A Matter of Life and Death or Something (10 page)

He didn't go in. They called his name and he said he had to go to the washroom sorry and he headed into the hallway, he was practically running to the elevator. Hours later now here he is having the worst coffee of his life. This is the only place that's open this late. This thing he is drinking has like two more names than he does.

Why didn't he go to his appointment?

It was like when he was sitting there he got thinking about it and couldn't figure out why he'd ever
started
going, or how he'd lasted so long. It's been like five months. E had suggested maybe he should think about it; he was already thinking about it. He needed something. He needed to take his mind off of her. No. He needed somewhere he could go and just talk about her for hours. Did it make him feel closer to her sometimes in some backwards way? Did it give him hope?

Did he do it for her?

No he
wanted
to go. And at first it was free through school. He had an initial half-hour consultation with one counsellor named Janet, in which he described the things that were going on in his head. He'd brought an epic web of a list that filled two whole pages of graph paper with black ink. He showed her the list, which contained every sorrow and habit and insurmountable obstacle—she glanced at it a moment and handed it back. How could she have overlooked it or consumed it so casually? It was the most enthralling list.

Janet left the room for a minute and then returned with a thin stack of paper, fresh with the smell of photocopying: fire and asphalt. When she handed him the pages they were still warm in his hands. He always loved the feeling of holding warm paper—it was one thing that felt precisely like hope. The smallest things could be comforts. The white sheets had tiny font typed in columns and bulleted lists, sprinkled with little clip-art illustrations of men with frowns, question marks shooting out of their heads. They outlined some “unhelpful” styles of thinking, and basic coping strategies. As he squinted at the papers Janet said he would be set up with a regular counsellor on a weekly appointment basis, to begin
cognitive therapy.
Cognitive therapy, she said, was a drug-free treatment, with emphasis on the conscious changing of thinking patterns, in the hope that negative feelings would change as a result. It would be a start. If he turned out to need drugs they'd address that later. It sounded pretty good.

Then the meetings were every Thursday with a psychologist named Ralph who had a short grey beard like a shag rug and a firm handshake. His office was a warehouse a few blocks off campus, fully stocked with table saws and belt sanders and nails and glue. The psychologist and the patient hung their jackets on pegs on the wall and washed their hands in the filthy square industrial sink and put on their safety goggles. Let's get to it, Ralph said at the first appointment, and started cutting two-foot squares out of a large sheet of plywood.

Together they began work on a complex filing cabinet system for the thoughts who came clawing their way into the patient's mind. They got three or four boxes built in the first couple of hour-long sessions. The patient was a slow carpenter, but Ralph said they were making great progress. Quicker than most patients, he said. When the patient returned the next week, even more cabinets had appeared: fifteen, sixteen of them stacked and waiting to be filled.

You worked on them without me? he asked.

I got to thinking, and figured we'd need a few more.

You didn't have to do that.

Sure I do. It's my job.

Soon the focus shifted and the patient did less of the building and began the filing. He sat in the orange upholstered chair in the centre of the huge floor and did his mindfulness exercise. He'd put the earmuffs on to save himself from the noise of Ralph's cutting and hammering and ladder extending. He made an effort to sit up straight and focus on his breathing. (When he got in the chair, Ralph would take notice, and, trying not to be obvious about it, he would make quicker cuts, wouldn't leave the saw running. He would hammer softer and walk on tiptoe. It broke parts of the patient's heart and made him want to try harder. He knew he could fix it.)

It always took a few false starts. His mind would be whirling, speeding in nine directions on nine layers at once. Something would surface—an image of E standing up from her bed naked in the morning with the new sun sparking a ring around her hair and showing off all her smoothest skin—then something long past—childhood, riding in the car through the poor part of town, June bugs on the porch floor in May and his bare foot crunching them into the rough wood—then an overbearing wonder about the future: what would he do when his lease was up, would he stay here again or finally scrap it all and be the vagabond he always pretended he might be, and then the giganticness of having done it all
wrong,
of continuing to do it
wrong,
of everything right being embarrassing, everything wrong being worse, of being in all the wrong places at all the wrong times, having all the wrong heroes and wanting everything for all the wrong

Then he would catch himself, somehow, and be back again.

Start over.

Gather up the drawstrings from all corners of your mind and pull them a little tighter. Come back to your breathing, keep slowing it down. Close your eyes and let the thoughts come whipping by and try not to chase after them. Fold your hands together to stop them from grabbing. Instead of
being
the thoughts, just watch them run past.

Eventually the patient would recognize a thought and write its name on a sheet of paper.

