A Good and Happy Child (30 page)

But Maggie jerked away with a cry of outrage. She bumped her head against the door, hard. Almost instantly, the door popped a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

227

open—the babysitter must have heard us arguing and had been standing there waiting for some signal to intervene. Maggie staggered backward. The babysitter drew her in. Then the door banged shut. It was over in three seconds.

Our neighbor—the Merrill Lynch broker—opened her door to peep. I hung my head and said nothing. I dropped the envelope on Maggie’s doorstep.
Let her send me another set, if she wants it so bad.
r r r

“I got the papers in the mail. I’m the defendant in our divorce,”

I explained. “I’ve hired a lawyer.” I sighed.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” you said, with feeling. “Are you okay?

You seem a little run-down.”

I had hit bottom, I told you. My wife had kicked me out of the house. I had hoped that the situation would be temporary. Now I commuted to your office from my friend’s couch in Brooklyn, shuffling to the Q train in the frigid, predawn dark along with the Mexican day laborers heading to construction sites in Manhattan in their jeans and workboots. I regarded them guiltily. They were poor, didn’t speak English, and worked like horses to send money home to family. I was white and college educated, but something invisible prevented me from holding my child and sharing a bed with my wife who lived in the same city. In the subway that morning I had rested my head on the window and with burning eyes read the ads for cheesy dermatologists (
Call
Dr. K!
) and personal injury lawyers (
Work Injury? Fleischer & Dietz Will
Get You $$
), and next to them, a public service ad called Poetry in Motion, presenting a few lines of Dante’s
Inferno
for the edification of commuters, embedded in decorative computer graphics:
When I had journeyed half our life’s way

I found myself in a darkened wild,

for I had wandered from the true road.

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J u s t i n E v a n s

This was my fourth visit in our new “early slot.” You handed me coffee in a big colored mug. You always gave me milk, which I don’t take, but I never corrected you. It was our new ritual.

“Well, I’m glad you manage to come here,” you said. “It shows you’re still working toward your goal.”

“I think,” I said, “I’ve forgotten what that is.”

“To reclaim your family,” you said firmly, “and your right to reenter it.”

“It’s too late!” I groaned. “And I have no energy to fight it. No . . .
will.
I’m going to lose them, and I’m immobile. Exhausted.”

“Maybe you’re exhausted because you’re doing heavy emotional work,” you said. “You need to be realistic. These journals you’re giving me—there are serious incidents here. Going to a mental hospital? Possessed by demons?” You stared at me. “You weren’t aware of any of this?”

“I told you,” I said lamely. “I hadn’t thought about it in a while.”

“And you thought you were just going to muck the stables in your journals, but keep wearing your nice neat neckties during the day?”

I didn’t answer. “People don’t come here to use the tissues, George. They come here to work. It’s going to exhaust you.”

“I thought it was supposed to make me happy.”

You blinked, then without a hint of irony, said: “Not necessarily.”

“Great.”

You fidgeted a moment, as if conflicted over your next words.

“What do
you
think about what you’re writing, George?” you said at length. “Do you believe you were possessed?”

They were the facts as far as I knew, I told you—memories recollected, as if seen through a camera, with the film already beginning to fade around the edges. How could I know what had caused those facts to happen?

“You’re presenting the thesis about demon possession as if you believed it.”

“I did at the time,” I said carefully.

“Okay,” you said. “What about now? Do you believe what you’re writing in your journals?”

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“I’m writing what happened,” I said.

“You’re writing what you remember,” you corrected.

“Fine, sure,” I said. “It’s a memory. Subject to interpretation.”

“Sometimes a new interpretation is what’s required to move forward.”

“New interpretation of what?”

“Of you! George Davies and the universe he lives in.”

“George Davies, divorced washout,” I grunted. You blinked in annoyance—you had grown severe about these self-deprecating asides.

“Okay,” I conceded, “help me out.”

