I was sitting in a deep, roomy leather armchair and he sat facing me. Not facing me exactly. He was at an angle to me, turned a bit toward one corner of the room, and surely that was deliberate. On the table before me was a box of tissues in case this was going to involve any tears, and a little wooden clock in case I had too much to say. There was a large window in this room, and rain was running down the expanse of it. The walls were white. He hardly said a word. It was me who was talking—and talking and talking. After an hour, his eyes flitted to the clock in front of me. I understood, and I got to my feet immediately, being sure to thank him.
My friend Christine had advised me to go to see him, when I told her I was feeling sad. In her culture, she said, there was a solution to every problem, even sadness. And so that’s what I did: I sought a solution to this problem of mine, although not very seriously. I wrote down the date and time of the appointment and I met with him in this room. I met with him several times, in fact. Every time I was in that room, rain was running down that enormous window.
I didn’t talk to him about my grandmother. I didn’t say anything about the Don’t gos that, late at night, echoed from one side of my skull to the other, reminding me that I had gone. I didn’t tell him about not knowing why her thumbnail was disfigured and black. I didn’t ask him about the oh-so-thin threads that are tied to the tails of life’s paper kites. Or the thick rope—thick perhaps, but still invisible—that separates what one understands from the empathy one feels for people.
What did we talk about, in the white room, seeking a treatment for sadness? Was it perhaps something about my father, or my mother? About Imran and Kuhl? My studies? The trap of language? I don’t remember now. Anyway, at the time, was I even aware of such a thing as the trap of language? I don’t recall. Did I really say something to him about feeling disabled because of language? I don’t think so. If I had said anything like that, he would not have noticed it anyway. He would not have detected this trap. He didn’t see me as disabled, bound to a wheelchair that was language’s incapacity to fully express me. No, no. We didn’t have any discussions about traps of any kind. He wanted to know, plain and simple, the reasons for my sadness. Like him, I wanted to know those, too.
Our appointments were scheduled for Fridays every week. I didn’t know when or how I was supposed to assume that these Friday meetings would now draw to a close. But I discontinued them of my own accord after three or four sessions. I told myself that in the end, sadness is not an illness. Or perhaps I found it all rather futile—the way he drilled into me, searching for the reasons behind my sadness. In the women’s toilets you always saw notices plastered around urging you to dial a free number to get advice. “If you’ve no one to talk to, we listen.” Sometimes they explained, in bullet points, the symptoms of depression. Other notices were specifically about advice on sex and unwanted pregnancies. The word depression terrified me. My mother was never completely cured of it, and I was mortally afraid of turning out to be like my mother. Many times, Christine had reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s words: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.” The first words I said to the counselor in the white room with the rain rolling down the windowpane were: “I am not depressed.”
I was in the hunter’s trap. I believed that one day, some little rodent would chew a hole in the wire that surrounded me on all sides, and would free me. Any rodent, any fate, but as I waited for it to bite, the wire settled itself around me more firmly. Where was the bite that would be my salvation? What I didn’t realize was that I was the rodent. By the time I did understand that, all my verminous teeth had fallen out.