Authors: Joan Thomas
“My parents wouldn’t let me play computer games.”
“Well, I played it a lot in high school. I had an amazing house and two kids. We all played it, all my friends. But we were all kind of getting into the environment and then suddenly we started thinking about
The Sims
– what it really was, the way it taught you to be a consumer. So then we all quit playing.”
Kajri doesn’t reply. The dorm quiets and Sylvie rolls to her side and watches the tangle of clothes she left on the floor gradually emerge from the darkness, lit up by the line of yellow light seeping in under the door. We thought we could decide who we were going to be, she thinks. We thought we could resist all that. And now, the thing is, she’s not a parent. Since she found out she’s pregnant she’s been feeling younger than she did before, as if the child she used to be is overtaking her. Thoughts she can’t quite lay hold of flicker on the edge of her mind, images just outside her memory, like outtakes of the real story. The faun crouching in the dim light of the forest, her golden eyes glowing. He’s not my brother, the faun says.
My mother found him in a Dumpster. He’s a filthy little beast. She lifts a thin arm and wipes her nose. He only has one ball, you know, she says. Sylvie leans closer to listen, sinking into a carpet of leaves.
W
hat a relief to be back in the office. No silky toss cushions here. No Mexican cut-tin figures, no chili-pepper Christmas lights, no Afghan prayer rugs made by the slender fingers of unschooled, war-traumatized children, no ornamental vases or dried flowers or alligator suitcases stacked up in urbane imitation of a side table. There is a freedom in having only what you need.
By the time Aiden set up this practice, he had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to conduct his life. The address by the park so he has a green space to run in, the two-hour break in the middle of the day. His shower and his little fridge. Purcell and Haydn and Erik Satie hanging a spotless curtain between him and the dens of commerce all around. His brave and questing clients. And his casual clinical style, with its streak of mordant humour (
mordant
from the French word for “biting,” because people in a state of unawareness need a sharp nip now and then).
Tuesday, nine o’clock. It’s Norman Orlikow’s hour, but no sign of the Badger. Aiden moves over to the couch, swings his legs up, and reads an article on self-harm and suicide among teenagers in Tonga after the introduction of television. Then he digs his nail clippers out of a tin in the bathroom cupboard and trims his fingernails, catching the clippings in a Kleenex.
Ten o’clock, Odette’s hour. He waits until 10:15, then calls her answering machine again. “Hope you got my message last week. I got yours. I heard you loud and clear. I’d like to encourage you to come in next week so we can work this out. I’ll keep your hour open until I hear back.” Then he tries Edith Wong again, still hoping for
a consult. This time she’s got an out-of-office message on. Away until January 22.
Eleven o’clock, Christine Tolefson arrives. She’s a true holiday confection, Christine, grotesque and (he would guess) very expensive, although her hair is like the hair on a cheap doll.
“I typically ask patients for a history in the second session,” Aiden says when she’s settled on the couch, legs crossed in a silver miniskirt just adequate to requirements. “So, just like you’d tell a medical doctor about the illnesses and conditions your parents and grandparents had, I’d like to know about the emotional dynamics in your family.”
She’s staring at him blankly, so he talks a little more about what this might entail. He can’t read a thing in her face. She looks different today, as if her features have been subtly rearranged. “A history,” she says finally, as though she’s prepared to deny having such a thing. Her parents were “okay” (i.e., they left her alone); she was married at eighteen. No children – her husband never wanted children. She doesn’t have a job and never really has. “My husband has money coming out his ass-end,” she says. “Well, my ex.”
“Why did the marriage end?”
“What do you think? Somebody hotter came along. Younger.”
“You met somebody younger?”
She doesn’t bother to respond, just stares out of those elaborate eyes. Over Christmas he told Liz how strangely plastic his new client’s face seemed (or how
not
plastic, in the true sense of the word) and Liz said she must be using Botox. Maybe he’ll publish a paper: “The Clinical Implications of Cosmetic Nerve Paralyzers in Assessing Emotional Affect.”
“Tell me about your relationship with your ex.”
“He’s my bank machine. He’s paying for this. He wants you to fix me up so I’ll leave him alone.”
“And what do you think needs fixing?”
