Rabbit Remembered

comb. The grooming is a positive sign. Or did his mother comb his hair for him today, for this appointment, and see to it that he shaved? 'There were some voices,' he admits, huskily, then smirks as if to dare the world to make much of it.

'What did they say, do you remember?'

No answer.

'What did the voices say?'

'Nasty stuff.'

Nelson waits.

'They tell me what a miserable fuck-up I am. They tell me to kill myself. Or maybe I think of that myself, to shut them up. It might be worth it.'

'Michael,' Nelson said, loud and urgent enough to make the boy, whose eyes sidle and flutter, look at him. 'If you ever, for a moment, think you might follow through on these impulses, you must do what?'

A long pause. 'I don't know.'

'You must get in touch with the Center. At any hour.'

'Yeah, well, shit, I'm not apt to be calling any center at four in the morning.'

'The recording gives the number for Emergency Services. Call it. Here's the number in case.' He writes it out on a Fresh Start memo pad and rips the sheet off. A renewed surge of rain slashes against the window at Nelson's back. He pictures the leaks venturing, trembling, lengthening, out onto the windowsills of this old school, the paint flaky from previous soakings. 'Do the voices say anything else?' Nelson can hardly hear the answer against the noise of the rain.

'They tell me to kill my parents.'

This is delivered with a mumbled huskiness and yet with some defiance, a twitch of teen-age swagger and a smirk that hangs on his face forgotten. 'How does that make you feel?' Nelson asks.

Michael surprises him with a surge of affect: 'Horrible. I love my parents. They've been great to me, giving me everything I've ever wanted and not putting any pressure on about entering the, you know, fucking dry-cleaning business.' His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain. 'They sent me to college when a lot of parents would have had me go straight into the business. My dad's getting older and hasn't been strong for a while. They sent me to Penn, the finest university in the state. So what did I do? Hey, I fucked it up.'

'You didn't, Michael, you got sick. We're trying to make you better. You're better now. You dress yourself, you're no longer violent-'

'I can be violent at home.' He begins to brag, to someone imaginary sitting where Nelson sits. 'My mother, what a naggy bitch, honest to God. She says to stop watching the old movies on TV, get up, get out, do this, do that. I don't see the use.'

'The use is what we call normal psychosocial functioning. It doesn't come without effort. Let's look at your graph. You have not been in to the Center for a week, and then only twice the week before. That's why I've asked your parents to come in with you. They, and Dr. Birkits, and all of us want your attendance to improve.' Birkits was the Brewer psychiatrist the DiLorenzos had taken him to on the advice of the Penn psych service after his break. Birkits, one of these demoralized post-talking-cure shrinks, referred this hot potato to Fresh Start. They don't get many clients with an intact home, and who can afford a private psychiatrist.

'I bet you all do,' Michael sneers.

'We do, Michael. We want to improve your functioning, and we offer here at Fresh Start a safe environment for you to practice in, with the groups, the activities, the counselling. But you must attend.'

'Hey. Sir. O.K. Can I be frank?'

'Of course.'

'I can't stand these people. They're fat. They're queer. They're ugly. They're not my type.'

'What is your type?' Nelson asks, and instantly regrets the hostility he hears in the question, which popped out reflexively.

'Loser,' Michael responds, and laughs, a barking abrupt noise that doesn't belong to his frightened face. 'Loser is my type.'

'Not so. You or anyone here. We're human, which isn't always easy. The other clients are kind people, here to help each other. They care about you, if you let them.'

'They wouldn't if they knew what's inside my head.' He jerks forward in the straight chair. His complexion looks a little clammy, moist at the hairline. The poisoned eyes swarm with shame and yet with an excitement that something transformingly strange is happening to him. 'The voices whisper to me about girls I see on the street. This one and that one. They tell me to picture her shitting.'

'Shitting?' Nelson has been betrayed into confessing surprise. Perhaps Michael intended this. He wonders how much of an enemy the boy sees him as. Does he sense, within his mental-health counsellor, some ethnic enmity, with envy of his easy slender build and dago good looks? When Nelson tries to picture what a schizophrenic sees he remembers Howie Wu telling him, Their sense of distance has broken down. Things up close look far away, is how Nelson has framed this-there is no clear depth in which to locate yourself. The gears that notch us one into another fail to mesh, maddeningly, meltingly. Trying to think his way into Michael's head plants a sliding knife inside Nelson, a flat cold queasy sensation below his ribs.

'They show me her squatting down. I want to rub her face in it. I want her to eat it. Does that shock you?'

'No,' Nelson lies.

'Well, it does me.' Michael slumps back as far as the chair allows him. His affect is flattening; his eyes narrow as he recalls, 'Thirty thousand bucks a year, think of it, plus extras and my own car. Pussy everywhere. Hot-shit professors. A bunch of frats rushing me. And I fucked up. I couldn't hack it. I didn't even know what courses I was supposed to be taking. I hid in my room with the shades down until my roommate complained to the dean and they got the psych service on me. They tell me I told the dean or somebody he was the Whore of Babylon. I never heard of her.' He snickers a little, testing the face opposite his.

'Michael,' Nelson says in firm conclusion. The boy was bragging now, bullying. When you feel uncomfortable, Howie has told him, trust your gut. Get off the horse. 'I can't emphasize enough how important it is that you are faithful with your medications. I've made a note here to Dr. Wu to reconsider the Trilafon dosage.'

'I drank beer and tequila at Penn,' Michael tells him, uncertainly standing, sensing he is dismissed and being relieved yet not, unsatisfied, uncured. 'My parents didn't know it, but I would get fucking blasted. I think that's what screwed up my brain.'

'I don't think so. The human brain can take a lot of beer. Michael, this is not your fault' Nelson says, coming around his desk so that in the tiny office the boy-tall when he stands up, his girlish mouth sagging, his face glimmering in the rainy light, begging to be understood-has nowhere to go but out, to the waiting room, where his parents are eager to come in.

'Such a gorgeous child,' says Mr. DiLorenzo, when a second chair has been pulled up for his wife in front of Nelson's desk. 'Bright, good, A miracle boy. To have this boy after his three sisters and Maria over forty, it seemed to us a miracle.' He speaks carefully, with dignity, as one who remembers when he spoke English less well, the child of immigrants who spoke it hardly at all. His hair, brushed straight back, is going white but his bushy eyebrows are still black.

The wife speaks up: 'Even as a little boy, though, he stood apart a little. He would play with others, but then wander away and come inside. I'd say, 'What's wrong?' He'd say, 'Nothing.' As if he didn't see the point of people. He was quiet. He never had a tantrum.'

'My wife imagines things in hindsight,' Mr. DiLorenzo says, sitting back erect, his eyes enlarged by thick spectacles, eyes frayed to death from closely inspecting fabric. 'He was a perfectly normal boy. Got top marks, too, all the way up through senior year. Gave the salutatorian speech about how we should help Russia keep democracy and capitalism. Never any trouble to anybody- teachers, me, nobody.'

'A little trouble would have been more normal,' his wife says. 'At the time I wondered if having all those older sisters hadn't taken something out of him. My daughters and me, we had too good a time, always laughing, always busy at the house, always telling each other things. Michael was like a little prince, detached.'

'Don't listen to her, Mr.-'