Thrill-Bent by Jan Richman

chooses to do. Those feathers are there, they’re gonna come out, it’s part of being a peacock. It’s not like he says to himself, ‘Hmmm, should I get her flowers, or should I show her my fancy tail?’” He mugged this last bit, this peacock imitation, and then rolled his eyes at the very idea of a “her” being that important in someone’s, even a peacock’s, life.
    Dr. Berger sat staring at my father in silence for a long moment. “Well,” he said, “I must congratulate you for your scathing indictment of my profession, Mr. Richman. I myself am sometimes just as skeptical of the mind’s claims to omnipotence.” He gazed with respect and amusement at my father’s deadpan stare. “Do you know what this word ‘omnipotence’ is? It is all-powerful. So, perhaps we can agree that the mind of the peacock is not so all-powerful, that his body, his nature, shares some of the credit. How did you put it?” The doctor looked up at the ceiling, his eyes moving slowly across the arched molding. “Ah, yes. ‘It’s all part of being a peacock.’ No?”
    My father shrugged. “Yes.”
    “But perhaps we can also agree that there are certain things in life we must do—eating, for example. We must eat, or we die. But, unless we are starving to death, we have a certain number of options: we can choose when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat, etcetera. When you are sitting at a restaurant looking at a menu, do you let your body decide what to order?”
    “I usually get a burger.”
    The doctor’s eyes widened. “Interesting.”
    My father looked up, surprised. “What’s so interesting about eating a burger?”
    “Well, listen to what to you just said. ‘Eating a burger.’ What is my name, Mr. Richman?”
    “Dr. ... uh ... Berger?” My father broke into a slow smile and laughed into his hand as though he had been told a slightly pornographic schoolyard joke. “Oh, I get it.”
    “Do you? Do you get it?” The doctor clapped his hands in elation. “Do you understand your desire to devour me, to remove from your path any obstacle capable of assimilating you?”
    The doctor had sprayed a fine mist of spit on the desk during his sibilance, and he looked down at it for a silent moment, confused, as though he’d wandered into an unfamiliar part of town. Then he removed and carefully unfolded a not-quite-white handkerchief from his coat pocket and mopped up the delicate constellation of spittle.
    My father watched with mild astonishment. In all his weekly visits, he had never seen the doctor lose control. He didn’t want to eat the doctor in a sandwich with catsup and mustard, and he didn’t know what “assimilate” meant. But he recognized the look of panicked isolation on the face of this towering, brainy man, who was now pecking persistently at his brow with his handkerchief.
    “Dr. Berger, are you okay?” asked my father with genuine concern.
    “Oh yes, yes, I am quite fine, thank you,” said the doctor, revived from his sudden transformation by the slightly hoarse voice of the boy, which now lacked any hint of ironic contempt. The doctor smiled wearily at my father, a smile like a white flag, crinkling at the corners and wavy, windswept in the middle. He refolded the handkerchief and tucked it away in his coat pocket. “I’m afraid that concludes our time for today,” he said.
    For two years my father was paraded to an array of specialists: orthopedists, masseuses, physical therapists, and speech pathologists. Each specialist claimed that my father’s particular problem was slightly peripheral to his field of expertise, and referred him to another specialist, someone more capable of diagnosing and absolving, someone who would return my father to the normal, lithe boy he was before this urgent dance overtook him. A nutritionist suggested more iron in his diet, and so my grandmother snuck spinach and brussel sprouts into his lunchbox in various guises, chopped up in tunafish sandwiches, layered