There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvellous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.
“So how are you?” Sarah Caldwell. You write my name at the top of the page. I don’t remember you ever asking my name. Of course, you didn’t need to. It was given to you by the other doctor. Still, there’s a social protocol to be followed. For that matter, you never offered your name either. But it’s there, typed in big, pretty letters, on the diploma in its generic, collegiate, thin, black frame on the wall.
“Fine, I guess.” A child has been here. There is a small, blue, plastic chair decorated with a sticker of a puerile bear holding a handful of colourful balloons in the corner of the office. And perched on top of the filing cabinet is an aged, stuffed white rabbit with large floppy ears. The chair looks too small for a child and the rabbit looks too large. Sad. Children should not be subjected to this kind of torment, forced to live in a world where nothing fits. I imagine you are excitedly proficient in your relations with children. There is a comforting, paternal softness to your voice and in your facial features. I wonder if you will be as caring with me as you are with the child, or if the only person I will be permitted to meet will be the one who didn’t ask my name, didn’t offer his, and didn’t shake my hand.
“How did you feel about the last session?” I’m wondering why I came back, when I will be asked to leave, and not really expecting you will be able to help me.
“It was kind of a waste.” Your sharply outlined cheek bones and long, thin nose are features of a face that probably took you the better part of your youth to grow into. And now it doesn’t matter what you look like. Or so says the ring on your finger.
“Why’s that?”
“We didn’t really talk about much.” Everything about you looks deteriorated. Your plain gold wedding band is not as shiny as it should be when representing eternal love and happiness. Your cheap black shoes are scuffed along the toes as though you have being wearing the same shoes for years. Your hair has been left uncut two weeks too long. The pink paint on your office walls is faded and there is a lighter pink rectangle where a picture used to hang, but its shape doesn’t match the two motel prints of flowers hanging on the other walls. Or rather, there is one print is hanging on one wall. The other hasn’t been given the privilege of being nailed to thin drywall. Water-coloured flowers in a brass frame, again without any self-respecting sheen, only ever received enough attention to be placed on a three-drawer laminate filing cabinet, a mausoleum where documented lives lay buried and forgotten.
“What is it you would like to talk about?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see the point.”
“The point of what?”
“Of talking.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it’s not going to change anything. This is just what I am.” I watched the words forming in my head as if made by some machine. Every sentence is a cliché and there is no way to stop it. This is what I have been reduced to. I would fight it, but all that seems to do is make the machine choosing my words work more efficiently.
“On the contrary, I believe active participation in discussion is the most effective way to bring about change and that even the most apparently static situations are actually quite dynamic. You can think of it as trying to view all the little molecules in a piece of wood. The piece of wood doesn’t look like it’s moving anywhere, maybe it’s even nailed down to something, but when you more closely examine its character with a microscope, you are able to visualise the activity of all the molecules as the vibrate and move around.” The best electron microscopes require the size of the sample to be small, so you would have to remove a piece of the wood in order to view it, but by doing so you are thereby changing the original character of the wood. Maybe that’s your point. So which piece of me needs to be removed?
“I don’t have a microscope.”
“You can borrow mine.”
“You wear glasses.”
“Yes, I do.”
“So maybe you will see me wrong. How can I trust the version of me seen by you is accurate?”
“The microscope comes fully loaded with both coarse and fine focus knobs so that you can adjust the image to your eyes.” How can I trust the version of me seen by me is accurate?
“But if you leave me in control of the focus, then all I will see is what I already see and since you said my vision is impaired, and yours can’t be trusted, any data that is collected will be inconclusive because it was obtained subjectively.” I am very, very confused. Here I am sitting in the corner of this tiny, poorly lit office in my torn jeans and baggy t-shirt picking at the fabric on the arm of the chair becoming increasingly agitated. You can’t see it. You can’t see that the walls of the corner where you have placed the chair I am sitting in are pushing in. There’s something wrong with the air in here. I want out. The black, digital clock on the edge of your desk deliberately facing me says we are not even half way through the session. I could leave. You wouldn’t stop me. No. I have to be normal, look normal. I have to sit in the chair and endure the anxiety.
“Is subjective data not adequate for the task at hand?”
“Not if I’m the one in charge of interpreting it. It doesn’t matter what I see, or how many different variations I see, the result will be the same.”
“What result is that?” How do you tell someone that everything around you makes you want to die? The confusion of this predicament has stilled my hands, which have wandered away from the chair to the wall, testing its solidity.
“I want to die.” Huh. I said it. Such simple words said so simply. But I don’t understand what they mean.
“Why do you want to die?” I’m addicted to romance. Death can offer me an eternity of it.
“I don’t see any alternative. When I was younger, I thought that by the time I reached this age things would have changed.”
“Remind me again how old you are.” Remind. If you would just admit you are ignorant, we could get through the mundane details more quickly.
“Twenty-six.”
“What things did you think would have changed?”
“I thought I would grow into wanting life.”
“When did you first begin contemplating suicide?”
