The Tenuous Line of Sanity by Frank Siegrist - HTML preview

There was silence for a while, then Joe said: « And she just told you all that just like that? »

« Who told me what just like that? » asked Jack whose thoughts had clearly gone elsewhere.

« Ethan’s mother, of course! She told you this whole story about the till girl all by herself? »

« Well yes, actually she did… » said Jack. « As an illustration of how hard her job was and to explain why she worked overtime all the time. You see, with all those people stealing from her, and then she even gets summoned to court… while she had given the woman a choice and she could just have given the money back which would have been so much simpler for everybody! »

« But with all that overtime she’s doing, doesn’t that keep her away from her son enough so that she couldn’t have such a dreadful influence on him? » asked Joe.

« Apparently not… » mused Jack.

« And what about the boy’s father? Doesn’t he have a father as well? »

« Yes, he does, » said Jack, « but the father doesn’t have much influence. I dare say he doesn’t have much of a say at home at all. He’s a kind of practical guy, good with handiwork and tools and such, but not very good at theorizing. He is no intellectual match for his wife. So while she thinks they debate about everything in a very civilized, democratic way, reaching agreement through consensus, in actual fact she wins every argument hands down, simply because she’s better at arguing. »

« So she always wins, even when she’s bloody wrong, is that what you’re saying? »

« Yes, that’s what I’m saying. But she isn’t aware of that in the slightest. She is convinced that they reach every decision through consensus. »

« How can he bear that? » asked Joe.

« That’s what I wondered too, » said Jack.

« And what about her? » asked Joe. « Doesn’t she get bored of always having the upper hand in every discussion and never getting challenged in a stimulating way? »

« If she got challenged in a stimulating way, the discussion would just never end because she would keep finding other arguments! That would be tiring for everybody. I guess she needs a man who eventually gives in to her superior intellect! »

« Okay, » said Joe, « that might explain why she chose a man like that. But why did HE choose HER? If he’s such a practical guy who can fix anything, couldn’t he have found any number of admiring girlfriends? Why did he choose one who is always niggling and arguing about everything? »

« It’s a mystery to me too, » said Jack. « Especially since he’s also the kind of guy who likes to raise his voice from time to time, to make a joke or to disagree with you or whatever. He has a big, booming voice! His wife, on the other hand, is so soft-spoken you really need to pay attention to catch what she’s saying. And, as I explained, she won’t turn louder when she’s angry, on the contrary: if you make her angry, you’ll be met with ice-cold silence! »

« And you witnessed her anger in person, did you? » asked Joe.

« Yes, when I questioned her too much about her job, she was at first very happy to complain about it, but then she seemed to realize that I was probably analyzing her or something, because - as she made clear with ice-cold and crystal-clear clarity - she was here for her son, not for herself! »

« They must be a funny couple, » mused Joe.

« Yes, they are! » said Jack. « He is big and strong and loud-mouthed, a real bear of a man, while she is… - well, you’ve seen her -… »

« She is small and soft-spoken and rigid as a nail! » Joe completed the sentence.

« Yes, that’s it, » said Jack. « And she keeps putting him to shame for raising his voice, since - according to her - raising your voice, especially towards a child, is very, very bad! »

« Aha, » said Joe, « I understand! His influence can’t balance out hers, because in her presence he doesn’t even dare to open his mouth at all, I bet! »

« I guess you’re right, » said Jack. « Which is a real pity, because if he dared to stand up to his wife he would just scold the boy with his big booming voice, and probably that’s all the boy would need to become normal again! »

« And instead of that the boy gets medicated! » said Joe. « But does that really solve the problem? »

« Well, it obviously solves the problem for his mother, » said Jack, « since she’s absolutely delighted with those drugs! It solves the problem for the teachers as well since they now have a perfectly school-adapted pupil. As for the boy himself, I guess he feels quite okay now, since the medication allows him to accept the situation he so badly couldn’t accept earlier. In the process any originality he might ever have had got killed off, but in today’s world originality isn’t essential anymore, quite the opposite… »

« Yes, » said Joe, « I know what you’re going to say: in cave-dwellers’ days finding berries where nobody else had thought to look might allow you to survive starvation. In today’s world - where berries come from the supermarket - originality just means you don’t fit in and you get ostracized for it… »

« Yes, that’s right, » said Jack. « So let’s be happy for Ethan that he fits in so well now thanks to his medication! »

« Really depressing! » sighed Joe.

 

« And what about that schizophrenic guy John? » asked Jack, changing the subject. « Did you see him yet? »
“Yes, indeed!” said Joe. “He was one of the first ones I saw after the swap.”
“Having trouble taking his medication again, I bet...” said Jack.
Joe told him the whole story with the hat-stand. Jack was impressed.
“You could lose your doctor's license for something like that!” he said.
“I was a bit afraid of that too,” said Joe, “but it didn't turn out like that. The last I heard of him, he had taken some state exams.”
“He went back to his studies?” asked Jack, surprised.
“Yes, and apparently <<the Voice>> was dictating answers to him!” said Joe.
“You're pulling my leg!” said Jack. “That's not what the voices of schizophrenics do!”
“Well that's what he claimed,” said Joe. “After our first meeting, the voice only acted up a few more times, and John apparently really hit back. Then the voice was gone for a while. It has come back again since then, but apparently it is much friendlier now, dictating the answers to tests and things like that.”

« I never heard of such a thing! » exclaimed Jack.

« But it’s logical when you think about it, » answered Joe. « The voice is just a part of yourself, so the things it says are things you think yourself. If you’re a bloody religious person, the voice will take on the role of the Father, the Son or the Holy Ghost and tell you that you are the next prophet or something like that… »

« Yeah, I said that myself once, if I remember correctly… » said Jack.

« If you are a believer in Western medicine - meaning that having such an inner voice is considered very sick - then that’s what the voice will keep telling you: that you’re bloody sick! » said Joe.

« I think I can see what you’re getting at… » said Jack.

« But if you argue with the voice, it will end up being convinced by your arguments (since it’s just a part of you anyway), and then it will stop being nasty, and it will start helping you, dictating the answers to tests and things like that! » said Joe.

« Hm… » said Jack.

« But you can only argue with it if you accept - and even embrace - its existence in the first place! » said Joe. « So I guess that’s the main message: stop considering yourself sick, and then you won’t be sick anymore! »
“And John is still off his medication?” asked Jack.
“Oh yes,” said Joe. “He has no intention of taking it again. He made peace with <<the Voice>>.”
“Officially he's still psychotic if he still has that voice,” said Jack.
“Sure,” said Joe. “But he doesn't mind it anymore. To me that means he's healed.”
“If he ends up killing someone during a decompensation crisis and it turns out he hasn't been given his medication anymore, it will be your fault!” said Jack.
“He won't have a decompensation crisis,” said Joe, “for the simple reason he's not compensating. As I told you, he made peace with his voice.”
“I wouldn't have dared to do any of this,” said Jack, “Throwing a hat-stand at a patient and then letting him get away without his medication when he's obviously not cured...”
“He is cured,” said Joe. “He doesn't mind his voice anymore. He doesn't have any complaints. You can't be sick if you don't have complaints. That means he's cured! You yourself said something like that once…”
“Yeah,” said Jack, “But that was just a kind of philosophical opinion… For a psychiatrist, that’s still a rather personal definition of <<cured>> you've got there! Anyway, I wouldn't have dared to do any of this, but then again, I am not you. You are the psychiatrist now. Me, I'm an invalid now, living with his dog.”
Daisy raised her head when she heard the word “dog”. But nobody said anything about going for a walk or feeding her, so she lowered it again with a sigh and went back to sleep.

« Why does everybody resist the idea so much that schizophrenic patients could cure themselves? » asked Joe. « Why does everybody automatically assume they need medication? »

« Let me answer that with another question, » said Jack. « What would happen if it was common knowledge that schizophrenics can sometimes heal themselves without medication? »

« They wouldn’t automatically be given antipsychotics? » suggested Joe.

« Yeah, » said Jack, « but most of all they wouldn’t even be considered ill anymore. If they wanted to, they could just heal themselves, couldn’t they? If they don’t do that, it’s their own fault that they’re ill, isn’t it? So they should be locked up in jail! I think it’s still better that they would systematically be given antipsychotics rather than systematically being locked up in jail, don’t you? »

« That’s such an immature, un-nuanced reaction! » exclaimed Joe. « Even if some schizophrenics can heal themselves, that doesn’t mean all of them can, and most of all it doesn’t mean that it’s easy! »

« Of course, » said Jack. « Intelligent and educated people might understand that. But courts have to satisfy everybody, or at least the majority. And the majority doesn’t consist of educated and refined people, so there you are! »

« Depressing! » said Joe.

« That’s how it is! » grunted Jack.

 

On his first day as “Joe”, Jack had driven Joe's old Toyota Supra with Daisy in the backseat to Joe's dingy flat. It had suddenly felt depressing that he would live like Joe now, always counting his money, not much to spare, a small flat and just his dog Daisy for company...
When he had opened up the flat, he had felt Joe's presence everywhere, although, to Joe's credit, everything was reasonably clean. Joe had made an effort before they went off on their holiday together during which they had swapped their identities. Of course, if you looked carefully, there was still dirt in all the places Joe had forgotten, like between the ducts of the radiator. Of course Joe couldn't afford a cleaning woman like Jack and Blanca.
Would Jack manage to feel at home in this place now? The idea felt a bit depressing at first. But then Jack saw the worn-out but inviting couch in front of the TV-set (which was reasonably modern-looking), and after finding a beer in the fridge he settled down there and started flipping through the channels, quite happy that there was no Blanca here to wonder what he was doing... Daisy settled down on the carpet at his feet, and Jack began to feel quite cozy, almost homey. Nobody reminded him it was time to go to bed, and Jack had to force himself to get up from the couch and make himself ready for bed. He had almost forgotten that he would need to get up quite early tomorrow, because although Joe didn't have a real job, he did lots of babysitting for his brother Jack. Tomorrow morning Jack would drive to the house which had been his until recently and spend most of the day with Benjamin!
Jack had set the alarm-clock to what he thought was a sensible hour, but Daisy came to wake him up before that, because she wanted to go out for a piss. Jack sleepily pulled a pair of trousers over his pyjamas and took Daisy out. She went off to sniff at all the bushes nearby in a very business-like manner, and by the time she was ready to go back inside with Jack, it was already time to hurry! Jack quickly got dressed properly, ate some cereals for breakfast, brushed his teeth, made sure the unfamiliar keys of the Supra were in his pocket and left the house with Daisy who purposefully went off to the car and patiently waited in front of the door that he would unlock and open so that she could jump into the backseat.
Jack gunned the engine and listened to its unfamiliar sound for a while. It was kind of an exciting sound, rumbling and mumbling at an idle, but promising to raise to a cacophony of rage if you pushed the gas hard enough! Nothing like the soft, all-too-discreet purr of his Mercedes. Well, not his Mercedes anymore – it was Joe's now. This old Supra belonged to Jack now!
He drove the familiar way out of town over to the well-to-do suburbs where Joe lived now. On the curvy road through the little forest, he made the tires squeak once or twice, just for the hell of it. Daisy was lying on the whole length of the backseat, her haunches well dug in, her head held high and balancing on her neck as the car bounced through the curves. Her haughty look told Jack that she was perfectly used to this driving-style but probably didn't appreciate it all that much. Indeed, as soon as the car levelled out after the last curve, she pushed her back against the backrest and stretched out all four paws comfortably.
When Jack arrived at the house (HIS house till recently), Joe had apparently already left for work in the purring Mercedes (his first day as a psychiatrist!), and Blanca was ready to go. She gave Jack a quick peck on the cheek and hurried out, telling him not to forget that Benjamin must take his gym-bag with him to kindergarten, because they had their gym-class today.
Jack sat down in the expensive leather-couch in the large, sunny living-room and took in the atmosphere of this place that had been his until recently and wasn't his anymore...
In half an hour or so he would have to wake up Benjamin, get him dressed, give him breakfast, get his teeth brushed, bring him to kindergarten. All this was quite straightforward, and yet Jack was almost apprehensive. Apprehensive about taking his own son to kindergarten! Bloody hell!
When Jack went up to Benjamin's room, he was already awake and lifted his face from his pillow, calling out “Uncle Joe!”
“Hi Benjamin, time to get up!” said Uncle Joe who was really Dad.
“Where's Daisy?” asked Benjamin.
“She's downstairs, waiting,” said Jack, “Get up, get dressed, and you can go and find her!”
So Benjamin willingly got up and started putting on his clothes, needing just a little bit of help from Jack when he wanted to put his T-shirt on the wrong way. It's a funny thing with T-shirts – you lay them out in front of you, the front facing you, but when you pull them on, the front always turns out to be at the back...
So far, Jack was managing fine. Benjamin didn't start a tantrum when Jack told him it was wrong but willingly turned it around his head till the front was at the front.
Then he ran down the stairs calling out: “Daisy, where are you?”
Breakfast went fine too, although Benjamin of course threw down some bits of bread for Daisy, and Jack pretended not to notice.
It was the teeth-brushing Jack was most afraid of. But that went fine too and Benjamin really spat out most of the toothpaste again afterwards, rather than swallowing half of it.
Afterwards he held out his feet so that Jack could put on his shoes and tie his shoelaces and they were ready to go (don't forget the gym-bag, mummy had said!).
They hurried off to Kindergarten together, Benjamin babbling all the way, Jack saying “yes, yes” and Daisy trotting behind them.
Benjamin went into the kindergarten with his friends, gave Jack a quick wave, and as Jack waved back he heard him explaining to his little friend next to him: “It's my daddy, you know, but he pretends to be Uncle Joe. The real Uncle Joe is living with my mummy now.”
Jack wondered if he should challenge Benjamin about this later on, but he decided against it. Kids always make up stories. It was best to treat this one the same way as all the others, even if it happened to be true. By treating it differently, he would just raise unnecessary suspicions.
So he decided not to worry about this and followed Daisy who was showing him the way past the kindergarten into the forest for her first proper walk of the day.
After more than an hour of brisk walking, Jack felt quite short of breath. They got back to the house and Daisy went straight to the kitchen where a plate was waiting for her that just needed to be filled with some dog-biscuits from the bag that was waiting for her there too. After all, since Joe (now Jack) and Daisy came here for babysitting practically every day, they half lived here.
Now Jack had to worry about lunch. There was no time to relax after the brisk forest-walk with Daisy. Soon he would have to go back to Kindergarten to pick up Benjamin, and by then lunch would have to be pretty much ready.
Jack started opening up kitchen-cupboards, wondering what to prepare. He felt strangely at loss in this kitchen which had been his OWN kitchen until very recently!
In the end he managed to throw something together just in time to go and fetch Benjamin. He left it simmering on the hot-plate and went off to the kindergarten once again, Daisy following him dutifully.
When they came back to the house with Benjamin, Jack was afraid Benjamin wouldn't want to wash his hands, wouldn't want to come and sit at the table, wouldn't want to eat and wouldn't want to brush his teeth afterwards. In the end all this turned out to be much less of a problem than Jack had anticipated. There was quite a bit of Benjamin's meal that mysteriously ended up on the floor next to his chair, but that was no problem since Daisy was waiting there anyway to lick it up. Other than that, Benjamin ate nicely. Apparently he wasn't in a fuss-making mood. Maybe he only made big fusses and threw big tantrums with his mother. That's what Joe had always claimed, anyway.
After lunch, they went out to the playground.

