Killing and Letting Die

     It was the spring when I first met him, after two weeks of unseasonably warm weather that had coaxed leaves from trees and grass from the earth.  In my parents’ backyard flowers were curiously poking their heads above the dirt around them, as if unable to quite believe it was safe enough to show their faces.  The memory of winter, only two weeks past, and of clouds that grew between the earth and the sun like a stubborn moss, seemed already long past. 

       The doorbell rang sometime in the early afternoon, and I heard my mother plodding through the kitchen and foyer to answer it.  A moment later she called my name.  “Peter,” her voice reached through the house, “Come here, honey.”  I wiped some dirt off my pants, and came up the steps from our small yard and onto the enclosed porch.  Now half-blinded by the sun, I struggled to see through the double sliding glass doors that lead into the house.  I heard my mother’s heavy frame coming into the den, adjacent to me.   “Don’t even think of coming in here with those shoes on,” she warned, just as her silhouette appeared in the sliding doors.  “He has bad eyes,” she explained to someone else, and I squinted into the house. 

     “No I don’t, mom!” I protested, “It’s just bright out.”  I saw a smaller shape step out around her, and lightly hop out onto the porch. 
     “Peter, this is Troy,” my mother said.  “His parents just moved into the Carmichael’s place.  He’s going to be starting eighth grade next year – you’ll be in the same class.”  She paused significantly.  “Troy is going around introducing himself to everyone.” 

      I looked past Troy at my mother, a bit wide-eyed, I imagine.  That sort of extroversion seemed nothing short of extraordinary to me, a nearly incomprehensible display of confidence.  Like a small adult, Troy offered his hand, and then squeezed mine painfully when I took it.
      “It’s nice to meet you, Peter,” he said crisply.  Even though he was around the same age as me, Troy was almost four inches taller.  He had symmetrical features that hinted strongly of a budding masculinity, and blonde hair styled back away from his face.  His skin was bronze and clear, handsome far beyond the beauty innate in youth, beauty that so often burns off as the heat of puberty consumes it.  Troy, it was obvious, would only be complimented by the passage of time.  Blue eyes, large and round, sought mine.  “Troy Stevens,” he stated with another squeeze.  “So you go to Rivers?” he asked, referring to the middle school.  He finally let go of my hand. 
      “Yeah.” 
      “I’m starting there in the fall.  Got the rest of this year off.”  There was a moment of silence.  “You like sports?”
      “He likes computers,” my mother offered hopefully.
      “Mom!” I hissed, “Shouldn’t you be doing something?”  Her bulk quivered for a moment at the edge of the porch, and then silently withdrew. 
      “I like sports,” I lied.
      “Awesome,” Troy said, sounding more casual now that my mother wasn’t standing behind him.  “I like ‘em lots.  Maybe we could play basketball or baseball or something soon – my dad’s putting up a hoop in my driveway.”
      “Sure,” I said, “Anytime.”  I was terrible at sports, especially at basketball, and almost instantly terrified the idea of demonstrating my inabilities.
      “Well,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, “Gimmie your number.  I’m gonna get everybody’s number around here so I can start a league or something.”  We went inside and I wrote it down.  To my amazement, he pulled a wallet from his back pocket, something I’d never even thought to have, but suddenly knew I could not live without. 

      After high school Troy went on to Georgetown law, following in his father’s footsteps.  I understand that he’s now, at a pretty young age, a managing partner at a law firm in Philadelphia.  As he went through high school, his looks, family money, athleticism, and magnetic personality made him popular and well liked.  He was on the varsity basketball team – the captain, of course.  But back then, on that first day in our development, he seemed just a fairly normal12-year-old boy, if one whose confidence I envied. 
     Troy had no sooner stepped out our front door before my mother crowded me for information. 
      “So he seemed very nice,” she pushed. 
      “He was okay.”
      “And very polite, very handsome,” she continued, looking out the window after him.  “Do you think the two of you might be friends?”  Her hands were held, expectantly, in front of her chest. 
      “I dunno,” I mumbled, feigning disinterest. 
      “But Peter…” I turned my back defiantly and went back outside to my army men.  As soon as I knelt down, though, I felt childish and stupid.  I went back inside.
      “Mom,” I called, “Will you take me to buy a basketball?”  I thought at moment.  “And a wallet?” 

      Wilmington Delaware, where I grew up, is a bland town with a long corporate history.  The downtown, especially in those days, consisted of squat, square buildings that hunched together across a few blocks, their backs turned away from the crumbling row homes that surrounded them.  The offices, and the luncheonettes and restaurants that fed them, quickly shuttered themselves after sundown when the workers funneled back out to the suburbs.  And what suburbs Wilmington had.  They sprawled westward from the city for mile after mile after mile, remarkable only in their relentless uniformity.  Tucked into the houses were the college-educated implants from two-bit towns and country farms, men lucky enough to have ridden the post-War boom into a new way of life, living their version of the American dream.  My family, like most of my friends and neighbors, had a working dad and a stay-at-home mom, the last generation to be raised this way. 

      Donald was my best friend, which for a 12 year-old is about the biggest statement you can make.  At that point in your life a best friend is an absolute, something you believe transcends family or geography or any external force, the one fixed thing in a changing world.  At 12 almost everything in your life is given – home, family, clothing, food, vacation, school, classes – the only real choice you have is your friendships.  Maybe it’s because of that you simply know that you’ll be best friends for life, and nothing and no one will ever come between you.  Best friends can fight and disagree, but that categorization never moves from its fixed place. 

     Donald was a big kid for his age – even bigger than Troy, for Donald had begun lifting weights a year before, transforming his body through the daily ritual of training.  He loved the then-alternative bands, punk acts like the Dead Kennedy’s, Fugazzi, Agent Orange, and Suicidal Tendencies.  Donald’s advantage, though, was an older brother who mentored him.  I had only my parents – an engineer father who was averse to any outdoor activity, and a doting, too involved mother. 

     Donald and I grew up across the street from one another, and were best friends since we were old enough to walk, although puberty was putting new strains on a friendship that had been based on proximity as much as personality.  We often played army, running around an old cemetery near my house, although by then Donald would sometimes seem a little bored with our games, and was always the first one to quit.  But when we played, it was terrific fun – we carried black plastic M-16’s and .45’s, and stormed castles, beaches, and fortified compounds with nothing but the power of our minds.  I had to keep an eye out for my mother, who once came to check on me and confiscated my toy gun, giving it back to Donald.
      “He’s not allowed to play with guns, Donald,” she scolded.   
      “Lighten up, Mrs. Faulk,” he quipped, smirking in disbelief, tall enough to look down at her. 
      “I’ll tell your mother,” she threatened.
      “Go ahead.  My dad takes me hunting three times a year.” 
     “Come on, Peter,” she instructed.  “Time to go home.  Now.”  In the end, though, no matter how many times my mom caught me breaking her rules with Donald, she knew how important friends were, especially for someone as shy as me.  So she tolerated, reluctantly, our closeness.  Donald and I had been friends all our lives, after all, and he would laugh off stuff like that.  “Jesus,” he might say, “Your mom’s a real fat fucking pain in the ass, isn’t she?”  I would wholeheartedly agree, even though it was hard not to cringe at his harshness. 

      Mike was another neighbor and friend, who moved in when I was around nine.  We’d been friends practically ever since we met, and used to play Dungeons and Dragons sometimes, or program my dad’s old IBM computer.  Mike’s room was one of the most animated things you’ve ever seen.  He had painted it with watercolors – right onto his walls – and created Arizona landscapes, hybrid aliens, classic cars, and buxom girls.  Not surprisingly, Mike ended up going into graphic design.  While Donald and I talked about our hopes and dreams, Mike and I were more topic-oriented, spending hours discussing the minutia of programming, or a particular TV show, or how hot we thought such and such a girl was.  Mike and I were a lot alike, and we really understood each other in a way that probably would have made an interesting friendship.

     About a week after Troy moved in and introduced himself, Donald, Mike, and me were playing army in an old and mostly unused cemetery near my house.  We used the grave markers as protection against the imaginary bullets that streaked through the air.
      “I’m hit, I’m hit!” Mike yelled, falling backwards.   
      “’Sup guys,” came a jaunty call, drifting through the middle of our battlefield.  We turned to see Troy leaning on the cemetery wall, looking tall and bronze and composed.  None of us saw him hop over; he appeared to have been standing there all afternoon.
      “Nothin’,” Donald mumbled, letting his plastic gun dangle limply in his hand.  Mike jumped off the ground, wiping the grass from his chest and sides. 
      “Hey,” I called, “You wanna play with us?”
      “Play?”  Troy laughed.  “What, like army?”  He looked at each one of us, pausing long enough to make me embarrassed to have asked the question.  When no one said anything, he smiled.  “How about instead of army let’s play something for real.  How about a game of basketball?  My old man put up a hoop.” 

     “Sure,” Mike said almost before Troy had finished speaking, tossing his gun between two graves.  Donald stuck his into a bush as he passed it, and all three were over the cemetery wall before I, reluctantly, decided to follow.  What choice did I have?  I enjoyed Mike and Donald because we didn’t play sports, but used our imaginations instead of just strength or coordination.   I didn’t want to be left there, alone, and I also didn’t want to embarrass myself; but between those two evils, it seemed losing both of my best friends was by far the worst thought.  I’d rather be included, even if not as an equal. 

     At Troy’s house, we tried every combination of teams, but whomever played on mine lost.  I knew how fat and slow and awful I was, how much more I was sweating, how desperate I was to be at least as good as Mike, how my trying made me look even more pathetic.  Finally Troy yanked the ball from my hand. 
      “Hey,” he shouted, “Let’s play keep-away!”  He threw the ball to Mike, and as I ran after it, the ball went to Donald, who threw it over my head back to Troy.  I tried to get it for a little while, running between the three of them, hoping they might stop.  After a few minutes, I gave up. 
      “Aw,” Troy teased, “He’s ti-erd.”  Mike and Donald roared with laughter, and I laughed too. 

      A few weeks later school ended for the year, releasing us into the seemingly endless freedom of the summer.  Mike and Donald had faded from me in those last few weeks, eating lunch with me as we always had, but getting up after they ate to go and hang out with Troy.  Sometimes I went along, but felt uncomfortable when I did.  I spent the first week of my vacation in my yard, looking at my army men, pretending I wasn’t waiting for the phone to ring. 

