You'll recall that we left Martis in the previous chapter after he got thrown out of law school for pushing a law firm interviewer over in his chair.

Dr. Flicke and I walked through West-Central Park, the biggest green plot in Purdesville, home of Northern California University's top-25 law school and Dr. Flicke's psychotherapy practice. He had a bristly beard with too much skin showing through the curly hairs, which almost twirled back into the same holes they had just climbed out of a few centimeters earlier.

"What I don't understand, Martis," he said, looking at the ground as he spoke slowly, his voice higher than you thought it would be when you first met him, "Is this strange reluctance of yours to embrace this difficulty, to say, to God, "Hey, God! I see what you are up to und it's A-OK by me!"

Sometimes, he'd see me or his other patients outside of his office. Often he'd hold his appointments with us in what he called (in his self-help book, Re-Adjusting to the Re-You): "The 'Out-There' World," which he contrasted with the "Hey, It's Dark In Here!" internal world.

We came to this park every once in a while, walked slowly around the paths, bought Creamsicles or Bomb Pops and talked about what angered me or frustrated me or depressed me. Today, I wasn't eating anything, though Dr. Flicke was. He'd bite with his two front teeth, which stuck out a bit, into the cold, hard white rock of the ice cream part of a Drumstick. He'd wipe his lips with a paper napkin after each bite, but he never caught the drips of vanilla on the bottom part of the beard on his chin.

"It's not that I don't want to accept things as difficult," I told him, "It's ok that what happened happened. I just sort of wish I didn't have to deal with it. It's like getting fired from a job instead of deciding to quit, right? I mean, I'd rather leave on my own terms."

The doctor smiled and stroked his oily whiskers, smearing a small drop of ice cream around. Even though it must still have been cold, he didn't seem to feel it. He stopped walking, turned his head slowly to me. He squinted his eyes slightly, his watered-down blue eyes looking smoky, yellow where they were supposed to be white, red lightning strikes of blood scratching on the eyeballs. "Martis, these are your own terms. This is mit what we are dealing."

He did this with only two words, as far as I could tell -- in the style of a German or Austrian or Swiss who had come to the United States during college and never gone back, he turned "with" into "mit," and "and" into "und." Of course, he was Canadian, as it said on the jackets of his books, English-speaking Canadian, not German or Austrian or Swiss. He came from Toronto. He didn't even speak German. But he used these German words instead of their just-as-short-in-English counterparts. The blurbs of his books described him as "Canada's latter-day answer to Freud."

"Was that a question Canada was asking?" my girlfriend Pauline had asked me after my first appointment with him. She had gone back and looked at a few of his books, some of which I had bought on the internet after getting referred to him. She laughed the hardest at Energize and Realize: The Two-Fold Path to Victory.

"Sounds like a tag-team in professional wrestling," she had said.

"What do you mean they're my terms?" I asked Dr. Flicke. "I freaked out. I pushed the guy over. I didn't choose to do that. My brain made me do it."

"Oh, Martis," Dr. Flicke said. "Und what's next -- that you have no control over anything you do? Come now -- these are all choices you make, moves you make in the chess game of your life, the necessary consequences of pro-active deliberation and action by one Martis Furthingtone." He pronounced my name like that, with an "e" on the end, like I was the leader of some doo-wop band -- "Martis and the Furthingtones." I never corrected him -- it had just been too long now.

He took a sip from his soda, a can of Coke. He smiled, gently, as if he were a father at a barbecue, cooking his chicken over the Weber grill, when his little girl, bless her heart, came up and said to him, in a very serious voice "Daddy, I don't want you to die," while his friend from the office, Clark or Rod or Bruce, looked on and tried not to laugh. "This is your life, no one else's," he told me. Dr. Flicke held down a silent little burp, kept it inside his body. The Coke had gone to work fast.

"So what do I do?" I asked him. He tended to offer me general advice. But that wasn't what I needed this time. I could get that from a Jonathan Livingston Seagull book or a treatise on Zen Buddhism. I needed, here, to get very specific guidance, which fit my personal situation, which situation included the fact that I had thrown a perfectly innocent law firm interviewer against a heater and destroyed, in two seconds, my chances to become part of the esteemed legal profession. "I really have no idea. What do I do?"

The doctor nodded, appearing to show that he had expected my question. "Martis, that is the question, is it not?" He looked straight into my eyes.

His gaze almost smelled. It was so weak, so watery, so washed-out blue. I've heard of a thousand yard stare or something like that, where soldiers, like in Vietnam, just developed this way of looking, where it looked like they were looking out far away, through you, beyond you. This was not that. This was the as-far-as-you-are-away-from-me-and-barely-that stare.

