Thus, in his case, no more hoping that he would become normal again. That he would live a normal life. That what had happened would not have happened. Forget all that. Therapy taught him to give up those hopes. Hope would have to reside in something like this: hope to do some good, no matter how fucked up you are.
This was worth writing down on a piece of paper, in shaky block letters, and then pinning the paper onto the mirror in his bathroom, along with various other encouragements in the form of phrases or images; probably it looked like a madman’s mirror, but he wanted to put things up there.
HOPE TO DO SOME GOOD, NO MATTER HOW FUCKED UP YOU ARE
Every time he remembered to brush his teeth or shave, which was getting less and less often, he would see that sign and ponder what he might do. This mainly made him feel confused. But it did seem like the urge to do something was there in him, sometimes so strong it was like a bad case of heartburn. When he was exhausted by sleeplessness, or groggy with too much sleep, that burn still sometimes struck him, radiating outward from his middle. He had to do something. Maybe he wasn’t going to get to be a Child of Kali, clearly not, but something like that. A fellow traveler. A warrior for the cause. A lone assailant.
Over breakfast, soothing his stomach with a little plastic tub of yogurt, he pondered what he might do. One person had one-eight-billionth of the power that humanity had. This assumed everyone had an equal amount of power, which wasn’t true, but it was serviceable for this kind of thinking. One-eight-billionth wasn’t a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.
He wandered the streets of Glasgow, thinking it over. Up and down the hills to the east and north, enjoying the sidewalks so steep they had staircases incised into them. You could work off a lot of stress walking the streets of Glasgow, and the views kept changing their perspectives under the changing weather, reflecting the storms within, the fear, the sudden bursts of exhilaration, the black depths of ocean-floor grief. Or beautiful dreams, the world gone right. How to share that? How give? Saint Francis of Assisi: give yourself away, give up on yourself and all you thought you had. Feed the birds, help people. The positive of that was so obvious. Do like Saint Francis. Help people.
But he wanted more. He could feel it burning him up: he wanted to kill. Well, he wanted to punish. People had caused the heat wave, and not all people— the prosperous nations, sure, the old empires, sure; they all deserved to be punished. But then also there were particular people, many still alive, who had worked all their lives to deny climate change, to keep burning carbon, to keep wrecking biomes, to keep driving other species extinct. That evil work had been their lives’ project, and while pursuing that project they had prospered and lived in luxury. They wrecked the world happily, thinking they were supermen, laughing at the weak, crushing them underfoot.
He wanted to kill all those people. In the absence of that, some of them would do. He felt the urge burning him from the inside out. He wouldn’t live long with that kind of internal stress, he could feel that as surely as he could feel his triphammer heart pumping over-pressured blood through his carotids. Oh yes, high blood pressure. He could feel it trying to burst him from inside. Something in there would break. But first, some kind of action. Vengeance, yes; but also, preemption. A preemptive strike. This might stop some bigger bad from happening.
Twice a week he visited his therapist. A nice middle-aged woman, intelligent and experienced, calm and attentive. Sympathetic. She was interested in him, he could see that. Probably she was interested in all her clients. But for sure she was interested in him.
She asked him what he was doing, how he was feeling. He didn’t tell her about his dreams of vengeance, but what he did tell her was honest enough. Earlier that week, he told her, a hot waft of steam from a giant espresso machine in a coffee emporium had caused him to freak out. Panic attack; he had had to sit down and try to calm his beating heart.
She nodded. “Did you try the eye movements we talked about?”
“No.” He was pretty sure this was a bullshit therapy, but the truth was that in the heat of the moment, so to speak, he had forgotten about it. “I forgot. I’ll try it next time.”
“It might help,” she said. “It might not. But nothing lost in trying it.”
He nodded.
“Do you want to try it now?”
“Just move my eyes?”
“Well, no. You need to do it when you’re dealing with what happened. I don’t want you to re-experience anything in a way that feels too bad, but you know we’ve tried having you tell me what happened from various perspectives, and maybe, if you’re up for it, we could try that again, and while you tell me about it
