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Tom’s only experience with psychologists was from TV. He was strangely unnerved to find himself in a doctor’s office that resembled any other doctor’s office he had ever been in. There was still a medical examining table with all the accoutrements. There were maps of the human bodies’ various structures: nervous, skeletal, and circulatory. No photos of Freud or Einstein, which always seemed to adorn the walls in Tom’s imagination or an evening program, sitcom or drama.
On the drive over he played out a whole conversation with the doctor in his head:
“Tell me about your mother. Do you love her?” And he even had a Freudian accent. Or one that Tom imagined Freud having.
“Of course, she’s my mother.”
“Did you have a long attachment with her? Let’s say, nursing?”
“What? No! I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t remember it....”
“Hmmm.”
“What are you trying to say, here?”
“Why did they call you Tommy Titsucker in school?”
“What?”
“Everyone has a sexual attachment to one’s mother.”
“Get out of here.”
“After all, she was the first woman to ever spread her legs for you.”
There was none of that. The ensuing session or interview was not what Tom imagined. Mostly the doctor asked him about his sleeping and eating habits and looked him over a bit. It felt like being at the regular doctors, except with more conversation and questionnaires.
“Tell me what happened on the highway the other night, Tom,” the doctor said.
“Nothing much to tell.” Tom felt flush.
The doctor shrugged and held his arms in this position as though he had been frozen that way. And would he ever be back to normal? “There must be some story to tell,” the doctor said, “Otherwise why would Officer Coxcomb suggest you come talk with me?”
“I don’t know, really,” Tom said. “It was a mis- understanding. I was looking at my gut to see if I was getting fat.”
“But you’re not fat, far from it.” The doctor spoke softly and let go his shoulders so he once again looked like a person, a person with a neck at least.
“I know that,” Tom said. “I was hoping I was getting fat, I thought I felt a paunch.”
“You would like to gain weight,” the doctor seemed to assert.
“So I could feel like I fit in, maybe.”
“Fit in to what? Pants? Are you are looking to gain weight to find a new wardrobe?”
“No, fit in at work,” Tom said, shaking his head.
“You want to fit in at work?”
“No, I don’t really care.” Tom knew he had stumped the doctor. He had stumped himself. The reasonable explanation, once it came from his lips, did not sound so reasonable after all. Why had he been looking at his stomach? At that particular spot. Oh, God, does the doctor know about the billboard?
“Why at that particular spot, any reason?” the doctor said and pretended to be interested in Tom’s blood pressure reading. “That’s an attractive young woman.”
“Look,” Tom said in his sternest voice, “I know what you are getting at, and no, I was not masturbating to the billboard. I pulled over to talk on my cell phone.”
“And look at your belly,” the doctor added.
“Sure,” Tom said. There was no use explaining; these were the basic facts. Perhaps he would have started to masturbate if he hadn’t been arrested, but at the actual point of contact between Tom and the officers, Tom was not masturbating, nor thinking about doing so. Much.
“Do you think there is anything interesting about sitting on the side of the road looking at your belly button, Tom?” the doctor said.
Tom flinched visibly. “Not my belly button!” he shouted, “My belly. Now you’re putting words in my mouth!”
The doctor quickly jotted something down in Tom’s file and then smiled graciously. “Tom, please, let’s not get excited. I’ve hit a nerve and you don’t want to discuss that subject.”
“I don’t really want to talk about it anymore, either,” Tom said and tried to relax. It was like talking to a child, he thought.
“So we won’t talk about it anymore,” the doctor agreed and still smiled. The beard had a streak of silver down the center and added a distinguished flare to the man’s face, so that when he smiled it could easily elicit a smile from Tom or at least put him at ease.
“Alright,” Tom said, “it is a little odd, I can see that. But it’s nothing like the police are making it out to be.”
“Do you often feel people are out to get you in this way?”
“What?”
“Can we talk about the lawn ornament incident?”
The gnome. “I’d rather not,” Tom said. “How do you know about that?”
“Relax, relax.” Calming smile again. Hmm, hmm. “There is no secret plot against you.”
“Ok.”
“But if you did feel that there were, how would it manifest itself?” the doctor said. “Do you think people speak to you through, I don’t know, perhaps the radio?”
“People do speak through the radio,” Tom said flatly.
“Really?”
“Sing too. It’s radio.”
“No, no.” The doctor leaned forward. “What I mean to say is, do you feel that people speak to you personally and directly through the radio.”
