She led me up the stairs. “I’ve thought a lot about you over the years, wondering how you were doing.”
“I’m doing okay.”
She glanced back, judging this for herself. “Come in and catch me up.”
Her office was anchored in heavy colors: dark red walls, deeply stained oak floors and wainscoting, a barge of a desk. Everything else in the room strained to lighten it up. A Persian rug shot with PeptoBismol pink, pale floral loveseat, lacy white drapes and lamp shades. The only thing that remained from her old office that I remembered was the chocolate leather armchair.
She took my jacket and hung it behind the door. I sat on the loveseat, she sat in her armchair.
We smiled at each other again. Old times.
I said, “You’re not going to take notes?”
“We’re just visiting, right? Besides, I don’t scribble as much as I used to. I found out I listen better without a notepad.” She shifted her weight, crossed her legs. “So you live in Colorado now. How did you get out there? The last we’d talked—well, I got a letter from you when you went to college. You couldn’t decide what to major in.”
“I opted for a degree in Starving Artist.” I shifted into Amusing Summary mode. After a dozen “Hi, my name is Del” introductions with doctors and fellow patients and various small groups, I’d decided that this was the least painful way to cover the arid territory between college and my current life. The long job hunt to turn my Illinois State graphics arts degree into a job offer, the ignominious move back into my mother’s house, the series of low- paying jobs. I highlighted the most humiliating moments, such as deciding to move across the country with my girlfriend, then getting dumped as soon as we arrived.
“I think it was thirty minutes after we’d emptied the U-Haul that she broke up with me.”
She laughed. Thank God she laughed. “Well, she wasn’t going to break up with you until you unloaded, right?”
“Oh no, I only date the smart girls. Anyway, I decided I liked Colorado. I went through another string of dead-end jobs, office temp work, a few months at a web development shop that went bust, an even shorter stint drawing farm equipment ads for the PennySaver. My last job was at a decaling shop in Colorado Springs.”
“Decaling?”
“It’s like an automotive tattoo parlor. I tweaked the graphics files, managed this big Agfa film printer. And if I was a good boy, every few months I got to make up a new logo. I’m very proud of my Beaver in Hardhat with Wrench.”
“You said, ‘your last job.’ You’re not working there anymore?”
“Ah, no. They fired me officially a couple weeks ago. Of course, I’d stopped showing up weeks before, so I can’t blame them. ”
She nodded. “When you called, you sounded upset.”
“I did?” That night I’d made sure to calm down before I dialed. “I may have been a little stressed.”
“You said you needed a prescription refill on some sleeping pills. What are you taking?”
“Nembutal?”
“Okay.” A slight pause, enough time to start me worrying. “When was this?” she asked. “How many milligrams?”
“Fifty, at first, though he upped me to a hundred. This was probably the middle of January.” Her expression didn’t change, but something made me backpedal. “Maybe the end of January. But not every night—just when I need it. Occasionally.”
She frowned. “So that would be before you lost your job, then. What happened to make you look for a doctor?”
She hadn’t said whether she was going to give me the prescription or not. I felt like a junkie on a job interview. I described the crash at a level of detail between what I’d said to my mother and what I’d said to Lew and Amra. Smashing through the guardrail, yes, flipping and crunching to the bottom of the ravine and almost drowning, not so much.
“And the noises started again,” she said. That’s what we’d called them in therapy, too—the noises. She’d immediately noticed the parallels between the crash and my swimming pool accident, and leaped
to meet me. I’d forgotten how quick she was, how in sync we could be. It was like we were picking up where we left off years ago.
“When did they start?” she asked. “While you were in the ER?”
“Faster this time. I was still in the car when they started.”
She pursed her lips. “So how are you handling it? Are you using your exercises?”
“I’ve tried them.” I’d worked with Dr. Aaron for months before she taught me something that could smother the sensations in my head. The exercises were mental plays I could enact. The one that worked best was one I called Helm’s Deep. My mind was a fortress, and the noises—the pounding, the shaking, the metal-on-metal rasping—
were orcs coming over the walls. All I had to do was knock them off the parapets. If they kept coming, I just had to back into the keep and seal the door. And if they came through the door, I retreated to the caves. Yeah, it was cowardly, but there were no frickin’ elves to help me out. And it had worked—until now.
I ran a hand across my neck. “The door’s closed, but I can still feel them.”
“How are you getting through the day?”
I laughed. “I don’t know. I can’t just ignore it—sometimes it’s the loudest thing in the room.” Loudest was the wrong word, but she knew what I meant. “I’ve learned to not respond, at least in front of people. I keep my face blank; I try not to wince when it startles me. I just . . . concentrate on what people are saying. And I keep nodding.”
“That must be incredibly tiring.”
I laughed, ran a hand across my mouth. “You have no idea.”
“The Nembutal . . . are you using that to help?”
“During the day? No. That’s just to help me sleep. I mean, I can sleep most of the time, it’s just that sometimes I can’t sleep. Look, I know you’re worried about the pills—”
“Nembutal’s a heavy-duty barbiturate, Del. They use it to knock people out before operations. It’s heavily addictive, and a hundred milligrams isn’t far from overdose territory. You have a few beers when you take one, and you could end up like Marilyn Monroe.”
“I’m not about to get addicted. Trust me, that’s not what I’m worried about.” I lifted my hands from my lap, dropped them. “Doctor. Do you think possession is real?”
“Of course.” She tilted her head. I remembered that gesture from our sessions. “Del, I know you’re not making this up. And neither are the thousands of people who’ve been affected by it. ”
“That’s not what I mean. Not possession the disorder. Oldfashioned possession. Do you believe you can be taken over by some outside force—some god or demon or whatever—or do you think it’s all just . . . delusions of delusional people?”
“No one knows, Del. What matters is—”
“Just tell me what you believe, Doctor. Yes or no. Are people just going crazy, or is it something else?”
She frowned, seemed to weigh her answer. “I think that yes, there are people who are psychotic, or who have multiple personality disorder, who also say that they’re possessed. There are even people who aren’t psychotic who want so badly to be possessed, or want to explain some past trauma, that they convince themselves that they were seized by some higher power. I’m not talking about people who fake possession—there’ll always be people who’ll use the O. J. defense. But there are people like yourself, Del, who don’t want to be possessed, and who aren’t liars and aren’t ‘crazy.’ The Jungians—”
