…-he took her seriously and talked to her as he would to a grown-up person. To ask his advice about a damaged rabbit and to discuss it with him would be very grown-up.
“So how are you?” Laura. Kayla. You wouldn’t believe me.
“I’ve lied to you.”
“Why?”
“Because there are things I can’t tell you.” There are things I can’t tell you, that I don’t have time to tell you, but I’ve never lied to you. Except for right now. Sometimes, my thoughts come out twisted in speech and lose their context, but that’s not lying. Other times, the truth is spoken when it should have been left hidden in silence. So I tell you I lie to protect myself from the things I could say that might lower your opinion of me.
“I hope you don’t feel you have to censor yourself here.”
“I do.”
“You do what?”
“I do have to censor myself here.”
“You certainly don’t have to on my account.” That’s exactly why I have to. Because you don’t care what I say. Nothing I will ever say will have an impact on you and I can’t stand to see my thoughts, my feelings, dissolved by your indifference. “So what would you like to talk about?”
“I can’t remember if I’ve been eating enough. I know I ate, but I don’t know how much everyday. Time goes so quick. I can’t catch up. It’s too fast. And I forget.”
“What do you eat in a typical day?”
“Coffee. Peanut butter.”
“That’s all?” There is kindness in your voice.
“Sometimes potatoes.”
“Why such a limited diet?”
“Limited culinary skills. And limited funds.” And limited appetite.
“Even a person who can’t cook a meal can prepare a bowl of cereal for breakfast.” I can’t. Besides, I usually sleep past breakfast.
“That’s a good idea. But I told you, I forget.”
“You forget to eat?”
“Yes. And I forget what food is. I walk around the grocery store and I don’t comprehend that all the products laid out before me are edible, so I leave.”
“You must get hungry.”
“No. That’s why I forget to eat. There’s nothing to remind me.”
“Then maybe you need to set some reminders for yourself, like an alarm that goes off three times a day as an indicator that it is time for a meal.” Like Pavlov’s dogs. “It would be a sort of Pavlov experiment on the human digestive system. Eventually, you won’t even need the alarm, your body will respond naturally. In order for it to work effectively though, you need to have the alarm set at the same time for each meal and you have to eat something each time the alarm goes off.” I close my eyes and let the sound of your voice roll over me, not hearing the words, only the gentle rhythm as your vocal cords contract and release. Your voice is pale yellow, with specks and lines of dark green interwoven. Your voice reminds me of unwatered grass, drying in the blazing heat of the sun.
“I don’t have an alarm clock.” I open my eyes again because you have stopped speaking.
“You don’t have a clock?”
“No.” The fact that I don’t have a timepiece in my house can’t be that unusual.
“How do you get up in the morning?”
“When I had to get up in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“I used my cell phone.”
“So use that.”
“Except I hardly ever use my phone. It’s not like anyone is calling me. Sometimes I forget to turn it on for days.”
“What about a little clock like this one?” You reach into one of your desk drawers and retrieve a small, grey travel clock. You move your chair closer to mine to properly exhibit all the functions of the timepiece. I’m wondering how many clocks you could need in one office; there are already two on display, one facing me and the other facing you. “This one is probably fancier than you need. It’s linked by satellite to an atomic clock so that it always displays the correct time, even if you change time zones.” You are so close. Both of our hands our on the little clock, our fingers separated by mere centimetres. I could sit like this all day, listening, watching you proudly showing off the different functions of the buttons. Your simple enthusiasm is a light reprieve from my own confusion. “It even has a light. Though I don’t think you should be waking yourself in the middle of the night to eat. But it would be useful for winter mornings.” Now that you’ve surfaced from your prideful display of your toy, you are retreating from me, re-establishing the three foot barrier of air between us.
“Lights startle me.”
“You don’t have to use the light.” If I buy a clock, will you like me? Will you like me because I remind you of yourself? If I become you, what will happen when I falter and you see the real ugliness that I am? It might be safer to not eat. You’re waiting for me to talk. There isn’t enough time.