     The day it happened was a spectacular one, with the sky a perfect overturned bowl of blue.  If you looked long enough, it seemed almost deep enough to fall into.  Occasional clouds, white and violent against such a tranquil background, moved like unnatural things. 
      I was sitting on my porch steps throwing stones absentmindedly into a birdbath when I saw them.  Mike, Donald, and Troy were lopping across the field that backed up to my parent’s house, a quarter mile away.  I hadn’t talked to any of them in awhile, and with a holler I jumped up and tore out the gate and down into the field.  It was summer, and we could go fishing at the creek, or hike through the woods, or catch frogs, or do lots of things that didn’t involve balls and bats and gloves.  My brain was bursting with ideas, ideas I knew they would like. 

     I ran as fast as I could.  By the time I caught up with them, they had stopped walking and were standing in a tight-knit circle, as if conspiring.  None of them acknowledged me as I ran up, leaving me to stand just outside their circle, breathing heavily, looking in. 
     “So,” Troy was saying, a smile heavy on his lips, “If we all say we’re staying at each other’s houses, see, we all have an excuse – and can stay out all night.”
      “I should be able to get some vodka from my pop,” Donald said.
      “Good.  Just be sure to replace whatever you take with water – but not too much.” 
      “Right.”
      “Awesome plan,” Mike said, shaking his head.
      “So this Friday night then,” Troy confirmed.  Mike and Donald nodded.
      “This Friday,” I said, “Wow – so soon.”  I saw them exchange glances with each other.  “I dunno if my mom will let me, let me go on such short notice.  Nah, she probably will,” I offered.
      No one responded, and Donald and Mike both looked at their shoes.  Troy made a strange face, his lips pulling away from each other to briefly expose his teeth.  “Yeah, right.  Hey look, Pete – um, no one, uh, no one said you were invited.”  Mike and Donald both turned their heads, while Troy tapped a stick in the ground.  The four of us stood there a moment, no one looking at anyone else.  I felt my stomach do a lazy roll, like I’d just dropped ten feet.  My heart was pounding in my chest, and I knew my cheeks were bright red.  A Blue Jay landed on a nearby patch of open grass, calling loudly before he picked a worm from the ground, and everyone looked to it.  I noticed the brilliance of the overheard sun, busy gathering its summer strength, and birds and insects chirping happily all around us. 
     “Oh,” I managed at last, “Okay.”   I turned before anyone could see the stupid, childish tears that came to my eyes.  I started back towards my own yard, wanting to run, wanting to cry, but determined to hold onto what little dignity I still had.  I heard Troy whispering furiously behind me, and was glad when I could no longer hear him, or feel their stares on my back. 

     I walked as fast as I could, trying not to think, trying not to remember that Donald and Mike were my best friends.  It didn’t yet occur to me what a lonely summer I would have, or what I would do with no friends.  I didn’t think about how I would have to spend my nights looking out my window at the three of them playing basketball, or watch them sitting in Troy’s driveway talking about maybe girls or cars or travel, too far away to hear, as invisible to them as if I’d never existed.  None of these things had yet occurred to me; all I felt was the burning of my cheeks, the sick feeling in my stomach, and my refusal to cry until I was safely inside.   I marched forward, head down, and stepping through thick grass I kicked at the clumps of cut remnants, sending them away from me in little explosions. 

     “Hey,” Troy called, “Hey Pete!  Hang on, man…” His voice was soft, pleading, and I slowed down without turning.  Everything was wound so tight I didn’t dare risk giving up control, even for an instant.  I didn’t want to add the humiliation of tears on top of everything else.  But then I did have a thought.  Donald is my best friend.  And so I stopped, and even began to turn around, feeling those constrictions loosen, feeling a sense of relief so strong it was like absolution.  As I turned an arm came across the side of my neck and a pair of legs entangled themselves around mine, sending me face-first to the ground.  Someone landed on the small of my back, and I cried out.   
     “Turn him over!” Troy laughed.  “Hurry!  Get his arms,” he called, “And his legs – damn, he’s a squirmer!”  Donald, the biggest of the three, grabbed one arm and stood on it, and then the other.  He was on my forearms, with my knuckles face down, his weight crushing – I thought I heard my right arm snap, and yelled, kicking and twisting my legs.  “Damn,” Troy laughed, “He even screams like a girl – sit on those legs, Mike!”  As instructed, Mike dropped onto my knees, placing his shins directly on top of them.  Just laying there was excruciating, and when I struggled some more Mike hopped up and down on my legs, smashing his shins into my kneecaps, making me scream again.   I saw all three faces red and laughing and joyous. 
      “Perfect,” Troy shouted, “Now, like I told you!”  Donald squatted behind me, dropping his knees on either side of my head, holding it in place with his thighs.  He knelt on my biceps, distorting the shape of the muscles with his knees, mashing them into the ground.  My ears were mostly covered, and I shut my eyes as tight as I could. 
      “Come on, Donald!  Hold his eyes open – that’s it!”  Donald’s hands, reeking of mud and pine needles, pulled back on my eyelids, and I saw Troy leaning into view, laughing so hard he was leering, framed by the serene blueness of the sky.  Troy’s lips pulled away from his teeth until he was able to compose himself long enough to spit carefully into each one of my eyes.  He laughed, his cheeks rosy and bronzed, and Donald let go of my eyes, letting me blink the sticky saliva down each cheek, like glutinous tears.  I fought to get loose but Troy held my legs as Mike got up next.  Laughing and shaking his head, Mike then spit accurately without ever really looking down. 
      “Aw, nice one, man!”
Donald started to let go, and I struggled again, but he held me until Mike had taken his place.  Mike clawed open my eyes, digging his fingernails up my cheeks as he did.  After the first lump of Donald’s warm saliva landed in my right eye, I started to cry.   Everyone laughed, and I stopped struggling, going limp under their bodies.  Donald shook his head, “Jesus, Petey,” he said softly, and spit again.
      “All right all right,” Troy laughed, “Christ, look at him!  Looks like he took a money shot to the face!  Let’s get outta here – now watch it – fat boys like him sometimes spaz out when you let ‘em go.” 
      On the count of three they jumped off, a little nervously, but I didn’t move.  After I heard their laughter and quick conversations fade, I pulled my knees to my chest and turned on my side, rocking softly, my tears mixing with the sticky saliva.  I lay there a long time, hoping I might fall upwards forever and ever into that blue sky, hoping I might just cease to exist.  But I didn’t, and no amount of will would release gravity’s hold on me.  Eventually I did get up and went home, got cleaned up, and even ate dinner with my parents, pretending like nothing was wrong.  But everything was wrong; everything had been shattered; I had no one to whom I could relate, no one to whom I could cry, no way to get even; my world was dark and closed and I left utterly, completely to myself. 

 
      These days, I make my living as a writer.  I’ve had some modest success, enough to give up freelancing and, with the limited teaching I do, make a decent living.  It’s a strange profession, writing fiction.  In many ways, after all, I am a professional liar, pretending to live in places I’ve never been, talk about experiences I’ve never had, write from viewpoints I’ve never held.  My best stories, though, are the ones that involve things that I have experienced.  Small wonder, since your own emotions have a poignancy, and darkness, that the imagination simply cannot match.

     I’ve never written or talked about what happened on that day.  I’ve never even alluded to it in my work. Fiction can help to purge what’s within, give it a place to go and exist outside of yourself, little black ink marks curling on a page that, taken together, can be unspeakably violent, or profound, or beautiful, or disturbing.  And once there they lay, dormant, activated only when a reader chooses to engage them, and even then only from the safe distance afforded by such an experience.  The reader gets a view into an experience, but isn’t the experience itself – the writer alone must bear that burden, no matter how many eyes take in that which has been cast away. 

     I’m one of the lucky ones, for these days I mostly turn to writing for release, instead of through drinking the way I did for so many years.  I hated myself for so long, so viciously, that alcohol was the only way I knew to try on a different personality to present to the world, one that wasn’t wrapped in shame and self-loathing.  But things are better now. 

     Nancy, my wife of eighteen years, thinks me a gentle man.  I have given her and our children a nice life, and sacrificed much to be as good a father as I can.  Even when I drink too much too often, I have the sense to stay away from them.  My family would deny to the point of death that I am capable of anything more wicked than occasional self-absorption, a crime many artists must be guilty of in order to create.  If only they knew the lies I’ve told them, that I’ve omitted a whole part of myself.

     And I’ve told lies here, too.  Truth is never a set thing for a writer, I suppose, who must bend it daily in the creative act.  None of the names in this story are real, even my own, although the people and what happened are all too real.  But the truth is, I don’t know what Mike is doing these days or if he went into graphic design, or if Troy became a lawyer like his father.  You see, I lost touch with them after high school.  I’ve never returned to Wilmington, not even for my twenty-fifth high school reunion.   What would be the point, after all? 

     The past informs the present, gives shape to who and what we are.  All of us are the products of our experience and our actions, and the defining points of our lives can seldom be gotten away from, even if we can understand just how much influence they have had.  Choice in life is often nothing but an illusion, for the most profound experiences shape all subsequent experiences, influencing their flavor and their interpretation, moving in an uninterrupted line backwards through time.  

     There’s one more lie.  I’m not Peter.  I’m Donald.  And forty-seven days after I spit in my best friend’s eyes, in the middle of a glorious summer, he took his own life – that kind, shy, self-effacing boy I’d known my entire life.  He was found by his mother hanging by a necktie from the back of his bedroom door.  He didn’t leave any note – even in death he was too gentle and kind to lay blame on anyone or anything.  Me, Mike, and Troy never spoke of it, not at the funeral, nor in the 5 years afterwards.  Peter, for us, simply ceased to exist. 

     And the truth is it’s not like we raped someone, or even beat them up.  It wasn’t arson, or killing someone’s beloved pet.  It really wasn’t that big a deal.  I hardly ever even think about it anymore, really.  It’s just that today would have been Peter’s fortieth birthday, and I just wish I could call him and, at least once, say I was sorry. 

