Exley, page 24
“What did you mean by that?” I asked him.
“By what?”
“‘No, I was actually in the war,’” I said. “That’s what you told the woman at Fort Drum.”
Mr. S. didn’t say anything for a second or two. I slowed down. He still didn’t say anything. I stopped at the foot of the ramp. I was behind him, obviously. I stared down at his head. There was a swirl of hair and then a bald spot in the middle and then a big, red black scab in the middle of the bald spot.
“J. said she didn’t think your father was really in the war,” Mr. S. finally said. “She told me you didn’t even know what company he was in, what division, nothing. She thinks you’ve made the whole thing up. That’s what I meant.” He started drumming his fingers on the arms of his chair, and I knew he wanted me to push him up the ramp into the house.
“But J. saw him,” I said.
“She said the guy she saw might not even have been your father,” Mr. S. said.
“Who did she say it was, then?”
“She didn’t know,” Mr. S. said. “She said it could have been pretty much anyone.”
I could hear the front door creak open. I looked up. J. was standing in the doorway. She couldn’t have heard what we’d been talking about—we were too far away—but I wanted her to apologize for what she’d said about my dad. I was going to wait for her to apologize. I hated her so much, because I knew, no matter how long I waited, she wasn’t going to apologize.
“I know it was you who gave J. that scar,” I said. I said this loud enough for J. to hear. And she did. J. started walking down the ramp. She was wearing clogs, and they went bang, bang, bang on the aluminum. Mr. S. put his hands on the wheels of his chair and pushed, and the wheels rammed into my shins. I let go of the chair and took a step back. He spun the chair halfway around so he could look at me. “Fuck you, you little fucker,” he whispered. “It was her father.”
I didn’t get this at all. “That’s what I just said,” I said.
“Come on, Daddy,” J. said. She got between her dad and me and put her hands on the handles on the back of the chair. I was still so mad at her. I couldn’t stop thinking of how she’d said my dad and I looked a lot alike, even though she obviously hadn’t meant it.
“You and your dad look a lot alike,” I said.
“Go away,” J. said. She started rolling her dad away from me and up the ramp.
“No, really,” I said. “You two could be twins.” This was a lie. J. and her dad looked nothing like each other. And then I got it: Mr. S. didn’t want me to call him Mr. S. because he wasn’t Mr. S., because he wasn’t J.’s real father, which was why he didn’t have her last name. He hadn’t given her the scar, and he wasn’t her real father, even though she called him Daddy. I wondered what J. called her real father. I wondered where her real father was and whether he ever wanted to say he was sorry but didn’t because he knew it was too late.
J. charged up the ramp like the wheelchair and the man in it weighed nothing at all. I knew that wasn’t true; I knew they were heavy. J. must have been really strong. When J. got to the top, she pushed the chair right through the open door, then kicked the door shut behind her. I waited a long time for her to come to the window again. But she didn’t.
Doctor’s Notes (Entry 22, Part 1)
After my dreadful experience square dancing, I return to my office to reread these notes, and I see clearly—the cigarettes, the slovenliness, the language!—that I am turning into Exley. Exley! In horror, I set out to reverse the transformation, beginning with my face: I put a new blade on my razor, run the water, lather my face, wet the blade, and am about to address my face with it when the telephone rings. It is M.’s mother.
“I found M.’s diary,” she says, forgoing any of the conventional greetings.
I am so taken aback by this that I forget to interrogate M.’s mother about the reasons for her attending the funeral, the reasons for her deep, dark, terrible stare. I also forget to wash off my face and put down the razor. I am holding it with my left hand, the phone with my right. “Where?” I say.
“On the kitchen counter,” she says.
“Wait,” I say, looking at the clock on the wall. It’s late afternoon, and I know M.’s mother usually works significantly later than that. “Why aren’t you still at work?”
“I came home to get the mail,” she says. “I do that every afternoon and then go back to work.”
That seems a curious thing to say and do, but my mind is, for the moment, on M.’s diary. “How do you know it’s his diary?”
“Because he’s written ‘M.’s Diary’ at the top of the first page.”
