out of here, with HER man!”
Well, this just still wasn't nasty enough. John was sitting there quite calmly, saying nothing.
“She's smiling at him, a shiver goes through him. What's he shivering like that? Can't he see she's just pitying him? Look, her eyes caught that other guy! Look how they sparkle now! Look how she's smiling now!”
Still no reaction. What had he been saying before, when John suddenly stood up and cried out: “Enough!”? Something about how he would lay her flat and all that. He had to go that way once again:
“She's standing there, talking and smiling at that other man, a hand on a hip, one long leg curved elegantly outwards, brushing her hair behind her shoulder with a quick flick of her other hand...
He wants to smell the nape of her neck! He wants to pull her top right over her head, he wants to grab her by her hair and twist her head back, back, all the way back and stuff her mouth so that she can only make gurgling sounds!”
“Please...” said John pleadingly. But this was not the reaction Joe wanted from him. Joe wanted him to get angry.
“She would do this for any other man willingly. Look how he confidently twirls his wine in his glass! One more little twirl, and she will go with him! She will lay her hand on his crotch and start whimpering with lust when she feels the bump growing there! But you, what do YOU think? Look at yourself! Your limp little dick hanging between your legs, your twitchy, sweaty hands that don't manage to hold on to anything...”
Joe started pointing at his patient, making facial expressions of disgust mingled with pity. He knew a voice didn't make facial expressions. He was becoming more than just a voice.
“I don't think I need to hear any more of this...” said John getting up once again. “If this is what you call a therapy nowadays, I think you need one yourself. I'm getting out of here...”
“Sit back down, you little shit!” snarled Joe, and he got up too.
John sat down again reflexively.
“It's me who's getting enough of this! Look at this little shit sitting in my practice, whining like a sick puppy! Look at this woman here,” Joe went over to the hat-stand, took it in his arms and started spinning it around, “she dances with me happily, she will dance with anybody, so now try it yourself if you're man enough to catch her!” And coming out of a dizzying swirl, he flung the hat-stand at his patient with enough momentum to knock him out. John only just managed to avoid it and it went crashing on the floor.
Joe charged at his patient right after the hat-stand that had barely missed him: “So, you couldn't even catch her, you miserable piece of shit!”
Now John jumped out of his seat at last and yelled back: “Is that what you call a therapy, man? Hurling hat-stands at your patients? You're crazier than I am!”
“Well,” Joe yelled back, “at least I can get a woman when I want one! I finished my studies, not like you! I have that diploma on my wall over there! I'm a real man, not like you whiny little whelp!”
“Because you think I need a stupid diploma like that to get a woman?” John yelled back. “You think you're a real man because of that stupid piece of paper? Any bricklayer is more of a man than you are! He doesn't make scenes like this just to show he's a man!”
“You bloody well go and get such a piece of paper too, like your old man did, and his old man before him, or else hole yourself up to spare us all your whiny face!”
“Let me show you what I'll do to that stupid paper of yours!” yelled John and made to walk over to the wall where Jack's diploma was hanging. “And the old man and his old man can go back to their graves to eat dirt!”
“Okay, okay, that'll do!” said Joe laughing and held back John's fists in his palms.
John looked at him, bewildered by the laugh that was so totally out of character. “What was all this about?” he asked, not knowing if he should be afraid of this crazy psychiatrist or relieved that the act was over.
“It was great!” said Joe reassuringly.
John smiled uncertainly.
“I loved the bit about how your old man and his old man can go back to their graves to eat dirt!” said Joe.
“I said that?” asked John, feeling a bit giddy.
“Yes,” said Joe, “You did! And I think you should remember that one!”
“Remember it for what?” asked John, almost laughing now.
“It's something to tell <<The Voice>> when it starts up again about how you're a nobody because you don't have a diploma.”
“I don't understand,” said John.
“You tell <<The Voice>> that you don't need such a stupid piece of paper to get a girl, and that your old man and his old man, who both had such papers, can just go back to their graves to eat dirt!”
“When I hear the voice, I should just start talking to myself? But that's crazy!” said John.
“Hearing a voice in your head is crazy anyway, so don't worry about being crazy!” said Joe confidently. “When you hear the voice, excuse yourself politely from whomever is around you, go to the toilet or some other quiet corner, and then hit back at it, just as you did right now!”
“And this will work?” asked John incredulously.
“I guarantee it!” said Joe with absolute confidence.
“So what happens now?” asked John.
“I think for the time being you can go home,” said Joe.
“And what about my medication?” asked John.
“Have you been taking it lately?” asked Joe.
“No,” said John.
“For how long have you been missing out?” asked Joe.
“Oh, for a while...” admitted John.
“Okay,” said Joe, “Then keep on like this. And when the voice bothers you, hit back!”
Joe held out his hand to say goodbye. John took it and held it a bit longer than necessary. “I don't know what exactly I expected when I came here today,” he said, “but it sure wasn't this!”
Since he said it with shiny eyes, Joe took it as a compliment.
“I just thought we'd try something different for a change,” he said, giving John's hand one more shake.
“A change it definitely was!” said John and walked out of the practice. His step was much lighter and springier than it had been when he had come in, a lifetime ago.

