Psychiatry Contest

     The letters on the sign, propped there on a brass tripod in the big lobby window, spelled PSYCHIATRY CONTEST. They were black letters, six inches tall and in a formal, legible font. No punctuation.

     Now, I’d like to think that I know at least a bit about psychiatry, if only from cultural osmosis—and plenty more about contests—but standing there on the hot sidewalk, cars and people passing behind me, I just couldn’t make out how those two categories would overlap in a way that made any sense, let alone necessitating the manufacture and display of a sign. I thought for a moment about the errands yet to be run on my day trip into the city.

     My mental to-do list went out the proverbial window.

     I swung open the tall glass door and walked inside.

—

     The temperature was twenty degrees cooler in the vast marble atrium. Here, the voices were soft and the echoes loud. In the middle of a long reception desk, composed of graceful curves and hidden lights, slumped a concierge who said that he had no idea what the Psychiatry Contest was, but that whatever it was, it was taking place on the third floor and that if I wanted to explore the matter further I was welcome to use the main lobby staircase or the bank of elevators located to his right, my left.

     The third-floor mezzanine was like a smaller version of the lobby below. Straight ahead, a reception podium was manned by a lady with too much hair and an impatient look in her eyes. I suspected that she suspected that I might be planning to ask her where a guy could take a dump.

     “Sir. Can I help you?”

     “Hi-low,” I said, then closed my mouth so quickly that my teeth clicked. I had started with “hi,” but then some part of my brain told me that “hi” was too informal and decided, without my conscious input, to just change it to “hello” right there in the middle of speaking so that it came out as some weird, half-baked frankengreeting. Ignoring it, I pressed on.

     “Can I get some information on the sign down front? In the window?”

     “What about it?”

     “Like, what is it? The Psychiatry Contest, I mean.”

     “Sir, we just host the events. We don’t always get a lot of info about them.”

     “Oh. I see.”

     “Sorry.”

     “That’s ok. Is it in progress?

     “Yeah, it’s going on now. I mean, something is anyway. They’re all in there.”

     “Can I go in?”

     “Well, it’s not like you have to have a ticket or anything, but just the fact that you don’t even know what it is seems to mean that you weren’t invited. Right? Plus…“

     “What?”

     She paused a beat. “You’re not dressed like the rest of ‘em.”

     We both performed the obligatory scan; down to start on my gray Nikes, stained green around the bottoms from lawn maintenance, then on up over my cargo shorts with the bulging pockets, next my brown Mudhoney hoodie (bought for me two Christmases ago by my teenaged son because he had become convinced for some reason that the peak years of my youth could probably be best encapsulated in the form of Mudhoney merch), and finally to a limp, faded Reds cap. I pulled off the cap and shoved it into my kangaroo pocket, then gave my graying hair a finger-combing.

     The look on her face was not encouraging.

     “Listen,” she said, “I don’t care if you want to go in there, but if they kick you out and come asking me, I’m gonna tell ’em I didn’t see you.”

     “Deal.”

     She gave me a little half smile, a hint of mischief in it, and it was just enough to distract from my blossoming anxiety and to get my feet working. I crossed the balcony to a set of shiny hardwood doors. Like I was fourteen again, slipping into a movie I hadn’t paid for, I pulled the door out quickly, just enough to move through sidewise, my palm on the wood to soften its fall back into place.

—

     The big conference hall was dark around the edges, but lit throughout its core by a galaxy of amber bulbs that were suspended just above eye level. The ceiling of the place soared so high as to be indiscernible. Some kind of guttural music was throbbing in the air and a voice was announcing things over a PA, the words distorted beyond interpretation. The atmosphere was warm with designer fragrances and the musk of human bodies. Wave after wave of round tables, all belly-height without a chair to be found, stretched from the back, which started just inside the doors I’d passed through, and reached across the expanse of the massive hall until they met the shore of a huge pyramidal stage. There were several hundred people divided into groups of fours and sixes surrounding each table. It was a fairly even distribution of both men and women, ranging from young to elderly, nearly all wearing dark, pressed suits, starched white shirts with ties of elegant colors and weaves, stiff skirts and dresses, tapered slacks, hard shiny shoes. It looked like a pallbearer’s convention.

