Ruffly Speaking

men were green, but they aren’t—they’re gray—and I would have sworn that dreams about UFOs were just that, dreams, whereas, according to the experts, alien abduction dreams, in marked contrast to all other dreams ever dreamt by human beings since the first time Adam fell asleep, aren’t really dreams at all, but accurate memories of real events. And while we’re on the topic of that report, let me warn you that if anyone ever asks whether you’ve heard or seen the word trondant and whether you know that it has a special meaning for you, just say no! It’s a trick question. Answer yes, and you’ll be dismissed as some joker who’s trying to claim credit for a UFO abduction, but who’s never actually gone farther from home than the suburbs of Cleveland, okay?
    “So I didn’t take it seriously,” I admitted to Rita. “But neither did you! That’s why you showed it to me in the first place, because—”
    “Because, if you really want to know, because it roused a lot of anxiety, and the reason it did was—”
    “I know! You’ve told me a million times. Because the introduction was written by some famous professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, so you showed it to me so I could make some kind of crack about it, and I did, right on cue! And I said that what that proved was that if you were looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe, Harvard probably wasn’t the place to start, and I also said that if people were being kidnapped, all that proved was that the alien beings weren’t too bright, be-cause—” As perhaps you’ve surmised, at precisely four o’clock that afternoon, I’d consumed one large cup of Bustelo.
    “Enough!” Rita jerked her manicured right hand up and then sharply down in unintended imitation of beginning dog trainers who’ve read about the drop signal in a book but haven’t yet figured out exactly what it’s supposed to look like. “But the other part is that those people's suffering is real. You don’t believe—and I don’t believe—that they’ve been abducted by aliens, but these people have had terrible experiences, right here on earth, way too close to home, in most cases, and to make fun of—”
    “Rita, I made fun of the pamphlet, the report. I thought it was stupid. So did you. But I never said the people were stupid, any more than you did. Look, feeling as if you’ve been in contact with any kind of Other, capital O, is horrible. Even just the ordinary sense of not really being yourself... Rita? Are you still not...?”
    “More than I was,” she said quietly.
    My own voice matched hers, soft, low-pitched. “Have you talked to Stephanie Benson?”
    Rita nodded stiffly. “She’s an interesting woman. Among other things... Anyway, Stephanie said this obvious thing, and it’s so... What she picked up on was actually this same theme, and she pointed out... I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. Alienist. It’s British, and it’s out of date, but it’s not a bad word for therapist, and I never made the connection. For that matter, neither did Lang.” Rita’s analyst, of course, Norris Lang, who also, I might add, either hadn’t noticed her hearing loss or hadn’t insisted that she do something about it. If I were a shrink, first of all, I’d make all my patients have their vision and hearing tested, and I’d make sure they had jobs they liked, and I’d refer them all to purebred rescue groups to adopt wonderful dogs, and I’d enroll them in dog training classes. And before long, the handful who weren’t promptly cured would be too busy with dogs and clubs and shows to worry about their sanity, and I’d have no patients left, all of which explains why psychotherapy concentrates on dreams, impulses, memories, and wishes instead of on the primary life force we can control, namely, the dog. And if you don’t believe me, just try bringing your dreams to heel or teaching your memories to drop on recall. And even after years of therapy, what have you really got, at best, but a slightly improved version of your same old self? No matter how wonderful you’ve become, don’t you need someone else to love? Someone who’ll love you more than you could ever love yourself, someone with an undeniable reality infinitely more powerful than all the shadowy chimeras of mere mental life? Even after all those years of fifty-minute hours, don’t you still need a dog?
    "Alienist,” I said. “I like that. And I’m glad you met