Lake Shore Drive
1
AM I GOING TO GET BETTER?
It was thirteen years ago now, and for better or worse I know that I was wrong when I thought that I'd never forget it. I remember a great number of the details, and I'm close to certain that if it came to my having to endure it again, I wouldn't be able to--that because of what happened before, I somehow this time would disappear. It stays with me that much. But I don't live now in the real authority of the experience. I can recount the number of days spent in Wilmette's Gillson Park, along Lake Michigan, and the few times that the friendly, good lake air, insulating, was enough to stop for maybe five precious minutes my otherwise unstoppable fear--stop it and answer my prayer, which was also at that time unstoppable. But I'm not scared now, and I don't pray. And if I went down now to the park and the harbor, I'd just grow sleepy, nod off, as the wide sky, water, land--the colors and shifts--all came soon enough to mean nothing, or almost nothing. I wouldn't, as then, stay so worriedly and yet so quietly watching and hopeful.
But I do hope now that I can sufficiently fight off sleep(twin brother of death) and get down some of the details of it. And I hope I can force to life now some simulacrum of an old prayer, which might provide enough force to get out some simulacrum of a once-true story, the one that thirteen years ago I was certain would live with me forever, but which, in the most vital sense, I have now forgotten.
In the fall of '72, when we'd decided finally to call Vietnam, that strange bullet hole in our nation's history, a hole period and forget it (and though I was twenty-four and hated the war with the complete intensity of my age and of that time, I didn't know about this ending), I had reached a point of absolute crisis. I went to a longtime friend of mine, Johnny Lemaster, and confessed to him the truth: I was next to completely frightened--all of the time--over nothing. It very nearly killed me to have to go to Lemaster, but, all other questions over, I had to have a name, and he could give it to me. He was a medical student, and he knew physicians. I was sure he had answers. If I hadn't been, my position would have been even more unspeakably doubtful. Or more exactly--without a confident reverence for medical, scientific authoritativeness, I would have died, and under very strange stars.
The name I got was Dr. Alexander Conlon. A world-conqueror? An Irishman like me?
"He's the best there is," said Johnny, "and he knows right where you're comin' from."
So both, I hoped. But immediately I felt far too sick to dwell on this doctor's good name or fame. To the extent that he was like me, I was that much sicker; and immediately the mere thought of world-conquest, which did keep sounding in me, if as subtly as Pythagorean dream-music, kept making me shrink to a kind of geometric near-zero. I was afraid to look out and see if I had even an inch of life, afraid I didn't, or that if I did and looked, I wouldn't any longer. Worst of all--and this could not be spoken, any more than I or anyone else can die in a dream--this doctor, this Delphic Oracle, was my single, last hope. So it was just barely possible to think, even for a short length of time, of the first hour appointment.
Also I had absolutely to prevent his finding me insufficientlyestranged, freaked out, and his not taking me in. Or our spending even a single hour on the wrong things, or my forgetting a key point. So I actually found the strength to write out a rather lengthy statement; and I took extreme care with my history, though I couldn't believe, past a point, in what I was saying. For the most part I had just to drift into that location of myself at the right place at the right time, and could make no statements at all, nor even think at all about the one I'd made.
But among the things that most helped me in that drift--although I could not admit this to myself--were that Johnny Lemaster was every bit as much my enemy as my old friend and that science was as much my goddamned despair as my hope. It was so good to feel somehow that I might not hear what I wanted to hear--for when you're all but completely lost, the last things you want are your own directions or any slight suspicions that, in hope, you're fabricating your own story of salvation. Just plainly calling a hole a hole is a beauteous humble service to what is known as honesty. But I remember the praying too, the murmuring in a nearly total silence, and the looking out from inside my possible inch of life, with next to completely shut eyes, for a friendly sign.
