CHAPTER 11
Ashley leaves before I wake up, but she leaves a note telling me she’ll call me later and see what I was doing. I drudge around the apartment like a zombie, unfeeling, uncaring, un…everything. I go online and drop all of my classes, and it reminds me that there is no refund available at this point. I click OK, and then move money around in my bank accounts. It’s almost ten in the morning when I go into the kitchen and look for food. Finding nothing that looks good enough to sit down and eat, I go outside, into the chilly autumn morning, without a jacket on. Without a jacket on just to piss Sarah off if I happen to run into her. I get to a diner, and sit down and order three pancakes with two sides of sausage and three scrambled eggs. The waitress laughs and says I’ve got a big appetite for such a small man. I tell her she’s too fat to be making jokes and go back to drinking my coffee.
“Well, I think the president ‘oughta do something about it. If there’s a war coming, we need to be prepared.” This old man sitting at the counter says to his friend.
“We don’t know if there’s a war coming yet. I think we’re plenty prepared though. We’ve got the best army in the world. Best navy in the world. Best air force in the world. Hell, we’ve got the best everything, minus obesity rates.” I look at my waitress and laugh to myself.
“Either way, we’ve got to be prepared. If Russia decides to make a move, then we’re screwed. If they unload their entire atom bomb collection on us, then we’d be up shit creek without a paddle.” I eat the food, and then leave her a ten dollar tip, because I feel guilty about being an asshole to her before. She didn’t mean to be mean, she was just kidding around. But I’m not in the mood to explain that to her.
I call the hospital, and ask when the psychiatrist has an appointment available, and they say she’s got one available at two in the afternoon, and I say I’ll take it. Ashley calls and asks how I slept. I lie and say I slept fine. She says I was talking in my sleep. I ask her what I was saying, but she says it was nonsense. I was just rambling, like a crazy person. I tell her we should get dinner tonight, and she says she can’t, but that she could come over later if that’s okay. I tell her yeah and go back to the apartment.
All of Patrick’s stuff is gone. Not just the stuff in his bedroom, but the DVD’s beside the TV, the plates that were his, his loveseat. They were all gone. I guess his parents or one of his cousins came down when I was in the hospital and got it. They knew what stuff was his. Didn’t touch any of my things. Just let them be. I get to the hospital and the psychiatrist introduces herself, and she seems like a nice woman. In her mid-thirties, blonde, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds. Probably doesn’t have any kids, because I don’t notice a ring on her finger. The one thing I do notice is the scar on her right cheek.
“It’s actually a funny story. I was out camping with my family when I was eleven or twelve. I can’t remember. Anyway, I was camping with them and my dad has this knife he likes to carry around with him all the time. Shows it off, keeps it in a sheath. Tells me that he’s better with that knife than I would be with a pen. When he was asleep, my little brother takes the knife and starts playing with it. Throwing it into trees and up in the air. I warn him to be careful, and that he might take his eye out. He doesn’t care, and just keeps on throwing it. Well, his hand slips as he’s throwing it the knife launches out of his hand, and slices my cheek open. The knife was so sharp, it cut deep, and it bled very badly. I started crying and my dad comes out and yells at him, and my mom starts bandaging me up, while my dad is spanking him and telling him to never touch his knife again. After that trip, he never brought the knife with him anymore. Always left it at home. Funny how something like that can change someone’s habits.” I look at her, very interested, because she just told this story in which part of her face got cut open, and she doesn’t seem to care, or worry how I’ll take it. She just tells the story as it was, with no restrictions attached. I can already tell I’ll like her more than the therapist I had before. She seems like she’s got a sense of humor, and she knows what she’s doing.
“I like your office. Very cozy. Like you live here or something.” I say.
“I might as well live here with all of the hours I work dealing with crazy people. Not you of course.” She laughs.
“Oh, no. I’m about as crazy as they come I guess. But that’s not why I’m here. Not now at least.”
“The doctors told me what happened, so you must be feeling pretty sad at the moment, I’m guessing. Lost, maybe?” I shrug my shoulders.
“I’m not feeling anything really. Anger, I guess. A little bit. At Sarah.”
“Who’s Sarah?” She says.
“His girlfriend. Excuse me. His “ex” girlfriend.”
“Were you two close?”
“We were all close. We were like one big happy fucking family.” I scratch at the armrest of the leather chair I’m sitting in.
“Do you feel like you were betrayed?”