Benjamin immediately spotted a friend of his there and ran over to him. Jack found himself having a friendly chat with the young mother of Benjamin's friend. Daisy settled down under a park-bench to rest. That was perfect, since dogs normally aren't allowed on kids' playgrounds. Jack had unfortunately forgotten her leash in the car and couldn't have tied her anywhere if she had insisted on following Benjamin on the slide or whatever.
Jack had also forgotten to bring an afternoon snack for Benjamin, so when Benjamin came whining that he was hungry, Jack excused himself to the mother of Benjamin's friend and went back to the house with Benjamin and Daisy. There he cut some fruit for Benjamin and shook a few biscuits out of a box onto a plate. He didn't put the whole box of biscuits on the table, because he knew full well what would happen then...
After that, he and Benjamin played with some legos until Blanca came home.
Benjamin had been really well-behaved until then, but as soon as the door opened and Blanca appeared, he grew cranky. Well, it's true that Blanca interrupted their game (for which Jack was grateful, actually, because he was growing really tired – he had already built several lego-dinosaurs for Benjamin and was beginning to run out of ideas), and Benjamin probably wasn't happy that Jack was explaining to Blanca how the day had gone instead of continuing to play with him. But while the atmosphere had been quite relaxed till then, it grew hectic now, and Jack was glad his job here was finished for the day. So when Blanca asked him if he would stay for dinner, he declined, saying he still had some things to do at home.
Blanca smirked at him comically and said: “Oh, I see!”
When Jack tried to say goodbye to Benjamin, he wouldn't give him a hug or anything, looked down pouting and said: “You're not Uncle Joe anyway!”
Jack just laughed and said: “Whatever you say! See you tomorrow, then? Do you at least want to give Daisy a hug?”
Benjamin ran over to Daisy and clung to her neck. She was a big dog and Benjamin wasn't so big yet, so she was just the right size for him for a big hug. Daisy put her ears back, out of harm's way, and looked at Jack helplessly.
Blanca watched disapprovingly. She didn't like this excessive physical closeness between her son and an animal. She thought he might become allergic to dog-hair, mightn't he? But her husband had told her it was exactly the opposite – continuous and regular exposure to the potential allergen prevents allergies rather than causing them. It might even prevent all kinds of other allergies, unrelated to this particular allergen. As he said: “When the immune system isn't exposed to a wide variety of compounds, it gets bored and ends up reacting exaggeratedly to innocuous substances!”
Blanca had never heard of an immune system getting “bored” before meeting her husband, but he was the doctor, after all, so she had to accept it. Nevertheless, she still never really managed to find this physical closeness with an animal normal. It was because of her upbringing, she knew that, of course – in her culture dogs were confined to the garden, not let into the house!
Jack ignored Blanca's disapproving look, said “See you tomorrow!” to Benjamin once again, held out his cheek to Blanca for her perfunctory peck, called Daisy to follow him and left.
As he sat in the Supra and started the engine with its surprisingly enticing engine-sound, he still felt the spot on his cheek where Blanca's lips had given it a quick peck, and he felt a pang of jealousy at having left her to his brother. He had really lost her now, and he wondered how she was doing with Joe...
Then he told himself he had lost her ages ago anyway, and he rather looked forward to thrashing through the curves on the little forest-road with Joe's old Supra once again!

When he got home, he remembered Blanca's quizzical look when he had told her he had “things to do”, so he started Joe's computer and looked into the dating site Joe had been using. Joe had left a piece of paper with all the passwords on his desk, so Jack had no difficulty logging in.
He saw that two women had left him (or rather Joe, but after all he was Joe now) messages, but on the photos of their profiles they looked sort of old and plump, although they were pretty much his own age. Did he look that old and boring too? If so, it was no wonder Blanca had lost interest in him long ago! He ran into the bathroom to look at his reflection in the mirror and was more or less reassured: he had some grey hair and and a few wrinkles, but they just made him look mature. And he still managed to put on a grin that looked boyish and conveyed just a jest of recklessness... Just what women liked, right?
No, no, he told himself, he by far didn't look as boring as those two women who had just left him messages!
He started looking at other women-profiles, and some of them looked quite exciting, actually, although he had to admit most of them were just a bit (or even quite a bit) below his age-group.
He started leaving them messages too. Not just standard messages, but messages relating to what they had written about themselves in their profiles. He tried to be witty and original, and he prided himself in managing quite well. He was really proud of some of the sentences that came to him all naturally and that made him laugh himself when he read them back at himself!
Surfing on this dating-site was sort of addictive, he admitted to himself. He would have stayed in front of the computer non-stop till it was time for bed (or beyond) if Daisy hadn't suddenly come to disturb him, obviously wondering when he intended to give her supper...
After feeding Daisy (a chicken-leg covered with oatmeal and some hot water poured on top), he took out some bread for himself but couldn't be bothered to spread anything on it but rather went back to the computer where he chewed it dry as it was. There were still lots of exciting profiles to look through, and he left a witty message to almost all of them! If they all answered back, he would be very, very busy in the next few days!
Late in the evening Daisy came to ask for her evening walk and evening piss, and Jack had to admit to himself it was really time to shut down the computer for now. He would continue tomorrow. He went to bed with a tingling feeling of excitement in his crotch!
The next day with Benjamin went fine too, even though Jack hadn't slept enough. He felt cheerful, almost a bit euphoric, and this seemed to be contagious, because Benjamin was really cheerful too. When Blanca came home in the evening, Jack remembered how Benjamin had reacted the day before, so he didn't straight away jump up to greet Blanca like he had the day before but stayed on his knees on the floor with Benjamin and the racing-car game they were playing, waiting for Blanca to come over and bend down to give him her usual perfunctory peck (on the brow this time rather than the cheek). She lifted up Benjamin and gave him a kiss too, but he just struggled to be put down again and continue to play with Uncle Joe (he had accepted that Jack was “Uncle Joe” now).
When Blanca called from the kitchen to ask him if he'd like to stay for dinner, he declined once again, but at least he stayed long enough to greet Joe when he came home from work. Benjamin was eager to show the racing-track he had built with Uncle Joe to his dad, and Joe was patient and relaxed enough to show interest, so this allowed Jack to make himself ready for going home without Benjamin throwing a tantrum.
At last Jack was sitting in the Supra! He gunned the engine, really pleased with its sound once again, and then drove home even faster than he had the day before. When he got into Joe's flat, he started up the computer even before taking off his shoes.
By the time he had laid down Daisy's leash and taken off his shoes, the computer still wasn't quite ready to run the browser, and Jack found himself impatiently tapping his foot at the leg of the chair. Then the browser started at last and Jack could start the process of logging into the dating-site. When it opened up at last, Jack straight away looked into his message-box ...which was empty except for the two messages he had already read the day before.
This must be a mistake, he told himself. Why, he had written to several dozens of women the day before, and not just standard stuff like all the other men wrote, but personal stuff relating to what they had written about themselves in their profiles. How could there not be a single answer???
After a while Jack discovered that next to each correspondent there was a little box which showed whether she had read Jack's message or not. Most of these boxes were not ticked off yet, so the women hadn't even READ his messages, let alone answered them. This was shocking at first, but then Jack felt it was actually rather consoling – it meant there was nothing wrong with his messages as such. Reading them and not answering was surely worse than just not having read them yet. He just needed to be more patient. Maybe most women didn't log in to this site as regularly as he did. Maybe the next day there would be some answers...
In the meantime he could surf some more!
But he found he was strangely uninterested in looking at more profiles and writing more witty messages. What's the point if nobody answers?
In the end he rather shut down the computer, fed Daisy and ate something a bit more wholesome for supper than he had the day before. After that he didn't feel like starting up the computer again, so he rather watched some TV. But he didn't find anything interesting there either, and he almost wished he had Blanca back who would come and ask him what he was doing and shouldn't he go to bed, rather?
After Daisy's evening walk (for which he was glad because the fresh air tore him out of his mournful feeling of boredom for a while), he really got ready for bed and told himself that tomorrow would be another day and that we shall see what we shall see...
The next day he tried to keep up the good mood with Benjamin, but he wasn't totally successful – Benjamin was cranky at times. On the other hand, he stayed for supper this time and had a talk with Joe. Apparently Joe was doing fine as a psychiatrist, but Jack didn't dare to ask him how it was going with Blanca...
When he finally sat in the Supra, ready to drive home (he was already thinking of Joe's dingy flat as “home” now, which was probably a good sign on some level), he found he didn't care about the engine-noise anymore at all. Bouncing through the curves in the forest on the way home wasn't as pleasurable as it had once been either.
He resisted the temptation to start up the computer, telling himself he would give those women a day more to answer. Indeed, he wasn't ready for another disappointment, and he told himself the chance of a pleasant surprise would just become bigger for the next day if he managed to resist the temptation today!
But the next day there were no new messages either, just the two from the two boring women he hadn't answered yet. At least some of the boxes showing his messages had been read were ticked off by now. But being read and still not answered was in some sense even worse than not being read at all, wasn't it? Or in any case that's what he had told himself two days ago...
He shut down the computer in anger and then spent a long time in the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror and wondering what was wrong with him.
And then he remembered a conversation, or even several conversations, he had had about this with Joe long ago, when Joe had first started using dating-sites.
Indeed, Joe had had the same complexes about writing hundreds of messages and never getting any himself. And Jack had been the wise one saying that this was normal.

Me, the ghost, I got interested. And instead of getting into Jack’s head to see what he remembered about those conversations with Joe long ago, I decided rather to move back in time and find the actual conversations so I could follow them in full.

And this is what I found:

“When will you realize, at last,” Jack had said, “that men and women just aren't the same!”
“Oh, I know what you're going to say,” answered Joe, tired in advance of where this conversation was heading. “You're going to say that our genes evolved over millennia in a world that was very different from our world today. The cave-dwellers' world in which men went hunting and women picked berries...”
“Yeah,” answered Jack, “women picking berries while men go hunting, that might indeed be deeply imprinted in our instincts, but perhaps not for the reason we like to think.”
And then he launched into a huge explanation, just as Joe had anticipated: “Some scientists actually think it was the women who mostly nourished the family. With all the small children to look after – and you know, they had carried them in their tummies for nine months and given birth to them and all that, meaning they were a really big investment! - going without food surely wasn't an option for them. The men on the other hand hadn't invested so much in the children - just given their sperm - , so of course they cared much less. They didn't bother too much with the berries. They rather went hunting! They brought back some extra protein from time to time, of course, but maybe not very reliably. The real point of hunting probably wasn't to feed the family at all, you see, but rather to show what a bully you were! Bullies who survive must have good genes, so those were the ones the women mated with, producing yet more bullies for the next generation!”
This idea was new to Joe, and he was vaguely interested, so he let Jack continue: “So while the women did all the work, fed the children and all that, the men just went hunting to show what bullies they were! And when there weren't enough dangerous animals to hunt, they just hunted each other - men from neighbouring tribes, you know. That's called war rather than hunting, but deep down it's pretty much the same. The point is that you show what a bully you are, else the females don't want you. As long as you're a bully, never mind what exactly you're doing!”
So this was what Jack thought men were for? Interesting! Joe allowed himself to quickly summarize what Jack had just said, just to be sure he had understood him correctly: “So women raise the children, feed the family and do everything else that is necessary for survival while men just work on being bullies, is that what you're saying?”
“Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying,” said Jack, “and maybe that explains how we can be so fucking satisfied with developing, producing and selling stupid flat-screen TVs. Never mind that nobody needs those at all, because that's not even the point at all. The point is having a bigger flat-screen TV than your neighbour - and a bigger car and a bigger house. All this is like the tail of a male peacock or the antlers of a stag - deep down they're fucking useless, but they're not meant to be useful in the first place. They're meant to make you into a bully. And the more useless things you can afford, the bigger a bully you are!”
Joe wondered how a respected citizen with a good job and earning good money could hold such views. He also gave a quick glance to the huge flat-screen TV sitting in the middle of Jack's living-room... But it wasn't time to interrupt Jack yet. Jack was in the midst of an explanation. It was best to just let him go on when he was in this kind of mood. There would be time for questions later.
“And that's the kind of husband women want.” Jack continued. “While they carry and coo and feed and clean the babies, they want a husband who brings home a huge flat-screen TV as a trophy that fills the entire living-room wall! Then they know that they got the perfect father for their babies, and that's what makes everything worthwhile!”
Now Joe still felt it was time to intervene: “Okay, but why is it bully to do so much hunting if hunting in itself is useless anyway? Why is it bully for a man to be strong when being strong is useless, since women can just pick berries and happily stay alive without the help of a strong man?”
Jack caressed his chin and said: “Yeah, this is actually quite a hard question...”
He seemed to be enjoying himself, caressing his chin some more and looking very wise: “And to answer it really properly, you would need to develop complicated equations, run complicated computer simulations, and so on...”
But just before this patronizing attitude became too aggravating, he looked straight at Joe and continued eagerly: “To simplify this question, let's just look at the male peacock with his fucking exaggerated peacock-tail!”
“Okay...” said Joe, since some kind of comment seemed to be expected of him at this point.
“The usual explanation,” said Jack, “is that if he manages to survive IN SPITE of this tail, then he must be a fucking big bully, and so the females will preferably mate with him, producing the next generation of peacocks with similarly exaggerated tails. This is called sexual selection as opposed to <<natural>> selection.”
Joe had never heard of any such <<unnatural>> selection, but he thought Jack would surely explain it some more, so he just let him go on: “As you rightly pointed out, the explanation is not quite complete. On one hand it's true that surviving with such an exaggerated tail means you're a bully - mainly because that exaggerated tail makes you bloody conspicuous to foxes and such, and if you still survive in spite of this, you must be a really big bully. But in the end, having such a tail is still just a handicap. If you could be the same kind of bully without this exaggerated tail, you might survive twice as long as a normal peacock - which also means having twice as much time for producing offspring, so that should help you produce lots of offspring like yourself, namely without the exaggerated tail. Being a big bully and having the tail as well allows you to live a normal peacock-lifespan - while having the exaggerated tail without being a bully of course means you just get eaten straight away before managing to produce any offspring at all.”
“Yeah,” said Joe, “so while it's surely nice to be a big bully, what's the point of the tail?”
“Good question,” said Jack. “Since being a bully WITHOUT the exaggerated tail is in some sense even more advantageous - or perhaps just as advantageous - as being a bully WITH an exaggerated tail, because it allows you to live longer and thus to have more time to produce offspring, even if the females prefer males WITH an exaggerated tail...”
Jack barely took a breath and went on without giving Joe time to say anything: “The females of course prefer males WITH an exaggerated tail because else they have no way of telling whether he's a bully or not.”
This time Joe had something smart to say, and he almost lifted up his hand as he would have done in school long ago when he wanted to say something: “Age could be a give-away too, couldn't it? I mean, an older male should be more attractive than a younger one, because if he managed to survive that long he must be a bully. And this should favour less exaggerated tails that allow you to live longer, shouldn't it?”
“Yes, you're right,” admitted Jack, “And another problem with the exaggerated tail is that even though it shows you're a bully, all this bulliness ends up being rather useless, since it just gets canceled out by the handicap of having that exaggerated tail... The female might of course not care about that, but she still should, because her offspring will inherit that stupid tail too, so what's the use of their bulliness if it all gets canceled out by that stupid tail? As far as the success of her offspring is concerned, she might be better off choosing a male with a less exaggerated tail.”
“Exactly!” said Joe. “So what's the point of the exaggerated tail? What's the point of hunting mammoths when hunting is useless anyway? What's the point of bringing home wall-covering flat-screen TVs when wall-covering flat-screen TVs are useless?”
“Ah,” said Jack, looking very smug, “but only the male offspring inherit the exaggerated tail! The females only inherit the bulliness!”
Since Joe only looked at him questioningly, Jack explained: “Maybe the female chooses the male with the most exaggerated tail more for her daughters than for her sons, you see?”
Joe looked a bit incredulous. Jack's theory was beginning to look a bit contrived.
“This is where it all becomes really complicated,” he admitted. “There are forces acting in favour of an exaggerated tail, and others acting against it. This means some equilibrium will be reached. There is a point from which onwards the tail starts acting against itself. In other words, there is a limit to the practicality of everything, even peacock-tails.”
Joe nodded, and Jack continued: “But where exactly is that point? That's where complicated math and computer simulations come in, because a nice and clean and elegant theory like the one I'm presenting here cannot in itself answer this question.”
Joe looked at his brother quizzically – Jack had just nicely managed to talk himself out of a tight spot! And Joe wasn't entirely buying it...
“But let's come back to what I said just a little moment ago,” Jack continued quickly. “The female perhaps chooses the male with the most exaggerated tail more for her daughters than for her sons.
In any tribe, the females are the limiting factor to the number of offspring the tribe can produce. As long as there is at least one male left in the tribe, the tribe can happily go on reproducing.”
Jack held a little split-second pause for effect, then he said: “So what are all the additional males for, then?”
Since Joe didn't know the answer, Jack continued: “They are just test-beds for the bulliness of genes, you see. Females can't be test-beds, because they are too precious. The tribe needs them to produce offspring. The males, on the other hand, are disposable. You just send them off to go hunting dangerous animals - or to war if there aren't enough dangerous animals left. Most of them will die, of course, but the few who come back victorious must be the biggest bullies, so they can have all the females!”
The tight spot was obviously long forgotten. Jack was going strong again: “That still means that bulliness must be useful in itself, of course. But hunting and war - and producing flat-screen TVs - doesn't need to be useful in itself, you see, because it's just a test-bed for testing the bulliness.”
“Okay,” said Joe, “I get it now. So a dating-site on the internet is just some kind of lek where men show off their bulliness while women just wait patiently till the bulliest of them all turns up so that they can choose him.”
“Exactly,” said Jack.
“So what is a man supposed to do?” asked Joe.
“Well,” said Jack, “there's no point in writing hundreds of messages. All the man needs to do is to put a bully photo of himself on the site and wait till he gets chosen.”
“And if he never gets chosen?”
“Then he's obviously not bully enough.”
“So what should he do then?”
“Try to get a bullier photo of himself.”
“But trying to be proactive by writing to the women himself is no good?”
“No good at all!”

« But why not? » asked Joe. « Trying to get noticed by writing messages doesn’t mean you’re not a bully, does it? »

« Well, » said Jack, « in some sense it does. It means you’re not bully enough to be noticed solely on account of your bulliness… »

« So it’s better not to write messages, but rather to pretend that you’re such a bully that you get more than enough attention anyway, is that what you mean? » asked Joe.

