Bear and His Daughter by Robert Stone

a Vietnam veteran. The trauma inducing his post-traumatic stress had been nothing more serious than his own birth, a routine procedure. Now, in addition to the poverty, anxiety and confusion that would always be his life’s lot, he had been visited with irony. It was all arbitrary and some people simply got elected. Everyone knew that who had been where Blankenship had not.
    “Because, I assure you, Mr. Blankenship, you were never there.”
    “Whaddaya mean?” Blankenship asked.

    When Blankenship was gone, Elliot leafed through his file and saw that the psychiatrists had passed him upstairs without recording a diagnosis. Disproportionately angry, he went out to the secretary’s desk.
    “Nobody wrote up that last patient,” he said. “I’m not supposed to see people without a diagnosis. The shrinks are just passing the buck.”
    The secretary was a tall, solemn redhead with prominent front teeth and a slight speech disorder. “Dr. Sayyid will have kittens if he hears you call him a shrink, Chas. He’s already complained. He hates being called a shrink.”
    “Then he came to the wrong country,” Elliot said. “He can go back to his own.”
    The woman giggled. “He
is
the doctor; Chas.”
    “Hates being called a shrink!” He threw the file on the secretary’s table and stormed back toward his office. “That fucking little zip couldn’t give you a decent haircut. He’s a prescription clerk.”
    The secretary looked about her guiltily and shook her head. She was used to him.
    Elliot succeeded in calming himself down after a while, but the image of black sky remained with him. At first he thought he would be able to shrug the whole thing off. After a few minutes, he picked up his phone and dialed Blankenship’s probation officer.
    “The Vietnam thing is all he has,” the probation officer explained. “I guess he picked it up around.”
    “His descriptions are vivid,” Elliot said.
    “You mean they sound authentic?”
    “I mean he had me going today. He was ringing my bells.”
    “Good for Blanky. Think he believes it himself?”
    “Yes,” Elliot said. “He believes it himself now.”
    Elliot told the probation officer about Blankenship’s current arrest, which was for showering illegally at midnight in the Wyndham Regional High School. He asked what Probation knew about Blankenship’s present relationship with his family.
    “You kiddin’?” the P.O. asked. “They’re all locked down. The whole family’s inside. The old man’s in Bridgewater. Little Donny’s in San Quentin or somewhere. Their dog’s in the pound.”
    Elliot had lunch alone in the hospital staff cafeteria. On the far side of the double-glazed windows, the day was darkening as an expected snowstorm gathered. Along Route 7, ancient elms stood frozen against the gray sky. When he had finished his sandwich and coffee, he sat staring out at the winter afternoon. His anger had given way to an insistent anxiety.
    On the way back to his office, he stopped at the hospital gift shop for a copy of
Sports Illustrated
and a candy bar. When he was inside again, he closed the door and put his feet up. It was Friday and he had no appointments for the remainder of the day, nothing to do but write a few letters and read the office mail.
    Elliot’s cubicle in the social services department was windowless and lined with bookshelves. When he found himself unable to concentrate on the magazine and without any heart for his paperwork, he ran his eye over the row of books beside his chair. There were volumes by Heinrich Muller and Carlos Castaneda, Jones’s life of Freud and
The Golden Bough.
The books aroused a revulsion in Elliot. Their present uselessness repelled him.
    Over and over again, detail by detail, he tried to recall his conversation with Blankenship.
    “You were never there,” he heard himself explaining. He was trying to get the whole incident straightened out after the fact. Something was wrong. Dread crept over him like a