The Deep Whatsis (13 page)

“My mother killed herself”
is a phrase I have written, thought, thought out loud, said out loud, said to myself, written by hand, typed, shouted, and yet it still isn’t true no matter how many times I repeat it. Yes, it’s true she went mad, it’s true she died by her own hand, but still “killed herself” somehow doesn’t tell the story, or at least tell it accurately enough. There were mitigating factors, as there always are, and perhaps from far off “suicide” is a word that describes a particular action, said action being sufficient to warrant certain explanations for behavior and attitude, and I have been guilty in the past of exploiting the event and turning it into a master narrative and this is what in the end makes it at least partly false. I’m thinking this as I stand there waiting for the Avis bus and then at once I change my mind, decide not to rent a car. Maybe it was the experience of being in Seth’s Range Rover, or the sight of him
wandering off into the night in it, from my window, perhaps to his demise, a crash on the BQE I imagine, or at least him getting pulled over and having his license taken away and the car impounded, or was it my mental state, which teetered on the edge of utter oblivion: At any rate driving seeming like a bad idea then and it does now. I take a cab to the hotel. On the way up Lincoln Boulevard there’s an ambulance blocking traffic and it looks like a hairy, wild-eyed man has chained himself to a shopping cart; they are trying to cut the chain with a bolt cutter, to free him in order to take him to jail. When we get past the ambulance, traffic moves again. We wait through two greens at the left onto Pico but then we get the arrow and sail west toward the sea.

Shutters on the Beach is in Santa Monica, on the water as the name implies, and it’s always where I stay in LA; in fact I lived here for nearly two months while I was looking for an apartment, during my so-called Hollywood screenwriting phase. Harrison Ford stayed here during that time; he was shooting a movie called
Firewall
, which had the working title
Untitled Harrison Ford Project
, I can tell you he’s much older in person than he is while lit up properly, with gauze on the lens or whatever it is they do, and he brought a dog with him all the way from New York. I get my early check-in and the room I am assigned is in the back, in the new building, the one that is nestled against the hill that goes up toward Main Street, toward Capo, one of my favorite restaurants near the beach (the other is Sushi Roku), and immediately I know that this room will not do at all. For one thing, to get to it you have to walk across the
pool deck area to an elevator, you have to take the elevator up a level, and then you walk across a kind of little bridge and then you have to go down some stairs, totally defeating the purpose of the elevator ride. It’s as if stairs are an outdated technology so there’s a useless elevator journey included free with your stay.

The next room they show me is on the floor above, and it’s equally unacceptable. Most of the rooms at Shutters are done in a kind of Cape Cod beach theme, some of them more so than others, and this one immediately makes me uncomfortable; there are too many conch shells lying around, too many jade-colored light sconces, too many shawl-like blankets, too many David Halberstam books on the shelves. I force the front-desk girl, friendly, perky, thirties, obviously an aspiring actress, to let me look at a room in the main building, she says there aren’t any available for the week that I will be here, but I know that isn’t true, they always keep rooms open for last minute VIPs and so on, if you are willing to pay, and I am. She has Paul take me to a room with not a beach view exactly but one looking north up the coast, or rather, onto a parking lot; yes, that’s more like it. I tip the guy a twenty, roll my R2-D2 trolley inside (I had left him in the hall in case this room didn’t work out either), and the first thing I do in any hotel room is I turn on all the lights in the bathroom, even the heat lamp; then I sit on the edge of the bed. About three minutes later there is a knock on the door, I get up and answer it. It’s another of the bellboys with a fruit basket for me; I assume it is from the production company, Gangrape, as it’s de rigueur for them to lavish the agency people with little welcome gifts like this. He sets the fruit basket down on a side
table and goes out. There’s a small card in an envelope and I open it. The card does not have the Gangrape logo on it (a few horny rabbits wearing dildos), in fact the card has no logo at all, just three words written in girly handwriting.

“See you soon!” it says.

I toss the card into the little wicker trash bin and close all the curtains on the windows that face the parking lot and make the room as dark as possible. I try for about an hour to masturbate and don’t get anywhere. It’s impossible to imagine that she is in LA and sent me this fruit basket. I read the card again, I stare at it like a man looking down into a ravine from a high perch, I pick up the room phone and dial the front desk and ask if they knew who it was who sent it; the guy tells me they will check their records and get back to me. Then I call HR Lady back at the office. She doesn’t pick up and I leave a message. “It’s Eric. Please call me as soon as you can,” I say. “Look, I know what’s happening, I don’t give a fuck about my bonus, I’m having a nervous breakdown, just call me, please.” Then I get a little pad of Shutters on the Beach stationery and make some quick calculations. If I were to resign, my salary alone would add up to almost all the salaries of the people I’ve fired. Meaning that if I were to quit I could hire most of them back without increasing the payroll. The catch of course is that if I were to resign I would have no authority to hire anyone much less the people I had already fired.

