Okay. Now I want you to stop asking me that. I’m telling you this now and it will be my answer forever: I was not sleeping with Bethany Bishop. There might be a lot of things wrong with my marriage, but that is one line I have never crossed. No! Never! For fuck sake, why do you keep asking me?
Look, just drop it already. We’re coming up on the end of this long and sorry tale, and if you keep asking me that, I don’t think I’m going to have the momentum to push through to the end. Is that what you want?
No, I didn’t think so. You’ve come this far, you might as well hear the rest of it.
So, my wife, Jenny -- who I was NOT cheating on -- drove me to the doctor’s office late that terrible afternoon. She must’ve left Jacob with a neighbor or something, because I don’t remember him being along for the ride, but I do remember pulling up to that same gulag-like clinic that we had recently taken him to. Jenny actually had to help me out of the car. I was that unsteady on my feet. Even with my eyes closed behind a thick pair of sunglasses it was still too bright outside, and she carefully led me like a blind person into the central processing nexus and then down one of the spoke-like arteries to sit in one of the waiting room chairs.
I remember sitting there with my eyes closed, feeling Jenny’s presence next to me, listening to the soft ambient noises of the clinic, and trying not to think about anything. There was so much, and it was all so overwhelming, that the allure of wiping my mind absolutely clean seemed the most inviting of all. The muffled voices from the nurses station, the persistent cough of the transient patients, the staccato opening and closing of doors, and the rhythmic pulsing of air through the air handling system -- they all merged together into a kind of lullaby, and I felt myself drifting off, not to sleep, but to some other welcome form of mindless oblivion.
“Alan Larson?”
“Over here,” I heard Jenny say after a short pause, and then turning towards me, “Alan, honey, they’re ready for you.”
I opened my eyes and slowly nodded my head.
“Do you want me to go in with you?”
“No,” I said, rising from my chair, leaning heavily on Jenny’s arm to regain my feet. “No, I’ll be all right. You wait here.”
The light seemed tolerable and I could clearly see the nurse -- a man with the build of a linebacker -- waiting for me at the door that led to the examination rooms. I began walking confidently towards him and he stood aside so that I would have uncontested access to the passage.
“Okay,” I heard Jenny say behind me. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
Inside the nurse -- his nametag said “Ray” -- led me back to one of the examination rooms, where he weighed me, took my temperature and my blood pressure. When he asked me why I was seeing the doctor today I told him that I was having my first migraine attack, and he gave me a sympathetic look.
“Migraines are awful,” he said. “My mother gets them, and they usually put her down for an entire day.”
I nodded my head knowingly. “They’re no fun,” I said.
“Okay,” Ray said, standing up and getting ready to leave the room. “The doctor will be with you in a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
I don’t know how long I was in that small examination room by myself, but, contrary to what Ray had predicted, it was a whole lot longer than a few minutes. For a little while I just sat there, my eyes barely open, my mind trying to bring back the emptiness that I had momentarily achieved in the waiting room. But that proved elusive, the change and the near absence of any ambient sounds having the opposite effect on my disposition. Are these little rooms soundproof? I wondered suddenly, remembering the times we had brought Jacob here and the way I had to hold him down in order for the nurse to administer those endless childhood vaccinations, his shrill, plaintive voice screaming in absolute terror and frenzy. I strained my ears to see if I could pick up the noise of any similar human suffering going on around me. Sadly -- or not, depending on your point of view -- there was nothing. No sounds at all. Just the steady and untrammeled rush of blood in my own vessels shushing and rushing in my ears.
I stood up and went over to look at the poster on the wall. Each of the examination rooms here had one, dedicated to a variety of medical conditions or anatomical systems. They could be used, I supposed, as educational tools by the doctors, pointing out the inner workings of a patient’s condition in colorful medical illustrations -- although I couldn’t remember any doctor I had seen here ever even referring to one. The room I was in must’ve been used to see pregnant women, because its poster was headlined PREGNANCY AND BIRTH. It was dominated by the figure of a nude woman, her belly swollen with a full-term fetus, fully visible in a kind of cut away view, its head already in its fateful position against her cervix, and its little face both wrinkled and wisened. The woman herself -- her dark hair framing a face that was neither caucaisian, asiatic nor hispanic, but some hybrid of the three -- looked at me with a serene wisdom of her own, knowing fully the role she and all like here were to play, and accepting it as both inevitable and foreordained. All around her was a series of smaller illustrations, each related to her and her condition, the largest of which was an exploded view of her own reproductive organs, showing the emergence of her ovum from her ovary, its pursuit and fertilization by a cloud of wriggling spermatozoa, its long journey down her Fallopian tube, and its eventual implantation in the wall of her uterus.
