This Is My Brain on Hold

WILL

After five minutes of navigating a phone tree and ten minutes on hold, I finally reach our MVCC contact. My heart rate’s 108, and I probably need to change out of my drenched T-shirt as soon as the call is over.

“Hello, Blanca Sanchez here.” She’s harried. Distracted.

I take a deep breath and rub the wrist holding the phone. “Hi, Ms. Sanchez! I just wanted to follow up on our previous e-mail and see if we could still help you out with the catering for your student activities fair.”

“Yeah, we’re working out the details for that. I still don’t know if I even have the budget for food.”

I close my eyes and look down at the script I prepared for this very reply.

“Oh, that’s totally understandable. There are quite a few other institutions that have the same problem, which is why A-Plus has a program to augment your event with a hybrid of free and low-cost items. Essentially, we’d be able to provide the event with free fried rice and beverages, with the option for your students to buy egg rolls and crab rangoon for a nominal fee.”

“You can do that?” Ms. Sanchez asks suspiciously.

“Oh, yes,” I say, trying to sound as welcoming as possible. Jocelyn and I both agreed that when it came to telling her dad about the plan, we’d ask forgiveness instead of permission. The goal is to have the profit of egg rolls balance out the sunk cost of the fried rice. But even if we end up in the red for the afternoon, if we pass out a couple hundred flyers and coupons to a captive audience? It’ll definitely be worth it. “I can send you a sample contract. All we would require is a fifty-dollar deposit against cancellation, which will be refunded after the event.”

“Huh.” I can tell that Ms. Sanchez is trying to figure out if the deal is too good to be true.

Time to seal the deal with the part that I practiced with Jocelyn a dozen times. “A-Plus is very excited about the ability to offer this service to MVCC, because your students have been terrific customers. This year’s booth at the Boilermaker Expo at MVCC was our most successful ever.”

“Oh, yeah, I think I remember some of the people in my office coming back with dumplings.” She pauses, and I cross my fingers. “Okay, why not. Sounds like a win-win. You can e-mail me the information.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I say after I do a silent scream and fist pump. “You won’t be disappointed, and I look forward to your event.”

I’m practically buzzing as I put the activities fair up on the whiteboard we got to keep track of upcoming catering gigs. We already have six contracts for the next two weeks, and the four meals we did last week are almost singlehandedly driving the 25 percent increase in profits we’ve seen lately.

I can’t wait to tell Jocelyn, but she only left for her interview an hour ago. I look down the rest of my to-do list for the day. I already did a deep dive into the past week’s numbers, isolating the catering and online orders as the sources of increased revenue. Next up is some website stuff I wanted to do so people could select the Healthy Choices option for individual items.

A little more than halfway through my coding, I hear Mr. Wu and Jocelyn get back. Charged up with the good news, I head into the kitchen only to see the door swing shut as Jocelyn goes upstairs. My heart drops.

I turn to Mr. Wu, who’s muttering in Mandarin. “Did it not go well?”

“She very moody.” He frowns. “So, probably no go well.”

I turn to stare at the door leading up to the apartment upstairs. It’s just a piece of wood with a few bits of metal, but with no one upstairs to chaperone and Mr. Wu glaring at me with his best “don’t you have work to do” scowl, it’s impenetrable.

I walk back to the front and grab my phone to text Jocelyn. I can already feel my heartbeat pounding with worry in my ears.

You okay?

I stare at my phone for two agonizing minutes before it’s obvious she’s not going to respond right away. Briefly, I consider pulling a fire alarm to clear the building or going out to buy a grappling hook so I can scale the outside wall up to her room, something smart or heroic that’ll pull her out of whatever funk she’s in. Then reality sets in as my thoughts shrink down to a realization that’s small and sharp: Obviously, she doesn’t want to talk to me.

I’m dizzy with disappointment for a moment, unmoored, and I try to find steady ground by piecing together what must have happened.

The interview didn’t go well. Was it my fault? Did I set her up for a fall by forcing her to meet with Grace, whose level of perfection was probably unattainable? Did the omelet I made for her give her indigestion? Should I have walked her through my breathing exercises this morning? I must have failed Jocelyn in some way for her to close the door on me like that.

I go back to my laptop and consider sending her an e-mail, even though it’s unlikely she’ll check her e-mail if she’s not responding to texts. I’ll give her the good news about the catering business to try to cheer her up. And I’ll apologize for whatever I did, or whatever I didn’t do.