Heartened by his success with John, Joe looked through the list of today’s appointments and went through the corresponding patient files. There was a ten-year-old boy named Ethan. He suffered from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) together with ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). He had a prescription for Risperdal and Ritalin that was coming up for renewal.

Now Joe of course remembered all Jack’s simplified explanations about how various psychoactive drugs worked and how there were basically just two big classes of them, or three if you counted the likes of Ritalin. And here was a patient getting Ritalin…, combined with Risperdal, which definitely seemed like a total contradiction! He had always known something like this was going to happen! He would need a long talk with Jack about this!

But for now there was no time for this. He was going to see this patient in a few minutes…

Ethan had come with his mother and Joe asked them both into his consulting room.

« So, how is everything going? » he asked with a broad smile encompassing both mother and child.

« Very, very well! » answered the mother brightly. « Ethan is studying well at school, he has some friends now… Really, we are very, very satisfied with his progress! »

In the meantime, Ethan was just sitting on his chair, looking bored and a bit sour.

« And what do you think? » Joe asked Ethan, turning to the child with a kindly smile. Did Ethan’s mother glance at her son nervously, or did Joe just imagine it?

« Yes, » was all Ethan would say.

Joe pretended to take a few notes while Ethan continued to look bored and his mother sat stock-still and expectant.

Joe looked up slowly, and as gently as he could he asked Ethan’s mother if he could speak with her son alone for a minute.

« Why, of course! » she answered, flustered, fingering the hand-bag in her lap. She shot her son a warning look (this time Joe was sure of it!), got up and left the room.

Even though his mother had left and he was facing the doctor alone, Ethan looked just as bored and sour as before.

« So, Ethan, » said Joe, « tell me what has changed since you’ve started taking those pills. »

« I concentrate better », said Ethan.

« And what do you do in your spare time? » asked Joe.

Ethan, perhaps remembering his mother’s warning look, answered: « I do my homework. »

« I mean your spare time, Ethan », said Joe patiently. « Homework is not spare time. What do you do in your spare time, when your homework is finished. »

« I read up on the other subjects, » said Ethan.

Joe sighed. Had Ethan and his mother rehearsed this, or what?

« No, » said Joe, « I mean when you’re not working for school! »

Ethan looked up at the left corner of the room and Joe could almost sense him focussing inwards into his brain to find what to say. « I play video games » he said finally.

« What kind? » asked Joe.

« Star Wars » answered Ethan.

Unfortunately Joe didn’t know anything about Star Wars. Hell, he didn’t even know who Dark Walker was, or was it Dirt Wader?

Looking at Ethan feeling slightly helpless, he saw Ethan carried a chain with a ring around his neck and he had a sudden inspiration. Wasn’t that the magical ring from « The Lord of the Rings »? Joe hadn’t seen the films (let alone played the video games), but at least he had read the original books by Tolkien!

« Is this Frodo’s ring you’re carrying around your neck? » he asked.

« Bilbo’s ring, » answered Ethan. « Well, first it was Gollum’s, then Bilbo’s and then Frodo’s… »

« But whose was it originally? » asked Joe.

Ethan looked at Joe as though Joe were an idiot. « Sauron’s, of course! »

« Can you explain to me what Sauron was doing with this ring? » asked Joe.

Ethan turned up his eyes and shook his head in contempt. This doctor was really a total idiot!

« It’s a ring of power! Sauron MADE it! »

« Okay, okay, » said Joe soothingly. « Sauron made it, and then what happened? »

« Sauron lost it, Gollum found it, Bilbo won it from Gollum and gave it to Frodo. »

« And now you’re carrying it, » said Joe. « Are you like Frodo? »

« Bilbo, » said Ethan.

