Cyril Berganske

by Michael Bishop

BACK TO OMNI FICTION ARCHIVES

The next day government forces reinvaded. One day later, an unidentified armed contingent joined the battle on the side of either the rebels or the government — no one fully understood its allegiances or its agenda. For the following eight months, fire plummeted almost continuously on the once beautiful city; skyscrapers either crashed down or assumed the look of lofty, wind-sculpted salt licks; the Judas trees and sycamores for which city parks had once garnered national acclaim lost their foliage to machine-gun fire or exploded into kindling under the assaults of missile launchers, mortars, and hand grenades. The Durante-Fields Building toppled gradually. The windows crazed and tinkled down. The walls, the celebrity gargoyles, the lift tubes, the ornamental flying buttresses, the gigantic Disney medallions, the terraces on every other floor, and the floors themselves crumbled under persistent bombardment, drooped, hung by bent tethers of rebar, PVC, or wiring, and eventually capsized into the streets, deafening residents and refugees alike, stirring smoke and dust, booby-trapping the entire neighborhood with a new set of obstacles. Devers moved his practice to a cellar just off the kitchen of a defunct midtown bistro. Ms. Gill came along as secretary/receptionist and lookout. Despite the conflict, clients poured in. In fact, daily war fed the practice by providing Devers fresh emotional casualties: kin who had lost kin, old folks who despaired of life's meaning, young folks who could imagine no future, soldiers who had witnessed atrocities, late-blooming agoraphobics, traumatized children, and insomniacs of all ages, not to mention sufferers of dyspepsia, nightmares, nightsweats, and radical dread. Cyril Berganske did not follow Devers from his high-rise offices to the dank stockroom underground. He had visited Devers only once, and Devers, when he thought of Berganske, supposed him dead or long since fled to a city free of siege. His case had promised an interesting, protracted series of therapy sessions, but Devers could not think how they would have ended and knew that even if Berganske had come back, the war would have turned his fees from cash to barter. Today, most of Devers' clients paid him in goods: firewood, windowbox spinach, jugs of potable water, a parka, a harmonica, candles. Today, a man with a bloody nose was the opposite of a novelty. You assumed him the victim of flying glass, ricocheting stone, or a bullet that had just missed fragmenting his skull. [next]