“Of course not,” Tom said but felt as though he were lying. Just then, when the doctor asked him that question, Tom’s mind flashed back to the night at the billboard. He had heard his name spoken through the radio. It was no accident and it was no mistake. When the good-looking officer was standing back at his car, Tom could hear the conversation between the officer and his dispatch. The good-looking officer spoke Tom’s full name into his mic and dispatch repeated it back. “Tom Ryder” crackled through the officer’s radio. Tom heard this, but knew that was not what the doctor had in mind at all, so he chose to say nothing about that. It would only confuse the issue. Tom felt he knew what the doctor was trying to do. Tom knew his defects, and psychosis was not one of them. High strung in high school, maybe. There were his pills for that. Depression? Over the years doctors and family had hinted this. Tom did not believe himself to be clinically depressed.
His father, after all, was depressed; his mother and Uncle would admit it without reluctance now, years after his death. He did not take a real interest in anything. It was hard to comprehend his father’s depression, however; Tom remembers the man having hobbies and smiling a lot. He had friends. There was a favorite picture of his father Tom kept. His father has on a hat a la Frank Sinatra, tilted at an angle, smirking. Not the look at all a man who was depressed and had nothing to live for. A man who could have used a tan, perhaps. Maybe a membership to a gym. A fellow that might have looked good in a suit and tie; he had that smile. Or whatever kind of suit. Space suit. Why not? Why not to the moon? One of those men that knew mathematics so well, perhaps, that they knew satellites were the ultimate goal, not a trip to the moon (fly me to the moon).
Tom recalled verbatim his last conversation with his father. He was at university and he called his father on a pay phone down the hall from his dorm room. His father was drinking because Tom could hear Andre Ethier and the Deadly Snakes playing on the stereo in the background. One: His father was so house trained he would have never played his music too loud in the house, not even in the basement, Tom’s mother would not stand for it. Two: Tom’s mother, if she was home would have been swaying to different music upstairs, casting shadows on the things up there and would have certainly been on the phone as well. Three: his father was slurring a little and seemed talkative. Still, Tom liked his father after he had a few drinks. The man loosened up and talked to him as he did when Tom was smaller.
“How’s the dorm?” His father asked for the third time. This time Tom expanded as both he and his father knew he would. Or was it the propensity for drunk people to repeat themselves? Either way it worked, and Tom told his father:
“There is this guy down the hall that’s totally, like, he wants to instill laundry etiquette on, like the whole floor, maybe even the whole dorm....”
“Haha...”
“I know, right. He tells me and anyone that will listen....”
“Which isn’t for probably very long.”
“No, you’re right. But he tells everyone ‘if you have two or three loads that you need to wash, what you should do is wash one load and put it in the dryer but not wash the second set of clothes until half hour later. The washer takes 30 minutes and the dryer will run on the same coinage for 60 minutes. So, your clothes will sit in the washer for an unnecessary 30 minutes while some other fellow could have been utilizing the washer. If, at the end of the first 30 minutes, the washer is still empty you may start your second or third load, whatever the case may be. Even if the next fellow is only 1 minute behind you and puts his clothes in the washer, you both have utilized the washer, the water, and both your expenditures. If you happen to come out on the bottom of this transaction it will not matter, because the law of averages dictates that you will come out, if not on top, then at least even.’ And all that shit.”
“It makes sense.”
“I guess.”
“No, it makes sense.”
“Sure, but the problem is, this guy, the guy with the etiquette capitalist theory, gets extremely angry if he sees a washer and a dryer going at the same time if he is trying to wash clothes. Especially if he finds out it’s the same owner of both the clothes in the dryer and the clothes in the washer. There have been two or three occasions of vandalism and they blame this fellow, that’s what I hear around the dorm. So he flips out and starts doing shit to people that won’t buy into his theory.”
“Which is a good theory.”
“It is a good theory.”
There was a long sigh.
“Why are people like that, dad?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know what to tell you my son,” his father slurred, and his last meaningful words to Tom were: “People are fucked.”
Another memory from when Tom was eight. Four? He must have been six. It came back to him there in the psychologist’s office. His father and mother in the car. Small Tom propped in the middle. No seatbelt, it was the late 80’s. It was somehow different then, there were not enough pictures on the news of children like Tommy lying in the road having been flung through the window of a car. Hit by a drunk driver, which was somehow more accepted then, as well. His father and mother were joking around. They had just been to a garage sale in which, even though Tom was small he sensed his father had been humiliated, and he could sense too that his mother was disgusted by the whole affair. Yet they were trying to keep things light with barbs back and forth, and Tommy sensed the tension and the fun and sat giggling between them.
“It must be so hard to walk upright with no bloody spine,” his mother said, and his father smiled and shook his head. “I mean really?”
“It was only two more dollars.”
“The price said $5.”