“It’s too late.”
“Too late?”
“It’s too late to start another conversation.” You will only ask me to leave in the middle of it, happy to be rid of me and the obligation of listening.
“We still have eight minutes.”
“I know.” I know exactly how many minutes are left during every minute of these sessions.
“How are you finding your medications?”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“No. I just like to check in every once and a while.”
“I guess they’re ok. I thought they were helping, but I don’t seem to be getting any better.”
“What do you think about increasing the dosage?” I don’t think anything about it. You’re the doctor.
“Sure. But I don’t think it will help.”
“I could also prescribe lithium which is used as a mood stabiliser and as an augmentation to anti-depressant therapy.”
“Fine.” I’m not depressed.
“Here you go then,” you hand me the prescription, a tiny piece of white paper that will deliver me from my insanity. You still handwrite your prescriptions. I like that. It’s classic. Though, your penmanship looks forced, like you were concentrating very hard on making the letters. Maybe you had a learning disability when you were younger. “It looks like we need to stop for now.”
“The rabbit is gone.”
“Excuse me.”
“There used to be a rabbit in here. A white rabbit, with long floppy ears. I found it amusing that a psychiatrist would have a white rabbit in his office.” You laugh a trivial laugh at my observation probably wondering how you missed something so obvious yourself. Are you paying attention at all?
“Maybe I should bring it back.” You missed the point. The rabbit will never return. Your whole sentence is dispassionate, in both words and delivery. If that weren’t convincing enough on its own, there are the worn shoes and unpainted wall to exemplify the noncommittal quality of your character. But I want to be wrong. I want to walk through the door next week and see the rabbit sitting contentedly on top of the filing cabinet, a guardian to the souls buried there. I want to know that this exception of a person sitting across from me is capable of enacting the potential I see in him. I need you to.
“Maybe.” You open the door to show me out. It feels less chivalrous on the way out than on the way in, as if you want me to leave.
“Have a good week.”
“Thanks.”
……….
I haven’t been at the top of my game lately. I drove drunk. Last night, at a school acquaintance’s (not a friend’s) end of semester party, I began to feel lonesome and decided his house was not where I wanted to be. This occurred sometime around four in the morning when almost everybody else had left and the host had gone to bed. Frank came out of his bedroom to make sure I was ok to drive. I wasn’t, but I convinced him I had only had three beers when it was probably closer to six. I can handle my liquor, but that many are going to make a dent, even in me.
He gave me a hug goodbye and I fought back the tears that threatened to pour out at such a kindness. I hardly knew him. Mostly, I ignored my colleagues, working on a speak-only-when-spoken-to agenda.
As soon as I walked out the door, though, the crying started. It was fierce, as if I had found out that someone I loved had been brutally mauled to death by a grizzly bear and they were still trying to locate all the pieces of his dismembered body. I cried all the way to my car and while driving. However, I forced myself stop crying when I passed a police car on the side of the road as I didn’t think I was sober enough to drive and cry at the same time.
When I arrived home, I didn’t go straight to bed like I was expecting. Instead I went to the bathroom to relieve myself of the large number of beer filling my bladder. I washed my hands, avoiding my reflection in the mirror above me. I dried my hands. Then my hand reached out, without consulting me, and found the razor sitting above the sink.
I didn’t try to cry. I didn’t try to stop it. I was exhausted and already familiar with the new routine. I wouldn’t win even if I did try to stop it. It was easier to submit. There was no pain, no sensation at all, when the razor broke through my skin.
I was lying on my side on the bathmat, crying now that the cutting was over and I had been returned to my damaged body. I saw the white piles of cotton of the bathmat as though they were bleached blades of grass. I saw the light in the other room, shimmering mythically, through my tears. I saw my body, pieces of my body – fingers, a wrist, part of a knee – not moving and this calmed me.