It really did help you, you know. For a while. It did. It was embarrassing but not useless. You're just so fucking stubborn. You could still go back. Go back next week. It's collapsing, rebuild it. But why would you? You're already giving up or telling yourself you are, you don't know what you're doing, you can't keep going into something like that without being hopeful you are way past hopeful, you are desperate, hopeless. You have ALWAYS been desperate, you're never NOT desperate

Get up. Get up from the chair and drag yourself to the index catalogue you have written. It hangs from the wall on a bit of white string. When Ralph notices you do this, he will resist the temptation to grin. Don't let this make you feel like a guinea pig. Don't resent his goodness. Pick up the little book and browse through the categories:

Find the section code you need and then consult the yellow numbers and letters stencilled on the polished concrete floor. Walk down the corresponding column until it intersects with the proper row and there you'll find the square on the floor marking where the correct cabinet will be: look up and find it suspended far above your head.

(The cabinet structure is growing enormous and sprawling in order to accommodate the exponentially increasing number of categories and subcategories. The wooden boxes, all connected at the sides, form a number of snakey armatures hung from the rafters with cables, filling the entire space just below the warehouse's ceiling. Like a maze of ventilation ducts, but wooden. And where air ducts would be dustily and unquestionably grey, Ralph has been painting areas of the filing labyrinth primary colours: lemon yellows, cobalt blues, cadmium reds, in accordance to some grouping method you don't understand, and which Ralph claims doesn't “really” matter. Sometimes you do like thinking of it as a Personal Ventilation System—admit this. And of letting your head breathe, and all the other pleasant and banal thoughts those of course lead to. Don't hate yourself for this. Breathe.)

Raise the ladder and climb to the proper cabinet and file all your bad thoughts away.

After a while you will get another separate assignment, concerning your journal. This is your
first
sad attempt at keeping a journal—remember how Ralph loved those two entries you came up with—but you were faking it. You were whining and bitching. Why me why me. You still had no idea what it felt like to be completely irreversibly abandoned. To have no way out. You were writing it for them and it didn't last. It was embarrassing. Not like you're doing better now—what are you doing now. You act like you're writing your fucking memoir, on your deathbed. The epic saga of Phil and his cabinets. Amazing. You're SITTING HERE. You did NOTHING today. You wandered around hating everything. It takes a lot of energy. Now you're here, you've spent two and a half hours in this place sipping the worst coldest coffee and savouring the most expensive brownie you can remember having. There is nothing to say here. Write your memoir.

Ralph said it would be a hugely useful practice for you to read over your entries a day or two later and eliminate all “unhelpful” words. To notice them. It would be a simple and effective way of controlling the influx into the DOOMSDAYS and ALL-OR-NOTHINGS cabinets, and maybe even the GUILT. You were to first cross out the bad words, then cut them out of the pages with a utility knife and reveal all the holes in your worldview. So you do this, and you bring the stray words with you to the next session in an envelope. Then he shows you how to use the photocopier to enlarge the troublesome words. Blow them up to one thousand times their original size and print them on chalkboard-sized sheets of poster paper, one word each.

This is how big those little buggers
really
are, Ralph says, with your
EVERYTHING
s and your
NOTHING
s and your
ALL
s and
ALWAYS
s tacked up all over the warehouse. Roll them up. File them away.

And today you didn't go. They called your name and you ran away. It was supposed to be a way of ridding yourself of things, of storing the weight somewhere, and it worked up to a point, but now it
only
adds to
everything
. The cabinets are
completely
stuffed and barely close, they keep moving on to newer and more convoluted structures: grouped now in secondary and tertiary colour schemes—
complete
disorder. What was orange last week is now blue-green. Turquoise turned to violet then back to yellow. It's
total
mayhem. Obscene records line the walls—graphs and fucking pie charts outlining your progress to date, extrapolating your future improvements—it's
all
so calculated and hopeful, you
hate
it, it scares the shit out of you, you
hate
yourself for even going. As if you can find
yourself
by eliminating
yourself
.
Everything
that has
always
been you. This is you,
Phil
. It's not going to go away. It's not like the therapy doesn't work, it does make you feel better. A bit better. But the fact that you even need to go—you need to go, what are you thinking not going, who are you performing for? But then it's
always
when you're actually there that you feel your
worst
. You're
always
embellishing and inventing things to discuss, to keep momentum. You turn
all
the small problems of the day-to-day into monstrous problems, cataclysmic,
only
to keep the system functioning and expanding—you take
all
your new terrifying ones—the
forever
ones the cages that
never
open—you turn them into small musings on the horizon of your meaningless life, you pretend and hope them
all
away, they don't go away, you are too good at lying. You
only
feel good talking to yourself and you will do it forever, write your life down, make it exist, catalogue it distance it, this is the
best
thing you have learned, most days you can't even manage
this,
tell your weak selfish little story to yourself don't fucking lie, maybe it will be enough help, the drugs will help the old ones were not the
right
ones. Relax and tell it and
never
stop writing, you can
always
go back you can but don't worry tell it be
real
—
every
second hurts more than
anything
, the reason you
ever
went in the first place was to STOP putting
everything
in boxes—it's FINE it's all fine just get it down now cross all the
bad
out and see what's left.

