Authors: Peter Mattei
“Here what is?”
“The form.” He takes it and sits down at an old desk and hunts for a working pen. He finds one and scribbles on the sheet of paper, then signs his name at the bottom and stands.
“Done.”
“What’s done?”
“The paperwork.”
He comes around the desk and hands the form to me and I take it and look at it.
“What is it?” I ask.
“You came to me, we spoke at length, I conducted an extensive psychological examination, and then I deemed you fit,” he says. I had heard there were scam doctors like these in New York, the ones actors went to when they needed to pass a drug test before working on a movie. I look at the paperwork.
“You mean mentally fit? How do you know I’m mentally fit if we didn’t even speak?”
“We don’t have to talk about it unless you want to talk about it,” he says.
“Talk about what?”
“Whatever it is you did.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“It’s a formality,” he continues. “Let’s assume you kicked a door in, or in a pique of anger you threw a chair out a window. Or tossed your computer at a wall. Screamed at a colleague,
threatened to kill someone, took a shit in your boss’s office, or any of a million other things you might do and that people in stressful jobs do everyday, and let’s say some overly sensitive person reported it internally to the human resources department, and for insurance purposes your company needs to vet you as not insane, so you come to see me. The liability requires it.”
“But I didn’t lose my temper,” I say. “I never lose my temper.”
“No?”
“No. I don’t even have a temper to lose.”
“Well then perhaps this is merely meant to be prophylactic.”
“In what way?”
“Perhaps someone is worried you might possibly lose your temper at some point in the future.”
“But couldn’t anyone possibly lose their temper?” I say. Dr. Look pauses for a moment to consider this, nodding with a mock seriousness he didn’t even know was mock.
“I suppose. But that’s really none of my concern.” He then reaches out his hand to shake mine, indicating that the office visit is over. I stand dutifully and take his hand and shake it for the second time. Then I look at the form again.
“It says here we met three times for one hour each time.”
“That’s right, that’s what the insurance company requires.”
“But I’ve only been here for five minutes. And you’re going to bill my company for three hours at, what, what’s your hourly?” I ask him, knowing it’s rude but going there anyway.
“Four-fifty,” he says.
“So you’re going to charge my company thirteen hundred and fifty dollars to deem me mentally fit without even
talking to me?” I say, repeating the obvious, and with a tinge of disbelief.
“Would you rather you had to come here three separate times?” he asks. “Who has the bandwidth to do that these days?” I don’t say anything, I stand there looking at him. Then I look at the form again. Through the jargon I spy a number from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, known as the
DSM
, that psychiatrists use: 310.83. I’ve studied the
DSM
before and I know what the classification means.
“Isn’t 310.83 Borderline Personality Disorder?” I ask. “I thought you said I was fit as a fiddle?”
He looks at me with more mock mock-concern than before and then slowly crosses over to an easy chair that looks like it had been sitting out in the rain for a year.
“Sit down,” he says quietly. “Why don’t we begin?”
I sit back down on the couch, which I now realize is a divan like you would see in an actual psychiatrist’s office, with a headrest at one end. It’s then that I look around for a diploma on the wall. I find one and squint at it.
“Harvard,” he offers. “Psychiatry MD with a PhD in behavioral studies.”
“Really,” I say. “That’s great.”
“This isn’t my main office,” he says as I look around. “My main office is downtown.”
“I see.”
“So why don’t you tell me what happened?” he says, and there’s something about his tone, something strong and reassuring yet at the same time anxious, as if he is hiding some kind
of horrible career-destroying event in his past, something that got him here, a character-defining backstory that doesn’t get revealed till the end of Act Two, and this comforts me; I want to know more.
“Well …”
Then a long silence hangs between us and I realize for the first time that noises from the street can be heard, cars whooshing by and horns and a siren in the distance. An argument, in Spanish, or is it Cantonese, becomes barely audible, too, filtering up from below. Dr. Look reaches down to his feet where one of those white noise machines sits half-hidden under the skirt of the easy chair. It’s a round gray cylinder about the size of a small pound cake with a single switch on the side of it. He feels around for the switch and then flicks it, keeping his eyes on me the whole time, and the machine begins making its patented, airy, noise-canceling, oatmeal-colored sound, and then all the sounds of the street fade away into oblivion.
