“We’ll be passing Ukiah,” Gary says. “You should see Ginny.”
They’re winding along a narrow creek toward the Blue Lakes, through a canyon. “I don’t feel up for that.”
“You never feel up for seeing her, and she notices. She’s your sister. We can just say hi for fifteen minutes.”
“You know she won’t let us stop for only fifteen minutes. And if Bill is there, we’ll have to talk with him too.”
“He’ll be at work.”
“The answer’s no.” The earth here red and so many cutaways for the road. Lined with manzanita.
“Why don’t you like her?”
“I never said that.”
“Well why do you never want to see her?”
“Do you enjoy seeing her?”
“Not really.”
“And why is that?”
“The whiny voice, I guess.”
“Yeah, I’ve never believed her voice, our whole lives.”
“Well it is her voice, like it or not.”
“No it’s not. It’s just a fake. We’ve never heard her voice, except maybe when she’s angry or crying. Maybe that was real.”
“Well it’s only one small feature. Jesus.”
“That’s the other problem, how religious she is. Like I want all that judgment shoveled onto me. Wheedling questions about my two divorces and about whether I’m going to church and everything pointed to whether I’m a good man, which of course I’m not.”
“She’s not so bad. You make her sound mean.”
“She is. Always smiling, always tittering because a laugh seems more friendly, and behind all of it is pure meanness and judgment, getting out her fork and turning me over to see if the other side is roasted enough yet. Just the way she looks at me.”
“She has glasses, and the lenses are thick. It just makes her eyes look bigger so you think she’s examining you.”
“Yeah, it’s only that. You’re right, little brother.”
“Now who’s being mean?”
They hit a flat section and then the Blue Lakes on the left. “Slow down.”
Gary takes his foot off the gas and they hear the engine compression. “Want me to pull over?”
“Yeah, why not?”
They pull in under weeping willows hung down to the water. The color not as blue today, washed out by the sky. Long narrow lakes between the road and mountain. Jim gets out and walks down to the edge.
The sand rough, pebbled browns and reds and greens, a bit of blue. Water calm and clear, no one swimming at this time of year to churn it all up. Soft decay and mud only a few yards out. A rope with knots hanging, waiting. He remembers joy here, swinging on that rope with John, fighting to push each other off, endless games invented out of nothing. Gary too young, six years younger.
Small cabins all along here that you could rent, just ten by tens, enough for a bed and a bunk above. Shared toilets in the lodge. All changed now. There was in fact a different America. No drugs here then. No guns except to hunt. Almost no crime. Not just nostalgia but something lost. Now it’s a dangerous place, redneck in all the worst ways instead of the best ways.
“Those six extra years,” Jim says. “I saw a place you never will. All gone. Even just a six-year difference. And over the next ten or twenty, you’ll see something different, too, something I couldn’t guess at right now.”
“We’ll see them together.”
“God, you sound like an after-school special, one of those crap things I’m supposed to find for David and Tracy to watch when I’m working. You wouldn’t believe how bad they are, how obvious.”
“Thank you for appreciating that I’m trying to help you.”
“Just do it in a way that’s not idiotic.”
“And your thought that things change in six years is so smart. Of course they fucking change.”
“Fine. I was trying to remember something, trying to remember what it felt like then, when life was a different thing entirely. But you’re right. It’s gone.” Jim pushes the toe of his boot into the sand just behind the waterline, watches it fill and cloud. “Let’s go,” he says.
They climb out of this valley and descend into another and join Highway 101 and pass through Ukiah.
“Not too late to stop and say hi,” Gary says.
“Too late,” Jim says.
They hit Cloverdale and don’t stop this time at Fosters Freeze. The world continuing to vanish behind Jim. Places that will never be seen again.
He nods off, so exhausted still, and wakes as Gary takes the turnoff in Santa Rosa.
“Almost there,” Gary says. “Afterward we can see your kids again if you want.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t do that again. Too hard. I already said goodbye.”
“It’s goodbye for only a few months. You could see them again today.”
Gary’s denial tiring, so Jim doesn’t answer. Santa Rosa so characterless, streets on a grid and just everyone living their lives. The therapist’s office in a nicer section, leafier.
