Dennis Courtney, 22 December 1996

Introduction to Psychology
--------------------------

The day began with a ray of light jumping the fence, skirting the
window, and illuminating the brown carpet at the side of the bed. 
The alarm clock soon followed with an abortive attempt at a ring,
before losing its sound in a toss of the bed's occupant, whose
sudden movements had pulled the bedcovers from their normal
position and in doing so dislodged the alarm clock's plug from the
wall.  The black liquid crystal numbers vanished instantly.

"What next," grumbled the sleeper as he rose determinedly to his
feet, springing up with the stiff agility of a tripped-upon rake. 
Gathering his wits about him he entered the bathroom and greeted
his newly opened eyes with a splash of hot water.  His eyes were
red now, red from the smoke of the fire the night before and redder
still from the water.  He thought he looked better that way,
purposeful and resolute; no salesclerk wasted the time of a
bloodshot customer.

And he was a customer, as he saw it, and the word brought to him a
sense of clarity and direction which jarred the unsettling fog of
sleep from his mind.  A world was a marketplace; each life
experience and exchange of goods and services.  You could plot
those sorts of things on a graph, and lines would intersect and
tell you how much stock to buy, or how much rent not to pay next
month.  At least that's the way they taught it in the schools, he
thought, remembering the charts and graphs and overhead projectors
thrown before a classroomful of decidedly bored students of which
he was a member during his attempt at college.  His professor had
crooked, horn-rimmed glasses which seemed oddly rearranged on his
face, as if stuck there by the whim of a surrealist painter or bent
back into form after a glassframe-unfriendly calamity.  His
professor gave him good marks in introduction to economics, not his
first nor his last.

He was one of the best, a clever one.  That's what his mother had
always said.  He remembered the moment as a child sitting in the
bathtub and watching the whole world bent around the shiny
reflective surface of the faucet, which was steel or aluminum or
shiny metal.  And he saw his mother in that warped world, washing
his hair with shampoo that got in his eyes sure enough but never
enough to complain about and his mother was saying how handsome he
was and how the girls would just love him when he grew up, but that
was a long way off.  He had forgotten the rest but remembered the
way the world looked as it was bent around the metalwork handles
hot and cold, or the spout between them, and how each curve and
crevice of the bathroom tile was warped about in the steamfilled
background, and how his nose ballooned up when he looked at the
center of one of the handles and the rest of his head sort of faded
from the nose as if in fright of it.  Looking to one side you could
shrink the nose and make the ears big, or even better it was to
glance at it with one eye and imagine a director's camera seeing
you through a keyhole as part of some mysterious, black and white
film.  He could look at the faucet's reflection all he wanted, but
he would still be there.  He wondered if it were possible to see
the faucet's reflection without him, or the walls, or the shower
curtain in the way to block the faucet's view.  He imagined the
world wrapped around a single bathroom fixture and looked with
wonder at the sky in the bathroom window, which he promptly closed. 
The bathroom was steamy enough as it was, and the open window's
breezes seemed to bring more steam.  How did it look outside?  Did
steam form there and creep in or did steam pour out from the window
as he saw it, but in reverse?  Would it matter if he was in the
bathtub to watch?

As it was he hadn't met a keyhole you could look all the way
through, he thought the idea rather quaint as he once stared at the
lock in his own front door, and how the keyhole went in for a way
and then stopped in a bit of darkness.  Once he had taken a
flashlight as small as a pencil and poked it into the keyhole, but
that was no way to see the back of the keyhole if the light was in
the way, so he moved it back a few inches and tried a glance.  It
was still dark, maybe they just made keyholes that way.

The world has to have learned something since last night, he
wondered in the present day sense as he slapped himself a few times
to see if his mirror image could keep up with his movements, or
whether the mirror him would refuse to slap itself, because the
slaps stung a bit and there was no reason for him to go round
slapping himself in the morning, considering there were better ways
to wake up.  But his shadow slapped himself just as much as he did,
just so it could show exactly what he looked like afterwards.  The
red bits in his bloodshot eyes were still there, and now his face
muscles had tightened a bit as to better endure the blows.  The
sting of the morning would comfort him later in the day, when he
had something to compare it to.

There were better ways to wake up, coffee was one of them.  How had
his mother said it?  It would stunt his growth, it would; but a
single drink had never done anything to anybody, unless you count
that Greek philosopher forced to drink poison.  What was his name?
It wasn't important; such was the coffee, he drank it anyway.

