By the Time You Read This

25

DR. FREDERICK BELL CONSIDERED himself a calm, rational man, so it was disturbing to find himself more and more agitated of late. He blamed Catherine Cardinal for that. It could have ended so differently, and everyone would have been happier, but no. Raising his hands before his face, he noted the trembling in his fingers. It wouldn’t do. He could not afford to lose control.

Dr. Bell hit the Play button and immediately the trembling in his fingers eased a little. The DVD recorder was a British-made state-of-the-art Arcam, with a hundredgigabyte hard drive, bookmarking capability and automatic archive-to-tape functions. And it was whisper quiet—a serious consideration in a therapy session.

But the best feature was the digital videocam, a Canon slightly larger than a golf ball, completely hidden in the sconce beside the bookshelves. The wide-angle lens (courtesy of Carl Zeiss) could take in both doctor and patient with no distortion. The microphone, an omnidirectional marvel hidden in the Arts and Crafts chandelier above the coffee table, was the size of an eraser. The recording software included a feature that counteracted the distance between speaker and microphone, and the quality of the sound still gave Dr. Bell deep pleasure on playback.

He watched the beginning. When he had first started recording, he had not activated the system until doctor and patient were past the preliminary greetings and hesitations. But now he recorded his sessions entire.

He watched Perry Dorn enter the frame and sit down, daylight gleaming a little through his thinning hair. He listened to the polite exchanges, his excitement growing. Then there was a pause, his onscreen patient so still and silent that Dr. Bell imagined for a moment that he had accidentally hit the freeze-frame.

Every therapist has to learn what to do with pauses in the conversation. Some believe that if a patient is hesitant, it is not the therapist’s place to prod them into speech. Five minutes, ten, let them blow the whole fifty minutes if they want. You go at the patient’s speed and no faster.

Others won’t let a pause last much beyond a minute. A patient can misinterpret the therapist’s return silence as hostility, as letting them twist in the wind. The appropriate response may be a gentle question, nothing too probing, or perhaps a quiet summary of where they left off at the previous session. Still others, more hands-on, will ask about any “homework” they may have assigned.

It’s young Perry who breaks the silence. Poor Perry.

“I’m so sorry I called the other day,” he says. “I’m sorry I interrupted you.”

“That’s all right,” Dr. Bell says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more attentive just then. It simply wasn’t possible.”

“Oh, I know that. I can’t expect people to drop everything every time I get depressed. I felt bad about calling. I just—I really thought I was going to do it, you know. I really thought I was going to …”

How long to let that silence hang? Speak his thought for him? Or let him hear it ringing over and over in his own head? Dr. Bell had seen a movie when he was a boy, an old sword-and-sandals epic, in which one poor unfortunate had a giant bell lowered over him. His tormentors then proceeded to beat on the bell with hammers. When it was lifted up again, blood was trickling from the victim’s ears. Sometimes maintaining a silence could have the same effect as that bell. Kill myself, kill myself, kill myself, ringing inside the skull over and over again.

Then it was endgame. Bell watched it with the pleasure of a chess champion reliving a recent victory. At each step, since he was winning, he had more and more options, more plays available to him. But for the patient, who was losing—who was not even aware there was a game in progress—each move left fewer and fewer choices, until eventually he had none.

Onscreen, Dr. Bell lets the silence bloom.

Perry lowers his head.

Dr. Bell lets the silence expand to fill the room like gas.

Perry starts to sob.

Dr. Bell slides a box of Kleenex across the coffee table. Knight to Queen-4.

Perry takes a Kleenex and blows his nose. “Sorry,” he says.

“You were feeling desperate,” Dr. Bell says. “You wanted to kill yourself.”

Perry nods.

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Too chicken, I guess. Chicken to the tenth power, that’s me.”

Perry gives a little snort of self-derision. This results in the need for another Kleenex.

It was amazing how filled with self-hatred a person can be and yet still be walking around, Dr. Bell thought. By all rights Perry Dorn should have killed himself years ago, but no, he hung on, day after day, year after year, wallowing in misery.

“Surely it’s more than a matter of being chicken,” Dr. Bell says onscreen. “After all, what was there to be afraid of?”

A shrug.

“The pain. Partly the pain. Also, I’m scared I might make a mistake and just blow my face off without actually killing myself.”

“That could happen, I suppose, if one were not careful. But perhaps there was something else about the plan that didn’t seem adequate?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, what would Margaret think if she were to find out you’d killed yourself?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

Perry thinks a few moments.

“Well, in the short term she’d be upset, I suppose.”

“And then? In the long term?”

“Long term, I don’t think she’d give a shit. She’d just think it was another sign of my …”

“Defectiveness?”

“Exactly. My defectiveness.”

“She’d feel well rid of you.”

“Exactly. Like she’d made a smart move by dumping me.”

Suicide as revenge, Dr. Bell had thought but not said. To voice that observation would have hauled an unspoken motive to the surface. Perry could have examined it, perhaps even rejected it. Certainly, if your objective were to keep the patient alive at all costs, that would be the correct thing to do.

“You want her to know what she’s done to you. How she’s destroyed your happiness.”

“Right, right. I didn’t used to be like this!”

Bell had had his doubts on that score, and still did. There was suicide in Perry’s background, a history of antidepressants. There was the angry mother, the more competent sister.

“Have you had any other thoughts since, on how you might change that? Enhance the effect, so to speak?”

“Hey,” Perry says, and there’s almost a smile on his face. Almost. Perry has never actually smiled in Dr. Bell’s office. “Aren’t you supposed to be talking me out of this?”