Remember? We're sitting on hot rocks on the beach—it's hot and humid—you share your water bottle—the walk here was a bit awkward—I was in an ecstatic high mood—so grateful to finally have this day together—you've been busy, with the summer class and with seeing summer friends, with summer, and work—you're working at the shop and the other shop when they need you—if I see you it's for a maximum of fifteen minutes per day—nowhere near enough of you.

So I've got this high to have this whole morning to walk with you—we slept together at your house, without blankets, it was the heat wave—we ran into each other in the park the evening before—it's such a small city—we got to your room and had the long talk about how It Can't Mean Anything—but how it seems bound to happen, unavoidable—we both want to so yeah sure—but how we understand that We're Not Seeing Each Other—neither are In Any State to be seeing anyone. But then breakfast is cheerful and exciting and decidedly Like Old Times—poached eggs on the grainiest bread, yogurt, coffee, and I convince you that today's the day for skinny-dipping—it's going to be another fireball of a day, a mushroom cloud, too hot already at 7:30—we got up early for you to get to work, we forgot it was a holiday. No work today. I convince you to come swimming.

I'm in a hyper mood, we're walking, you're sort of just neutral, laughing at me and rolling your eyes—I'm such a romantic—especially today—not fully letting yourself get sucked into the old dynamic, but you're warming up, I can tell. I'm thrilled—I can't be bothered with rules—you have a lot on your mind—You've told me at least three times now that we can't Be Together, if we hang out we have to find a way to Just Be Friends. I'm not paying attention—today it's all words.

We get to the beach. We're sitting there on rocks sharing an orange—two young deer with white spots all over come out from trees on the far side of the beach, walking in their alien way—tails swatting, new strange legs bumping—they stop dead when they see us, their knobby legs quivering—what do they think they see?—they disappear. As far as I can possibly tell you are thinking you do in fact want to go skinny-dipping—you're just taking your time—I keep going on about how it's the perfect day, the perfect place—and so on—I'm this giddy little kid.

I'm wholly focused on the water and getting you in it and the day—the water will feel so cold and good on our skin—just us and our skin—I'm imagining it even now—there's no one around—does anyone ever come here? Perfect. I grab the bottom of your t-shirt and start to slowly peel it up—you snap. You can take your own clothes off. Sorry. Silence. Then: We're not talking about this again.

(But I don't want to talk about it either and I just want to be in the water—I don't know what you mean or why it's coming up
now
) You growl. We're not—You stand up: I think I'm just going to go to school—I'm still sitting there—Here we go—You're impossible!

(I don't know what's going on, we've had the nicest morning, everything's fine.) Can't we just—

No. I'm going to go—DON'T go. Listen—What do you even want from me?—I just don't understand why we're fighting!—This is what we DO. This is exactly why—No it's
­different.
This is different, and you're just looking for it and so now it's happening. We're
friends.
We don't hate each other!

I'm going to school.

(You don't
have
to fight with me anymore. I can't believe it. I'm going crazy—Don't go, we don't have to swim—

Why do you even want me to stay? Is this actually fun, to you?

I don't say anything—I'm crushed into a ball, frustrated mindless—grinding my teeth—the distance between what I wanted and what the day is—I always had to imagine you—how could I become such an expert at fooling myself—a con artist out of work bored—I gave it endless chances—I am raving and pouncing at everything, I am nothing, I'm in a thousand places—

I want to die.

What the fuck—that's it—What?—You can't just SAY something like that!

What?

You're insane. I should have—I'm
going.
Don't come find me.

—

Goodbye Phil.

You pick up your bag and hurry so fast through the tall grass—I wonder if you're crying—do I want that?—you look back—I can't tell—you see me still here hunched over in a wretched pile of me—I knew this but never felt it so powerfully completely—I can't tell you anything about this even if I tried—it's coming back so sure and one directional, I am a mass of dark energy hunched with the surest goal—I am horrified—I can't remember if you really came or not or was it possible I even made it up—I wish I made you up, I could forget, I have never been so completely nothing so alone, it never goes away, you went away.