The bar is closed, it’s not quite 1
PM,
so I go out to the pool. The light is getting brighter as the fog and pollution burn off, and I realize I should be wearing my sunglasses. But I don’t
want to go all the way back to the room so I go to the lobby and down the stairs to the spa, where I know they have a tiny quote-unquote “store” that sells extremely expensive beach stuff such as bespoke sunscreen, hats, Japanese sandals, and Ray-Bans. I buy the Ray-Bans and go back to the pool deck. The temperature is in the eighties already and it’s climbing. I sit in a deck chair and face away from the beach; something about the ceaseless idiocy of one wave after another strikes me as profoundly unimaginative. I consider changing hotels; I could stay at the Four Seasons, which is nowhere near the beach, or even the Standard, in downtown LA, also not near the beach, but the production company we’re working with, Gangrape, is fairly close, in Culver City, and since I didn’t rent a car it seems like a bad idea to be so far away. I decide to wait here at the pool until Tom Bridge and the FreshIt creatives from the agency arrive.

From the pool attendant I order some shrimp kind of skewer thing and I can hear the tractors out on the beach tilling the previous day’s trash into the sand; I don’t feel well. The last time this happened to me I managed to comfort myself with work, so I think why not try again? I go back to my room and get my FreshIt folder; in it there is a printout of a PowerPoint document, sixty-five pages of information about the launch of the new FreshIt World of Scents scent-making device. I take the printout back to the pool. The sun is bright now, and it’s hard to read. Most of the pages are white.

The first page just says FreshIt World of Scents in the Lucida Grande typeface and behind the title in the upper right-hand corner is an egglike purple and green circular whoosh
that is meant to convey, I’m guessing, the excitement and energy of new technology. And that it does, beautifully. I stare at the swoosh for I don’t know how long, imagining how many high-level meetings there were in the offices of the Microsoft Corporation, on the huge campus in Redmond, Washington, to discuss the heft and hue of the egglike smoosh, whether the soft focus green band on the left side was really working with the purple orbish center or not, let’s explore some options for Wednesday’s meeting. The second page of the PowerPoint document sets up the structure of the deck. Part One (twelve pages) is about the product itself. The product is a machine that emits a series of awful, saccharine, synthetic fragrances—Brazilian Picnic, Aloha Sky, Hibiscus Morning, Rainforest Mist, and five others. It’s kind of like an electric scented candle; as such it is an obvious improvement on a real scented candle because a) FreshIt World of Scents doesn’t require a dangerous household flame in order to work, the way a candle does, and b) it costs a lot more than a scented candle, because it has moving parts, thereby employing more people in China where it is manufactured, as well as using fossil fuels to generate the electricity that it runs on, so everybody wins.

The reason we are here in Los Angeles is to create a series of commercials meant to convince people to buy FreshIt World of Scents at their nearby Walmart. And that’s where the remaining forty-seven pages of the PowerPoint deck come in. Part Two (twenty-four pages) gets to the meat of it, our consumer insight, or what we at Tate call the Heart-Mind-Key. The Heart-Mind-Key is a proprietary tool, developed by us
to aid our clients in really getting inside the hearts and minds of our target consumer. Page 28 of the deck is entitled The FreshIt World of Scents Heart-Mind-Key Insight Driver. Bulleted half-sentences beneath the title are written in the voice of Abby. Pages 45 and 46 of the doc (Addendum B) tell us that Abby is thirty-four, married, with three children ages two to ten; she lives in the South or perhaps the Midwest. She does not presently work (she’s a homemaker!) but was employed for a few years, as an administrative assistant or perhaps a schoolteacher, and she quit when her second child was born, and her family’s median income is $32,000 a year. She’s in touch with the latest trends, she’s an Information-Seeker, she’s Family-Oriented, spends four hours a week online, reads
Redbook
and
Family Circle
, votes conservative, is religious, enjoys her friends when there’s time, is probably obese, has pets, several pets, that stink up the place, and is too busy as a modern mom to devote the needed thirty minutes of each day to housecleaning. Abby isn’t a real person, of course, she’s the creation of our new Director of Psychographics, Nigel, a gay guy from London who has a PhD in psychology from Oxford. What Nigel might presume to know about women from the Deep South, a place he’s never been and wouldn’t even feel safe visiting, is beyond me.