The Showdown

     The Mississippi sun was still low on the horizon, yet the coolness of the night had long passed.  Elderly trees lined the street in stoic columns, their leaves sagging in the oppressive stillness of the morning.  Everything everywhere was dry from the long summer drought, and seemed weary of the heat.
The young man walked with a confident swagger that belied his age, his right hand wrapped around the weapon.  Soon they would meet, but this time he was armed, this time it would be different.  With his chest pushed out and chin held high the boy walked on without fear, feeling easily three times his age.
     For days he had told himself that violence wasn’t the answer, that there might be a solution short of murder.  Compromise, though, proved impossible, and there was no reasoning with his enemy.  The last straw had been two days before, when his opponent had attacked him again, this time in front on his friends and his girlfriend.  Everyone had laughed.  The young man’s ears still stung when he thought of it, and he had resolved to make sure it would never happen again.  
     He made the left turn by the Lenderfield’s old barn, which had nearly fallen in on itself after a big thunderstorm some weeks before.  Mr. Lenderfield was too old too fix it himself and too poor to hire any hands, and the barn seemed sadly aware of its fate.  A lone cow stood near the crumbling rear wall, chewing cud and watching with a disinterested gaze as the young man sauntered past.  A breeze emerged from behind the Halver’s shrubs and moved into the street, disturbing the packed dirt of Richard’s Lane.  It tousled the boy’s wet hair and made dust cling to his arms and the nape of his neck.
Up ahead was a white post, marking the intersection of Richard’s Lane and Derrick Court Road.  There he would turn right, and shortly up that road his rival lay waiting, ready to run out and attack like the simple-minded fool he was.  It had been the same everyday since the start of school, almost three weeks running.  The boy had tried to fight back, but he wasn’t good with his hands and was awkward on his feet.  His pants, three inches too short for his body, attested to the growth spurt that had left him far taller and thinner than he’s been just a few months before, making him an easy target for someone so short.
     The young man narrowed his eyes, mimicking the tough look he’d seen on his older brother’s face after a long day in the fields.  Today it would end, for he would not be relying on merely his body but on his mind, and the weapon.  He knew there must be no witnesses to his retribution, for even at his young age he knew that to kill in public would be to open oneself up to public retributions.  He had no fear of the sheriff, or of prison, or even of defeat, but did fear the back of his mother’s hand and the crack of his father’s belt.  Therefore he had to kill in anonymity, and hope his friends would believe him when he whispered what he had done.
     The signpost was now directly in front.  The boy looked about, eyes scanning the surrounding farms, confirming that he was alone and his plan secure.  His heart beat faster as his palms grew slippery, the sweat making it hard for him to keep his grip.  The street here was heavily shaded, lined with ancient oaks and sycamores that stood as high and wide as anything the boy had ever seen.  They had brought in pictures of the new Empire State building to his classroom, but he doubted it was as tall as the biggest trees of Derrick Court Road.
     The breeze died as quickly as it had begun, stifled by the swelling heat of the morning.  The young man reached around and peeled his shirt off the small of his back where it had stuck.  He walked a few more steps, turning the weapon over in his hand, feeling its weight tug on his arm.  The smell of fresh-cut grass, probably from the Macalester’s farm, came across the lane.  He took a deep breath, telling himself he was ready.
     He moved down the middle of the street, exposed on all sides, resisting the urge to dash through the gutters as fast as his legs would take him.  He knew, from hard-earned experience, that running didn’t work, and that displaying fear only encouraged the bully to attack him even more viciously.
The young man’s head cocked from one side to the other, listening.  Somewhere a cricket, oblivious to the passing of the night, chirped busily to itself.  There was the rumble of a wagon over a far hill on the Macalester’s land and a few birds twittered in the bushes, but otherwise the morning was quiet.  
     The young man stopped.  The trees on either side of the road stood immobile, their arms drooping in the heat.  The ancient fieldstone walls on either side of the lane, the height of a man’s waist, offered up no sounds of movement, no indication that anyone or anything crouched behind them.  Maybe there would be no fight.  Maybe his opponent was a coward.  This was, after all, the first time he welcomed the fight instead of avoiding it, and perhaps his confidence was the only weapon he had ever needed.
     He heard something scrambling onto the road behind him and turned so quickly on his thin legs that he nearly fell over.  With a scream his opponent appeared from under a thick scrub of a rose thorn, and was now dashing towards him, only two-dozen feet away.  The boy stepped back with his right foot, eyeing the narrowing distance between them.  He hardly had time to take aim, and knew he would get but one shot.
He raised the weapon, something it had taken him almost twenty minutes to find.  It was a smooth black rock, perfectly sized to fit the palm of his hand.  With his expert throw, it could be as deadly as any bullet, and he had brought down many raccoons, squirrels, and possum in the last few months alone.  He choked down a whimper of panic, refusing to give the rushing, kicking madman the satisfaction of hearing it.
     Its ugliness repulsed him.  Standing just over two feet tall, it had a huge, red flap of skin that dangled obscenely from its neck.  Tufts of dirt flew up behind as its claws dug into the earth, and he could see the spurs, shaped like scythes and twice as sharp, even from twenty feet away.  The young man thought of the exposed white socks that stuck out from beneath his pants, and wished he had put on his father’s denims, even though he knew in his heart he couldn’t go to school in old, battered grownup clothes.
     He dropped his lunch bag at his feet where it raised a small cloud of dust, then cocked his right hand behind his head, squeezing his left eye shut as the right took aim.  His right arm rocketed forward in a flash, losing the stone halfway through its swing.  It whistled through the air, turning over as it sped away from him.
     The young man’s right arm stayed by his left waist where the follow-through had left it; his left eye was still pinched shut.  The rock closed to within an inch of the bird’s head, ready to knock its brains out.   The rooster was finished, dead, until at the very last instant it bobbed to the left and the stone passed harmlessly.  It drove into the ground, skidded, and rolled gently into the gutter.
     The young man’s closed left eye popped open along with his mouth, and the whimper that had been waiting below his vocal cords jumped free.  He turned to run, but the rooster grabbed a hold of his scabbed left leg and scratched, kicked, and pecked into the shin.  He fell, screaming in pain, trying to get his hands around the bird’s neck to wring the life from it.  It drove beak and burr into the naked flesh of his hands and legs.  The boy struggled and kicked, flailed and shouted, but still the bird held on.
     It paused and looked up: the school bus had turned the corner, and was rumbling up the block.  The boy, sensing his chance, lunged, but the bird easily jumped out of harm’s way.  The young man dove with outstretched hands, but the bird simply fluttered a few more feet away. Struggling to his feet, the boy tried to wipe the blood from his legs and hands and get the dirt off his face, but it was too late.  He could hear the laughter already and, turning, saw his some of his classmates’ heads sticking out the open windows.  Some pointed and all laughed, even Mrs. Evans, the driver.
     The rooster and the man looked at one another, the victor and the vanquished.  The bird contemptuously scratched some dirt onto the young man’s shoes, and then strutted off towards its own yard.
     He watched it go, and reached down to retrieve his lunch.

A Difficult Case 

     Blankets are pulled up tight against the dampening chill, and eyes close as the body settles and grows quiet.  Consciousness begins to dim, releasing its hold over the more unruly, primal parts of the mind.  Memories blend with fantasies and, holding hands, they dance in ever-widening circles.  Sleep draws closer, with dreams awakening just below the fading intellect and occasionally coming into view.  The waking mind, now flickering like a candle buffeted by an ever-stronger wind, finally, suddenly, blows out.   
     In the darkness that follows there is only awareness, pure and undifferentiated.  It is without division, without separation, without thoughts or concepts or form.  Only stillness and perfection, a nothingness fuller than all the stars in the sky, and more empty than the deepest vacuum in space.  In this stillness everything simply is, as it should be.  Eons and seconds pass, days and centuries, decades and long afternoons, it makes no difference; time has no meaning here, no power, no purpose. 
      This suchness gives birth to form and substance, and a woman begins to take shape, gaining solidity as her world forms around her.  She is standing on a rooftop, looking out over the dark streets of a city that still sleeps. She stands at the edge of the building, precariously, hesitating only for a moment before she steps off.  Instead of falling the eighty feet to the ground she stands on the air as if it were a solid thing, defying gravity, defying reason, and begins to walk along from building to building, her bare feet touching nothing but the emptiness of the night sky itself. 
      The woman enters a familiar building through its rooftop door and descends a flight of stairs.  She exits into a dingy apartment strewn with books and clothes and discarded food, mementos of another life, of another existence.  Moving around the room, she picks up objects and examines them as if reliving memories from long ago.  She moves through the room self-importantly, absorbed in her own existence, not noticing a gossamer light that begins shimmering in the distance like a great city seen on the horizon.  She is surrounded by the gentle light but oblivious to it, and her world begins to fade away, taking first the city, then the building, then the very room in which she stands.  Without protest she too is dismantled, yet even as she ceases to exist, she thinks she is as solid as that world around her already vanished. 
      Darkness now comes, taking the last of the woman with it.  This darkness is active, alert, like the sky just before dawn when the stars, knowing they must soon hold their secrets through another long day, blaze thunderously across the sky
      In that explosive darkness Tersa begins to take shape.  There is awareness of a body, warm and comfortable under heavy blankets.  Scattered thoughts appear, and begin to congeal like crystals forming in a laboratory, taking familiar shapes and following predictable pathways.  Her eyes open and blink, and stretching her body she smiles.  What a strange place to have ended up, after all that has happened to her!
      This morning, she rises into a canopy of clouds outside the window, her diffuse rays lighting the old curtains drawn neatly shut. She is the sun, she is the curtains, she is the stained, Rorschach-like patterns worked into the fabric, she is the gray metal bars that cover her window like heavy branches. 
      Feet are surprised as they, naked, touch the coldness of the tile floor.  The curtains are pulled back and the light flows into the room as if that stained fabric were holding back a waterfall; the light washes over everything, undulating in continual, ever-changing motions, as complex and beautiful and breathtaking as the very thoughts of God. 
      Tersa uses the bathroom, showers, brushes her teeth and hair, and then lays on the bed in a set of clean clothes, wondering what this day will bring forth. 
      I am Tersa, although much of the time I don’t really know what that even means; her life and her patterns of thought are often as foreign to me as a tree standing in the distance, blowing and bending in its own gentle breeze.    