She shrugs. She won’t speculate. After a while they get to Christmas, which she spent with a single girlfriend who introduced her to a computer role-playing game. She’s happy to talk about her new cyberspace incarnation. “My name is Zara Foxtrot,” she says, telling him at length how you pick a name and build your avatar. “You have to know a lot about computers. Like, even to fly properly. Because you don’t walk there, you fly. I still haven’t made it off Help Island. A lot of guys hang around Help Island cruising the newbies. There’s one guy online every time I go on. He acts like he’s really into me. Although, how do you know who he really is?”
“You’re hoping to meet a real man through this game?”
Duh!
the eyes in her frozen face say. She’s got a line of dark red drawn a few millimetres outside her natural lips. You keep this up, he wants to warn her, you’re going to look like Tammy Faye Bakker in no time.
“You know,” he says, “the end of a marriage can be a great chance to be on your own for a while. Get to know yourself better.”
She dismisses this with a little moue of her stretched-out-heart-shaped mouth.
“Christine, we all want love. We all need it. But romantic love can’t carry all the demands of life. It can’t be the only source of your happiness.” He’s back in the groove. Sort of. That last bit is word-for-word from Virginia Satir.
It’s mucky out but he dresses for his run at noon. He’s standing at a bench doing his stretches when the Badger appears on the asphalt path. Walks along turning his head from side to side with an impassive expression, as if he’s a foreman doing a routine factory inspection. As he approaches the bench he acknowledges Aiden with an unconvincing display of surprise.
Aiden wishes him a happy new year. “I was just about to drop you a line,” he says. “The window hasn’t been fixed yet because of the holiday, but the super shoved an estimate under my door. It’s $245.”
“Two hundred and forty-five dollars? That’s bullshit.”
“There’s a privacy glaze on the glass, so it’s more than it would be otherwise. I won’t bill you for this morning because I didn’t really expect you, but I think it would be fair for you to pay for the window as a condition of coming back.”
“Who says I want to come back?” Norman says sulkily.
“Just a guess,” Aiden says. “Based on your following me to the park. But suit yourself. You know where I am.”
His run is slippery and fractious. His iPod is full of melancholy crap. There’s a stink in the air – somewhere a heap of rotting factory waste is thawing. By the zoo, Aiden’s sweating like a pig. How do you dress for a temperate zone winter? He runs by the riverbank shack. Without snow on its roof, it sticks out like a sore thumb. The cops are going to notice and tear it down. The stink he’s been smelling gets worse as he goes along. The minute he gets into the narrow stretch through the trees, he realizes it’s him. It’s his shoes. It’s the fish emulsion fertilizer he spilled in the garage when he was putting the Christmas tree stand away.
He’s relieved to get back to the bridge. To see the iceberg on the other side of the river, a spectacular piece of public art sticking out of the ground like a tooth from a gum. Not that crazy iceberg blue – it’s some sort of metal, like dental amalgam. One day Defrag pointed out the obvious. “It’s a monument. For after the real icebergs are gone.”
Defrag came to Aiden with the psychiatric diagnosis of “eco-anxiety.” This is not a
DSM
-recognized diagnosis, at least not yet. It’s treated as
GAD
: generalized anxiety disorder. Defrag’s psychiatrist
explained it as under-activation of the serotonergic system and over-activation of the noradrenergic system, for which they prescribe
SSRIS
. The psychiatrist was Peter Saurette, a man Aiden likes and admires. He first encountered Saurette at a professional conference, early in his training. A small man, homely and very attractive. He had a natural gravitas, a considered way of speaking that made Aiden want to listen to every word. Aiden used to fantasize about being his patient, opening up the murky depths to that revealing and judicious gaze. Of course, when they started consulting on a professional basis, Aiden discovered that the fifty-minute appointment was a thing of the past for Saurette; his patients dropped in at the rate of four an hour to get their prescriptions tweaked, and their counselling, if they got any, happened somewhere else.
“I’m struck by how aware and engaged with the world Jake is,” Aiden said to Saurette on the phone. “He’s one of the most conscious individuals in my acquaintance. And let’s be frank – what informed person isn’t anxious these days?”
“Suicidal ideation is not the hallmark of a healthy individual.”
“No, of course. But still,” Aiden couldn’t resist adding, “I don’t suppose we’d diagnose tornado anxiety in someone watching a funnel cloud move in his direction.”