The four bulleted half-sentences in Abby’s voice read:

Immersing myself in the research works for a while but then the plastic bag is wrapped tightly around my head once more. I want to die. So I realize the best thing to do right now would be to get out of here, out of this hotel and away from this ocean with its relentless predictability, and so I throw some clothes on and head out. The bellboy who brought me the fruit basket is in the lobby, he opens the door for me with a smile.

“Basket you brought,” I say to him in a wheezy desperate voice, “who give?”

“Sorry?”

“Who gave to you?”

“Sir?” he asks.

“Who give you that fruit?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I believe it was another guest at the hotel that gave you that fruit basket, if that’s indeed what you are referring to, a young woman.”

It was impossible to consider. “Can you describe?”

“Um, young, not tall, dark hair, petite, pretty … very pretty …”

“And you say guest at hotel?”

“I believe so.”

I look away, sucking in air in an attempt to keep my lungs from imploding.

“Didn’t she leave a name on the card?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

“Would you like me to ask at the desk, sir?”

“Just get me a fucking cab. Please.” He jumps through the door and there happens to be a taxi in the circle outside that
has just dropped off a guest. It’s Mark Ruffalo, and I don’t even wait for the driver to take his bag out of the trunk before getting in. Then the driver gets back in and looks at me.

“The nearest hospital,” I tell him.

He gives me a look and then pulls out of the circular dropoff and takes a left up Pico. Fifteen minutes later we pull up at UCLA Medical Center, right in front of the emergency room. A sign says Authorized Vehicles Only and while I’m paying the driver a security guard is heading toward us to wave us off. As I lurch past him into the ER I notice he’s rocking a pair of Reebok Ex-O-Fit Hi Straps.

The diagnosis is Acute Anxiety Reaction
. I probably would have just been given some IV propranolol and sent on my way after an hour or two of observation, but I became extremely agitated while waiting for the doctor to look at me and I may have knocked some things over, a table perhaps, and a couple of chairs. Subsequently I had to be restrained to a bed, which is when I got the Ativan, and then I relaxed and went down for a whole two days. I must have needed the sleep. This means I’ve missed our preproduction meeting with the clients, I’ve missed our casting callbacks, I’ve missed our kickoff dinner with the folks from Gangrape—I think we were going to Koi. I also realize that I’ve left my phone at the hotel, there are probably a hundred messages inquiring where the fuck I am. I go over it in my mind, did I tell the bellhop I wanted to go to the hospital? No. There’s no way that anyone would for a second
suspect that this is where I am. What they figure, with good reason, is that I met a girl at a bar or on the beach and went home with her, and being a tweaker she murdered me, or I’m on some kind of bender, screwing my brains out with some jewelry designer from the desert or something. It’s not a big deal. The appropriate lies will have been told the clients, I had a Family Emergency back in Ohio, his mother, he’s so, so sorry not to be here, he’s been weighing in on the casting, he had a long talk with the director about it, he’s still very involved, this is one of his top priorities. I try to reach the nurse’s call button but can’t, I see there are restraints holding me tight to the bed frame. I squirm and try to loosen them but no.

I sink down into the mattress and the restraints loosen on their own; for the first time in my entire life I feel free.

For the next couple of hours I watch a reality show called
Hooker Bust
, and then another one called
Operation Repo
and another called
Party Heat
and another about fat white people who talk like they’re from the ghetto and seem to exist on nothing but Red Bull. During all this I think about what I will do if I get fired and my options in advertising have winnowed. I’ve tried screenwriting, I’ve tried writing writing (i.e., fiction), I’ve tried poetry (high-school paper), I’ve tried directing (two web-only spots for Nike), maybe I need to make a bigger break, a clean break with creativity, get into something like accounting or engineering. Or I could teach. It would be really cool to be an industrial designer and design things like chairs or iced-tea glasses, or mobile devices, but that would require going back to school. Same with computer programming, same with being an
entertainment lawyer, which is something I considered, same with psychiatry. These days every profession requires an advanced degree; this is most likely because globalization has reduced the need for a sizable local workforce, so graduate schools have stepped in to provide a few extra years of postcollege babysitting. For a time I had even wanted to be an architect, but I looked into it and architects make little and work long hours. Besides, there’s something revolting about building houses for other people to live their lives in, enabling their addictions to magical thinking, reality television, and so on; maybe I should just stick to being a high priest in the state-mandated church of involuntary materialism. Maybe I could move to Haiti and work for Sean Penn; I knew a music video director who had met him at a lawn party in Bolinas. Before I can decide my post-advertising fate, the nurse-attendant comes and undoes my straps because I have a meeting with the doctor.