      Barry Long takes a sip of coffee from a mug that proudly declares Clozaril.  Someone walks in behind him. 
      “Dr. Long,” a self-assured voice announces, “And how are we this fine day?”
      “Not too bad.” Barry takes another sip.  “Getting a little sick of this weather.”
      “It seems like old man winter doesn’t want to give up the fight this year.  Snow, then warm weather, then more snow. It’s a wonder our patients aren’t getting pneumonia.”    Dr. White is a tall, lean man with an impressive head of neatly ordered gray hair, who carries himself with the infallible air of someone not only in charge but also steeped in the confidence imparted by prestigious degrees; a man with an infallible understanding of this world and its inhabitants.  He pours himself a cup of coffee and pulls out a chair, sitting down across the small table from Barry.  They are in a functional kitchen with two windows, framed by heavy steel bars, which look out over a lawn.  A single florescent bulb hangs above them, giving the kitchen a clean, antiseptic feel. Dr. White sniffs the air dramatically.  “That doesn’t smell like our coffee.  Still bringing your own?” 
      “Everyday.  Susan used to do it, and I guess I just picked up the habit.” 
      Dr. White raises a groomed eyebrow at Barry.  “Is that so?” He pauses significantly.  “You haven’t mentioned Susan in a long time.”
      Barry ignores the comment.  “Care to know where it’s from?”
      “Columbia?” Dr. White asks innocently.  He examines Barry with a swift movement of the eye, taking in feet that are askew under the table, white socks whose elasticity has long departed, an ample stomach sagging over a belt, and a shirt bearing a half-dozen stains of various sizes and colors. 
      “Originally, I’m sure that’s true,” Barry says, smiling into his coffee.  “It’s Ghirardelli.  The beans are infused with raspberry and then dusted with Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate.”
      “How decadent,” Dr. White says.  “And you grind that everyday and tote it into work, and then boil water and pour it into a French press.  Isn’t that a lot of work for a cup of coffee – I don’t recall you making it that way a few months ago,” Dr. White clears his throat.  His face, as crisp and well kempt as his starched white shirt, folds carefully along the brow. 
      “You really should try it, Jon.”  Barry begins to get up.  “Come on, let me make you a cup.”
      “Oh no,” Dr. White says, adding his pinched laugh, “Ha-ha.  I like the day-old.  It keeps things honest.  Besides, if I like that, you’ll have to be grinding and making coffee for two everyday.” 
Barry’s smile, never long on his face, fades as he sits back down.  “So, what are you reading,” Dr. White asks disinterestedly. 
      “This?” Barry says, tapping a new, spiral-bound notebook with his index finger, “It’s the Tersa woman’s journal.  She offered it to me,” he adds, sounding embarrassed.  “You know how hard it’s been to get her to open up, right?  I mean, she’s got no interest in talking to us – or to other patients for that matter.  I’m not sure if she wants to be here or not – frankly, I don’t think she really gives a shit one way or the other.  She just gives you those strange stares – you know what I’m talking about?”
      Dr. White nods.  “Like she’s the only one who got the joke.”   
      “Yeah – yeah, that’s it exactly.  So I asked her to write down her dreams, thoughts, whatever she wanted, thought I might get a better picture of what’s happening in her head, told her I’d be reading them on occasion.”  Barry looks up again, brushing his thinning hair, still solidly brown and parted forcefully to the side, further off to the right.   He offers a quick smile, “I think it just might work.  Gotta try something to reach her before we have to ship her upstate.”
      “Anything helpful in there?” 
      Barry lets out a little chuckle.  “I suppose, but it’s not like any journal I’ve ever read before.  I’m not entirely sure what to make of it.  Not sure if this falls into an axis one or axis two model or shades of both, quite frankly.”   
      Both men sip their coffee.  “I’ve gotten her to talk,” Dr. White says with a slight movement of his head.  “And I believe I’ve made a positive diagnosis.”        He looks over his colleague.  “Frankly, I’m surprised you don’t see it.” 
      Barry sits his coffee down.  “You got her to talk? Really? How?  I tried everything, and the only thing I could get her to give me was a brief history, but even that was with almost no affect at all – it was like she was reading dictation.”
      “Of course.  Because she’s totally dissociated from her past.  And it’s quite a colorful past, wouldn’t you say?”  The skin around Dr. White’s eyes wrinkles a little in the corners, and he unfolds a newspaper, scanning the headlines.
      “So how did you get her to open up?” 
      “I told her if she didn’t speak to me, I’d have her thrown in jail.”
      Barry frowns.  “That’s not much of a way to win her trust, Jon.”
      “And yet it’s within my discretion, so it’s certainly not a fabrication.”
      Barry shakes his head, one of his hands rubbing his bald spot the way he sometimes did when uncomfortable.
      “Barry,” Dr. White says, crossing his legs,  “You have to remember psychiatry is a scientific process, not an intuitive exercise.  I simply applied pressure in the logical place at the appropriate time to get the desired result.  Tersa can learn to trust me later.  For now, she only need respect me, and the power this institution has over her.  I gave her a most colorful description of jail – no windows, four women per cell, rampant sexual indiscretion – I got her out of that shell, if only for a moment. I simply gave Tersa an alternative to think about.”  He turns the newspaper to another page.  “Naturally, she opened up, even if only enough to placate me.  She is suffering from a personality disorder, certainly.  She has some kind of post-traumatic stress symptoms, too.  She is clinically depressed.  But her most pressing issue, and the one that is fueling the others and preventing any lasting healing is her schizophrenia.      She has a wonderfully self-sustaining fantasy backed by a very capable intellect.   If we’re to believe her, she has a Ph.D.  And she’s very clever – tries to turn the analytical tables around when you’re talking with her – it’s quite remarkable.  I think she may be a little too clever for her own good –” 
      “So what’s your diagnosis,” Barry interrupts.
      “Fortunately, I’m a pretty clever man myself,” Dr. White replies, smiling slightly at his understatement.  “Textbook type-one schizophrenia, of course.” 
      “I’m not so sure.”  Barry’s hand flutters across his bald spot again.
      “I am sure,” Dr. White says, “Type-one schizophrenia is the most obvious diagnosis – look at how she’s presenting.  I’ve already started her on Cisordinal, so she can expect some relief soon enough.”
      “You –”  Barry begins, “But –”. 
      “We still have to deal with her depression,” Dr. White cuts him off, “And the high likelihood of suicide given her history.  We’ll also need to start her on an SSRI.”
      Barry leans back in his chair.  “She’s uninsured, Jon.  I thought your policy was to shuffle the uninsured off to State.  Why the interest?” 
      Dr. White turns the page of the newspaper.  “The interest, Doctor Long, is in helping her.  State can’t do much but crudely medicate this woman.  But we both know she isn’t going to stay on meds because she doesn’t think anything is wrong with her.  No, she’s perfect for the SRU right here, which means she falls under the grant’s coverage.  We’re behind schedule for the year already, and need to get another four or five patients enrolled as soon as possible, or we could risk our grant.  We, Doctor Long, can cure her, not simply medicate her.”
      Barry shakes his head.  “But I don’t think she’s shown signs of positive schizophrenia symptoms – I mean, don’t you think it’s pretty Goddamn hard to tell the difference between schizophrenia symptoms and bipolar disorder?”  He rubs his neck, “Hell, I’m not sure of much of anything about her, and don’t think it’s wise to begin medicating her this early in the game, before we can both assess her condition.  Or does my clinical opinion not matter?” 
Dr. White folds the newspaper shut and sits it between them, then removes his reading glasses.  He looks Barry over with a calculated eye. An expert in the use of silence as a subduing weapon, Dr. White says nothing for a long moment.
      “Of course it matters, Dr. Long.  No need for defensiveness,” he says at last.  “But let’s look at the facts: This woman lived in a city park for 6 months, never once showering, brushing her teeth, barely eating, just frozen in her own mind.  It’s a miracle she didn’t end up dead.  She’s probably been raped, and even though her blood and urine were clean, I strongly suspect previous narcotics usage.  Her extreme introversion, convoluted speech, psychopathic behavior, and hostility to therapy, along with three serious suicide attempts, tells me she isn’t differentiating her prerational structures and impulses.  She’s in denial of her own former depression, her three suicide attempts, the causes of her homelessness, her estrangement from her family, work, and all social relationships.  She believes she is a god, and that God is now speaking through her so strongly that she no longer has a need to actually exist.  She sometimes speaks of her past in the third person.  Suicide is the next logical step for her – although she might think it a self-sacrifice.” When Barry only rubs the top of his head in response, Dr. White places his reading glasses back on his nose and continues to silently read. 

                                                      
      You and Dr. White are urgently trying to determine just what is wrong with me; normal people, after all, people who have jobs and raise families and      commute from nine to five, who take their allotted vacation someplace warm, who show up at church once a week, and who spend quality time with old friends on the weekend – these people do not behave like this.  Normal people, you reason, do not act as I act, they do not speak as I speak, do not think as I think.   And maybe something is wrong with me -- it is hard for me to say, or even to know -- some days I understand, I know, that a life spent in this hospital is as perfect and beautiful as one spent in a park, or at a job, or in a monastery, or helping others.  It makes no difference, not because I do not care or am cynical, but because I see the impermanence of each of those lives, each of those choices, how all manifest existence is equally empty, equally dream-like.
      I don’t know what ‘me’ you’re trying to help, Barry; I feel disintegrated; that there is so little left of me that I might simply blow away in the breeze, like so much ash left on the sidewalk, and I become afraid I may indeed disappear.  Afraid -- as if that single world could capture it.  And I see and feel things -- strange things; colors around people, feel their emotions inside of my own soul.  It’s like the barrier between my skin and the world has collapsed to the point that we have fused into a single whole, one that has no room at all for the smallness of Tersa.  On those days I feel a darkness; a separation from the calm that is normally present; and its absence is like a violent wedge in my mind; a splinter in consciousness.  It is enough to drive anyone mad, especially a 28-year old woman whose life never had much meaning to begin with.     
      You are a psychiatrist, and like all who work with the mind you are not so much interested in my present state as you are in what got me to it.  Both you and Dr. White would like to know more about Tersa.  I will share with you that you may help me.  Perhaps I am indeed insane, although I’m not certain what that even means.  I am certain that I’m not like the others here, that there is something that sets me apart.  I am certain that you too see that, Barry -- and that you want to help me.  I trust you.  
      Tersa’s life had only two possible endings.  My present state, or death at my own hands.  In Tersa’s life, depression was the only constant.  I remember vividly the first day depression entered her mind, taking hold there like a dark creature that burrowed in, unwanted, and began to breed.  I was coming out of my kindergarten class into a cool fall day – the kind, late in the season, when the sky is forlorn and gray, and the trees seem muted, almost saddened, their colorful and effusive leaves taken from them by the cold.  I walked out of the school building, a little girl in a bright pink Winnie-the-Pooh jacket, feeling the coldness and sterility of the air that was such a contrast to the warm, fragrant air of the classroom.  As I crossed the playground, surrounded by other children, I was overcome with a profound sense of sadness and fear.  I looked at the trees that stood naked on either side of the playground, their arms crooking up into a sky that seemed too gray, too low.  I stopped, overwhelmed, and looked to my classmates, but they continued to skip and play and laugh, not even noticing that I was staying behind. 
      The wind still blew, and the sky looked much the same it had been that morning, but everywhere everything was different.  I stood there, a little girl brightly dressed, and began to cry.  Eventually my mother found me and led me to her waiting car, telling me that everything would be okay.  But my life was never the same. 

