Exley, page 15
“You don’t know the book now,” I said. “But you will.” Then I took the book out of my backpack, and I read. I read the first two chapters, out loud. I didn’t look up when I read. I didn’t want to lose my place and mess up. When I was done, I finally raised my head and looked at the class. Some of them were looking at the clock on the wall, which told me I’d been reading for an hour and a half. But most of them were looking back at me. They didn’t look angry. They looked inspired, although to do what, I don’t think they knew. They also looked confused and beat up, like they didn’t know what had happened to them. They looked like Harold after the second guy who wasn’t Exley had hit him.
“That was from A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley,” I said. “It’s a crime that almost none of you have read this book. But you’re going to. I want you to go buy the book. I want you to read the whole thing, including the two chapters I just read to you, for next week. That’s your assignment.”
“We have an assignment?” F. asked. He looked tired. There were circles under his eyes. They were lines within the circles. I could tell, by the circles and the lines, how many cows F. had to milk the next morning, every morning. I felt a little bad for him, for all of them. So I finally gave them what they’d been waiting for. I called attendance. I called W.A.’s name. “Here,” he said weakly, and then hauled himself to his feet and shuffled out of the classroom. They all did. Until finally it was just me and K., whose last name was Y. I’d read for so long that her hair was dry by now, and curly. Her fleece jacket was halfway unzipped. Her eyes were wet and shining. She walked up to me, and for a second I thought she was going to kiss me, right there in the classroom, which she’d never done before. She didn’t, but she might as well have. K. was so close to me that her chest was touching mine.
“You sound just like him,” she whispered. She closed her eyes.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s what V.’s father said, too.”
“I’ve been so lonely,” she said.
“Me, too,” I said. And then: “I bet there are some butterscotch cookies waiting for us back at your place.”
“No,” she said. She opened her eyes and took a step back, so that our chests weren’t touching anymore. “No, no, no, no.” Then she closed her eyes again and moved closer. Her chest touched mine again.
“Why not?” I asked. But K. didn’t answer. She just stood there, her chest against mine, her eyes closed. I closed mine. I wanted to see what she was seeing. But all I saw was what I saw with my eyes open: K. was standing so close to me she was touching me with her chest, but she wouldn’t let me come home with her, and I didn’t know why. I took a step away from her and toward the door. Then I took another and another and another. K. didn’t seem to notice. When I left the classroom, she was still standing there with her eyes closed.
Doctor’s Notes (Entry 17)
The end of the day, and I’m so fatigued I can barely focus on my final patient. The only thing I can focus on is M.’s mother: the memory of her voice on the phone, the promise of seeing her in person two days hence. And when I “take a break” from focusing on M.’s mother, I focus on M. It is fifteen minutes before six. On Tuesdays at six, M. teaches his father’s literature class at Jefferson County Community College (JCCC, in the native tongue). Or so he claims. I had always assumed this was merely another fantasy of his: because after all, what college allows a nine-year-old boy to instruct its students? But then again, he also claims that K. is one of his students, just as she’d been one of his father’s students. And then I remember M.’s mother’s reaction to my saying K.’s name — “No . . . Shit.” That reaction wasn’t to a fantasy. That reaction seemed real enough.
“ ‘I’ve got human life — do you understand that? Human life! — in my hands,’ ” I say to my patient, and rise from my chair. She looks startled. As well she might. She is not like M.; she, as with my other patients, expects me to speak like myself. Although we, too, have a “groove”: each Tuesday, she wonders what might be causing her late-onset bed-wetting, and I explain that it is not actually bed-wetting if you have dreams about wetting the bed but don’t actually wet it, and that in any case it’s probably connected to her fear of the ocean. Not of the actual ocean water, but of the ocean floor and all the “yucky stuff” one might step on. I myself have the same fear and have had it since boyhood, and, as I tell her, “Look how I turned out!” Curiously, after the session the patient doesn’t seem to feel demonstrably better. I suspect she is a late-onset healer, as well, and any day now will find herself all at once healed.