« That’s exactly what I mean! » said Jack. « And what you write in your profile is important too. Don’t write too many nice things about the partner you’re wishing for. Rather write about all the things you do NOT want in your future partner! »

« Won’t that just put off potential love-interests? » asked Joe.

« On the contrary! » answered Jack. « It will suggest to them that you get too much unwanted attention, precisely because you’re such a bully that all women just flock to you! And if you’re such a bully, even more women will be interested in you! »

« But can you give me some kind of concrete example of what to write and what not to write in the profile? » asked Joe naively.

« Sure, » said Jack, « If you’re a non-smoker, don’t write that you can tolerate smoke even though you don’t smoke yourself. That will be seen for what it is, namely a way to keep all your options open because you’re not sure of getting enough attention otherwise. Rather write that you hate smoke and that smoking women should please abstain from writing to you! »

« But then smoking women really won’t write to you… » mused Joe.

« Maybe they’ll still write to you, thinking to themselves that your intolerance of smoke will help them quit, and that they can still go outside for a quick smoke when you’re not looking. In any case, the fact that you so clearly state what you do NOT want will mean to them that you must be flooded with messages from women, and thus that you’re a really big bully! »
“Okay,” said Joe, “being a psychiatrist, I guess you're the expert...”
Jack let the compliment pass and said: “You know, there is an interesting fact about the Y-chromosome which is strongly in favour of this whole theory, actually.”
“Only men have it, you mean?” asked Joe.
“Yes,” said Jack, “as you know, females have two X chromosomes, and males just have one, the other one being a Y-chromosome.” Then he looked at Joe meaningfully and added: “What you perhaps don't know is that the Y-chromosome is actually just a piece of junk.”
“Well,” said Joe, “if women can do so fine without it, then it can't be that meaningful, can it?”
“Exactly,” said Jack. “You know, our ancestors bloody long ago didn't have any Y-chromosomes. There were just the two X-chromosomes, and they had a switch in them making the embryo into a male or a female depending on the temperature of the egg and such. So you see, the mother could actually regulate how many male or female babies she would have depending on how she placed her eggs in the nest. Crocodiles still do it like this even today.”
“Hm,” said Joe.
“In us mammals, this system fucked up,” continued Jack. “There was an X-chromosome some time long ago that got fucked up through some mutation or what and stayed stuck in the <<male>> position. All the offspring inheriting this fucked-up chromosome were automatically male, never mind the position of the egg in the nest. Since all the animals with this fucked-up X-chromosome were necessarily male, this fucked-up chromosome never managed to encounter another one of its kind with which it could recombine. Because males can't produce offspring with each other, you see? Once it had lost its ability to recombine with a <<normal>> X-chromosome, it was alone! From then on it could never recombine with anything anymore. This of course means it was free to degenerate more and more with each generation without ever getting a chance to be fixed up again through recombination with another one of its kind with different errors.”
“And this fucked up X-chromosome became the Y-chromosome,” said Joe who had been paying attention.
“Exactly,” said Jack. “Nowadays there is practically nothing of value on it anymore. There are one or two genes essential for making sperm, and the rest is just the gender switch blocked in the <<male>> position. Whatever else is on the Y-chromosome is just rubbish - unless it has some unknown function that wasn't discovered yet, of course. But even if some of that rubbish still turns out to have a function, the Y-chromosome is much smaller than the X-chromosome, so, for lack of space, there just really can't be bloody much of value on it ANYWAY!”
“Are you trying to say that women are better than men ANYWAY?” asked Joe.
“No, it isn't that simple,” said Jack. “Just wait and see!”
“Okay,” said Joe, thinking that Jack should have become a high-school teacher.
“Of course the mammalian X-chromosomes aren't completely normal anymore either,” continued Jack. “They lost their ability to switch on the male program. The Y-chromosome is needed for that nowadays.”
“Bloody interesting,” said Joe, “but I still don't see what you're getting at!”
“Okay, hold on, here it comes,” said Jack. He took a deep breath and plunged into his lecture head-first: “It seems that many, many mental disorders can be traced to problems on the X-chromosome. This, in other words, seems to imply that many genes linked to mental functions reside on the X-chromosome, since those are the genes that are fucked up in people with mental disorders. Women have two X-chromosomes and there is a reasonable chance that they won't both have the same defects, so for any defective gene on one of her X-chromosomes there will be a good chance that she also has a non-defective one on the other X-chromosome to compensate. That's a smart arrangement since women are essential for the survival of the tribe.”
“As I said,” said Joe, “you're just trying to say that women are better than men. And coming from a man, this always makes me suspicious. I feel it's a kind of gallantry on his part because deep down he feels men are really the superior ones...”
“It's not that simple,” repeated Jack. “Just hear me out, please!”
When Joe dutifully kept silent, Jack continued: “Men have just one X-chromosome, plus a Y-chromosome that is mostly rubbish. If they have a defective gene on that X-chromosome, they can't compensate for it so they will be mentally handicapped and that's it!”
“As I said...” said Joe, but Jack held up his hand and continued: “On the other hand, if they have a bloody GOOD gene on their X-chromosome, its effects won't be diluted by the other gene on the other chromosome!”
“Aha,” said Joe, “so men are still better than women, then?”
“Just listen me out and let's take a stupid example to help you understand,” said Jack. “Men are supposed to be better at map-reading than women. Let's say there is a gene - or collection of genes - on the X-chromosome responsible for this. Let's say there are just as many good versions as bad versions of this gene in circulation. Or let's just say, for simplicity's sake, that there are just two versions, a good one and a bad one. A man obviously has one out of two chances to get the good version. If he gets the good version, he will be a top map-reader, and that's it! The woman, on the other hand - since she has two X-chromosomes - either gets good-good, good-bad, bad-good or bad-bad. If she gets good-bad or bad-good, she will be a mediocre map-reader. She can only be a top map-reader if she gets good-good, and there's only one chance out of four that she will get that - while a man has one chance out of two to be a top map-reader.”
“So men are better, on average, than women...” completed Joe.
“Hear me out!” Jack cried out.
“Okay, okay,” mumbled Joe.
“The woman also has only one chance out of four to be a bloody bad map reader. Indeed, she's most likely to be a mediocre map-reader!”
“I get it now,” said Joe at last. “Men are more likely to be bloody stupid, and more likely to be bloody smart too, is that what you're saying?”
“Yes,” said Jack, “and that's exactly what you can see in the real world: while the average intelligence of men and women is surely the same, the most intelligent people in the world nevertheless quite often seem to be men, but so are the most stupid ones! And mental problems like autism seem to be mostly male - there are hardly any autistic women. All this perfectly fits the theory of men as test-beds. Women can't afford to be mentally deranged, because they have to raise the children. On the other hand, this perhaps also means losing a chance to be extraordinarily brilliant. Men have no such limitations. If they are too stupid, they will just die. And if they are brilliant, all the women will be dancing around them, they will have hundreds and hundreds of children with many different partners - many more than a woman could ever have, even if she has different partners, since there’s a limit to the number of pregnancies she can have in a lifetime -, and this ensures that the bloody good gene these bloody bully men carry propagates to the next generation! Isn't that a good system?”
“I get it,” said Joe. “The whole thing means that while most women will normally end up having some children anyway - and thus probably a more or less fulfilled life -, men have a chance either of being total losers destined to die straight away, or to be big bullies and have hundreds of children.”
“Exactly,” said Jack. “And mostly of course they are losers.”
“Depressing...” said Joe.
“Luckily most men aren't aware of this,” said Jack. “They all think they're big bullies - until they die in a car-crash or some other stupid accident due to their crazy activities... You know, the kind of crazy activities young men just NEED to perform in order to feel bully, like driving much too fast. The ones left behind eventually have children.”
“Oh, I see!” said Joe. “The problem with men like me is that they feel like losers, never realizing that being a loser is totally natural for a male! Most males are losers, and just a very few become really big bullies!”
“Okay,” conceded Jack, “That’s how it is for stallions and cocks and such. Maybe for modern humans things have become yet a bit more complicated. With the advent of monogamy a middle way is now possible between being a loser or a bully. But the instinctual programs concerning bullies and losers are still with us, of course.”

Jack remembered this whole conversation now! He had been the one explaining all this to Joe. And Joe had probably believed him, put a cooler photo of himself on the dating-site and then just waited. And considering the various adventures and love-stories he had mentioned over the months or even years before their identity-swap, it had obviously worked!
Now Jack just had to follow his own advice, and it would surely work for him too, as it had worked for Joe!

Jack remembered there had been other discussions about the differences between men and women too. It had been quite a topic for a while!
Jack tried to bring them back to his mind (while me the ghost, I went to find the actual conversations in the past, and that’s what I’m sharing with you now):
“So you don't believe in gender-equality, obviously,” Joe had said. “Anyway, women are supposed to be prettier than men, and if they were equal in all other aspects, they would necessarily end up being better than men, wouldn't they? So how could they be equal?”
“I guess deep down nobody ever really earnestly thought they should be equal.” Jack had answered. “It just keeps getting misunderstood that way.”
And then he had launched into another one of his little lectures: “They shouldn't be equal - they should just have equal rights. Rights are not given by the natural order of the universe. They are given by us. We don't have equal rights because the natural order of the universe somehow demands it, but rather because human society demands it. And human society was of course created by us. The point of equal rights is that everybody should have the same chance to develop into whatever is most suited to him or her. If it turns out that most women look after the children while most men bring home the trophies, then so be it. The point is that if some rare woman prefers to bring home trophies rather than looking after the children, she should be able to do that too.”
“Yeah,” Joe interrupted, “and if some crazy man prefers to look after the children rather than bringing home trophies, he should be able to do that too!”
“Exactly,” said Jack. “You're a man, but you still spend more time with Benjamin than Blanca does! And Benjamin even behaves himself with you, while he's just awful with his mother!”
“Unfortunately Benjamin isn't my own son...” said Joe sadly.
“Well,” said Jack, “genetically speaking he is, actually. Since we’re identical twins, my son is just as much your son as mine.”
“Not really,” said Joe. “And sorry for putting it so bluntly – but you're the one who planted the seed, not me!”
“There isn't a test in the world that could determine whether he's your son or mine,” said Jack.
Joe decided to leave it at that. Else Jack might end up realizing that he was jealous of him with respect to Blanca...
"Anyway,” said Jack after a moment's awkward silence, “the point of equal rights is that everybody has the same chance to do whatever he or she fucking likes -THAT's the point of equal rights. It has nothing to do with being equal otherwise!”
Then he leaned back comfortably and continued: « Coming back to women being prettier than men, it's really quite an interesting fact that human females are supposed to be pretty. In most animals, the males have to be strong, brave and beautiful - by having fucking useless peacock tails, for example -, else the females don't choose them. The females don't need to be anything, because they will always get a male to fertilize them anyway, sperm being so cheap. »

He paused, then he continued: « In humans, males still need to be strong and brave, like in most other animals, but somehow it's up to the females to be beautiful! »
Joe just nodded and made a sign with the hand to show that Jack should go on, which he did: “The only logical conclusion is that in humans it's not just the males who compete for the females, but also the females who compete for the males! This of course seems like a contradiction in terms, because those called <<males>> are the ones who compete for the others, called <<females>> - that's almost a definition of males and females. How could females compete for males?”

Joe looked a bit doubtful and asked: « Why should one gender compete more for the other than vis versa anyway? Why isn’t the situation more balanced? »

« Well, » said Jack, « when one gender provides an expensive egg - and, in the case of mammals, even a long pregnancy followed by breastfeeding - while the other provides nothing but cheap sperm, then of course the ones providing almost nothing will have to fight for those who provide almost everything! »

« That still doesn’t explain why the situation is so unbalanced, » said Joe. « Why does one gender provide almost everything and the other almost nothing? If the woman is the one carrying the baby in her tummy, then why wouldn’t it be the man doing the breastfeeding, for example? »

« In some species it really is a bit more balanced, » said Jack. « Female fish, for example, lay their eggs for the male to fertilize, and then they swim away. The male fertilizes the eggs (he would be stupid to just leave them, since they are so precious, and that’s also why the female dares to leave them to him, because she ‘knows’ that of course he will take care of them), and once he has fertilized them, he might as well watch over them, since it would be stupid to just let a predator eat them. After all, once he’s fertilized them, they are his kids! »

« I thought fish just left their eggs to hatch on their own, » said Joe.

« Not all do, » said Jack. « Some fish-dads look after their brood really well and carry them around in special pouches and so on. If you see a fish taking care of its young, you can be pretty sure it’s a male. Female fish don’t do that - they just lay the eggs and that’s it! But it’s still the males competing for females, even in fish, because apparently the eggs are still more precious than dad’s babysitting! »

« Okay, » said Joe, « I’ll buy that. But why is the situation so unbalanced in mammals when it manages to be more balanced - or in any case a little bit more balanced - in fish? »

« Well, » said Jack, « unlike male fish who can be bloody sure the brood is theirs because they fertilize the eggs directly, male mammals can never be completely sure, since mammalian egg-cells get fertilized within the female’s body… »

« Oh, I see, » said Joe, « so they rather fight over some more females instead of raising the children of one particular female which might not even be theirs! »

« Exactly, » said Jack. « Since a female mammal keeps her egg-cells in her body, she’s the only one to know for sure that the resulting children are really her own, so she is left to look after them on her own too! »

« While a fish-dad knows the children are his own because he fertilized the eggs directly… » said Joe. « But are you sure fish are really capable of ‘knowing’ such things? »

« Not consciously, of course, » said Jack. « Just instinctively. And what I really mean by ‘knowing’ is that a gene programming you to look after your own children will spread, while a gene programming you to look after any children - never mind whose they are - will die out because it’s not favouring its own survival. So if the information isn’t out there somewhere that they are really yours, you shouldn’t be looking after them, else the gene programming you to do that will just die out. That’s what I mean by ‘knowing’. It’s more a figure of speech than real ‘knowing’ in the human sense… »

« Okay, » said Joe, « I think I got it. So the fish-dad ‘knows’ the brood is his, and that’s why he looks after it, while a mammal-dad doesn’t ‘know’ the brood is his, so he rather conquers some more females, hoping that at least some of them - though who knows which ones? - will carry his kids! »

« Exactly! » said Jack.

« And that explains, » said Joe, « why mammalian males - or bird males - compete for females, sporting superb antlers and peacock tails and so on, while mammalian females don’t need to compete at all, since they will be left with the child-rearing. »

« That’s right, » said Jack, « whoever offers more, competes less, and vis versa. »

« Something just occurred to me, » said Joe. « What if scientists discovered a way to fertilize an egg-cell with another egg-cell instead of a sperm-cell? That would make males superfluous! There would just need to be lesbian couples taking turns with who carries the baby in her tummy and who breastfeeds and so on. Since the situation would be more balanced, there wouldn’t need to be so much competition anymore - no more horrific wars causing immense suffering… »

« Yeah, » said Jack, « and all those trophies males bring home wouldn’t be needed anymore either: no more sports cars would need to be produced, nor wall-covering flat-screen TVs… »

« Yes, » said Joe, « we wouldn’t waste all our natural resources anymore by producing all this useless shit just so that males can show they are bigger bullies than their neighbours! »

« Yeah… » mused Jack. But then he added: « And yet it still wouldn’t work out like that! »

« Why not? » asked Joe.

« Because natural selection would then favour two kinds of women - those who prefer to carry babies in their tummies and those who prefer to just provide a gamete, » said Jack.

« What on earth is a gamete? » asked Joe.

« An egg or a sperm cell, » answered Jack. Then he continued: « Soon there would be two kinds of females - those who like rearing children and those who prefer just to provide a gamete. »

« I see what you mean, » said Joe. « And those who provide nothing but a gamete would start fighting over those who provide the much more expensive child-rearing! »

« Exactly, » said Jack, « and soon we would be exactly where we started out from, with one type of female in actual fact being a new type of male! »

« Growing antlers and peacock tails and buying sports cars and flat-screen TVs! » said Joe.

« Exactly… » said Jack.

« But we started this whole conversation because the situation in humans is still not completely unbalanced. Human males need to be big bullies alright, but human females still can’t just be drab and plain and do nothing but patiently wait for the best male to appear - on the contrary, they need to be beautiful! So why do human females need to be beautiful? »
Jack answered: “Because in human beings, the females obviously compete for the males and not just the males for the females! Indeed, human females aren't just beautiful - they also get jealous of each other because of males. They even fight each other because of males, or at least they can be bloody mean to each other if they don’t fight outright. It's a crazy situation, but it's really like that!”
“And what explains this, according to you?” asked Joe.
“Well,” said Jack, “all this undoubtedly arose because of monogamy. Without monogamy, hundreds of females could happily share a male, because one male is really quite enough to fertilize hundreds of females, so there really isn't any reason for competition among the females with respect to males. Monogamy makes all the difference, where one female can somehow stake an exclusive claim to a male! It's a strange situation, but obviously it really is like that, else females wouldn't need to be beautiful!”
Joe had expected a longer and more complete explanation, but obviously Jack didn't have more to say about this right now. Joe reminded himself to bring up this topic again some other time: where on earth did this monogamous tendency in humans come from in the first place? What did Jack have to say about that?

