Jericho by George Fetherling Read Free Book Online

true birthplace of Civ. I was drawn west, to Judea, Palestine, the West Bank, whatever you want to call it. I’ve always been drawn west. That’s what I’m doing here, how I got into a mess like this. The sun going down in the west puts some kind of force into play and certain people can’t get free of it any more than a piece of scrap metal can get out of the way of a magnet. It’s like the alleyways were paved with gold. Also, nobody was looking for me out here on the Coast.
    My colleague Mo had just started maternity leave and we had no budget to secure a third person even temporarily and so Jane and I were keeping the office open on our own. In practice, this meant we had each taken over some of Mo’s responsibilities in addition to our normal positions. The jobs tended to blend together rather than stay distinct. Jane was doing both financial counselling and classic social work, and I had taken on lay therapy (which is my main interest anyway). For example, Jane returned from seeing a woman who worked at Cult Video, the local rental place on Main. “It was very weird,” she said. “She lives with a large male transsexual. There were all these women walking in and out of the apartment, and the one with the biggest breasts turned out to have once been a man.” Conversely, one day I had to go to St. Paul’s Hospital to talk with a member of the psychiatric staff, and there was a guy in the elevator whodefinitely was not part of the team. I pushed one of the buttons, he pushed a higher one. Then he said, “There’s a lot of floors here I’ve been on: two, three, six, nine, eleven, twelve …” (There aren’t that many floors.) I told him he should try some of the others. I informed him: “I understand some of them are quite exotic.” But of course he was closed to my ironic rejoinder.
    Still, I wasn’t prepared for Bishop when, once Beth and I had become friends, she first introduced me to him. One constituent factor was his appearance. He had shoulder-length hair, but it was from transplants, and I can imagine how he got the money for that: haggling in the washroom with people in need. He looked like an abuser himself. It was immediately apparent that he was what I call a histrio, an emotionally overcharged person. I don’t know what the situational expectation was when she told me about him—I don’t think I’m a jealous person—but when I met him I quickly realized he was borderline.
    What do we mean by this? The borderline personality is one who, because of echoes of past traumas, expends most of his or her energy merely trying to remain within the boundaries set by functional society. (Of course, some rogue authorities in the field have argued that functional society is tyrannical and that these people are heroes of a kind, but I put no faith in that position, which seems to me faddish old seventies nonsense.) The classic borderline personality is a jejune American or is of that type. Over thirty years or so, these profiles were developed by American clinical figures such as Otto Kernberg, James Masterson, Gunderson (the first name is unable to be recollected by me) and, here in Canada, Daniel Silvers. In Britain and Europe, borderlinepersonalities are called sociopaths. But then, if the nosology differs, so does the reality it names.
    Bishop is also borderline in a lay sense. I mean he is borderline mediocre. Beth, who has much to learn in these matters, thinks he is an intellectual. I think he is someone who has picked up a lot of interesting-sounding babble somewhere (interesting-sounding to him) and continues to replay it out loud, in no particular or logical order, to impress people or anger them or maybe (he no doubt feels) amuse them. Personally, I am neither angry nor amused and certainly not impressed by him. He is the kind of male I might have been interested in when I was about sixteen, and that was when I was in the full throes of heteroism. Some may accuse me of not being neutral in