“Should I come in?” Gary asks when they’ve pulled up.
“No, I think you already have your warnings.”
“Okay. Have fun.”
“Should be a hoot.” Jim walks past flowers expensively kept. Some famous botanist lived in Santa Rosa, a combiner of genes to make new varieties. Gardens and buildings named after him, but Jim doesn’t remember his name.
“My receptionist said you talked about ‘blowing your head off,’” Dr. Brown says when they’re sitting. The trees in the background again, and Jim notices there’s a fence beyond them, overgrown and old and hard to spot at first.
“Yep.”
“Is that your plan?”
“Unless it will come off in some other way.” Jim imagines unscrewing his head like a tick’s. Is his head in fact burrowed into something right now and he just doesn’t know? That would be a real lack of perspective.
“Let’s set that aside for a moment,” Brown says. “We’ll return. But first tell me how it was to see your family.”
“Better than I would have thought. My dad actually said he loved me. And he talked for basically the first time ever. Told me all about his gripes.”
“Well that’s great.”
“Yeah, and it didn’t matter. Everyone was good to me but it doesn’t matter now. I’ve turned some corner where it’s too late.”
“What corner is that?”
“The one where every question from the therapist seems idiotic. But I guess I turned that corner a lot earlier. So maybe this was a new corner.”
“I’m of course not going to be hurt by whatever you say. I’m here to help you. Let’s keep the focus on you. What did you feel when your father said he loved you?”
Dr. Brown is leaning forward and has his hands laced together, as if real discoveries are to be made. Jim can’t look at him anymore. Far too annoying. So he closes his eyes and wonders how it felt when his father said that. There’s light against his lids, leftover, slightly orange, and otherwise just darkness or nothing, and no thoughts are moving. Thoughts are only reports from far away, being sent to other people but not to Jim. “I don’t know.”
“Remember. Hear him say the words again. See him.”
Jim tries that. He remembers pretty clearly. “I can see him. But I’m not there.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no me in the memory. No one who could have felt something, so I can’t say whatever that something was.”
“Open your eyes.”
Jim does that. Brown looks annoyed.
“Do you want to be here, Jim?”
“No.”
“Then how am I supposed to help you?”
“You can’t.”
“I guess we return then to your comment about blowing your head off.”
“Oh that little thing.”
“Yeah. I’d like to recommend a place here, instead of going up to Alaska.”
“Cuckoo’s Nest again?”
“It’s nothing like that. It’s terrible that movie was made. This is a place where you would have help and be safe. Right now you’re not safe.”
“But I am free, and I’ll take that. No pills, no guards, no terrifying nurse.”
“It isn’t anything like that. Nurse Ratched doesn’t exist in real life.”
“Too bad. That’s all that was keeping them alive, being able to hate her instead of just wanting to kill themselves.”
“The same way you want to hate me?”
“I think you’re reaching too far now. You’re not important enough. You’re just annoying and not very good at your work.”
Jim can see that this hits. Only for a moment, but Brown has some sort of professional pride. “Right there,” Jim says. “That’s the problem. You’re not supposed to reveal any of you. But I can see you and your limits.”
“I’m human, not a machine. And I’m trying to help you.”
“Then you should have helped me. When I first arrived, I was willing, but you had one eye on the clock and the other on your wallet.”
“You’re angry that you can’t find a way out of your despair, and I understand that. And it’s okay to blame me. But we need to do the real work now. Who is it in you asking for help right now? What does that Jim feel like?”
“Is this one of those child self and six other selves things? Because all that is crap. There’s no self, no Jim, and certainly no group of Jims in here. And yeah my moods go up and down but I don’t become different people. There’s just the world stretching endlessly but empty, like tundra up in Alaska. It goes on and on, and that’s what it’s like inside, a wasteland you’d never be able to cross, only wind. Pressurizing at every edge but just nothing in the middle. So what I need is either a way to remove the pressure, so that it’s okay to wander endlessly in nothing, or I need there to be something on that tundra, someplace to shelter or hide or go into and make a life. One of the two. But wandering around in nothing under pressure is not something I can endure. I can’t keep doing that for years.”