“Must run,” I say to the patient, and I run out the door, into my Subaru, and drive to the college. On the way to the college, I notice a stone house. I remember that according to M., K. lives in an apartment in a stone house on the way to the college. I wonder if that’s the house until I pass another stone house, and then another one, and still another. By the time I’ve reached the college, I’ve passed seven stone houses. The North Country is known for its numerous limestone domiciles, but still, I don’t think I’ve seen so many of them together before. Drat, I think, because this means that in order to find K., I’ll have to search seven houses instead of just one. It’s as though M. (and his father?) have chosen to have a relationship with this woman in this kind of house only to make my life, as a detective, more difficult. This, of course, is a most juvenile way of thinking, “ways of thinking” being as contagious as any other sort of disease.
Anyway, I reach the college, follow the signs, and park in the lot by the Humanities Building. Fortunately, M. is most specific in our sessions. Just as he told me the number of the room in which M.’s dad is hospitalized, so, too, has he told me his classroom number: H-134. I find the room. The door is closed. There is a rectangular window in the door. I peer through it and see M. standing at the front of the room, just to the left of a lectern, which is resting on a table. His eyes are closed; his lips are moving, although I do not hear his voice. The window is wide enough so that I can see the whole classroom: other than the chairs, the table, the lectern, and M., it is empty. I look at my watch. According to M., his class starts at 6:00 p.m. It is now two minutes after. I look back at M. He seems so small, standing next to the small lectern, in front of an empty classroom. Last evening I was peeved at him for telling his mother I had said one thing to him, when in fact I had said another. I was prepared to remain peeved until our session tomorrow. But I look at him with his eyes closed and his lips moving in an empty classroom, and I am not peeved at M. any longer. Poor kid, I think, even though pity is not more productive in a mental health professional than peevishness. We mental health professionals are not put on this earth to pity our patients; we are here to heal them. I have put my hand on the door’s knob, which is more of a handle than a knob, when I hear a deep voice behind me tell me, “Don’t.”
“What the . . . ,” I say, and turn to face the voice. It has come from a security guard: a large, scarlet-faced man wearing a blue uniform and a golden badge and a large belt with a baton dangling on one hip, a firearm holstered on the other. He is reminiscent of the guards in the Veterans Affairs hospital, and my left arch begins to throb in their memory. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t bug him,” the guard says.
“But I’m his mental health professional,” I say.
“Oh,” the guard says. His face relaxes somewhat, more concerned than distrustful. “Is the little guy”—and I suspect the guard is on the verge of uttering something adjectivally offensive, “nuts,” “loony,” “bonkers,” something for which I will have to scold him mentally — “sick?” he finally says.
“I’m not really at liberty to divulge that.” I am preparing to lecture him — I am in a hall of higher learning, after all — about doctor-patient confidentiality when it occurs to me that the security guard might be able to help me. “Is he always in there alone?” I ask.
“Always,” the guard says. “Every Tuesday.”
“No one is ever in there with him?” I say. “Not even a female named K.?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” he says.
“And you’ve never done anything about it?”
The guard’s face turns defensive, the brow descending toward the nose, the nose rising to meet it. “He’s not hurting anyone,” the guard says.
Except himself, I think but do not say, because I’m not certain it’s true. I look into the classroom. M.’s lips aren’t moving anymore, although his eyes are still closed. He has a grateful, shining look on his face, like someone is about to do something nice to him or for him. I am certain he’s thinking of his father or K. And then the look changes, and I know something has gone wrong: either someone hasn’t done the thing M. wanted him/her to do, or he/she has done the thing M. wanted, but it wasn’t so nice after all. Poor kid, I think again.
“What do you think he’s thinking about?” the guard asks.
“Probably his father,” I say. “He was formerly a professor here.”
