Freud is already there. Not conjured, simply there as the tram rounds a bend. Black coat, gloves, beard, a dark hat carried rather than worn, looking like a consultant from another century who has arrived to inspect a badly run business and found, with weary satisfaction, that human beings are still making the same mess of themselves.
Beside him, a few steps off and already faintly irritated, Lacan has returned, though not in the tracksuit from yesterday. Today he has the look of a man who would like it known that Freud does not impress him.
“Who’s your daddy,” a bearded 30-something-man mentally notes two seats down in the tram. He is travelling, moving forward, toward “A New Masculinity in the Polish Workplace: Challenges and Opportunities” at the Hyatt, where he will spend the afternoon discussing patriarchal terror, a subject that will terrify everyone.
“Ah,” Freud says, gazing past the Man toward the back of the tram where the three boys are sitting together, warm-faced, coat sleeves too long, laughing over something on a phone with enviable, self-contained ease. “Sons.”
Lacan makes a face.
“Do try not to make everything sound biblical.”
Freud ignores him.
“And the father,” he says, turning now to the Man, “who is late to his own experience.”
The Man does not answer because it is true and because he resents hearing it from one of the oldest of the wise priests of secularism, finally arriving to confirm that the family has, once again, refused to remain private.
The tram is already moving when he realises he is on it. He has boarded, validated the ticket, found a place near the door. The carriage carries that familiar Warsaw mixture of quiet compliance and low-grade irritation, people arranged in practised avoidance, eyes on phones, everyone privately convinced that what they are enduring is not quite worth making a fuss about.
At the back, his three boys sit together in the loose formation children achieve without instruction, not excluding him, but not orienting themselves toward him either, which is exactly right and he knows it. They are there. That ought to be enough.
Then the tram slows, the door opens and a boy gets on.
There is nothing in this. Boys get on trams all the time. Fourteen, perhaps. Backpack. Headphones not quite in place. A face still negotiating with what it will become. Common enough to be invisible.
And yet the Man’s body registers something before thought can organise itself, a tightening under the ribs, not sharp enough to count as pain and not clear enough to deserve a name, but sufficient to interrupt the smooth functioning of the scene.
The Boy is there before anything else, not as memory but as presence.
“Don’t,” the Man says with the old certainty that something is about to happen that should not.
The boy moves down the aisle, not toward him, not away from him, simply moving as one moves in a metal box on wheels that belongs to no one and must be shared anyway, and then turns his head, not fully, but enough.
Enough for the face to configure.
The word arrives at once, hated as soon as it forms.
“Harperish,” the Man thinks.
Lacan laughs outright.
“Oh dear.”
Freud, unexpectedly, nods.
“Yes,” he says. “But I can see the resemblance.”
The Man hates the word because it performs too much work too quickly, flattening a face into a pattern, the pattern into lineage, the lineage into possibility.
Behind him, one of his sons laughs at something on the phone. The sound is utterly ordinary and, for that reason, stabilises his thoughts briefly.
“Good,” says Freud softly. “Reality offers a hand.”
“And he slaps it away,” says Lacan.
A second structure overlays the first.
A son or a half-brother’s son, another nephew, that might exist elsewhere.
Freud comes alive at once, beard practically brightening.
“There we are,” he says. “Excellent. At last, someone admits paternity is never only biological.”
Lacan rolls his eyes.
“You have been waiting your entire afterlife for that line.”
“And you,” Freud replies, “have spent yours pretending you are not merely my difficult son.”
At this point the tram seems to become crowded with fathers.
The tram stops again.
More people get on.
Now there is Grzegorz Braun, a one-eyed pirate, waving a Hanukkah menorah above his head and carrying a fire extinguisher to put out flames he has already started. Around him cluster toads in little shoes, damp and obedient, following him down the aisle.
“Oi, Freud!” Braun shouts suddenly, pointing.
“There he is. The old Jew. The anti-Christ. The beginning of all this.”
Freud sighs.
“Again?”
“Godless psychology. Desire. Sex. Mothers. Fathers. Everyone talking about themselves. This is what destroyed civilisation.”
Freud watches all this with professional interest.
“You see?” he says to the Man. “A father is useful. An enemy even more so.”
Because Freud, Darwin, Marx, Soros – all of them have become the same figure in this theatre: the convenient anti-Christ, the explanation, the personification of everything that has gone wrong. Godlessness. Modernity. The Jews. The English. Evolution. Sex. The family breaking. The old authority collapsing.
The Man knows this is absurd. Knows too that absurdity does not stop anything.
The tram boy looks up.
Their eyes meet.
Not in any meaningful sense: nothing is exchanged, nothing is recognised, nothing is acknowledged. And yet the contact is sufficient to alter the function of the face entirely, so that it is no longer simply a face but a surface on which something has been written.
“We could make something of this,” the Editor blurts.
The Man finally arrives, too late and too composed.
“This is projection,” he says, as if naming the mechanism will dissolve it.
Freud gives him a long look.
“My dear fellow,” he says, “of course it is projection. The question is why this one, why now, and why you are so insulted to discover that you have an unconscious.”
Lacan adds, “And why, having discovered it, you insist on speaking like a school handbook.”
At the back, one of his sons looks up briefly, without intention, and in that glance something steadies.
They are there.
The tram slows. Stops. The doors open. Cold air enters and briefly reorganises the space. The boy steps off without hesitation. He is gone. A life to lead. Loves to be had, lost and rehad.
Outside, Warsaw continues in its indifferent way, grey, functioning, uninterested in being read.
The Boy is now looking at the back of the tram, where his sons are still laughing, still not in need of theory. Hopefully they never will. The tram continues.
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