I stopped crying and relished the peace I had been delivered into. If this was to be my death, I could not have imagined it more halcyonic. My breath slowed, my eyes closed and I let myself slip away into what I hoped would be oblivion.
It was naïve to think the wound was lethal. I didn’t die, I wasn’t anywhere near death. But it did relax me enough to put me to sleep.
Laura didn’t want to wake me, now that I was finally asleep. She sat on the bathmat next to me and held my head in her lap, her attention completely fixed on me. But it was time to take my meds, one of the red pills to help drive the sadness from my brain and one of the blue pills to induce unconsciousness. I didn’t understand why blue-pill-sleep was better than beer-sleep or razor-sleep, but it was Laura and I wasn’t going to question her.
Only, when I woke to take the pills, I began crying again, more intensely than previously. I still had the razor in my hand. “Give me the razor,” Laura gently demanded. I wanted to hold something real, to touch something, to feel my body and know that I existed. The razor promised me these things and I was reluctant to relinquish that gratification, even to Laura. “I can’t take it from you,” she said, “You have to give it to me.” So I did. Because I was too tired and confused to decipher what was best for me, I let her decide. There was no reason to believe she didn’t have my best interests in her pretty, red heart pumping life and beauty through the rest of her body.
“I’m going to put you to bed now, but I need your help,” Laura said as she pulled off my socks, my own body immobilised by the invasion of shadows in my mind. “I’m going to take care of you. I’m right here.” I used her voice as an anchor to keep me from being pulled into that unrelenting darkness. Then I cried at the relief of knowing I wouldn’t be left alone, even if she couldn’t make the shadows go away.
Laura removed my jeans, tank top, bra, and underwear. She pulled a clean pair of underwear from the dresser and pulled them up my legs and then dressed me in a pair of cotton pants and t-shirt to sleep in. She pulled the blanket up to my chin and carefully lifted my head so she could move the pillow underneath it. When she had finished making me comfortable, she crawled in underneath the covers with me her head resting on top of my shoulder and her arm lying across my stomach. I could feel the weight of her extremity pressing against my breath. Tangible.
I was dizzy when I woke in the morning. My left side was weak and numb giving me a slight limp, a side effect of blue-pill-sleep. After eating my breakfast of toast and peanut butter and coffee, proud of myself for remembering to eat, I looked at the clock on my phone and realised it was already one in the afternoon. I hadn’t even done anything and the day was practically over. The laundry pile in the corner of the bathroom over-filled the black plastic basket, but I knew it wouldn’t get washed that day. There were still at least three pairs of clean underwear left in the dresser, plus my emergency underwear, which is what I called the pink thong I detested wearing but meant I could extend not going to the laundromat for another day.
I hate the laundromat. Among the numerous ways I waste my days, my life, laundry day always is by far the most tormenting. If I could afford to, I would have someone pick up my dirty laundry each week and bring it back clean and folded without me ever having to endure fighting the welfare moms with their six kids and thirty loads of laundry for a washing machine.
It was for that reason, the laundromat being crowded, that I began washing my laundry on weekdays when most regular people were at work. Still, the florescent lights gave the room a surreal feeling, like I’m sleeping but not resting, and it wearies me quickly. I’ve tried to fight the weariness with caffeine, but all that does is accentuate my awareness of the waving air and increase my nausea from watching the machines turn circles of fabric and colours and soap over and over and over.
I also tried going at different times of the day, thinking if I left the house before my daily confusion and hazed reality set in, I would not only succeed in washing my laundry without ill effects, but I might also make it through the rest of the day without encountering any trouble. It didn’t work. The confusion and haziness only began earlier and I had a longer day of it to endure.
I tried going in the afternoon, when I was emotionally numb, usually after a nap. That didn’t work either. Instead, it roused me from my comfortable lethargy into a world of bright lights, loud noises, and malodorous people.
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