Death Therapy Read online

  “How do you feel about that, Remo?” Dr. Forrester asked.

  Remo shrugged and sat down. “Am I supposed to feel something?”

  “I hate you,” said Florissa. “I hate your maleness. You think you’re so handsome everyone wants you.”

  “What do you feel, Remo?” asked Dr. Forrester.

  “I think this is silly.”

  Florissa began to cry, as though her heavy mascara crop needed watering. Her face now looked as if it should be condemned by the health department.

  Florissa said she felt rejected. The other members of the group, except Dr. Forrester and someone else, went to her, put their hands on her back and face and began patting. They intoned that she was wanted and should not feel rejected. They told her she was loved. She had done beautifully. She had given of herself. She had given the entire group a beautiful moment.

  “He doesn’t think so,” said Florissa. “He thinks I’m ugly. He doesn’t want me.”

  Remo glanced briefly at the other member of the group who had not joined in the group consolation of Florissa. He was a huge man, not in height but in girth, weighing perhaps 450 pounds. He was as black as the last midnight of the world but his face, although enpuffed by billowing fat, remained strong. He reminded Remo of a great black King. He was so encumbered by weight he breathed heavily just to sit upright. As Remo watched, he kept spraying something into his mouth with a little rubber ball and a plastic tube device. It was for asthma. His black eyes burned as they looked over the apparatus at Remo. Formidable, Remo thought. Formidable.

  Remo looked for Chiun, worried about what he might do. And then Remo blinked. Chiun had joined the group, and he was massaging Florissa’s back. He motioned the other members away, then working his delicate hands up and down her spine, he intoned: “You are the flower of all men’s longing. You are graciousness flowing softly like the murmur of love from man to woman and from woman to man. You are splendor of your kind, a jewel of rare and exquisite elegance. You are beautiful. You are woman.”

  Remo saw Tubbo lift her mascara-smeared puss. She was beaming. “I feel loved,” she said.

  “You are loved because you are loveable,” said Chiun, “a precious loved flower.”

  “Make him love me.”

  “Who?”

  “Remo.”

  “I cannot account for his ignorance.”

  Remo looked at Lithia Forrester and then realized the secret of group therapy. Those leading it had to keep a straight face. Then again, maybe it was good. Hadn’t Chiun forced Remo in his training to examine his emotions, then use those that were beneficial?

  Chiun returned in his little paddling walk to the open pillow near Remo. He sat down as he normally did, with a lightning fast soft motion that looked slow, almost as if a feather were drifting to rest upon the pillow. Only after years of training could Remo duplicate the motion. Remo checked the faces to see who would recognize such body control. Again, his eyes rested on the black man’s face. He was watching Chiun intently. Lithia Forrester had noticed nothing.

  The group was told to identify itself; to say how each one felt about the newcomers, to guess what they did for a living.

  A man in his mid-forties, who said he was not permitted to identify exactly what he did, said he felt rejected by the world and his society. He said he assumed both Remo and Chiun had government jobs because only cleared people could attend Human Awareness Laboratories.

  “Remo is a health instructor in some military kind of thing and Chiun must be a translator of some sort for the state department’s Japan desk.”

  Chiun answered. “You think I am Japanese. Therefore you work for the CIA. Correct? And you speak like a white man who has attempted for many years to master Mandarin. Correct? Therefore you work in the Asia section. Correct?”

  “Amazing,” said the man.

  “You have just proven Communism is a failure,” Chiun said. “To not succeed against you schmucks is the proof of Communism’s failure. I am not Japanese.”

  “Chinese?” asked the CIA man.

  “Schmuck,” said Chiun, again using the word he had picked up from a Jewish woman at a Puerto Rican hotel. Chiun loved the word.

  The CIA man lowered his head and then told the story of his career, how he had been an expert in grain production, one of the best, really he was. He was really good. He was so good he was promoted to the hot Asia section and put as second in command of operations. He had done so poorly in that job, he was left there.