"Peter Roche?" I nodded yes as I entered the office, which was a foursquare box, lit now only by window light coming from above and behind the doctor, who was seated beside a desk, casting a shadow on the floor before him. I looked away. The beige wall paint wasn't the right color for the time, but it was clean even at the light switch and blended with the off-white cloth of the drapes. I could perform normally enough in the moment, making quietly sure that the door clicked shut between me and the other outcast in the waiting room, a girl, who would never look up, just as I would never look back. Then, neither pious nor impious, but exactly in between, as I had to be, I took up my position before him in a chair which awaited me. Then I looked out and saw that he wasn't an athlete, but that he also appeared to be no madman. For an instant, though, I lost all balance and began praying as I never had before, almost vocally begging God, a name I could neverreally call on if I was to live, that this man here would be powerful and fast enough to prevent whatever was coming--that he had the right arm and hand, even teeth, for all hell's fiends, a number of whom, at night, were advancing on me the second that I closed my eyes.
And I can still very neatly date this crisis of hope: October 17, 1972, one day after the one-year anniversary of my father's death. Back then, however, I didn't like these dates. Birth and death were two things that I had always, it seemed every second, to deny.
"Our friend John Lemaster tells me you've got a few troubles."
"Yes I do." But he was decidedly not impressive, this "best," with a body not really overweight, yet loose-fleshed, soft in the belly, and light brown hair maybe too thin to show all the advance of gray. He wore a very pale blue dress shirt with a flattened open collar, and his eyes and skin lacked color as he sat in the dim light before his window, twenty-nine stories high in the air.
He wasn't much older then than I am now, maybe forty to my present thirty-seven. I haven't the slightest idea of what's happened to him. I don't know what, in the eleven years since I've seen him, he's come to look like. But I believe that I could take it if I heard now that he'd had his troubles, even if such news might erase, in some unknowable measure, the eleven years of distance now and bring me back into the hole myself, to some extent.
But I don't mean coming all the way back again to that actual hushed zero-hour, only details of which remain, when in that small room the two of us began our quiet offensive against total fear. This remains impossible, or incompatible with life, as far as I can tell; and if anything had been really wrong with him then, and I could have seen it, I'd have had no capacity even for any defensive stratagem or even the slightest lamentation. Somehow along a darkening road I had come to utter helplessness, and he was there before me--the last sign of hope. But again I cannot in the fullest sense remember what this was.
"Do you want to tell me about it?"
"I want to," I said. Then, "But I'm not sure what's important. Or I've thought, whenever I could, about what things must be important, but I get incredibly frightened every time I start to say to myself, 'This must be important.'"
I stopped, but he said nothing. So I went on (which he would interpret as a good sign). "And then I tried when I could to think of things you'll be most interested in, but at the same time I said to myself, 'If that's what he's interested in, then I'm ... I don't know.'"
I'd been about to say, looking at his pale face, that then I'd be in the hands of an intellectual, somebody who thinks he knows something, and I'm as afraid of that, I've discovered, as I am of utter medical incompetence and ignorance. But I couldn't say this because I desperately wanted him to think out a plan and was terrified of interfering, though it seemed there in fact was nothing to interfere with now except more silence.
I averted my eyes from his face, and the window. "I have a kind of history that I wrote, though I really don't know if it's the kind of thing that you want to take any time with."
"And if I didn't want to take any time with it?"
Immediately I admitted, sick-nervous, smiling, "I'd be disappointed."
He smiled back. "I don't see any reason to begin with a disappointment."
But he wasn't writing anything down as we began this thing, as I had some silent hope that he would be. But he never put pen to paper in the whole two years I was with him, though there were ten-minute gaps between patients' hours, and I've always assumed that he took that time at least for recording his impressions--yet I never asked. And if in fact he's kept records, I'd be damned curious now to see them--because there might be things in them I wouldn't really want to see. For though I'm nowhere near as afraid now that I was a compelling case as I was afraid then that I wasn't, I still wouldn't want to read that I in fact was nearing the borderline of something permanent or irreversible. Or I wouldn't wantreally to get the feeling that Conlon was not writing about me but about someone else--to find a story truly incomprehensible to me in his arrangement of the details. Or to read things that maybe would annoy, or possibly seriously anger me, things perhaps about my father and me, or my wife and me, or Johnny Lemaster--whose name came up more often than I'd like to admit--and me.
I took out of my pocket the papers I'd been fingering. Then actually hoping (no reason yet for disappointment) that I was getting us on the right track and that I was saving most precious time, I read him my little piece of work, though I wondered what note he'd really take of anything I'd say.
