Haven© (Sample)
“Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.”
-Marcel Proust
“Time Regained,” vol. 12, ch. 3, Remembrance of Things Past (1927)
“Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Discipline,” Nature (1836).
“Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember.”
-Oscar Levant
Recalled on his death, Time 28 Aug 72
ONE
September 18, 2006
The mime hits a tree.
Of course, it is all pretend.
Steven Lawrence (who will from this point forward will also be referred to as ), has been miming his suicide attempt since the middle of the night. He got out of bed around three in the morning and quickly decided that this was the day for him to die. So, he sleepily climbed into his unitard, carefully applied his make-up, and went outside into the cool morning air to begin the mimicry that he is currently performing on his front lawn.
is driving his imaginary vehicle into an imaginary tree. The imaginary car is an exact replica of the car that is resting in his driveway, a red late-nineties sedan. He is driving this imaginary machine into an imaginary tree that doesn’t sit in his front yard, though there is an actual tree in its place that plays the part quite well, though not nearly large enough to remove him from life as efficiently as the tree he will eventually meet.
backs away from the tree in a semi-sitting position, his hands on the imaginary wheel, pushes his right foot down hard where the accelerator would be, and then he moves rapidly toward the tree, halting about six feet in front of the tree, propelling himself into the air, thrusting forward as if he were suddenly shot from a cannon; his arms resting at his side exposing his head to whatever might choose to find it.
is fit, like most mimes. Pantomime is, after all, an art dependent on fitness, a method that requires a wiry, strong frame. is no exception to the mime standard. He is a man in his early sixties and yet he has the body of a thirty year-old. The positions that he is expressing in his current performance would lead one experienced in the art of mimicry to assume that he is a serious professional.
For example, the act of miming the sitting position is extremely difficult to learn, and even more difficult to master, but to do it on one leg, with his other leg tilted up to act as the accelerating foot is a skill reserved for a true master mimic, someone who is a practiced, and dedicated craftsman. This mime is nothing if not an artist, and yet no one is there to watch him perform what may be his life’s greatest performance.
has spent most the morning experimenting with differing body positions. He realizes that the easiest body position to mimic is the act of lurching forward with the imaginary seat belt applied. It has been very difficult for him to successfully mimic his unharnessed body being forced through the windshield, or the contortions of the body if the chest were to be thrust into the steering wheel in an upward position. He has imagined miming this moment for months, he has planned and mapped out all the possibilities countless times, and it is crucial for him to get this right since this will be his final performance, his swan song, a personal homage to his private work after a life buried under the weight of years collecting guilt through repression.
’s plan had been to wear no seatbelt at all. This, he believed, would make for a quicker and more assured death. This throws a wrench in his plans to try to perfectly mimic his death before it occurs. It is extremely difficult to mimic while in mid-air, or to mimic as if you were in mid-air. Still, he continues to try.
Also, has decided that another act of efficiency will be to adjust the driver’s seat as far back as possible just before impact so as to reduce the chance of engaging full-on into the steering column. The distance between and the steering wheel will make for a clear launching ground from seat to windshield and therefore a more assured demise.
It is quite cold this morning, and is shivering. It is just after seven in the morning, and ’s lawn sprinklers have been going off for several minutes now, as they do every morning as a function of their timer, and he has not once taken notice of their coming on, or the sporadic spraying that whips and douses the thin material of his unitard. It doesn’t appear as if he has even noticed his wetness. He is wearing nothing underneath his unitard, other than the black and white striped portion that covers the chest, which is peeking out from the shoulder straps of his tank-style unitard, which is also displaying his nipples through the thin material quite plainly.
again attempts to fire himself head-on through the imaginary windshield, and he is finding more success when he shuts his body down in flight, letting the initial thrust carry him free of struggle or resistance. He is confident that if he is able to properly propel himself up and out of the seat with the seamlessness he has just mimed, then he may be able to experience a clean death, minimizing pain or chance of prolonged consciousness.