“I feel like Caesar right now.” I say.
“Well, at least you weren’t stabbed multiple times, and at least you’re still alive. That’s the most important thing to remember. That you’re still with us. That you made it out in one piece.”
“Do you realize how uncomfortable these chairs are?” I say.
“Yes, I do.”
“Then why do you have them in here?”
“Because, I feel that people are more open when they’re uncomfortable. When the physical part of their body is in a state of negativity, the mental part can come out.”
“I’ll tell you right now, I’d rather sit on the fucking floor. Or get one of those chairs from out in the waiting room. Although, I guess this is better than my last therapist’s chairs.”
“Those are comfortable chairs. I’ll admit that I’ve thought about changing them out a couple of times for those. What was his chair like?”
“It was higher than the patient’s chairs. So you always felt like he was talking down to you, which he was.”
“Hmmm…sounds like he was kind of an asshole.”
“Why put yourself in this piece of shit chair, along with your patient, and have to sit in it day after day after day?”
“Because, I want to feel what my patients are feeling. As much as possible. And for me to do that, I have to be as much in their shoes as humanly possible. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, I get it. But that’s not going to make me like the chair anymore.”
“It says a lot about a person when they’re sitting in a chair they don’t like. I’ll have patients get up, adjust the seat, adjust their pants, cross their legs, anything they can do to make it more comfortable. But they’re always afraid to say that the chair is just “uncomfortable” and that they’d prefer to sit in another chair. But you did. It was one of the first things you said. Which means, it’s not going to be hard to get emotions out of you. Get your feelings on the surface.”
“I don’t know. I’m pretty good at hiding my emotions.”
“When was the last time you had sex?” I start to get a little more uncomfortable, and it’s not the chair’s fault.
“Four months ago I think.”
“Was it with someone you liked?”
“It was with someone I used to like. My girlfriend at the time.”
“Did you ever use drugs before having sex?”
“Not usually.”
“What would you do?”
“We’d do a couple of lines of coke sometimes. She was big into coke, so I guess I went along with her.”
“Do you normally enjoy it without the drugs?”
“Sometimes.”
“How often is sometimes?” I start to think hard at this question.
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On how attractive the girl is. How good she is at it. If I haven’t jerked off before we have sex.”
“Those are all very good variables.”
“If they weren’t, I would’ve just said all the time.” I smile at her and she writes something down.
“Do you think you had an active sex life prior to your ex-girlfriend?” She says.
“I slept around a lot. Too much for one person.”
“Did you enjoy it? Living the life of someone who has sex with no commitment?”
“Half and half. I felt kind of disgusted with myself after a couple of them. They were girls who actually liked me, and all I wanted was someone to fuck. So I guess there’s a bit of guilt that goes along with that.”
“There always is. Unless you’re a sociopath.”
“Wouldn’t that be great though? To do things and not give a shit about the other person. Really just live your life however the fuck you want to.”
“I had a patient that was a sociopath. Complete sociopath, so there was no silver lining.”
“What happened with him?”
“I had to turn him into the police.” She says.
“Why’s that?”
“Because he kept on talking about how great it would be to get rid of the people that caused stress in his life. And not by means of sending them to another country.”
“Sick fuck.”
“Exactly. So, never wish that. Not in a million years.”
“Okay, I believe you.”
“How old are your parents?” She asks and I purse my lips.
“I don’t know. Do you still count after they’re in the ground?”
I agree to come back to see her every week. She tells me I have a lot of problems I need to get sorted out before I can function again. I tell her I’m functioning fine, that I’m a goddamn robot. She laughs and says that even robots need to be tuned up every now and again. That nobody’s perfect. “We all have our demons.”
I’m leaving the hospital and I run into a friend I had in class last semester. His name is Jacob, I think. But he spots me and waves, and starts approaching.
“What’s going on, man?” He shakes my hand, and gives me a limp dick handshake.
“Just coming back from a check-up. What about you?”
“Visiting my friend. She OD’d on something last night, can’t really remember. Might’ve been Molly. I don’t know. Either way, she was pretty fucked up. So I came to pay my respects.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Where did it happen?”
“At John’s house.” Same place I met Ashley.
“Oh, shit. Then I bet John feels terrible.”
“He’s already up there actually. If you want to, you can come up and say hi.” I look at my phone, and then grit my teeth.
“I’ve got to be somewhere at three thirty, so I really shouldn’t push it. But give him my best. I hope your friend is okay too, man.”