  “Typical,” said the black man. “Typical.” He did not want to identify himself or tell what he thought or felt.

  Dr. Forrester prodded. She prodded while looking at Remo. Finally the large black man told a story that left them all looking down at the carpet, not wanting to lift their heads.

  Larry Garrand was born in Middle River, Conn. He wasn’t fat then. Larry Garrand was a Boy Scout. Larry Garrand was president of his elementary school class. Larry Garrand was captain of the elementary school football team. Captain of the baseball team. Larry Garrand had the highest grades in his elementary school class. Yeah, some kids started skin popping. A couple of the girls got pregnant at eleven years old. But they were the niggers. Larry Garrand and his family were different. They were the class. Not class because they were light. He never went for that. His family was class because his father was a high school teacher in Booker T. Washington High School. And he was black.

  Larry didn’t go to Booker T. He went to the white high school, James Madison. Oh sure, he knew there were racists there but that was because they didn’t know substantial Negroes. They hadn’t met good Negroes. Larry was going to show them. This white high school, James Madison High, was something else. Sure everyone thought Larry would make a great halfback.

  “Halfback?” interrupted Remo.

  Halfback, continued Larry Garrand. He smiled.

  He was thin then and fast. Real fast. But he didn’t want to make it running. He wanted to make it another way. He wanted to show the white folks that Negroes could cut the mustard in every way. Decent Negroes.

  It was a whole new scene at Madison. First of all, his freshman year saw him in the lower third of his class. He had been first in elementary school. He knew what the whites were thinking. His father saw the report card and didn’t say a word. What his father was really saying was that they weren’t as good as whites, so why try? Larry Garrand tried. He read his lessons twice. He pretended, in front of the whites, that he didn’t work hard. But he studied ten hours a day. During mid-term recesses, he would begin reading for the next semester. Larry Garrand invented his own speed reading.

  It was the time of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Larry Garrand thought they were both wrong. When the whites saw how really top notch Negroes could be, they would change their minds and not one second sooner. Larry Garrand won a scholarship to Harvard. He graduated magna cum laude despite severe headaches every two weeks. He went to many doctors, but none could cure him.

  He had been approached by many white women but refused their offers. He wanted to show that black men—it had changed from Negro by then—weren’t just interested in white pussy.

  One night, the police made a dragnet pickup in Roxbury, the black section. They picked up Larry Garrand but when he showed who he was, they let him go. After all, he wasn’t a nigger. Not all blacks were niggers and whites were beginning to realize that.

  When Afros first came out, Larry Garrand secretly died inside. They looked so stupid. So niggerish, if you want to know the truth.

  Larry Garrand got a master’s and then a doctorate, not in sociology or the other plush easy courses that attracted most blacks. He got it in physics. The headaches got worse. But he had almost made it.

  Dr. Lawrence Garrand went to work for the United States government’s Atomic Energy Commission and he was Dr. Garrand and the secretaries called him sir, He attended a cocktail party at the White House. In one discovery he was noted in a national news magazine, his opinion sought by U.
S. senators. Where he worked it was Dr. Garrand this and Dr. Garrand that and Dr. Garrand will not be able to meet with you this week, Congressman, perhaps next.

  When Dr. Garrand knew that he had become the world’s foremost authority on atomic waste disposal, then he felt he could allow himself to indulge a secret boyhood wish. He bought himself a gold colored Cadillac convertible. After all, for the foremost authority on atomic waste disposal, this was an eccentricity. Do you know that the foremost authority on atomic waste disposal drives a gold Cadillac?

  He even indulged in a modified Afro, cut neat every week of course. And well, since it was in, he bought a dashiki. The foremost authority on atomic waste disposal drives a gold Cadillac, wears an Afro and a dashiki. Dr. Garrand was the one really helping the Afro-American’s cause, not the shouters.