“A professor, huh?” the guard says. “What’s his name?” I tell him. “Never heard of the guy,” the guard says. “I’ve been here eleven years. I thought I knew everyone who teaches here.”
I am about to respond to this when I notice M. is now walking toward the door. His eyes are still closed, and while they are still closed I consider fleeing. But then he opens them and sees me; the panic in his eyes must resemble the panic in mine. They dart here and there, as if looking for escape, but there is no place else to go. His feet must realize that, because they continue walking toward me.
“Good luck, Doc,” the security guard says, and walks away from me, from us. I turn back to the door. M. is standing in front of it. He looks minuscule, standing so close to the door; his head barely reaches the top of the window. I open the door for him, the way I’ve imagined opening the door for his mother at the NCMHP gala the day after tomorrow.
“What are you doing here?” M. asks, and before I can answer, he also asks: “How long have you been standing there?”
“Just a second or two,” I assure him. “I wanted to ‘watch you in action,’ but alas, it looks like I’m too late. How was class?” It doesn’t occur to me to speak like Dr. Pahnee, and evidently it doesn’t occur to M., either. He shrugs. “It was OK,” he says. “I let them go early. But before that, I read to them.”
“From what text?” I ask. M. raises his eyebrows, as though to say, What text do you think? I’m becoming quite adept at “reading” him, the way M.’s father (and M. himself?) are so good at reading the aforehinted text. “Do you think your father would want you to teach A Fan’s Notes?” I ask, and M. shrugs. “After all,” I say, “he asked you not to read the book.” “And I didn’t,” M. says, “until two days ago.” Then, before I can say anything, he shrugs yet again. Oh, those shrugs! Those damnable shrugs! Sometimes I wonder: Is this really why I became a mental health professional? To be shrugged at by children? In the same vein, sometimes I wonder why people have children at all. Their parents, of course, must wonder the same thing. Although I cannot imagine M.’s lovely, loving mother wondering that. I cannot say the same thing about M.’s father, on the other hand. I tell M., “I have to say — have to say and, indeed, must say—that I wish I knew your father better.”
“What do you want to know?” M. wants to know.
“About K., for instance,” I say. M. glances over his shoulder at the classroom, then down at his feet. “Your father’s student,” I add.
“She’s my student now,” he says, looking up at me. M.’s eyes dare me to tell him that K. isn’t his student. But a good mental health professional never accepts a patient’s dare, which is fortunate, since I never dared to accept a dare before I was a mental health professional, either.
“I know she is,” I say. “But how did you know K. was your father’s student?”
“What do you mean?” M. says, and then before I can tell him what I mean, he says, “I’m teaching my father’s class. She was in the class when I started teaching it.”
Yes, and how did you come to teach your father’s class in the first place? I think but do not say. Instead, I ask, “Did your father ever mention K. before he went to Iraq? Did he ever talk about her around you or your mother?”
“No,” M. says quickly, much too quickly, and so I know the answer is yes. How to prove what I know, however, is a more difficult matter.
“Are you still journaling?” I ask M.
“Am I what?”
“Journaling,” I repeat. This is another way I am certain that M. is not really teaching his father’s class. If he were truly an English professor, then he would know what it means to journal. Because I know from an article in one of the mental health profession’s leading periodicals that English professors no longer have their students write essays on literary matters — literary matters and, indeed, literature — and instead have their students journal, a process which privileges feeling and emotion and devalues such less essential matters as form and style. The point of the article was that English professors, like the rest of society, are better off rejecting their former standards and practices and embracing the standards and practices of mental health professionals like myself. “Are you still writing down everything that’s happening to you?”
“Pretty much,” M. says, and then twists his face into a question mark. “Why?”
“Just curious,” I say, and then attempt to flatten my face into an answer.
