In Session 17: Dick Tracy
“You have more or less control over things,” he said.
A Tibetan bell sounds when the lobby door opens. It rings for me alone, opening up an exotic disposition. I can sense things. The man was suffering from angularity. I knew it when I saw him step out of the Lyft. It was a snap diagnosis but his hat was snap brimmed, so there was a logic behind it. He said his name was Dick Tracy.
He looked drawn when he came in, glancing pointedly at his watch to tell me the session was on his dime now. “I’m not a drawing,” he said. “I had this angular jaw when I came out of the womb.”
“You hurt your mother before you were even born, then.”
“She could never warm up to me after that. Where do you want me to sit?”
“Take one of those leather chairs. They’ve got a masculine vibe and you’re an action hero.”
“No, not really.”
“Of course you are, and in your medium of illustrated fiction ..” He interrupted me.
“I meant the chairs,” he said. “Not masculine.”
He had settled into one of them and seemed oddly energized. “See? It’s like sitting in a lap, and what does that make you think of?”
This seemed like pretty basic material. His unconscious had led him to the chair in order to bring up his mother, and get right to the source code.
“Mother?” I suggested. He gave me a queer look.
“Mother? No. A lap dancer.”
“But …” I paused and searched for the words. “If you kept the metaphorical relationship between yourself and the chair ...”
“You think I’m too angular?” He was wounded. I could hear it.
“Your inner experience is your own,” I said.
When I looked more closely and saw the man behind the stage makeup, I knew he’d had work done, and that whoever he had been, back in the thirties and forties, was obscured by time and the surgeon’s knife. “You said on the phone something’s happening here, Tracy, but you don’t know what it is. I’ve seen this before. A Mister Jones. A failure of imagination. You live in a world as devoid of any feminine curvature as Trump’s signature.
“That world is a relic now, like a turning plow.”
“I know it,” he said. “I’m exhausted from seeing all the angles and calculating the odds. I look in the mirror at this square jaw, and I realize I exist as impressions so fused to beliefs they’re one thing, and even if I know that what I believe isn’t true, and so never was true, I can’t untangle from it anymore.”
I used the technique of rephrasing what the client said to me. It builds trust.
“You live in a geometric world of panels and streets and buildings and words. Words can be geometric. They can build a logical structure, be precise and clean and pure. On the other hand, if you start to sound like Major Weldon Penderton extolling the Spartan pleasures of life in the barracks, you need to steer into the skid. You can run all the angles, play all the angles, be concise and focused and pointed, but you’re missing one thing.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “You have to decide.”
We sat in silence again.
After a minute or two his face softened and I could feel in my chest what he was feeling in his chest. It was a paralysis of the will, which has to wait for composure before it can resume imposture. When he left I gave him a rare English translation of The Kingdom Without Space, by Bruno Goetz.