     The table nearest me was empty except for one middle-aged guy in a light tan suit and no tie, unkempt hair spilling out over his ears and neck. He leaned on his elbows, trusting the table with his weight, the orange light reflecting in each bead of forehead sweat like tiny flaming match heads.

     “I forgot to dress up for this one,” I projected my voice toward him in a kind of yell-whisper.

     I braced myself a bit, afraid I might startle him, having just materialized out of thin air. Instead, he turned only enough to sight me in his periphery, then pivoted back to his drink. I sidled up to the table’s edge, a few comfortable feet to his left.

     “I quit dressing up years ago,” he said. “I’m the khaki sheep on this black twill farm.” He flipped the lapel of his suit coat as if offering evidence.

     “So,” I ventured, “remind me how all this works. The Contest.”

     His arm shot up and he gesticulated oddly until a girl swimming among the tables looked up at him. He made a peace sign and pointed at the tabletop, then picked up his clear plastic cup and swirled it at her.

     ’S’yer name?” he said.

     “Uh, Fred.” It was the furthest I could get from blurting ‘Freud.’

     “Dr. Fred?”

     “Yup. Dr. Fred. Psychiatrist. Pleasure.”

     “Yeah. I’m Fredrick,” the guy said.

     “Oh. Your name is Fredrick too?”

     “You know, I used to take all this stuff more seriously, but I’m over that. If they don’t even bother to keep people from walking in off the street—no offense—then that’s their problem.”

     “Who’s problem, exactly?”

     “The NBP. National Board of Psychiatry. They’ve been doing this for almost a hundred years now. Crazy, huh?”

     A roaring cheer rolled across the room and spilled over our little table in the back. I could see that there were tiny people on the different levels of the pyramid-shaped stage, but from our distance, I could not tell what any of them were actually doing.

     “Are they over there competing in the contest right now?”

     “Oh yeah. That’s the spot. Never know when they’re gonna call your number. Supposed to be random, chosen by computer or tea leaves or some shit, but I think it’s rigged. Has to be. I mean, wherever there is a system that can be rigged, there is someone trying to rig it. Which sucks, because this used to be about something.”

     “About something.” I repeated the words and waited, nodding.

     “Yeah, you know. Prima virtus, secunda sanitas.”

     “Mm.” I paused a beat, rubbing at my chin. “It’s been a while since my last Greek lesson.”

     He puffed air from his nose. “Latin. First gather power, that then we may heal. I think after a century it’s kinda gone to some people’s heads. The power part anyway.”

     “And this,” I waved my hand toward the stage “is how to get power?”

     The man’s eyes narrowed, and he looked at me for the first time with some attention.

     “Like you wouldn’t believe, Freddy. Most psychiatrists have some inherent, genetic abilities. Intuition. Charisma. High IQ. Then there’s the training. Four years of pre-med. Four more in medical school. Another four years of psychiatric residency. And that’s just the beginning.” His hands danced in the air as if conducting the words that he spoke. “This whole thing, this competition, it’s a machine, built and perfected for the purpose of concentrating and grinding and refining those inherited and acquired skills into the most potent distillate of psychiatric mastery. The fuckers who win these things, they can pop an aneurysm in your head after looking at you for twenty seconds. They’ll make you jerk off to pictures of your mom just to flex. Understand?”

     “I…no. Not really.”

     The crunchy voice on the speaker system made noises and his head rose on his neck, pivoting toward the pyramid.

     “That’s me. Why don’t you come on over? See what I’m talking about.”