      In the years that followed, I was lost in myself, with an ever-present bleakness there to great me every morning and to send me off to sleep every night.  My loneliness would sometimes lessen when others were touched by tragedy; a classmate’s parent would die, or a teacher would become ill, or a bus driver seem overwhelmed by the some blackness in his life, and I would, however briefly, feel connected with another, even if we never spoke a word.  Grief knows no boundaries, no races, no distinctions of any kind.  One of my classmates died slowly of a brain tumor in the sixth grade, returning to school every so often in a façade of normalcy.  After he died, I wished more than anything that I could have switched places with him. 
      By my sixteenth birthday, my life had been lived largely without friends or boyfriends.  A tall, pimply boy named Jim asked me to a dance unexpectantly, and within a week I had fallen hopelessly in love with him.  When he broke up with me, three days after taking my virginity, I realized something had changed.  My love for him had torn a small hole in the grayness of my world, affording a glimpse of what lay on the other side. I was crushed by Jim’s rejection, and that taste of another state of mind became toxic, making my depression so much more unbearable.
      This poor girl only wanted to be happy, like we all do.  As that scared, depressed, self-doubting girl, I just wanted to be able to live like everyone else, to laugh, to have friends, to feel normal. Just for a few days a year.  One weeknight in mid-winter, I climbed into my bathtub fully clothed and slit both of my wrists.  And then I lay back, breathing hard, bleeding faster than I expected, and waited.  As I lay there, bleeding out into the whiteness of the tub, my mind grew quiet, so quiet that my thoughts no longer seemed my own.  Lying there, dying, I felt not fear or terror or regret, but freedom, absolute freedom. 
      As I started to lose consciousness, I heard my mother come home and call my name, and then heard her scream as she found me – my mother, my poor mother, the woman who sacrificed so much of herself for me, who always put my needs ahead of her own, who was, and is, the most selfless person I have ever known.  I never wanted to make her suffer; I just wanted her to help me make the clouds go away, even if only for a little while, so I could see the blue sky again.   
      When I got back from the hospital and went back to school, my stitches hidden under long-sleeved oxford shirts, I sunk back into my old habits, withdrawing once again from the world.  That taste of freedom I had felt laying there in the tub remained only as a memory, but also as the only thing that nurtured me.  It had been more real than anything else in my life, and I clung to it.  In my last year of high school I moved through the school halls like an apparition, growing ever fainter to my peers, teachers, friends and, most of all, to myself.    

      Barry rests his chin on his left hand, his gaze falling onto his wristwatch.  When he finally sees the position of the small hands, he jumps out of his chair, knocking over his waste can as he heads out the door.  Moments later he’s back in his office, scrambling to find a pen and, once found, he hurries out the door. 
      Barry finds Dr. White looking in through the small glass window that opens up to Tersa’s room, standing next to one of their residents, a boyish-looking 26-year-old named Ryan. Dr. White, in his crisp white coat with casebook in hand, doesn’t turn or otherwise acknowledge Barry as he rushes up, struggling to catch his breath.  Barry glances over Dr. White’s shoulder at the handwriting that curls across his notepad in dense, perfectly formed script, easily readable even from a distance. 
      “So you think the schizophrenia is the primary mechanism fueling the delusions, as opposed to an axis two disorder?” Dr. White is saying, “Excellent, Ryan.  Observational and clinical evidence backs up that assessment completely.  Now –”  The young man gives Barry a sheepish nod of the head, smiling as he notices Barry’s tie is off-center, exposing a collar that strains against his neck, while the left side of his shirt hangs out like a crumpled piece of paper. Ryan finds himself looking over the two men several times before giving his full attention back to Dr. White.
      “Now – are you listening to me Ryan?”
      “Yes, Doctor White.”
      “So what is your assessment, then?”
      “In my opinion,” Ryan says confidently, “She’s clearly exhibiting negative schizophrenic symptoms – the high degree of social withdraw, the lack of interest in anything or anyone, the lack of emotional affect, and the utter lack of humor all point to undifferentiated schizophrenia.  Her inability to identify with herself, and her strong dissociation from her past, combined with what I can only infer is her belief that she thinks she is God, form the matrix of a highly unstable and potentially dangerous cross-section of symptoms.”
      “Excellent,” Dr. White affirms.
      “She’s been put on clozapine, right?”  Ryan’s voice gains confidence and sounds more clinically self-assured.  “It has shown tremendous clinical promise in treating negative symptoms.”       
      “Indeed.”
      “I’m concerned about her side effects,” Barry says as if he’d been standing there all along.
      “Yes,” Dr. White replies, looking only at Ryan, “We’ve discussed it already.” 
      “Not with me.” 
      “No, Doctor Long.  You were late.  She is beginning to show signs of tardive dyskinesia.  But the tremors are mild, and as you know will almost certainly go away once she’s off medication – but we have to get her into the SRU and into ECT therapy for that.”
      “Jon, she can hardly write.  They’re more than just tremors.  And I’m also growing concerned about her blood work.”
      “Her counts are within acceptable limits.  The risk of bone marrow failure is still remote.  I saw your notes from yesterday,” Dr. White turns the page in his casebook definitively.  “I don’t share your concerns.”
      “I believe Tersa is making progress, and think we should begin scaling back the meds and focusing more on her therapy.  I don’t see any difference between your diagnosis of negative schizophrenia and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and yet we are jeopardizing her health –”
      “Someone suffering from bipolar disorder does not exhibit the kind of delusions this patient has,” explained Dr. White with a sagacious tilt of his head.  
      “Look, her condition simply isn’t that cut and dry – there is something quite unique going on with this patient, something that I don’t think is as easily quantifiable as you’re making it out to be.  Her journals, for instance –”
      “Are a waste of time.  I warned you she was clever, Dr. Long.”  Dr. White still faces Ryan, who looks back wide-eyed at the two men arguing while both face his direction.  “She’s using them to manipulate you.  She’s avoiding talking about her problems, avoiding taking blame for her actions, in denial about her own mental illness, and suffering still from a highly delusional belief that she’s somehow no longer herself and that that is somehow a good thing.”
      All three men peer in through the window in the silence that follows, although all they can see are Tersa’s feet poking up through the blankets.  Dr. White summarily moves down the hall to the next window. 
      “I’ve been making progress with her,” Barry insists, “I think she’s coming around.” 
      “Patient 4562,” Dr. White responds flatly.  “Thomas M., Esquire.  Ryan, you’ve worked with this patient.  What is your assessment?”
      “Identity neurosis fueled by an NPD,” the young man says quickly, “The intrapsychic structure of Thomas’ personality disorder was preserving his infantile grandiosity and narcissistic beliefs, until his law firm fired him for unethical behavior.  This created a split in his psyche, and has directly contributed to his breakdown.  His treatment thus far –”
      “Jon,” Barry interrupts, still standing by Tersa’s window, “Her meds need to be lowered, and her psychotherapy increased.  A breakthrough is imminent, I’m sure.”  He presses on, despite the color that can be seen coming into Dr. White’s normally evenly-toned cheeks.  “Look, it’s obvious that she hasn’t developed a rapport with you, that she doesn’t trust you.  Do you really believe you’re in the best position to assess her condition?” 
      Dr. White puts his pen into his jacket pocket, clicking the point first, then folds his casebook closed.  Two almost perfectly circular red dots, an inch in diameter, have appeared on each cheek.  “Ryan, we are nearly finished our rounds.” His nostrils twitch indignantly.  “Continue to overlook your notes, and then we’ll discuss the rest of your patients over lunch.  Barry, walk with me.”
      Dr. White walks away at his brisk pace, silently, forcing Barry – who is several inches shorter – to occasionally double-step to keep up.  “I would like to see you in my office in one hour, Doctor Long,” he says tightly, his back to Barry.  “And be punctual.” 
      Barry slows to his natural, ambling pace, letting Dr. White continue to stiffly march down the hallway ahead of him.  Turning, Barry heads back to his own office where, checking his watch, he sees he can finish Tersa’s journal and make some headway in analyzing it.  He sits down at his desk and, without another thought of Dr. White, continues to read where he left off. 

      I got into Brown as a languages major and did well, despite my condition. In many ways, college was easier than high school, for I had no friends or teachers distantly concerned about me and constantly asking if I was okay, which made my contraction from the world that much stronger.  No one noticed or cared what I did or thought, which was both liberating and frightening.  I got through, like a recovering addict, stubbornly, one day at a time, each day hoping that the next would be a little better. 
           Not knowing what else to do with my life, and knowing little else, I decided to stay in school and enter the Master’s program at Brown.  It was my second year of graduate school when I got the call that my mother was in critical condition and I needed to come immediately home.  My mother and I had drifted apart while I was in college.  She tried to hold us together, writing me once a week and calling twice a month, but I never wrote back and mostly just listened to her when she called.  That’s what’s so horrible, so constricting and suffocating, about depression.  It prevents your heart from opening to anything or anyone; you are consumed by it, your mind made toxic, and you have no room at all for the suffering of another.  It is like the whole of your being collapses in on itself into such a tightly-bound ball that nothing and no one can penetrate it. 
      My mother was a beautiful woman; she had the straightest hair that, as a little girl, somehow reminded me of moving water.  Her eyes were brown and open and a little sad, but they always reached out to you; they always told me how much they loved me, how much they wanted to comfort and soothe.  I remember her hands being soft, like gloves, but with a man’s strength running through them from planting and digging in her yard all spring and summer.  She kept her nails cut short to keep the dirt from getting under them.  When I was in high school and would come home in my dazed way, she would sometimes just sit with me and hold my hands in hers, not saying a word.  She knew – she knew there was nothing she could say, that words often are harsh, fumbling things even when wielded with great care.  She expressed her love much more directly than that, and it was she that sustained me.  In her letters, she would talk about little things, the weather, seeing a fox run through the yard, hiring a man to fix the roof.  But those letters weren’t her anymore than the phone calls were.  It was when I would go home to visit, and she would look at me, look into me, really, and we would sit together like we had years before, her holding my hands as if I was still a little girl.  I just wish I had known then what I know now, so I could let her know how much she meant to me, how much I loved her, respected her, needed her.  But I didn’t, I couldn’t, and I lived my life in that narrow sphere of my own creation, circling slowly in upon myself. 
      When I finally made it home and went to the hospital, I was told the truth.  My mother was dead.  She had drowned in a lake near our home despite the fact that she was a good swimmer and the day had been calm, if cold.  Within a week, her body was in the ground and I was back at her home, going through her things and trying to make sense of it all.  I was left without another soul on the planet to call my own, and guilt, at not knowing if she had killed herself, at not helping, consumed me. 
      I dropped out of school and took a series of meaningless jobs from which I was frequently fired.  About a year after my mother’s death, I remember packing away some picture of her for storage when that act – packing away an image – led to an epiphany.  I realized I was free, free of any socially constructed identity – I was no one’s friend, lover, daughter, mother, wife, sister, or anything else.  I was free, and was at last able to bury her. 
      And then something unexpected happened.  My depression, with me since childhood, lessened and then, over a period of three days, lifted entirely.  In its place there was elation, determination, drive; I sold my mother’s home and belongings, moved to Philadelphia, and enrolled in an accelerated Ph.D. program to finish my education.  I ended up with my first real boyfriend, a relationship built not on sex or need but on trust and sharing.  I made friends, went to parties, and felt almost unbearably alive.  I wanted so badly for my mom to see me, to see that I had made it through, that I was, finally, happy.  I missed the feel of her hands on mine, of seeing her graying hair that still flowed like melting snow across her back, and those everyday letters and phone calls so different from her presence. 
      But three hundred and ninety-four days after my epiphany, it returned.  On a cloudy afternoon I awoke from a long nap, and there it was, as powerful as ever before.  At first I fought back with everything I had, starting SSRIs and seeing a new psychiatrist, who promised new drugs and new therapies to help me.  But nothing worked, and my world grew smaller, darker, narrower.  I lost interest in my boyfriend and in sex, in going to parties and in keeping up with my new friendships.  Twenty pounds slipped from my body in a single semester.  Somehow I finished my work at the University of Pennsylvania, I think because I could no more stand the thought of being out of school than staying in it. 
Which brings us to this year, after I finished my dissertation and was graduated.  I gave in to the darkness, admitting that it had won, and that I could fight back no more. I would try and kill myself one last time, except this time I succeeded. Perhaps I killed my sanity -- perhaps Doctor White is correct -- but it’s not just that -- it’s something different.  I know I’m not well yet, but I also know I’m not crazy.  Don’t you see?  The perfection of my mind requires no trappings, no constraints, no brightly colored garments in which to clothe itself.  It need only be.  