Dr. Brown is sitting back now in his chair, looking thoughtful. “That’s good, Jim. That’s a good description. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. That’ll be sixty dollars.”
Brown’s smile is only a wince. “I want you to close your eyes now. Close them.”
Jim is reluctant but does it.
“Now imagine that tundra, that empty open space.”
“Now imagine yourself walking along, and I want you to see a cabin.”
“That’s never there, but okay.”
“Let’s make it something else then. Are there mountains?”
“Yes. At the edges.”
“Can you see a cave there?”
“Yeah there are caves.”
“Okay, walk into one of those caves. Find one big enough to be comfortable.”
Jim can see tundra in the fall, when the blueberry has turned and there are so many colors, shades of red and yellow and green, and the mountains all snowcapped. A bull moose at the edge of one of the million small lakes and mosquitoes everywhere in dark clouds that shape-shift constantly. He’s following one of these and approaches the base of a cliff, and there’s a cave, cut like an eye into the rock, and when he steps inside it’s much larger than it looked. Dark ceiling with shapes hanging down, slick floor like the skin of a halibut, mottled green and brown. “The floor is the topside of a halibut,” Jim says. “I’m standing on its skin, and the cave is very cold, as cold as the ocean bottom.”
“A halibut? The fish?”
Jim tries to ignore Brown, who is fucking up the vision. The chamber he’s found feels sacred, the home of his totem animal, and maybe there could be some answer here. He walks over the slippery flesh and looks for the rise of gills, for the slow breathing.
“What do you see?”
“Just shut up,” Jim says, and he tries to breathe this air in the cave, wondering if it’s water, if he’s submerged, and he can see only shadows, without shape. Everything so dark. He’s walking with his hands out, and step after step brings him no nearer to anything. The cave extends as far as the ocean floor and is as featureless.
“I’m just going to wander,” Jim says. “There’s nothing to find. I picked a totem animal who lives in a place unlivable. Under the pressure of ten atmospheres, and no light, and no solid ground, only mud that stretches for thousands of miles without feature. That’s exactly what the inside of my head is like. The pressure, the darkness, the lack of solid ground, the lack of feature or distraction or any other relief, just stretching on forever, and the thing is, I can’t do forever.” Jim can feel himself choking up at the thought of having to endure. Feeling sorry for himself again. “And now I’m fucking crying again about poor me having to face forever.”
“It’s okay. Don’t be hard on yourself.”
“I’m a fucking baby. There’s nothing wrong and I still fall apart.”
“Sometimes we think mental illness is nothing, but it’s something, and you’re suffering, but you can get past it and recover and be yourself again. It’s possible.”
“You haven’t been here. If you had seen this place you’d know.”
“Keep your eyes closed and keep walking. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes.” Jim keeps walking farther along the bottom.
“And now I want you to stop and turn around and find the light from where you entered.”
Jim opens his eyes. “That’s just so stupid. Honestly. The light at the end of the tunnel? Come on.”
“Sorry,” Brown says. “Maybe it was too obvious.”
“Yeah. I told my kids they took a halibut up to the moon and let it fly, but I’m realizing now that the moon is an easy place, so much nicer. So much easier to live there.”
“Are you going to see your kids again today?”
“No. Just going to the airport and then up to Fairbanks.”
“And your brother is still going with you?”
“Yes.”
“I need to talk with him again.”
“Honestly? I think he’s been briefed. And I’m not a child. So no, you don’t get to talk with him.”
“Okay. Well we need to come up with a plan.”
“No we don’t. The plan was the problem all along.”
“What’s that?”
“Talking with my friend John, I realized I’ve always had a plan, and that’s been the problem. He thinks killing myself is my plan now, something I have to accomplish, like finishing my homework, and I can never not finish my homework.”
“So it has to be okay to fail at this idea of killing yourself.”
“Yes, even though that’s embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing?”
“Yeah, everyone expects it now. And I’ve told everyone. Would be awkward to stick around.”
“That’s interesting. So how can we make it okay to fail at this?”
“Just undo all my education and everything I’ve been for almost forty years.”