I read first that I didn't remember a single innocent day in my life--that I just remembered being aware of myself--always. When I was a kid there were times when I seemed to escape, feeling the joy of a beautiful religion ("listening to the girls' voices sing the Latin hymns on First Fridays, looking at the beautiful faces and knowing I'd always believe in heaven") and when maybe I had my small world in my hand. But mostly any grace or ease in my life then derived from victories--victories in fights on the playground, sports victories, which did come. Though by the time I was fifteen I would have a feeling, which never left me alone, that I had lost forever some source of strength, or some grace.
I wrestled on the high-school team, but in time I couldn't make moves. I just would freeze to save energy, and the losses started to pile up so that I couldn't forget them for a minute. I never lived anywhere then, for whole seasons, but in my past losses and in upcoming meets. I kept inviting my girlfriend to come and watch me in the hope that this would make me fight, and I finally got her to come to one event. I got my father to come too so that I would, I figured, be under enough pressure absolutely to explode, and get a victory. And I succeeded crazily in making that day into everything that I wanted it to be--the key day of my life--the test and proof of the worth of what I was.
My father was a famous high-school and college football star, with two brothers who were stars, and it used to beimpossible for me to understand how kids who didn't have a tradition to live up to could do as well in sports as they did--though I could envy them their ignorant freedom. I'd even wish for complete stupidity and orphanhood--wish that I'd never known my father or heard his voice--if, even slightly more than they distressed them, such wishes would help my victory dreams.
I stopped--looked off the page, though this instantly disturbed me--and said, "I loved my dad, very much, always. But, honest to God, I can't remember when I didn't have flash-like wishes that he was gone--wishes that would also break my heart as fast as they came."
Conlon smiled slightly and nodded, encouraging me in a friendly way to go on--which made me glad. But then with this there was trouble. It came immediately, this kind of friendliness, as a terrible trouble to me and disappointment. I had to turn immediately away again, in fear, from the pale face in the dim light. Voices said--Get your eyes off him. Get your eyes off even his shadow on the floor. And this really is it--this is what I want now to recall--this insane time when every slightest step I took, either toward what I desired or away from it, would register instantly as the first movement of some terror or some dangerous joy that would be nearly too much for my life.
"It's so pathetically desperate," I said to my wife last night. "But for me--even still--it brings the goddamned dead world to life. I mean the way I knew how much to care for myself and yet not to--when I was on the edge, listening to voices inside me--and every second believing what I heard."
She said softly, "I know."
"You know I don't seek pain," I said, "for the sake of pain. It's to get past the unbearable emptiness--all the sentimental lies and the sleep that kill real poetry, the real thing, which--I mean this--can't live if the object world doesn't start to speak, and move ... some. But I can't really go back," I said.
She said, "You don't have to go back. Listen to yourself.Listen. It's enough. I can hear you--and know what you mean."
In the beige room, with my head bent down in the low light, I read to Conlon how I had a photograph of my father when he was seventeen like me. It was of him in his football uniform, smiling, with his helmet in his hand. I stuck the picture in my wrestling locker, like an altar niche, and in a way used to pray before it--to work up my pride and get back the energy and grace that I'd lost. I told how I kept going to look at the picture on that day when I'd asked my girlfriend and my father to come see me--one of those days that a teenage boy could turn maybe into the last day of his life--and how I kept imagining myself, as I waited for my match, getting married to my girlfriend.
I stopped myself again here, and said, "Johnny Lemaster was on that wrestling team. I don't know if he told you. I think because he never lost he doesn't remember it as well as I do. Zero tradition." I smiled. "But he knows about the photograph. He even told me, intelligently enough, I suspect, that I might be worth more of a damn if I burned it, though he asked me a couple of times if he could take a look at it."
"He didn't mention the wrestling," Conlon said, "just that you were old friends, like brothers." He looked at me carefully. But I went back to my statement.