In an indirect way, the topic really came back, although the discussion started with something else entirely:
“You know,” said Joe, “all your explanations just seem cold to me.”
“What do you mean by <<cold>>?” asked Jack.
“I mean,” said Joe, “that you bring up reasons for everything, but all these reasons seem so mechanical, as if the whole thing didn't make any sense, deep down.”
“Why would something <<mechanical>>, as you call it, not make sense?” asked Jack.
“Okay,” said Joe, “maybe it does make sense, but there's no point to the whole thing.”
“What kind of point would you like there to be?” asked Jack.
Me, the ghost, listening in to all these conversations between Jack and Joe, I pricked up my ears and got really interested. At last they were getting to the point and discussing the point! The point of life, the point of the universe, the point of everything!
“Well,” said Joe, “a god, maybe, who made all this with a precise idea at the back of his mind. So that we wouldn't just be here for nothing.”
“Oh, I see!” said Jack. He looked thoughtful for a while, then he said: “There isn't the slightest reason to believe there could be such a god.”
“Well,” said Joe, “there's still this argument about Nature's constants...”
“Oh yes,” said Jack, “I know about that argument.”
“Well,” said Joe, “I for myself didn't really understand it. I just heard about it, so maybe you could explain it to me?”
“You want me to be God's advocate then, when I don't even believe in God?” asked Jack, smiling maliciously.
“You just said you understood the argument, so please explain it to me properly. And then, while you're at it, you can also explain to me why it doesn't hold in your opinion.”
“Okay,” said Jack. “So Nature's constants, that's all about fundamental values like the charge of the electron and the mass of the proton, and so on. Or perhaps rather more fundamental constants than that which I don't understand really well either. Anyway, the point is that if these values changed just a little bit, then heavier elements than hydrogen would perhaps never have been able to form, and thus there wouldn't be life, or at least not of our kind.”
“These constants,” Jack went on, “don't depend on anything more fundamental than themselves, or at least nothing more fundamental that we have found out about yet. They are just arbitrary. There is no theory explaining why they should be exactly what they are. And yet, if they were different, matter might never have come together to form galaxies, stars with planets, living beings, smart living beings building washing-machines and smart-phones..., so all of this just wouldn't exist!”
“Okay,” said Joe, “I get it! The question becomes: why did all these constants settle at exactly the values that allowed our existence? Doesn't that mean some god-like being must have set them like that, since it's much too improbable that they just all got the exact values that made our existence possible by chance?”
“Yes,” said Jack, “that's how the argument goes.”
“Okay,” said Joe, “but now you're going to debunk it!”
“Exactly,” said Jack, “now I'm going to debunk it, if you're patient enough to hear me out!”
“Sure,” said Joe, “I'm all ears!”
“Okay,” said Jack. “You see, wondering why our universe has the exact set of constants that allows our existence is like a fish in a pond wondering why the pond seems to be so perfectly adapted to his existence while the world all around isn't. How come he finds himself in exactly this spot so perfectly suited to his existence? Isn't this a proof that a divine creator must have put it there for him on purpose?”
“Oh,” said Joe, “I see what you mean: if the pond wasn't suited to his existence, he wouldn't be there to wonder about it. Since he's there to wonder about it, the pond must be suited to his existence.”
“Exactly,” said Jack. “That's called the <<anthropic principle>>. Things are such that we can exist, because if they weren't, we wouldn't be here to wonder about them. But actually the argument is yet a bit more complicated than that. If all types of universes could exist, with all types of life living in them, how come we're in exactly this one, with these very special conditions allowing heavier elements than hydrogen to exist, which further makes chemistry possible, and so on? Our type of universe, with its finely tuned constants, is highly improbable, you see, unless there are other fundamental reasons for the constants of Nature to be exactly what they are. And one way to get out of this conundrum is to assume that our type of universe is the only kind to support life, because our type of life is the only kind that exists. Or if it's not the only kind, then it should at least be the most typical kind. That would explain why the constants of Nature are so finely tuned in our universe - if they weren't, we wouldn't be here to measure them, since other universes don't support life, or in any case not much of it. All this means that our kind of life must be a typical kind. If it isn't, the whole argument breaks down. If life could also exist in the kind of universes where only hydrogen exists - which means there are no heavier elements forming inside stars, so there aren't any stars at all in the first place, nor galaxies, nor solar systems with planets, and so on -, then how come we're in such a rare universe where such things as molecules, planets and washing machines exist? Scientists don't like highly unlikely things to happen without a reason, you see?”
“Yes, I see,” said Joe.
“The only plausible reason anyone has found, as far as I know,” said Jack, “is precisely this <<anthropic principle>>: our universe is such a special case because it's the only kind of universe which can support life. All the other, less special universes exist too, but we're not in them, and thus we don't measure their natural constants, because we could never have appeared in them in the first place.”
“Yes, I get it,” said Joe.
“But the whole argument breaks down if other life-forms - not requiring galaxies, solar systems or planets - could exist just as easily, or perhaps even more easily.”
“What kind of other forms of life?” asked Joe.
“Well, so-called Boltzmann brains,” said Jack. “These are free-floating brains that just pop into existence in an ever-expanding universe. If the universe expands forever, that makes time and space infinite, so any structure of any complexity will necessarily pop into existence at some point, including free-floating washing machines, smart-phones and fully functional brains, you see. If the universe really expands forever, then these so-called Boltzmann brains will end up outnumbering <<normal>> life-forms like us, which means we aren't so normal after all, and the whole explanation about why the universe is such as it is - namely the only kind which allows observers to observe it - breaks down!”
Jack took a deep breath and continued: “THUS - that's how the clever argument goes - a forever expanding universe must surely be physically impossible. Either that, or the finely tuned constants of Nature require another explanation than the anthropic principle.”
But Joe somehow wasn't so impressed: “How could anyone prove that we aren't such what's-it-Boltzy brains anyway, and that this strange universe we seem to live in is anything more than a Boltzy brain hallucination...”
“Not Boltzy,” said Jack. “BOLTZMANN!”

Was that it? Was that all they were going to say about this topic? I was disappointed. I had expected more.
Luckily there really was more to come:
“Well,” said Joe, “if there so much isn't any real reason to believe in any kind of god, why do so many people want to believe in one?”
“Oh that,” said Jack, “that's just about controlling sexuality.”
“Sex?” said Joe incredulously. “What has sex got to do with it?”
I wondered about the same thing.
“Remember we once discussed why they don't have stallions at the horse-riding schools?” asked Jack. Without waiting for an answer from Joe, he continued straight away: “The reason you don't get to ride male horses isn't because you're not good enough for that. Okay, it's true that stallions can be a bit too spirited for a beginner, but that's not the main reason you don't get to ride one. The main reason is that stallions are problematic to keep in a riding school. First of all they would fight with other stallions over the females, the mares. Secondly you'd have a hard time keeping a stallion calm when one of the mares was on heat.”
“Sure,” said Joe.
“You see,” said Jack, “females don't normally compete with each other over males - since a male can happily make hundreds of females pregnant, there's no need for females to compete over them. Males, on the other hand, compete over females, since every female only gets on heat every once in a while. And this is what makes males problematic.”
“I still don't see how this leads to religion,” said Joe.
“Now you might wonder,” said Jack ignoring Joe's interruption completely, “how the human species solved this problem. How come we live peacefully in huge towns full of both males and females, and the males aren't even killing each other over the females?”
“Sometimes they do,” said Joe.
“Okay, you're right,” said Jack, “occasionally they still do, but the real question isn't why they sometimes do it, but rather why they don't always do it? How is this possible?”
“Through religion,” said Joe. “That's what you're trying to say, right?”
“Yes,” said Jack, “some anthropologists argue that's what religion is for. You make everyone believe there's a big Alpha-Male in the sky.”
“Hmmm...” said Joe.
“And don't you think you can cheat on Him,” Jack continued, “because He's everywhere and He sees everything! Besides He's almighty! And logically He owns all the females. If you try to cheat on Him, He'll punish you! He'll punish you after death by sending you to Hell for an eternity of suffering!”
“I see...,” said Joe.
“Actually it's very convenient that the punishment only comes after death,” continued Jack, “since nobody ever comes back from there, so there isn't anybody to tell the others that he fucked as many females as he liked and still never got punished for it!”
“Yeah,” said Joe.
“So we lesser males better keep quiet!” continued Jack. “We're not allowed to fuss and fight like stallions would. Occasionally, though, the big Alpha-Male gives a lesser male a chance to fuck.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Joe, “why would he do that? The alpha-male keeps the females to himself. Why would he suddenly want to share them?”
“You're right,” said Jack. “Has anyone ever heard of an alpha-male doing such a crazy thing? When a male lion takes over the females from another male that he’s just chased away or killed, the first thing he does is to kill all the pups so that the females would stop suckling them and be ready to have new pups. That's logical, isn't it?”
“Exactly,” said Joe. “So why would such an alpha-male ever be so crazy as to let lesser males have a go?”
“Well,” said Jack putting on a wise air, “it seems that baboons - if I'm not mistaken - do that. The alpha-male really lets the lesser males have a go from time to time. Not too often, of course. Most of the offspring are still his. The reason he does this is probably so that the young ones wouldn't be killed if something happened to him. Indeed, the new alpha-male would be forced to let them live, since some of them could be his, after all. And since he couldn't be too sure which ones, he would be forced to let them all live. Or if the group of baboons got attacked, all the males would help to defend the young ones, not just the alpha-male. And why would they do that? Well, simply because some of them could be their own.”
Just in case Joe didn't know this yet, Jack gave the full explanation: “The reason for all this is that a gene can only survive if it ensures its own survival, for example by programming you to take care of your own young - who logically have a good chance of having that same gene too. A gene that makes you kill your own young is not a good gene in that sense, so it gets eliminated by natural selection.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Joe, “I know all that...”
“So, you see,” continued Jack, “that an alpha-male would let the lesser males have a go is not completely unheard of...”
“Yeah,” said Joe.
“And that's how the Alpha-Male in the sky does it too. If you want a female, you have to ask for His permission. So you go to Church where this permission will be granted to you by the Alpha-Male through His interpreter, the priest. It's called marriage. And of course after that you're not allowed to fuck any other females but this one specific one.”
“I see,” said Joe.
“You see,” said Jack as if he hadn't heard Joe at all, “that's how we humans are able to live peacefully together by the millions, males and females happily mixed without the males fighting over the females at every turn... But horses aren't like that, you see. They don't have any Big Stallion in the sky watching over all the others. And that's why stallions are problematic to keep in a riding school together with lots of mares and other stallions!”
“Oh well,” said Joe, not quite convinced, “lots of people don't get married in Church anymore nowadays, and lots of people live together without even being married at all!”
“Sure,” answered Jack, “but they still don't become as unruly as stallions. They still feel watched by God on some level, even if they claim not to believe in God at all. It's an old tradition, and it creeps into you insidiously, quite independently of what you consciously believe or not.”
“Okay,” said Joe, “so God was just created to control the males' sexuality, according to you. But what about the females' sexuality?”
“Ah,” said Jack full of eagerness, “that's a very interesting question too!”

Jack launched into his next lecture to Joe:
“Controlling the females' sexuality is probably even more important than controlling the males',” he said. “That's because if one single male steps out of line, he might fecundate hundreds of females, and you'd have hundreds of illegitimate children. The other males could never accept that. They would all grow suspicious of each other and end up fighting like stallions! But if you control the females' sexuality and one single one steps out of line, she can just have as many children as is possible for one single woman – in other words not too many – and it stops there. You just condemn this woman to whatever penalty you chose for adultery and it's done! In other words, you get better results by controlling the females' sexuality than by controlling the males'.”
“Yeah,” said Joe, “and I know what the penalty is for a female stepping out of line: it's calling her a whore and ostracizing her!”
“Exactly,” said Jack, “that's exactly how it's done!”
“But there's a simpler way to control a female's sexuality,” said Joe, “Just cut off her clitoris and labia and all that so that she can't feel anything when she has sex. That way you can be sure she won't ever look for sex with another man than the one she was <<given>> to...”
“Yes!” said Jack, “You're a genius coming up with these examples! In some parts of the world it's really done like that!”
“Okay,” said Joe, “but now you're going to explain how it's done in our part of the world.”
“Yes,” said Jack. “Here in the Christian part of the world, we have this guilt-thing. First of all there's the original sin. Then came Jesus and saved us all by dying on the cross for us. Of course, in some sense this makes us even more guilty, since he had to die such a horrible death for us. So now we should spend our time going to Church, being bloody grateful and praying to him, not having fun!”
“So having fun has become a kind of sin?” asked Joe.
“Exactly,” said Jack. “Having fun is bad!”
“So bad that it's a sin?” Joe insisted.
“Exactly,” said Jack, “for true Christians having fun is a sin. We should all spend our time feeling guilty and ashamed and asking for God’s forgiveness. It would be tone-deaf to have fun when Jesus had to die such a horrible death to save us all. Especially the biggest fun of all, namely sex.”
“Yeah, I got it!” said Joe. “But shouldn't this apply equally much to males as females?”
“Well,” said Jack, “having a bit of fun during sex is still necessary for males, else they don't climax and the woman won't be fecundated... So unfortunately you still have to allow them that much fun. Else mankind would die out.”
“I see,” said Joe, “but the woman doesn't need such fun in order to be fecundated.”
“Well,” said Jack, “if, during sex, she just can't hold it back and still ends up having some fun, that can be forgiven if at least she didn't do it on purpose.”
“Oh, yes, I see,” said Joe. “If she has fun without having actively wanted it, then it can be forgiven. But seeking out a man on her own would of course mean that she was looking for the fun on purpose, and that's unforgivable!”
“Yes,” said Jack, “that's called whorish!”
“But if the man she was given to is just so good in bed that she has fun by accident because she just can't hold it back, then it's okay,” said Joe.
“Exactly,” said Jack, “that's exactly how it is.”
“Well,” said Joe, “this method of controlling women's sexuality is still a bit less brutal than cutting off their clitoris and labia, isn't it?”
“It's brutal enough,” said Jack.