“Seller’s remorse,” his father said.
It was a fondue set, presumably in the family for over half a decade. Tom’s father took it to the man with the cash box set up on a wooden table near the garage door. He produced his five dollars and said: “I’ve been looking all over for one of these.”
“Oh, wow!” the man said placing his hand over the cash box and eyeing the five dollars suspiciously. “How did that get in here? This must be a mistake.”
“Someone put a price on it.” Tom’s mother said, suddenly appearing at her husband’s side, Tom felt his father stiffen a little.
“Well,” the man said slowly, “the wife and I really do like the fondue. And it’s been in this family for, shit, I don’t know, years at least.”
“Oh, well, that’s too bad, we have been looking at getting a set.” Tom’s father placed the box holding the fondue set on the table. The box showed many people smiling and sticking forks of meat into boiling chocolate/cheese/whatever your imagination wants! Try fruit for a fondue.
“Yeah, I know, but...” The man rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced long and hard. “Ah, hell, I tell you what. Six bucks and it’s yours.”
“Six bucks?”
“You know, you go down to Walmart and get this for ten times the price. That’s a good set there, clean and only used a couple times really, and once by accident, so it was put away quickly. Seven dollars.”
“You folded like that cheap table he had his money on,” his mother said as his father guided their vehicle home.
Tom’s father sighed. “Don’t ever get married, Tommy,” He said. “When you wake up one morning, lots of mornings, but one morning and say, ‘I have no idea what I am doing with this person’ that’s when it truly is a fate worse than death.” And his mother sniggered a little and punched him in the ribs before he finished saying it. But it was a joke that seemed to have been told before; it was very familiar. Or else so entirely fresh it was funny. A joke is always half a truth anyway and when the laughter was out, there was still the pilot light of the Truth glimmering in his eyes. You saw it. Still, when Tom was in a foul mood, he would take the picture out from the photo album, and the picture itself wasn’t hard to find because it was the only picture Tom ever really looked at, not being a picture-looking-at kind of guy. When he was in these low moods his father’s smile would take on a whole new look for him. It wasn’t the smile of a care-free good old fellow just wanting to be your friend. No, this time it reminded Tom of leering, yearning beyond control. Perverted nearly. Looking for something you could never obtain. Tom could sometimes believe he saw drops of sweat on his father’s forehead, near where the hat tipped so jauntily before. Not evil, but someone who would tell you about their interest in cars when clearly you were not interested. Too friendly, if there was such a thing. And there was. Or someone who would lose the focus in their eyes when they were talking about their dog. Perhaps someone who always mopped the floor and the slightest bit of dirt would make them lose their minds.
Then there were times when Tom looked at the picture and saw a man who didn’t have a care in the world. Those were relaxing moments, in a way. Tom could see his own lift of an eyebrow in his father’s grin. Sometimes Tom would tip an imaginary hat. These were the light feeling days when he would find that he was not fidgeting so much, or that people around him were smiling at him more. Or he was smiling at them more. Rare days, to be sure, but a reprieve Tom owed to his father’s picture or even his memory. When he thought of his father he did not think of the failure his Uncle sometimes made him out to be. Nor was he confused by the man, as his mother claimed to be. When he thought of his father he felt something close to serenity, if there was such a thing. As though the moment he was in counted more than anything else. And the moment would never end; frozen in time just like his father’s face tilting back a hat that he wasn’t worried would fall from his head and get dirtied on the floor. If it did, there were other hats. A hat was a hat, there was no sentimentality towards a hat.
There was no real sentimentality over much. There was a house fire when Tom was young. He remembered his father laughing and watching from the street. He rescued the photo albums and clutched them under his arm and made asides to Tommy every few minutes; “Look at those sparks, Tommy.” He said. Smiling at the sky. “It’s getting hot here, Tommy,” he said and nudged Tom on his chest until they were both on the street and then on the neighbour’s lawn, with the neighbors standing looking, offering no sympathy, shocked by the homeowner’s flippancy.
Tom’s mother, however, ran around the neighborhood shrieking to anyone who would listen about their home going up in flames, and shouting, for whatever reason “I just cleaned the house, I just cleaned the house!”
Afterwards, at his Uncle’s home, he listened to his mother tell him about all the things that were now gone: an antique desk from her grandfather. “Irreplaceable,” she said. A wooden clock Tom’s father made in the garage, his first endeavor at woodworking. “It wasn’t that great a clock,” his father added. “Irreplaceable,” his mother went on, speaking of things Tom had never even seen; they were so special and precious. Tucked away in the attic or garage, rarely seen by even the owners, but somehow so valuable now that they were gone. His mother cried a bit and Tom’s father massaged his arm until he fell asleep and woke in his Uncle’s spare room, wedged between his mother and father. At once he felt ashamed because he was too old to sleep with his parents, and relieved to know he was safe and not tucked away in an attic or garage waiting to be burned and cried for.
