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15 NATHAN, THIN AS A NERVE, WOULD SIT STIFFLY IN HIS WINGBACK CHAIR and slowly twist a pencil between his long fingers, listening more compassionately to me, it seemed, than any other psychologist ever had. Odd accentuations in his eyes made it seem as if he was in a constant state of subdued reaction, guarding a multitude of impressions, correlating every shift of my body, every hesitation, every word to his psychodiagnostic formulas. I told him that I wanted to get Bo back. I was walking through a fog and I wanted out. "The fog is your way of experiencing depression," he said. "This is your problem, and I think it's been your problem for a long, long time." I slumped into the couch. I hadn't expected such a sudden and charmless diagnosis. He went on. "And before you can even begin to think about Bo again, you've got a lot of work to do. You're going to have to let him go. You're going to have to work on yourself and your relationships with your mother and father. You can't even think about lovers until you've taken care of your own family." I was watching him more than listening. He practically sparked, he was so crisp. He swirled his hands like a magician, conjuring the land through which I'd travel. He said he would go with me, holding a light here and there as I found my way. But I was going to love Bo whether Nathan wanted me to or not. I wasn't going to give him up for Nathan. There would be no transference. At times in our sessions I felt like a runaway at confession. Nathan instructed me to tell him where I had been all these years and exactly what I'd been into. Eventually, he took me back in time, to the old campfires, to the nights of the Boy Scouts, to the embers flirting in their eyes, my Copyrighted Material 95 father's voice buttering the world. The coals are skulls shrunken down, crumbling, hissing, dying. Nathan darkens the office. Walt awakens. He smells like smoke. "What is it, Walt?" Nathan asks. Walt's skin is burning. He floats inside me, and I give him my voice to use. He tells Nathan what Daddy is doing to him; he blacks out under the pressure of rage. Nathan calls him back, but he does not understand that the boy has left. Walt watches from the galaxy he goes to when he is dead. "Did you see him?" Nathan asks. Who are you talking to? I think. Don't you understand there are others here? I see a sooty-footed boy. The light cries over him. He knows he can never be touched again, and he asks God why he let this happen, but God does not answer. I realize that Nathan is talking to me. "... so when your father caused your orgasm, that's the very moment you became a homosexual." I don't want to hear this thing. I want to know about Walt. "The boy ... when I was telling you what was happening, it felt like someone else," I say. "Was he like my inner child?" "You could say that," Nathan tells me. "Let's call him Little Walt," I say. "Okay," he says. "We'll take good care of Little Walt. He needs our love." "Does this mean I have multiple personality disorder?" I ask. "No. Little Walt's a psychological metaphor, a part of your own personality. " No, I'm not, the boy tells me. The discovery of Little Walt was at once stunning and sad. I could not shake him off; worse, I sensed there were other Walts even younger and more pitiful. Walt would speak to me whenever we were alone. In his vagabond voice he'd tell me things I'd long forgotten, taking me with him to his hiding places among the stars. I talked to him soothingly and felt him blink his boy eyes. I fell in love with him. Nevertheless, I could do only so much inner child coddling. Nathan told me that I needed to explore the breadth and depth of rage I secretly harbored toward my father. As the weeks passed, I began the work of hating Dad, never directly, never feeling the anger I thought I ought to feel, but seeing him as someone else, the truly, deceptively, insane. Around the office...
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