« You’re like Bilbo? » asked Joe.

« Yes, like Bilbo when he went to get the mountain back with the dwarves. »

« Aha, » said Joe, not knowing what to say. This conversation really wasn’t going anywhere. What a frustrating kid!

« And in what sense are you like Bilbo? » asked Joe.

« Well, » said Ethan, « I’m wearing his ring. » Then, as an afterthought he added: « A copy of his ring. » It was better to make this perfectly clear for this doctor who obviously wasn’t quite right in the head.

« You know, » said Joe, trying again, « when Tolkien wrote the books about The Lord of The Rings there was someone a bit like Sauron. It was Hitler. »

« Hitler and Stalin signed a pact in 1939, » said Ethan promptly.

« Hitler was like Sauron for Tolkien, » Joe tried again. « Is there someone like Sauron for you too? »

Ethan looked at Joe stupidly. Finally he said: « Sauron isn’t even a person! »

« Okay, » said Joe, « is there something rather than somebody like Sauron for you? »

« Sauron is like a fiery eye on a tower-top, » said Ethan. He was trying to explain to the soft-headed doctor why there wasn’t anybody or anything like Sauron for him, Joe guessed.

« Sauron was evil » said Joe. « What is evil for you in your life? »

« You mean when someone is mean to me? » asked Ethan.

Finally they were getting somewhere! « Yes, » said Joe, « that’s what I mean! »

« Well, » said Ethan, thinking, « once Nolan kicked me under the table, but the teacher saw it and told him not to do it again. »

« Are you friends with Nolan? » asked Joe.

« No, but I’m friends with Julian, » said Ethan.

« Do you meet him at school? »

« Yes, and sometimes also at home. He comes to my place and we play video games! »

And so we’re back with the fucking video games, Joe helplessly thought to himself!

« And what else do you do? » asked Joe.

« My mother gives us a collation, » said Ethan.

« What kind of collation? » asked Joe.

« Apples and pears, » answered Ethan.

« Do you like that? »

« It’s okay, but cookies are better! »

« Which cookies do you like best? »

« Those with the chocolate chips! »

« So why doesn’t your mother give you such cookies as a collation? »

Ethan shrugged. « She does sometimes, but not too often. »

« Why not too often? »

« Because it’s not healthy! »

« And does this make you angry? »

This seemed to be a difficult question. But after a while Ethan finally said : « No. »

« Why don’t you get angry? » asked Joe.

« We just eat them in a hurry and then we go back to the video game! »

« And what do you talk about during the collation? »

« Well, there was this time when Saruman caught both wands and he sent Gandalf flying up to the ceiling like this: woooosh! »

« And why did Saruman do that? »

« Well, he was good at first and then he turned bad. »

« Why did he turn bad? »

Ethan shrugged his shoulders.

« Saruman was a great magician like Gandalf, » said Joe patiently. « Why did he suddenly turn bad? »

Ethan shrugged his shoulders again. It seemed he couldn’t care less. He was probably more interested in how he had made Gandalf go « wooosh! ».

Joe gave the answer himself, hoping it would inspire Ethan somehow to say more: « Saruman was a great magician, and he believed only great magicians like himself could defeat Sauron. He was very arrogant. And when he saw that he and the other magicians weren’t strong enough to defeat Sauron, he lost hope and so he changed sides. Gandalf was different. Gandalf believed that even the smallest and most insignificant creatures like Hobbits could help to defeat Sauron. So Gandalf didn’t despair like Saruman and kept hope till the end. »

« Can I go now? » asked Ethan.

« Are you more like Gandalf or more like Saruman? » asked Joe.

« Saruman is a bad guy, » explained Ethan, « so you can’t play him. You can only play AGAINST him. »

« Okay, you can go now, » said Joe, giving up. « Call in your mother, please! »

And as Ethan’s mother was facing him again while Ethan was going « wooosh-wooosh! » in the waiting-room with the door between the two rooms left ajar, Joe filled out the prescription renewal form.