And Joe would soon have a chance to find out just how brutal the Christian way of controlling women's sexuality could be, namely through a patient – Daniel.
Daniel had already been Jack's patient before, and Joe gradually pieced together his story from Jack's notes as well as from the new things Daniel told him.
Though actually it wasn't so much his own story Daniel was telling Joe – it was his wife's story, his soon-to-be-ex-wife's story, to be precise... Her name was Katalin.
It seemed that Katalin's grandmother had been abandoned by her own mother who apparently divorced from her husband (something unheard of at the time in a small village in the Hungarian countryside where she originally came from), and ran away, leaving the child to the father (in other words to Katalin's great-grandfather). He didn't know what to do with the child and left her to his own parents. So Katalin's grandmother was brought up by her paternal grandparents. We can only guess how good (or not) it was for her there, but in any case she became a fervent Catholic, perhaps because Jesus and his merry-men and all the saints were some kind of imaginary friends for her to replace the family she had never had (this interpretation came from Katalin herself, by the way, not from Daniel, as Daniel clearly pointed out).
When she came of age, Katalin's grandmother was forced to get married with Katalin's grandfather because she didn't have the trousseau demanded by the cloister to become a nun, which would have been her true wish. In any case she never grew tired, even in old age, of telling this story to all her children and grandchildren (who wouldn't even have existed if she had really gone to the cloister to become a nun).
Couple-life couldn't have been so fulfilling for Katalin's grandparents since the grandfather conceived several other children with several other women during the war, but nothing was known about them except that they existed.
They had four children of their own – a boy and then two girls, and much later another unplanned little girl, namely Katalin's mother. In Katalin's grandmother's room there was a picture that made a big impression on Daniel: it showed Katalin's grandparents, both steadfast and serious, Katalin's uncle and two aunts, already quite grownup and already quite serious too, and finally a little minx of a girl who really didn't seem to belong on that picture at all – Katalin's mother.
Since Katalin's mother was much younger than her brother and sisters, she still lived at her parents' place when her siblings had already left long ago to start families of their own.
“She lives there to this day,” Daniel explained. Joe made appropriate noises to show he had understood, including all the innuendo it implied for Westerners like Daniel and Joe.
Katalin's grandmother, as a fervent Catholic, never tired of preaching virginity before marriage. It was probably out of rebellion against this that her youngest daughter, Katalin's mother, slept all over the place until the inevitable happened. When she realized she was pregnant, she wasn't even in touch with Katalin's father anymore, but she managed to find him again through some common acquaintances. She discussed the problem with him and they quite reasonably decided she needed an abortion. For Katalin's father, the case was closed.
This information, by the way, came from Katalin's father himself when Daniel, sick of knowing only half of his wife's family, had insisted on seeing him. Up till then Katalin had believed she had been a wanted child.
But, coming back to the story, when Katalin's grandmother, the fervent Catholic, heard about the pregnancy, she managed to convince Katalin's mother to keep the child and pretty much “forced” Katalin's parents to get married. The young couple moved into the wife's parents' house until a flat of their own would be attributed to them (as this was done during Communist times in Hungary).
Judging from photos and voice recordings from that time, Katalin's father was delighted with his little daughter (she slept on his tummy, he sang lullabies to her...) in spite of originally not having wanted neither her nor her mother.
Katalin's father was still a student, and so he was sent to a special camp for students to pick apples (this was a Communist idea to force intellectuals-to-be to get an idea of the real work done by labourers). When he came back from this camp, looking forward to seeing his sweet little daughter again, he was badly disappointed – his motherin-law met him at the garden-gate, held out a pile of clothes to him and told him that unfortunately he couldn't live here anymore because, as she said, “Jolika doesn't love you anymore” (though she had probably never loved him in the first place, since it was Katalin's grandma who had forced them to get married). He went back to live with his own parents and didn't see his daughter (nor his wife, by the way) for months on end till he was officially granted the usual visiting rights after the divorce.
But apparently it was too late by then to resume the father-daughter relationship they had built up earlier, because little Katalin hardly remembered him when she finally saw him again.
Besides, he had married again and soon had two sons. Little Katalin had to visit that family regularly, but she always felt very much out-of-place there, among other things because they were in the habit of going on excursions in the countryside and having other social activities little Katalin wasn't used to. She was used to staying at home with her mother or in any case only going out as far as there were paved sidewalks. She wasn't used to walking on adventurous, rocky paths through the forest or socializing with several people at once. She didn't know how to behave in such situations and just felt out-of-place and scared!
Little Katalin also had to visit her paternal grandparents regularly and spend some holidays there with her paternal cousins. She counted the days and the nights, praying for time to go faster, because she felt dreadfully out of place and badly missed her mother. But sometimes it happened, towards the end of her stay, that they asked her if she would like to stay a few days longer, and she didn't dare to say no while at the same time almost dying of despair.
Katalin had become mummy's girl a hundred percent. They lived in a total symbiosis, even sleeping in the same bed. During her whole girlhood including her teens, all the way till she met Daniel, Katalin never had a room of her own, not even a bed of her own. Her mother was like a sister or a best friend to her. Her classmates envied her this super-cool mother, but for Katalin it was just natural, she had never known anything else. Katalin’s mother didn’t have any difficult-to-satisfy expectations and didn’t put Katalin under any kind of pressure. Well, there was perhaps still ONE expectation (even though it wasn’t ever spelled out, of course), namely that Katalin would never leave home and always be dependent on her mother like a pet. Katalin’s mother always bought Katalin big, baggy, very comfortable but very unsexy clothes, as if encouraging Katalin to stay chubby and child-like and never to grow up and become sexy. After all, Katalin didn’t need to become dashing and sexy or who knows what to please the outside world, since she had her mother at home who assured her she would look after her forever, never mind if she didn’t know what to study, and never mind if she never learnt any profession and never got any job… This of course was very reassuring for little Katalin.

Katalin also felt relieved that she didn’t have a father at home like the other children, because the only father image she had in her mind was that of a fat guy in a dirty singlet sitting in front of the TV with a beer, occasionally yelling across the room because he couldn't find the bottle-opener (that, in any case, was the kind of father the other children seemed to have).
But from time to time her mother had a lover. They were always (according to Katalin, as Daniel pointed out) depraved men whom Katalin feared and despised. It usually lasted a week or two during which her mother was as if in a trance, forgetting about her daughter completely. During these times, little Katalin always suffered greatly. Luckily it never lasted long. Things always returned to normal when her mother sobered up, confirmed in her conviction once again that all men are the same after all, namely bastards.
Nevertheless there was a time when little Katalin was forced to live in a small studio flat with her mother and one of her mother's lovers for several months in a go. The guy was a drunk bus-driver, and of course little Katalin wasn't allowed to mention him at her grandparents' place where she spent her afternoons after school. Her Catholic grandmother definitely wasn’t supposed to know about this new step-father! Katalin was just barely of school-age then.
One day the legal wife of this man appeared and yelled at Katalin's mother, threatening to scratch her eyes out. Little Katalin witnessed the scene, but of course she wasn't supposed to talk about it with her grandparents when she was at their place in the afternoon. Her grandmother still saw that she was very agitated and gave her some calming pills for grownups, not knowing what else to do.
Luckily, shortly after this, Katalin and her mother left the studio flat (and the lover) and went back to live with Katalin's grandparents.
“Where Katalin's mother still lives even today,” Daniel pointed out. Joe nodded - he remembered.
Katalin's grandfather, a distant man with a very peripheral role in Katalin's life, died when Katalin was still quite small. After his death there was no other man in that house (Katalin's mother's lovers didn't come to the house, because after the fiasco with the drunk bus-driver she at least had the sense to meet up with them elsewhere than at home). It became a house of three women of three generations. Four if you count the dog, a phlegmatic Chow-Chow who was of course a female too.

Even though this dog was very phlegmatic, and thus certainly wouldn’t disturb any long-standing habits, it had still had a hard time finding its place in the family. Katalin had described how it had been when they had first brought it home as a puppy. She had held it in a card-board box on her lap during the bus-ride home, and the little puppy had writhed and trembled in there while Katalin, far from watching the wretched little creature with sympathy, had looked at it with disgust - what a bother, now this stupid animal would always be around, always be between her and her mother somewhere! Couldn’t they just bring it back? Why on Earth had they decided to get a dog?

Luckily the dog still managed to win her heart in the end, and it grew into a healthy adult dog, soon feeling confident enough to bark at other dogs from the garden. Katalin recalled its first barks - far from being moved that their little fosterling had gained so much self-confidence that it even dared to bark, mother and daughter both just sat in the kitchen, frozen stiff with shock that something was barking in their garden!

So even though you might think that having a dog meant they were open to animals at least (even if not to men), that wasn’t really the case. That dog had had a hard time getting accepted, and finally it just found its place as one more phlegmatic female in the household…

Joe nodded - he was getting the general idea.
A few years after the death of her grandfather, Katalin started taking piano-lessons. She was quite good at it - a true model pupil, but just for a while. After the first year, an audition was organized where her teacher presented her best pupils, and Katalin was among them. Katalin suddenly had stage-fright and couldn't play. The teacher, presumably under pressure herself, scolded her quite badly. Katalin's reaction to this, which (according to Daniel) was an absolutely typical reaction, was to NEVER play the piano again.
“Whenever she encounters difficulties,” said Daniel, “her reaction is always to abandon, reject and forget everything. That's what she did with her father and his whole family, that's what she did with the piano, and that's what she’s doing with me as well.”
Joe found it a bit surprising that this Katalin apparently dropped things so easily, even those she had seemed to really care about earlier, like the piano. But Daniel explained it like this: “All these things belong to the <<outside>>-world, and the outside world doesn't really count, or in any case doesn't count in any enduring way, since it can sometimes even turn evil. The only thing that is really constant and REALLY counts is the warm and soft nest she shares with her mother. That's where she takes refuge when the outside world turns too evil.”
So her mother sold the piano.
When Katalin turned sixteen, it was decided she was big enough now to visit her father on her own whenever she wished and that the visiting rights were obsolete. She immediately broke off all contact with her father, relieved that she would never have to see him again.
Daniel met Katalin when he visited a friend in Budapest during summer holidays. This friend was actually interested in her, would have liked to seduce her but didn't know how to. Katalin was only nineteen, Daniel was twenty-seven. They went on excursions together with their common friend. Later it turned out that Katalin had fallen madly in love with Daniel. Physically he had a strong resemblance to her father, which Katalin didn't admit to herself. And if she had consciously seen the resemblance at all, she would have admitted even less that it had played any part in her feelings for him. This of course only came to Daniel's attention much later when he once saw a photo of Katalin's father…
For her it must have been as if she had been given a second chance with that father she had lost when her parents had separated and with whom she had never been able to resume the father-daughter relationship. Daniel was younger than her real father. He was just about the age her real father had been when her parents had separated, namely when she had lost him...
A few months after his return to Switzerland, Daniel wrote Katalin a letter with the excuse of sending her a few photos of their common excursions. Her answer to this letter, in thinly disguised phrases, was practically already a love-letter. As Daniel let himself get caught in the game, her letters became hotter and more passionate. Yet Daniel didn't straight away jump into his car and drive over to Budapest to sleep with this girl who obviously wanted him, because he felt somewhere deep down that her expectations were vastly exaggerated and that she would predictably be disappointed. He rather let their relationship mature some more (in writing), and it was only in Spring the next year that they finally met again. She came to live with him in his little studio flat for six weeks in a go. The beginnings were hard – on the third day she was already prepared to take the plane home again straight away, just because he had cursed his computer that wouldn't work, which had confused and scared her. After some endless discussions where he tried to explain to her that love isn't given but must be built up, they finally stayed together for the whole six weeks.
In many ways those first six weeks with her new boyfriend were like the holidays she used to be forced to spend with her father when she was younger. With Daniel she was forced to confront her fears and phobia, just as she had been with her father earlier too. Just like her father, he took her to places and made her do things she would never have gone to or done with her mother. She was afraid of cable-cars, of steep mountain paths and mountains in general. She was afraid of water (and thus of the lake), she was afraid of animals (including Daniel's parents' cat), and most of all she was afraid of Daniel's deep, manly voice, of his physical force and of his body so different from hers or her mother's...
And yet their love seemed stronger than all this. After her return to Budapest, she cried in her letters that she couldn't bear to live without him anymore. As her courses at the university hadn't started yet, he suggested that she come to see him for a few more weeks and that he would send her the money for the airplane ticket. When she heard this, she straight away ran off to check out possible flight tickets. When she told him about the dates she wanted and he dared to say that actually a bit later would suit him better, she felt deeply hurt by this and decided not to come at all.
They still met again the following summer at her mother's place (or rather grandmother's place, since that's where they were living) in Budapest. Katalin's mother had gone to live with her current boyfriend and had left them the double-bed she ordinarily shared with her daughter.
The two weeks Daniel spent in that house that Katalin ordinarily shared with her mother - as well as her grandmother and the phlegmatic Chow-Chow - were quite hard for him. The house was small, dark, humid and crowded with heavy, dark furniture and lots of exclusively “feminine” trinkets. When he lifted the toilet-seat in the bathroom, what he found underneath made it quite clear that it hadn't been lifted in ages. Daniel was quite obviously the first man to come this way in a long, long time...
After a few more common holidays in Switzerland, Katalin went on crying that she couldn't bear to live without him anymore and that they had to find a solution.
At first Daniel found it nice to be missed, but gradually he felt she was putting him under pressure. He was doing translations in those days for one or two clients. Theoretically he could do that job from anywhere in the world, provided he had an internet-connection (which in those days wasn't quite straightforward in a country like Hungary yet). He wasn't sure he would manage to keep his clients if he lived so far away either. Finally, in December, and without any guarantee that this would really work out, he packed up his computer and fax-machine and left for Budapest to stay there, hoping he wouldn't get in trouble at the border with all that luggage when he was supposed to be just a tourist.
The first few weeks of his new life in Budapest were hell. They got a small apartment that belonged to Katalin's mother and that she had previously let out, but when Daniel arrived the tenants hadn't even moved out yet. Some furniture had to be bought in a hurry, namely a table to work on at least, the internet-connection had to be organized, all this before Daniel's clients would decide it was easier to find another translator!
Katalin couldn't bear to see her lover so stressed when according to her he should have been filled with nothing but boundless joy at being united with her at last! She was so disappointed by his attitude that she soon moved out of the apartment and back to her mother's place, leaving him alone in this town he didn't know and hadn't chosen for himself and whose language he didn't even speak. This was their first big crisis.
His first reflex was to pack up his car again and return to Switzerland, but he held himself back. He gradually got organized in Budapest and gently seduced Katalin once again. It took a few days till she agreed to see him again. And then it took a month or two till she came back to live with him in the apartment. And this time they took the dog too (that phlegmatic Chow-Chow who under Daniel's influence soon became thiner and sportier, just like Katalin herself did too, by the way).
They had (and they had always had) sexual difficulties. In bed, Katalin was passive and demanding at the same time. It was exclusively Daniel's responsibility to make her see fireworks in front of her inner eye. She wanted their lovemaking to be passionate and wild. It was Daniel's responsibility to make it wild, but at the same time she didn't want to lose control. Their position was never good for her, there was always an arm or a leg sticking out the wrong way and disturbing her. Whenever she still got pleasure out of it somehow, she immediately thought it was a breakthrough and that it would always be like this from that point on and then, predictably, got disappointed the next time.
Just in passing, Daniel explained she definitely wasn't simulating her orgasms. Apparently it was very important for him that Joe would really believe this. He explained that apart from acoustic and other physical manifestations, even her body smell would suddenly change, which in his opinion couldn't be simulated.
Joe dryly noted that of course he believed Daniel, since - according to his description of her - she wasn't the kind of woman to simulate orgasms anyway – she was much too selfish to do such a thing just to please or comfort him!
Daniel was a bit taken aback by Joe's reasoning but had to admit it was logical.
Anyway, whenever Katalin had exceptionally gotten some pleasure out of it, she would immediately want to repeat the experience, then again a few hours later, until it didn't work anymore. Then her disappointment was such that she completely forgot the pleasure she had gotten initially. She felt betrayed, as if Daniel had promised her eternal bliss and in the end hadn't been able to fulfill that promise.
It's worth mentioning that even though their lovemaking was never wild enough for her, whenever he still felt rather wild and tried to take her that way (since she always claimed she wanted it like that), it systematically ended in tears - in reality, she needed her lover to be a reassuring teddy-bear. Nevertheless she still never stopped complaining about their lovemaking being too soft, never realizing that there was a contradiction within herself.
“And you, did you realize there was a contradiction within herself?” asked Joe.
“No,” said Daniel, “I realize this only now.”
“Or in any case that's how you rationalize the problem so as to forgive yourself,” said Joe.
Daniel was taken aback, but, after all, it was a psychiatrist's job to take aback his patients every once in a while.
“I'm not saying your interpretation is wrong,” said Joe, “but there may be other elements you didn't take into account.”
“Such as me just being bad in bed?” asked Daniel.
“No,” said Joe, “that's not what I meant. I mean Katalin's upbringing.”
“About growing up without the presence of a man?” asked Daniel.
“No,” said Joe, “that's not what I meant either. I mean the upbringing she got from her Catholic grandmother.”
“But she never took her grandmother seriously!” exclaimed Daniel. “Nobody in the family took her holy-pot ravings seriously! And Katalin was much closer to her mother than her grandmother anyway.”
“Sure,” said Joe, “she may have felt closer to her mother, but her mother was working and only came home in the evenings. In the afternoons, Katalin was with her grandmother. Perhaps her grandmother was her primary caregiver, more so than her mother, however close she felt to her mother and however much she idealized her.”
“I never thought of that...” admitted Daniel.
“And in the eyes of a fervent Catholic, there are only two kinds of women,” continued Joe, “namely saints and whores.”
Daniel was a bit taken aback again, since he obviously hadn't expected his psychiatrist to speak of whores like this.
Joe explained, musing: “You know, earlier I thought I knew exactly what a whore is, namely a woman who takes money for sex rather than doing it for pleasure.”
“Isn't that what a whore is?” asked Daniel somewhat bewildered. He wasn't used to psychiatrists talking like this and voicing personal opinions.
“Not for fervent Catholics,” said Joe. “For fervent Catholics it's perfectly normal to take money for sex. It's called marriage. You marry the man who has enough money to feed you and your children-to-be, and you give him sex in exchange.”
Daniel had to admit this was what Katalin's grandmother had done. She certainly hadn't married out of love, since she much rather would have become a nun, as she never tired of telling everybody. This actually meant she was a whore. At least according to the strict definition that a whore is a woman who takes money for sex instead of doing it for pleasure.
“Of course Katalin's grandmother doesn’t see herself as a whore,” continued Joe. “For her, a whore is bound to be something different, namely a woman who has sex for pleasure rather than money.”
“You mean she completely inverted the definition of a whore?” asked Daniel confused. “Shouldn't sex always be for pleasure?” he added.
“Not for Catholics,” answered Joe. “For Catholics, sex is only for procreation. Pleasure is sinful.”
“But what does that have to do with Katalin and her attitude to sex?” asked Daniel.
“Everything,” said Joe, “everything... While consciously rejecting her grandmother's Catholic doctrines, they probably unconsciously still poisoned her mind. In particular the idea that seeking pleasure is sinful.”
“I don't get it,”said Daniel. “If Katalin really felt pleasure was sinful, how could she go on blaming me for not giving her enough of it?”
“SEEKING pleasure is sinful,” said Joe. “Getting pleasure if you can't hold it back isn’t sinful, because if you can't hold it back, then it's not your fault.”
Daniel began to see. His psychiatrist was on to something here.
“You mean she made me responsible for her pleasure so that she wouldn't have to seek it for herself?” he asked.
“Exactly,” said Joe. “Perhaps she didn't get all the nuances about saints and whores, but she definitely got the idea that pleasure, if there is going to be any, has to come entirely from the man. Nothing has to come from herself, since that would be whorish. Hence her total passivity in bed.”
“That's right,” said Daniel softly. “She wouldn't ever guide me either. She would just complain when things weren't how she wanted them...”
“Of course,” said Joe, “guiding you would have meant actively doing something to get pleasure for herself. She couldn't do that. You were supposed to do everything right on your own, so that she wouldn't need to contribute anything. So that she wouldn't need to be what her grandmother called a whore.”
“But why?” asked Daniel.
“Because she was a Catholic,” answered Joe.
“She wasn't a Catholic,” said Daniel. “On the contrary, she totally rejected her grandmother's beliefs.”
“She rejected them on the surface, but she was still influenced by them deep down,” said Joe.
“Even so, that doesn't explain why Catholics should be like that in the first place, does it?” asked Daniel.
“Well,” said Joe, “it's the way priests keep control over their flock. Sex is the most powerful force in nature. Control that, and you control everything.”
Daniel seemed to accept that, even though he had never had such a discussion with his psychiatrist before. He even wondered if a psychiatrist was actually allowed to voice his opinions like this. Wasn't it politically incorrect to bash up the Catholics like that?
But in any case it was an interesting idea...
Coming back to Daniel and Katalin's story, Daniel ended up staying in Budapest for more than two years. Before marrying Katalin and taking her to Switzerland, he insisted that he wanted to get to know her father. He went to see him on his own (because Katalin couldn't yet bear the idea of seeing him again, not even in Daniel's presence) and then he brought back his first impressions to her, and she was still quite curious. Thanks to Daniel’s influence, she eventually started writing him e-mails and some time later she agreed to meet her two half-brothers, and finally even her father in person, but only on “neutral territory”, namely at the graduation-party of one of her half-brothers.
But she still refused to meet her paternal grandparents at whose place she had always suffered so terribly much.
In the meantime she had a new dream – she wanted to do a semester in Madrid with the Erasmus-program. But she wanted to go there alone to get a taste of independence. Daniel couldn't imagine waiting for her in Budapest, so they officially moved to Switzerland (and in order to do that officially, they had to get married, which they did, even though Katalin detested the idea of marriage).
Leaving Daniel in Switzerland with the dog and all the administrative worries, she went off to Madrid with her new partner's debit and credit cards (since they were now officially a married couple), looking forward to being independent for the first time in her life and almost admitting that she wanted to have some amorous adventures as well.
The first weeks in Madrid were like a big carnival for her – she felt free at last, she was euphoric, and her only thought was to drop Daniel and find a Spaniard to replace him (while at the same time airily wasting the financial means Daniel provided for her).
During this time she met a certain Nacho, first sergeant of the Spanish Army, with whom she had already exchanged e-mails previously after having found him on an international pen-friends' platform. If she could have, she would have gone all the way with him (as Daniel found out by intercepting an e-mail she had written to a friend in which she explained how he would have been so much more exciting than Daniel). Unfortunately for her the first sergeant wasn't as interested in the ugly little ducking as she was in him.
The carnival atmosphere in Madrid didn't last. She didn't really manage to find real friends there, after all. And the first sergeant disappeared again on some new mission elsewhere. In December, Daniel went to spend Christmas and New Year with her, and after he returned to Switzerland, she once again started crying after him. So in the end Daniel and the dog moved to Madrid too, while officially continuing to live in Switzerland.
Katalin's new dream was now to stay in Madrid for good. After having looked into the possibilities, Daniel gradually managed to make her take root in reality again and to make her understand that such an undertaking would almost certainly be doomed to failure unless there was a proper career plan. You can't just go and live in a place without knowing what you're going to do there!
Katalin was forced to accept this, but not without crying many tears and remaining convinced in her heart that the main problem was Daniel not wanting to help her...
Later she still managed to get interested in something else, namely the famous translating and interpreting school in Geneva. This meant Daniel, with great relief, managed to drag her back to Switzerland.
While preparing for the entrance exam to this translating school, Katalin thought, at some point, that she might be pregnant, and she was vaguely disappointed when it turned out she still wasn't. Seeing his chance of founding a family and doing something real and proper with this labile and capricious woman at last, Daniel suggested having a baby for real.
And that's how, on a whim, they conceived their daughter Agnes.
And with her tummy already big and round, Katalin passed the entrance exam to the translating school.
Daniel's experience of Katalin's pregnancy was agreeable, sexually too, since on one hand they didn't have to worry about contraception anymore and on the other hand Katalin somehow became more receptive to tenderness rather than complaining about lack of passion and “wildness” all the time (their otherwise eternal problem).
When little Agnes was born, Katalin's mother wasn't happy about it at all. She was even offended at being forced to become a grandmother while still feeling much too young for that. She had already resented it when her daughter had abandoned her to live with a man (after all, she had never left her own mother either - except for the interlude long ago with the drunk bus-driver in the studio flat). That the young couple would move to Switzerland and found a family there was a catastrophe for her! She was depressed already, but her daughter's pregnancy just made her spiral down uncontrollably, and she let herself go completely under the tutorship of her own mother whom she had never left. She eventually still came to see her granddaughter, but only several months after the birth.
In the meantime, Katalin fell into a terrible postpartum depression.
She wrote down her feelings, whether it was for Daniel's benefit or just for herself never became clear, but in any case Daniel showed those notes to his psychiatrist who scanned them and added them to Daniel's patient-folder:

 

« I hate suffering.

I hate the lumpy, strangling feeling in my throat that keeps forcing me to cry.

I hate to wake up at night as soon as I’ve managed to fall asleep. I’d rather never fall asleep again.

I hate to feel so unwanted, to have nobody to cherish me or even just to give me a hug - although I couldn’t bear a hug anyway, because my huge, baggy, hurting breasts would be in the way.

I hate to feel that emptiness - I have nothing to offer, give or share, nothing but my suffering that nobody wants to hear about, especially not HIM.

I hate to feel his shy, soft, gentle touch when I don’t need gentleness at all because there’s a scream inside me just not managing to come out!

And I hate HER when she just can’t stop crying. If I didn’t love her so much I simply wouldn’t care, and it would be easier to bear, but I love her too much and that’s why I can’t bear her and that’s why I hate her!

I know she simply cries for her own pain, I know, I know, I KNOW, but I just can’t bear it!

I hate HIM when he has no time for me, when he’s so absent, when he shakes me off and doesn’t want any of me. And I hate him just as much when he wants me, when he tries to console me in his clumsy manner, when he wants to soothe me instead of holding me tight, when he strokes me with his shy, soft touch instead of squeezing the suffering away!

He’s all I have and I need him, but he’s too clumsy, too shy, too soft and most of all too distant, locked away in his own little worries, his own obsessive little ticks, not realizing that I deserve his attention MORE than any of his stupid worries do! Or do I?

I hate my weakness, my impotence, my sponginess. I hate to know that I just won’t manage, that I just fucked it all up once again, that I decided all wrong… or rather that I didn’t decide anything at all since I just let myself be pushed around once again!

I hate my breasts. I hate them when they’re baggy and empty, I hate them when they’re plump and full. I hate those blobs of fat just hanging there with no other purpose than to make me suffer. I hate their sensitivity, I hate how they force me to give milk while at the same time hurting too much to nurse my baby!

I hate it how the disgusting, sticky juice just runs out of them uncontrollably, how it wets my clothes, my body, making the whole of me sticky and disgusting! I hate it when they hurt and hurt and hurt and just won’t stop hurting like right now when they’re overfull and clogged up and can’t do anything but hurt! I wish I could cut them off and be rid of them FOREVER. Or rather, I would just want to have them back as they were BEFORE, before I even knew they could hurt this much, but nothing will ever be like before ever again, I guess…

Fuck it all.

I hate my tiredness that just won’t wear off however much I sleep (if I manage to sleep at all). I hate to feel too tired for anything I might enjoy, too tired even to pat Mirka, too tired even for myself, too tired to sleep, too tired to go on living.

And I hate that fucking pump and how it sucks and sucks and sucks, reminding me I have a baby, reminding me I can’t bear to nurse her, reminding me of my failure, reminding me of my suffering. And I hate it how it converts me into a milking cow, or not even a cow, but just a machine squirting out nourishment, material nourishment for my baby, while all the connectedness and love that should go with it just runs down the side somewhere…

I hate it how it tugs at my breasts. I hate to clean it ten times a day, watching every stupid drop running down along its plastic walls. I hate to see my nipple being squeezed and drawn into it, like a fat, red slug being squashed, squirting its innards all over the place, spraying them at the wall of the plastic tube while all the love and warmth that should have belonged to my baby evaporates.

I hate my body, its shapeless bulginess, its squishy softness, its droopy weakness. Wasn’t I a fat ugly duckling long enough as a young girl? Wasn’t that supposed to be over once I had grown into an acceptable-looking adult woman at last? Did I really need to trip and fall back even into THAT???

I hate that hanging tummy that won’t fit into my trousers anymore, I hate those wobbly thighs shaking as I walk, and most of all I hate those baggy breasts that only make me suffer!

I hate my sausage-like fingers that hurt me all night and bother me all day, all insensitive except for the pain! I hate my broad and flat feet slapping the ground like flippers. I hate my puffed up, permanently depressed face with its black rings under the eyes. I hate my vagina, smooth and distended and featureless except for the place of that cut that still hurts, reminding me of that sharp pain I felt when it was made, in that moment in which I lost my innocence and was transformed forever into what I am now: this fucking shapeless, powerless, impotent being which might as well forget its own existence if it weren’t for the pain, that incessant PAIN!

I hate to feel so drained, so used up, so senseless, so stupid. I hate to feel so unwanted, so unwantable, so unloved, so unloveable.

I wish I could just get out, run away, escape, but I don’t know how or where to. What I want to escape from is myself, and I know the only exit from myself is death. But I’m too weak and will-less even to consider killing myself, let alone doing it.

And those baggy hurting boobs would accompany me even into death, I’m sure of it. »