I sit there listening to the machine (possible tagline:
SILENCE
=
JUST TOO FUCKING FRIGHTENING FOR THE TIMES WE LIVE IN™)
fighting the effort of my mind to cancel that sound out, too, and so there we are bathed in a kind of delusional quietude, a silence built of a protracted death rattle, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt such peace.
“I lied earlier,” I say. He waits. “They think I hit someone,” I continue, “which I didn’t, I’m sure of that, although I was heavily intoxicated at the time, so perhaps it’s possible that I pushed her, although I don’t think I did, in fact I know I didn’t. But it’s all quite a mess.”
My gaze remains fixed on him to note his reaction, to see how far I can push this fallen man into moral lassitude and fraud.
“Hmmm,” he says.
“I mean it’s interesting, because they’re saying I punched someone in the face, and she’s saying I punched her in the face apparently, and even though that’s false there’s a certain amount of truth to it. Not her, but other people.”
“Who?” he says quietly, with a tilt of his head to suggest I lie down on his Viennese divan. I take the cue and lean back, putting my head flat on the couch, and now I’m staring up at an old partially rusted tin ceiling, sections of it missing and replaced by plywood painted the same creamy beige.
“A woman I work with,” I go. “A girl, really.”
“You hit her.”
“OK, for the sake of argument let’s assume I did,” I say. He doesn’t give me the pleasure of a reaction, and so I can’t tell if he thinks it is a grave and terrible thing I’ve done or if this is the smallest and least worrisome act of random violence that he’s ever come across. Of course it’s also possible that he knows I’m fabricating, since I’ve never hit anyone, certainly not a woman and most definitely not the intern, but since I do happen to know that I am an extremely effective liar, and no one ever knows when I’m lying, ever, with the possible exception of the time said intern called me on my not getting her text message.
“Go on,” he says.
“She’s nineteen or twenty or something, maybe older, I don’t know, she’s an intern at the firm,” I tell him, laying out the basic
facts of the story as simply as I can. “I’ve slept with her, sort of, and I enjoyed it and all, but the thing is, the thing that I can’t understand, is why it is I seem to have fallen in love with her.” He doesn’t say anything now and so I feel compelled to go on. “I don’t even know why I fooled around with her, apart from the fact that I was horny, and she’s funny, but I’m always horny and there are lots of funny girls and I masturbate eight or sometimes ten times a day in an attempt, one might call it vain, to rid myself of my erection, or at least partial erection, that I have had for quite some time now, nearly a year, ever since I started taking the medications I am taking in the current combination I am taking them.” I stop here, figuring this is enough shrink candy for one visit.
“You celebrated yourself in various ways,” he says. “It’s normal.”
“I’ve masturbated in my office at work, I’ve masturbated in an empty lot in the middle of the night, I’ve masturbated in the back of taxi cabs, in stairwells of department stores, in airport bathrooms, I’ve masturbated on airplanes, I’ve masturbated while driving on the New York State Thruway and looking at lewd photos on my iPhone.” I’m really laying it on thick.
“Why do you think that is?” he inquires, testing me, but I don’t take the bait.
“I guess you would say that I have a strong sex drive. Of course I can get sex pretty much whenever I want it, and I have paid for it on occasion, I work all the time so I don’t always have the bandwidth, as you call it, for dating. When I do date normally I date actresses and models. I meet them often in my job, and I make a good deal of money, so they’re attracted to me. I’ve
never really had a relationship with anyone and I’m thirty-three. I guess that’s not so weird since the advent of video games and reality television, not to mention that new porno app everybody is talking about, thirty-three is the new nine.”
Then I put an unexpected twist into the story, a Henry.
“I guess it all goes back to my mom,” I say and then, without thinking what’s coming next, there it is, sliding out of my mouth. “She died in a car accident when I was ten years old. I saw the whole thing.”
The rest of it just writes itself. “I was standing in our front yard and my mom was driving down the street. In my mental re-creation of that day I surmise that she was drunk because when she got to our house instead of slowing down to let a garbage truck pass she must have hit the gas instead of the brake. She lurched forward right into the front of the truck as it was zooming by.”
I figure this would be an excellent place for a pause and so I put one there. I look at him and wait, wondering why I am making up all these tales when there are perfectly valid truths I could be telling him; my father’s emotional rectitude (my sister’s phrase) or my mother’s actual illness. Dr. Look doesn’t say anything for a while. Then: “It must be very difficult for you to speak of these things,” he says quietly.