 

Annie and her master had arrived in Geneva, and they were now looking for some real-estate. The idea was to start a new prayer and meditation center. Annie only half liked it. It seemed her master wasn't prepared to really question himself. This wasn't a spiritual discovery-trip as Annie had originally hoped when they escaped from his ashram in Oregon together. No, he was going to do the same here as he had done there – start a new ashram.
Annie questioned the wisdom of this. She even started questioning her master's whole philosophy. This whole thing about giving up one's ego... Yes, the Master had said it again and again – the ego is what locks us up in ourselves. The ego is what separates us from each other and from God. Kill the ego, and God's grace will descend upon you...
Annie was beginning to see several problems with this idea. First of all, if the ego is such a bad thing, why does it exist at all?
Some primitive animal, some kind of reptile, let's say a turtle, probably wouldn't have an ego. It wouldn't need an ego to separate itself from other animals, because it would live alone anyway. It wouldn't need to delimit self against non-self. You could say it was all ego, or no ego at all.
And what about social insects like ants or bees? They certainly wouldn't have an ego. They do whatever they do for the colony, not for personal gain. Perhaps they have a collective ego.
And what about humans? Should they ideally do whatever they do for human society at large rather than for their own personal gain? Is that how things would be in an ideal world? And is it the ego of each one of us that is stopping this ideal world from being realized?
Annie wasn't so sure. Each and every individual human being has an amazing brain, much more amazing than an ant's or bee's brain, amazing though insects' brains may be in their own right.
But when you put many humans together and force them to work things out together, sometimes less-than-amazing compromises are reached. Too many cooks spoil the soup. So maybe it's good if each one of us keeps and defends his own personal ideas. And maybe you need an ego for that. Well not if you're a turtle which lives on its own anyway. But when you're a social being like a human, whose personal ideas could easily drown in the soup of conventions of his or her society, then you need an ego to defend your own personal ideas. That's what the ego is for, so why demonize it?
Maybe you could really become more open to God's grace by loosening up your ego at times, but not all the time.
Besides, what alternative to the ego was the Master offering? Total obedience? Wasn't he just making his disciples into zombies? Instead of being trapped by their ego, they were now trapped by their blind obedience and just as unable to follow their heart as they had been before!

 