I read how the space for me, that day in the gym, was this enormous pure vacuum of light, although the figures--my father, my girlfriend, my opponent--seemed to come so close to me or get removed from me to distances, depending exactly on what would make me feel most afraid. The time of the wait, too, and of the actual match, while always I was in that cold hollow of ice-light, seemed to be set on some clock in hell--moving fast or slow, depending always on what I didn't want. After my name was called--no sound ever more strange in my life--and I came into the center of the circle and heard the whistle sound, I was for a few seconds crazily alive, as if in that glaring void I'd discovered some secret. I even tried a move and almost took my opponent down. But there was no miracle cure, of course no miracle cure, and from the first instant, thetruth is, I was down-in more exhausted than I'd ever been before. And only moments into the second period I was on my back, and the referee's eye was down next to my eye, and his hand rose, to come down and end it.
After the meet, I sat alone in the low-ceilinged locker room, a basement now lit with a single bulb. I looked in at my father's photograph and felt the light burn even lower and the ceiling move in more tightly. His picture--the boy smiling, holding his helmet--I started to cry--to weep uncontrollably. I'd broken that line and let something die--that life. I knew too how I'd never in my life be what I wanted to be for a girl.
I said that later I became aware, of course, that there might be nothing unusual either in my losses or in my boy's self-pity. But I was sure there was something peculiar in the way that I took things, something that got me where I was right now. Something in the way that I saw things moving.
I read how by the end of my first year in college I had stomach spasms, which woke with me immediately every morning, without fail. I went to a doctor, and when I asked how long they'd last he told me as long as I had a stomach--a remark which worked like a charm. I soon had to start watching the foods I ate. Then just about all the time, my own acid was eating the walls of my own stomach. And again, I knew that this kind of thing was common enough, but I believed that my way of thinking about it was unusual. I thought, without stopping, about how I no longer had any safe place--about how some enemy was in the gate and was coming in farther and farther.
I reported then on how I came, by steady degrees, to know as things separate, besides my stomach: my neck as it stiffened, and then my throat as it contracted, and then the processes of my breathing and my heartbeat as they became irregular, sometimes wildly irregular. Nothing ever seemed to go away or go backward. Always there was a steady progress, a perfect working out of an intention, which was in fact a fabulously successful irony on my own intention--and maybe on all human intention and hope.
Sometimes, in crazy thoughts, it actually seemed to me asif disease prayed prayers, and as if they always came true, and that the whole damned world would belong completely to disease before it was over. By twenty, I was dizzy virtually all of the time, though I could still press the top of my skull with my hand and more or less control the vertigo. I studied this way, pressing my brains down, whenever tests came.
I went to another doctor, who showed signs of concern over the prolonged dizziness and wrote out a prescription, to be taken three times a day. I was happy taking my medicine. One of the side effects was dry mouth. I always welcomed it. It came as a sign, about a half hour after I'd swallowed the tablets, that my medicine was completely in me and was at its task, making me right.
Another of the possible side effects, however, was completely unforeseeable cardiac arrest. One day after I'd been taking the medicine for about six months, my heart practically exploded out of my chest. Something like a good friend inside me was suddenly then the most threatening alien presence--some kind of unbelievable fiend, who knew his task too, exactly. With my heart gone almost completely wild, I leaned against the wall in my room and in an instant I placed myself between the position of the compliant bird, with his neck in the jaws of the dark fox, and the initial resistant attitude of actual flight.
Now, more easily, if still anxiously--anxious to get things right--I took my eyes off the page and said, "It's been over two years since I quit taking that medication--but something's still with me. It's a very exact place. In those jaws, not moving, feeling the moist warmth and the hard pressure of the tooth. It's where I keep myself now all of the time, not complying with the sickness, but not daring to move either. And I keep myself exactly here on the advice--which I can hear--the perfect advice--of something deeper inside me than anything I have ever known."
I said yesterday to my wife, as we sat on our porch and took coffee, "Crazy as it all was, A, what's left of it moves me when I come across any real poetry. How to hold what we love ... so carefully ... and at the same time letting it go, outof a loose hand ... because that's the exact dictate of a voice. But then what am I saying? That people need to be as afraid as I was? As crazy? Yet I'd trust me over someone who was never afraid."
"I'd trust you," she said, "if I hope that before we're old we'll just be all the time absurd, and happy, with what you know."