’s final attempt feels so successful, goes so effortlessly without fault that he immediately jumps in his car, starts it up, and takes off down the road. He looks at himself in the rearview mirror, and is quite pleased with the job he has done on his make-up. His face is completely white, except for the vertical lines that come down over his eyes in black. He has also painted a small black tear under his left eye, just for an added theatrical effect.
The funny thing is that he knows he has never been happier than he is right now, doing what he has always wanted to do, be a mime, and not worrying about anybody’s judgments on his life choices or his manhood. He sees his tree coming up in the distance, a tree that he has dreamed of meeting on many occasions, always acknowledging its part in his destiny.
presses his foot onto the gas as far as it will go. He reaches down and pulls the lever under the seat and lets the seat ease back all the way. Then he quickly checks his watch, hits a button on the side of the watch, and a smile slides quickly onto his face, and his whole body relaxes. The tree is clearly in his sights.
The happy has begun.
The mime hits a tree.
July23, 2006
Transcript of Investor Meeting with Sebald Group
Subject: Haven© Psychological Aid
Dr. Brenda Bravda: Haven’t we all had a moment, or a string of moments in our life that we would like to relive, a particular piece of our pasts that we would like to return to just to experience that same level of happiness or self-satisfaction that we felt then? I have no doubt that everyone has a at least a modicum of fond memories in their head, somewhere, just floating around in their brain, hiding in a mess of other memories. We all have scattered pieces of those memories within us, puzzles that just need putting together.
What if we were able to provide those among us that suffer from chronic unhappiness their happiness back without chemists controlling their brains? What if we gave them the ability to help control their own happiness instead of feeding them some manufactured brand of something that merely resembles happiness, or that just simply lacks unhappiness?
The track that we have taken in the past to treat depression is troubling to me and many others in my profession. When doctors begin medical school, the first thing they learn is the Hippocratic Oath, which states: ‘First, do no harm.’ I took that oath seriously then and I take it seriously now, as I am sure the majority of doctors do. However, harm is often more relative than we might like it to be. We believe if we can help fool someone into believing that they are living a better life, then we are not only doing no harm but we have done our jobs to help aid in the better health of our patients. I, on the other hand, look at our predilection for prescribing anti-depressants quite differently. I see these drugs as none too subtle tools of behavioral control, an additional symptom to the problems our patients face. I fear that we are churning out drugs that only place a veil over the problem, causing a permanent malaise in our patients, taking them away from all that their life might offer had they been offered an invitation to relative normalcy.
What if we could offer these patients a quick fix in particularly trying situations? This fix would use the positive power of the patient’s own brain to trigger one of those past memories that once made them their happiest. Like a patient that suffers from diabetes giving themselves a quick shot of glucose to correct a blood sugar disparity, we can give our severely depressed patients, through a benign neuroelectric charge, a long flash of their happiest memories that will cause a high level of serotonin to travel to the proper places in their brain and correct their mood without ever having to be medicated in a traditional way, or we could simply continue using the traditional method of medicating someone’s life away; feeding them a preventative treatment day and night for a problem that does not affect them around the clock.
Our process for causing this electric shock will be explained more fully in the report I have passed around. However, for legal concerns regarding the patent, which is currently pending, I can not go into great detail about the process. But to alleviate any fears that I may be harkening back to the days of electro-convulsive therapy, I will briefly summarize the process. First, we give the patient a series of MRI scans. We ask the patients to seriously examine and explore their happiest life experiences, to ponder them, focus on those experiences alone. This is not an easy thing for most patients to do. It requires a great deal of concentration for a significant amount of time to isolate one’s thoughts and to think clearly about the past, our minds naturally have a way of linking memories together in a seemingly linear route of storytelling. For example, if one were to reflect on a great love affair, your mind might naturally take you to the end of that same love affair. It is a natural path of linear thought. So, I understand that this may seem a little on the new age side, but it is important, the patients are asked to go through a short series of classes on meditation in order to be better able to reach this more accessible focus in their minds and to rest there for an extended amount of time, even learning how to create their own links from good memory to good memory. When done successfully we can closely identify a patient’s neuromap of happiness. Then we measure theta levels through EEG, and through several thought concentration activities that the patient participates in, activities that show us the concentration levels that the person has used to focus the mind.
