The Man in the Rorschach Shirt, Ray Bradbury

The Man in the Rorschach Shirt

Brokaw.
What a name!

Listen to it bark, growl, yip, hear the bold proclamation of:
Immanuel Brokaw!
A fine name for the greatest psychiatrist who ever tread the waters of existence without capsizing.

Toss a pepper-ground Freud casebook in the air and all students sneezed:
Brokaw!

What ever happened to him?
One day, like a high-class vaudeville act, he vanished.

With the spotlight out, his miracles seemed in danger of reversal. Psychotic rabbits threatened to leap back into hats. Smokes were sucked back into loud-powder gun muzzles. We all waited.
Silence for ten years. And more silence.

Brokaw was lost, as if he had thrown himself with shouts of laughter into mid-Atlantic. For what? To plumb for Moby-Dick? To psychoanalyze that colorless fiend and see what he really had against Mad Ahab?
Who knows?

I last saw him running for a twilight plane, his wife and six Pomeranian dogs yapping far behind him on the dusky field.
“Good-bye forever!”
His happy cry seemed a joke. But I found men flaking his gold-leaf name from his office door next day, as his great fat-women couches were hustled out into the raw weather toward some Third Avenue auction.

So the giant who had been Gandhi-Moses-Christ-Buddha-Freud all layered in one incredible Armenian dessert had dropped through a hole in the clouds. To die? To live in secret?
Ten years later I rode on a California bus along the lovely shores of Newport.

The bus stopped. A man in his seventies bounced on, jingling silver into the coin box like manna. I glanced up from the rear of the bus and gasped.
“Brokaw! By the saints!”

And with or without sanctification, there he stood. Reared up like God manifest, bearded, benevolent, pontifical, erudite, merry, accepting, forgiving, messianic, tutorial, forever and eternal . . .
Immanuel Brokaw.

But not in a dark suit, no.
Instead, as if they were vestments of some proud new church, he wore:
Bermuda shorts. Black leather Mexican sandals. A Los Angeles Dodgers’ baseball cap. French sunglasses. And . . .

The shirt! Ah God! The shirt!
A wild thing, all lush creeper and live flytrap undergrowth, all Pop-Op dilation and contraction, full flowered and crammed at every interstice and crosshatch with mythological beasts and symbols!
Open at the neck, this vast shirt hung wind-whipped like a thousand flags from a parade of united but neurotic nations.

But now, Dr. Brokaw tilted his baseball cap, lifted his French sunglasses to survey the empty bus seats. Striding slowly down the aisle, he wheeled, he paused, he lingered, now here, now there. He whispered, he murmured, now to this man, this woman, that child.

I was about to cry out when I heard him say:
“Well, what do you make of it?”
A small boy, stunned by the circus-poster effect of the old man’s attire, blinked, in need of nudging. The old man nudged:
“My shirt, boy! What do you see!?”

“Horses!” the child blurted, at last. “Dancing horses!”

“Bravo!” The doctor beamed, patted him, and strode on. “And you, sir?”
A young man, quite taken with the forthrightness of this invader from some summer world, said:
“Why . . . clouds, of course.”

“Cumulus or nimbus?”
“Er . . . not storm clouds, no, no. Fleecy, sheep clouds.”
“Well done!”
The psychiatrist plunged on.
“Mademoiselle?”
“Surfers!” A teen-age girl stared. “They’re the waves, big ones. Surfboards. Super!”

And so it went, on down the length of the bus and as the great man progressed a few scraps and titters of laughter sprang up, then, grown infectious, turned to roars of hilarity. By now, a dozen passengers had heard the first responses and so fell in with the game. This woman saw skyscrapers! The doctor scowled at her suspiciously. The doctor winked. That man saw crossword puzzles. The doctor shook his hand.

This child found zebras all optical illusion on an African wild. The doctor slapped the animals and made them jump! This old woman saw vague Adams and misty Eves being driven from half-seen Gardens. The doctor scooched in on the seat with her awhile; they talked in fierce whispered elations, then up he jumped and forged on. Had the old woman seen an eviction? This young one saw the couple invited back in!

Dogs, lightnings, cats, cars, mushroom clouds, man-eating tiger lilies!

Each person, each response, brought greater outcries. We found ourselves all laughing together. This fine old man was a happening of nature, a caprice, God’s rambunctious Will, sewing all our separateness up in one.

Elephants! Elevators! Alarums! Dooms!

When first he had bounded aboard we had wanted naught of each other. But now like an immense snowfall which we must gossip on or an electrical failure that blacked out two million homes and so thrown us all together in communal chat, laugh, guffaw, we felt the tears clean up our souls even as they cleaned down our cheeks.