But of course the problem of my life is that I don't know anymore. I don't know how I stopped myself, with Conlon waiting, and rested in fact on that "perfect advice," and caught a breath. I can't hear now the small voice. Nor do I really know anymore what it means to believe, for a few seconds, as I did, that my doctor could know the exact place I spoke of--that place in the jaws of sickness--and that he would have a name for it--and that he would know what places one would be likely to go to from there if he did this or did that. I don't have this faith now--nor the magnificent fear, God help me, that possibly my disease might have gone, or might go, even deeper than the saving voice of the small someone inside me.
Now, after years of health, I can sport with the idea that such things as origins and endings are illusory, the idea that no doctor could pretend to know about the place of which I spoke, and that that exact safe location, that point between living and dying, is patrolled by no small someone and is in fact nowhere. But back then I was far too sick, Jesus help me, for this sport; and I was far too sick to be polarized, like the nation.
In those insane days, days of sickness and poetry, I honestly (there's the word) would cry for joy in the mornings when the sun rose out of the dark. But I dreaded also, with reverent terror, that the god of darkness would catch me in my tears. I felt an utter fear of death--and an equally true guilty dread over being alive.
But with the smallest, most intense hope, aware as I haven't been for years, of the incredible danger of desire, I kept on reading to Conlon what I'd dared to write.
I said that despite anything that perverse chemicalchanges had done to make my medicine work in me now as a poison, my somewhat better health lasted for some time--though also that I worried when my mouth stayed moist after meals. Of course I feared that the movement, the godforsaken progress of the thing was far from over. But, June of '70, several months after I quit my medicine, I graduated magna cum laude from the University of Chicago College and had been accepted at the Graduate School for Advanced Studies--although I felt the demon of disease immediately present at the graduation ceremony. In fact I was sure, in crazy seconds, that the sickness was working with an ever more miraculous exactitude to make my achievements meaningless. But I was married that summer too, in August, to my wife, Allie, the girl who came to see me wrestle that time (Johnny, home from Yale, was the best man). And my marriage was and is happy, very happy.
But from day one in the Advanced Studies Program, where, I said, in my third year I was still preparing for a career in teaching, life wasn't at all what I had it cracked up to be. In fact, in the six months since I'd passed my Master's exam--at the midpoint of my second year--absolutely nothing had been the same with me. Any furies that I might have been able to keep back with career hopes it seemed now were only waiting to make louder and louder noises in an ultimate ridicule of those hopes as they were being realized, and then to come in after me.
I now read too that in the fall of my second year, October of 1971, I came to know about completely absurd, wholly undeserved pain as I watched my father die of cancer.
Conlon leaned slightly forward. He said, "Lemaster did mention that. He could see how hard you took it."
"Johnny was there," I said, "and I'm sure he knew what I was feeling, or some of it." When I'd said this, I returned to my statement.
But before I end now this account of a statement that I no longer possess, I'll say again that I know that my adolescent agonies and my prolonged anxiety, with all the different physical complications--all these things, even with my peculiarway of taking them--certainly don't amount to anything unheard of. Over the last several years I've talked more and more openly with my friends about my hard times, and many of them have said that they've suffered through quite similar things, if perhaps not through so long a stretch.
Yet after a point in such confessions, I begin to feel like a Nam vet, talking to friends whom he respects, but who got to stay home. The final lines in the last battles I fought at that time were drawn far far in. And in that moment in that small, faintly lit room, with this doctor I didn't know, I found it very hard to go on. But the time when I had to talk to someone not-myself had long come, and of course was passing.
I said that it started at night, when I looked into the shadows above the glow from my reading lamp. My nightmare wasn't all there at once--coming ripping through the wall--though I'd seen faces like painted medieval satans with red tongues and the torn limbs of the damned in their mouths. I said that I knew now where these pictures came from--right out of the heart of everlasting terror, when the mind is pressed hard enough. For some months now--for me--they were coming alive--pictures--red faces in the shadows of ceilings of rooms, making me lose faith in the simplest safeties we need to live--to walk through rooms.
