Brother Suspect

“One brother fills the air with the stench of hate, the other wants to revive us with jasmine smelling salts. One turns the family name into a name from Hell, the other adjusts some vowels to become another stranger on a plane.”

By Jeanne Randolph
Image by Mike Feagans

Of course the United Airlines Boeing 737 was carrying enough fuel to reach Los Angeles International Airport. LAX was our destination. I was flying with a phobia. My carry-on included a comforting fetish (my 1954 Oxford University Press reprint of Four Tales by Joseph Conrad, dust jacket in very good condition), a damp clean facecloth in a baggie (for safe breathing should the cabin air thicken with polyester flames), and a flask of Wild Turkey® bourbon. I was scared stiff. When the plane lifted heavenward my stomach sank. I swilled down some bourbon. The flight attendant was still buckled into a contraption that looked like an amalgam of an electric chair and a Tilt-A-Whirl fun seat. Her head was bowed. I knew she was scared to death. The pilot had warned we would encounter turbulence before reaching our flight avenue at 35,000 feet.

Too stiff to flex my spine, I left my Conrad stowed under the seat in front of me. I fumbled for the magazine in the pouch with the throw-up bag and safety card. SkyWest magazine dropped into my lap and I began leafing through each trembling page. Within seconds I had leafed and leafed all the way to the final article, an article about bin Laden.

Not that bin Laden; his brother, who is launching a new perfume. He wants to bring a divine aroma into the world. The article also mentioned that when he travels he adjusts the spelling of his name. And because he “looks like just another guy” anyone sitting next to him would “accept him as just another passenger.”

My head in the clouds, the name “bin Laden” turned into a symbol, and I relaxed into my preferred personal narcotic: psychoanalytic theory. I began toying with the notion of the name “bin Laden” as a symptom; a symptom of the fracture line along which the human psyche “splits” in defense against gross anxiety. In 1946 Melanie Klein had psychoanalyzed the splitting of psyches. She had witnessed patients’ sadism and grief at such cross-purposes that their souls would literally break in half. Klein described the “relations of the patient to the analyst split in such a way that the analyst remains the good (or bad) figure while somebody else becomes the opposite figure.”

Might bin Laden the perfumeur be desperate to enact the “good figure” of the family name? One brother fills the air with the stench of hate, the other wants to revive us with jasmine smelling salts. One turns the family name into a name from Hell, the other adjusts some vowels to become another stranger on a plane.

Most often the human unconscious is said to be more like a Rottweiler, homo hominis lupus. “Man is a wolf to man,” said Freud. But what if, instead of irreconcilable sadism and grief, splitting might also sever extraordinary tenderness from vulnerability? What if, at the moment of trauma, there was a surge of caritas instead of grief; not sadism, but vulnerability projected into the nearby world? The unconscious like a mama kangaroo? That’s crazy talk.

Still, I speculated, Joseph Conrad’s tale “The Secret Sharer” could propose just that: a discombobulated psyche breaking in two, one dimension pure tenderness, the other pure vulnerability. In “The Secret Sharer” a stowaway has lost everything except his vulnerability. His protector, the captain of the ship, is consumed by tenderness for him.

“The Secret Sharer” was within my grasp, one of the Four Tales at my feet. Curiosity was my muscle-relaxant. Letting SkyWest slide down my leg, I pulled the book up into my lap. The tale of the Secret Sharer is recounted by a newly appointed English captain on a ship homebound from the Gulf of Siam. The captain recounts how he had pulled a man alive out of the Gulf; in his own cabin the captain had secluded and protected this fugitive, and then maneuvered the ship so the fugitive could swim safely ashore. In accomplishing this, the captain had risked the ship and the lives of his crew.

The captain is not otherwise particularly nice. He’s quite grumpy and judgmental, constantly reminding himself how he feels like “a stranger,” before as well as after he fishes the obvious stranger out of the Gulf. The young stowaway hardly moves, and dares not speak, excepting a few whispered exchanges with the captain every midnight. There are incidents on board that tax the captain’s ingenuity and forbearance in keeping the stowaway secret, the worst of which is a search by the stowaway’s own captain and crew looking for him, the murderer, they say, of their ship’s second mate.

The captain calls his precious stowaway “my double, my second self, my other self, my mirror reflection,” and is terribly self-conscious, as if the ship “had a double captain.”

With literary hindsight, one might interpret the captain’s quarters, where the two “were side by side talking in our secret way,” as a utopia for two ideal psyches. Even so, the story indicts the pettiness of rote attention to hierarchy. This tale is a brilliant artist’s reparation for all the splitting in the world that has turned out so badly. A story bobbing in the foreground implies its background, to use Adorno’s words, “as that which keeps [utopian subjectivity] silent, the image of a world that refuses peace.”

The relationship between captain and stowaway offers an upside-down version of suspicion, a messed-up hierarchy of authority and suspect. This is a story of identification with the suspect, a reverse (someone with power in complete empathy with his hostage) of Stockholm syndrome. The captain recognizes his own vulnerability in the plight of the suspect, not exactly a dominant theme in US popular culture. With gratitude, the suspect acknowledges what they both long for, which paradoxically the man in power, the captain himself, did not really have: “. . . a great satisfaction to have got somebody to understand. . . . It’s very wonderful.” “The Secret Sharer” might be a story that challenges psychoanalytic theory (splitting always a symptom to be cured). In these times it could be interpreted as a story that challenges official US culture, its imagination and therefore its ethos having gone off the deep end.

To identify with the suspect would be to recognize the stranger within ourselves, a stranger who tries to hold fast through the squalor of consumerism. To identify with the suspect would mean succumbing to a grief that consumerism cannot console. Introspection, listening, self-restraint, these are not, alas, just personal traits, though as personal traits these may be latent in the kangaroo unconscious, waiting for their opportunity. These traits ebb or flow according to their value in the active mythos of a nation, of its government, of its artists, of its philosophers and educators—and, to be trusted, these traits must be palpable to the economic stowaways of the earth. Individuals can look into their own hearts and find light or darkness; individuals can impinge on the plans of their government—they must. Beyond that, we witness a split, enacted as military and economic institutions, which is as deep and powerful as the Gulf of Siam.

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