Jack and Joe were once again sitting on Jack's balcony, sipping a glass of white wine. Everything was as it had been many times earlier too, except that Jack was Joe and Joe was Jack. They had exchanged their roles. They had gone on a holiday together for three weeks, just the two of them with Daisy the dog. They said they needed this time together, just the two brothers, the two twins. And when they came back, Jack was Joe and Joe was Jack. Jack had hardly eaten during the three weeks. It was a crash-diet if ever there was one. But he fit into Joe's clothes perfectly now, although he hadn't managed to get Joe's muscle in such a short time. Joe hadn't fattened up too much. Jack told him it wasn't necessary – people are quick to pick up on negative changes and much slower to notice positive ones. At most, Joe (in his new role as Jack) would get a compliment or two about looking fitter. But nobody would doubt that he was really Jack.
Of course, Joe had to go to the hairdresser's and learn how to knot a tie. Then he just put on Jack's clothes and he became Jack quite easily.
Nevertheless, he was quite anxious when he came back from the holidays in Jack's elegant and somewhat baggy clothes and then stood in front of his brother's wife in Jack’s shoes for the first time. She gave him a cursory kiss on the cheek, and another one to the real Jack too.
“You look good!” was all she told him.
Benjamin was jumping and running around them all excitedly. He was too excited to remark on any identity-swap or anything like that either.
When Jack - in his role as Joe - left, the real Joe was anxious his dog Daisy wouldn't go with him. Daisy certainly wasn't fooled by the identity-swap! But she didn't mind going with Jack when he called her nicely, and trotted after him to Joe's car into which she settled as naturally as ever. Maybe she was a bit surprised when Jack sat down at the wheel instead of her master. But before she could manifest that this was wrong, Jack quickly drove away, leaving Joe with his wife...
Of course they had discussed and rehearsed everything endlessly during the holidays. Joe knew about every move Jack usually made when he went to bed, who went into the bathroom first, who undressed where and how, who climbed into bed first and on which side of the bed... Nothing could go wrong, really. Only the bedside lamp was still on when Joe, in his role as Jack, slipped into the bed next to Blanca.
So far, no mistakes had been made. She would switch off the bedside lamp, and they would fall asleep gradually.
Lately, Joe had landed in bed with a new woman more often than Jack. Of course this particular woman didn't know that Joe was a new man. To her, he was her husband Jack. But she was definitely a new woman for him. The first time with a new woman was always a bit scary for Joe. It was never really clear what she expected from him and what she would accept from him.
Often enough it had been more or less like this: it was too late for her to go home because they had chatted for so long, and he had of course told her to sleep here, no problem. He would leave the bed to her and sleep on the floor. And she of course told him there was no need for him to sleep on the floor, the bed was big enough.
Usually Joe didn't try anything the same evening. But on waking up the next morning, he would comment on how beautiful she looked in the morning light or something like that and lightly follow the curve of an eyebrow with his finger or something like that. If she didn't seem to mind, he would explore her face some more with his finger, brush her hair from her brow with his whole hand to see her eyes better, and if she still didn't seem to mind, his hand would brush over her brow once more, and her eyes and nose and cheeks...
After a while he would caress her arms as well, play with her hands, lay a hand on her tummy, feel her hips, find the bare skin under the seam of her T-shirt...
With Blanca it wasn't so hard. She leaned on her elbow and looked down at him as he was lying there and asked him: “So, how was that holiday with your brother? It'd been a long time you hadn't spent so much time together!”
“Yes,” said Joe, “it was good! Somehow you end up talking about other things after spending the whole day together. Things you don't talk about otherwise!”
“I can imagine,” said Blanca with a tone that seemed slightly cynical and slightly sad as well. “When's the last time we spent a whole day together, you and me, really together?”
Joe reached up and touched her face. “You're right,” he said, “Benjamin is getting big enough that we could leave him with his uncle for a few days...”
Joe was a bit afraid of what Blanca would say to this, but she just said: “He would be delighted! He gets on best with Joe, better than with me any day! I just don't know how delighted Joe would be. He seems to be very busy with all his acquaintances and always seems happy to leave in the evening...”
“I'll ask him,” promised Joe in his role as Jack, caressing Blanca's face.
After that he caressed her arms, her hips, found his way under the seam of her pajama-top...
Her breathing became heavier, and he felt it was time to try and kiss her. She didn't object to that at all. Nor did she object when he started undressing her purposefully.
Before he knew what he was doing exactly, they were making love passionately.
Joe knew that Jack and Blanca hadn't made love for ages. The flame had somehow gone out. It was part of the reason Jack had wanted to change places with Joe. That, and also so he would see Benjamin more often. Indeed, Joe often babysat Benjamin, while Jack only saw him in the evenings when he got home.
Joe didn't know what the problem with Blanca could have been. She responded to him eagerly. Afterwards, with her head lying on Joe's bare and perspiring chest, which was quite a bit more muscular than Jack's, she whispered: “I have been waiting for this for so long!”
He said truthfully: “Me too...”
She knew, of course, that he was Joe and not Jack. How could she not know after this?
“Oh Jack!” she sighed, proving him wrong.

So Jack and Joe were once again sitting on Jack's balcony, which in some sense was Joe's balcony now. Blanca was out of earshot and they felt safe to ask each other how it was going with their new roles. Joe was afraid Jack would ask how it was going with Blanca. But Jack either really didn't care, or he was discreet enough not to ask.
Instead he asked: « And how’s it going with the patients? »

« Oh, fine, » said Joe. « Though I do have an important question! »

« I’m all ears! » said Jack.

So Joe told him about the boy, Ethan. The one who took both Risperdal and Ritalin.

« And what’s the problem with that? » asked Jack.

Joe wondered if he was pulling his leg. « Come on, you know perfectly well what the problem is with that! According to your explanation about psychoactive drugs, there are basically just two kinds, or rather three if we count stuff like Ritalin. And this boy precisely takes Ritalin, TOGETHER with Risperdal. Ritalin enhances the dopamine-communication in the brain, while Risperdal diminishes it. How does that fit together? »

« Well, » said Jack patiently, « Ritalin is approved for ADHD and Risperdal for ODD, and this patient has both, so he gets both. Isn’t that completely logical? »

« Yeah, » said Joe, « except that logically their effects should cancel each other out! »

« Oh, » said Jack laughing, « I don’t think many psychiatrists have thought about that! »

« But do their effects really cancel each other out or not? » asked Joe.

« Not really, » said Jack more seriously now.

« But do they really act on the same brain-circuits, or is there something you haven’t told me about? »

« They really act on pretty much the same brain-circuits », said Jack. « And while Ritalin enhances the activity in these circuits enough to help with concentration, Risperdal diminishes it enough to prevent emotional outbursts. »

« But how can you do both at the same time? » asked Joe.