I lifted my eyes. Conlon's face was now a shadow against the glass and the blank sky. Then I once more lowered my head. With my eyes just touched closed, uttered the words exactly as I felt that I needed to, to save my life: "I don't know if I should scream what I'm about to say--or just barely whisper it--to get it right. I'm trying--Jesus Christ--so damned pitifully here to take some sane path."
Then I opened my eyes. He was leaning forward, looking at me with compassion. And I said a prayer--in absolutely perfect silence--perfect--that when he'd heard what I'd say now he'd have to take me in.
I said, "I can't name the hour. Some time. I started--truly. No words for this. But I started truly not to trust the structure of things ... I mean this. Doctor Conlon ... I think buildings could fall, literally come apart and fall! I mean it.Especially man-made things. Incredible. This is it! The buildings! I'm afraid. I'm so afraid. I think they can't hold. All the time, for months. I'm living like someone--Christ Almighty--in a shelter underground, for months, with the screaming of planes overhead, and then bombs. Only for me the cave-in comes on all the time ... in this silence. I'm so afraid to say this--my head--it knows. But walls--and the junctures of walls and ceilings--and the spans. I can't tell you this terror. But this is it. I can't help myself anymore with this. The whole world. All the time! I can't imagine where I go from here. If I stay by myself, my mind for certain will take the next step into hell. It knows exactly what to do next."
I stopped. Conlon, looking into my eyes, asked me carefully, very kindly, "Are you all right?"
I was just breathing--glad now that I could breathe, in that room, high in the air. I waited a long time, through nothing, and then just touched the paper, saying "I'll read this ... to the end."
And I read--I was able to read now--how when I first noticed this new, final terror I had prayed that I was learning something of fundamental importance about the necessity of stability in the world--and even that I might be able some day to use all that I was learning, in a story, and that I might say in that story that my fears were the real hidden fears of our time.
But when I learned instead was to keep my mouth shut, or very, very close to shut.
I hesitated for a moment again--but kept my eyes down on the page, not wanting to see at all now the space where I was, or to measure the shadowy light, or any distances. But I knew that Conlon studied me still with care, and this helped me. I read to him quickly now--how before I knew it, in any room that I was in, the walls, floors, ceilings were actually in some horrible goddamned world of black miracle and forgetfulness, where they might simply at any moment no longer do what they always do. I said I fear now all the time that none of these elements anywhere, joists, beams, no matter what the strength of their material, will be strong enough to supportweight for very long. And this unbelievable conviction has grown steadily, so that every godforsaken day I am still more thoroughly afraid to be inside a structure, any structure.
Ceilings are heavy on top of me--threatening. I study them with my eyes--the shadows. But everything might be ready. The wind terrifies me, even with small breezes, as it keeps pushing and pushing on things. On the building where I live. Especially at night ...
"Especially at night ..." I took my eyes off the paper as I repeated myself. I said, with terrible difficulty, "I'm more afraid of the dark now, Dr. Conlon, than ever in my whole life. I can't even say. I can't ... I can't say."
I bowed my head again as I said this, and my eyes filled with tears. But I went on.
Especially at night. The wind at night threatens everything I have ever known. And Christ, I said, I am angry. Jesus Christ Almighty, yes, how I want to say to any philosopher who thinks he can play with the structure of reality--"Give this a try for a while, you son of a bitch. Give a try, even for an hour, to a real distrust of, say, the post and lintel. See how you like that. Or see how you can stand it. Maybe after you try to stand it for seven months, or for a single hour, I'll trust you when you preach to me about what's honest. But never before, I said. Never on my goddamned life."
But the last lines of my statement were that if I spoke in this aggressive way anymore, something would erase me. That it would come for me and erase me. That it wouldn't let me escape, as it had up till now. That it wouldn't let me open my eyes and see, sometimes, how a few things are still there.
I was finished. But with my tears beginning to fall (sacrifices to several gods), I added, "I'm remarkable for secrets, Dr. Conlon. No one, except my wife, Allie, and possibly Johnny, knows any of these things about me. No one else who knows me can tell a thing. But maybe," I said almost in a whisper, "this concealment is something of which I'm still proud."
He right away moved his chair a bit forward. He waited till I dried my eyes, then asked me, "Why did you wait so long to come?"