Nothing has changed in the room but for some reason now it seems dark, as if many hours have passed in the last minute and a half. He shifts in his chair and suddenly I’m worried that he is going to come over and try to touch me, perhaps put a hand on my shoulder, but he doesn’t.
“So then what happened?”
“With the intern? You mean after I punched her? I got her a towel and some ice. I’m totally lying,” I say. “I didn’t punch anyone.”
“I know that,” he says, “but we’re talking about your mother now. So she was killed in an accident.”
“I ran up to the car and pulled the door open and screamed loud enough to wake my dad, who was inside the house, asleep in the dark in front of the TV”—I’m not a narrative innovator in any way—“and then I grabbed her bloody hand and pulled her from the wreck, only it was too late. She died in my arms right there on our street, which was called Magic Elm Drive.”
“Your mother died in your arms?” He repeats my statement in the form of a question. “On the street in front of your house?”
I nod yes. We remain silent for a long time. Long enough for me to realize that the died-in-my-arms line was a bit too much. “Was she heavy?” he finally asks. “Your mom? What was her name?”
“She was a bit chubby, yes, as I was growing up,” I say. “The body is only a vessel, an avatar of our actual selves.”
“What I’m wondering about,” he now says, “is how at age ten you managed to pull a somewhat, as you say, chubby woman from a wrecked car, and hold her in your arms while she died.”
“I was a pretty strong kid,” I say. “I lifted weights. I worked out.”
“Alright,” he says, leaning forward. “I find it of interest that you would tell me this story.”
“You’re a shrink, yes? Isn’t this what people do?”
“I mean such a blatantly untrue story.”
“I was testing you,” I say.
“And the girl that you punched,” he goes on, “you said that she is quite attractive, is that right?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Why do you ask why I ask?”
“I don’t see what her relative attractiveness has to do with it. Because my mom was not attractive? I’m confused.”
“About?”
“Everything.”
There’s a long silence. Then he says, “Perhaps you blame yourself for your mother’s death, even though you had nothing to do with it. You blame yourself for hitting your girlfriend even though you did not hit her. And you blame yourself for hurting people at your firm even though that too is a situation you cannot control.”
“How did you know about that?” I asked him, even though I knew the answer.
“I think we’re going to have to stop for today,” he says.
“But I thought I got an hour,” I reply. This guy really had his scam going. Not that we both don’t.
“And it appears we’ve gone over,” he says, pointing at the clock on the wall, and from my prone position I crane around but can’t really read the clock since it doesn’t have any numbers and from where I am a three could easily be a six or a nine is a twelve. So I sit up and try to focus on the clock with its inane swinging cat eyes, and he’s right, somehow we have gone over, way over,
although it’s also highly possible that while I wasn’t looking he got up and moved the little hands. As I stand he passes me his business card and I take it, look at it, he has scrawled on it the time of our next appointment: tomorrow at two.
As I’m walking back to the office I realize I left the mental fitness form on his desk; this was either an oversight on my part or, now that we had begun actual therapy, perhaps he didn’t mean for me to take it. I turn onto Fifty-third and pass a falafel cart and so I stop and get a chicken shawarma. I stand there watching this protoslave slopping ash-white lettuce and tomatoes onto a slab of blanched pita, then he dumps some pieces of genetically modified chicken flesh on top of that, and then he smothers the whole thing in a thick white fatty sauce. My plan is to take it to my office and eat it there, but instead I stop about a block farther down the street and just stand there stuffing it into my mouth and chewing; I realize this is the first meal I’ve had in almost a week, I need to eat more slowly. I get about half of it down and then I stuff the remainder into my mouth and watch as goo drips down onto the curb. Then I wipe my chin with my sleeve and head back to work; within a few steps I don’t feel well. At the corner of Forty-ninth and Broadway I stop and involuntarily upchuck onto the sidewalk; what was I thinking eating this shit? I finish expectorating my Jihad Chicken and get up and stand there looking around as if vomiting on the street is something I want some fucking attention for, people, hello, look at me. Then the light changes and I cross the street toward the office; to complete the picture I take out my phone and make a call to a friend as if nothing at all could ever be out
of the ordinary. I redial the last number in my phone, which it turns out is the Magic Man, Seth Krallman, his own line of digital yoga mats coming soon, and as I’m walking south I tell him via the phone the one thing I’ve been meaning to tell him for days now, but didn’t have the chance to, and that is that I really should buy his car.