“She has some literary talent, in any case,” Joe commented.
“Sure,” Daniel answered. “I chose her for something after all, and it definitely wasn't her physical beauty...”
Joe let that pass.
Daniel continued with his story: during her postpartum depression, Katalin repeated day in day out « if only the baby wasn't here! ». She said it until Daniel told her he didn't want to hear it anymore. And so she had a reason more to complain that he wasn't supportive, since he wasn't even listening to her...
Daniel did as much as he could. He looked after the baby (apart from breastfeeding, which he obviously couldn't do), he took care of the household, did the cooking, the shopping... Whenever he took out Mirka the dog, he always took the baby with him so that Katalin would have a quiet moment.
Breastfeeding had always been a big problem. Katalin had a crisis every time. Often she tore her breast out of the baby's mouth, crying out that she couldn't bear it. Unfortunately the childcare nurses she turned to were of no help whatsoever. Neither was the paediatrician. Mostly they just looked at the baby and told her how fine it was, that she was doing everything right and should just continue like that and stop worrying. If they looked at her breasts at all (instead of concentrating only on the happy baby), they all exclaimed how perfectly healthy they looked, full of milk and without chaps. Yes, since it was going so fine in everybody's opinion, she definitely had to continue with the breastfeeding! That was the only piece of advice she ever got – just continue, everything's fine! They asked Katalin where it hurt (because of the lack of chaps, they really couldn't imagine), and when Katalin tried to explain to them that it wasn't really pain, or in any case not in the usual sense, but rather some kind of unbearable tickling sensation, they just gave her empty looks, having no idea what she was talking about. As Katalin tried to explain it more, they understood it even less and all just ended up minimizing the problem.
Katalin explained it in some more detail to Daniel than she had ever dared to explain it to the childcare nurses. The tickling sensation in her breasts triggered contractions in her vagina and made her feel a need for sex. This tremendous need for sex, several times a day, far from being pleasant, disgusted her of her own body.
“The Catholic upbringing once again,” said Joe.
“What?” asked Daniel.
“Being disgusted of her own body for needing sex,” answered Joe.
“Oh, I see,” answered Daniel absentmindedly. This time he didn't seem interested in Daniel's opinion of the Catholics.
“Did you have sex with her after the breastfeeding?” asked Joe.
“Sometimes,” answered Daniel. “But Katalin wasn't really in to it. Or maybe she would have been, if I could have given it to her WILDLY, which I couldn't, or not wildly enough anyway. That had always been our problem.”
“Why do you always think you should <<give>> it to her this way or that way?” asked Joe. “Sex is not something you just <<give>> somebody. It's more like a ball-game. You can't play a ball-game with someone who never throws the ball back at you. It's something you do together, not something one of you just <<gives>> to the other!”
Daniel was looking down at his shoes, not saying anything.
“I think you've been with this particular woman for much too long, and she's put you under lots of pressure, filling your head with all the false ideas she got from her super-Catholic grandmother.”
“So what do you suggest?” asked Daniel, looking up with an almost challenging air.
“Find yourself another partner,” said Joe. “Have some adventures,” he added, since that was what he had done himself in the past few years before he swapped lives with his brother and became Jack the psychiatrist.
But later he had to admit that this had possibly been one of the worst pieces of advice he had ever given. And, as Jack pointed out, it's not a psychiatrist's business to give advice anyway. A psychiatrist may prod his patient with uncomfortable questions so that he would look at his life in a different way and draw new conclusions for himself. But it’s bad practice for a psychiatrist to give advice directly. The patient should remain an autonomous human being, not become a disciple of his psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist has no business becoming a guru.
But Joe had definitely planted a seed in Daniel's mind. At first Daniel had been too scared of his own failures to even consider the possibility. Katalin's judgmental opinions of him weighed him down. Sex had always been the one domain through which Katalin could systematically get back the upper hand in their relationship. She felt totally secure with this power she had over Daniel. But since the arrival of the baby, and in particular since Katalin's failure to breastfeed without making a tremendous fuss, something had subtly shifted in Daniel's appraisal of Katalin's competence as a “real woman”.
Yes, Daniel had been breastfed by his own mother, even though he of course didn't remember it consciously. He had also seen his sisters being breastfed, and this he even remembered consciously, because he was the eldest of his family.
Katalin didn't recognize the danger this represented to her power-base. She herself hadn't been breastfed, because when it hadn't worked straight away for her mother, she was immediately fed formula. She hadn't seen her mother breastfeed any siblings either. She didn't see breastfeeding as an attribute of womanhood as Daniel did.
But for Daniel breastfeeding your own baby was definitely an attribute of womanhood. One that Katalin apparently lacked.
And she was the one telling him he was not a “real man”, when she wasn't even a “real woman” herself?
Katalin didn't see this danger to her power-base coming!
Anyway, coming back to the story, Katalin started using a breast-pump. This was supposed to diminish the awful sensations of the suckling baby, and in any case it spared the baby from having to experience her mother's crisis.
Unfortunately Katalin couldn't bear the sensation of the breast-pump either, as she described in the text Daniel had shown Joe. And even bottle-feeding the baby was awful for her. She saw the greedy eyes of the baby, like the eyes of a hawk, and her body reacted with all the awful suckling sensations just by memory.
Daniel had no sympathy for Katalin's description of his daughter's “hawk-eyes”. On the contrary, he was a happy and proud father. He was proud of his daughter's strong will to live and to grow, and so he was proud of her hungry suckling too. He happily took over the bottle-feeding with Katalin's milk. The result of this, unfortunately, was that Katalin felt even more left out and alienated from the baby.
Every morning after the first breast-pumping and bottle-feeding of the day was over, the proud daddy, the contented, happy baby, and the dog Mirka (eagerly waiting for the door to open so she could go out for her first piss of the day and sniff the pisses of other dogs) all went out together with the pram. Katalin, in the meantime, stayed alone, lying on the bed, feeling spent and dredged and discarded.
“But what was I to do?” exclaimed Daniel. “I couldn't stay there on the bed with her all day, consoling her, could I? The dog definitely needed to go out, and little Agnes and I definitely needed the fresh air too!”
“Sure,” said Joe, thinking of his own dog Daisy who was with Jack now.
Since the childcare nurses were of no help whatsoever, Daniel looked up a psychiatrist for his wife at a psychiatric clinic so that she could discuss her postpartum depression. But the person she saw there was a man - while she should probably rather have seen a woman - and she didn't really confide in him and thus he didn't understand her problems at all either. She came back from there disgusted of psychiatrists.
In the end, Daniel looked up a psychiatrist for himself, since he couldn't bear the load anymore himself. His wife, on the other hand, categorically refused to see another psychiatrist.
Later on, Katalin nevertheless went to see a somewhat esoteric masseuse and reflexologist (suggested by Daniel's mother) who finally told her to give up the breastfeeding and even the milk-pumping, because it obviously wasn't doing her any good. That's how Katalin finally dared to stop with it, leaving it to Daniel to feed little Agnes with formula milk. Nevertheless, she still blamed Daniel for not having been the one to encourage her to stop breastfeeding or pumping. In her eyes, he should have done that himself, rather than waiting for another person to do it. She really considered Daniel responsible for her happiness, and thus it was always some failure of his when she was unhappy.
In October of Agnes' first year, Katalin started university. It was a real relief for her to have a reason to go out of the house every day. In the first year she had many classes and a lot of homework. The change of scenery was like a bowl of fresh air for her. Daniel stayed at home with little Agnes who was getting close to six months old. Katalin had stopped breastfeeding quite a while ago already, and he could look after her by himself. Katalin was free to stay in the library after her classes, or to go to parties with her colleagues. She felt much better. She was alive again.
But later she started having problems with one of the professors who obviously could neither understand nor accept that a person whose mother-tongue was not Spanish would dare to attempt the course of translation studies with Spanish as the first language (interestingly, though, he was a Catalan, so his mother-tongue wasn’t Spanish either - he had undoubtedly suffered from this and couldn’t bear the idea that this young woman would have the same « problem » and dare not to suffer from it as much as he had!). Clearly, Katalin, with her Hungarian nationality, didn't pass unnoticed. It was logical that it was going to be a bit of a fight to be accepted. The professor in question was the kind who liked to get his boots licked, but Katalin didn't know how to do that. Whenever she felt attacked, she simply clamped shut. She never submitted to anybody, even if it would have been only a matter of pretending to submit. She had grown up with a mother who had treated her like a sacred relic - cherished and protected, but sometimes also forgotten for the benefit of a momentary lover. The only role she knew how to play was the role of the victim.
The professor made her fail in his exam twice, by just a tenth of a point. The second time it was quite clear that he did it on purpose. With Daniel's support and encouragement, she appealed against the exam-mark, but without success (there is always some subjectivity in the evaluation of a translation, so it was difficult to prove any wrongdoing on the part of the professor). On her third and last chance, the professor gave her such a bad mark that the trickery became all too evident. Daniel tried to tell her that this was good – any independent authority would now be forced to admit that this mark wasn't at all objective! But Katalin wasn't in a fighting mood anymore, and she was finally unregistered from the university at the end of the year.
Some time earlier they had gone to Budapest with the baby to visit Katalin's family. Katalin's paternal grandmother had died some time ago, but her paternal grandfather was still alive and very interested in seeing his great-granddaughter. He had seen photos of her at his son's place (since there was some contact with Katalin's father now). He hoped he would be able to see her during Daniel and Katalin's visit to Budapest. But Katalin claimed she didn't have a single positive memory of this man and absolutely didn't want to meet him.
Daniel practically had to “force” her to agree to one single visit at least (one single visit during the many weeks they spent in Budapest that summer).
And when they finally went to see him, he had prepared Katalin's favourite cake (of which he remembered that it had been her favourite when she was a little girl) and he was all charming, even singing a song to little Agnes. He discussed politics with Katalin and Daniel, and Katalin also learned what his profession used to be. Apparently she hadn't known about that earlier (he had been an engineer just like his son, Katalin's father).
When Daniel and Katalin got back to Switzerland with their baby and their dog and all their luggage, Katalin put away their condoms in the bathroom cupboard together with medicaments and other rarely used items rather than on the bedside table as usual, claiming that they wouldn't need them anymore. Indeed, from then on she refused any advance from Daniel's part, but without feeling any need to explain anything to him.
After a few weeks of this, Daniel told her that they seemed to be heading for a divorce (hoping of course to provoke her and force her to explain this new behaviour of hers). She answered cheerfully that they would indeed surely divorce when little Agnes was somewhat older.
“Obviously the provocation didn't work,” Joe commented about Daniel’s divorce talk. “She just provoked you in return.”
“You think it was just provocation on her part too?” asked Joe.
“Undoubtedly,” answered Joe. “She called your bluff, so I guess it's your turn to call hers now.”
“How?” asked Daniel.
“By showing her she's not irreplaceable,” answered Joe.
Well, anyway, Daniel hadn't known how to call her bluff just then. When she had told him this, he had remained speechless. Of course, over the next few days and weeks, he started questioning her.
She explained that he had always been more of a father-figure to her rather than a lover, and she made it quite clear that if she didn't want sex anymore, it wasn't because she wasn't interested in sex per se, but rather because she didn't want to do it with HIM anymore.
Of course Daniel didn't find it so easy to accept this explanation.
“Because it's wrong anyway,” said Joe.
“Aren't you just saying this to make me feel better?” asked Daniel.
“No,” said Joe, “look, I think it was like this: one fine morning your wife woke up and realized that she was now a married woman, a mommy, with a flat, a dog and a car.”
“You're right...” mused Daniel, “she always hated this kind of bourgeois life, as she called it.”
“As I see it,” said Joe, “you were the one who gave in to all her momentary little whims, letting her go off to Madrid on her own when that was what she wanted, but you had a dominant position on the longer term.”
“A dominant position on the longer term?” asked Daniel.
“Yes,” said Joe, “look, with lots of patience and perseverance you had finally managed to get her to marry you, and then you promptly got her pregnant as well, while all she had ever wanted was to chase after her ephemeral dreams, labile and capricious as she was! It's logical that she eventually had to rebel!”
“It's true I dominated her with my wider life-experience, with my maturity and my masculine voice that scared her.”
“Exactly,” said Joe, “and she always got her requital in bed, where she always claimed you weren't good enough for her and you always believed her.”
“I hadn't looked at it this way,” admitted Daniel.
“You know,” said Joe, “it's interesting that she claims you were more like a father to her rather than a lover. When adolescents grow up, they rebel against their parents. It's part of becoming independent. She’s doing the same, only she’s doing it with you!”
“But I wasn't ever her damn father!” exclaimed Daniel.
“No,” said Joe, “but to her you probably were. She had never rebelled against her mother, since her mother had been more like a big sister or a best friend rather than a mother, and so there was nothing to rebel against. She couldn't rebel against her father either, since she had stopped seeing him during her teenage years. She met you before she could rebel against anybody else! So now she’s rebelling against you!”
“But does this insight help in any way?” asked Daniel.
“No,” admitted Joe.
Daniel still made some efforts to save the marriage. He dragged Katalin to a marriage counsellor. She accepted to accompany him there to help him “understand and accept”. But she didn't at all call her own attitude into question.
On the second or third meeting with that counsellor, there was a memorable moment when the counsellor asked Katalin at which point things had taken a bad turn between herself and Daniel. She answered that it had never been good with him anyway.
The counsellor raised her voice and told her: “Come on - you don't marry someone, stay with him for years and even have a child with him if it was never good!”
Katalin just put on an offended air but didn't say anything. What could she say? Yet again an ignorant therapist who just didn't understand her!
Later the counsellor told Katalin and Daniel that the evaluation phase was over and that it was up to them to start a serious therapy now if they wanted to, but that they should realize that it meant working on themselves. For the duration of this therapy they should change nothing in their current situation, undertake no separation or divorce measures, not start sleeping together again either, not move around the furniture in their home – in short, not change anything. She wouldn't give them a new appointment for now, because she wanted them to discuss it together and only come back if they were ready for this.
Of course this was the last time they ever met this counsellor. Katalin wouldn't let herself be pressured. Whenever someone tried to pressure her, she threw the ball right back, rejected everything, and that was the end. Her piano teacher long ago - for whom Katalin had been a model pupil till the day the piano teacher had scolded her - had experienced it too: one single scolding, and that had been the end!
“You know what you've got to do, then!” said Joe in parting with Daniel that day.
“I can't,” Daniel answered dejectedly.
But then he still could, because the next time he came to Joe's office, there was a spring in his step and a shine in his eyes!
He explained to Joe that he had really decided to call Katalin's bluff, and so he had started looking for a girlfriend, quite openly! He had asked Katalin to make photos of him for an ad on a dating-site on the internet. And Katalin had done it. Of course Daniel had hoped she would break down and tell him not to do it, but she had held fast, so he really set up an ad on a dating-site.
What had to happen eventually happened, and he really met someone! And yes, he now really had the proof that it wasn't him who was sexually dysfunctional!
Joe was happy for his patient.
But things started turning ugly in the next few days. Indeed, Daniel finally got a reaction from his wife. He hadn't managed to make her jealous when there would still have been time for him to take back his ad on the dating-site (and to cancel further meetings with interested parties he had met through that ad). He had even made her take the photos for the ad herself, and she had accepted this as if it had been the most natural thing in the world.
But now that the situation was beyond repair, she did finally react – she took Agnes to the youth protection agency, claiming her father was abusing her!
And she filed for divorce.

In the meantime, Jack, in his role as Joe, was still busily looking for a girlfriend on the internet. Sending messages to hundreds of women on the dating site was useless, he had understood that much. Just waiting for a woman to contact him, on the other hand, was frustrating.
He started idly looking through the messages Joe had sent to women and received from women previously and that’s how he found a correspondent who looked quite sweet on her photo. And the messages she and Joe had exchanged were quite nice too. Jack got a glimpse of the tenderness Joe could feel for someone. He hadn't really known Joe had that in him. Although he should have known, seeing how his son Benjamin ran towards him enthusiastically whenever he saw him... Or Daisy the dog, for that matter!
In the last couple of messages, it seemed they had agreed on a meeting. What had happened then? Had something gone wrong at that meeting? How come Joe had just happily switched identities with Jack and left this woman hanging there?
Jack decided to find out and wrote her a short message, saying he was sorry not to have contacted her for a while and excusing himself for having been very busy. Maybe it was altogether the wrong thing to say, since Jack didn't know what had happened between them last. Anyway, he would see!
He got an answer the next day already. She was delighted to hear from him! She thought he had forgotten all about her and was really glad to see that wasn't the case, since they had had such a good time at their last two meetings.
So it seems they had met twice, Joe and this Linda.
Jack arranged to meet her for a third time on the weekend, and they went for a drive together in Joe's old Toyota Supra. They drove over a small mountain-pass in the Jura, walked along the mountain-lake in the valley on the other side, and then they even went to see those drip-stone caves that had so impressed Jack when he was a kid, making him lose his faith in God for creating such pointless beauty...
He even tried to explain the feeling of awe he had had as a kid in those caves to Linda, but leaving out the part of how it had made him into an atheist. Linda liked what he was saying and took his arm as they walked back from the cave to the car.
When he took her home, she invited him up to her place for a cup of tea, and it suddenly occurred to Jack that this was their third meeting, and he remembered how Joe had said that sex always happened on the third meeting. Either that, or there was no third meeting at all.
The first meeting is to get to know each other. The second meeting is just because the first one had been nice, but then it all happens on the third. Joe called it the Law of the Third Meeting. And he assured Jack that although every woman follows this law, none would ever admit it. Every single one would say, when pressed, that she wasn’t in the habit of going to bed with a man on the third meeting already. If she did it this time, that was because..., well, because this was so SPECIAL.
Jack didn't know if this Law of the Third Meeting was something specific to women or rather specific to Joe. In any case he got scared now that Linda asked him up for a cup of tea. For her, this was the third meeting with him, even though for him it was his first one with her. What was he supposed to do now?
If the Law of the Third Meeting held, then no sex today would mean no sex with Linda, ever. And Jack was sure he would blow it! He wasn't as cool about meeting new women as Joe had become over the months and years of using the dating site! Jack was still a newbie!
He went up to Linda's flat with Linda as if in a dream, feeling that she was just as nervous as he was.
Should he just ask her if she would like to sleep with him?
No, no, that would be exactly wrong. You mustn't ever ASK a woman, because when you do, she is sure to say NO. She would even be offended!
Was this because of that Christian guilt-thing so deeply imprinted on our mentality here in the Western World? One mustn't seek pleasure, but if one gets it because of not being able to hold it back, it would still be forgivable?
Committing oneself to sleeping with a man by saying YES to him, that would be an active attempt to get pleasure for oneself, which is unforgivable.
So a woman would need to be sort of raped so that she wouldn't be guilty of having sought pleasure for herself?
This sounded like the kind of theory Jack liked to make up and then explain to Joe, but it sounded contrived to his own ears. Maybe there was some truth in it, but it couldn't be the whole explanation, he felt.
Aren't we modern and liberated enough nowadays that a woman could say YES to a man just for the pleasure of it? (Or for the hell of it?)
Well... How can a woman know in advance that she will really get pleasure? And if she doesn't get pleasure, then why say YES to the man? Just out of submission?
That too is part of the whore-persona – that she would submit to any man...
Though, if she wants it for herself, where's the submission in that?
But she can only really want it for herself if she feels sure that she'll enjoy it. And how can she know that in advance when the man just ASKS her?
The trick is not to ask, Joe had once explained to Jack. You just start doing it. You brush against her as if by accident, and if she likes it, you brush against her some more, and so on till you end up in bed. If, on the other hand, she didn't like it the first time you brushed against her, you just pretend it was an accident... No harm done!
But Jack wasn’t sure he knew how to just “brush” against her “accidentally”.
Linda was quite nervous and spilled half the tea when she poured it into his cup. She ran off to get a rag to wipe it up, and Jack just sat there, feeling lost here in Linda's flat with Linda running around him with a rag...
But finally they both settled down with their tea, and the situation got more comfortable straight away when they started having a conversation once again. Jack was good at that – he had been a psychiatrist, after all, and he knew how to make people feel comfortable about spilling out their hearts and souls (rather than their tea).
Eventually Linda put her hand onto his, just for emphasis when she said she had really enjoyed their excursion together. The gesture felt just a little bit affected, as if she had been planning it for a while, but Jack confidently put his hand over hers too and told her that it was the same for him. And when he lifted his hand from her hand again, it went over to her face and brushed the hair from her brow, as if this had been all natural. Her face suddenly felt huge in front of his, and all he needed to do was to bend towards her a little bit.
The next thing he felt was how her lips were responding to his, and then she whispered into his ear: “Please, take me, take me in your arms!”
He stood up and pulled her up with him and took her in his arms, and then she led him to her bedroom.
It hadn't been so difficult, after all!

A few days later, as Jack was having a beer with Joe, he felt he had to tell him something about it. After all, he and Linda were talking on the phone daily nowadays and looking forward to the next weekend, to spending more time together. Linda had become what you’d call his “girlfriend”, he supposed...
“You know,” said Jack, “I found Linda in your mailbox on the dating site.”
“Oh yes, Linda!” said Joe, “she was a nice girl! I hope you're treating her right!”
“Well...,” said Jack, “we met, actually, and...”
Had Joe just become a bit pale or was Jack just dreaming?
“Nothing bad happened, I hope?” said Joe. He really looked a bit alarmed.
“Well no, nothing bad, on the contrary...” said Jack, feeling quite uncomfortable.
“You mean, you've become her boyfriend or something?” asked Joe.
Jack felt he was giving Joe the most terrible answer by answering yes, but Joe seemed almost relieved.
“Man!” he said, “you had me scared that she found out you weren't me or something!”
“No, no,” said Jack, “nothing like that! I was just afraid you would be hurt or something that I took your would-be-girlfriend for myself or something!”
“No,” said Joe forcefully and almost laughing now (although it still sounded a bit constrained to Jack), “when we swapped identities, I was ready for whatever that might mean, you know!”
Jack felt relieved. This had been difficult for him.
But now it looked as though Joe was the one having a hard time getting something out: “You know, Jack, there's something I have to tell you too, before you hear it from someone else, I mean...”
And just like Joe previously, Jack felt alarmed now.
“Well,” said Joe, “it's just about the same as what you just told me, though I'm not sure how you're going to take it...”
“Just say it,” said Jack, his mouth feeling dry.
“Blanca is pregnant!” said Joe. And now that he had finally got it out, there was undeniably a trace of pride around Joe's lips as well.
Jack felt a surprising flash of anger rise to his head! The fucking bitch! For years she hadn't wanted him anymore, feigning to have become uninterested in sex. And now that she could have his brother instead, she got pregnant straight away!
But Jack knew his anger was misplaced and quickly forced himself to get it back under control. Hadn't he just seduced Joe's would-be-girlfriend? Hadn't he known all along what he might get himself in for by swapping identities with his brother Joe?
A few days ago he had had sex for the first time in years! And there was more of it coming! And he was seeing his son almost every day for the biggest part of the day while earlier he had been growing estranged from him...
So what was he complaining about?
It was as if he had divorced from his wife and let his brother marry her instead, but without the court and the lawyers and all the hard feelings, and he had a new girlfriend at last!
When Blanca asked him the next day if he already knew the news, he said yes and told her how happy he was for her, for them! A little brother or sister for Benjamin, she said with shining eyes! She asked Jack if he would be able to babysit the little one together with Benjamin once the childcare leave she was intending to take would be over. He said he would of course, unless his new situation would force him to make new plans, and he told Blanca that he was in a new relationship which seemed serious, and that in any case he hoped it was serious. Blanca said she was so happy for him too, and it sounded completely sincere! She asked him if it was Linda, and Jack said yes (obviously Joe had already told her about Linda earlier). She exclaimed: “You see? You see? I always told you she would turn out to be the right one!”
And as he gave her a little peck on the cheek before she left for work, he said: “And it seems you were right, as usual...!”
Then he settled down in the big comfortable living-room (the kind he would never be able to afford for himself anymore, now that he was an invalid without a diploma) and waited till it was time to wake up Benjamin for his breakfast and school.

