By the Time You Read This

35

LEONARD KESWICK LEANS FORWARD on the couch, gripping and twisting a shredded Kleenex. He is a roughly spheroid man, and looks weak and dispirited, like a partially deflated soccer ball. His eyes are large and watery, slightly protuberant—a bloodhound’s eyes. He looks up mournfully at the unseen camera.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says. “I don’t know where to turn with this problem.”

“Well, you’ve turned here,” Dr. Bell says onscreen. “That’s a start, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but I don’t seem to be getting over this. It’s been months now, and I’m not getting any better.”

Dr. Bell, watching this a year later, nodded his agreement. “Because you don’t want to get better,” he said quietly, although not onscreen. “You just won’t admit it.”

The office phone rang and Dr. Bell froze the image. He had set the voice mail to pick up on the first ring so he could monitor the message. He knew who it would be. She had already called twice, the second message considerably more distraught than the first.

“Dr. Bell? It’s Melanie. Oh, God, you’re probably at the hospital or with another patient. Please call me as soon as you get this. I’m feeling really, really bad …”

“Of course you feel bad,” Dr. Bell said to the room. “You always feel bad.”

“I’m afraid I might really do it this time. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Bell clasped his hands behind his head and spoke to the ceiling. “Sounds like real progress to me.”

“Please call me when you get this. Please. I’m sorry. I just need—I just—please.”

“Please-I just-Please-I just-Please-I just,” Bell mimicked her. “Gimme, gimme, gimme. I, I, I.”

“Something about seeing my stepfather again really put me over the edge. Everything is just black. Absolutely black, and I can hardly breathe. Please give me a call when you get this.”

There was a timid click as she hung up.

Bell sat back and pressed Play.

“What I can’t get over,” Keswick says, “is how helpless I am over this. And it came on so suddenly. I mean, I looked at porno magazines as a kid, same as everybody else. Looked at them right through college and even a little after. But magazines are different. Magazines, it’s just normal: adult women, adult guys. It’s not as if I went searching for the stuff I’m staring at these days!”

“I believe you,” Dr. Bell says. “There are people addicted to eBay, to shopping online, gambling online— people who had no problems with these areas before the Internet came into their lives.”

“Yes, because you used to have to go way out of your way to do them. Let’s face it, it used to be difficult to be a shopaholic in Algonquin Bay. What are you going to do, buy up the entire collection of ski pants? Same with gambling. There’s no casinos here. The most damage you could do to yourself was with the lottery. But this stuff is right in my home. It’s as if they filled my drawers and closets with an endless supply of pictures.”

“Is it just pictures?” Dr. Bell says onscreen.

“What?” Keswick looks bewildered, as if the doctor has suddenly addressed him in Farsi. “Well, yeah. I would never touch a kid. I never thought about kids sexually before. I still don’t—not actual kids I see on the street. And I know the damage sexual abuse can cause. I would never do that to a kid. Never.”

“Well, let’s talk about exactly what it is you are doing.”

“I’m looking at pictures. That’s all. I get them from file-sharing sites.”

“Do you ever post any pictures yourself?”

“God, no.”

“Do you pay for the pictures you look at?”

“No. And I never would. That would be encouraging the whole enterprise.”

“All right. So tell me, what is it you do that’s so terrible? You haven’t molested any children. You haven’t taken pictures of any children. You haven’t paid anyone else to take them. You haven’t sent them to anyone.”

“No! I just look at them! But it’s sick! It’s sick! I shouldn’t be looking at them! Oh, God, I’m so ashamed. So ashamed.”

Keswick is weeping now, tears filming his cheeks. He takes his glasses off and tries to put them on the table but drops them. He doesn’t stoop to retrieve them, just sits there in a soggy, rumpled heap, crying.

Finally, when he is able to speak again: “I have kids of my own, that’s the real kicker. Jenny and Rob. They’re three and five—younger than the pictures I’m looking at—but still, it makes me want to throw up. I can’t imagine what I’d do if I found out someone was taking pictures of my kids. I think I would even be able to kill someone in that situation.”

“This has been going on how long? A year? Eighteen months?”