“Well, that’s the standard line of the so-called green bloggers,” Saurette said.
Aiden deserved that. He had actually lifted the tornado argument from a blog. He tries not to hold his embarrassment in that moment against Peter Saurette. He can only assume that, for his part, the guy feels diminished. At one time he led people along the path to self-knowledge; he watched with knowing eyes while they confronted their terror and loss and the spectres of their parents. He was once a shaman of the underworld. And then, Aiden thinks as
he rides the elevator up to his office, Doctor Peter Saurette became an agent for Big Pharma.
Defrag, when he comes in, does not look well. Aiden can read the signs: his cautious movements, as if he’s trying to fend off nausea. “Sorry about the last session,” he says. “Bill me anyway.”
“I intend to,” Aiden says. “So, what was up?”
“I was a little under the weather.” Defrag sits with his hands dangling between his knees. “Under the weather.” He repeats the phrase thoughtfully. He looks thinner than ever. He lives on air.
“Are you eating?” Aiden asks.
“I’m eating.”
“What did you eat this morning?”
“I ate a bowl of oats.” He looks like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Aiden always thinks: a long, keen face and dark eyes, a hank of dark hair.
Counter, original, spare, strange
.
“Not bad,” Aiden says. “Tell me about the day you missed your session. What happened?”
“I went to work,” Defrag says. “But I couldn’t work. And then I went home.”
“Some days it’s not even worth chewing through the restraints,” Aiden says, and Defrag grins, recognizing the reference. When he first came to therapy, he’d have these bad days periodically, like waking up with the flu, and he could never pinpoint a cause. For weeks he’d live an ordinary, productive, middle-class life, and then suddenly he’d be too sick to move. He’d lie curled up in bed, dizzy, panicked, disoriented, as though his inner ear was out of whack. For no reason at all. They don’t bother with that narrative anymore.
“What did you read that morning?” Aiden asks.
“I guess it was reports on the
UN
climate summit,” Defrag says.
“I missed them,” Aiden says.
“Yeah, well, they were on page eight.” Defrag laughs.
“So what went down?”
Defrag tells him. He outlines the whole thing passionately and efficiently – he’s clearly gone over it a thousand times in his mind. Aiden, listening, is ashamed. Unevolved people in power, he thinks.
We’re all bozos on this bus
. He deals with it himself by not staying up on the news, but Defrag has never cultivated the protective layers that most people count on.
Defrag’s previous counsellor (an
MSW
Saurette referred Defrag to) gave him a relaxation
CD
of birdsong. Brain-imaging technology has shown that birdsong promotes a sense of well-being, she explained. It’s evolutionary: if the birds are singing, no predators are prowling the forest. Defrag lay on his bed and identified the silvery scraps of song in his headphones. The Acadian flycatcher – endangered. The black-capped vireo – endangered. Kirtland’s warbler – only two hundred left. “Maybe you’d do better with whale music,” the counsellor said when he brought back the
CD
. Laughter shook Defrag when he told Aiden. His chest is a cage full of unruly laughs just dying to get out.
“Who do you talk to about the things that worry you?” Aiden asked at the time. “Among your friends. Your colleagues at work.”
“Nobody wants to talk about it. Why would they?”
“I have this sort of issue with my wife,” Aiden said. “When I mention climate change, she says, ‘Please. You think the gods are punishing you personally?’ ”
He rarely mentions his family in this office, but with Defrag, establishing trust was huge. Aiden found himself encouraging a kind of double thinking that would let Defrag acknowledge and process his fears while still finding ways to live a reasonably contented life. “As if” thinking, you might call it: live as if catastrophe is not just around the corner. Most people are extremely good at this. He also encouraged Defrag to join a group of like-minded
individuals, an environmental lobby group, but it was all kids and he couldn’t deal with it.
Frankly, Aiden is as close to a like-minded individual as Jake Peloquin is likely to find. “One organism, one vote,” Aiden said during a session early on, and Defrag’s expression sharpened. A couple of minutes later, Defrag dropped in “Clone me, Doctor Memory.” Aiden hadn’t run into anyone who knew Firesign Theatre since his buddy Glen died – it was like a Masonic handshake. They’ve never acknowledged it; they just drop a line now and then. It’s the sort of humour you need headphones and a thousand wasted nights to get into.