Dr. Jaktar is a nice-enough man from the Punjab region of India. He is probably forty, balding, and has thick black eyebrows that meet in the middle; I ask during the initial pleasantries if he is a Muslim and he says he was born a Muslim but converted to Catholicism when he got married. I’m gathering he may have married a nurse that he met while doing his internship in Ireland. Jaktar is a psychiatrist and he has a few questions for me; I quickly ascertain that since I am now calm and collected and the Stress Event, as he keeps calling it, whatever it was, is over, I can go. I don’t tell him this, but I don’t want to go just yet; going can only mean returning to Shutters on the Beach, and to the FreshIt shoot. I’m just not ready to
look at eight hours of callbacks of perky middle-aged women, the so-called Abbys, shrugging to camera, smiling, winking, and saying “I love my family—even if they don’t always notice all the cool things I do for them!” I just can’t stomach this shit anymore, I’m experiencing a classic case of metanoia. For a moment, as I’m giving Dr. Jaktar some basic information about my medical history, I consider having another temper tantrum, maybe just reaching out and knocking his monitor from his desk with a quick jerk of my hand, or overturning his chair in a fit of sudden rage, but I don’t want to repeat myself. So I finally tell him that I’ve been thinking of committing suicide, I’ve been having suicidal thoughts lately, they run in the family, and he perks up at this, this is like the holy grail for these guys, he can see his income stream widening.

“Would you say you’re depressed?” he inquires.

“No.”

“Have you ever been diagnosed as having depression?”

“No.”

“Then how would you know what depression is?” he asks. I tell him I guess I have no idea what it is, I just know I’m not depressed, I’m highly functioning, I’m on a mission to reinvent a very large, traditional agency, and apart from a few bumps in the road such as my becoming an evil troll, it’s going swimmingly.

He uncrosses a leg and leans in toward me, deeply interested. I tell him that despite my feelings of intense self-loathing, which potentially date back to my early teens, I don’t want to off myself, it’s been done to death, so to speak, I just think about
it from time to time, it’s a subject that interests me on a philosophical level, perhaps, according to Tacitus or somebody, the only question worth asking. Isn’t life, after all, as some German hipster once wrote, nothing more than one long, comical, failed (and ultimately successful?) suicide attempt? I also tell him without hesitation that I am happy, that I’ve always been happy, ever since I was a baby, more or less, so it’s confusing to me why I have so many thoughts of death but I just have them, perhaps it’s only a maudlin interest of mine, the way some people are obsessed by other dark topics such as the Civil War or World War I or World War II or the Vietnam War or the Iraq War or war in general or hunting or family dynamics or serial killers or that 4chan internet meme where they Photoshop pictures of a mutilated Miley Cyrus. Then I tell him the story of sitting at the pool at Shutters and staring out at the ocean reading about people and their smelly homes in need of privatized electronic scent enhancement. “There’s something undeniably sad and at the same time exalted about that, don’t you think?” I ask him. “Don’t you?”

“About people needing a fake scent in their homes? Or about you spending your time working to sell such a thing?”

“Both, obviously. They’re the same.”

“How do you mean?”

“Because they’re both lies, the scent itself and our firm’s representation of it in the world, and lies are a window onto the truth, something like that.”

He doesn’t say a thing for a time and then he tells me that they will keep me here another day for observation. He remarks that my period of agitation seems to have passed, so I
will not be tied down, and he apologizes for the physical restraints but the insurance requires it, as well as the diazepam I was given as a chemical restraint, which I note is a benzodiazepine, otherwise known as a roofie: I’m being date raped! That makes me think of Intern, her behavior at certain times, as well as mine. Did she slip me something in one of those pomegranate-infused Belvedere-and-Veuve chamtinis? Did she slip something to herself and make the blood test a part of her pogrom against me?

As Jaktar goes on about scheduling an appointment with a psychotherapist for some “talking therapy” as he calls it, I read a flowchart on the wall behind him to give me something else to focus on. The flowchart tells what to do if a patient is confused. First, determine if the cause of the confusion is environmental or not. If it is, remove the cause of the confusion, then reassess. If confusion persists, medicate. I determine that the cause of my own confusion right now is Dr. Jaktar and his involuntary Punjabi head bobbing; I just want to go back to my room and watch television. There is a pause so I stand up, thinking he is dismissing me, but he doesn’t move and he says, in one quick burst, “Tell me about Dr. Look.”

I did not see this coming. I sit back down.

“How do you know about Dr. Look?” I ask him.

“When you were sedated we looked in your wallet to see if you had medical coverage; when you became violent you lost certain rights pertaining to your privacy. We found his business card. What can you tell me about him?”