“About eighteen months. It was like instantaneous with me. The minute I stumbled onto that site, it was like a lock turned inside me. Like these tumblers clanked into place and suddenly I go from being a more or less normal human being to being a sex fiend. A pervert.”

He cries again, and Dr. Bell watches him in silence.

“I’ve tried twelve-step, like you suggested. I found a site online. It’s better than nothing, I guess, but it’s only once a week and sometimes hardly anyone logs on. There’s no sex addiction groups here that I know of. And even if there were, I could never tell them what I’ve been looking at.”

“You’ve told me. Why couldn’t you tell them?”

“That’s different. You’re a doctor. Our conversations are privileged. There might be people I knew at the meetings. I would die if this ever got out. Literally. I would have to kill myself.”

“Well, perhaps we should work on reducing some of this shame you’re suffering from.”

“But it is shameful. What I do is shameful.”

“Let me finish. With all addictions there’s a cycle of shame that seems to operate. Take heroin, for example. An addict has resolved to quit using, but he’s feeling a little nervous, a little jumpy. Eventually he goes out and buys some dope and shoots up. Magic. All that anxiety is gone. It’s a powerful thing. But it wears off, of course, and then the addict is left with his shame at having used the drug again. Then he needs something to counteract the shame—and what’s the first thing that comes to mind?”

“More dope.”

“More dope. Exactly. And that’s one of the reasons twelve-step programs enjoy some success. Being in a room full of people who accept you and your weakness, who even share it, is a powerful way to reduce shame. It’s certainly a pity, as you say, that there’s no such group here in town. Suppose we were to have a couple of sessions with your wife—”

“Never. Don’t even think that. She doesn’t even know I’m seeing you.”

“But you’ve said many times you have a loving relationship with your wife. Wouldn’t that love survive the possible disappointment of finding out you have an unfortunate weakness?”

“She would hate me. She would dump me. She would take the kids away from me and I’d never get to see any of them again.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve heard her talk about it. You know, when there’s a story in the paper or on TV, about a teacher or a priest or whatever. She’s always completely disgusted. She says stuff like, ‘Oh, they should boil that guy in oil.’ ‘They ought to castrate that man.’”

Dr. Bell is the calm voice of reason. “But priests, teachers—those are people who are responsible for lots of children. They’re in positions of trust.”

“Look, I work for ComSoc. Social assistance. I’m surrounded by social workers. You think they’re going to tolerate having a child porno addict in their midst? I’d be out of there in five seconds.”

“We were talking about your wife, not your colleagues. This would only be sharing the information with your wife. Is there not any possibility she was exaggerating her response to the stories you mentioned? One often says things like, ‘They ought to hang that man.’ But one doesn’t necessarily mean them.”

“She may have been exaggerating. Meg isn’t one to hold back her feelings. She may have been exaggerating about the punishments, castration and so on, but she wasn’t exaggerating her disgust. I could hear contempt in every word. If she ever felt that kind of contempt toward me, I couldn’t live with it. I’d sooner die, I swear. I’d sooner die.”

Bell froze the image, savouring his patient’s horrified gaze, his absolute helplessness, then hit the Off button. Keswick had been a lamb to the slaughter. A little too easy, really, to be completely satisfying. Still, there was a neatness about it, an almost Greek inevitability, that one could appreciate.

The phone rang again.

“Hello, Melanie,” Bell said without picking up. “Little distressed, are we? Lurching toward an actual decision?”

“Dr. Bell, it’s Melanie again. I know you said you’d be unavailable this week, but I thought you’d be checking messages. This is pretty critical …”

He could hear a sniffle, loud and wet. He got up and took the DVD out of the player, slipping it into a numbered sleeve.

“Please call me back, Dr. Bell. My thinking gets so distorted. I think maybe I should go to the hospital. If you could just get me into the hospital. I actually have the pills. I have them in my room, and it just seems like the best thing to do, but I don’t know.”

Dr. Bell took out a CD of Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ. Eli, Eli, why hast thou forsaken me? An agony of ropes and nails and abandonment.

“Oh, God. I can’t stand this anymore. I don’t know why I’m alive, I truly don’t.” There was a messy disconnection as she had trouble hanging up.

Bell pushed Play and lay back on the sofa.