"Let's have it, Ace."

I summarize Ella's complaint.

Bubba speaks at some length.

"Thanks, Bubba. I'll get back to you."

I hang up and take a look at Ella. She's got one leg crossed over the other, is frowning mightily at her thigh, squeezing it from the bottom to make the top, which is somewhat quilted, tight. She plucks something on her skin.

"Ella," I say.

"Yes?" she says, looking up with mild interest.

"Why didn't you tell me that Fat Alice is FA413-T, a rather low-grade robot which vacuums the floor and monitors the room air for particles?"

"So what?" cries Ella. "She still got me cornered and broke my arm and subjected me to radiation poisoning."

"Ella, you were not even in the primary coolant unit. You worked in the secondary unit with non-radioactive sodium."

"She still pushed me!"

"Ella, listen. You've got your job back if you want it. What is more, you've been promoted. You are now Fat Alice's superior." What Bubba told me was that Ella, whose job was hardly more demanding than Fat Alice's-reading dials and noting molar concentrations of chemicals-could now periodically remove Alice's software cassette and run it through the magnetic cleaner. "Do you want your job back?"

Ella claps her hands. "Wow," she says, and starts around the desk. "You were always my bud."

"Okay, hold it, Ella. I want to show you something."

An idea occurs to me just in time, and I get a book and hold the book between me and Ella. "I want you to look at something."

"Anything, Doc! Anything at all."

The book is Feliciana Farewell, her gift of three years ago, the yearbook and our year. I open it to the group picture of our class, only twenty or so boys and girls standing in a tight little trapezoid, each with the fixed, self-obsessed expression of high school seniors. The world lies ahead, the expression says, and who am I?

It is by way of being a quick study, a little test, as crude and inconclusive as palpating an abdomen for liver cancer.

I've used it before. Most people, I daresay nearly all "normal" people, will seek out themselves in the photograph, usually covertly, but I can watch their eye movements. As a matter of fact, there is a laser device which can track and print out the eye movements until the eye settles on its prey. Which is me? How do I look? People are generally self-conscious, either shy or vain, like General Jeb Stuart, whose last words were "How do I look in the face?"

I wish I had my Mackworth head camera, which actually traces out eye movements. I need the records.

The point of the test, of course, is that self-consciousness implies that there is a self.

The book is open under my chin, facing her, her eyes on the book, my eyes on her eyes. They are looking at the picture, yes; focused? perhaps; interested? mildly. But there is no seeking herself out. A laser trace would show not a zigzag, cat chasing mouse of self, but a fond little moseying, cow-grazing. Maybe she's looking for me.

"Okay, Ella," I say, closing the book and putting it on the shelf. "You've got your job back and been promoted. You come back here next week after work." I don't have to ask her. I want a tracing, medical evidence.

"Oh boy." She claps her hands. "Thanks, Doc. Wait till I tell Mel."

"All right."

CASE HISTORY #3.

Here come Kev Kevin and Debbie Boudreaux, old friends, patients now, married couple: Kev, an ex-Jesuit; Debbie, an ex-Maryknoll nun.

They've had their troubles. I see them for marriage counseling. I don't do much of that, but they are old friends.

The trouble is that Debbie, who had taken over her father's Oldsmobile agency in New Orleans, was quite competent and happy as the young woman executive, named Woman of the Year by the C. of C., in fact, as happy as she had been as Sister Therese teaching at the Ortega Institute in Managua. But Kev was unhappy as personnel director of Boudreaux Olds, even though there had been every reason to expect that his experience as counselor at the Love Clinic at Fedville should stand him in good stead in dealing with salesmen and servicemen.

This dispute was acrimonious. They fought even more than non-ex-religious couples.

Here is a sample: Debbie: The trouble with you is you're still a closet Jesuit. Even though you've taken up transcendental meditation and teach it to the salespeople at your little ashram and play tapes of the Bhagwan and the Maharishi, supposedly to increase their selling potential, what you're really running is a closet-Jesuit retreat. Next you'll have them saying the rosary and making the stations of the cross. You don't want to sell Oldsmobiles, you want to convert people. And the truth is, like the Bhagwan and most Orientals-and most Jesuits-you have contempt for women.

Kev: The trouble with you is you've turned into the worst kind of man-eating bitchy feminist. You're known as the Bella Abzug of the LADA (Louisiana Automobile Dealers Association). You pretend you're the belle of the ball at the C. of C., but deep down you hate men. And if you want to know the truth, that's the reason you and all the other nuns quit, not because of politics or the Church, but because you don't know who in the hell you are and you copped out, and so you take it out on men from the pope on down. You still hate their guts and you still don't know who in the hell you are or what you are doing.

Debbie: Speak for yourself.

Kev: Doc, you wouldn't believe what she's into now.

