In the Absence of Angels by Hortense Calisher

Purgatives. Even emetics.” He laughed slightly, almost with pride. “Nothing like that works,” he continued, shaking his head with the doting fondness of a patient for some symptom which has confounded the best of them. “It’s too cagey for that.”
    With his use of the word “it,” the doctor was propelled back into that shapely sense of reality which had gone admittedly askew during the man’s recital. To admit the category of “it,” to dip even a slightly co-operative finger in another’s fantasy, was to risk one’s own equilibrium. Better not to become involved in argument with the possessed, lest one’s own apertures of belief be found to have been left ajar.
    “I am afraid,” the doctor said blandly, “that your case is outside my field.”
    “As a doctor?” said his visitor. “Or as a man?”
    “Let’s not discuss me, if you please.”
    The visitor leaned intently across the desk. “Then you admit that to a certain extent, we have been — ?”
    “I admit nothing!” said the doctor, stiffening.
    “Well,” said the man disparagingly, “of course, that too is a kind of stand. The commonest, I’ve found.” He sighed, pressing one hand against his collarbone. “I suppose you have a prescription too, or a recommendation. Most of them do.”
    The doctor did not enjoy being judged. “Why don’t you hunt up young Hallowell?” he said, with malice.
    “Disappeared. Don’t you think I tried?” said his vis-à-vis ruefully. Something furtive, hope, perhaps, spread its guileful corruption over his face. “That means you do give a certain credence — ”
    “Nothing of the sort!”
    “Well then,” said his interrogator, turning his palms upward.
    The doctor leaned forward, measuring his words with exasperation. “Do you mean you want me to tell you you’re crazy!
    “In my spot,” answered his visitor meekly, “which would you prefer?”
    Badgered to the point of commitment, the doctor stared back at his inconvenient Diogenes. Swollen with irritation, he was only half conscious of an uneasy, vestigial twitching of his ear muscles, which contracted now as they sometimes did when he listened to atonal music.
    “O.K., O.K. ...!” he shouted suddenly, slapping his hand down on the desk and thrusting his chin forward. “Have it your way then! I don’t believe you!”
    Rigid, the man looked back at him cataleptically, seeming, for a moment, all eye. Then, his mouth stretching in that medieval grimace, risorial and equivocal, whose mask appears sometimes on one side of the stage, sometimes on the other, he fell forward on the desk, with a long, mewing sigh.
    Before the doctor could reach him, he had raised himself on his arms and their foreheads touched. They recoiled, staring downward. Between them on the desk, as if one of its mahogany shadows had become animate, something seemed to move — small, seal-colored, and ambiguous. For a moment it filmed back and forth, arching in a crude, primordial inquiry; then, homing straight for the doctor, whose jaw hung down in a rictus of shock, it disappeared from view.
    Sputtering, the doctor beat the air and his own person wildly with his hands, and staggered upward from his chair. The breeze blew hypnotically, and the stranger gazed back at him with such perverse calm that already he felt an assailing doubt of the lightning, untoward event. He fumbled back over his sensations of the minute before, but already piecemeal and chimerical, they eluded him now, as they might forever.
    “It’s unbelievable,” he said weakly.
    His visitor put up a warding hand, shaking it fastidiously. “Au contraire!” he replied daintily, as though by the use of another language he would remove himself still further from commitment. Reaching forward, he gathered up his papers into a sheaf, and stood up, stretching himself straight with an all-over bodily yawn of physical ease that was like an affront. He looked down at the doctor, one hand fingering his wallet.