Immediately the question brought an answer, a rush of answers, from behind a door that I rarely, if ever, opened. But I was loose all of a sudden, after the beginning had been made and after the tears. The work was actually beginning. My statement had been made, and I had now only the very slightest suspicions of how a first day like this could turn out come midnight, when it would be just me, and a dim light in the dark.
"I simply didn't want to give in. I was extremely ashamed of having to go see a doctor, I'll be honest. But I guess you hear pretty regularly from your beginning patients that they thought they were able to go it alone. I bet this screws up a hell of a lot of people."
I stopped for a second. "I believe pride goeth before a fall--even still." Then I closed my eyes. "But in some moments," I said, "I've sort of dared to think that I've learned something by becoming completely helpless: that I've had a true happy fall. I can actually say that I've placed some hope in this possibility once or twice."
I held up a finger in the air, and bowed my head. "But there's another thing too. I know this now and can say it even if it scares me to death, which it does. I truly wanted to believe that time would heal some wounds, at least. I desperately didn't and don't want to think that there may be some force actively, successfully working against me, but I did and do want one to be one working for me--call it time. And I still figure, even though I've come to you, that without pure patience--something the helpless learn one hell of a lot about--I am in enormous trouble."
Then I opened my eyes. "But I suppose humility or stupidity has screwed me up too."
"We have to be afraid," he said, "so we can get to the point where we are no longer afraid, or where fear is strictly useful. You don't want to count on time too much. Things can get away. So we have to distrust--but then trust at the same time. We're going to have to challenge that notion of bad progress--of things continuing to get worse--which has you by the throat. But I share your own sense of a need for caution.Medicine and time are going to be fairly slow partners here. And you know, of course, that the therapy is going to take a considerable amount of money. The fee is fifty dollars per hour. I've got to tell you this right away, so that we won't begin something we can't finish."
"I have the money," I said, "from my dad." And I thought not only that I was in, but that we were going to finish something that we had begun. I was intensely grateful to my father for the blessed money.
"Good," he said. "I should say too right away that I don't like to treat someone in your condition with drugs. I don't believe medication gets to the root of the problem. If you hadn't had the adverse reaction you did I suspect that sooner or later you would have found the medication inadequate."
This was Johnny's "best," but still I was afraid of the unscientific uncertainty of an empty medicine chest. "I'm absolutely convinced," I said, "that my condition is to some significant extent chemical. The disease gets in and alters your molecular structure somehow. I swear it. It's a stage of this thing. I know it. Mind and matter--somehow they interpenetrate and goddamn curse each other in some kind of a vicious circle. It's unbelievable. But"--and I was now actually praying out loud--"I swear I want more than I can say to believe that biochemistry isn't at the bottom of this. I'm crazy saying this. It's so risky. But I want the root to be something else. Or I guess I'm confessing that I'm glad to hear what you're saying about the drugs. It's gotten to be pure heresy now to say that there's such a thing as a responsible self. I want very much, even if it makes me more afraid, to be a heretic in this regard. Part of me's gotten very conservative. I figure the new thinking of our time truly could kill me."
But it was as if I were foretelling something: the untelling of my whole story, with its key points, its connection between the way things fell out and the way I fell. My sister is right now about the same age I was then, and is suffering from symptoms very much like mine. She is being treated by her doctor with regular medication for a disease that at present is called Panic Disorder, and that is attributed to nothing except biochemistry.Science has her quite safe, as well; and, though I suspect she does pray, she is not, even implicitly, encouraged to.
"But what"--I asked him now--"will ... our procedure be?" I felt again afraid--as afraid as I'd thought I might feel if I ever asked this question.
"We'll talk," he said, "nothing frightening."
"But what'll we say?"
"I don't know yet."
"I'm afraid I've said it all. I've been afraid that I'll just come up empty here and that we'll go nowhere."
"I'm sure you've got a number of things left to say."
"I sure as hell hope so."
"It's very positive the way you've been talking already. The fact that you're making noise is a very positive sign. I get people who can't talk at all. You want to be helped--I can see; and you want to help. I can listen for as long as it takes."