"What?"

"Wicca."

"Wicker?" I'm thinking, Good, she's doing handcrafts.

"Witchcraft."

Debbie: Don't bad-mouth what you don't understand. Wicca bears no relation to your stereotypical witchcraft, witches on brooms. It is extremely positive and loving, because it is the old nature religion, a nonsexist pre-Judeo-Christian belief. No guilt trips. It is nothing less than becoming one with nature and with yourself.

Kev: Plus a little hex here and there.

And so on.

To tell the truth, at the time I didn't have much use for either of them, though they were my friends and my patients. I confess certain sardonic feelings toward both of them. There was Kev's faddish Hinduism, his new voice, which has suddenly become hushed and melodious like the Maharishi's, his casual but mysterious allusions to his siddhi. What's a siddhi? I asked. A spiritual gift. Like what? Like levitation, no big deal, he said. Yes, during meditation he was often six inches off the floor. And there was Debbie's new lingo, her everlasting talk about dialoguing, creativity, community, intersubjectivity, centeredness (her favorite word, centeredness). And her new word, empowerment.

What would happen, I wonder, if I asked them what they thought about God and sin?

I thought they did better, looked better, felt better as Father Kev and Sister Therese in the old days, as priest and nun, than as siddha Kev in his new soft Maharishi voice and a NOW Wicca Debbie in her stretch pants. If you set out to be a priest and a nun, then be a priest and a nun, instead of a fake Hindu or a big-assed lady Olds dealer who is into Wicca-this from me, who had not had two thoughts about God for years, let alone sin. Sin?

That meeting was before I went to prison. Prison works wonders for vanity in general and for the secret sardonic derisiveness of doctors in particular. All doctors should spend two years in prison. They'd treat their patients better, as fellow flawed humans. In a word, prison restored my humanity if not my faith. I still don't know what to make of God, don't give Him, Her, It a second thought, but I make a good deal of people, give them considerable thought. Not because I'm more virtuous, but because I'm more curious. I listen to them carefully, amazed at the trouble they get into and how few quit. People are braver than one might expect.

This was three years ago.

Anyhow, after listening to this marital warfare for a few weeks, I had an idea which might help them. I made a semiserious suggestion. Yes, I confess it, my suggestion had its origins both in a wish to help them and in a certain derisiveness and a desire to be rid of them. Yet it worked! Why not, I asked them, why not put your talents to better use? After all, you've both had extensive experience in counseling. You both have superior-er-intersubjective and social skills (they used words like that, worse than shrinks). Why don't you start your own counseling center, perhaps couples' counseling. You could do it and you'd be helping yourselves while helping others. Was I being sarcastic? Not altogether. They'd been battling so long, they knew all the tactics of marital warfare. Ex-soldiers, after all, keep the peace better than politicians. Look at MacArthur in Japan, Eisenhower in Washington.

We laughed. And they did! And they got so involved in other couples' fights, they stopped fighting each other. They started something called Beta House out in the country. I talked Enrique Busch into letting them have a great barn with stables at the time Enrique was quitting polo and taking up golf. I did it by lying, that is, by not telling Enrique who Debbie was, that is, an ex-Maryknoller from El Salvador, or telling Debbie who Enrique was, a member of the famous fourteen families-they would have wanted to shoot each other on the spot-but by telling Enrique that Debbie's father had founded the White Citizens' Council in Feliciana, which he had, and by telling Debbie that Enrique had deep feelings for the people of El Salvador, which he did.

So Beta House was founded in a barn, the stables converted to intimate bedrooms for estranged couples, the loft to an encounter room. Painted on the side of the barn was the logo they'd agreed upon, a yin-yang centered between two hearts, the yin-yang a concession to Kev's Eastern leanings, the two hearts expressing Debbie's notions about dialoguing and centeredness. Two hearts centered on a yin-yang.

So here they are three years later: They're pleased to see me and I them. There is no space of irony between us. I wish them well and they me. They're as lovey now as they were fractious before. They sit side by side on my couch, holding hands and feeling each other up-which generally gives me a pain but doesn't now because it's an improvement over the mayhem.

"How does it go?" I ask them.

"Wow," they say; both, I think. They look at each other and laugh. Then, putting on serious faces, they utter little noises of gratitude, not sentences, but exclamations: "Dear Doc," "Our Doc," "Oh boy, Almond Joy," and suchlike. It seems I saved their marriage. It seems I get credit for the barn and Beta House, even though I only made a single, not quite serious suggestion, mainly to get rid of them. No more talk of Wicca.

"Very good," I say presently. "I'm glad things are going so well. You both look fine. But what can I do for you? I can't imagine that you need anything further from me."

Secret looks between them, more laughter, again an instant sobering up, and they make their request.