« Well, this is a bit of a mystery. And as I said, I don’t think any psychiatrist prescribing these drugs ever thought about it… »

« Except for you! » said Joe.

« Well, just because you’re forcing me! » said Jack laughing. Then more seriously: « There are some hypotheses, though. You see, Risperdal is made of a molecule that blocks dopamine receptors. It goes into the receptor and blocks it. That means that if you take this drug, you have less receptors on the receiving end that can react to dopamine. Ritalin, on the other hand, leaves the receptors alone. It rather acts on the cells squirting out the dopamine, blocking the pumps that take it back after squirting it out. Since the pumps can’t pump it back into the cell that squirted it out, it stays around longer to act on the receptors of the cell at the receiving end longer. »

« That still doesn’t make any sense to me! » complained Joe. « You’re still giving a tranquilizer and a stimulant at the same time! The two effects should still sort of cancel each other out, shouldn’t they? »

« Well, perhaps not, » said Jack. « With Risperdal you have less receptors available to react to dopamine. If you have a sudden surge of dopamine, it will fill up all the available receptors and have no more of an effect than that, because thanks to Risperdal there just aren’t that many receptors available. On the other hand, since Ritalin blocks the pumps that take the dopamine back, there will always be some dopamine to act on the receptors that are still available. »

« Aha, » said Joe. « Risperdal blocks the effect of the surges while Ritalin bridges over the troughs? Is that it? So the combination of Risperdal and Ritalin evens out the dopamine communication in the brain? »

« That’s what scientists think, yes, » said Jack. « So you would always have enough dopamine to concentrate, but you wouldn’t get spikes that make you go completely nuts! »

« But why would this boy, Ethan, have such erratic dopamine communication in his brain that it would need evening out like this? »

« Ah, who knows? I have some idea about this, but why don’t you tell me first what your impression of him was? »

« I hate that kid! » said Joe. « All he could talk about were his fucking Star-Wars video games! I tried and tried to draw him out, but nothing worked! When I mentioned Hitler, he spat out that Hitler and Stalin had signed a pact in 1939! His brain must be stuffed with trivia, but he is incapable of saying anything personal! »

« Why on Earth did you mention Hitler to a 10-year-old boy? » asked Jack, baffled.

« Oh well, we were talking about the ‘Lord of the Rings’, and I wanted to ask him if there was anyone like the baddie Sauron in his life too, mentioning that in the author’s life there was, namely Hitler. »

« And what exactly were you trying to ‘draw out’ of him? »

« Well, something, ANYTHING about good versus evil in his own life. Maybe he could have admitted that there was a good and a bad side to himself. A bad side that made him have emotional outbursts, for example, even though the good side knew this was wrong. »

« But he doesn’t have emotional outbursts anymore, thanks to Risperdal! » said Jack.

« Yeah, but maybe he still has dark thoughts hidden in him somewhere… I guess I just wanted to hear from him that thanks to the pills his good side was more in control now, or not, or whatever the case may be. I just wanted to hear SOMETHING from him personally! But it was absolutely impossible! »

« Well, » Jack admitted, « maybe the Risperdal just killed off any original thought he might have had… So now, thanks to his improved concentration due to Ritalin, he just learns trivia by rote and that’s all that ever comes out of him! »

« But that’s AWFUL! » exclaimed Joe.

« Well, » said Jack, « you should have seen him before he started his medication! »

« How was he? » asked Joe.

« He couldn’t sit still! » said Jack. « You couldn’t speak to him at all! Now at least he is calm and you can speak to him, even if anything he says is just trivia learned by rote. I guess his teacher loves him now! »

« If I were a teacher, I would still hate a kid like that! » said Joe with conviction. « Especially if I were a math-teacher! »

« What’s so special about math-teachers? » asked Jack.

« Well, math requires thinking and you don’t get far just by rote-learning! »

« That’s how math was taught in the good old days! » said Jack. « But not anymore! Now even math-teachers don’t explain anything anymore and just make their pupils learn stuff by rote. »

« But why on Earth would they do that? » asked Joe.

