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T
ime, however, has a habituating effect that no one can escape, and after rolling into Seinstein's room every day for twelve months, spending an hour talking about himself, and then rolling back to the waiting lunch, the routine was a part of Vincent's new life and the therapist's honey-smooth voice stopped provoking him. She asked follow-up questions as if he were mentally disabled, but at this stage he knew it was about the answer, not the question, and he had to formulate the answers himself.

At her encouragement Vincent tried to take up painting again. He knew he had talent, but when she asked what had become of his paintings, he could not reply. Maybe the half-finished canvases were still up in the attic at Calle de Serrano, maybe he had thrown them out? Seinstein made sure resources were put at his disposal, but after a few weeks in front of the easel he gave up. He had nothing to communicate.

P
anda Seinstein had worked at Lakestead House for six years when Vincent was admitted to the institution. She also had a practice in Lanceheim but was only there one or two days per week. At Lakestead there was also a sense of collegiality she lacked at her own practice, and the patient base was more challenging than the stressed-out career animals she saw in the city.

Work was Seinstein's life. She recorded all her sessions, and could spend whole nights going through transcripts from patient conversations without feeling tired. She lived alone and had given up on finding a partner. She had degrees in psychology as well as literature and philosophy, but she never referred to her extensive education, because most often it frightened the patients.

She had not made the consultation rooms at either Lakestead or Lanceheim warm and cozy. There were therapists who believed in wall-to-wall carpeting, curtain arrangements, and the aroma of fresh-baked rolls. Seinstein was their opposite, preferring bare but functional furnishings.

“You often talk about Lion Rosenlind,” she observed one month in Vincent's second year at Lakestead House, when his therapy sessions had been cut back to every other day. “But I get the impression you don't know him particularly well. Why do you think he has become such an important reference point in your life?”

Vincent restrained his irritation.

“Maybe I wasn't one of Lion's closest friends,” Vincent answered defensively, “but I enjoyed his company, and I think he enjoyed mine.”

From the first day at Lakestead House, Vincent had talked about his life in the past tense. He experienced that he was in a place, mentally as well as physically, that was an end point. He had meant to take his own life, fate wanted something else, but that did not change the conditions. Vincent did not intend to return to what had been.

“Maybe I wasn't Lion's best friend,” he said, “but I didn't need to schedule a time with his secretary.”

“Do you think he was more important to you than the other way around?” Seinstein asked in a soft, gentle voice.

“Yes, but that's obvious, isn't it?” said Vincent, irritated. “Lion Rosenlind is one of this city's most influential . . . one of the richest animals alive. And I was . . . no one special. Of course I wasn't particularly important to him.”

“And why was he so important to you? Aren't such things usually mutual?”

Vincent waited with his reply. He stared at the painting on the wall, an explosion of colors and forms on which the patient could project anything from wild happiness to deep desperation, and then answered.

“I was never looking for friendship. I guess I didn't care whether I was particularly important to Rosenlind. As long as he invited me to his parties and talked to me when we met at the bar.”

“But you said you did business together? You have hinted that these were important matters?”

“He used me sometimes,” Vincent replied, shrugging his shoulders, “when none of his regular business contacts dared. On paper I was responsible for a number of different operations. I was on a number of boards that never met. I was just a name on legal documents. I didn't ask any questions. No one knew who I was. I was perfect, don't you think?”

“So he exploited you?”

“We exploited each other.”

“You exploited him by going to his parties?”

“He was a trophy, Seinstein. Don't you get it? Lion Rosenlind. All I had struggled for—”

“Struggled? I haven't had the impression that you struggled. Don't you always say that exertions aren't in your line?”

All staff members at Lakestead House wore similar slippers. They were plastic and could go in the washing machine, and over time became formless. Doctors and nurses shuffled along through the corridors in these ugly things, but no one wore them as carelessly as Dr. Seinstein. Vincent had often been on the verge of asking her to take them off during their sessions, because it irritated him that they were always about to drop off her paws.

“Revolting against life is not free,” he observed, raising his eyes. “Society is based on the idea that nothing is free. Toil now so you'll be rewarded later. Be bored in this life, you'll have fun in the next one. I guess during part of my life, the idea was to prove that's not so. That it was a device to keep us in check. If we don't have anything to believe in, what's left?”

Dr. Seinstein hummed in the manner Vincent had learned to loathe; as if she understood something he didn't understand himself.

“I thought you had decided that everything was just meaningless?” she said.

“Then you haven't been listening,” he exclaimed. “It's clear as hell that everything is meaningless. But accepting it . . . goes against the grain. My whole life has been based on looking for clues. Isn't that what knowledge is about? Can anyone really be happy with how absurd this life is? What do you think about waking up every morning your whole miserable life and feeling that nothing means anything? Never feeling anything—not for real, not in your heart, because every miserable emotion is constantly being undermined by how completely idiotic life is?”

“Do you want to feel?”

“That's obvious!” he exclaimed.

“And how do you act in order to make that happen?”

He lost the thread.

“What do you mean?”

But she did not develop the question. Instead she let it grow inside the hare until there was an answer.

“I'm taking it too far. Is that what you mean?” he asked. “A few steps too far. To start with I don't feel anything, no happiness, no satisfaction, and then I think that if I take a few more steps, a few more hours, then maybe it will happen. That applies to work. It applies to relationships. It applies to Lion Rosenlind. Is that what you mean?”

“I don't know,” Seinstein answered. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, this motivation we've been talking about, isn't that where it comes from presumably? The unwillingness to accept life's cursed meaninglessness? I mean, something makes me get up in the morning, right? Something has always made me want more. More of everything.”