—

     I followed Fredrick, swerving between endless staggered tables until I felt drunk, strobing into and out of rosy spotlights. Finally, the full structure came into view. A complex blossom of massive cubes were arranged in twisting Fibonacci whorls of interconnected stages and catwalks rising five levels above the floor, culminating in the single canvas-topped platform at the pinnacle. The capstone. Each surface served as host to a one-on-one competition of some kind or other.

     On a nearby stage at floor-level, two women in charcoal pant suits seated on opposite sides of a folding card table were each furiously scribbling information onto little square prescriptions, ripping them off the pad, and feeding them into twin fax machines. On another, a pair sat in metal chairs facing each other, knees touching, eyes closed tightly as if in pain. On their heads were matching helmets composed of wires and straps and electrodes. A fat orange cable hung suspended between them, connecting the two contraptions by the metal spikes protruding from the top of each.

     From our place on the ground, we couldn’t even glimpse the top-level goings-on.

     There were a few dozen ushers in blue uniforms, all of whom seemed to be adolescent boys, efficiently intercepting contestants, taking hold of suit-sleeved elbows, speaking silently into headsets, disappearing into and popping out of the pyramid. They seemed to be crawling all over it, like sapphire honeybees on an enormous hive. I couldn’t help picturing twitching wings and sharp, clinging feet as they sorted psychiatrists into streams of losers and winners, bustling them off to their destinations like packets of pollen.

     One of the Blue Boys was suddenly beside me, his hand buzzing low on my back, navigating me forward and around several corners. My focus was downward, trying to avoid tripping over my own feet, and it took me a moment to realize that I was suddenly inside the pyramid. I felt disoriented. We double-timed it up steps, squeezed down tight passageways that then opened onto oddly large and empty spaces, then off around another corner and up more steps.

     The sound of the crowd pulsed at a distance, like the burbling of liquid inside byzantine pipes. Then, all at once, I had the sensation of shooting out the end of a water slide, born back into the world, all of its noise and light attacking my nerve endings. I squinted against the golden brightness and looked out on a black sea filled with floating circles, large and small. Tables and faces. A thousand psychiatrists gazing upward, shouting things that made no sense to my ears.

     For reasons that were not explained to me, I seemed to have been attached as a kind of apprentice and thereby allowed to follow Fredrick to his successive bouts, standing off to the side like a resident physician observing his attending on rounds. I watched as he handily whipped a tall redheaded kid in a pill identification contest, then bested an old guy in head-to-head electronic medical record chart completion.

     Before I knew it, we were on the third level, where the competitions took on strange and even disturbing flavors.

     I stood by Fredrick’s table as he faced an obese woman in a perfectly tailored black three-piece suit of linen. They were required to take turns speaking for twenty seconds at a time. The goal, as it became gradually clear, was to recount to each other the most depressing of their patient’s stories, to describe the peaks of human suffering, over and over until one person, the loser, shed a tear. I couldn’t always hear the things that they were saying to each other. I quickly realized that I didn’t want to.

     After Black Linen had turned on the waterworks, we were shuttled to a stage where Frederick and his opponent were both strapped tightly into strait jackets, then pushed off their feet and left to wriggle and grunt across the surface of the canvas. Just when I began to worry that his escape was an unrealistic expectation, he jerked wildly, causing the crotch buckle to pop loose. It was only another two or three sweaty minutes before he had pushed the thing up his back and over his head, stopping the timer at eight minutes, thirteen seconds. His defeated counterpart lay very still, staring into the far dark.

     On the penultimate level there were only five stages. They unfolded like giant white flower petals, sprouting out from around the base of the last, central arena, the Pyramidion; an eleven-foot tall, black obelisk, at the top of which was the final platform. The peak of this alien mountain. Industrial ladder rungs poked out of its side, leading all the way to the top. I was still unable to gain a view of that last square battlefield somewhere above us. Vertigo sloshed in my brain for a moment after glancing down on the little staring faces from what felt like an alarming height. 

