The Landlord. Kristin Hunter

neighborhood?”

      “It seems to be,” Elgar admitted. “Yes, Fathaw, that’s what it seems. Of course,” he added, “as you know, Fathaw, all things are not what they appear to be. My tenants refer to themselves as Creoles and Choctaw Indians. And sometimes, I believe, Nigerians and Senegalese.”

      “Elgar, you are even more of a fool than I thought!” roared his father. “Nigerians, indeed! Your mother and I are simply at our wits’ end about you, Elgar. She worries about you constantly, about your bad habits, your foolish ventures, your undesirable companions. Frets night and day because you never visit us and never call. While your brothers are such loyal sons. What a contrast. I never know what to tell her about you. I never even know where you are. This nonsense of yours must stop, sir, do you understand? It must stop right now! I am going to put your mother on the phone in one minute. But first I want to know where you are, Elgar. I mean where you are right now. We’re coming down there to get you.”

      “I am in Hell, Fathaw,” Elgar said simply, and hung up. And, retracting his hand at the last instant, slammed the receiver through the nearest pane instead. Showers of glass sprayed his face, miraculously missing the dangerous-glinting green eyes.

      Hurrying numbly through dim streets to keep his scheduled appointment with Borden, he was only vaguely aware of moisture tickling various upper frontal areas. Hence when the good doctor received him with cracks in his professional composure, with his mouth, in fact, wide open, Elgar was surprised.

      Until he reached up and touched his forehead. His fingers came away bloody. Touched his cheek. Also bloody. His upper lip yielded another harvest of gore. Apparently the scattering fragments of glass had made him as monstrous as his father’s vision of him.

      “Just following my father’s advice, Borden,” Elgar said. “He told me to acquire a stiff upper lip. And it does seem to be getting numb, now that I notice.”

      Borden stared. “Elgar, I know you love to be dramatic, and I have my rules, but this seems to be an emergency. If you want to see a doctor about those cuts, I can reschedule your appointment.”

      “Funny, I thought you were supposed to be a doctor, Borden. You great big phony. Upset at the sight of a little blood.”

      Borden said smoothly, “It is not so upsetting as all that, Elgar. All the same I am willing to delay your hour for fifteen minutes if you want to go downstairs and wash up.”

      “No, let’s get right down to business,” Elgar said. “I can stand it if you can.”

      Borden replied, “You should know by now that I can stand anything, Elgar. Come in.”

      “However,” he added, opening a cabinet to reveal a businesslike assortment of swabs and syringes, “there is no reason why I have to spend the next hour contemplating physical horrors in addition to psychic ones. No. Tilt the face up to me, Elgar. Turn it toward the light. Yes.”

      Borden’s fingers were wonderfully deft and confidence-inspiring as he dabbed lightly with antiseptic, peered closely, grunted, bent with tweezers, and removed several splinters of glass from Elgar’s scalp, finished by making rapid passes in the air with a roll of bandage.

      Afterward Elgar went over to the mirror and checked. His head was neatly swathed and tied like the kid’s in “Spirit of ’76.”—Yep, he thought, puckering his chin thoughtfully, yep. A professional job.

      “Are you quite finished admiring yourself?” Borden inquired. “Then perhaps you will want to lie down over here and describe this latest hair-raising episode. Or should I say, ‘scalp-raising?’ You say it resulted from a conversation with your father?”

      Elgar stretched out and studied the dismal patterns on Borden’s mildewed ceiling. “You know I can’t talk to my father, Borden. It’s impossible. He always tried to make me feel like nothing.”

      “Apparently he succeeds,” Borden observed. “Since, following your conversations with him, you always attempt to destroy yourself.”

      “Aaaaaah!” was Elgar’s only comment. That and a pummeling of the couch.

      “Yes. It is better to destroy my couch, Elgar. Though even better if you take out your aggressions on appropriate objects. Have you noticed, Elgar, that you have no trouble reacting with anger to any person except your father?”

      “Oh, have I ever noticed,” Elgar declared passionately, unconsciously echoing Borden’s speech pattern. “Oh, brother, have I ever. Yes. Yes yes yes yes. When I talk to him I don’t feel anything but weak. That and stomach pains.”

      “Which are, as we know, your way of feeling anxiety, Elgar. Stomach pains are anxiety, nothing more. There is nothing physically wrong with your stomach, as you know from having swallowed quantities of barium. As well as a number of even nastier concoctions in your various attempts at suicide, with remarkably limited results. Yes. Your stomach is actually an organ of fantastic recuperative powers, deserving of study by science, Elgar. Now tell me. How does your father achieve his annihilation of you?”

      “He hasn’t yet,” Elgar said quickly. “I’m still here. Don’t you see me here, Borden?”

      “Of course,” Borden reassured him. “I mean your psychic annihilation. How does he make you feel like nothing?”

      “By knowing it all!” Elgar howled. “By having a formula for everything! By being so successful, he is everything!”

      “And yet you know that statement is untrue, Elgar. Your father is not everything. This room, for instance, this desk, this chair, they are not a part of your father or his holdings.”

      “You don’t know Upper County, where I come from,” Elgar said grimly. “Up there, they would be. There’s nothing in the whole county he doesn’t own.”

      “I see,” Borden said. After a pause to formulate his thoughts he announced, “Elgar, I think we have found the key to your identity crisis.”

      “Turn it!” Elgar cried. “Open this box I’m in. Tell me who I am.” Adding bleakly, “Unless I’m nothing.”

      “No, Elgar, you are not a nothing,” Borden said.

      Hope shining through hopelessness, Elgar looked at him.

      “You are an anti-everything, Elgar. Engaged in a vast crusade that dissipates all your psychic energies.”

      Elgar bared his fangs to growl at Borden’s jargon.

      “Wait, Elgar. Let me put it this way. You come from a powerful family with a totalitarian father who insisted that everything be done his way. Who even insisted that his children grow his way, as if you could make a birch sapling become a sycamore. As well as a mother who imposed her musical and other standards upon you, even sending you to a girls’ ballet class. Yes. Your mother is another totalitarian figure. With her loud and constant insistence that your father is never wrong.”

      “It gets louder the wronger he is,” Elgar said, and clutched his stomach. “Ouch!”

      “Yes, it even hurts you to admit he can be wrong. Growth, Elgar. Painful. Yes. So you spent your childhood being something other than a sycamore, being a birch, perhaps, trying to grow big and strong enough to stand independent of all that Establishment—your father’s estate, his enterprises, his millions, and all the powerful people who support him, including your mother and your obedient brothers. You wished to be a person, not a Representative of something you disliked. You were, we might say, a birch, but no Bircher, Elgar. But, to continue this rather appalling image, you are still only a slim sapling, and every time you spring up in your own form, your father slaps you down. With the force of a giant woodsman. A Paul Bunyan.”

      “That’s right,” Elgar said, nodding, reacting to his own fate more calmly than he would to an unfavorable weather prediction. “Yep. That’s how it is.”

      “Is that all you can say? And in that tone of meek submissiveness? Elgar, what would you say should