“That sounds basically healthy.” Seinstein smiled.

“So I thought that if it is even more intense with Maria, if I did things with Dingo that normal stuffed animals wouldn't even dream of, then I would feel something. And the experience would be so extreme that I couldn't dismiss it?”

“And Rosenlind?”

“Rosenlind's the same thing. That's as far as you get. And I guess I thought that if I made it all the way to him and his circle then . . . I could raise myself above all the everyday stuff.”

“And did you?”

“To start with, absolutely. It was amazing. Hanging out with all those self-confident stuffed animals who were swimming in money.”

“And then?”

“I don't know. When the kick of being counted one of Lion Rosenlind's friends . . . where only the cream of the crop in the city are counted . . . when the kick subsided, because it did . . . then it was more a feeling of winning.”

“Winning?”

“Over everyone who wanted to take life seriously. If Rosenlind and I were buddies, without my having accomplished a thing, it was like the evidence that I had chosen the fastest way.”

“The fastest way to what?”

“To the goal. Everything is a race. Life is a race.”

“Do you think so?”

Vincent was silent a few moments. “I should answer no. But here I sit with you hour in and hour out, trying to understand myself better. You may wonder why, if life isn't a race.”

Dr. Seinstein made a note on her pad.

“That was fine, Vincent,” she said, looking up.

With that, the session was over for the day.

After the sessions with Dr. Seinstein, Vincent was often exhausted from suppressed confusion, anger, or despair, but because the rules required it, he forced down a little food before he rang for the nurse and asked to be rolled down to the sea.

 

Panda Seinstein's Comments 1

N
o, I can't say anything about that. No, I have never had reason to compare my patients with one another, and the thought is not an attractive one.

What would set them apart? Everything sets them apart. Everyone is unique. It would be unprofessional to have any other attitude. Each and every one has his oddities, and you will never get me to comment on different degrees of difficulty. It's a matter of experience. It's a matter of chemistry. The relationship between therapist and patient must take time to develop and find its contours. Individuals with deep wounds in their souls take longer time. Vincent Hare was, as you know, such an individual.

T
o start with? He lied. I don't think I've encountered a patient who lied the same way as Vincent Hare. Not just to me; he hardly noticed it himself. No, not in that way. It was impossible to expose him. He was a master of omission. When he retold episodes and memories, he avoided the decisive emotions, he avoided telling about viewpoints and afterthoughts, and so every story became distorted and open to interpretation. True stories were no longer true. I admit that it fascinated me. Never to be caught in a lie, even though he never gave me the truth.

Distinctive? The fear. At least the first year. He was scared to death. You don't need a degree or therapeutic experience to realize it was his father who damaged him and put that terror in him. Vincent knew that. What he possibly did not realize, and what we worked on together a great deal, was the extent of the damage, and how it influenced him in ways large and small.

What was out of the ordinary was the combination of indifference—you seldom meet stuffed animals who are so little concerned with the appreciation of others—and social competency. When he wanted to, he could charm anyone. Without needing to on a deeper level. That's very special.

 

T
oward the end of the second year Vincent could use his legs to the extent that he no longer needed help in the room. Between the bed, the chair, and the toilet he walked by himself, clumsily and with crutches, but now he knew his legs worked. He still preferred to sit in front of his open window at night and stare out at the sea, which he could not see, but heard. Sorrow and despair might attack, as they did all the time, but he fought back with the tools Dr. Seinstein had given him. More and more often it happened, however, that Vincent sank into repose with thoughts that left him restless, and there were nights when the hours until dawn passed as if time were only a friendly blink of an eye.

During the day he sought the calm at the shore. After lunch the nurses pushed the wheelchair across the grass and over toward the rocks. He asked them to place him hidden in the shadow of a small pine from where he could observe the other patients undisturbed as in twos or more they walked by the sea in the afternoon. Vincent did not long to keep them company. In the wheelchair, often with a patterned blanket on his lap so that he did not have to see the uneven shade of his legs, he felt old and used up. It was not a wholly unpleasant sensation.

N
ot long after he came to Lakestead, Vincent had noticed a bear who often walked by himself. There was something sympathetic about the bear's slightly slouched figure. His clothes were old and worn, his gaze amiably absent, but he did not seem to seek solitude in the same way as Vincent; it was more that solitude had found the bear.

One day, after more than two years at Lakestead House in a self-imposed isolation that was starting to bore him (even if he did not admit it), Vincent asked his nurse who the bear was. He got the answer that this was one of the “lifers,” in other words, one of the patients who would not leave the institution until the Chauffeurs came and fetched him. Vincent experienced this as good news. If the bear would never leave Lakestead, he was safe to talk with. (Later in the evening Vincent realized that very thought meant that for the first time he was thinking about his own time at the institution as limited.)

The next day he gave the nurse, who at lunchtime was rolling him as usual across the lawn, instructions to wait, and when the bear came walking they intercepted him on the way toward the shore.

“Excuse me,” Vincent called out. “Excuse me, my . . . my name is Vincent Hare. We don't know each other. But I've been thinking about something, and I'd like to ask your advice.”

“Yes?”

The bear had stopped, and observed the hare in a friendly way.

“I have a question about patterns,” said Vincent.

If this surprised the bear, he did not show it. He extended his paw.

“Teddy,” he introduced himself. “Patterns?”

Vincent thought a moment, and for once he was careful as he chose his words.

“I've been thinking a bit about patterns, and repetitions. I've been wondering a little about the lives of stuffed animals, and if we ever, collectively, have a chance of taking ourselves out of these patterns.”