     On the platform beside us, I saw a short man and a very old woman squaring off for battle. Both were double-fisting syringes; big glass models like something from a ’50s cartoon, filled with splashing liquids of green and red and blue, needles tipped with glistening droplets. They circled and poked at each other, feigning this way and that, getting more sluggish and uncoordinated each time that a jab pierced the skin.

     Our next competition involved another card table with a pair of flimsy chairs on either side. One seat was occupied by a young lady. Not yet out of her mid-twenties, she was strikingly beautiful. Looking at her there in a snug maroon dress, thick coils of dark hair flowing down her back, I wondered how a patient could talk to her without being dazzled. She lifted her hand just an inch or two off the table in a bashful, repressed sort of wave. In front of her on the table was a large metal bowl, half filled with colors. I helped Frederick to his seat and saw, upon closer inspection, that the bowl contained about a million different shapes and shades of tablet and capsule.

     “What are those?” I spoke low into his ear.

     “Who knows,” he whispered back. “It’s a big ole mix. Everything from antipsychotics to Ambien to Ritalin. Hell, they throw Viagra in there. Goddam birth control pills. You name it.”

     “What are you supposed to do?”

     “Back up, Freddie. Green light.”

     I stepped aside. A timer on the table lit up with a big red zero-point-zero and a Blue Boy brought over two large glasses of water. They each turned their heads to the side, closed their eyes, and reached over the edge of the bowl. When they had chosen their pills, they then faced each other, traded pills, popped them in their mouths and gulped them down with the water. The timer began counting and their mouths were examined, a flashlight beam illuminating cheek pouches and tongue undersides.

     I had no idea how much time might elapse before whatever was next would happen, but I didn’t have to wait long. At the five-minute mark, a buzzer went off and the timer froze while the contestants repeated the procedure for picking a pill, trading, swallowing, and then watching as the timer started again. They sat with hands in their laps. At first, they looked around and around at what there was to see, sometimes staring each other down, but strangely never acknowledging the audience in any way. Even when we would occasionally get pelted with a paper wad or a pharmaceutical company promotional ink pen, they didn’t break.

     Just before the timer hit ten minutes, Frederick started bouncing his knee up and down. It was subtle at first, but by pill time, it was starting to rock and roll. They took their fifteen-minute doses, the girl choking on her water and struggling to get her hacking and coughing under control. Frederick’s whole body was vibrating by now. I thought for a moment that the girl was looking at him sympathetically, head tilted to the side like a concerned golden retriever. But soon her face melted into a pained grimace and she began to rub helplessly at the knotted cramp her neck had become.

     Somehow, they made it through two more rounds of brain candy. The writhing tremor had left his body and Frederick again sat stone still, tongue swollen and red as a strawberry, lips glued to his gums, glass empty. He seemed to be struggling to stay upright, but without warning the girl tumbled out of her chair and ended up twisted into a drooling pretzel on the mat, signaling Frederick as the victor.

     He looked like he’d had half the blood drained out of him. Leaning on me for support, we shuffled across two catwalks to the next stop on the fourth level. The stage that we were escorted to was empty. No table. No opponent. There were two squares made of red tape on the white canvas floor, each about three feet to a side and with six feet of mat between them. I found a place to stand away from the teetering edge and after a while a giant in a blue blazer and an orange tie with spots came sauntering across a catwalk to our stage. Gabardine stretched to its frayed limit across his bulging chest and arms and thighs. From between the suit lapels sprouted a massive head, looking something like an angry bison with a good haircut.

     The furry juggernaut stepped into the red square opposite Fredrick. They both seemed to know what to do—as it had been with all the other matches—without being given any rules or instructions. While Bison stared directly at his opponent, small eyes simmering deep in his skull like hot embers, Frederick took a different tack, letting his vision go unfocused, his gaze drifting down to the red tape. Both men seemed to be concentrating with intense effort. Moisture beaded on their temples. Muscles trembled. Each gradually extended himself in such a way as to stand taller, spine pulling straight, skull rising to the tip of the vertebrae as if invisible hands had taken each by the crown of the head and were slowly lifting upward.