      Dr. White’s office is a large, comfortable room complete with wood-lined walls, packed bookshelves, a hardwood floor, and two unbarred windows that, along with the large inlaid desk (which has been in the hospital’s possession for over 150 years), face the door.  Dr. White is sitting behind his antique desk, Barry in an overstuffed leather chair facing him. After clearing a few papers away, Dr. White straightens his penholder and stapler, and then folds his hands together in front of him. 
      "Dr. Long,” he announces solemnly, “Do you know why I called you here?”
      Barry shakes his head.
      “Earlier, in front of Ryan, I did not ask you about Tersa.  I asked you about Thomas.  What troubles me is your mind was not where it should have been or where I asked it to be – it was focused where it has been for quite some time.  On Tersa.”
      Barry leans back into his chair, looking out the window, at Dr. White’s elaborately framed degrees, at the floor, at his hands, and then finally at Dr. White, whose eyes have been following Barry’s with a mechanical precision. 
      “I am director of this facility, Dr. Long, and in front of our interns, I expect you to defer to my judgment.  It is unprofessional to do otherwise.  There is an order here, and young doctors like Ryan need to follow the rules, especially in the beginning.  You know this – the same was expected of you, and you would not tolerate Ryan speaking out of turn to you.  I expect you to be a professional.” 
      “A professional,” says Barry dismissively, “Are you serious?  I don’t really give a shit about protocol, Jon.  A woman’s life is at stake here – I think you’re being reckless with her.  I do not believe she belongs in the SCU.  Period.  And I think you should at least consider the substance of my objections.”
      Dr. White’s measured expression does not change.  When he speaks, it is with a steady and commanding tone.  “Reckless?   Somehow I don’t think that’s a valid accusation.  But you are free to disagree with me.  Just not in front of Ryan, or any other subordinate.  You have unfettered access to me, no?  Use it wisely to make your points, in private, the way I expect a professional to do.  Are we clear on this matter?”  
      Barry rubs his eyes before looking up. 
      “Are we clear?”
      Barry sighs.  “Yes, we’re clear.” 
      “I have been director here for eight years, and have worked with you for nearly four of those years.  I would say that I know my job and that I know you as a professional and as a colleague.  Agreed?”
      “Yes.”  Barry shifts slightly forward in his chair.
      “Now, when your wife – ” Dr. White pauses, an uncharacteristic hesitancy passing over his face, “when your wife passed, so soon after your son, I was aware that a tragedy of that magnitude would require the proper amount of mourning, processing, recovery, therapy, and so on; and indeed, I believe I was supportive not only as the director of this hospital, but also as a colleague and, I believe, as a friend.  Agreed?”
      “Your card was very thoughtful,” Barry says, tugging on his ear and looking up to the corner of the room.
      Dr. White’s face momentarily registers surprise before snapping back into place.  “I was at a conference in San Diego, Barry, you know that.  I couldn’t come back – it was on new ECT therapies for schizophrenia, and I was the keynote speaker, for God’s sake.  And we did talk – extensively, when I got back.  I offered you all the help I could.”
      “You talked, Jon,” Barry says steadily, “I listened.  Remember?”
      “Because you wouldn’t say a Goddamn word,” Dr. White snaps.  He pushes down on the lapels of his coat and takes a deep breath, tamping out the flare of emotion.  When he speaks, his voice is calm and once again measured.  “When Susan died, under such sudden circumstances, I obviously realized the strain of losing your son and your wife would be almost unbearable.”  His calculating eyes attempt to digest Barry’s changing expressions.  “Now, I arranged to provide you not only with adequate time off and reduced hours upon your return, but also to help you find the appropriate counseling with any number of qualified experts, all of which you refused, which I respected, despite my own rather strong feelings on the matter, which I made known to you.  Agreed?”
      Barry nods, just slightly, no longer looking at Dr. White but at his degrees.  Cornell University. Harvard University. 
Dr. White leans back in his chair.  “Let us speak plainly.  I’ve known you too long, and we are both too much professionals, to beat interminably around the bush. 
      “What happened in the past is no longer my concern.  It is the past; it is through.  My concern is with the present, and with the patients we have now, under our care, now.  With how we treat them, now.  With our ability to diagnose them, now.  I have taken what was once a backwards-looking and ineffective hospital and turned it into one of the preeminent mental healthcare facilities on the East Coast, and intend to further make it the best in the nation.  Our schizophrenia research unit has turned the tide on schizophrenia, and we are revolutionizing treatment of this disease.  We have increased our state and federal funding ten-fold since I’ve been here, and stand poised to increase it substantially more as our clinical research continues to be published.  This institution has become the model of schizophrenic cross-treatment therapy, and while our results are not yet statistically overwhelming, that is only because we haven’t had enough patients. But that will change this year.”  Dr. White’s back had straightened into an exclamation point.   
      “In short, Dr. Long, this program has become bigger than you.  It has become bigger than me.  It will, with the funding and research methods I’ve put in place, outlast both of us.” Dr. White’s hands come together in front of him.  “Which brings us to you.  In the last few months,” he says in a stiffening tone, “I've watched a gifted researcher and psychiatrist go from an extroverted professional with impeccable judgment to an almost sullen, withdrawn, and introverted man whose judgment is increasingly suspect.  I need you to take yourself out of Tersa’s care, Barry.  For your own good.”
Barry crosses a leg while pushing his hand through his hair.  “I will not,” he says evenly.  “I believe I’m the only one really helping her.”
      Dr. White sighs.  “I need you to trust me on this, Barry.  You’re nearly obsessed with her.  And it’s at the expense of our other patients to whom you’ve hardly given any consideration.”
      “The other patients are fine under your care, or Ryan’s, or Maureen’s, or Rick’s.  I’m concerned with Tersa.  I will not be removed from her care, Jon,” Barry says, groping for the right tone.
      Dr. White momentarily breaks eye contact.  “You don’t see it, do you?”
      “See what?”
      “Barry, doesn’t it strike you as odd that you’ve chosen to work with a depressed woman, prone to suicide?  That you’re trying to prove she’s not schizophrenic?  That you’re trying to help her so hard?”
      “So?”
      “Look – I know the circumstances around Susan’s death.  I know she was depressed.  And I know that Tersa bears more than passing resemblance to Susan.”
      “That’s preposterous,” Barry nearly shouts, trying to sound dismissive.   
      “Is it?”  Dr. White’s eyes narrow.  “Susan and Tersa look alike, they both suffer from depression, Tersa’s tried to take her own life – isn’t it obvious you’re trying to –” He swallows the end of the sentence, not having to add help her because you couldn’t help your own wife.
      Barry sits immobile, his body rigid to the observation.  But blood bursts into his cheeks and spreads across his forehead and jaw like fire, betraying his static expression and calculated posture.  Dr. White notes the affect, then turns to look out his window. 
      “I’m sorry, Barry,” he says at last.  “But you are jeopardizing Tersa’s health, and I am obligated to put her interests before ours.  This isn’t your chance to get things right, things you couldn’t get right before.”  The two men sit in silence, Barry red and sweating, eyes shifting around the room like an animal’s, Dr. White as static and immobile as a museum piece.  Barry’s breath begins to slow as he takes control of it, and the color bleeds from of his face, leaving it as pale as it was crimson only moments before.  
      “My recommendation,” Dr. White says softly, turning back, “is take a few weeks off – do whatever you like.  Leave Tersa in my care, and when you come back – refreshed, clear-headed – we can discuss her ongoing care, if there is still a need for it.  I’ll have Dr. Mitchell take over your patients, and you will receive full pay, of course.  This entire conversation will not be noted in any official record, nor will the reason for your absence.”
Barry nods, bringing a warm smile to Dr. White’s face.  “I’d rather not,” Barry says, watching the smile wilt.  “My place is here, with my patients.”
      Dr. White says nothing for a long time.  “You won’t reconsider?” 
      “You would have Tersa enrolled in the SRU and subjected to what – fifteen electroshock treatments a week for five weeks?  Seventy-five treatments, possibly obliterating her memory and sense of self?”
      “Yes, Barry, at least seventy-five treatments.  But it isn’t her memory that will be obliterated, it’s her depression.  And then we can bring her schizophrenia under control with medication.  We can give Tersa her life back.” 
      “But what about patients like Dan Reynolds?”
      “He lost his memory, true.  But he is no longer depressed.”
      “He’s no longer Dan, Jon.  He doesn’t know who he is.  What about Jason Kirk?”
      “Look, I’m not going to go through this with you.  You know as well as I do that ECT isn’t perfect.  But for these patients at the extremes it’s their best hope.  It’s Tersa’s last hope.  Otherwise they’re lost, Barry.”
      “It’s not about the funding, not about the publications?”
      Those two bright patches of color reappear on Dr. White’s cheeks.  “Careful, Dr. Long.”
      “I’m just saying we all have our subconscious agendas, Jon.  Dan wasn’t a good fit for the program – we all knew it, but pushed him through anyway.  I don’t want to make that mistake again.”
      “And if Tersa’s not introduced into the program, she goes up to State where they’ll turn her into a zombie and then release her back to the streets with a bus ticket and twenty bucks.  Do you really want that?”  