After all of that, we can get an extremely thorough level of neurofeedback that will allow us to better understand how to trigger the places in their neuromap that need stimulated. Then, finally we bring the patient back for a final series of imaging scans and explore their brain and compare the before and after scans to reach a conclusion of whether or not they would get the maximum benefit from the surgically implanted anti-depressant device, Haven©. When done successfully we will be able to locate these positive memories, and isolate the area in which they are located in the mind. We then implant an almost microscopic electronic device that, through the patients prompting, will trigger those time-of-life memories whenever they deem necessary through a harmless electric reminder to tickle these happy centers, and it is just a natural impulse of the brain to recall happy memories when the brain’s happy places are stimulated.
Now, I recognize the fears about such a procedure. The brain, after all, is our body’s most treasured possession, our most delicate and mysterious of organs, but I assure you that our test subjects will be carefully selected from doctor referrals and will only be the subjects that exhibit the most need. We have tested the device for over twelve months on animal specimens, and have had a 100% success rate with absolutely no complications.
We believe that this could revolutionize the way depression is treated throughout the world. We also believe that it will save many lives, if not from death than from the debilitating effects of depression on each individual life. Imagine the benefit of a perpetual band-aid just waiting in your mind to repair any sudden psychological boo-boo. It would be revolutionary.
Of course, this treatment could be offered in cases other than depression. We have talked about the possibilities of those patients that suffer from a virtual laundry list of anxiety disorders. The isolation of a moment to provide self-assurance could possibly correct many different psychological deficiencies that stop so many victims from living a life interrupted by constant misgivings and insecurities.
We have rested too long on our laurels. We have fallen too far from innovation in the sphere of medications. The pills we prescribe should act as a last resort, not a first response. It is time for the medical community to put the power back in the patients’ hands, not in the hands of the chemists and the pharmaceutical companies. We can change lives if we act in the spirit of invention, and we will only change lives by channeling our caution into the better avenues of ourselves: hope, belief, possibility.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
(Smattering of applause)
I can take a few questions.
Mark Slyden (President of the Sebald Group): Who else knows about Haven©?
Bravda: Well, Sir, I have a few devoted assistants that have been with me throughout the process of creating and testing our hypothesis. We are a very tight knit group, and I have the utmost confidence in their loyalty to the project, meaning I am confident that there will be no leaks about the process to other companies.
TS: So, as I understand it then, we are the only firm that you have addressed so far with this project.
Bravda: That is correct.
TS: And what if we pass?”
Bravda: Well, then, I guess it’s back to the drawing board for us, but I think it would be a mistake for you to pass. I have no doubt that Haven© has a market, and therefore I am not concerned about my ability to find investors. My primary concern is time and timeliness. I would like to start the process of testing the device on human subjects. I am also very concerned about the prospect of corporate espionage and would prefer to expose the information that I just presented to as few audiences as possible. That is the reason why you were all required to sign the legal waivers before the presentation. However, it should also be stated that it is of the utmost importance to my colleagues and I that we be given the time and secrecy to complete our studies without outside pressure or interference.
TS: OK, Dr. Bravda. Thanks for your time. We will get back to you with an answer within the week.
Bravda: Of course. Thank you all very much for your time.
As Dr. Bravda exits the elevator to the lobby of the Sebald Group’s office building, she can feel an attack coming on. The attacks usually introduce themselves with an increased heart rate, and her heart is racing well beyond normal. As soon as she acknowledges the possible presence of an oncoming attack, the sweat begins to pour.
The glass exit doors now seem miles away, but still act as an oasis from the closed, and very public space of this upscale city building. She tries hard not to appear overly rushed as she accelerates toward the doors, but she can’t help but move faster than normal. The heels of her shoes now broadcast an audible rhythmic click-clack on the marble floors that is easily as fast as the beating of her heart, and the sound seems to be exacerbating an already anxiety filled situation.