Still his father was the one who was depressed and not quite comfortable in life, as his Uncle put it. For all his calmness and easygoing disposition, he must have had mental problems, his Uncle and his mother reasoned. And when Tom slipped into complacency or relaxed a little too much for his comfort, he felt afraid that perhaps he was like his father. Not comfortable in this world. Not cut out for this life. Or this race, however his Uncle always phrased it.
“Tell me something about your days in grade school, or early high school.” The doctor snapped Tom into the present and Tom sat stunned for a few seconds. “Did you get along well in school?” the doctor prodded.
“Well,” Tom said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Did you have many friends?”
“Not really,” Tom admitted.
“Were you picked on?” the doctor asked.
“No,” Tom frowned, “They did call me Tommy Titsucker for some reason.”
“Any reason why?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said, “I don’t think so. You know how kids are.”
“You went to college?” the doctor said, “University?”
“I did, for a while. I dropped out.”
“Why is that?”
Tom shrugged. “It was a lot of money. My father died when I started, and I just wasn’t interested.”
“When you started, what were you interested in doing?”
“Nothing, really,” Tom said, and felt a chill of sweat run down his back. He shifted in his seat. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Did your parents drive you toward anything?”
Did his parents drive him toward anything? His mother, sure, always driving. His Uncle always needling on about this and that: “A man is judged in this world by his ability to earn a living, and his capacity to earn the best living he can.” But his father never really gave any advice of that sort. Tom remembered many talks with the man, but never any practical advice on what to do with his life. “You’ll find something.” His father always smiled and they would drive in silence, with his father describing the countryside, “There used to be a farm there,” he would start and Tom would watch as the old farm passed, his father’s story coming to life in Tom’s mind about neighbors who would help each other out, and cows dying in the spring come calving time. In Tom’s imagination he could hear the hissing of oil lamps at night, and the ticking of old clocks in the silence of the living rooms, silent except for the crackling of a wood stove, which provided the only heat. There would be things to do in the morning for these people, but now there was only the hissing, the ticking, the crackling and the muted shuffling to bed. His father drove him through the country until he could see the stars in the sky through the windshield and the lights of town, the traffic getting heavier and horns shouting at each other.
And arriving home to his mother ushering him quickly upstairs to his room and admonishing his father for keeping him out so late. “It was a nice drive.” He could hear his father defending himself. “He’s got school,” his mother would shout back. “It’s Friday tomorrow,” his father would reason. It made sense to Tom. Obviously to no one else.
“I think they just wanted me to be happy,” Tom said, not sure if what he was saying was the truth.
“Were your parents happy?” the doctor asked.
“My dad was,” Tom said, and smiled. “My father was a happy man.”
“Are you a happy man?”
“Sometimes,” Tom said. “When I’m not doing anything I’m happy.”
“Explain that, ‘when you’re not doing anything you’re happy’, can you tell me what you mean by that?”
“I don’t know,” Tom admitted, “I suppose when I feel obligated to do something I get, I don’t know, nervous or something.”
“At work?”
“Yes, but not just at work. When I come home to Eddy and...”
“Eddy is your boyfriend?”
“Girlfriend.” Tom frowned.
“I’m sorry, continue.”
“When I come home to Eddy and... well, if you want the truth, she’s the one you should talk to.”
“And why do you say that?”
“...”
“Tom? Why do you say that?”
“It’s nothing. Nothing. Forget it.” Tom shifted uncomfortably.
“Tom, I want to write you a prescription for some anti-depressants. Nothing to be alarmed about...”
“I’m not alarmed.”
“...many people take this medication these days. I want you to try this for a few months and make an appointment to see me in, let’s say, a month or two, can you do that?”
“I suppose...”
“And there is a book I want you to pick up at a bookstore, one I think will help immensely.” The doctor began writing on a pad. He ripped a page off and handed it to Tom. “Give this to my receptionist and make another appointment. We’ll see how things are going after that.”
Tom took the slip of paper. After he booked a second visit and left, he unfolded the paper to read what the doctor had written. The top half of the paper was an illegible prescription. The bottom half was the title of a book: Choose Your Own Reality by Travis Bunk. He already owned the book and he felt like throwing the doctor’s paper away. Yet, as he walked down the street and watched others pass him with their hands deep in their pockets and their eyes on the ground, he clutched the advice in his fingers and tried to blend in with the crowd.