     They paused there, still and straining for a few cycles of my own ragged breathing, and then Frederick began to come apart from the floor. His body rose about two inches further, leaving a gap between the soles of his Manolos and the ground. The exact distance was promptly calculated by a Blue Boy with a measuring tape. Frederick dropped back to the worn canvas and stumbled in an attempt to avoid collapsing completely. The Bison stomped and huffed and, amazingly, turned, ran, and leapt from the far edge of the stage, disappearing soundlessly down into the chaos that surrounded us.

     I looked for activity on the adjacent stages, but they were empty. Ushers herded us toward the metal rungs on the side of the Pyramidion. Frederick managed them shakily, but the climb appeared to have burned up the last drops of gas in him. I pulled myself up, no easy feat, and crested the edge of the peak to find a flat, square stage with no ropes or rails, covered in stretched red canvas with a tall, narrow table in the middle. For a moment it was just the two of us, there on the roof of the world. We sat on the mat breathing heavily and looking out over the spectacle of the place. All the white cubes spiraling outward below us were empty and clean. The audience had quieted, but they had not calmed, as evidenced by the hum of energy coming up off them in waves, tickling over us like static electricity.

     A few fingers poked up over the far edge, followed by a tuft of fuzzy white hair. I felt a strong compulsion to lend him a hand, but assumed that course of action might be frowned upon. Instead, I helped Frederick stand up and together we watched as his ultimate opponent struggled onto the stage in fits and starts. When he was finally able to get to his feet, he smiled broadly and warmly at us both, eyes swallowed by round wrinkled cheeks, teeth so perfect they had to be man-made. His suit cloth was a dark and earthy corduroy, complete with felt elbow patches and a wide paisley tie. He remained silent, like all the contestants before him, and walked slowly but steadily to the waist-high table in the center of the platform. Its surface was three feet in length and a foot and a half wide, a stubby black handgun resting in its center.

     Frederick leaned heavily on the table, looking like a wrung-out version of the man I’d found earlier in the back of the room. A loud buzzer sounded and the hush became total silence. He pushed himself up into a standing position and faced the old man. Both placed their palms on the table and stared with great concentration into each other’s eyes.

     Then, nothing happened for what seemed like a long time. I felt weary. Bone tired. I wanted off the summit of this mountain of madness and found myself scanning the far distance for possible exits.

     Frederick let out a muffled groan before he made the first movement. I could see that it was the sound of his strained defenses, his depleted will, finally splintering. His left hand came off the table and moved a few millimeters toward the weapon. He was shaking again, coarse twitches and spasms erupting sporadically. His fingertip brushed the hard molded plastic and he managed to pull back a smidge. I saw the smile leave the old shrink’s face. Outwardly they both appeared still, almost peaceful, but the degree of focused power they were aiming at each other lead me to imagine invisible sparks shooting from their eyes, black smoke billowing from their ears. All the hairs on my body, from nuts to nose, stood on end, stretching out toward this concentration of conflicting energies. Then, in a sudden lurching movement, the gun was in Frederick’s hand, the muzzle pressed under his own stubbled chin.

     His trigger finger was curled into a tight, trembling ball, but appeared to be gradually pulled open, as if by tiny unseen chains. I noticed a cramping pain in my abdomen and realized that all my defensive muscles were rigid, unconsciously guarding me from the unpredictable stings of this weird hive.

     Once his finger found the trigger, the fight went out of him. His eyes closed, and the rest happened quickly.

     The gun exploded against his bared throat and my eyes squinted to shield from danger and horror alike. I held that way only a second, then looked to find that the shot had scalded a bright red track up the side of his face. He had managed to remain on his feet and he brought the gun down, pointing it at the old man. He fired immediately.