  One evening, while driving to New York City, not in Mobile or Biloxi or Little Rock, but in Jersey City, N.J., the world’s foremost authority on atomic waste disposal was stopped by a motorcycle policeman. Not for speeding. Not for passing a red light or making an improper turn.

  “Just for a check, buddy. Let me see your license and registration. Yeah, yeah, sure. You’re the foremost authority on everything. You know it all.”

  “I was just trying to explain who I am.”

  “You’re Mr. Wonderful. Keep your hands up on the wheel where I can see them.”

  “I’ll have your badge, officer.”

  The motorcycle patrolman shined his flashlight directly into Dr. Garrand’s eyes.

  “I’ve had all I’m going to take from you. You shut up. Now open your hood.”

  Dr. Garrand pressed the hidden hood release, taking joy in his own anger, anticipating the glorious revenge when the patrolman was dressed down by his superior, who was dressed down from Washington.

  Dr. Garrand heard noises as the policeman’s head disappeared under the hood.

  “Okay, follow me,” said the patrolman, handing back the registration and license.

  “Is there anything wrong?” asked Dr. Garrand.

  “Just follow me. There will be a patrol car right behind us.”

  That night the world’s foremost authority on atomic waste was booked at the Greenville Precinct, for incorrect registration of an auto. The motor mount number and the registration did not match. Dr. Garrand, if that was his name, was allowed one phone call. Since he did not know a politician, other than a President and some senators, he called the head of the Atomic Energy Commission.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Larry, he isn’t home. They’re booking you for what?”

  “Incorrect registration or something.”

  “That’s incredible, Larry. Tell them to send you a letter. I’ll tell him as soon as he gets home.”

  And that was Dr. Lawrence Garrand’s phone call before he was placed in a cell block with a pimp who hadn’t paid off, a drunk and disorderly, and a breaking and entry. All black.

  He spent the night with the niggers and just as red was coming into the gloomy cold gray which he could see through the small mesh-covered window, he realized something that made his headache go away.

  There weren’t three niggers and Dr. Lawrence Garrand in the cell. There were four niggers, one of whom claimed to be the world’s foremost authority on atomic waste disposal.

  And for some crazy reason, all he could think about was all the white pussy he had passed up.

  The Atomic Energy Commission, of course, complained to the Jersey City cops. But Larry Garrand didn’t care anymore. He was still called sir, still sought by senators, but Larry Garrand didn’t care anymore. Because Dr. Lawrence Garrand, world’s foremost authority on atomic waste, knew that when push came to shove, when you’re driving alone at night in Jersey City, you, Larry Garrand, are a nigger.

  And that was the story.

  The room was silent.

  Florissa pointed out that Dr. Garrand was allowing whites to define his terms of reference. The CIA man suggested emigration to Africa. Someone else suggested that overeating was no compensation, to which Dr. Lawrence Garrand answered that he had his own compensation which was none of anyone’s business. And Dr. Forrester did not push him to explain.

  Then Chiun spoke.

  “In the world there are hundreds of flowers that bloom, each with its own beauty. Yet not one depends on the other’s admission of it. Beauty is beauty and one should accept the beauty that is his. For it is only his and no one else’s.”

  Everyone thought that was a beautiful sentiment.

  Remo whispered to Chiun: “Why don’t you tell him about the clay that God burned too long? He’d love that one.”

  The group wanted to know what Remo was whispering and he advised one and all to blow it out their ears. This was considered hostile.

  Florissa thought it was the most hostile, particularly now when she had almost forgiven Remo for not wanting to make love to her.

  The class retired to womb-touching, a floating-around in a pool nude and leaning on people. Dr. Forrester was not present. Chiun sat fully robed on the pool’s edge. He explained that to enter the pool nude was a violation of his cultural habits.

  Remo tried the same thing. He was accused of having hangups. He explained that getting undressed in front of strangers was an American cultural thing too. It was decided loudly that American cultural things didn’t count.