The coffee machine had stopped after dropping one cup's worth of
water through the filter.  This was because he had only put one
cup's worth of water in the contraption to begin with.  He had
laden the filter with three cups' worth of grounds, coffee was
cheap anyway and he appreciated the flavor.  It tasted the same
with one cup but he felt as if he was preparing for company,
company that never came, but he felt happier when he was preparing
for unexpected events.  He cleaned his room with the self-reminder
that his girlfriend was due to drop by any minute; she never came
because she didn't exist.  It didn't bother him; by that time he
had pushed his clothes into their drawer homes and hung his best
shirts with hangers in the hallway closet.

Hangers should be wooden, or plastic, his mother once told him, but
never wire.  He didn't understand why not wire but that's why he
was a man and she was a mother.  He recalled once attempting to fit
a fine plaid shirt onto a bent wire hanger, it kept slipping and
falling onto the closet floor, which was replete with balls of
dust.  He attempted to bend the hanger into shape, it looked normal
enough when fixed but hung oddly with the other hangers in the
closet.  He followed his mother's advice and bought forty plastic
hangers, twenty red and twenty blue.  He had chosen only the blue
ones at first but then imagined himself with a twenty-first shirt
and nowhere to hang it.

Clearly, the world has grown older by a day, he thought as he
dressed himself.  Twenty-four short hours would fit one per hanger
with some to spare.  A day was not much for him, but of course
there were billions of people on the planet so when you multiplied
it out there were a lot of hours in a day.  Certainly some of those
people must have learned something yesterday, he mused, though he
had no idea how many were out there to begin with.  By the time
someone gets around to printing how many are out there, people have
babies and ruin the whole thing.  As if they printed books fast
enough to begin with.

Someone had learned something yesterday.  He thought about what he
had learned, sitting at home with his clock radio and the phone on
the desk waiting to ring.  It was hard to learn things when so
dreadfully little was happening; often he would sit on the bed the
wrong way and disturb the covers on one side of the bed such that
they would pull out the clock-radio's power cord.  His mother kept
all furniture eight inches from the wall, even bookcases.  It was
enough to get in and reach with one of those vacuums which are just
long poles with tiny vacuum heads on one end, and it prevented the
yanking of cords from the wall by sudden furniture movement.  His
mother would object, but he kept his bed pressed to the wall.  His
room looked eight inches bigger.

It was quite a thing to measure furniture spacing, but his mother
had been an interesting character.  In college he remembered an
introduction to psychology which had been an incredibly silly
class, and they had talked about his mother and your mother and the
professor's mother in the strangest of terms.  The instructor sat
uneasily in a high stool at the front of the classroom, perhaps it
was so high that the instructor forgot he was short.  He was a
frightfully small man.  Perhaps he had drunk too much coffee.

The psychology course was dropped after a few days, for it was an
incredibly silly class.  He remembered the instructor speaking of
his mother, and Freud's mother, and another fellow with a German
name who had a mother, and somehow these mothers had all taken
psychology and given us lessons as children.  He didn't remember
his mother taking psychology but the whole focus of the course was
on the fact that we don't remember much of anything when our
mothers are that way.

His instructor had an odd way of speaking; he explained everything
in the strangest of contexts.  In the first day of class he had to
review his own childhood memories and they were explained, he
remembered the faucet because it was shaped like a phallus, his
instructor would have probably said.  The flashlight he used to
probe the keyhole was also a phallus, and the tubelike vacuum his
mother used to clean behind the bookcases.  The world was nothing
in itself, said the teacher, only a random collection of objects
which reference each other in a very symbolistic manner. 
Eventually, they all pointed to the phallus.  His coat hangers were
male, because they split into two phallic arms which penetrated the
sleeves of his shirts.  All of them, even the red ones.  In all of
this his mother showed up again, supposedly because she did not
have coat hangers or faucets and envied their absence.

It was all nonsense, but it had probably revised itself since his
college days.  The world was wide open, he thought, it has learned
something since then.

Each of the billion hours passed silently in the room as he readied
himself for the day.  He cut himself shaving twice, once on the
chin and once on one side of the lips.  His razor could have been
male, but his hair stuck up like thousands of phallic objects from
ear to ear and the razor captured them within two twin blades,
which had some sense of an orifice between them.  Surely it could
be explained, however, there was some relationship the world had
with this razor, and the razor must have pointed to the phallus in
some respect.  His mother used a razor, too, but it was a different
razor and wasn't used on the face but the legs.  What an odd
concept, he thought as he peered at his own legs.  Perhaps there
were both male and female razors.    

The coffee was ready, and the coffee was strong.  It woke him with
a chemical sense of urgency that filled the seat of his skull and
his neck and shoulders with a tense readiness.  Opening the closet
door, he looked around for a blue hanger and convinced himself:

"Clearly, this day is a wiser one."