BY DR. AGONSON
The crazed convulsions reached their peak, the patient straining at his bonds, then suddenly were ended. Comatose, barely breathing, he lay. I grabbed his wrist. His pulse was weak. I kept my finger pressed into the vein, my eye on the clock, counting the beats of his heart.
“Cover it up,” I say after a moment, and a curtain was pulled over the strange sketch. “That, ladies and gentlemen,” they begin rolling the weird image away, “is one of three typical responses. Certainly, it is the most flamboyant. Our patient here has reliably reacted the same way to every exposer as . . . ”
A hand was raised. I nodded.
“You said typical, but we all saw it.” He laughs nervously. “What are the other reactions?”
“Well, you’ve seen one, and it is an extreme case. You can see everyone else here too, so you tell me, how did they react.”
The student looks away from me, his hand reaching up to his chin.
“Uh,” he begins, “Some didn’t look.”
“Didn’t look?”
“Yeah,” he says, “When the curtain was drawn, a lot of us looked away.
“A natural response to the fear of seeing something dangerous, but what of those that looked?”
“Well,” he swallowed, “I wasn’t watching them.”
“What were you watching? The patient?”
“Yeah,” he said nodding, “The patient.”
“And you didn’t look at the picture?”
“Well, I looked at it—”
“And what happened to you?”
“I felt . . . cold.”
“Cold?”
“Yeah, cold. Not real cold. I mean, like a chill down my spine.”
“It disturbed you?”
“Yes.”
“Most people,” I go on, “merely feel some form of discomfort, a chill and so forth.”
His hand was raised again.
“So what’s the other one?”
“The other one?”
“You said there were three typical responses. Most people feel uneasy, some act out in a frenzy like the patient . . . ”
“The patient,” I continue, “if I had given him free reign, would have attempted to destroy the image. You and I, most of us here, we merely feel an aversion to it. Some, after they see it, gain a strange compulsion, a fixation. The fascination inevitably leads to an attempt to recreate the thing in some form or other, a doodle, a sculpture, some may even attempt poetry.”
“And then what?”
“In such cases, depending on factors we don’t wholly understand, the doodle or verse gains the same peculiar properties of the original image and can therefore cause the same effect as we saw just now.”
Tale Told 