Pandemonium

She led me up the stairs. “I’ve thought a lot about you over the years, wondering how you were doing.”

“I’m doing okay.”

She glanced back, judging this for herself. “Come in and catch me up.”

Her office was anchored in heavy colors: dark red walls, deeply stained oak floors and wainscoting, a barge of a desk. Everything else in the room strained to lighten it up. A Persian rug shot with PeptoBismol pink, pale floral loveseat, lacy white drapes and lamp shades. The only thing that remained from her old office that I remembered was the chocolate leather armchair.

She took my jacket and hung it behind the door. I sat on the loveseat, she sat in her armchair.

We smiled at each other again. Old times.

I said, “You’re not going to take notes?”

“We’re just visiting, right? Besides, I don’t scribble as much as I used to. I found out I listen better without a notepad.” She shifted her weight, crossed her legs. “So you live in Colorado now. How did you get out there? The last we’d talked—well, I got a letter from you when you went to college. You couldn’t decide what to major in.”

“I opted for a degree in Starving Artist.” I shifted into Amusing Summary mode. After a dozen “Hi, my name is Del” introductions with doctors and fellow patients and various small groups, I’d decided that this was the least painful way to cover the arid territory between college and my current life. The long job hunt to turn my Illinois State graphics arts degree into a job offer, the ignominious move back into my mother’s house, the series of low-paying jobs. I highlighted the most humiliating moments, such as deciding to move across the country with my girlfriend, then getting dumped as soon as we arrived.

“I think it was thirty minutes after we’d emptied the U-Haul that she broke up with me.”

She laughed. Thank God she laughed. “Well, she wasn’t going to break up with you until you unloaded, right?”

“Oh no, I only date the smart girls. Anyway, I decided I liked Colorado. I went through another string of dead-end jobs, office temp work, a few months at a web development shop that went bust, an even shorter stint drawing farm equipment ads for the PennySaver. My last job was at a decaling shop in Colorado Springs.”

“Decaling?”

“It’s like an automotive tattoo parlor. I tweaked the graphics files, managed this big Agfa film printer. And if I was a good boy, every few months I got to make up a new logo. I’m very proud of my Beaver in Hardhat with Wrench.”

“You said, ‘your last job.’ You’re not working there anymore?”

“Ah, no. They fired me officially a couple weeks ago. Of course, I’d stopped showing up weeks before, so I can’t blame them. ”

She nodded. “When you called, you sounded upset.”

“I did?” That night I’d made sure to calm down before I dialed. “I may have been a little stressed.”

“You said you needed a prescription refill on some sleeping pills. What are you taking?”

“Nembutal?”

“Okay.” A slight pause, enough time to start me worrying. “When was this?” she asked. “How many milligrams?”

“Fifty, at first, though he upped me to a hundred. This was probably the middle of January.” Her expression didn’t change, but something made me backpedal. “Maybe the end of January. But not every night—just when I need it. Occasionally.”

She frowned. “So that would be before you lost your job, then. What happened to make you look for a doctor?”

She hadn’t said whether she was going to give me the prescription or not. I felt like a junkie on a job interview. I described the crash at a level of detail between what I’d said to my mother and what I’d said to Lew and Amra. Smashing through the guardrail, yes, flipping and crunching to the bottom of the ravine and almost drowning, not so much.

“And the noises started again,” she said. That’s what we’d called them in therapy, too—the noises. She’d immediately noticed the parallels between the crash and my swimming pool accident, and leaped