Psychic Crisis in the White House
The President was alone in dark woods, and he could smell bears
There are as many forms of attack as there are types of people.
There’s road rage and there are bloody stabbings and there are long, slow poisonings accomplished with little more than silence and dark thoughts.
“An enemy can drag you off into the cave of her mind and do anything she wants with you,” Tio Mate told the President.
“You are being dragged off into a dark cave, señor. And it smells of bears.”
This thought was upsetting for the President because he had begun to have bad dreams about being out in the woods, alone in the darkness, and he could smell bears. He was terrified.
There are peculiar things about leaders that don’t get out into the public discussion.
That there is in residence at the White House a psychic detective, for example, is not well known. Unlike a psychiatrist, who prescribes medication, a psychic detective intervenes directly into the collective psyche, like a diamond cutter, he knows just where to tap.
The President’s olfactory hallucinations revealed themselves to Tio Mate as an intense odor of vegetation mixed with honey and black earth. The honey attracted the bears to Tio Mate’s mind, the black earth, the living and dying. A wild Syrian brown bear had once danced for Tio Mate, or in his presence anyway. He imagined that this dancing bear was what the President could smell in the dream. The bear was coming to mind along with the President’s olfactory hallucination.
“When two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention.” (Agent Dale Cooper)
The only thing the White House psychiatrist could suggest was that the bear is a positive mother symbol because she teaches her cubs to survive. She trees them when she goes out for groceries, and they are forbidden to come down for any reason. She doesn’t come back one day, and they either cross that line mother set or they die. She might see her grown cub at the overlap of their territories, but if they speak at all, it’s a “good fences make good neighbors” kind of thing.
“There are metaphorical bears,” she suggested. “There is Russia, for example, and California. There is the Native American belief that bears are the animal psychologically most like humans.”
“The President is scared of his mother?” Tio Mate asked.
The psychiatrist looked at him over her glasses. “Did you ever see When a Stranger Calls?” She paused, waiting for an answer which did not come, so she clarified: “The danger is coming from inside the house.”
Tio Mate realized that the information he needed he had to get directly from the magical animal, not from a psychiatrist. A dancing bear is a magical animal if she has made the decision to dance independently of commands and rewards.
In meetings with the magical animal there is a doorway to another world.
Tio Mate could go through the door. He wasn’t separated from nature. Birds would light on his shoulders, linger there, sing in his ear. This world was in the muscle memory, down below the search functions. It was connected to vegetation, into trees, plants, animals, and weather.
Tio Mate was entranced by the bear’s dancing. He was sure that behind it some suggestion, perhaps many, were being placed into the President’s psyche. Maybe by the Russians. There might be instructions beneath the surface of his existence as an iconic gunfighter. How would he know? He might be behind a firewall. He might be programmed to get very close to the President, and await instructions from the bear.
Tio Mate had never before experienced such a psychic battle as he was having with the bear. Once in a while he would clear his thinking and tell himself again that he was in the service of the Chief Executive. Then the doubts about his own loyalty would start again and he would lose focus. He became increasingly convinced that he could be a double agent and not know it, and then his mind would insist that there’s no evidence for this. A voice whispers, “You see what I mean?”
In front of this confusion of will, Tio Mate’s noble face remained calm and inscrutable as the smoke curled away from the slender cigarillo.
He was like a driver in a hard rain. He had to keep going and do the best he could by keeping his focus directly, intensely, ahead. As suddenly as it had come into the Presidential bedroom, the Syrian dancing bear was gone from the stage, was behind the curtain.
The President was awake. “Did you win?” he asked.
Tio Mate supposed the President thought of a psychic battle as being like a gunfight, that he would kill the bear or scare it off. He couldn’t tell him to be understood that while he could protect him from all the accidental tourists in his psychic space, another iconic godlike being was a different story. When gods collide, the outcome is always up in the air, so to speak.
“What do I do now?” the President asked.
“You could order us some food from the kitchen,” Tio Mate said.