Brenda can feel the tremors building up, bubbling over into her hands and knees. She is desperate to get out of the building, dying to catch a gulp of fresh air. Now, her breathing is going thin, leaving her body sucked out by the panic. She tries to forget that there are small crowds of business-types scattered about, conversing, lobbying, planning. All she wants is for them to remain distant, for them not to scatter, uncharacteristically, from their groups to notice her hurrying. She tries to pretend she is not weaving herself through this maze of skirts and suits, trying desperately not to pinball off anyone, inevitably causing a flood of apologies and pseudo-polite hand gestures. Now, she is counting her steps, just a few more until the blue and grey of sky and concrete saves her from this pile of metallic walls and pallid faces.
She pushes a door into the outside air. Finally, air. Breath.
Dr. Bravda has had these panic attacks on and off now so often that she has begun fearing them on a daily basis. Almost every given moment of every given day that she is not knee deep in her work is a day filled with dreadful waiting. If she is not immersed in work, her mind can travel those tumultuous tunnels of anxiety she has intrinsically compiled and often she gets lost in her mazes and wonders if she’ll ever make it back to something resembling normal.
She is proud of herself for making it through her meeting with the Sebald Group without an attack. She had feared such an attack since the meeting had been scheduled weeks ago. It is especially strange because the situation in the boardroom was so ripe for attack. Slyden, who was sitting just beside her, had his hands all over her upper leg, stroking her inner thigh, sneaking his fingers playfully up her skirt, and though she was certainly repulsed, she was not surprised by his behavior. Ironically, she feels that this seemingly unnerving violation may have inadvertently distracted her from focusing on the larger group of ties and jackets that she was offering her presentation to. His hand put her thoughts squarely on getting through her spiel without her disdain for him boiling over. His repugnant act had a consolation effect on her anxieties, focusing her fears squarely on his hand instead of on the weight of the social expectations of everyone else in the room.
Dr. Bravda has grown weary of giving herself the stimulation in public. She is unsure of her physical appearance when she experiences that sudden exhilaration of memory feedback. She prefers to be relaxed and semi-private when applying the shock. Also, even if she had wanted to give herself a quick shock in the building she would have had to drop everything and seep into a ball on the floor. This is the one defect she has encountered with the device. However, its sudden effectiveness would never be a problem in cases of emergency. Also, her physical reactions may not be representative of other subject’s reactions. This is why this presentation was so important. Funding is crucial to find answers to this, and countless other questions.
Brenda enters the quiet, hot confines of her car, starts the engine, turns up the air conditioning. “Good Day Sunshine” begins to play through her stereo speakers. She pushes a button on the side of her wristwatch, her head eases back softly against the head rest, her eyelids quiver and sink, and a smile pours itself all across her face.
The happy has begun.
September 18, 2006
Billy Lawrence’s dad is dead.
The noise of the words bounces back and forth in his head, fading and then coming back again.
Billy Lawrence’s dad is dead.
He hears it uttered by different voices, familiar voices, and imagined voices. He tries hard to determine how he should feel about it through the tone and inflection of each individual voice. Some voices are more empathetic than others, understanding, slow and deliberate, as if they were waiting for him to break in response to their declaration. Some are more matter-of-fact, stating it as if Billy should understand the inevitability of it all.
Then Billy inadvertently hears his father say the words.
Billy Lawrence’s dad is dead.
It isn’t until he imagines hearing his father speaking that he recognizes the realness of the words, realizes the true weight of their meaning. He feels a rush of absence, a quiet recognition of goneness, and then he feels a settling into the completeness of a life. He acknowledges the ending of a man, the fading of an animated face, his father’s image reverting back to photographs instead of movies. There is a quick shock that comes with such recognition, such a revelation of ending, the sudden stopping of the machine that was his memory of his father.
Billy stares out his kitchen window, realizing, all of a sudden, that he will never see his father again, that his voice will only ever be a quiet echo in his mind, a never ending whisper of old words, but only as long as Billy’s memory is strong enough to hold it there. It occurs to him that if he could just hear his father say one more word. That he might be able to hold tighter to that sound, but no more words will come. He tries to remember other dead voices and they seem only half-right, broadcasts of generic sounds, amalgams of many voices, known and unknown. His dead grandfather sounds more like what he might imagine other grandfather’s might sound like: wise, reflective, gruff with age. The voice is more generalized than real, and Billy is reasonably sure that the voice he has manufactured probably bears little resemblance to that of his grandfather’s.