So Jack was beginning to feel really fine as Joe. He knew he had made the right choice! All the harder it hit him when an official letter landed in his letter-box like a bomb…

It was a letter from the invalid’s pension. They were reviewing his dossier. Normally nothing to be afraid of. They asked for the name and address of his current attending physician so they could contact him or her for an update. The only problem was that Jack didn’t have an attending physician, and as far as he knew, neither did Joe. How Joe had gotten his invalid’s pension in the first place had always been a bit of a mystery in the family, not least because Joe himself didn’t really know. It certainly wasn’t because of any physical disability, since Joe had always been perfectly fit. He had spoken to a doctor (was it even a psychiatrist?) about his difficulties getting and staying motivated, his difficulties with authority figures… Things like that. He probably imagined the doctor had written a wonderful case study about him, like a novel, explaining how life had been tough on him and why he needed an invalid’s pension. But Jack, himself a doctor, knew perfectly well it didn’t work like that. In order to get an invalid’s pension, you needed a definite diagnosis, and to be eligible for a pension, this diagnosis needed to be on their list of disabilities that warranted a pension. And this list certainly wasn’t very long, even though Jack didn’t exactly know what was on it. Schizophrenia was definitely on it, but Joe wasn’t schizophrenic, and Jack doubted that Joe could have fooled his doctor into thinking that he was. Bipolar disorder was surely on the list too, but Jack couldn’t see Joe playing that role either. Substance use disorder was probably on the list too, but Joe had never been a drug addict and Jack didn’t think he had pretended to be one either. So, what was left? One of the personality disorders, no doubt. But Jack didn’t think the multitude of officially existing personality disorders had all made it on the invalid’s pension’s list of disabilities warranting a pension. Probably only « Cluster A » personality disorders had made the list because of their link to schizophrenia, in particular « schizoid personality disorder » and « schizotypal personality disorder ». Most likely Joe had been diagnosed with one of those…

So what should Jack do now? The simplest solution would be to ask Joe. Maybe Joe should be Joe again for once and just go and see a doctor of his choice and do what he had done years ago when he had gotten the pension in the first place. The diagnosis (whatever it was) would be confirmed and everything would be fine. But Jack quickly rejected that idea. They had swapped lives. Jack was Joe now and Joe was Jack. He couldn’t just run to the real Joe whenever in doubt. He was Joe now and he had to be Joe on his own. They couldn’t swap their lives back and forth at the slightest excuse, because then someone was bound to find out eventually that something was fishy!

Of course they could still give advice to each other. But Jack doubted Joe had any really good advice on this particular matter. If Joe had played a role to get his invalid’s pension, he himself hadn’t been aware of it. He had always told the story as though he himself had been surprised at how easily he had gotten that pension!

So what should Jack do now? Just go and see a psychiatrist and play being Joe (exaggerating the idiosyncrasies a bit) and then he would automatically get the same diagnosis Joe had gotten originally? Joe had been able to do this because of his naivety about psychiatry. He had probably just played himself with some added shadiness, never realizing that this added shadiness qualified as a definite « Cluster A » type of personality disorder. Jack, knowing all about personality disorders, would have a hard time doing this. He knew too much about the matter, he would fit too many definite details into his play-acting and it wouldn’t look natural. The fuzziness you always encounter in real-life cases would be missing. No psychiatrist would be fooled by it!

And what if the psychiatrist decided not just to talk with him, but rather to make him take a Rorschach test? Would Jack be able to fool a colleague (or rather an ex-colleague, since now he was Joe) on a Rorschach test?

Jack knew, of course, how you detect schizophrenic tendencies (and having a « Cluster A » personality disorder would arguably qualify as having schizophrenic tendencies) in a Rorschach test.

You might naively think that schizophrenics, with their tendency to hallucinate, would find it very easy to see crazy and wild things in a collection of meaningless ink blots. But actually it’s exactly the opposite - schizophrenics find the Rorschach test very difficult.

Schizophrenics don’t have hallucinations because of their exuberant imagination, quite the opposite.

What one has to realize first is that normal perception (seeing what is really there) implies a lot of interpretation. Specks of light hit the retina, and it’s up to the brain to extrapolate meaningful information from these specks of light. When the brain gets it right most of the time, you are considered normal. When the brain keeps coming to conclusions about what caused these specks of light that are widely off the mark, then you are said to have « hallucinations ».

And the interesting thing is that we are all geared to see a bit more than what is really there…

Imagine some tree branches moving in the wind. If you see them as a tiger getting ready to pounce, you might be considered to have hallucinations. On the other hand, if you see them as branches moving in the wind when in reality it’s a tiger getting ready to pounce, you might end up being eaten. And if you get eaten, you won’t have any more children, thus you won’t keep passing on your genes (including those genes that give you a tendency to rather see branches moving in the wind instead of tigers getting ready to pounce). In other words: those genes making you see branches moving in the wind rather than tigers getting ready to pounce have a tendency to die out!

The point is, it’s better to see a tiger getting ready to pounce a bit too often (when in reality it’s just branches moving in the wind) rather than not often enough (seeing branches moving in the wind when in reality it’s a tiger getting ready to pounce).

And that’s why we all see a bit more tigers than there really are.

It’s better to see a bit too many tigers than a bit too few. So in that sense we all hallucinate a bit. It’s when we hallucinate too much and start seeing tigers absolutely everywhere that this becomes a problem.

But if a schizophrenic person is someone who sees tigers everywhere, why wouldn’t he or she find it damn easy to see all kinds of interesting and wild things in meaningless ink blots?

Probably because schizophrenics don’t as such see more tigers than we all do. We all have a tendency to see more tigers than there really are, but most of us find it easy to « shift gears » and decide not to see a tiger when it’s too implausible that there would be one. Schizophrenics’ problem is not that they spontaneously see more tigers than we all do, but rather that the process of « seeing things » gets out of control in their case. Most of us might subconsciously decide that it can’t be a tiger (because there are no tigers here anyway, or for whatever other reason), so we never even consciously see a tiger. In schizophrenics, this control mechanism doesn’t work, so if they were going to see a tiger, they really do see a tiger!

While normal people can to some extent control what they see so that they would only see plausible things (or so that they would see implausible things, if that’s what they want - like in the case of a Rorschach test where you are explicitly asked to see something when you know there is really nothing), schizophrenic people have no such control over what they see. So if they do « see » something, they are overwhelmed by it. And if they don’t see anything special, then they just don’t, and they don’t know how to either.

In that sense schizophrenics are much more likely to give what would at first sight seem like a sensible answer (namely: « this is just a meaningless ink blot and how could I see anything in it? ») than normal people who can easily force themselves to « see » all kinds of interesting things (or not, as you would in everyday life where you prefer to limit yourself to plausible things).

Of course, at the beginning of a Rorschach test you explain to your test subjects that the goal of the test is to interpret the ink blots as an image of something. You make it clear that « this is just an ink blot » is not the answer you want.

When you naively get presented with this test as a patient, you might think these ink blots were all freshly made just for you. And you might think that everything you say is completely original and that the experimenter must be fascinated by your originality.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth! The ink blots used for the Rorschach test are always the same, and they have been the same for generations. So whatever you see in them has certainly been seen by countless other people countless times before…

So when you say: « Oh, this looks like two Indian girls dancing! », you can be bloody sure that the psychiatrist or psychologist won’t be exceptionally amazed or moved by this answer, because he or she has certainly heard it before. Maybe in 30% of cases or something like that…

If you want to seem normal, « Two Indian girls dancing » is a good answer, by the way. Jack knew how to interpret the Rorschach test, of course, and describing lots of persons (in this case « Indian girls ») is always good. It means you get along with other people. If you see more animals and monsters than people, it might mean you don’t like people so much and don’t get along with them.

Then, of course, there are lots of ink blots (or parts of them) that you could plausibly see as vaginas or penises. When you take the test, you might be shocked by the number of vaginas and penises you see, never realizing that the apparently haphazard ink blots were actually carefully crafted and that it’s totally deliberate that there would be so many « vaginas » and « penises » in them…

A normal person would of course realize that it is surely not appropriate to describe every other ink blot as a vagina or a penis, so a normal person would come up with some other answer. Schizophrenics, on the other hand, can’t control what they see so easily, so they might give these answers, « penis » and « vagina », repeatedly. That’s why seeing too many penises or vaginas would be interpreted as a sign of schizophrenia.

« Aha! » thought Jack, « maybe that’s how Joe got his diagnosis! He wanted to seem a bit shady, so he made sure to describe a lot of the blots as penises and vaginas! And that’s how he promptly got diagnosed as possessing schizophrenic tendencies! ».

Well, if Joe had really already taken a Rorschach test, there was no risk that Jack would be made to take one now. It’s not the kind of test you can do several times!

Even if you don’t call a « vagina » a « vagina », in order to seem normal it’s still better to at least call it something positive, like a butterfly, rather than something considered more negative, like a crab. The experimenter knows which parts of the blots look like vaginas, and if you call them something considered negative, like a crab, the experimenter will conclude that you have a problem relating to women (because the experimenter knows you would certainly have seen a vagina too, consciously or unconsciously, even if you didn’t call it a vagina). If, on the other hand, you call it a « butterfly », the experimenter will conclude that you like women!

Of course this interpretation will be wrong for someone who likes crabs but hates butterflies…

That’s the problem with the whole test, actually. It rests on assumptions about the test subjects that could be wrong. One of the ink blots, for example, often looks like a « musical instrument » to Japanese people. To Western people it doesn’t at all look like any musical instrument they know, so a Western experimenter might conclude that this is a bloody incongruous answer, indicative of schizophrenia. After all, schizophrenics just keep not knowing what to say, so they end up saying incongruous things.

As an experimenter, you should thus be careful not to interpret a test subject’s answer as indicative of schizophrenia just because he or she is Japanese!

But in Jack’s experience there was one answer which was definitely indicative of schizophrenia - when he pressed schizophrenics, telling them that this surely looked like an animal of some kind, they would look at the blot from all sides and end up saying: « well, I can’t really see an animal…, just bones here… and flesh…, a mass of flesh…». Apparently schizophrenics just weren’t able to « put together » a whole animal with their inner eye on the basis of an ink blot. At most, they saw parts - bones and masses of flesh…

Nobody else ever saw anything as vague as a « mass of flesh »! That was a typical schizophrenic response!

What if Joe had been made to take a Rorschach test and had seen lots of penises, vaginas and an occasional « mass of flesh »? That would explain the diagnosis he got, and thus his invalid’s pension!

And if he had already taken a Rorschach, Jack wouldn’t be asked to take another one and wouldn’t need to worry about how to simulate Joe’s illness in this context. On the other hand, if they still made him take a Rorschach, he would just concentrate on not seeing any happy dancing Indian girls, but rather penises and vaginas and « masses of flesh ». And if he needed time to find enough penises and vaginas and « masses of flesh » in those blots (that he would much rather see as « dancing Indian girls »), then so much the better, because people with schizophrenic tendencies are SUPPOSED to find the Rorschach test bloody hard!

And now he remembered another response that was often seen as indicative of schizophrenia. If Jack wasn’t mistaken, it was precisely in the « dancing Indian girls » card. Schizophrenics - desperately trying to « see » something and not managing to see the dancing Indian girls - might end up seeing something in the white space between the dancing Indian girls at least. That white space, framed by the « Indian girls », could be seen as a lamp or vase or something. If someone gave lots of answers about the dark blotches and ended up coming up with yet another interpretation for the white space between the blotches as well, that wouldn’t be seen as a sign of schizophrenia, of course. But someone who just wouldn’t find anything to say about the blotches and who would, in desperation, at least find something to say about the white space between the blotches… - that would be considered an indication of schizophrenia!

Okay, so if Jack was forced to take a Rorschach test, he would look at that « dancing Indian girls » card for a long, long time and finally say that the white space between the blotches could be a kind of lamp…, or vase…

Most likely he wouldn’t be made to take a Rorschach test anyway. The psychiatrist would just talk with him, and Jack just wouldn’t be very forthcoming with his answers, like someone who doesn’t have much to say, isn’t too interested in people… The right answers would probably come to him. He mustn’t think up too much to say in advance, because if he was too talkative, that wouldn’t fit into the role of a socially awkward and isolated person like an invalid living in a dingy flat with his dog is supposed to be.

So Jack looked up a few psychiatrists (avoiding any he knew personally, of course) and called them, explaining that he needed someone for the update demanded by his invalid’s pension. Some were surprised that he didn’t have a regular physician for that, others mumbled something about not taking new patients (even though Jack explained that he had no intention of becoming a regular patient), and he always asked them if they knew a colleague who might be able to take him. Some of them gave him names and numbers, and at one of those numbers he finally got lucky.

He hoped he wasn’t conducting this business of finding a psychiatrist too « professionally » - after all, he was supposed to be a socially awkward person who doesn’t know how to talk to people. Luckily many psychiatrists have a professional tone of their own - they talk in a kind of far-away and detached voice, not the kind that would invite you to brightly and smartly make an appointment, but rather the kind that would make you hesitate and not remember what you wanted to ask them in the first place. So Jack wasn’t tempted to use his usual, bright and sparkly « business-manner », but rather just dryly recited his phrase about needing to see a psychiatrist for the review of his health status demanded by the invalid’s pension.

And finally this was done and he had an appointment. He filled out the reply-card for the invalid’s pension, giving the name of the psychiatrist he had just found as the referee for the questionnaire that needed to be filled out about his health status.

In the next few days, especially on his walks with Daisy, he just couldn’t help imagining how this appointment with this psychiatrist would go. For so long he had been a psychiatrist himself, and now he was going to see one, not as himself, but as Joe, and not really as Joe either, but rather as the persona Joe had presented to the medical establishment in order to get an invalid’s pension.

In the night before the appointment, Jack dreamed about having to take a Rorschach test. About halfway through the test, after having made an effort to see penises, vaginas and « masses of flesh » - if indeed he managed to find them - he got to what is known by psychologists as « The Father Card ». People often see it as some kind of huge, threatening figure (a gorilla for example) standing on its hind-legs, seen somewhat from below, and between its legs there is a big « something » that could be considered part of a loincloth hanging down (if you like innocent interpretations) or the head of an animal (a giraffe or a dragon or something like that) on which the gorilla is riding.

Because of its dark, threatening nature, responses to « The Father Card » are thought to represent the test subject’s relationship to figures of authority and to authority in general. Seeing the big « something » dangling between the gorilla’s legs as a penis is thought to show the test subject’s insubordination, because if you can see your « father »’s dick that clearly, it means you don’t mind looking at him bluntly, which further means you don’t show him due respect!

And instead of vaguely calling this a « mass of flesh », perhaps with a bone sticking out here or there, Jack said: « Aha, a gorilla! He is towering above me, proudly exhibiting his dick because he is the alpha male and all the females belong to him anyway. That’s why he is allowed to exhibit his dick like this. Any lesser males who would dare to do this would immediately be castrated! »

And that’s how, in one fell swoop, he had undone all the « masses of flesh » he had laboriously forced himself to see earlier. He had just revealed himself as a bloody insubordinate patient who saw the authority figure (the medical establishment in this case) as clearly as can be and who was out to outsmart it! In other words: he had just given himself away!

He woke up soaked in sweat, and it took a long time of just lying there in the dark till he had managed to convince himself that none of this had happened for real and that the meeting with the psychiatrist was still ahead of him, not behind him!

He eventually drifted off into an uneasy sleep again, only to be woken up a few hours later by the alarm clock because it was time to take Daisy out for her morning piss so that he would be ready for his meeting with the psychiatrist.

He didn’t change after going out with Daisy - after all, he was playing a socially awkward person who doesn’t know how to dress for special occasions.

He found the psychiatrist’s practice on time, rang the bell, stepped in and found his way to the waiting room. In spite of being nervous, he still noticed his surroundings - the drab room, the old, ruffled magazines on the coffee table, the haphazard collection of chairs lining the walls… And a young woman sitting on one of them, looking lost and acknowledging his greeting with a squeaky « Hello! ». She was probably a regular customer and not used to coming across other patients in the waiting-room. Jack himself was surprised to find another patient in the waiting-room. Was he so much too early for his appointment that the previous patient hadn’t even been let in yet? Or was this drab practice shared by two separate psychiatrists with a common waiting-room?

Really, Jack’s practice which he had left to Joe was much more stylish, with big, bright windows, modern furniture and always new, glossy magazines for the patients to ruffle through!

Eventually a squat man in a brown suit appeared in the doorway and called Jack in for his appointment. Jack nodded to the young woman and went with the man.

The consultation room was as drab as the waiting room had been. The brown-suited man told Jack to take a seat and himself sat down behind his desk. First thing first he asked Jack for his insurance card and copied the number from it. Then he looked down at his pad and eventually said: « So you’ve come for the review of your health status demanded by the invalid’s pension… »