Each answer seemed funnier than the previous, and no one shouted louder his great torments of laughter than this grand tall and marvelous physician who asked for, got, and cured us of our hairballs on the spot. Whales. Kelp. Grass meadows. Lost cities. Beauteous women. He paused. He wheeled. He sat. He rose. He flapped his wildly colored shirt, until at last he towered before me and said:
“Sir, what do you find?”

“Why, Dr. Brokaw, of course!”
The old man’s laughter stopped as if he were shot. He seized his dark glasses off, then clapped them on and grabbed my shoulders as if to wrench me into focus.
“Simon Wincelaus, is that you?”

“Me, me!” I laughed. “Good grief, doctor, I thought you were dead and buried years ago. What’s this you’re up to?”

“Up to?” He squeezed and shook my hands and pummeled my arms and cheeks gently. Then he snorted a great self-forgiving laugh as he gazed down along the acreage of ridiculous shirting. “Up to? Retired. Swiftly gone. Overnight traveled three thousand miles from where last you saw me . . .” His peppermint breath warmed my face. “And now best known hereabouts as . . . listen! . . . the Man in the Rorschach Shirt.”

“In the what?” I cried.
“Rorschach Shirt.”
Light as a carnival gas balloon he touched into the seat beside me.
I sat stunned and silent.

We rode along by the blue sea under a bright summer sky.
The doctor gazed ahead as if reading my thoughts in vast skywriting among the clouds.

“Why, you ask, why? I see your face, startled, at the airport years ago. My Going Away Forever day. My plane should have been named the Happy Titanic. On it I sank forever into the traceless sky. Yet here I am in the absolute flesh, yes? Not drunk, nor mad, nor riven by age and retirement’s boredom. Where, what, why, how come?”

“Yes,” I said, “why did you retire, with everything pitched for you? Skill, reputation, money. Not a breath of—”

“Scandal? None! Why, then? Because, this old camel had not one but two humps broken by two straws. Two amazing straws. Hump Number One—”

He paused. He cast me a sidelong glance from under his dark glasses.
“This is a confessional,” I said. “Mum’s the word.”

“Confessional. Yes. Thanks.”
The bus hummed softly on the road.
His voice rose and fell with the hum.

“You know my photographic memory? Blessed, cursed, with total recall. Anything said, seen, done, touched, heard, can be snapped back to focus by me, forty, fifty, sixty years later. All, all of it, trapped in here.”
He stroked his temples lightly with the fingers of both hands.

“Hundreds of psychiatric cases, delivered through my door, day after day, year on year. And never once did I check my notes on any of those sessions. I found, early on, I need only play back what I had heard inside my head. Sound tapes, of course, were kept as a double-check, but never listened to. There you have the stage set for the whole shocking business.

“One day in my sixtieth year a woman patient spoke a single word. I asked her to repeat it. Why? Suddenly I had felt my semicircular canals shift as if some valves had opened upon cool fresh air at a subterranean level.

“‘Best,’ she said.
“‘I thought you said, ‘beast,’” I said.
“‘Oh, no, doctor, ‘best.’”

“One word. One pebble dropped off the edge. And then—the avalanche. For, distinctly, I had heard her claim: ‘He loved the beast in me,’ which is one kettle of sexual fish, eh? When in reality she had said, ‘He loved the best in me,’ which is quite another pan of cold cod, you must agree.

“That night I could not sleep. I smoked, I stared from windows. My head, my ears, felt strangely clear, as if I had just gotten over a thirty years’ cold. I suspected myself, my past, my senses, so at three in the deadfall morning I motored to my office and found the worst:
“The recalled conversations of hundreds of cases in my mind were not the same as those recorded on my tapes or typed out in my secretary’s notes!”

“You mean . . .?”
“I mean when I heard beast it was truly best. Dumb was really numb. Ox were cocks and vice-versa. I heard bed and someone had said head. Sleep was creep. Lay was day. Paws were really pause. Rump was merely jump. Fiend was only leaned. Sex was hex or mix or, God knows, perplex!

Yes-mess. No-slow. Binge-hinge. Wrong-long. Side-hide. Name a name, I’d heard it wrong. Ten million dozen misheard nouns! I panicked through my files! Good Grief! Great Jumping Josie!

“All those years, those people! Holy Moses, Brokaw, I cried, all these years down from the Mount, the word of God like a flea in your ear. And now, late in the day, old wise one, you think to consult your lightning-scribbled stones. And find