     The bullet struck the geezer just above the left eye, snapping his head back on his neck like a Pez dispenser. Crimson gore splashed in an arc through the air and across several of the white stages below. Yet, somehow, the old fellow was also still standing. Dazed and grunting, he rubbed at what I began to realize was a knot on his forehead smeared with paintball juice. Frederick dropped the gun on his way to collapsing. Three Blue Boys climbed up over the edge and onto the canvas. One grabbed the gun and dropped it into a satchel, then took out a black cloth. The others tilted the table over to reveal a trap door in the stage. The Boy with the satchel pulled a hood over the old man’s head and together they lifted him, carried his stiff body a few steps, then dropped him down the chute. When they had closed the hatch, they disappeared back over the edge from where they’d come.

     Frederick had become a twitching puddle, leaving me the only person standing at the pinnacle. The faces were all expressionless and aimed at me, some so far away that they blended with their neighbors. Someone, somewhere among this horde, grunted—a pebble dropped in a silent pond—then others made similar calls in return, bouncing and multiplying, rising in volume as more psychiatrists joined in. Random at first, the staccato, moaning note began to coalesce around a beat and a tone. It swelled, reaching into my chest with its force. Their croaking throats became a heartbeat. A thousand heartbeats, all focused up on me. There was a strange twinge in my neck, and then I suddenly had the sensation of water rushing over my body. I looked down to find that I was dry, and that’s when the floor under my grass-stained tennis shoes turned from red to black. I dropped into that nothingness with narcotic indifference, the pulsing collective heartbeat dying somewhere up above me.

—

     Hotel sheets against my nose. Cheap. Starch and bleach coming off them. None of my appendages reacted the way I expected them to, like moving in molasses. The maid was in the room with me.

     “Mr. Riley? Can you sit up?” She said. “Dr. F is gonna see you.”

     Not a maid. These were hospital smells. Hospital sounds.

     A figure loomed dark in the doorway.

     “Rip Van Riley!” A familiar voice. They somehow knew my name. “You slept the better part of three days. Rise, my son.”

     I pushed against the gravity keeping me glued to the bed and managed to get into a shaky posture that resembled sitting. My eyes hurt.

     “I hear that you were talking in your sleep,” he went on, coming more into focus, hair creeping out over the collar of his white lab coat. “Some grandiose shit about a giant contest in a downtown conference hall?”

     “Prima virtus,” I coughed at him.

     He went through the motions of laughter without making much sound. “Right.”

     Someone under the bed was holding both my ankles.

     “Well, I hope that everyone is treating you well. Let me know if they don’t. I’ll check in on you weekly for rounds.”

     “What? I can’t stay here. I have to get home! My family doesn’t even know where I am!”

     He shot a glance toward the nurse who then silently slunk out of the small room.

     “Nah. I need you for the next round,” he said. “You’re my good luck charm. The other day wasn’t even the Big Show.” He smiled and turned to leave.

     “You piece of shit,” I heard myself hissing. “You can’t treat me like this!” I spit in his general direction, a few bubbly flecks landing on his khaki pant leg. A bit much perhaps, but I was indignant.

     Frederick stopped.

     He walked back over and bent toward me. His hand came forward with a small photo, poking it between my tingling fingers like a magician forcing a card on a volunteer. He closed his eyes and his face fell slack. Suddenly my own face was very heavy. My eyelids dropped, cancelling the world and leaving me to float within myself. I had a microdream in which I was lost in a foreign city, and when I opened my stinging eyes again, he was gone and my room was empty.

     I tried to walk to the door but the leather restraints around my ankles kept me anchored to the bed. My brain throbbed and my vision blurred. I sat back down and tried to focus on what was in my hand.

     It was a grainy photo of my mother, at Lake Tahoe, in a one-piece bathing suit.