Do you know what they want from me? A prescription for Alanone, the new Smith, Kline & French polyvalent vaccine which confers some immunity against both the lymphadenopathy virus of LAV-III and the glycoprotein D of Herpes II.

Without turning a hair and in the same smiling voice of our newfound friendship, I ask them why they need it. "I thought you were running a couples' retreat."

"Couples' community," they both correct me. Kev makes certain noises of demurral, but Debbie says quickly and as if she were reading it, "It is also an open community. We do not discourage creative relationships across stereotypical bonding. We find that open relationships, entered into maturely, enrich rather than impoverish the traditional one-on-one bonding."

I do not say something derisive as I might have two years ago, but merely reflect a moment, sigh, and reach for my PDR, the physicians' big red book-what do I know about creative relationships or pills and vaccines?-and write them a prescription for- How many do you want? "Three hundred," says Kev; "Four hundred," says Debbie. I make it four hundred. After all, better not to have than to have LAV-AIDS and Herpes II.

Somewhat abstracted, I forget to run the simplest test on them, a dominant-eye test or an out-of-context language test, like: Where is Ketchum, Idaho? (They'd know, because the Bhagwan had hung out there.) I have no doubt that either would have told me instantly and as merrily as a four-year-old, eyes rolled up to consult their interior brain maps. I'll test them later.

Absently, I receive their hugs and thanking noises and watch from the windows as they depart in their old Econoline van with its flaming yin-yang logo centered between two dialoguing hearts.

2. WHAT TO MAKE OF these patients? What's in common? Nothing? Something? Enough for a syndrome?

Here's Mickey LaFaye, formerly anxious and agoraphobic, terrified of her own shadow, now a sleek, sleepy, horsewoman Duchess of Alba straddling under the sheets. Plus some peculiar business about a stallion and a stable boy. Plus Dr. Comeaux's special interest in her.

Here's Donna S-, formerly a fat girl, abused as a child, but a deep-down romantic, waiting for Galahad. Now she's jolly, lithe, and forward, or rather backward, presenting rearward.

Here's Enrique, once an enraged Salvadoran, now a happy golfer with no worries except his daughter making Gamma.

Here's Ella Murdoch Smith, once failed and frightened, guilt-ridden, couldn't cope, a solitary poet of the winter beach and spindrift. Now Rosy the Riveter, hardhat lady at Mitsy, with her boyfriend in a standard Louisiana pickup, getting beat up by a robot.

And Kev and Debbie, old friends, ex-Jesuit and ex-Maryknoller, a quarrelsome, political, ideological couple. Now content, happy as bugs in a rug; no, not happy so much as fat-witted and absorbed. Running some sort of encounter group out in the pines which sounds less like a couples' retreat than a chimp colony.

Don't forget Frank Macon, old hunting pal, once a complex old-style sardonic black man, as compact of friendship and ironies as Prince Hamlet, as faithful and abusive as a Russian peasant. Now as distant and ironed out as a bank teller: Have a nice day.

And Ellen.

What's going on? What do they have in common? Are they better or worse? Well, better in the sense that they do not have the old symptoms, as we shrinks called them, the ancient anxiety, guilt, obsessions, rage repressed, sex suppressed. Happy is better than unhappy, right? But-But what? They're somehow-diminished. Diminished how?

Well, in language, for one thing. They sound like Gardner's chimps in Oklahoma: Mickey like-Donna want-Touch me-Ask them anything out of context as you would ask chimp Washoe or chimp Lana: Where's stick? and they'll tell you, get it, point it out. Then: Tickle me, hug me. Okay, Doc?

Then there's the loss of something. What? A certain sort of self-awareness? the old ache of self? Ella doesn't even bother to look at her own photograph, doesn't care.

Bad or good?

For another thing, a certain curious disinterest. Example: Take the current news item: Soviets invited to occupy Baluchistan, their client state in southern Iran to restore order, reported advancing on Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf. What to do? Let them have it? Confront them? Ultimatum? Two years ago people would be huddled around the tube listening to Rather and Brokaw. My patients? My acquaintances? No arguments, no fright, no rage, no cursing the Communists, no blaming the networks, no interest. Enrique doesn't mention liberals anymore. Debbie does not revile Jerry Falwell anymore.

There's a sameness here, a flatness of affect. There was more excitement in prison, more argument, more clash of ideology. In Alabama we were polarized every which way, into pro-nukes and anti-nukes, liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, anti-Communists and anti-anti-Communists, born-again Christians, old-style relaxed Catholics, lapsed Catholics, Barbara Walters haters, Barbara Walters lovers.

Nothing like Alabama!

The warfare in that quonset hut at Fort Pelham!