Then he hears his father again.
Billy Lawrence’s dad is dead.
Billy stares out at the rain falling in his yard, watches it drip down the glass of his window. He concentrates on the drizzling lines, watches them fall like chaos in the shine of the streetlamp outside. The tap of the rain on his trailer’s roof is always more pronounced than it would be in a house. He listens to the rhythm of the rain, and it helps take his mind from the sound of his father’s voice. The noise outside only reminds him of the quiet on the inside, and it envelops him like a suffocation, and so he goes out into the rain, stands in his front yard, the rain falling hard on his body, the noise wraps his body up with the static of life.
“Your dad is dead.” He yells into the mouth of the pouring rain.
It isn’t until he hears himself say it that it becomes completely real to him. Hearing it in the world for the first time really puts the gravity of the moment into real perspective, and so he lets himself cry, or perhaps the crying just came over him and he did not allow it at all, but he lets it pour on him all the same.
July 23, 2006
As Dr. Bravda enters her research center she looks at the picture of her late husband, Benjamin Bravda. Whenever she is uncertain of the way she feels, unsure of the way she should feel, seeing his face always fills her with a calm clarity, a sense of certainty that she can not attain through any other means. She approaches the picture, a large portrait painting, the kind of picture that is often found decorating the entrances of public buildings, usually the pictures are of large benefactors, or someone who generally had a great deal to do with the creation or the work of the facility. In this case, Benjamin Bravda is the namesake of the facility, and was the trigger that propelled Brenda into a place where she felt compelled to conceive of the Haven© device.
Benjamin had struggled with manic depression all his life. Brenda experienced all of his many moods—at once exalted to the point of tears of joy only to wake up the following morning, covers over his head, refusing to get out of bed, barely speaking, doing the least bit possible to perpetuate survival.
It was on one of these dark days, a cover-up-your-head-barely-speaking-morning that Benjamin decided he no longer wanted to survive. He often referred to himself, and his disorder, as the curse of Sisyphus. There were days when he was more than happy to push the rock, this burden of life, up the mountain. There were days when he would shine with pride having made it to the apex, only to watch helplessly as the rock rolled back down to the bottom. Eventually his burden became too great, too heavy for him to push any longer.
So, one Tuesday morning, on a beautiful early spring day, he rose from bed, shaved clean, took a hot shower, meticulously groomed his hair, combing each strand into its proper position to the side, just as he had as a boy. It occurred to him as he was staring back at himself that he was still very young and instead of looking at the remainder of his life with the burden of required hope for the future, he has found that he is happy to be relieving himself of the burden of future.
Time stands still.
He hears the words.
Time stands still.
It has always sounded like a meaningless cliché to him in the past, and now it makes so much sense. The presence of time seems to float away, and its absence washes over him like waves of warm water, and he feels as though he owns it. It no longer owns him. There is a realization that all the burdens of life are peeling off of him layer by layer like a tree losing its leafs so that he is naked, raw, only an echo of his essence is what remains. With this knowledge he moves gracefully, with balanced, deliberate steps to the closet in the bedroom where he grabs his best suit, carries it into the kitchen and hangs it on the back of a kitchen chair. This is the suit he will be buried in.
Then Benjamin retrieves a common kitchen knife, the sharpest one in the house and lays it on top of a bath towel that is nicely folded on the countertop at the side of the sink. He pulls his body onto the counter, lays his naked flesh out on the cool countertop. He takes a moment to swim in the sensation of the counter’s coolness, to exist completely in one of his body’s final sensations. He then turns the water on, keeping the pressure low, and manipulates the temperature until it is pleasantly warm. With the knife in one hand he places his left wrist under the water and slits his wrist length-wise. His face registers no pain, no reaction whatsoever. He then does the same with the other wrist, all the while he is trying to keep the blood flowing cleanly with the water into the sink. He watches the blood flow down the drain the redder side of pink, then the redder side of red, and he is secure in the fact that the water pressure is just high enough not to cause a mess.