I worked my way around the examination table -- sure enough, equipped with stirrups for gynecological exams -- and wandered over to the small counter and set of cabinets that sat in the far corner. Here was the sink where doctors washed their hands, and on the counter sat an array of glass jars, each stuffed to overfilling with a series of examination tools -- tongue depressors, cotton swabs, rubber gloves and so on. Without embarrassment I began opening the cabinet doors, and was surprised to find the cupboards largely bare. Several extra boxes of rubber gloves, a few folded examination gowns, and some bottles of antiseptic hand soap.
I didn’t know what kind of surprise I was expecting -- is this where the doctors kept their medical experiments gone wrong: malformed fetuses kept in formaldehyde jars, just like the ones that sat on the countertop -- but the surprise came not from the contents of their cupboards but from the sudden opening of the examination room door and the swift and unexpected entry of the physician that would decide my fate.
“Well, now, what seems to be--” the doctor began, an older man with a bald pate and a white coat, stopping suddenly at the sight of his patient, not waiting patiently in the chair like he had been expecting but, evidently, rifling through their cabinets in search of something. My hands, in fact, at that moment were in the process of stuffing an examination gown back into a cupboard that had already twice proved of insufficient dimensions to contain its disrupted fabric and that of its brethren.
The doctor looked at me suspiciously for a moment and then seemed to collect himself. “Were you told to put on one of those gowns?”
My first instinct was to run, and I believe if he hadn’t been standing in the doorway I might have done just that. The irrationality of the impulse surprised even me, but there it was, an intense need to flee, to get out of the tiny, suffocating, controlled space and back out into the wide unknown, futilely tamping down the chaos that otherwise threatened to overwhelm me.
“Yes, I said, welcoming the lie as far easier than explaining what I was doing looking through their cabinets. “Yes,” I said again. “But one wasn’t put out for me. I didn’t know where else to look.”
The doctor shook his head, and carefully shut the door behind him without, I noticed, turning his back on me. “That’s not necessary,” he said. “Why don’t you come and have a seat?” He gestured to the patient chair I had previously vacated.
I did so obediently, and I watched him as he rolled a stool out from under a small table affixed to the wall in the very corner of the room and settled himself down upon it. Under his white coat he wore a dress shirt, tie, and what looked like an uncomfortable pair of slacks. He hooked his loafered feet on the chrome rim of the stool and dropped the file he had brought in with him on the table.
“So,” he said. “What brought you in here today?”
I looked absently at the file he had seemed to discard. It was manilla and only contained a few loose pieces of paper, one of which was poking its goldenrod hue out from behind the folder’s cover. On the folder’s exposed tab was a large white sticker emblazoned with a capital letter L, and a smaller companion in which someone had typed -- evidently on an old-fashioned typewriter -- my last name comma first name.
“My wife thinks I’m having a migraine.”
“She does? What do you think?”
That drew my attention away from the folder. Given the look on the doctor’s face, I got the distinct impression that was how he intended it. I looked down at the tag pinned to the breast pocket of his coat: a medical ID, with an outdated picture of the same man, and a name laserprinted in clear bold type. BLAIR comma Leland.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had a migraine before.”
“Are the lights in here bothering you?”
“A little.”
The doctor reached behind him and flipped off the light switch. For a moment we were plunged into absolute darkness, but then he pulled the door open a crack, allowing enough light from the hallway to spill into the room so that we could still see each other.
“Is that better?”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
In the partial darkness, the doctor sat and studied me for a few moments. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Your name is Alan, right? Alan Larson?”
“Yes.”
“Alan, I’m Dr. Blair.”
He extended a hand and I shook it. I struggled to place him. Now in the dim light it was even harder to be sure, but I don’t think I had ever seen him before.
“Your badge says Leland.”
He looked at me quizzically. Not offended. At least I didn’t think so.
“I hate that ‘i’m the doctor and you’re the patient shit’. Always makes me feel like a child.”
I think he actually smiled. “My friends call me Lee.”
I looked at him skeptically. He definitely wasn’t my friend, but I decided not to push it. I had already done far more than I had ever dared do before and my heart was thumping in my chest like it was ready to leave without me.
“Okay, Lee.”
His smile softened a little, probably recognizing that it could never completely remove the wall that stood between us.
“Can you tell me what happened to you today?”
What happened to me today. I knew he was asking about my symptoms, but a lot had happened to me today, and his question caused the fear and the shame that I worked so hard to keep at bay to well up within me. I choked back a sob, terrified that so much seemed so close to the surface, and that such an innocent inquiry could tap into it so quickly.