I took a deep breath. I had been coming to these appointments, either in the park or at McDonald's or in the movie theater, where the doctor had once "shhh"'ed me when I had asked him, as the credits rolled for the start of the show, whether we'd start where we'd left off the week before. We had been to his office several times, but he seemed to constantly look at the clock in those. I ended up feeling more free on the field trips. "Come on doctor," I said. "A little help here, please? I'm really lost. I'm wondering what to do."

He stopped. He grabbed my hand. His fingers and palm felt cold, damp, soft. "There, there, Martis," he said, rubbing the fingers of his other hand through my hair, stroking me, trying, I guess, to calm me.

"Please don't do that, doctor," I said. "You know I really hate that."

He snickered and looked at the ground. "Ahh, Martis. The problem mit youth is that it is so . . . young." He let go of my hand and stroked his "beard" again. "Alright, my little friend. Let's step out of our respective roles. I will speak mit you as a man, a little man to man conversation."

He looked up at the sky, as if he was trying to remember how to figure out a difficult problem on a math test. "Now, let's see," he said. "What's the issue here?"

"That I got thrown out of law school and have nothing to do and no way to make money and that my life's a total disaster," I said.

"Mmmmmhmmmm," he said. "Good, good. That's right."

"And that if I don't figure out something quick, other bad stuff is gonna happen, like, I mean . . . stuff I can't even think about."

"Like what, Martis?" he asked.

"Like what?" I repeated, questioning. "What are you talking about, 'like what?' Like I get lymphoma and die on the street after getting beaten senseless by an ape that just escaped from the zoo. Like what? Like I kill my mother because I don't like the way she blows her nose. Jesus, doctor, sometimes you can be such a fucking retard."

"Good, good!" he yelped. "I like that energy. Keep accessing that place."

I groaned and stomped my feet, a child having a temper tantrum. "For the love of Christ!" I shouted. "Do your fucking job! You're not helping me! Tell me why that happened to me and tell me how I can stop it from happening again!!"

Tears came to his two-dimensional eyes. "I am so proud of you, Martis," he said. "That is the kind of anger that creates change."

He smelled to me then, by way of his close breath, like urine, like feces, like spoiled milk. I once heard about some kind of new weapon, a kind of bomb that would drop terrible smells, that would basically stink people out of their homes. It wasn't that it would kill them. It wouldn't. They would just be so overwhelmed with a much-more-severe version of the sensation you feel when you smell another person's shit. Dr. Flicke's smell, exaggerated, of course, would have been part of the witches' brew that went into that bomb.

How did his wife kiss him when he smelled like that? Didn't she get sick? Did his friends in college joke around behind his back about his breath?

"You are so full of shit," I said. That's just the easy bullshit answer that you give me all the time. Here, it's different, you know, because I freaked out, pushed a guy over."

He nodded. "Yes, alright, Martis, you have a point," he said. "We should come up with a more workable strategy, a game-plan, some kind of rational framework we can use to construct the narrative of your life."

The smell of shit came inside my nose. "Alright," I said, "that's fine. Let's get somewhere."

He paused. He breathed in deeply. He tapped his left foot. "Let's get . . . to . . . Af-rica," he said, with his eyes closed, rolling the "r" so he sounded like an American trying to speak French. He breathed in again. "Yes, Af-rica."

I looked at him. I waited for something else. He just breathed, breathed in the sound of his voice saying "Africa," breathed out the putrid, spittle-specked gas from his mouth/throat/belly. "To do what with it?" I asked when I realized that was all he was going to say.

He opened his eyes as if waking from a pleasant dream he'd had in a warm, soft bed early on Sunday morning. "Why, go there of course!" he said. "You should go there, live, perhaps with the Peace Corps, for instance, and really test yourself."

I wrinkled my brow and looked at him. "Why?"

"Because, dear Martis," he explained, pointing a finger into my chest, "You . . . need . . . a . . . test/rest." That was the first part of the title of his first book: Test/Rest: The High Power/Low Power Route to Relieving Anxiety. "Only by really putting yourself out there will you overcome the urge that drove you to smash that poor black man against the heater in that interview."

"But I hate the heat! I'll hate Africa!" I shouted.

"Exactly!!" he shrieked, his eyes watering again. "Oh, good, good God! Genius!! Let us start preparing immediately!"

My stomach sank. My mouth dried. My hair itched. I took shallow breaths. "But I have absolutely no desire to go to Africa," I said, sharply.

"Immediately," he continued, walking ahead of me. He continued to mutter to himself, making barely-audible plans for my departure.