I looked at him and felt perhaps as much longing as any alienated demoniac who ever came raving before Jesus, hoping for the touch or the healing word. So much had been said already. So much dangerous outreach--approaching the brink of salvation.
Before long, however, because in this first hour I had let out so many demons whom I had so carefully kept out of sight, I would face a crowd of terrors like none I'd ever faced. I would find myself weeping and bracing myself and weeping and bracing myself whole nights. Or driving off to Conlon's house in the dark just to see if it was there. Or driving down roads where no one was and rushing out of my car to walk and run for hours, then returning to sink against the car door and cry for some sign of mercy to whatever it was that was failing now more and more to keep crushing weight at a right distance away from me.
But now I looked at his pale, soft face and, not knowing what was coming in the nights ahead, happily forgot whatever I might have thought about the possible inadequacy of his power, or the unimpressiveness of his figure, and asked him the next question. I still regard it as the most crucial question I have ever asked.
"Am I going to get better?" I asked, simply--loud enough for us both to hear. But even in the new happiness of those beginning moments, I felt the presence of some trouble.
But he said, "I most certainly believe so."
I could hear him, and I could still see the smile on his face. I now had tears in my eyes again, but was rubbing them away as I broke into a smile myself. I said to him, "You said it would take a long time." Then I asked him another enormous question: "How long ... is long?"
"I don't like to say," he said, "but I think that we might expect some results over the next few months. But don't expect to be cured by then. It's not unusual for a thing like this to take two years."
I said, "Of course. And you can trust me to keep my expectations within bounds. That's become lately my most advanced skill."
Now too, having read to her every word I've written so far, I said to Allie, "After I'd learned about expectation the way I did--about the arrival and departure of everything moving, insanely, on the pulse--I was ready with this insane heart to understand the words--always, in poetry, about absence, arrival, departure--I swear. So beautiful. The beginning and end of the world."
She smiled, and touched my hand.
And Conlon, when I told him I'd keep my expectations within bounds, smiled broadly and nodded. But there were some seconds of silence, and I worried about how many more there might be.
He spoke, however, and I liked the thoughtful quality of his next move. "When you say that you fear that built structures are going to cave in on you, you obviously are not speaking metaphorically--though just as obviously you aren't ducking and cringing at the present moment."
I interjected quickly, "It's as if my mind were out to prove--I swear--that some of the most traditional metaphors, the grounds of poetry, don't come from nowhere--that because of some eternal dictate they, and they especially, will magically, immediately speak themselves when you come tocertain moments or places in your life; or maybe that the recurring metaphors of poetry have the power of passing from just talk into the mind's absolute reality. But either way, 'The house is falling' isn't just words with me, and I'm not randomly picking and choosing what I'm afraid of, I guarantee you."
"I believe you. People don't make up stories like yours. They couldn't. But there's another question I want to ask you. When you say that you fear that the house is falling on you, do you mean that you really believe that the house is falling on you? Or, even at its worst, is there a difference for you between fearing and believing?"
My answer was certain, though I never knew it like this before, not having known, or perhaps dared, to ask this question. "There is a difference. I'm afraid of it ... but I don't believe it."
He nodded his head and said, very gently, "That's a large difference."
And in that room, in the shadowy window light, the two of us were extremely glad to have perceived it. I might still, too, with some true understanding, distinguish poetry from both madness and mere words.
But now he looked at his watch and touched it: the first hour appointment was over. He said that he was sorry and rose to shake my hand. But in a businesslike way he asked me if I would be able to send the checks twice monthly and, with his hand lightly on my arm, if I was comfortable with our procedure.
I smiled and told him, "I believe in conversation--and don't fear it."
"Good," he said, and asked me if the hour was a good time.
I said that it was, and we made the next appointment for the following week, same day and hour. Then I even told him that I thought I was in good hands, and he even told me at this point that things would turn. I nodded and proceeded then through the waiting room, still keeping my eyes to myself here, and not wanting to catch any name, if any name was to becalled. Then I headed for the elevator which, with its good, friendly lights for each succeeding number, its regular pace through all the unlit intervals, its emergency stop button, its phone, would drop me down twenty-nine stories to the ground.
Copyright © 1992 by Patrick Creevy