      “Just give me more time to evaluate her.  To make sure.”  Barry looks down.  “There’s nothing for me at home.  You know that.  What would I do without my work?” 
      Dr. White pulls down on the lapels of his coat again.  “I do not have the luxury of warning you a second time on this matter, you understand?  If you do not take the time off, I will have to note my reservations about your behavior into your official record.  Do you understand what I mean by that?  Do you understand that I will not warn you again?”
      Barry nods.
      “It’s not personal, Barry.  You know that too, right?”
      Barry stands, not bothering to ask if there’s anything more.  Dr. White watches him shuffle out the door.  He sits silently behind his desk, fingers pressed together and resting under his nose, his eyes focused inward.  After a few minutes he gets heavily to his feet and, opening a cabinet near his desk, pulls a file and returns with it to the desk.  He begins writing in his careful and methodical way, his pen moving continuously and without pause until two pages are filled with the neat lines of his handwriting.


      It was late on a Tuesday evening with the cold winter air still wrapped firmly around the city.  My dissertation had been finished and submitted, and a job was offered to me at Brown, all of which would have made most people very happy.  I had opened the letter from the university and left it on my desk, half-read.
      I was lying on my back in my small apartment here in Philadelphia, looking at the ceiling, listening to the clock tick off seconds.  It occurred to me that I had never wanted a PhD., had never wanted to teach, had never even wanted to have spent so much time on the East Coast. 
      I got out of my bed, looking at the wretched squalor of my apartment, with its filthy rugs, unwashed clothes, torn sheets, piles of papers and old food, and saw how they reflected exactly the disorganized state of my own mind, the true nature of my being – soiled, confused, purposeless.  And I knew I could not live with myself for another night, for another moment; I realized it had to end, right there.  I walked up the stairs to the top of my building and stepped out to the roof, shocked at the cold of the winter night.  I wore only a T-shirt and shorts, and the cold sharpened my intent.
I stepped up on the edge of the roof, dangling one bare foot over the street.  I spread my arms and closed my eyes – there would be no stopping me this time, no last-minute saves, no trips to the emergency room.  I leaned out over Pine Street, and felt myself do a lazy half-flip so that I was going to land squarely on my back.  I felt the ground rushing up beneath me, felt my body slam into the pavement, crushing my skull and spine, shattering my pelvis, and exploding both femurs.  Tersa was instantly dead. 
      I opened my eyes and looked down at the street below, surprised to still be standing on the ledge.  My arms were still spread, my one foot still raised off the ground.  But my mind was as blank and as deep as death.  I had no sense of time, or of temperature, or of place, or even of Tersa.  It was as if I was looking out of my eyes for the first time. 
      I don’t know how long I was there, until a sudden, stabbing pain brought me back to my body, back to the world of time and place.  Between my eyes it felt like a stray bullet had smashed into my skull.  I placed my hand there and pulled it away, expecting blood but finding nothing.  The pain became more intense, and it felt to me like the vastness of the universe was being forced into my head.  I put my hands over my ears and fell backwards, almost blind with pain.  I have no memory of what happened next.   
      I awoke lying on my back on the roof of the building.  I opened my eyes, looking straight up into a sky that was astonishingly clear and blue and deep, as infinite as the heavens behind it.  The sun shone not far off the horizon, its light infinitely more complex than I ever suspected was possible.  It was, I realized, the very essence of life itself; it was love; it was God.  Everything was crisp, distinct, as if the world was coming into existence every moment – even the grime on the roof, the discarded cigarette butts and the trash seemed unbearably alive.
      I got dressed and wandered the streets of Philadelphia, wide-eyed and full of wonder.  Instead of being separate from everything and everyone, I was everything and everyone; I was the source and the end; the sun and the darkness, life and death; beyond any duality or any sense of identity.  I was a God, a gnat, a homeless man, a young pretty woman, the emptiness of the sky, the chaos of the morning rush hour, Tersa.  I could turn my thoughts on or off, could summon the thought of Tersa and of her memories, her pain, her emotions, but wasn’t them anymore.  It was like remembering a poignant biography of someone else.  I went a minute without thought, five minutes, ten minutes.  The wall of depression had been shattered, and I was part of a freedom more beautiful, more simple, than language can capture.  I was no longer limited to the darkness of depression or the lightness of pleasure – I was both.  I was none.  I was everything. 
      And so I wandered the city, it is true, giving up my job and my apartment and any externally constructed identity.  I simply existed, for 6 months, living on park benches and in shelters, sometimes unable to function and sometimes finding no need to do so.  You see, on some days the self-contraction would return, and I would become Tersa again, overwhelmed by the vastness in me and around me.  You have spoken to her and helped her with her contraction, and you have spoken to that which exists around her.  Do you see the two-in-one, Barry?  Do you see that I am realizing that only one of them is really real?
      I do not understand why this has happened to me, Barry, but know I am not like the others here.  I have seen the angels, and the devils, that reside within and around us.  I’m beginning to see -- as these weeks have passed, I have been seeing more and more; I think I know now what has happened to me.  I see it contrasted by you; you have been my foil, you have been my gift.  You have cleared away the clutter that was in Tersa -- the pain of her life, felt so sharply, pain that even in my most clear moments swirled blackly around the feet of my freedom.   As you have helped clear that away, I have begun to see, Barry, to see things as they really are. 
      You know -- you know I am not like the others here.  These poor souls suffer from delusions so powerful many of them are in a hell far more real, and far  worse, than any imagined by a theologian.  You see their delusion, Barry, you see how their minds have tricked them into believing truths that you and Dr. White know to be false.  But how different are your delusions, Barry, how different are Dr. White’s?  Your prisons are much more finely constructed than those men and women you treat – your prisons are guarded by society and patrolled by theory and education. What happens on sleepless nights, when your mind will not be still and you must live with the tyranny of conscious thought, when theory and education and social status no longer provide an illusion of safety?  What comes to you in the hours before dawn when the whole world sleeps?  Don’t you wonder, Barry, what happens when everything falls away and there’s nothing left?  What is it you see then?  What words describe it?  Can you tell me?  

      Barry takes out his notebook and makes careful, deliberate notes, then pulls two reference books from his briefcase, finds the pages for which he is looking, and makes the appropriate notations.  After twenty minutes of work, he lets his gaze fall out the window of the train.  It’s a mild morning for winter, overcast, but the eighteen inches of snow the city has received is still thick on the ground, and the warm air coaxes obscuring mists out of the moisture.  Overhead, the sky is a thickening shade of gray, and the world seems more part of a dream world than a waking one. 
      The R7 travels on an elevated rail over some of the worst areas of Philadelphia, disgorging views of burned-out neighborhoods whose dilapidated factories still declare, in faded paint and broken signs, the dozens of industries that made the city one of the wealthiest places in the world a century before.  The homes fair no better than the factories; one in four are partially boarded up and many sink into their foundations, their darkened faces providing no view of the difficult lives within.  Barry rests his head against a rattling window, no longer interested in watching the stark images of poverty slide serenely past. 
      Tersa, Barry knows, is wrong about one thing: emotions are as permanent and fixed as anything in the human mind, and their reality and power can twist logic, unseat reason, and sabotage decades of education and experience.  Emotions can even force an attractive and educated young woman to abandon her job and her career, and live as a homeless mendicant on the streets of Philadelphia, forsaking all human contact. 

      Barry takes his notebook back out of his bag, and makes a few additional notes in Tersa’s file before looking back out the window, nodding to himself and then even risking a smile.  The gloom makes no acknowledgement of his breakthrough.  He snaps his briefcase shut and exits the train at the next stop. 

    [continued in Excerpt 3a]   

A Difficult Case, Continued from Excerpt Tab 3

     I see it now, Barry.  I see where and why I was lost when I was first brought in here  -- the patterns of energy, of thought, of archetype, of life that I so clearly could feel and see -- these too are just more phenomena, more expressions of the underlying Beauty of being.  But I couldn’t understand that -- I knew that Tersa wasn’t real anymore, yet didn’t know what else was real, or was not…
     All the way up and all the way down, it is Perfection; don’t you see it?  The fire that burned upwards within me took me outside of myself, it is true, and landed me here, confused, conflicted, calm-but-on-fire, no?  That fire burns upward still, but water now flows down at the very same time, washing out of myself and into the world.  I have been completed.  The end and the beginning all at once, a glorious contradiction where the contradictions cease to have any meaning.  When I first awakened on that rooftop, it shattered the habitual patterns of thought that made Tersa who she was.  But Tersa was so damaged, so fragmented, that everything that came afterwards was built on unstable ground.  You have put Tersa back together enough so that I can finally truly set her free.   Tersa is beautiful and wonderful and worthy of love and respect, but she is as impermanent as anything else; she is, ultimately, not real, and she will indeed one day blow away like that ash on the sidewalk.  You can shatter yourself now, while you are still alive or, like most, you can wait to be dismantled in death, where you will indeed get a fleeting glimpse of your own true face, a taste of Perfection as your smallness is snuffed out of existence.  I have indeed died, Barry, been set free into a deeper understanding. 
     Part of you understands me, part of you knows all too well that these words of mine are not the ramblings of an unsettled mind that has fallen asleep to sanity; you know it is the Truth of a mind that is Awake, that sees through the obscurations of our existence.   You see, Barry, that it is time to set me free, to release me into the world.  My place is no longer within these walls, of that I am absolutely certain.  I no longer need asylum.  How can I prove this too you?  Perhaps by sharing more of what I see and sense of you…
     You, Barry, believe that pain has substance, has life and power – you have given it hard edges and used it to prop up the whole of your life.  You fight and claw to hold onto your world when, like Tersa, you are just about to break through into the infinite waiting behind every thought. 
You have asked me so many questions, Barry, about my life, my loves, my family, my upbringing, my current understanding of the world.  I wonder if you can answer some of my questions.  Was there a time, perhaps not that long ago, when your theories, your sharp and methodical mind, divided the world into such digestible, easy-to-understand quanta that there was little wonder left?  Magnificent sunsets reduced to low-frequency light diffracting in the atmosphere; fiery stars ablaze in a cold winter’s sky reduced to lumps of burning hydrogen gas; depression and anxiety and perhaps even love reduced to the simple interplay serotonin and dopamine within the brain itself.  Life, after all, is much less frightening if everything is understood, if everything has its proper place, name, and purpose.  Is that not so?  Does that not make us all feel better?  Isn’t it good to know that I am a Type 1 schizophrenic — after all, that sounds solid, clinical, and definitive, no? 
     When I look at you, Barry, I can see in your eyes you have experienced great loss.  I can tell you no longer quite believe yourself.  Perhaps even your theories have been reduced to nothing more than empty concepts, no longer able to explain the world?  I told you before grief knows no boundaries, not between races or sexes or cultural identities or even, Barry, between patients and their doctors.  I see your grief, though you try to hide it from me.  It’s in the way you hold your head, expressed in the slow movement of your eyes, heard in your deliberate and detached speech, shown in the curve of your shoulders, and seen with the dense movement of your body. 
     I am free of the complex mass of mental, energetic, and physical habits held together by a few ruling ideas, desires, and associations that we call ‘Tersa’; the irony is that as my mind has become free, it is now my body that is trapped not in a metaphorical prison, but an actual one.  I now see, in a way I could not before, how much the others around me suffer.  Like Tersa, they think their suffering is real, is absolute, when in fact it is no more than the passing of a shadow across a wide, open field.  I feel such intense joy, such profound peace, that transcends utterly ordinary, fleeting emotion.  Sometimes, when other patients come near me, they too can feel it.  Perhaps that is what I am to do with my life.  I thought that it would be enough to just live, to exist, but know now that is selfish and incomplete.  I can help others wake from their dreams, from their nightmares, and show them a world without division.  But I cannot do it if you will not release me from this prison. 
     I can help those around me, Barry.  I can help you.    


