This Dog for Hire

only he could see.
    “When I was little, before this, four or five, I guess, Peter used to make me alphabet soup, you know, from a can, of course. I still remember it.” he said, his brown eyes glowing. “He’d bring the bowl carefully to the table, one of those flat, wide soup bowls with rims, and some of the soup would slosh up onto the rim of the bowl, and when it went back into the bowl, the letters that had washed up onto the rim would stay there, and he’d say, We need these, we need every letter, because there’s a message in there. Where? I’d say, looking into the bowl of soup. In there, he’d tell me, there’s a message for you in the soup. You just have to find it. And he’d hand me the soup spoon. Do you remember what a soup spoon felt like in your mouth when you were four or five, how huge it was?”
    Kleinman must have nodded. Clifford smiled at him.
    “That was my brother. Huge. I loved him. And he hurt me.”
    “What would you like to say to Peter now?” Kleinman asked.
    Clifford sat still. I could almost feel the dizziness of his trying to think of what to say and the question of who you were, of how old you were, as you said your piece.
    “He wasn’t all bad,” he said softly, almost inaudibly, his eyes down.
    Clifford took a huge breath and let it go. He looked up now, toward the direction from which the hand with the tissues had come.
    “I wouldn’t like to say anything to him. I’d like to hurt him.”
    “That’s a very disturbing thought. Tell me about that. Tell me what you feel.”
    Sullen now, Clifford sat staring, saying nothing, for what seemed like forever, until finally Dr. Klein-man said they’d talk more about it next time and the screen went black with thousands of swirling white dots on it.
    In a moment the next session began. Clifford had on a flannel shirt, a deep rust, cream, and teal, his hair looked darker, it looked wet, curls on his brow, the rest smoothed back tight and straight, pulled into a ponytail in the back. He looked stony as he clipped on the microphone.
    “I saw him. My brother.”
    He exhaled through his nose in disgust.
    “And what happened between you?”
    “I told him that I remembered what he had done to me.”
    “What did he say?” Kleinman’s voice full of emotion now.
    “He said I shouldn’t make a big deal out it. You always were like that, Cuffie, is what he said to me. What a pain in the ass you always were. Imagine. He called me a pain in the ass!”
    “How awful this must have been for you. How painful.”
    “You’re so thin-skinned, he said. I can’t even talk to you. That’s just stuff boys do. You don’t have to make a whole production about it now, do you, it was a million years ago, we were just kids, playing. That’s how boys play, Cuff.”
    “And what did you say to him?”
    “What kind of boys play that way, Peter? Tell me that.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He got furious. He got furious. Nor mal boys play that way, he said. So I said, Yeah? How about your boys? Do your sons play that way? And he jumped up—we were in a fucking restaurant—and I thought he was going to smack me right in the face.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I kept right on going. Man, I couldn’t stop. He was putting on his jacket, and I was sitting there shouting at him. If it’s so fucking normal, then I guess you wouldn’t mind if everyone knew about it, would you? Like your sons. Or your wife ? Or, and then I was laughing at him, the way he used to laugh at me, those nice folks at your school.”
    “What happened then?” Tension creeping into Kleinman’s voice.
    “He split. Ran out. Stuck me with the bill. You know, I remembered something else, Dr. Kleinman. I remembered that one time when we were kids, after he had started abusing me, I said I’d tell on him, and do you know what he did?”
    Silence.
    “He said he’d tell everyone I was a little shit-eating sissy. And they’d believe him, not me. And he laughed at me, laughed at his cleverness, at the trap I was in. After that, he used to call me that. '" fact, in front of my parents, you know how kids always like to tease each other so that the parents don’t know what’s going on? Well, he just shortened it to SES, shit-eating sissy, then just SSS, and I’d know, SSS, like a snake. He’d whisper it at the table or when we were riding in the car, he threatened me with it, he shut me up with it until I felt so bad and so beaten that I shut away the whole thing,