“Curious,” I say, because I don’t recall M.’s journal identifying itself as a diary, or even as a journal, its more proper, serious name. But in my haste I must have missed it.
“Should I read it?” she asks.
I do not hesitate, even though I am mentioned in the journal, even though I’ll have a bit of explaining to do once M.’s mother has read it. “Yes,” I say. Because this is not an accident. Clearly, M. has meant to leave the journal where his mother can find it. Clearly, this is his “cry for help.” Clearly, M.’s mother’s perspective on the journal will help me discover what is real and what is not and thus help me accelerate M.’s healing. Clearly, M.’s mother should read the journal. Clearly, she wants to read the journal and has called me, not to get my professional opinion, but to get my professional permission. “Read it,” I say. “And then call me back when you’re done.”
“I can just read it out loud right now,” she says. “It’s only one page.”
“What?” I say, but she’s already begun reading.
Something Terrible Keeps Happening
Something terrible keeps happening and I just don’t know who to tell, so I’m telling you, Diary. It’s about Dr. ______. My mom thinks he is a nice man. His diplomas on the wall in his office say he’s a nice man. He told me he was a nice man during our first session, when he had me sit on his couch and close my eyes. “I’m a nice man,” he said. “A nice man—and, indeed, a very nice man!” But he is not a very nice man, not to me. I knew that in our first session when, after my eyes were closed, Dr. took my hand and put it on his ______. This happens every time I see him. He tells me to close my eyes and then takes my hand and puts it on his ______ and moves it up and down. The first time he did it, I asked him what he was doing, and he said, “It’s a radical therapy called journaling.” I didn’t get that, but I kept “journaling” anyway, because Dr. ______ told me to and because I was scared. I was so scared. And now, I’m more scared than ever. Because last night I woke up to find Dr. ______ in my house, putting his hands in my ______. This time I was brave and said, “You’re not supposed to put your hands in my ______. It’s wrong.” He went away when I said that. But I’m scared he’ll come back tonight and try again and I don’t know who to tell, so I’m telling you, Diary. You’re the only one who listens to me.
Doctor’s Notes (Entry 22, Part 2)
Oh, Notes, how would you have a mental health professional respond to such a journal entry? How would you have a man respond? How would you have me? “It’s not true!” I say, and drop my razor on the floor: the blade pops off upon impact and skids across the floor and underneath the couch, the couch upon which M. would have me having him close his eyes and . . . “It’s not fuckin’ true!” I say.
“Which part?” M.’s mother asks.
“None of it is fuckin’ true!” I say, even though that itself is not an entirely true statement.
“Why are you swearing at me?” she says. It’s a question that begs for an apology. I offer one, and she accepts. Then silence, except for the crinkle of paper: I suspect she’s rereading the journal entry. “Do you really make M. ‘journal’?” she finally asks.
On the one hand, hearing this is a relief, because I know M.’s mother knows that I have not done what her son says I have done. On the other hand, I can hear the mocking quotation marks in her voice, and so I respond with a defensive, “Well, yes, I do ask him to journal.” And then I realize what I’ve said and shout, “No! Not like that, for Christ’s sake!”
“Why are you talking like that?” she says. Before I can apologize again, she adds, “Jesus, M. must be really pissed off at you for him to make up something like this.” M.’s mother pauses, and I know she wants me to tell her what I’ve done to “piss off” M. But I can’t tell her that without telling her I broke into her house, etc., and so I say, “Even the healthiest doctor-patient relationship can be contentious—contentious and, indeed—” But M.’s mother cuts me off before I can continue. I expect her to tell me, once again, that this is “bullshit.” But instead she says something much worse.
“You know,” she says, “I know you’ve done your best with M. But maybe this just isn’t working out.”
“Please don’t say that,” I say, trying desperately to keep the desperation out of my voice, trying desperately to change the subject from whether “this” is not working out to just about anything else. “Let’s talk about something else,” I say.
“Like what?” she says. I can hear the telltale rustling, flipping, and ripping sounds of someone going through her newly delivered mail.
“Like why do you come home to get the mail?” I ask.
M.’s mother laughs, an unhappy, burnt-sounding bark of a laugh. “M. sometimes likes to surprise me by sending himself letters in the mail,” she says.
