Back in undergrad when Beth and I were engaged, we used to go to parties and art openings and shows where we made several friends who listened to the same music Beth liked, friends who dyed their hair and had piercings and wore fishnet and lace. For a crowd that looked so intimidating, they were actually pretty nice. Almost none of them made fun of me. A few admired my proficiency in electronics, especially when their VCRs were on the fritz. Also, they were captivated by my surname. In fact, they were so impressed when Beth Stransky became Beth Crowe that they all pitched in and bought us a pet raven.
It would have made more sense to me if they’d found an actual crow. Ravens are related to crows, but so are jackdaws and rooks. I gathered that ravens were considered to be “cooler” for some subtle reason I couldn’t quite grasp, and that no one could explain.
We never determined the bird’s gender. Beth was the one who named it Poe, but after a few weeks she decided it hadn’t bonded to her, and its care fell to me. Apparently the bird had been very difficult to procure, so although it would have spoiled the surprise, it probably would have been a good idea to ask us if we even wanted it first. Our apartment was large, but not big enough to house an adequate aviary. I estimated Poe’s wingspan at approximately fifty-three inches. When I let it out of the cage to get exercise, something always ended up tipped over and broken. Poe made strange noises, splashed in his water dish and crapped basically everywhere. I knew this wasn’t Poe’s fault, though, any more than the inability to understand why ravens were cooler than crows was mine. I studied for my finals that year by reading the textbooks aloud to Poe. The bird might have enjoyed my company, but I couldn’t say for sure without anthropomorphizing it.
I can only speak for myself, and eventually, I grew to enjoy Poe. The duties were time-consuming and messy, but caring for it must have given me a sense of purpose I hadn’t experienced before. In fact, the first thing I did, once we had a dial-up Internet connection installed, was to research ravens to make sure that the dog food we’d been told to feed it was nutritionally adequate.
That’s when I discovered that keeping a healthy raven as a pet was totally illegal.
When I was younger and a lot less worldly, the thought of getting in trouble frightened me more than it does now. Rather than looking into the actual consequences of owning a migratory wild bird, I panicked. I could end up in jail. Beth, too. And Poe, I decided, would likely be euthanized. Although Beth didn’t really want the bird anyway, not once had she suggested selling it, probably so she didn’t disappoint her friends. Would she be willing to keep breaking the law to make sure we weren’t ostracized? I thought it was best to spare her from that decision.
While I knew that Poe was just a bird and I’d never assigned human motivations to its behaviors, I was surprised by what happened when I released it. I punched the screen out of the window and stepped aside. Poe studied the window for a moment, hopped onto the sill, and launched into flight. No hesitation. No looking back.
I was struck by how hurt I felt.
When I dropped off Daniel after our date, and he slammed my car door and walked up his driveway without a hint of indecisiveness, without even a parting glance, I felt exactly the same way.
“Is your mnevermind left over from Friday,” Dr. Bergman asked, “or did you mnem again?”
I shifted on the squeaky leather couch. “Yesterday.”
“Nitrous induction?”
“Binaural. I haven’t used nitrous since my first year of undergrad.”
“Okay, good, I was under the impression you didn’t need sedation to go in. But you look a little worse for wear—how did you sleep?”
“Terrible. Every hour, I woke up. Even with the prescription.”
“Do you have a headache?” she asked. I hadn’t been thinking about it, since the worst part of waking up all night long, aside from the anxious repeating thoughts that are impossible to stem, are the fatigue and body ache. My head hurt too, though. It was a dull tightness that spread across my scalp like a stiff new silicone cap. I knuckled my eyes and nodded.
She turned off the overhead light. I might have stopped her, since nothing but a good night of sleep would help me feel better, but there’s one thing I’ve learned about lying: you need to be consistent. If I was going to use the headache excuse to get her to turn off the lights when I wanted to read my file, for now I’d need to sit there in the dark.
It wouldn’t have been too bad if the dimness didn’t make me so groggy. My eyes felt dry and my head wanted to nod forward. Where was this drowsiness when I’d been listening to my backup alarm clock tick and trying to forget the way my date ended? When I’d been laying there in my empty bed, feeling like I’d just watched Poe fly away?
