In Session, (20): Daddy Longlegs
The Lay Psychiatrist treats a human flamingo
When he walked into the room I thought it was a man on stilts. He had the longest legs I’ve ever seen, so absurdly long that I asked him to take off his trousers so that I could have a better look at them. “Just drape them over the arm,” I said, indicating the yellow chair. “The socks also, please.”
I wanted a look at his toes.
It was as I suspected. They curled like claws gripping a branch in a windstorm. Those feet were terrified. The calves, skinny and worried, looked on helplessly. Communication with the brain was scrambled.
“You have trouble keeping yourself grounded,” I said, signaling that he should put his pants back on before sitting down. “You have no chi flowing from the ground into your feet. You are off the ground.”
“It’s worse than you think,” he said.
“Tell me more,” I said.
The secret of being a good psychiatrist is to stay out of the way until you need to shed new light on an existing landscape.
“I got scared into my head when I was a kid,” he said, “and I used to dream that my feet were missing. In the dream I knew they’d been taken by Killer Bob. I didn’t think much about it until I watched Twin Peaks, and there was Leland Palmer, suspended in the air, and Killer Bob was on the ground and ready to kill again.”
“A serial killer sometimes takes your feet,” I said, nodding. Feeding back to the client what he’s just told me builds rapport. He feels like I understand him and know what he’s talking about. This is seldom the case.
“Sometimes there’s two of them,” he said. “Like the Salamanca cousins. I know they have my feet, but I’m trying to not let on I know.. How I’m walking around without feet I don’t know. Dreams are like that.”
“You’ve lost your grounding,” I said. “You’re floating around in your head, never knowing when a pair of feet are going to run up and snatch you out of the air.”
““The Salamancas are an improvement on Killer Bob, don’t you think? At least with them, the killing is business.”
“What kind of work do you do, by the way?” I asked.
“I’m a lobbyist for a pharmaceutical company.” He began to look around at the walls, his facial expression like Officer Kujan getting woke just after his interrogation of Kaiser Soze. “Where did you go to school?” he asked. I ignored the feint.
“Let’s talk podiatry,” I said.