“I guess I was about sixteen when I had my first true suicidal thoughts. I used to lie on my bed holding a pair of scissors over my chest trying to summon the will to stab myself. When I was twelve, before I had developed a concept of suicide, I would wish to be in a coma or, failing that, develop amnesia. At least by the time I was six, I was already trying to erase my memory.”
“Lifelong depressions can be challenging to overcome as they are often regarded as the normal state of being. Often times, a person will overcome their depression and not recognize what lies beneath and so, out of habit or fear, resume the depression. This is especially true when a child has been traumatized at an early age. Lacking any other comfort or coping ability, the depression becomes a type of security.”
“That would make sense. Only I think I wanted to die even before there was any abuse. I was supposed to die. When I was born my mother had a post-partum haemorrhage and the doctors couldn’t stop the bleeding. I was supposed to be a twin.” My sister died and I lived, but I would have preferred it the other way around. Or, at least, we could have died together.
“You’ve had a close relationship with death from an extremely early age then.” Not so early. I was never supposed to be a twin. At least I don’t think so. But I like the story.
“When I was little, maybe four, our neighbour shot herself in the head with her boyfriend’s handgun. I wasn’t allowed to leave the house and even though I didn’t understand what was happening, I moved from room to room trying to see…something. There was no mortification, I don’t even know if I was curious, but there was a dead body and I wanted to see it.” That night, after my parents had gone to bed, I changed out of my night clothes into some of my play clothes. The neighbour’s house was the one beside us, on the left. Afraid my parents would hear me sneaking out, I walked through the house barefoot. It occurred to me that once I was outside, I could put my shoes on, but I would have had to open the creaky closet door and I also didn’t want to wear dirty shoes in the neighbour’s house lest I leave evidence of my presence. I crawled into their house through one of the low basement windows which had been left open a crack. There was a piece of wood on the other side, put there to prevent people from opening the window from the outside, but my arm was small enough to easily fit through the opening and knock the piece of wood out of its position. I didn’t know what I was looking for or what I might find, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. They had a normal house, like ours. I wondered if all people disappeared like this, without evidence, when they die.
“It’s normal for a child to be interested in such things, especially when there is a lot of excited commotion, which I imagine there was in such a situation.”
“Other kids always told me I wasn’t normal.”
“What were you’re friendships like growing up?”
“I didn’t really have any friends. There were people I pretended to be friends with because I was forced to by circumstance.”
“Do you know why you didn’t have any close friendships?”
“I never felt that I belonged. Kids would make fun of me and I didn’t understand what it was they saw in me that they found so repelling. Maybe they could tell something was wrong with me.” If I could, during lunch breaks at school, I would pretend I was sick so I wouldn’t have to go outside. I found the motion and the noise of the other kids playing discomforting. If I did have to go out I would play or sit by myself, away from the other children.
“How did you get along academically?”
“I liked learning, but school bored me.”
“What about school bored you?”
“The subject matter I guess. It was too easy and too slow.”
“What subjects did you enjoy?”
“In one of the classes, there were these different stations set up – science, math, painting and the like. The other kids would all be fighting over paints or toys, but I spent most of my time at the math station. I did like the idea of the reading station, but the books there were too simple and boring. ”
“What type of books did you enjoy?”
“I don’t remember. There was a novel about a girl and her brother who was murdered and scalped. I think that might have been the first true sadness I felt. I would also read Shakespeare, but I was really just reading the words, I had no comprehension of what the story was about, except for the end of Romeo and Juliet.”
“It is a young age for early English poetry. When did you learn to read?”
“I don’t think I remember learning to read. I do remember sitting with a book practicing for homework, but that was later in life. I do remember doing math though. I think I was about four when I started learning algebra.”
“You’re obviously quite intelligent.” If I was intelligent, I wouldn’t be failing all of my classes. However, I like that you said it and since I know if I open my mouth nothing gracious will come out, I keep it shut. “Well, I think we need to stop for today. If this time is good for you, I can book you for the next couple of months.”
“Fine.” I might as well come. It’s not like I’m doing much of anything else.
“Have a good week.”
“Thanks.”
……….
Work, as school, has become increasingly difficult. As a student researcher in the mathematics department, not a lot was expected of me. This, combined with my previous energy and commitment to work has allowed me to pass through the past couple of months without my incompetence being noticed. This last week has shown a further decrease in my productivity, zero productivity to be precise. Fortunately, the majority of my work is done on a computer and since I sit in a corner of the office where three other student researchers work, it’s easy enough to pass off random Googling (follow the links to see where they go) and daydreaming as legitimate work.
My supervisor has only come into the office once during the semester so I don’t need to worry about him unexpectedly dropping by while I’m playing Kitten War on the internet. However, he has noticed the decrease in output of my work. Since I had been progressing so rapidly with the project, it was expected that I would have been able to have it completed, and then some, by the end of the term so that it could be sent out for publishing. This was to be the project that was going to guarantee me a place in graduate school.