“Thanks.” He shakes my hand, only this time he actually shakes it.
I can’t remember the last time I actually had fun at a party. Actually enjoyed it. Maybe when I was a kid, when they would line the presents up for me like a castle, and I could just tear into them, then wind up with cake and ice cream all over my face, and not really give a damn about anything or anyone, except myself. Maybe that’s our problem, as a society. We start caring about other people too much. What they think, what they say, what they do. We should just be selfish, and not give a shit anymore. There was a birthday party I went to my sophomore year that I got drunk, and woke up beside this guy who was having sex with this girl who was passed out. I looked at him for a second and he didn’t see me, and I just put my head back down and pretended like I was asleep. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that she had just passed out during, even though it probably wasn’t true. I should’ve said something. But that’s how you end up with a black eye.
I end up sitting in my car for about thirty minutes after I leave the hospital, because I have no idea where the fuck to go. Or anything to do, because most of my friends are in class right now, and I’m…not. It would be a waste of time. I’d sit there and scribble nonsense on paper and then fail every test. It’s not worth it. I start to wonder when news will get out about what happened to Patrick. When I’ll start getting sympathy calls, telling me how sorry they are that it happened. Tell me if I need them, that they’re there. But in reality, they’re only there for the duration of that call, and then after that, they turn into little phantoms. Only showing up when I run into them on the streets, making up excuses for missed calls or texts. Same thing happened after Jessica and I split up. Only, this is a little more severe.
Ashley shows up at seven, and she’s dressed in bum mode. Just sweatpants and a t shirt, and she has her backpack, which means she’s spending the night. Which I’m happy about. More than happy, I’m excited to have her here. She’s the one person right now, in my life that I can put any trust in.
“I brought a couple of movies to watch, if that’s okay.” “Yeah” I say.
“As long as they’re good.”
“That depends on your definition of good.”
“Good meaning, something that won’t depress the ever loving shit out of me.” She puts her arms around me.
“Most good movies are depressing. Look at Citizen Kane. Try to smile after watching that movie.”
“True.” She goes to her backpack and pulls out two cases and hides them behind her back.
“Okay. You choose which arm. Right or left. And that will decide which movie we watch first.”
“What if you have both movies in one hand?”
“Then we’ll have to watch them both at the same time, and that would be pretty fucking irritating.”
“Left hand.”
She goes to the DVD player and puts the disc in and then turns off the lights and cuddles up next to me and I put my arm around her .The Twentieth Century Fox Logo pops up first, and then the silent Lucasfilm one right after, and then the loud, booming music that says “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.”
“What was the other one?”
“The Empire Strikes Back. So either way, it would’ve been good.” I kiss her on the side of her head and she kisses me back.
Halfway during the movie, she looks up at me and asks if I’m happy. I tell her as happy as I possibly can be. Then she asks if I was still taking Valium, and I told her I ran out yesterday. She then asks if I blame her for Patrick’s death. I say no, I blame Patrick for Patrick’s death. But I’m not holding it against him. She looks at me funny for a second, then goes back to watching the movie. When it’s over she gets up and stretches and asks if I want to watch the second one. I tell her no, and that I should probably get to sleep.
“What are you doing this weekend?” She asks, as I put on my pajama pants in the bathroom and she has her eyes closed in my room.
“Take a guess.”
“Hmmm. Does it have anything to do with me?”
“That’s a good question. Why do you ask?”
“Because, I was thinking it might be good for you to get out of here for the weekend. You know. Get some fresh air and all. If you want to.”
“I think that sounds like a splendid idea.” I say, and I jump on the bed beside her.
“Then that’s what we shall do. I’ll have the car pick us up at four tomorrow.”
“What car?”
“Chauffeur. Rich parents, remember?”
“Where are we going?”
“If I tell you that, it’ll take the surprise out of it all. Just know that where we’re going is going to be fun. And that’s all that matters.”
She rolls on top of me and starts kissing me, and I’m thinking that she wants to have sex, but I just don’t have it in me tonight. I feel ripped of any sexual desire at the moment, but I don’t want her to think it’s her fault.
That she’s not sexy enough, or that she doesn’t turn me on, because she does. But I feel like waiting, and that’s the first time I can honestly say that and mean it. We end up just screwing around, and she comes twice, and I push her hands away when they start to reach for me, and all I can think to say is, not now, and she understands to the best of her ability.