“Letters?” I say.
“Letters that are supposed to be from M.’s dad,” M.’s mother says. “M. got to the first one before I did, and he made us both miserable, trying to convince me it really was from his dad. I figure if I get to the mail first, I can pretend the letters never got here. And if the letters never get here, then M. can’t pretend he didn’t write them. It saves us both a lot of trouble.”
“How many letters have you intercepted?” I ask, even though I know how many. “And what do you do with them?” Even though I know that, too. M.’s mother doesn’t mention that the manila envelope is missing, however, which means she hasn’t yet noticed its absence. “Did you save the envelopes the letters came in?”
“No,” M.’s mother says.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” M.’s mother says. “Who saves envelopes anyway?”
“Do you remember what the envelopes look like?”
“Sure,” she says. “They were normal envelopes postmarked by an army post office.”
“A what?” I ask, and then she explains that letters sent from soldiers go through APOs, not through the local post office. “You wouldn’t know where it was from, necessarily.”
“But it was definitely sent from a soldier.”
“Of course.”
“Why of course?”
“Because you know M. He knew I’d check the postmark, and so he found some poor guy in Watertown, about to be shipped out somewhere, and handed him the letters, paid him a little money, and asked the guy to send the letters to him at our address through his APO.” M.’s mother pauses to let me catch up to her way of thinking. “You know M.,” she finally says.
I do know M., and what she says sounds outlandish, which is to say, it’s possible that M. has done what she’s said he’s done. “And you’re sure M.’s dad couldn’t have sent those letters?” I ask.
“Sure I’m sure,” she says. “If M.’s dad had sent the letters, then they couldn’t have been sent from an APO.”
“Why not?”
“Because M.’s dad didn’t join the army and would never join the army,” she says. I can hear exasperation creeping into her voice; it reminds me of how M. sounds when someone mistakes his logic for a lie. “I thought we’ve been over this,” she says.
“We have,” I say, and am about to say more when a beeping sound interrupts me.
“Shit,” M.’s mother says. “Can you hold on? I have another call.”
I’m about to tell her that I can and will hold on when I hear a knock on my door. I look again at the clock and see that it is time for M.’s session. “Look, I’ll have to call you back,” I say, although I think M.’s mother is still taking her other call. In any case, she doesn’t respond. So I hang up and open the door.
Tell Me What You’ve Been Up To
So, tell me what you’ve been up to,” Dr. Pahnee said right when he opened the door. But I didn’t answer him. Because clearly he was all lathered up. I mean that both figuratively—he sounded sarcastic when he said, “So, tell me what you’ve been up to”—and literally: his face was covered with shaving cream and I couldn’t even see his beard. He didn’t have a shirt on, either. His arms were scrawny, like they hadn’t been used enough, and his chest was flat and covered with wiry gray hairs.
“Should I come back later?” I said, and then rubbed my face like something was on it, so that Dr. Pahnee would realize that something was on his. But he didn’t rub his face or put on a shirt or anything. He turned and walked back into his office and sat in his chair, like always. I followed him and sat on his couch and watched him light a cigarette. He really did seem like a guy who smoked now, too, except he didn’t seem to have an ashtray: he used the floor instead.
“I just got off the phone with your mother,” he said.
“OK,” I said.
“She said she found your diary on the kitchen counter.”
“She couldn’t have,” I said. “That’s not where I keep it.”
“Where do you keep it?”
“I don’t want to tell,” I said. “If I tell, I’m afraid someone will go looking for it and read it without me wanting him to.”
Dr. Pahnee smacked the arms of his chair and yelled, “Cut the shit, Miller. Jesus H. Keeriiisst!” He seemed angry about something again, except I had no idea what it was. I thought we were just having a friendly conversation about my diary. But he was clearly upset, and sweating, too: I could see sweat making trails through the shaving cream. I was starting to get a little warm, too. The radiator behind me was rattling and hissing.