A Moronic Device
It was seven o’clock when I got home that night, the time I usually got home on Tuesdays. Mother’s car was in the driveway. The garage floodlight was on, but the rest of the house was dark. I put down my kickstand and parked my bike in the driveway, walked inside, turned on the kitchen and living room lights, and yelled out, “Hello, I’m home!” but no one answered. This wasn’t a big deal. I figured Mother was next door talking to the neighbors or something. To kill time, I went to my dad’s study, took out my “journal,” and wrote down everything that had happened to me that day so far. When I was done, I put the “journal” back in the window seat, walked outside, crossed my arms, and leaned against Mother’s car. As I did, I caught a whiff of myself. I smelled like K. The smell made me feel sad and lonely. But the air smelled cold and clean. I tugged on the front of my coat to make it like a tent and then started flapping it, right there in the driveway. I did this for a while, until the horn in Mother’s car honked. Twice.
“What the . . . ?” I said. I jumped up away from the car and bumped into my bike. It fell and made a soft crushing sound as it landed on the crushed stones in the driveway. My heart fluttered; I could actually feel wings beating in my chest. I was standing next to the back passenger door, and I leaned down a little and looked through the window toward the front seat. Mother was sitting in the driver’s seat. Her arm was hooked over the back of the seat. Her body was half turned toward me, and she was grinning.
This reminded me of a nice thing that happened. I was in kindergarten. Mother and my dad picked me up from school. I don’t remember why or where we went afterward. I got in the backseat. Mother was driving. My dad was in the front passenger seat. We hadn’t gone anywhere yet. We were just sitting there, parked on the street outside Knickerbocker Elementary. My dad turned around in his seat and asked me, “What’d you learn today, bud?” He asked the same question every day, and so I knew to have an answer.
“I learned the planets,” I said, and then recited them in order, Mercury through Pluto.
“Jesus H. Keeriiisst,” my dad said. He was smiling at me. He stuck his hand over the seat, and I slapped it. Mother was nodding at me in the rearview mirror in an impressed way. “How’d you remember that? I always get Uranus and Neptune confused.”
“What do you mean?” Mother said. “They’re totally different planets.”
“I know that,” my dad said. “But I can never remember which one is next to Pluto.”
“Ms. O. taught me how,” I said. Ms. O. was my teacher. I recited what she’d taught me. “‘My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.’ That’s how you remember.”
My dad repeated what I’d just said. “That’s good,” he told me. “I won’t forget anymore.”
“I know,” I said. “I asked Ms. O. what you called the trick, and she said it wasn’t a trick. She said it was a moronic device.”
“A what?” Mother said. She swiveled around to look at me, and as she did, her eyes caught my dad’s. Both their faces looked like they were trying to hold on to something. My dad put his right hand over his mouth; Mother’s lips were pursed, her eyes crinkled. I knew something was funny, but I didn’t know what it was yet, so I said, “A moronic device. It helps you remember things.”
“I think it’s a mnemonic device,” Mother said gently. “Not a moronic device.”
“It’s a moronic device,” I said, starting to guess I was wrong, but mad about it and not wanting to admit it. “The kind of device you need when you’re a moron.” Because I knew what the word moron meant, pretty much.
“Are you sure?” Mother said. “Are you sure it’s not a mnemonic device?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “You must be talking about another kind of device.”
My dad lost it then. He started laughing through his hand. And then Mother started laughing, too. Then my dad started laughing harder because Mother was. I wasn’t going to laugh, because it wasn’t funny. But I don’t think I’d ever seen the two of them laugh together like that. I didn’t want them to stop. So I started laughing, too. It might have been the nicest thing we ever did as a family. There’s a picture in a frame in my bedroom of the three of us. It’d been taken at Sears, at the Salmon Run Mall, when I was seven. We were all dressed up in clothes we’d never worn before. It was clear we were unhappy, because we were all grinning and trying too hard to look happy. Mother and my dad had probably fought about something right before the picture was taken. We looked unhappy, and we were. But no one had taken a picture of us in the car. Why hadn’t anyone taken a picture of that?