“Oh, I certainly don’t want to talk you into anything. My job is to help you recognize patterns in your life. To analyze your feelings about them. And to help you discover alternatives to these patterns that bring you so much pain.”

“You mean like my pattern of getting dumped by women I worship.”

“That’s one. Harshly put, but yes, that is one.”

“And my habit of destroying anything good that comes into my life. Academic future, et cetera.”

“Again, harshly put.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking about something you said long ago. When I first came here. You said, ‘We can find happiness in our work. Or we can find happiness in love.’ And some lucky few, you said, I guess like movie stars and so on, may find happiness in both.”

“But I also said it’s possible, indeed common, to find happiness in one but not the other. Many people are happy in their work but wretched in their marriage. Or the reverse. And they manage to have fulfilling lives.”

“Exactly! That’s what you said way back. And you said it’s very difficult to go on if you don’t find happiness in love or in work. And I just realized the other day that that describes me to a T. I mean, it’s obvious, now. I liked being a student, but I can’t even consider going to McGill with Margaret here in Algonquin Bay. My graduate career is over.”

“Costing you one source of happiness.”

“Right. And then Margaret dumps me.”

“Costing you the other.”

“So what’s the point of going on? I mean logically. I’m not trying to whine or gain sympathy or anything. I’m just saying it’s like there’s no point in my living anymore. I have zero source of happiness. I’m a black hole for happiness. What’s the point of staying alive? I’m just in agony all the time.”

“I can’t answer that for you, Perry. No one can. We all have to find our own reasons for living. I mean, if you really wanted me to, I could say all sorts of reasons: you’re young, you’re good-looking, you’re intelligent, things can change, clouds part, flood waters recede.”

“Happy talk, you mean. I don’t want happy talk.”

“No.”

“I want the truth.”

“I know you do. That’s why I say you don’t really strike me as ‘too chicken’ to do anything. I think you can complete whatever you set your mind to. The question is, how to know when your mind is really set on something. Clearly, the other day, you didn’t pull the trigger, it wasn’t set. It wasn’t satisfactory. Margaret wouldn’t know it was about her.”

“That’s true.” Perry sags even deeper into the couch. “Nothing I say or do reaches her. Never did, I guess. She had me fooled for a while, though. For a while there, I actually thought I mattered to her. I actually thought I existed.”

In the long silence that follows, Perry shoves his hands between his knees and all but curls up on the couch. His face goes blank and every angle of his bony frame expresses despair.

Dr. Bell froze the image. Most psychiatrists would have judged Perry a sure candidate for admission to hospital and a course of antidepressants. History, posture, ideation and personal circumstances would all go under the “reasons for admission” heading. And yet it was so unnecessary to prolong his suffering. He was banging his head on an open door.

Dr. Bell unfroze the image.

“Did you do the homework we talked about?” he says onscreen. And when there’s no answer, “Perry?”

Perry stirs. “I tried to.”

“And what happened?”

Perry reaches into his pocket and pulls out a balled-up piece of paper. In a move that appears to exhaust him, he sits up and rolls it across the table to the doctor.

Dr. Bell opens it up and smooths it out.

“‘Dear Margaret,’” Dr. Bell reads. “Why did you give up after ‘Dear Margaret’?”

“Because what’s the point? She doesn’t want to hear from me. She doesn’t want to know my thoughts. She doesn’t want to know I still love her. She wants me out of her life. That’s why I think I should save her the trouble and take myself out of her life for good.”

“And yet you haven’t.”

“Not yet. Part of me is afraid that blowing my head off will just make her and Stanley happy.”

“Do you mean that?” Bell said. “Do you really think it will make them happy? Suppose I put it another way: What do you think will be Margaret’s reaction when she first hears the news? And when she gets your note? Such as it is …”

“Shock, I guess. She’ll be upset. Mostly because she’ll worry that people will blame her. But they won’t. They’ll be all concerned for her—everyone looks after Margaret—and tell her it wasn’t her fault. ‘Oh, you were so kind to him.’ ‘Poor Margaret, you tried so hard not to hurt him.’ The problem was with me. There was something wrong with me. I had issues.”

“Will she believe them?”

“Oh, sure. She believes everything negative about me.”

A silence descends.

Dr. Bell felt now, watching the disc, just as he had felt then: He knew Perry’s suicide plan was not adequate. It was not going to have the punch the young man wanted it to have. Really, it was like shaping a theatrical performance. Tweaking the dialogue, blocking the scenes. Onscreen, Dr. Bell makes his move. Bishop to King-1, the Knight of the farewell note blocking the other escape routes.

“Something’s missing,” Dr. Bell says, and tilts his chair back, contemplating the ceiling as if he were a philosopher chewing away on the meaning of life, testing his own theory for weaknesses. “No, that’s not right …”

“What?” Perry sits up, a cat hearing the rattle of its bowl.

“No, really. It’s nothing. Stray thought …”

“No, what? Really. What were you going to say?”

“Well, I was just thinking of the laundromat. I was thinking how, when you started going out with Margaret, it seemed symbolic. You said yourself it was like you were starting out clean. I remember thinking that a witty remark. Neither of you carrying germs, you said—I’m sure that was your word—of previous relationships. And I was wondering …”

“The laundromat,” Perry says. He tosses a ragged Kleenex onto the coffee table. “Yeah, she’d have to notice the laundromat.”

Dr. Bell pressed his thumb down on the freeze-frame.

Mate.