Dying Inside

TWO.

When he was seven and a half years old and causing a great deal of trouble for his third-grade teacher, they sent little David to the school psychiatrist, Dr. Hittner, for an examination. The school was an expensive private one on a quiet leafy street in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn; its orientation was socialist-progressive, with a smarmy pedagogical underpi

Dr. Hittner chuckled. “You’ve got the wrong man,” he said. “I’m Hittner, with an n.” Perhaps he had heard such jokes before. He was a huge man with a long homey face, a wide fleshy mouth, a high curving forehead. Watery blue eyes twinkled behind rimless glasses. His skin was soft and pink and he had a good tangy smell, and he was trying hard to seem friendly and amused and big-brotherly, but David couldn’t help picking up the impression that Dr. Hittner’s brotherliness was just an act. It was something he felt with most adults: they smiled a lot, but inside themselves they were thinking things like, What a scary brat, what a creepy little kid. Even his mother and father sometimes thought things like that. He didn’t understand why adults said one thing with their faces and another with their minds, but he was accustomed to it. It was something he had come to expect and accept.

“Let’s play some games, shall we?” Dr. Hittner said.

Out of the vest pocket of his tweed suit he produced a little plastic globe on a metal chain. He showed it to David; then he pulled on the chain and the globe came apart into eight or nine pieces of different colors. “Watch closely, now, while I put it back together,” said Dr. Hittner. His thick fingers expertly reassembled the globe. Then he pulled it apart again and shoved it across the desk toward David. “Your turn. Can you put it back together too?”

David remembered that the doctor had started by taking the E-shaped white piece and fitting the D-shaped blue piece into one of its grooves. Then had come the yellow piece, but David didn’t recall what to do with it; he sat there a moment, puzzled, until Dr. Hittner obligingly flashed him a mental image of the proper manipulation. David did it and the rest was easy. A couple of times he got stuck, but he was always able to pull the answer out of the doctor’s mind. Why does he think he’s testing me, David wondered, if he keeps giving me so many hints? What’s he proving? When the globe was intact David handed it back. “Would you like to keep it?” Dr. Hittner asked.

“I don’t need it,” David said. But he pocketed it anyway.

They played a few more games. There was one with little cards about the size of playing cards, with drawings of animals and birds and trees and houses on them; David was supposed to arrange them so that they told a story, and then tell the doctor what the story was. He scattered them at random on the desk and made up a story as he went along. “The duck goes into the forest, you see, and he meets a wolf, so he turns into a frog and jumps over the wolf right into the elephant’s mouth, only he escapes out of the elephant’s tushie and falls into a lake, and when he comes out he sees the pretty princess here, who says come home and I’ll give you gingerbread, but he can read her mind and he sees that she’s really a wicked witch, who—” Another game involved slips of paper that had big blue ink-blots on them. “Do any of these shapes remind you of real things?” the doctor asked. “Yes,” David said, “this is an elephant, see, his tail is here and here all crumpled up, and this is his tushie, and this is where he makes pee-pee.” He had already discovered that Dr. Hittner became very interested when he talked about tushies or pee-pee, so he gave the doctor plenty to be interested about, finding such things in every inkblot picture. This seemed a very silly game to David, but apparently it was important to Dr. Hittner, who scribbled notes on everything David was saying. David studied Dr. Hittner’s mind while the psychiatrist wrote things down. Most of the words he picked up were incomprehensible, but he did recognize a few, the grown-up terms for the parts of the body that David’s mother had taught him: penis, vulva, buttocks, rectum, things like that. Obviously Dr. Hittner liked those words a great deal, so David began to use them. “This is a picture of an eagle that’s picking up a little sheep and flying away with it. This is the eagle’s penis, down here, and over here is the sheep’s rectum. And in the next one there’s a man and a woman, and they’re both naked, and the man is trying to put his penis inside the woman’s vulva only it won’t fit, and—” David watched the fountain pen flying over the paper. He gri

Next they played word games. The doctor spoke a word and asked David to say the first word that came into his head. David found it more amusing to say the first word that came into Dr. Hittner’s head. It took only a fraction of a second to pick it up, and Dr. Hittner didn’t seem to notice what was going on. The game went like this:

“Father.”

“Penis.”

“Mother.”

“Bed.”

“Baby.”

“Dead.”

“Water.”

“Belly.”

“Tu

“Shovel.”

“Coffin.”

“Mother.”

Were those the right words to say? Who was the wi

Finally they stopped playing games and simply talked. “You’re a very bright little boy,” Dr. Hittner said. “I don’t have to worry about spoiling you by telling you that, because you know it already. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I just want to play and read a lot of books and swim.”

“But how will you earn a living?”

“I’ll get money from people when I need it.”

“If you find out how, I hope you’ll tell me the secret,” the doctor said. “Are you happy here in school?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The teachers are too strict. The work is too dumb. The children don’t like me.”

“Do you ever wonder why they don’t like you?”

“Because I’m smarter than they are,” David said. “Because I—” Ooops. Almost said it. Because I can see what they’re thinking. Mustn’t ever tell anyone that. Dr. Hittner was waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Because I make a lot of trouble in class.”