Fury (14 page)

I seem to hurt more under the effect of New York City, or Nat-Mur, or both. I avoid my friends. I forget how to talk to people. I cry when I should be working, sleeping, eating a real meal, or paying my bills in a timely fashion. Most nights, I pace the apartment, my eyes wild and a cigarette burning down to nothing between my stained fingers. Most days, I flounder in bed without the energy to even draw the blinds.

The few people that I can't shake (mostly family) grow increasingly concerned about me. Even my mother, who never goes near the Internet, begins surfing mental health message boards. Although she's never tolerated my anger, she entertains my despair. She calls to give me screening tests: “Has the joy and pleasure gone out of your life?” “Do you have thoughts that you would be better off dead?” One evening she announces that she thinks my depression is “situational” rather than “clinical.” (In retrospect, it's hilarious the way she'd recited the symptoms like a college psych major: “Situational depression is sometimes called ‘adjustment disorder.' That's when it comes on in reaction to a stressful event.”) My well-meaning mama sends me articles about how B-complex vitamins can combat depression. She encourages me to write down the things the Lark has said that most hurt me: “Clearly, that man knew just where to hit you. He tapped into something you secretly believe about yourself. He triggered some anxiety that was already there.”

Other people offer advice too, and miserable as I am, I try all of it. I trail my friend Max to the Church Street Boxing Gym. “Enough chanting,” he declares. “I think you really need to punch something.” At my sister's urging, I put everything that reminds me of the Lark into a box and stuff it under my bed. My pal and yoga teacher Rolf tells me to draft a list of “things I want the law of attraction to bring me,” although I can't come up with any goals beyond “absolution” and “relief.”

There are those who tell me to start dating again. One girlfriend in particular thinks it is (no joke) important to sleep with someone new as quickly as possible. “It's like a cleansing ritual,” she says. “It'll clear away the Lark's energy.” Where others advocate fresh air or vitamins, she prescribes the erotica of Alina Reyes, specifically “The Butcher.” Finding a copy online, I discover it's a story of woman who consents to be slaughtered (in both senses) by her potbellied purveyor of meat for the explicit purpose of forgetting her ex-lover.

It's a ridiculous concept, a laughable prescription for good mental health. But when a friend of an acquaintance asks me out for a date, I agree. It's unfair to accept, since I can't seriously consider him—can't consider anyone—as a real love interest or partner. But the placater in me doesn't do what she wants; she does what people tell her to do.

We meet at the Russian and Turkish bathhouse on Tenth Street. It's a testament to my unstable state that I arrange to meet a stranger there: half naked, in a clouded room, among the primitive smells of sweat, salt, mud, eucalyptus, and purgation.

The man I meet might as well be my fraternal twin: He has my small stature, pale skin, aversion to eye contact, and tendency toward silence. A fringe of dark hair falls protectively across his face, which, just like mine, looks so childlike for his age that I am torn between the competing instincts to comfort and reprimand him. My aversion is immediate.

Trying to envision sex with him makes me more depressed than ever. Far from anything “pure,” I feel certain it would be a malicious act. I'd be doing it to obliterate the Lark, and to torture and eviscerate myself.

I see him only one more time before I collapse into full-on paralysis. We meet at Crif Dogs in the East Village, where I sip from a Dixie cup filled with water and watch him eat two tofu hot dogs with incensed energy. I notice his hands as he reaches across the table for a napkin. His nails are gnawed right down to the quick; even his fingertips are swollen and purple, masticated down to the knuckles.

“Oh my god,” I say, taking his gnarled hand with a candor I so rarely bring to dating. “What is this? What have you done to yourself?”

He relaxes instantly, as though he's been uncorked, and I watch the shy strangeness leave him.

He tells me he's recently been through a breakup. And because he hasn't yet deleted the last text message his ex-girlfriend has sent to him, he leans across the table and shows me the screen, which says something eloquent and caring like
I hope you fucking die, you stupid motherfucker.
She constantly cheated on him, he says, as we drift outside and walk among the juvenile clatter of Friday night on St. Marks Place. He misses her, he says, even though she'd been controlling, selfish, jealous—your garden-variety nightmare. Does he resent her? Some. He pities her more. She drinks too much, he tells me, as we walk up Broadway and through Union Square. She's “got issues.” When they were together he'd turned down work at her urging. He'd bought her gifts that put him into overdraft. During her blackest moods he had sat at her bedside, letting her humiliate and verbally abuse him.

As we near my front door, he asks me, “What do you think about someone who used to sleep with drag queens?” I search his eyes for the hint of a joke, but they stare back, earnest and expectant.

“Why?” I ask. “Is this something . . . I mean, are
you
trying to tell me that you used to sleep with drag queens?”

“Me? No. Not
me
. My
ex
.” (Forgive me, gentle boy, for revealing this here.) “Before I met her, she used to be involved with this guy named something like Sofonda Dix. He'd loan her stockings and do her makeup.”

I didn't know what to say. It is one of those moments when life is a surrealist novel.

“So, I wasn't checking into you or anything. But, I heard from [So-and-so] that you broke up with someone too.” He backs me into the doorway of a Korean nail salon and bites my lower lip with what seems like half-conscious aggression. I pull back from the mean approximation of a kiss, and instead I hold him close and lean my skull against his.

The next week is the worst in memory. Depression is too wimpy a word for it; this is nothing as manageable as a
mood.
I fester in bed, doubled over and steeling myself against grief so deep it seems to shallow my breath.

