“The question is,” I say to M., “why do you talk the way you talk?”
I expect M. to shrug once again, but he does not. Instead he looks me in the eye and asks, “Why do you talk the way you talk?”
“How do I talk?”
“ ‘Your father has a most unusual — most unusual and, indeed, most unique — writing style.’ ” M. makes his voice high and nasal and unattractive; the voice is not mine, to my ears. But I do recognize the words as my own. Many of my fellow mental health professionals narrate their notes into a tape recorder, but I handwrite mine so as to avoid hearing my own words in my own voice. I can’t speak for my colleagues and their voices, their words, but I find it much more difficult to maintain my own mental health if I have to hear my attempts to minister to the mental health of others. It is an even less pleasant experience hearing my words in M.’s version of my voice than it is in my own.
“And when did you receive this letter?” I ask Miller. I try to keep my anger out of my voice, but M. hears something anyway. He sits up straight and his eyes become wary.
“Four months after my dad left for Iraq.”
I nod significantly, although I do not yet know the significance of the information. “And did you receive any other letters from your father?”
“No,” M. says. He opens his mouth to say something else but then closes his lips before the words escape.
“I see,” I say, although I don’t yet know what I’m seeing or what M. wants me to see or not to see.
“Did you show this letter to your mother?” M. nods and drops his eyes to his sneakers, which are untied. I fight off an urge to nag him to tie his laces. The paternal instinct is not more attractive in a mental health professional than its absence is in a pater. “And what was her response?”
“She thought I wrote the letter myself,” M. says, still looking downward.
“I see,” I say.
“What do you think?” M. asks me, looking up at me hopefully. This is a moment familiar to every mental health professional. I think what M.’s mother thinks. But I must not let M. know that. But I must not lie to him, either. In these moments, the job of the mental health professional is not to tell the patient what he thinks, but to lead the patient to a conclusion that mirrors the mental health professional’s conclusion without revealing to the patient that the mental health professional has a conclusion. It is a tricky piece of business, admittedly. One has to approach it carefully, relying upon all of one’s considerable training and acuity.
“What do you think I should think?” I ask M.
M. nods, puts his head down again, and then starts weeping. If there is one way in which I lack as a mental health professional, it’s in my inability to “deal” with my patients’ weeping. I tell M. to please stop, that crying doesn’t do anyone any good. This only causes him to weep harder — harder and, indeed louder. I tell M. it’s important that he stay positive, which only results in an intensification of his weeping. Finally, I decide to remain quiet. Once again I fix my eyes on the letter. This time I’m not pretending to reread it. Because M.’s crying is so genuine and awful that it makes me think that something in the letter must be true, or at least true enough. I wait until M.’s weeping has diminished and then I ask, “What is A Fan’s Notes?”
“It’s my dad’s favorite book,” M. says. “He reads it all the time.” His voice quavers and he wipes his nose with the back of his right hand.
“What’s it about?”
“I haven’t read it,” M. says quickly, too quickly. Aha, I think but do not say. I consider pressing M. on the subject, but he looks so pitiable, so sad and small. Pressing onward might be the best thing (diagnostically), but I just don’t have the heart (figuratively).
“I think that’s quite enough for today,” I say. We both rise. M. is a mess — his shoelaces floppy, his blue eyes red, his face splotchy — and suddenly I panic with the thought that his mother is waiting outside my office and will see M. in his sorry state and blame me. “Is your mother picking you up?”
M. shakes his head. He tells me he rode his bike here and will ride it home as well. I tell him that I am also something of a cyclist and that, for reasons environmental, physical, and fiscal, I much prefer my Schwinn to my Subaru. But M. appears to be unimpressed by our commonality. He leaves and I immediately pick up the phone and call M.’s mother’s office. The phone rings and rings and then I hear her voice. Alas, it is only her recorded voice, but still deep and lovely and stunning. Which is to say, it stuns me, so much so that I forget what is required of me “after the beep” for several seconds, until I realize how creepy the silence must sound. I identify myself. “Remember me?” I say, which, even to my ears, sounds unattractively needy — needy and, indeed, full of need. “M. mentioned a book today,” I say, and then state its title. Then I hang up before incriminating myself any further. But then I realize the hang-up is so abrupt that it is its own kind of incrimination. Oh, despair! Some people, when desperate, retreat to pills or hard liquor. I nap. After the phone message, I nap for two hours, then, feeling better, awake slowly to the sound of a bell ringing. This strikes me as an apt metaphor for how the mind announces that it has healed itself, until I realize that it is not a metaphor: someone is ringing my doorbell. I open the front door and walk out to the porch. There is nobody there. But at my feet I see a book. I pick it up. Attached to its cover is a yellow Post-it note that reads, “You asked for it!” and then M.’s mother’s signature.
The New Parrot
There were no parrots — that was one thing I noticed — nothing bright or feathered or talkative at all. The other thing I noticed was that this wasn’t a restaurant, like the book said it would be: it was a motel. The book had gotten it wrong. Or maybe the place had changed owners or something. Because it was definitely a motel. The neon sign outside said so, even though the O and T and E and L were out. Just the M was lit, flickering and buzzing to let you know what kind of place you were about to go into. I didn’t want to go into the New Parrot anymore. I really didn’t want to. It was scary. You know something is scary if you’ve read the book, even if you’ve only read part of the book’s first sentence, and what you’re seeing isn’t out of it. But I got off my Huffy, leaned it against the wall next to the door in case I needed to make a quick getaway, and went in anyway, for my dad.
It was so dark, and once my eyes adjusted to it, I saw why. The walls were covered in dark brown wallpaper that was meant to look like wood paneling. The carpet was dark brown, too, and wet: it squished as I walked on it. It was like walking on the kind of giant sponge you washed your car with. I looked up and saw why it was wet: the ceiling was one giant water stain, and water was dripping everywhere, with no buckets to catch it. Drip, the ceiling went, drip, drip. It was like a cave. Before I’d read Waiting for Godot, I’d read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The New Parrot’s lobby, or whatever it was, reminded me of the cave at the end of Tom Sawyer, except there was gold and bats in that cave; in this one there didn’t seem to be anything, not even furniture. I turned around and saw, at the far end of the room, a square opening in the wall, with a handwritten sign above the opening that said CHECK IN. I walked over. There was a chair on the other side of the hole but no one sitting in it. On the counter, there was the familiar bell, the nipple-shaped clanger that lets people you know you’re here. I hit it, gently at first and then harder, but it didn’t go clang, or ring, but instead went thunk. It was the most depressing room I’d ever been in: more depressing than whatever room my parents happened to be arguing in, more depressing than my dad’s hospital room, more depressing than my room right before I was made to clean it. Beyond the desk and to the left, I could see a hallway, also dark, and a series of doors on either side of it. It was the kind of hallway you see in nightmares.