“I don’t know anything about him,” I say. “Why?”

Jaktar gives me a squint that I believe is meant to indicate he thinks I’m lying. Then he says, “I attempted to contact this Dr. Look but couldn’t locate him. He’s not board certified in the state of New York, he’s not on anybody’s list of psychiatrists in the state of New York, I don’t think he is practicing in the state of New York.” It really bothered me how often he had said “the state of New York.”

“I was referred to him by the General Counsel of our company,” I said, “Barry Spinotti, who is effectively my boss since we don’t have a president or CEO right now, the last one having quit. Barry referred me to Dr. Look and that’s all I know about him. He has an office on Lexington Avenue. Six-eighty-six or six-sixty-eight or eighty-eight-six or something like that. In the fifties near the Citicorpse tower. He said he’d gone to Harvard.”

“I’ve never been to New York,” Jaktar admits. “Harvard you say?”

For a minute or two we talk about New York and the differences between New York and LA. I tell him I love LA and used to live here, but hated the weather; he says he has some distant cousins in Queens and should really go and see them at some point. Then he crosses his other leg and sits back in his chair and nods; the second pleasantry-based section of our conversation has just ended.

“Mr. Nye,” he says, “why would the head of your company tell you to go and see a psychiatrist who doesn’t exist?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I sense I am in some kind of a battle with Dr. Jaktar only I don’t know what the rules are and I don’t
know what it would mean to lose. “It all seemed kind of fishy to me as well.”

“In what way?”

“Well his office wasn’t even a real office, it was like an old apartment that hadn’t ever been renovated. It had an old kitchen in the back, and there was a couch that was so dilapidated it had been repaired with duct tape. Does that sound like a psychiatrist’s office to you?”

“No,” he says, “it does not.”

“Exactly,” I say. “Because all of this could be part of some kind of setup on the company’s part to fire me without paying my bonus. It’s all a lie. Which undoubtedly is what motivated me to lie to this Look character, to make up some story about my mom dying in a car accident when I was a boy.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. He looks at me and his expression changes; suddenly I feel we are on the same page again, we are allies in something but I don’t know what. “When did she die?”

“About twenty years ago,” I go. “I was a boy.” I say no more. He nods.

“So what I’m curious to know is why did the people at your firm tell you to see a psychiatrist in the first place?” he then asks, and the moment of our alignment, our fleeting shared membership in the human race, is gone.

“Because there’s a situation at our office, and they’re trying to drive me crazy,” I blurt out, immediately wondering if that was a good idea and then immediately thinking yes it was. “She’s an intern, she’s accused me of sexual harrassment, and
it’s a completely baseless claim, and Barry said he wanted me to see the shrink because he would give me a clean bill of health. It’s all a scam, the whole thing. I mean if he wasn’t a real shrink and only pretending to be one, that’s a scam, but maybe he is a real shrink, and only pretending to be a scam artist in order to either a) rake in a little cash on the side or b) actually help people. At any rate, I think the whole thing was set up years ago by my company to help them get out of legal problems.” Then I told him, at far too great a length, about the sordid history of Tate and how the Old Man, when he was running things, was the biggest ass grabber in the history of Madison Avenue, and how the company had gotten bloated over the years so it was time to get lean and mean; I had been hired to be the agent of this much-needed-correction but had recently reached what I felt was the end of my complicity.

Jaktar thinks. If he were in a graphic novel I would have scrawled HMMM … in the thought bubble to the left of him. He nods again, I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it, and then he turns toward his computer and does some typing. I try to lean over and read it but of course the whole thing, in terms of angles, conspires against me, so I see nothing.

“It’s my professional opinion that you could use some rest, Eric,” he says. “Don’t you agree?”

All hospitals are the same, all hallways lead to nowhere, and in this one the doors are locked, making circular journeys impossible. Apart from the food, which is inedible, it’s not too bad here, in fact it’s quite pleasant even though I no longer qualify for the Klonopin drip, they’ve got me on Ativan. I watch a lot
of television, trying to ignore the commercials for payday loans and fabric softener and stool softener and cars that offer to make your payments if you lose your job, and I masturbate frequently in a vain attempt to rid myself of the erection that won’t stop. I also play dominos in the day room with a schizophrenic woman named Melanie who keeps shouting “WE’VE GOT SUITCASES! WE’VE GOT SUITCASES!” at the top of her lungs. I even let her win a couple of times, which makes her cry, and when she cries I hold her hand and this seems to calm her down and when she’s calm she smiles. “We’ve got suitcases,” she says quietly to no one, although for a second I think she means me.