My family—which, as a general rule, doesn't believe in talk therapy but does believe in prescription drugs—begins to propose pharmaceuticals they've seen in prime-time commercials. They drop names like Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Cymbalta, Lexapro. They assure me that there's “no shame” in taking something that might, at the very least, elevate me to a condition where I am well enough to work on my book. And while I'm no Tom Cruise on the subject—I'd taken Prozac for six months in my early twenties—I am still on a vaguely homeopathic kick. I want to confront the malady head-on instead of simply treating its symptoms.

I have ideas about what is responsible for this large-scale collapse, and I want to understand what's causing these disturbances.

I try to write about my personal anger in the form of a memoir, but in doing so I suddenly resemble the students and lovers that the Philosophers of Coimbra used to talk about, people who “fetch up the spirits into the brain” as a side effect of their “vehement and continual meditation” on the ailments with which they were afflicted. All this self-dissection is making me “afflicted beyond measure.”

I'm also distraught over the brief flash of anger I'd expressed to the Lark. I have a track record of feeling inconsolable after the rare occasions when I get upset. As a child, I was always drafting apologies for the most minor infractions and sliding them under my mother's closed bedroom door. “Dear Mom, I have been a bad daughter.” My mother still has those letters of admission—they occupy the same bureau drawer as her collection of birthday cards and keepsakes. As a teenager, I gained a little more confidence during arguments with my family, but I've never fully shaken the misery that followed them. During my most angst-ridden year, I had recurring nightmares that my mother was dying of some unspeakable disease, and I would awaken racked with an earnest belief that I had caused her sickness. My outburst on the phone with the Lark is similar. I've lost my resolve and started berating myself for reacting at all.

My ongoing anger research reassures me that depression is “anger turned inward against the self.” I'd read frequently that “denying one's own emotional reactions” landed a person in a trembling funk. Famed Swiss psychologist Alice Miller wrote, “It is easy to notice, if we pay attention, that [depressive moods] hit almost with regularity—whenever we suppress an impulse or unwanted emotion.” And in the writing of psychoanalyst Walter Bonime, I learn that “A depression-prone person is distinguished by anger over the painful disturbances to his or her life.” It seems possible that I have a great deal more anger to divulge to the Lark. For the moment, the feeling is still underground, fermenting somewhere beneath my depression in a place largely unknown to me.

I spin all these scenarios around in my mind until the day the man from my date at the bathhouse e-mails and calls me, among other things, a “cruel, selfish bitch.”

The placater in me had been thwarting his proposed dates in a waffling way for two weeks. But in a rare stroke of directness, I've confided that I'm still a little too bent out of shape and don't want to exorcise any lingering feelings for the Lark on him.

Had I no consideration
, this man demanded,
for the tough time he was going through?

For some reason the question does a number on me. My rope has been swaying over the edge of the abyss for months, and this man brings me to its frayed end.
It's too much
, I think,
that a relative stranger—a man who is not my boyfriend, not even my intimate—would ask me to ignore my own emotional life for the purpose of comforting him.
The placater holds on tight to the idea that everyone puts their feelings before mine—a laugh, given
I'm
the one who never shares my own emotions.

I fall into a furor of despair and flailing rage, and then, fed up with homeopathy's tentative and uneven progress, I go hunting for a therapist.

When faced with life's needs and urges I used to begin by classifying, abstracting, and conceptualizing, until the classification became more important than life itself. . . . I need a stirring of the heart, a renewal of life, and not a new way of thinking. There are no new ways of thinking, but feelings can be ever fresh. . . . Words are good for shaping feelings, but words without feelings are like clothes with no body inside—cold and limp.

—AN UNNAMED MAN,
seeking the advice of Indian spiritual teacher and
guru Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

My hunt for a shrink is not what you might call an informed search. I don't seek out recommendations. I don't ask for referrals. I select a woman on the sole basis that her practice is located three blocks from my apartment, which, in the death grip of depression, is the farthest commute I feel that I can undertake. (Let's call her Alice, since I followed her down my depression's rabbit hole.)

Under other circumstances, the fact that Alice is a dating coach in addition to being a board-certified therapist might have weakened her case in my eyes. But I'm still under the illusion that dating landed me in this mess to begin with, and so I entertain a fleeting hope that Alice is the perfect person to wrench me out of it.

It's raining as I wait for Alice in a nondescript suite of a nondescript building on a hectic avenue. She rents and runs her practice out of a small room in what I can only guess is an employment agency. Phones trill. The air smells of ink toner. I watch a woman in an open room down the hall nod in profile while a lumpish, sweating man slumped behind his desk gives her a lecture about her résumé, which should be “like a thirty-second commercial.” “With your résumé,” he says, “you are trying to convince the employer to
buy
you and your future potential.”

I sit fidgeting on a wobbly metal chair. Although the office is noisy with people returning from their lunch break, no one passing gives me a glance. I'm grateful to feel hidden. I've shampooed and dressed for the first time all week, but I know there's still something damaged and off-putting about me. My lips are cracked. My red eyes are runny. Although I'm immune to the smell of my own chain-smoking, I suspect I stink like an ashtray.

The woman who comes out to greet me looks impossibly young under her fine dusting of freckles. “Are you Koren?” she asks.

I nod and stumble to my rain-soaked feet.

“I'm Alice,” she says, extending her hand. “I'm so glad to meet you. Why don't you follow me?”

I trail this terribly well-adjusted-looking woman—she is as nimble and blond as sawdust, with high, wholesome cheeks—back into the intimate quarters of her office. Following her lead, I lower myself onto the overstuffed pleather sofa opposite her chair, where I spend a few seconds folding and unfolding my hands. I quickly survey the room's sparse furnishings. There's an Oriental rug on the floor with a complex, threadbare pattern. On the wall: a diploma. At my left elbow: a table. On top of it: an unlit sandalwood-scented candle and a ready box of “ultra-soft” tissues.