     Dr. White is peeling the skin off of a banana, pulling on the skin methodically to expose the flesh of the fruit beneath.  Barry stands with his back to Dr. White, looking out over the hospital’s snow-covered grounds.  Eddies of mists float up from the snow and are taken up by the air, twisting and turning in hypnotic patterns. 
     “I have confirmed,” Dr. White is saying, “My diagnosis with doctors Miller and Martin, and since Tersa’s already been involuntarily committed, the court order should arrive by week’s end.  We will begin ECT therapy next week.”
     “It’s a mistake, Jon,” Barry says, turning from the window.  Dr. White equitably measures his colleague.  He clears his throat, removing another piece of banana and taking the time to chew it.  “We have been over this territory before.  Have you found another reason to disagree with me?”
     “The SRU,” Barry says, moving closer to Dr. Long, his eyebrows knotting together, “Is for low-functioning adults with long histories of mental illness, and long histories of ineffectual response to pharmaceuticals –”
     “But under our strict guidelines, electroshock has resolved over a dozen cases of patient psychosis when their treatment is refractory to neuroleptic medication, improved their social withdraw, and lead to the simplification of their medication regiment.  You are concerned about the side effects of Tersa’s medication.  This is a great solution to that worry.”
     “But the risk of personality disruption and memory loss is still very real –” 
     “Of course,” Dr. White interrupts disdainfully.  “We want to disrupt the personality. That is entirely the point.”  Dr. White walks towards the door.  “Doctors Miller and Martin are going to review Tersa’s file and interview her before she is admitted to the SRU,” he states matter-of-factly, “I want their opinions.  The four of us will meet in my office, after they’ve had time to review the files and talk to Tersa – Doreen will email you the time – and we’ll discuss the case. 
     “I would very much like Doctors Miller and Martin to hear what you have to say.”  Dr. White steps into the hallway, “And Dr. Long, may I suggest you do your homework, get some sleep, and get yourself cleaned up?  This meeting is an important one for you.”  Barry stands alone in the kitchen, listening as Dr. White’s measured footsteps fade down the hallway. 
Barry finishes his rounds for the day and then, back in his office, carefully selects four reference books and a stack of papers, putting them neatly into his briefcase.  He gathers his coat, gloves, and hat, placing them under his arm and, with his briefcase pulling heavily on the other hand, makes his way though the quiet hospital corridors.  In his slow and methodical way Barry winds through the hallways until he is standing in front of room 51A.  The room is dark, but through the window he sees a nightlight creating an inviting pool of ethereal light.  He knocks gently and, receiving no answer, lets himself in. 
    Tersa is soundly asleep, her face the only part of her body exposed to the air.  Her high cheekbones and oval face run into a strong chin, and her hair, as dark and vibrant as a living thing, spirals out in waves across her pillow.  Dr. White, Barry reflects, was correct about one thing, at least.  Tersa looks like Susan – the two could easily be sisters.  After Dale died, he was so raw, so torn with pain that he hated Susan, hated her for reminding him, with every glace, of his son.  When she touched him he would recoil as if struck, and they ended up not only in separate beds but on separate floors.  Barry would sometimes see Susan send him a pleading look over their silent meals, or from across the room while he read.  Sometimes she would linger by his study door as he worked, not entering or speaking, him knowing she was there only by the faint sound of her breath.  He felt not pity, not compassion, not love, but hatred for her, for making his pain so unbearable.  They lived this way for weeks and weeks, until that day when he got the call doctor long your wife’s been in a serious auto accident and airlifted to Temple University Hospital please come right away and he did, all of his hatred, his anger, evaporated in a flash, as suddenly foolish as a temper tantrum. 
    On that long drive, the longest fifteen minutes of his entire life, he felt only blinding love for his wife and prayed, bargained, and begged for her to be okay so he could tell her he still loved her, he had always loved her, and would love her always still.  He wanted to whisper in her ear that they would get away, take a sabbatical from their lives and their sadness and find the time and the place to bury Dale and bring themselves together again.  He wanted to take her hand in his and tell her he was sorry, that he never meant to push her away, and that he would forever hold her close.  When he got to the hospital the chaplain was waiting for him at the entrance and he knew, of course, it was over, even before the surgeon told him Susan had driven into a telephone pole head-on at over fifty-five miles an hour.  She was thrown from the car after going through the windshield, and had broken her back, arms, legs, and pelvis.  She had four compound fractures, half a dozen broken ribs, and a fractured skull.  She had, somehow, made it alive to the ER, where the doctors had worked to save her life for two hours before letting her shattered body grow still.  The head surgeon was a handsome young man, much younger than he, who never made eye contact and who spoke in a dry monotone, like he was talking about something that had happened years before and had been retold so many times that the story no longer had any real emotion.      
    The nights afterwards had been a nightmare of pain and of vicious contraction, of time standing still.  There had been such unspeakable darkness that each moment, each crawling second, passed with an excruciating slowness.  Alone, devastated with agony, he only thought again and again about the last time he had seen his wife alive.  Susan had curled herself silently into the chair in his study without him even noticing, and when he turned and saw her sleeping body he had exploded in rage, shouting and screaming and ranting until she was driven away with tears streaming down her face.  He had, somehow, managed to keep on all these months, even though he had killed the only woman he had ever loved. 
Tersa stirs in her sleep and moans, and Barry looks around him as if unsure of even where he is.  And then he remembers Tersa and her mother’s death, and how he had explained to her it had not been her fault.  Yet he knows this is different, somehow.  This is unforgivable.  Children are allowed to hate their parents, after all, but not spouses, not Susan; not after she too had just lost her son.  He turns to leave, but is surprised to see an envelop bearing his name propped under the nightlight.  He opens it, straining to read in the half-light of the room.


     Dear Barry,
     Thank you for telling me that my fate is to be determined by an assessment this week with all those who have helped care for me.  Thank you too for telling me you believe me, that you do not think I am in need of medication anymore.  It is comforting knowing that you will be on my side, and help to convince Dr. White and the others that I am not delusional, not insane, not crippled by schizophrenia, not the product of my own delusions. 
     When I hear Tersa’s thoughts, when I reflect on who I was, I wonder if these medications, these treatments, these somber men in white coats, will erase this understanding I have gained, plunging me back into the dream, the nightmare, of my former existence.  If that happens I will again be the clinically depressed girl who needs help.  This perfection will not be lost, but it will be obscured in darkness, in the so limited understanding, of Tersa. 
Regardless of what happens, thank you for all that you have done for me, and I hope that you may one day know the peace of an open sky. 
     With all of my heart,
--
   

    Once home, Barry prints out his typed notes about Tersa that include the opinions he has been so strenuously voicing for so long.  He reads over them, unsure of even his most basic conclusions.  He walks down the short hallway to Dale’s room, peering in as if afraid of waking someone dozing inside.  He remembers seeing television specials and news reports when a younger man that would show a family who never redecorated a lost child’s room, preserving it in what he thought then was a pathetic and desperate refusal to come to terms with a loss.  And yet nearly a year has passed, and his son’s homework books are still on his desk the way he had left them before the accident, his bed still partially unmade, his backpack half-opened and spilling books in the corner of the room.  A fine layer of dust is the only indication that an active and bustling young man hasn’t set foot in the room in too long a time.  Barry goes back to his study, gathers the papers into order and places them in his briefcase, then carries the briefcase down the stairs and puts it by the front door.
     Over the course of the night Barry watches, unable to sleep, as the shadows morph, gradually growing more distinct and defined.  Light steals in around the blinds, filling the room with early morning twilight.  Barry sits up, after seven hours laying awake, and places his feet on the coolness of the wooden floor, then showers, shaves, brushes his teeth, and dresses.  He sits under the flickering glow of florescent lights on the train, surrounded by the long faces of the other commuters.  Outside, the naked earth looks bruised and old, with even stubborn weeds long brown and dead.  Tire tracks and rough footpaths have torn across yards and open fields, leaving streams of mud burst across matted grass.  Banks of blackened snow stubbornly remain, clotted in dark corners and against unused fences. 
     Barry tells the stunned secretary to let the other doctors read over his notes and decide for themselves what to do. 
     “But Dr. Long,” she stammers, “They’re waiting for you –”
     “Goodbye, Doreen,” Barry replies, handing her a stack of neatly ordered papers. 
He walks through the cold morning mists and through the streets of the wakening city, passing people hustling to their jobs and street vendors detaching carts from beat-up cars.  Everyone is dressed warmly, with faces reflecting thoughts of spring and of an end to the snow.  Barry spends much of the morning walking, moving slowly, his hands in his pockets, letting people rush around him on either side.  When he reaches Washington Park on 7th and Walnut, he wanders in, walking past the huge sycamores that, if they could speak, might tell of the days of cobblestone streets and horse-drawn carriages, or of the times when the Union army marched right past them a century and a half before.  Barry sits on a hard bench brushed clean of snow, and lets his face fall into his hands.  For a long time he doesn’t look up, but when he does, he sees the mists have cleared, and the sun is shining brightly. 

* * *