Anyway, I thought it would maybe make us both feel better if I told Dr. Pahnee what I’d been up to, like always. I didn’t tell him about the military funeral because he’d been there with me. Instead, I told him about the guy at the Crystal who’d hit Harold in the mouth and how he wasn’t Exley, and then about the shotgun and the dogs and V.’s father and how he wasn’t Exley, either; I told him about Mother and going to the Crystal for my early birthday dinner and how she was talking to herself at night; I told him about my dad’s bandaged head and the machine that breathed for him and what Dr. I. had said; I told him about what America had done to Exley and my dad and J.’s father, too, and how mad it made me, although I didn’t know what to do about it, and how J.’s father who wasn’t really her father took me to see the protesters, who didn’t know what to do about it, either. I told him that I needed to find Exley soon, before it was too late, but I didn’t know how to get to Alexandria Bay. Dr. Pahnee listened, but not with fingers together on his lips—maybe because of the shaving cream. He didn’t look me in the eye, either, which he usually did; instead, he was looking off to the side, toward his bookcase. I wondered if he was even listening to me. So I stopped talking. The only sound in the room was the radiator.
“Were you listening?” I finally said.
“Oh, I was listening,” Dr. Pahnee said, and then he got up and walked to the bookcase, pulled out a book, and brought it back to the chair with him. I recognized it right away: it was a copy of A Fan’s Notes! “You’re reading it, too!” I said. Dr. Pahnee ignored that. He put it cover-side down in his lap and opened it and started flipping pages. Finally, he found what he was looking for. “Here it is,” he said, and then he read a passage from A Fan’s Notes. The part where Dr. Pahnee’s name shows up. The part where Exley says Pahnee is the French word for “penis,” or at least the French pronunciation of the word for “penis.” When he was done, he put down the book and stared at me, his eyes like brown circles of sky above the cloud of his shaving cream.
“You know you have shaving cream on your face,” I said. But Dr. Pahnee ignored that, too. He just crossed his arms and said, “And after we’re done talking about my name, we can talk about our ‘journaling.’”
I didn’t know what he was talking about when he said “our ‘journaling,’” but I knew what he was talking about with Dr. Pahnee. I really did. I didn’t want to admit to it, but I knew it would be better if I did. Sometimes you have to tell the truth about some of the stuff you’ve done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven’t done.
“OK,” I said. “I knew what I was doing when I asked if I could call you Dr. Pahnee. But I never thought you’d read the book and find out. Anyway, I’m sorry.”
It was a pretty bad apology, but Dr. Pahnee nodded thoughtfully, like he was going to accept it and we could go back to how we usually were. Except he then said, his voice full of wonder, “You named me that before you read the book.”
“What’s that?”
“You asked me to become Dr. Pahnee before you even read the book,” he said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did,” he said. “You said you didn’t read A Fan’s Notes until after you went to see your dad in the hospital. Because you’d promised your dad you wouldn’t. But you named me Dr. Pahnee ______ weeks before then.”
“No,” I said. “I named you that after I saw my dad. I couldn’t have named you that before because I hadn’t read the book then. I promised my dad I wouldn’t. You’ve got it wrong.”
“I have it right here,” he said. He got up, walked around his desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a pile of leather-bound notebooks, went through them until he found the one he was looking for. He handed it to me and then stood behind me. On the cover was the word Notes etched in fancy gold cursive. “Turn to page ______,” he said. I didn’t want to, so Dr. Pahnee did it for me. I saw the date at the top of the page and then Dr. Pahnee’s account of the day we agreed he would become Dr. Pahnee. “Now turn to page ______,” Dr. Pahnee said, and I did that and saw a date weeks after the first date, and an account of the day when I came to his place and told him how I’d seen my dad in the hospital, etc. I kept flipping back and forth between two pages, like I was reading them carefully, but I wasn’t: I was trying to think of what to say next. I thought of accusing Dr. Pahnee of lying in his notes—about the dates, their order, what he said I said, and when—but I knew if I did that, then he’d accuse me of doing the same thing in my journal. I thought about saying something else, like how my dad always called his ______ “Dr. Pahnee” and that’s where I learned about it and not by reading the book. But that wasn’t true, and besides, that would make my dad sound creepy and pathetic and I didn’t want to do that. I couldn’t do that.