“Am I a victim?” you persisted, rhetorically. “Did a
demon
make me miserable? Or do I take responsibility? How can I expect my family to forgive me, if I can’t forgive myself?”

I threw up my hands. “Forgive myself for
what?
”

“Ah,” you said, with your sphinxlike smile. “For starters . . . inducing psychosis in others.
Folie à plusieurs,
if you prefer the French.”

I shook my head. “Remind me how this helps with my divorce?”

“Hear me out,” you persisted.

I sighed. “Go ahead.”

“
Folie à plusieurs
means madness of many. It’s when a dominant figure forms a delusional belief and imposes it on others. I see this in the stories from your journals.”

“We’re talking about me? When I was eleven?” I asked skeptically. “A dominant figure?”

“Children can be powerful inducers of delusion,” you retorted.

“For children, imagination and reality intersect. When a kid offers you an imaginary ice cream cone, he expects you to take a lick. Get the flavor wrong, and he’ll correct you. Sometimes you see children get the upper hand over adults this way. The child’s imaginative belief is so powerful, it makes the grown-ups doubt where the boundaries are.”

At last your reasoning became clear. “You’re saying I manipulated these people,” I said, incredulous. “Around the demon idea.”

“You created a shared delusion.”

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J u s t i n E v a n s

“Why would I do that?”

“It would have been preferable to the alternative.”

“Which was?”

“Accepting that you were angry and destructive. That maybe you still are . . . a danger to yourself or others. Your feelings of guilt would explain the repression. But why is it coming to light now?” you asked.

“Who are you afraid of endangering, George? Your son? Is that why you’re afraid to touch him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I found myself short of breath. “I’m afraid I’m a danger or afraid I’m still . . . a link to the demons.”

You took this in. “If you were afraid of demons, you would take him to a priest,” you said. “Instead
you’re
staying away. Can’t touch him, be near him. I’d say you were more afraid of
you.
”

My heart thumped in my chest.

You tapped your finger, ruminating on something. “Would it change your point of view,” you said, “if you believed demons didn’t exist? Or no—scratch that. If you believed
you
had never been possessed? When you were eleven?”

I raised my hands in frustration. “My father’s friends—they were the ones to make the demon interpretation, not me,” I said.

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Well, whatever. These were adults. Scholars. An eleven-year-old can’t lead a bunch of PhDs around by the nose.”

“They were predisposed to believe you due to their religious and intellectual convictions. As a gifted child, you perceived that.” You watched me for a reaction, but I merely blinked. “Your father was their friend, too. And even adults want explanations, George—for grief, for loss. Someone’s got to set the rules. Would you rather live in a universe of ambiguity, or one where your ice cream cone is
strawberry
?”

“This went on for months,” I objected. “People were hurt.”

“The greater the commitment to the fantasy. ‘If I turn back now, all this suffering would have been for nothing.’”

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“So you think I was a rotten kid. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’ve treated eleven-year-old rape victims who become elevenyear-old seductresses,” you said. “Trauma and loss of innocence can have unpredictable effects. Children are not always weakened. They learn to protect themselves.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head in frustration. “I loved those people. They were family friends.”

“Then ask yourself: Why am I struggling so much?”

You waited for me to answer, but I had none to offer. You spoke clearly but urgently, like a teacher speaking to child.

“If you hurt someone you hate, there’s no conflict. If you hurt someone you love . . . there’s conflict. Conflict in here,” you said, pointing to your head. “In here,” you said, reaching across the gap between us and making a fist to represent my heart. “It causes people trouble, makes them seek help. Do you understand?” To my surprise, you gave me a lopsided, apologetic smile. “I see it in all my patients, George. Getting at that pain is harder than anybody imagines.”

I said nothing. I felt dizzy.

After a moment, you relented, reclined in your chair. “I’m being direct with you, George.”

“I know. I asked for it.”

“I want you to be direct with me.”