« Because of the parents, » said Jack. « Parents don’t like their little infant prodigies to get bad marks. If they do, the parents come and complain and want to know exactly what their child did wrong. Now if the teacher tries to explain an exercise to the parent that the child hadn’t understood and that the parent understands just as little because they’re both equally stupid, the teacher will be in trouble. The parent will say things like: ‘how could my child have known that this is the way to get the answer when there was never an exercise like this in the homework previously?’ The teacher might try to answer that there had never been an exercise exactly like this previously because these exercises were meant to make you THINK. But the parent won’t accept this. So it’s better if the teacher just gives the pupils dozens of identical exercises and then he can show the stupid parents of the stupid pupils that THIS is how the exercise should have been solved, as had been demonstrated dozens of times previously. In other words: don’t think, just learn by rote! »

« Bloody hell! » exclaimed Joe. « So pupils like Ethan are EXACTLY what today’s schools want! »

« Exactly, » said Jack. « So in fact everybody should take a combination of Risperdal and Ritalin nowadays. »

« Yes, » mused Joe, « enough dopamine to always stay concentrated, but not so much that you would ever get too deep into things and start asking complicated questions… »

« Exactly, » said Jack.

« But Ethan’s problem wasn’t that he asked too many questions or thought about things too deeply. You said his problem was the emotional outbursts, right? And you said you had a hypothesis about why this Ethan had such erratic dopamine communication in his brain, didn’t you? » asked Joe.

« Yes, » said Jack, « I think it’s because of his mother. I talked with her quite a bit and I managed to ‘draw her out’ as you would say. I guess for a moment she forgot she was talking to a psychiatrist who was supposed to heal her son rather than herself, else she wouldn’t have told me so much… »

« His mother made him like that? » asked Joe, surprised.

« I think so, yes… » said Jack. « She is a kind of extremely righteous and rigid person. Her idea of education, and indeed of any kind of human interaction, is that you should never ever yell at anybody but rather explain things calmly… »

« And you obviously disagree with that, do you? So you think it’s better to yell at kids? » asked Joe even more surprised.

« Well, not systematically, of course… » said Jack. « But if you feel like yelling, I guess sometimes it’s better to really yell! »

« You think it’s good for kids to hear their parents yell from time to time? »

« Yes, definitely. Don’t quote me on this because it’s surely a completely unacceptable theory, especially for a psychiatrist… »

« But you aren’t a psychiatrist anymore, » said Joe. « I am the psychiatrist now! »

« Oh yeah, you’re right! » said Jack. « So you might as well quote me on this! Ha, it’s actually quite cool to just be an invalid! It allows you to say whatever you want! »

« So yelling at your kids is good? » asked Joe.

« Yeah, » said Jack. « Actually the kids ASK for it! They provoke their parents to be yelled at. »

« Because they enjoy being yelled at? » asked Joe.

« No, » said Jack, « they don’t enjoy to be yelled at as such, but they need to feel that they have the power to make their parents angry! »

« What’s in it for them? » asked Joe.

« Being angry is unpleasant. If you manage to make your parents angry while they’re trying to feed you broccoli, since feeling angry is unpleasant, they might think twice about feeding you broccoli again another time. They might try another vegetable next time… »

« So the kid won. Isn’t letting the kid win a bad idea? Isn’t that bad education? »

« No, that’s not necessarily bad education. Of course the kids shouldn’t always win, and they shouldn’t win too easily. But being yelled at, or possibly even slapped, is not an easy victory. »

« But, as you said, Ethan’s mother never yells. What does she do instead? » asked Joe.

« She just becomes ice-cold, » answered Jack. « I witnessed this myself as she became angry with me for questioning her and ‘drawing her out’ rather than treating her son! You could literally hear the cracking of the walls and ceiling as the icicles formed there, all around her… »

« Well, » said Joe, « that’s a form of anger too, isn’t it? »

« Sure it is! » said Jack, « but a child can’t understand it! When his mother turns to an ice-statue like this, he desperately behaves worse and worse so that she would come back to life at last! »

« He wants to make her explode… » mused Joe.

« Exactly! » said Jack, « He wants to make her explode to break the ice! »

« So you think that’s where Ethan’s emotional outbursts come from? » asked Joe.

« Yes, I think so, » said Jack. « If she started yelling at him like a normal mother, he would eventually break down in tears, and then she would feel guilty about having yelled at him, console him, and everything would be fine again… »

« And since the situation would have been uncomfortable for her as well, she would think twice about trying to feed him broccoli again, and thus he would have won… »

« Well yeah, sort of… » admitted Jack. « On the other hand, if she never, ever yells at him, he feels totally powerless over her. And that’s not good either. It should be some kind of back and forth thing like it is in all relationships. Fighting over broccoli with your mother prepares you for bigger and more important fights later on in your life. But if fighting over broccoli isn’t even possible because your mother just turns into an icicle and doesn’t react anymore however much you scream, then what can you do? »

« Scream even more and smear the broccoli on the wall? » suggested Joe.