“Well,” I said, struggling to compose myself. “It started at my desk at work this morning. I started having trouble seeing my computer screen.”
“What do you do?”
“There was-- Wait. What?”
“For a living. What do you do for a living?”
What did I do for a living. Oh fuck, buddy, if only I could tell you in a way you would understand. In a way anyone would understand.
“I work in an office,” I said.
“...okay,” he said, obviously expecting more. I was loathe to give it to him, but he seemed insistent.
“I sit at my desk. I type things into my computer. I have meetings with people. I send emails. I talk to people on the phone. Sometimes I get on airplanes and stay in hotels.”
“All right,” he said. “And today you started having trouble seeing your computer screen?”
So then I told him the story. About how I first thought something was wrong with my screen, but then realized the occlusion was in my vision, about the shimmering waves and the dizziness, about the dry heaves and the floor of the public bathroom, about the painful light and the pounding in my temples, about the dark room and the disorientation, about the sickening smell of food and the unsteadiness on my feet. And while I told him all of these things, beneath them all, running in the same current but at a lower and more dangerous amperage, were all the unspoken things that were likely the true cause of my affliction. The extra work that had been piled on my shoulders, the lack of confidence that Mary put very much on display, the hopeless expectations that Eleanor Rumford measured me by, the dangerous game that Wes Howard had sucked me into, the lack of confidence I had in my ability to retain and lead my team, the lingering and diminishing connection with Bethany Bishop, the uncertainty about the new position I was interviewing for and the fear of being found out, the burden that I was increasingly becoming on my wife, her own hidden inadequacies papered over with bravado and emotional distance, and my aching inability to understand or accept the son who loved me in ways that both frightened and angered me. If I’d had my wits about me, these are the “symptoms” that I would have described to Dr. Leland Blair, but he wasn’t that kind of doctor and I wasn’t that kind of patient.
But it overwhelmed me nonetheless, my emotions seizing up as if they had grasped the live wire of my dysfunction and uncertainty, and before I could finish my litany I was crying, the tears coming unwillingly and uncontrollably. Then I began to blubber, my entire face melting with what felt like syrupy bile coming out of my nose and eyes.
The doctor placed a reassuring hand on my knee and handed me some tissues. “There, there,” he said, exactly like he was comforting a small child. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
It was madness. I looked down into the abyss and let myself fall in.
“I’m sorry,” I said, blowing my nose into the tissues he had handed me and then absently using them to wipe away some of my tears. “I don’t know why I’m here. I know I’m broken, broken inside, but I don’t know what you or anyone else can do to fix me. I can’t feel anything soft or warm without realizing how empty and hollow it is. My son, my wife, my friends, my co-workers, my clients—they’re nothing to me. They’re forever separate. I can’t see them. It’s as if they don’t even exist. I’m alone. No matter how many people are around me, it’s as if I’m alone and always will be. I don’t know how to go on living like this.”
I dropped my face into my hands and let a fresh wave of sobs overtake me. If it weren’t for the reassuring pats he continued to place on my knee, I wouldn’t have known that anyone else was there with me. I was at the bottom of a well and there wasn’t anyway that I could see to climb back out.
“Are you here alone, today?”
“What?”
“Are you here alone today? Is there someone waiting for you? To take you home?”
It took me longer than usual to put the necessary thoughts together, first to understand, and then to respond. “My wife is here. She’s out in the waiting room. She’s eight months pregnant.”
He nodded reassuringly and then spoke in his best doctor voice. He told me he was going to write me two prescriptions -- one for the migraines and the other for anxiety. He gave me the short set of instructions for how and when to take each. But then he said he was also going to give me a referral to a counselor -- someone I could speak to privately and confidentially, and who could help me sort through some of the challenges I was facing. The counselors were here at this clinic, and he strongly encouraged me to give them a try.
“All right?”
I looked at him blankly, not really understanding anything he had said.
“All right,” I said.
He wrote out the scripts and handed them to me. Sniffling, I took the pieces of paper from him and began shuffling them and scanning each one with incomprehension.
“Do you want me to ask someone to bring your wife back here?”
“What?” I asked, looking up at him.
“Do you want your wife to come get you? Or can you make it back to her by yourself?”
“No,” I said, the intensity of my shame overcoming me, almost bringing the acrid tears back. “No, I can find my way. Just give me a few moments to collect myself.”
He tapped me on the knee again before rising from his chair. “Take all the time you need.” Then, seemingly without my observation, he was gone and the door had been closed behind him.
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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