Since it would probably take up most of the session to explain about Poe, I figured it wouldn’t be a good use of my time to try and explain about Daniel to Dr. Bergman using that particular analogy. Also, I’m notoriously clumsy with metaphors, and there was probably some reason that likening my experience with Daniel to the release of my pet raven was completely unrelatable. That’s why I mentioned Ryan first, when Dr. Bergman asked why I’d had so much trouble sleeping. At least my issues with Ryan were straightforward. Kind of.
Dr. Bergman opened my file, though she didn’t start writing yet. “What did he say to you?”
“Nothing.” I thought back. “Nothing at all. But he stood in my way when I was trying to get to my classroom.”
She flipped a few pages in my chart. “He’s quite a bit younger than you.”
“Everyone who works at the mall is younger than me.” That was an exaggeration, though sometimes it did feel that way.
“Elijah, you’ll need to be the adult in this situation. The less he can fluster you, the less satisfaction he’ll get from the teasing.”
“But his face was all red.” Ryan didn’t fluster me, not like the teenager at the pizza counter—he scared me. My attempt to put it into words did nothing to convince Dr. Bergman. I wished there was some way for her to see what I saw. “He looked angry.”
“And how did you react?”
“I told him to move, and also that he was going to jam up the schedule if he made me late for class.”
“Did he move?”
“Yes.” It sounded so innocent. Which it hadn’t been, at all. “Eventually.”
“Was that all he did, block your way? No more name-calling or suggestive faces?”
I shook my head, partially to say no, he hadn’t done any of those things, but partially because I was so frustrated with my inability to convey the fact that something about his behavior felt more threatening than ever. In the glass-front bookcase, I saw Dr. Bergman write, Co-worker teasing decreasing in severity as E reacts clearly and consistently. I was trying to figure out how to express that the teasing was not decreasing in severity, not at all, when I noticed something different about my file. She’d clipped a printout of an email to the inside of the cover. It read:
From: Dr. Enver Kartal (ekart @ psych.wisc.edu)
To: Dr. Sarah Bergman (s.bergman @ uwhealth.org)
Hello, Sarah, great to hear from you. I brought your raisin bread to the end-of-semester potluck. Again it was a huge hit, even if I can’t seem to get quite the same crust on it that you always did.
In regards to your autistic patient, the situation you’re concerned about is tricky. Because he’s not a minor, you’re bound by confidentiality. The exception would be if he met the clinical definition of a disabled adult: having an impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. You don’t mention if he receives disability benefits, but if he is high-functioning (does he live independently? Sounds like he holds a job) I think reporting the other man without the patient’s consent could turn out to be a messy mistake.
Reporting? Yes—yes! That’s what I wanted, Ryan to get reported to someone who could make him stop bothering me. Except there was always a chance that reporting him could backfire. If he lost his job and found out it was my fault, the situation would be even worse than it was now. As Dr. Bergman made additional suggestions about possible ways I could deflect Ryan while I considered the best way to bring up the potential for retribution, I scanned the section of the printout below Dr. Kartal’s signature line, which contained the original email he was replying to.
From: Dr. Sarah Bergman (s.bergman @ uwhealth.org)
To: Dr. Enver Kartal (ekart @ psych.wisc.edu)
Guess what, En, I’m wrestling with another one of those gray areas you find so fascinating. High-functioning autistic male is fixated on an older gay colleague. Patient is naive enough to be coerced into anything. Relationship or predation? Is that for Social Services to determine?
Predation? I read it through twice before I realized the question hadn’t been about Ryan’s bullying at all. Ryan wasn’t the one Dr. Bergman was thinking about reporting—it was Daniel.
When Dr. Bergman asked me if I’d seen Daniel since our last meeting, I told her that we’d attended the expo together. Which was true…I’d just left out the part where he came back to my apartment and we sucked each other’s dicks, and also the part where Beth walked in on us and got upset. The thought of Dr. Bergman filing some kind of report on him was so disturbing that I could hardly wait for the hour to be over, and when she asked if I wanted to book my next session, I declined and said my work schedule had been disrupted by the holidays. That was also true. It just wasn’t the specific reason I wouldn’t make an appointment.
I was going through a lot of changes lately, changes I really needed help understanding. But if continuing to see her posed any threat to Daniel, I’d just as soon work everything out for myself.