“Okay.” But there was suspicion in my voice.

“I want to go back to my original question,” you said. And then you repeated, emphatically: “Do you believe what you’re writing?”

Now I understood what you were asking. All I had to do was confess that the demons weren’t real, that I had manipulated the grownups, done all the deeds myself; and then renounce any religious claim to an overarching, defining force in all this.
I believe in one God, the Father,
the Almighty,
I began reciting, mischievously, in my head. But I knew: that wouldn’t go over in here. In the presence of your enlightened, sympathetic prying, even I wanted badly to surrender my faith and my memories; just release; let go; say to myself, it was all a dream; it was all
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folie à plusieurs.
Your expression implored me to join you: the wilderness guide, reaching for the client who’s tumbled into the drink.
It’s nothing but a sophisticated superstition,
that expression seemed to say.
You’ve internalized the religious logic, George, and my slightest sugges-
tion that you “give it up” could rack you with guilt—and destroy my credi-
bility. But can’t you see how, as a doctor, it’s my obligation to free you from
this? There are no monsters out there, George. There is only human kind-
ness, and the struggle against life’s troubles. You’ve got it hard enough. Don’t
complicate things.

How could I resist? I was seeking your help, your skills. These were founded on medical science, medical training—secular knowledge. Your world (as I perceived it in these sessions) represented the Enlightened Good Life—education, competence, prosperity—a French garden of secular virtues. My religious beliefs, on the other hand, splashed on the walls a wild spectacular of fear and hope. Christ heaving and bleeding on the cross. Demons feasting on souls as they plunge into hell. The ecstasy that might one day lift us from the grave.

Between the two, a lonely vacuum yawned, where neither set of rules applied. Depression. Lousy marriages. The conformist game of corporate life. That baseline throb of anxiety in a city where you fought crowds for every job, every apartment, even a spot near the pole on the subway.

If you keep fighting on both fronts,
you seemed to say,
the physical and
metaphysical, you will lose. Choose your real life.
Your hand reached for me. I wanted to take it. Did it come to this—that if I were to accept all the good you could offer me, I must also accept, as a whole, the worldview that supported it?

“My father used to quote Shakespeare on this one,” I said, a conflicted smile torturing my face. “And I never heard a better way to put it.”

“Let’s hear it,” you said.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt
of in your philosophy.”

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I watched for your reaction. Would you attack me with more debate? Delight in my choice quotation?

Instead you nodded, without smiling. You had been expecting this. Your eyes fell to the floor . . . you were looking away. Why? With shame? In defeat? More, I think now, with resignation. Another client drowned.

n o t e b o o k 1 6

The Letters

Kurt and my mom puttered and babbled in the kitchen. They were still excited from the events of the night before. Our midnight escape from a fixture-smashing ghost now seemed more like an adventure than a nightmare—at least it did from the perspective of Kurt’s kitchen, with steam licking the rim of his shiny black coffeemaker, and amid the cheerful clank of their breakfast preparations: Mom sifting flour, Kurt cracking eggs.

“Where’s the baking soda?” asked Mom.

“Cabinet,” Kurt said, and moved to show her. His hand went to her lower back. “Pancakes, George,” he said. “How ’bout it?”

I stood in the doorway glaring at my feet, unable to face them after overhearing them the night before.

“I want to go to church,” I declared.

A final egg smacked the side of a bowl, and their patter ceased. They turned to look at me—a small, angry boy with circles under his eyes—and exchanged a glance.

Preston scarcely stirred awake at 10:00 A.M. on a winter Sunday. We sat at traffic lights alone. My mother turned on the radio, but I snarled in a
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nasty way, and she punched the button off. My eyelids felt red and itchy from lack of sleep. Sensing my foul mood, she said nothing until the car at last came to a halt at the end of Early Avenue.

“Why do you want to go to church all of a sudden?” asked my mother. “Is it because of the ghost?”