“Maybe you could write a letter to yourself, explaining why it is you can’t do it and why that’s going to be okay.”
“Sixty just seems like too much. You need to think about your rates. Writing a letter to myself? Dear Jim, where did all the happy thoughts go? Why can’t we go skipping through the corn again? PS: I’m not going to be able to pull the trigger. Sorry, but don’t be mad.”
Dr. Brown is looking down at his hands now. Jim has broken him just a bit, maybe. “It feels good to break you,” Jim says. “A bit of unexpected satisfaction right at the end. So thank you for that.”
Jim counts out three twenties and walks quickly around the desk. Brown puts up his hands to protect his face, some instinctive reaction, but Jim reaches down quick and tucks the money into the waist of his jeans. “Thanks for fucking me.”
Brown looks angry but Jim is laughing, this rush of happiness, buoyant, and he walks out. He will never see any therapist’s office again.
Gary is waiting in the truck. “What?” Gary asks. “What’s so funny? Why are you smiling? And why are you done early?”
Jim gets in the passenger side and just feels better. “I feel good,” he says. “We had a kind of breakthrough. It all feels lighter now.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Well that’s great! That’s fantastic.”
“Yep. I’ve turned a corner. I’m no longer afraid to go back up to Alaska.” Jim looks at Gary, both of them grinning, and Jim thinks this is perfect. This is the way it should go. “You don’t even need to come up. You can continue on with your teaching and Mary and not have the disruption.”
Gary looks wary at that. “But I’m not supposed to leave you alone, especially during these first two weeks on the medication, and I’m supposed to keep you away from your guns.”
“Brown said that’s not necessary anymore. He said I don’t have to be watched.”
“How is that possible?”
“It’s a different understanding. I realized, from talking with John, that suicide was my plan, a kind of thing I felt I had to accomplish, and now I see I don’t have to do that.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Well let me think about this.” Gary starts the truck and drops it into drive and they ease away.
Jim isn’t sure what to say next. He needs to be careful not to say too much. All his life he’s known that believability depends on fewer words. A little liar right from his earliest memories. So when he lied to Elizabeth and to Rhoda he was doing only what came naturally. It never seemed wrong.
“We also had a breakthrough about the guilt,” he adds, unable to hold back. He loves the lies and finds it very hard to stop. “It’s an engine for the self-pity. I understood that for the first time today. I beat myself up so much, all the time, and then I feel sorry for myself.”
“Wow. This is all new,” Gary says. “And so quick. What a session.”
“Yeah the therapist was great. He pointed out that wanting to sleep with other women is only natural and actually I didn’t hurt anyone.”
“Hm,” Gary says.
“Yeah, I know. You don’t agree.”
“I think it’s better you’re thinking of it this way,” Gary says. “Really. And Elizabeth and Rhoda are both fine.”
“Yeah, infidelity is not doing anything bad to anyone. It’s just doing something good with someone else and not telling the truth about it. But even not telling the truth is okay, because no one wanted the truth.”
“Well,” Gary says, but then waves his hand in the air. “I’m sorry. I can’t help myself. I’m glad you had a good session, and I’m glad you found a new way of thinking.”
Jim is surprised to find out Gary has judged him. In his head, the idea that his family was judging him was only a story, and he suspected that actually they were being easier on him. So strange.
Jim looks out his side window for some privacy and wonders how anyone’s head makes any sense. He catches glimpses of himself whenever something dark passes. A face in lumps, too old and slack for thirty-nine. Lump of his chin, lump of his cheek, forehead sticking out too far, hair curly light brown and not belonging, eyes hidden away in shadow.
“Sorry,” Gary says. “This is great, really.”
Jim can’t afford to sink right now. He has to remain upbeat and seem repaired, all fixed. “We should have a good dinner,” he says. “Celebrate. It’ll be my treat, wherever you want to go. Then I’ll get a hotel and you can go back up to Sebastopol.”
“I don’t know,” Gary says. “I promised everyone I wouldn’t leave you alone.”
Jim puts his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “It’s alright now. They’ll understand. If you want me to call Mom and Dad and explain, I will.”
Gary grins. “Okay, okay. Let’s just have dinner and we can talk about it later.”