It was independence itself she helped her patients aim for, though Dr. I expressed this indirectly. She vowed to ease the irrational, inspire the irritable, illumine the ill, and lead them all into images of themselves, pictures they could draw internally. Dr. I thought all her patients were intrepid, even the timid ones. She understood that ichors of being flowed up and down the cores of every last one of them.
Dr. I needed all her insight to deal with a new patient, the silent man. Intimidated, he sat on the beige couch for nearly forty minutes and did not speak. His back was curved. His posture was terrible. “I’m an illustrator,” he said. “No words necessary.” At the end of the session he pointed to her computer and said, “Check the website.”
Before the second session Dr. I learned that he designed icons. Logos for companies.
“These icons are so imaginative,” Dr. I marveled.
“Not really,” he said, “just …”
“The image speaks.”
After thirty-five minutes of not speaking he said, “My son passed away,” and got up to leave.
Between the interstices of silence in the third session, Dr. I finally learned that the man had relocated to be with his son in his illness, and had in the process deeply connected with his grandson. The impetuous boy was a delight. But the mother just couldn’t explain to the boy that his daddy had died. Thus it fell to the illustrator to do it. In despair he had conveyed the essentials to the boy through drawing.
It was not until the fourth session, when he brought Dr. I the black-and-white cartoons he’d used to illustrate for his grandson his son’s exit from this world, that she discovered the man’s presenting problem was not death, but life. It seemed his grandson now looked to him to perform an impossible fatherly task. The imp had volunteered the illustrator to speak to his school. Not just the class, but the whole elementary school. Impossible! Yet inescapable. The thought of it brought the silent man to his knees.
“It’s why I’m here,” he said to Dr. I. “Not about my son. My grandson.”
Dr. I suggested biweekly appointments for a while. They marked their calendars. “What a chatterbox I’ve been,” he concluded.
But the next time he did not come.
At first Dr. I was surprised. He hadn’t seemed resistant, only quiet and monosyllabic.
She sat her in chair and waited. Dr. I did not just wait, though. She thought about him. She spent the hour with an invisible patient applying all her experience, and to a degree, her innocence, into thinking about him.
And the next time he did not come. Of all the actions she could take, she had to choose inaction; she had to wait. Therefore, Dr. I did not take off for a break at the coffee shop. She stayed in her chair. Inhabited it for this man. Is there such a thing as distance healing?
Or is it just time? Having to so severely structure her patience for her patient soon became a kind of irritation. Like an ink blot her irritation spread into her general thoughts about her profession. For instance, that tired, if true, insect image people use to describe becoming independent: that individuals would wriggle from helpless caterpillars into butterflies. Insipid, if accurate. But to her the transformation seemed more architectural. A column of a self, the I within each of those patients, needed to stand up, and then to lean into the storm of life.
The next week the man returned.
When she explained that she had kept each hour of his absence exclusively for him, thinking about him and his situation, he was incredulous. But moved. His head seemed to float up to the top of his spine.
It’s tiring work, standing up for your self. You come from the ground up. And yet you do have wings. A little i-child flies about, but a grown I has had to take those wings inside.
Using her instincts, she repeated to him something he had said before to her. “The image speaks.”
He left. But the next time he came back.
“I could show them something. Illustrate.” For the silent man, it all came down to a gaggle of children wiggling on the floor of a gym waiting for him to say something.
The possibilities for what that might be intoxicated both of them. (Dr. I imagined she heard the sound of a once-rusty pump. Could it be drawing the ichors of existence through his veins?)
“A huge pad,” the not-quite-as-silent man said. “An easel.”
At the appointed time of the assembly, he brought to the school a tall easel with a gigantic flip pad. From all the other kids, he selected his grandson to come to the front. He asked him a few questions, the same way he inquired of his clients at work, and then, as the boy directed, he drew an icon for him in response: a little-kid coat of arms with an insect theme. The man fashioned it with a caterpillar and a butterfly. Something all the kids could try for themselves.
Needless to say, all the children wanted him to create an icon for them. He relented, but now he was only on the fourteenth of his 341st flying-insect coat of arms.
Dr. I learned this, in detail, as the man cartooned the event for her the following week. “You ignited their imaginations!” she said.
Yes, he was surprised how much they’d liked it.
“I got inspired,” the man told Dr. I.
And so he shielded their inkling hearts.