  Remo stripped and climbed into the pool and everyone agreed that he managed to save the man who had gotten everyone to agree that American cultural things didn’t count. It seemed Remo’s hand accidentally slapped the man’s face into the water and the man had trouble resurfacing. Then Remo helped him recover by special artificial respiration. “It only looks like I’m punching him in the stomach,” Remo said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE FIRST SIGN THAT FRANCE would bid—yes, definitely bid—came when France began converting paper into gold in countries around the world.

  First, it was South Africa from which France demanded, and got, $73 million in gold. And then France’s top fiscal officer called the Secretary of the Treasury and told him that because of certain internal problems, France found it necessary to shore up the value of the franc with more gold. Well, the internal problems were of a secret nature and no, unfortunately, he could not speak about them but the Secretary of the Treasury would understand. Yes, it was just a temporary thing. The secretary need not worry that France was making any effort to undermine the American dollar. The integrity of the franc was all that was being considered at this moment. He could not say any more, which was true for a very good reason: he did not know any more. All he knew were his instructions to begin accumulating more gold.

  And soon, two hundred million more in gold was on its way to France’s national bank.

  The Secretary of the Treasury was perplexed. Ordinarily, governments conduct business much as bookies do with habitual gamblers—by telephone and pieces of paper and record-keeping—but only rarely by actual exchanges of money. Yet, in the emerging world, France was an ally and allies must be kept happy.

  The signs of what France was doing were immediately evident to Mr. Amadeus Rentzel of the House of Rapfenberg, but he was still not happy. On the international scene, France was a putz, epitomized by de Gaulle’s anguished question: “How can one govern a country that produces 117 different kinds of cheese?” On the mind of Mr. Amadeus Rentzel were Great Britain and Russia, which had not yet indicated any real interest in bidding.

  It simply would not do to have even one country fail to bid after having been invited, because that country might just alert the United States to what was happening—and that could be disastrous to their plan.

  That day, Rentzel began to make discreet inquiries. The answers were quick in coming. England and Russia might indeed be interested in bidding. Yes, the nuclear bomber thing was interesting. So were the revelations by the CIA man. But, after all, they were really in the nature of parlor tricks. What about sea power? What kind of guarantee was there that the package would i
nclude control of the U.S. Navy operations? True to its history and its habits, Great Britain looked for control of U.S. Navy strength. And true to its history of seeking sea power and sea ports, Russia wanted to know the same things.

  That night, Mr. Amadeus Rentzel, Swiss banker, spoke long distance to a private telephone in the United States.

  “John Bull and Ivan are the only holdouts. They won’t bid until we show them something involving the Navy.”

  The bored, languid voice answered: “How much do they expect us to show? We’ve gone through the Air Force and the CIA already.”

  “I know,” Rentzel said. “I’ve explained that. But they won’t budge.”

  There was a pause, then the long sigh of a person much used to being put upon by the world. “All right. We’ll try to do something quickly. The other countries are in line?”

  “Yessir. Literally itching to go ahead. I’m sure you’ve noticed the money movements in the financial pages?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. All right. We’ll give them something with the Navy.”

  · · ·

  Dr. Lithia Forrester sat in her domed tenth floor office at the Human Awareness Laboratories pondering a difficult question. Remo Donaldson must go. But how?

  The end button on her telephone began to blink on and off, splashing a spray of light onto the darkened desk. She picked up the telephone rapidly.

  “Yes?”

  “Do something with the Navy.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as anything you want, bitch. Just do it big and do it fast. It’s important.”

  “Yes, dear, of course.” She paused. “Will I see you tonight?”

  “I think we might be doing better on our plans if you thought less about sex and more about our project.”

  “That’s not fair,” she said. “I’ve done everything I could do. Everything you wanted me to.”

  “Then let your sense of accomplishment serve as your sexual gratification. Just get started. Do something with the Navy.”