We inmates, or rather detainees-assorted con men, politicians, ex-Presidential aides, white-collar crooks, impaired physicians pushing pills, mercy killers, EPA inspectors on the take from lumber and oil barons-criminals all, but on the whole engaging and nonmurderous. And next door, Hope Haven, a community of impaired priests, burned-out ministers and rabbis, none criminal, none detained, but all depressed, nutty, or alcoholic, generally all three, who had not run afoul of the law as we had but had just conked out, and so had great sympathy for us and made themselves available. One of them, my old pal and exparish priest, Rinaldo, Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, sojourned next door to me on the Alabama Gulf Coast for a year to recover from his solitary drinking. (I must call him. Has he gone nuts again?) At Fort Pelham we had discussion groups, seminars, screaming political arguments over meals, fistfights. In prison, ideas are worth fighting for. One also gets paranoid. There is a tendency to suspect that So-and-so has it in for you, to read hostile meanings into the most casual glance.

I witnessed such a fight between an anti-Communist Italian Republican dentist from Birmingham who had patented a new anesthetic and more or less inadvertently killed half a dozen patients and an anti-anti-Communist Jewish lawyer from New York, my cellmate Ben Solomon, recently removed to New Orleans, where he had been convicted of laundering Mafia-teamster money for a black mayoral candidate.

This pair and I were sitting in the prison library one afternoon, the Birmingham dentist reading Stars and Bars, a new New Right magazine published at Fort Sumter, South Carolina; the New York lawyer reading The New York Review of Books. I was reading a new history of the Battle of the Somme, a battle which, with the concurrent Battle of Verdun, seemed to me to be events marking the beginning of a new age, an age not yet named. In the course of these two battles, two million young men were killed toward no discernible end. As Dr. Freud might have said, the age of thanatos had begun.

These two fellows had argued violently at table about racism in the South and the crypto-communism of Northern liberals. Now in the library I looked up from the Battle of the Somme and began to watch them. Both were gazing down at their magazines but neither was reading. Not a page was turned for twenty minutes. It was clear from his expression that Ben Solomon, the lawyer, was festering, nurturing some real or fancied slight, which was being rapidly magnified in his head to a mortal insult. I knew the signs. Perhaps he had lost the last argument and was thinking of what he might have said, a killing remark. But it was too late for talk. His fists clenched and unclenched on the table. The dentist, I perceived, was aware of the lawyer's mounting rage. Then why didn't they steer clear of each other? Why didn't one just get up and leave? But no. They were bound, wedded, by hatred. They were like lovers. Finally the lawyer rose slowly and stood over the dentist, looking down at him, fists clenched at his sides. In a trembling voice he said, "Did you or did you not imply that as a supporter of Israel I was a secondclass and unpatriotic American?"

The dentist, surprised or not, did not look up from his Stars and Bars. "Only after that crack, addressed to others but intended for me, about rednecks, crackers, yahoos, and gritspitters. I only replied in kind."

"You mentioned something about Yankee kikes."

"Only after you used the expression 'Southron fascist rednecks.'"

"Take it back," said the lawyer, clenching and unclenching. Take it back! I am marveling. Like my five-year-old Tommy: Take it back. Well then, why not?

"Look, Doctor," I said mildly, "if the word offends him-"

Both ignore me.

"You take it back," said the dentist, rising.

"Look, Ben," I say, rising, "why not take-"

"Who in the fuck asked you?" says Ben, not taking his eyes from the dentist.

Neither would take anything back. I am rising from the Battle of the Somme to say something like "Hold it, fellows." Actually I'm fond of both of them.

"Tell him to take back 'redneck,'" says the Italian (redneck!) dentist to me, without taking his eyes from the lawyer.

"Take back 'redneck,'" I tell Ben. "Then he'll-"

"Tell him to take back 'Yankee kike.'"

"Okay. Take back-" I begin, relaying messages two feet. But before I can utter another word, they have actually hurled themselves at each other, and now they are actually rolling on the floor, grappling and punching, two middle-aged gents grunting and straining, their bald scalps turning scarlet. Neither can hurt the other, but they're apt to have a stroke.

I am straddling them, trying to wedge them apart. Good God: a New York-New Orleans Democrat Jew fighting it out with a Birmingham Italian Confederate Republican.

"Cut it out, goddamn it!" I yell at them, straddling both. "You're going to have a stroke!"

I did get in between and did stop the fight, easily, because both wanted an excuse to quit with their Jewish and Confederate honor intact. For my pains I got punched and elbowed, my glasses knocked across the room. "Somebody hit Doc!" one of them cries.

They both set about taking care of me, the lawyer fetching my glasses, the dentist staunching my bleeding lip. I go limp to give them something to do, carry me to the infirmary.

A discovery: A shrink accomplishes more these days by his fecklessness than by his lordliness in the great days of Freud.

What, then, to make of my patients?