But the term has already ended. The project won’t be completed. I should be studying for the one class I haven’t dropped out of, but instead I’m staring at a computer screen pretending I’m a gun-toting, dagger-throwing bunny hunting other forest creatures, hoping that this will be the day I remember how to take the integral of a natural logarithm. It’s something I’ve done a thousand times. The answer is there, in my head somewhere, buried.
When I grow bored of looking at pictures posted on the internet of people dressing their cats up as ninjas, I can stare out the window I sit next to watching the people outside move constantly, and silently, by.
Or, I watch the people around me when they’re too busy to notice they are being observed. I see the bodies of people, not the people themselves, around me. Concentrating. Checking. Discussing. Reporting. Communicating. Recording. Thinking. I view their bodies in pieces. A foot with its heel slightly lifted off the floor. A knee bent and crossed behind the opposite leg, leaning in for support. It all appears so familiar, to the point where I can’t distinguish myself from the tall, lanky, balding researcher dressed in putrid shades of brown. Watching the others, it’s like watching myself in a dream. The essence is familiar, but the body is foreign. I hear their unspoken thoughts, retorts to unappreciated comments, criticisms of their coworkers. Secrets. Silent. Dismissed. Forgotten. Repeated.
Today was the official last day of my employment in academia. There would be no publication and there would no graduate school. There would be no post-doctoral work and no professorship at any university. My whole life had revolved around math. Now, in one year, that life has been stolen from me. Although it doesn’t quite feel like it’s been stolen. It’s more like I came upon this life by accident, like finding a quarter on the sidewalk. I lived it for a while, but the money was spent too easily, too frivolously, and now it’s gone. It’s something I knew had to happen sooner or later. I was smart, but never smart enough to be smart professionally, despite what my colleagues insisted was above average intelligence. So, to celebrate my release from becoming institutionalised by the politics of academia, I treated myself to dinner.
There was a restaurant near my house, a lively sort of place where people dressed up in their week-end clothes and drank wine with their friends. Sitting alone at my small table in a corner of the restaurant, pleasantly lit with a single candle, I didn’t quite fit in with the social atmosphere. Groups of people had pushed tables together to make more room for more friends and more wine and more food.
I tried to sit politely in my chair, nervously fingering the edge of the red tablecloth, but everything was painfully loud. The sound of a fork against a plate from across the room, people talking and laughing, glasses clinking, shoes walking. It was overwhelming. There was a woman sitting near the end of a long rectangular table. She had short, almost boy-cut, white blonde hair which, given that she was in her forties, looked awkward enough, but contrasted with the red wine she brought to her red lips, was nauseating.
I took a big drink of my beer to try and soften the cacophony, but it only kept growing louder and I grew increasingly nervous in my chair, switching my legs, left over right, right over left, left over right.
When the bread arrived, I concentrated on spreading the butter, a simple task that should have required no thought or effort. Focusing on the shaking knife in my right hand, I held the small slice of soft, white bread in the palm of my left. I had to press hard, despite the butter being soft, to keep my hands from shaking during the process. The bread fell awkwardly from my hand twice, butter side down both times. So I gave up and instead took to tearing the piece of bread, and then the white paper napkin into little bits.
When the waiter came by to take my order, I asked him if he could turn up the music, hoping one singular noise would drown out the erratic and disorienting clamour of people. He looked confused by this request, but obliged. But the noise didn’t subside. My head became overfilled with the maelstrom. Seeking relief, I excused myself (do you need an excuse to leave the table when you’re dining alone?) to the washroom.
There were two empty stalls. I chose the larger of the two, locking the door behind me. I crouched down, leaning against the wall and cried, a painful sob trying to force the noise I could still hear being filtered through the bathroom walls out of my mind through my tears. Sounds carried like tiny vessels on the ocean of my tears.
But there were too many sounds, and not enough tears, so the noise multiplied profusely and became jammed behind my forehead. I banged my head against the wall in an attempt to dislodge them. It was working too, but then someone else walked into the washroom. Not wanting to draw negative attention to myself and risk the threat of hospitalisation I had already avoided once, I flushed the toilet and washed my hands.
However, upon returning to my table I found myself unable to withstand any more of the tormentful sonances. I quickly paid my bill, leaving the dinner that had arrived at my table while I was in the washroom uneaten, and began the walk home.
What should have been a peaceful walk on a mild evening along tree-lined streets was tortuous. Even outside the restaurant, the voices of the people were still in my head and instead of growing quieter as the distance between me and the restaurant was increased, they grew louder. They also grew in number, reproducing at an expeditive speed, like rabbits mating in the spring-time. The voices became indistinguishable until they weren’t even voices anymore, just unorganised noise.
Once I arrived home, I headed straight for the medicine cabinet, avoiding my reflection in the mirror as I reached in for a leftover prescription of codeine from a friend’s surgery. By this time, I had given up on trying to quiet the noise, so instead I got high in an attempt to push myself over the edge and completely loosen the psychosis. I wanted to hear what the voices had to say, to discover how bad it would be if I let myself go.
I was terrified, at first, that the voices now taking up residence in my brain would overthrow me and that I would wind up in a convulsing, drooling mess on the floor. Fortunately, the codeine calmed my body, if not my mind.
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