« Exactly, » said Jack, « behave worse and worse, hoping to break the icicle! »

« And however convinced she is that you should never ever yell at a kid, maybe at some point she still breaks down and yells at him? » suggested Joe.

« Yes, MAYBE! » exclaimed Jack. « I hadn’t even thought of that. But maybe on occasion he actually succeeded, so it reinforced his tendency to have emotional outbursts! »

« So that’s how he LEARNED to have emotional outbursts… » mused Joe. « And the only way you found to make him unlearn them is to give him Risperdal? »

« I’m not sure it really helps him to unlearn them, it just blocks them, » answered Jack.

« And that’s good? » asked Joe.

Jack shrugged his shoulders. « He’s your patient now, » he said, « try to find something better to do! »

Joe let out a sigh, then he asked: « And what about his inability to concentrate? »

« That comes from his mother too, » said Jack. « You see, she’s a control-freak, she needs to control everything. The first time she came to see me with her son, before entering the consulting-room she asked him about three times if he didn’t need to pee first. He screamed at her that he didn’t need to pee! And as soon as they were in the consulting-room… »

« He whined that he needed to pee, » Joe completed the sentence.

« Exactly, » said Jack.

« And why is that? » asked Joe.

« Because he himself doesn’t even know anymore when he needs to pee, » said Jack. « His mother decides everything for him. She decides everything for everybody, and not just at home. At work too. She told me that she’s the manager of the newspaper kiosk at the railway station (since I asked her as a matter-of-course what her job was) and when I asked her how she liked it, she complained about how it was awful, how everybody stole from her, cheated on her, and she had to work overtime every single day just to make sure things got done… »

« What’s the connection? » asked Joe.

« The connection, » said Jack, « is that she’s fucking unable to DELEGATE! She doesn’t put any responsibility on anybody, so of course nobody feels responsible and of course nothing gets done when she isn’t there. Nobody even identifies with the business since they have fucking no say in it, so they happily steal and cheat… »

« Oh I see, » said Joe, « to her own son she doesn’t even delegate his own pisses! »

« Exactly, » said Jack. « So now he himself doesn’t even know when he has to piss. He can’t learn to feel a piss coming since his mother systematically sends him to the toilet before that. All he can do is rebel against it, which is what he does… »

« And Ritalin helps him control his pees? » asked Joe doubtfully.

« Well, » said Jack, « in the end it wasn’t just about the pees. That was just an example. He couldn’t concentrate on anything anymore, since he was always too busy rebelling against everybody and everything… »

« But why did he rebel against everybody and everything if only his mother was the problem? »

« Well, because that’s what he had learned. He hadn’t learned any other way to interact with people, especially authority figures! »

« OK, let’s recapitulate,» said Joe, « So Risperdal is now stopping his emotional outbursts. Isn’t that enough? Does he really need Ritalin as well? »

« Yes he does, » said Joe. « With all those emotional outbursts, he had never had time to learn to concentrate properly, so he needs all the help he can get with that too. That’s why I gave him Ritalin. And it works! You’ve seen it for yourself - you couldn’t even imagine a better-adjusted school-boy than him! »

« Indeed, I couldn’t…! » sneered Joe. Even though he should have felt pity for that boy, especially in light of Jack’s explanations, he still couldn’t help hating him with all his heart! He was just the most unbearable kid he had ever met!

Jack must have seen the sneer, because he said: « Let me tell you one more story about his mother that I feel is typical of her. Maybe it will help you see her poor son for what he is, a victim rather than a perpetrator! »

« Okay, » said Joe.

« You see, » said Jack, « she got some surveillance cameras installed in the kiosk, and so, when some money went missing, she could examine the tape and see exactly who had gone near the cash register. And since nobody had gone near it except for the till girl, it was obvious who had taken the money… »

« Hm… » said Joe.

« So what would you have done? » asked Jack.

« I would have confronted the till girl and told her to give back the fucking money or else bear the consequences! » said Joe.

« Exactly, » said Jack. « And that’s pretty much what Ethan’s mother did. Except that she did it her own way. »