As I type through the message my hands start shaking, and the typos build up. The edges of my vision start to blur, and I close my eyes.

Five seconds in, five seconds out.

When I open my eyes my vision’s gone back to normal, but there’s still the slightest tremor in my hands, and my back feels like I’m a strung-up marionette. I continue my e-mail, only to be interrupted by a text chime.

Don’t want to talk about it, is all Jocelyn writes.

It’s like being sucker punched. I look down at my watch. I’ve been sitting on my ass for the past ten minutes, but my heart rate is 120. Another cramp hits then, as if someone’s stuck a fork in my liver and twisted. For a moment I struggle to breathe through cement-filled lungs. It’s been a long time, but I know what to do. I put my hands around my mouth and nose like a baffle and force my shoulders up and down, squeezing and releasing the muscles, willing them to relax.

Then, when I have a modicum of control over my body, I open up a new message and type slowly, reluctantly:

“Hi, Dr. Rifkin. Do you have any emergency slots this week?”

It turns out that Dr. Rifkin had a cancellation, so I slide into an open appointment at three thirty. Mr. Wu gives me permission to leave for a while after I promise to come back for the dinner rush. Jocelyn still hasn’t woken up from her “nap.”

When he opens his door to let me into his office, Dr. Rifkin has a gentle look of concern on his face. “I’m so glad I could get you in, Will.”

Left unspoken is the fact that it’s been years since I’ve called for an acute appointment. I’d been doing so well, in fact, that I’d cut down from weekly visits to twice a month, and now monthly. It just made more sense with how many commitments my parents had to juggle.

He leads me to the familiar couch, with its array of textured pillows. As always, I pull over the one covered in flip sequins, smoothing them down so they’re all green then drawing patterns in them to change them over to their blue side. I stare at the pictures on the wall of Dr. Rifkin with his husband and their two kids. They had just adopted their oldest daughter when I started therapy. It is wild to think that she is in grade school now.

“So, how can I help you?” Dr. Rifkin asks.

Well, might as well go with the headline. “I almost had a panic attack today.”

“Almost?” he asks.

“Well, not almost. I had one—the abdominal pain, the elevated heart rate. But I was able to control it with some relaxation techniques and mindful breathing. So it didn’t… I didn’t feel like I was going to die, or anything.”

Listening to myself, I think: That’s a pretty low bar.

Dr. Rifkin seems to agree, his forehead creased in concern. “Did you feel like you needed any medical attention?”

“No, not really. It was exactly the same symptoms I had before, and it went away within five minutes.” My doctors always reinforced to me that panic attacks are almost never dangerous, no matter how frightening they feel.

“That’s fabulous, Will. You’ve done an incredible job working on a lot of exercises and techniques to help you in this situation. I know that you know that, if this becomes recurrent, or if you have any new symptoms that you can’t explain, you should call me or go to the ER…”

I’m nodding before he even finishes his sentence, because I’ve been to this rodeo before. The next thing he’s going to do is offer pills.

“… and you know that if you ever get to the point where you don’t feel like you can control your physical reactions,” Dr. Rifkin says, right on schedule, “there are medications that might help to decrease the frequency of these attacks.”

I nod, because God, I’ve wanted those meds before. There was a point in middle school when I could barely go a week without getting another panic attack, when I wanted nothing more than a pill I could take to make me able to step on a school bus without fear of hyperventilation.

My mother had been frank about her opinion. “Those drugs, William, they can be good, but they can also be very, very bad.” She ticked off their evils on her fingers. “They can give you headaches, they can disturb sleep patterns, they can make you wish to harm yourself. Some of them can make you an addict.” She didn’t expressly forbid me to take them, though she warned me, completely unnecessarily: “You know that if you are thinking about taking drugs, you should not mention it to your nne nne or to your cousins, right? It’s better to keep these things private.”

In the end, I’d held off on the meds, and to this day I’m not sure if it was out of pride or because of my mother’s warning.

“Thanks, Dr. Rifkin. I’m good for now.”

He gives his usual nonjudgmental nod. “All right. Were there any triggers that you can think of for this most recent incident?”

The AC in Dr. Rifkin’s office is on full blast, and it’s nice when you first walk in from the August heat, but it creeps into a chill the longer I’m here. I look down at where I’ve tucked my hands in between my legs to keep them warm, and stretch my shoulders, preparing for the heavy lifting about to begin.

“I told you about my summer job at my last appointment, right?” He nods again. “Well, there’s this girl.…”