After reassuring himself that he has left behind no burden too great, he relaxes his naked body, lays his weary head on the towel by the sink, allows the temperature of the water to calm the rush of numb and static in his arms and quietly bleeds to death alone on a Tuesday morning in early spring with no one but the sun watching.
The sun shines bright on his body from the large patio door of the kitchen, which later shows through its frame a portrait that Brenda tries to forget everyday by looking at this portrait painting in the research building.
Somehow, she always lets herself flash past that image of him lying naked on their counter, the metallic din of water running in the sink, his arms draped across the metal lip, his hands together like a prayer, his body hours past life, and there was nothing in the house, no energy, no vibration. Benjamin was lying right in front of her, and yet there was no trace, no sound of life other than the sound of her own head quietly falling into a siren of pieces.
This portrait painting is the way she tries to remember him, smiling, confident, though she knows deep inside he was neither, and there was never a single thing she could do about it.
Brenda is waiting for those cool grey eyes to come alive. She touches his face over the glass of the picture. There is a knowledge that she recognizes that he would be proud of what she is trying to do in this lab. He would have been proud to see her during her presentation this morning. It is probably through the shadow of his pride that she has been able to do all the things she has done with this project. She allows herself, for a moment, to be proud too.
Brenda moves through the glass doors of the facility. It is a slow day today. Like most days are here lately, a project waiting for funding. It is a large facility, but they have had very little money to hire additional staff or to entice subjects into further experimentation. The largeness of the place often scares her at night. Since the office was opened eighteen months ago, she has rarely found her way back home. There is too much of the past on the walls at home, too much hopelessness. In this place she feels that hope is like a buzz everywhere, vibrating through the floors.
As she walks toward her office listening to the dull din of her shoes on the concrete floor, she remembers that her appointment calendar is clear for the remainder of the day. She knew that she would be spent after her meeting with the Sebald Group, and she is.
She tucks herself into her office, kicks off her shoes, sits down at her desk, calmly watches the screen saver of her computer, and is finally able to relax. She has been on edge about the Sebald meeting these past few weeks, working out the presentation, working up her nerves, that it has been difficult for her to just relax.
After only a few moments of quiet calm, the door opens. It is Billy.
“So, how’d it go?” He asks, popping his head through the doorway of her office.
“I think it went pretty well,” she says, trying to work up the strength to smile at him, ease his anxiety, while trying to forget her own. She had been sensing that Billy felt she would blow it, that she would crumble under the pressure of the presentation. In fact, she kind of thought she might crumble as well, but she didn’t.
“Did they give you any indication of which way they were leaning?”
“No, nothing. At least not anything that I could see, but it was a pretty tense crowd.”
“Yea, I’ll bet. I can’t even imagine trying to make a psychological pitch to a room full of republican MBA’s,” he says, trying to see if he could lighten her up with a bit of humor, but she looks too tired, only half-listening to his words. By this point Billy had made his way from the doorway into her office and was sitting on the corner of her desk.
Brenda is beautiful today. She is beautiful everyday, but it is not everyday that Billy sees her in this purely professional light. There is a power to her appearance, a pungency of perfume that gives him pause. Brenda has a real maternal power about her, something warm and protective in her eyes, always glaring out at you. He finds himself staring at her legs. They are in a relaxed position, slightly apart; her thighs are spread out just enough for the darkening absence between the flesh and the skirt to pry open his imagination, leaving him wanting, pregnant with possibilities. Billy stiffens his slumping posture, averts his stare, and loosens his pants around the thighs, rising slightly to give the tightening some ease.
Billy has been trying for months to advance his relationship with Brenda. He knows that she is still smothering herself in the space left by her husband, and even though it has been almost two years since his passing, out of respect for her mourning, Billy has been extraordinarily restrained in his advances, almost to the point where they are hardly recognizable as flirtations.
They have been extremely close during the process of building Haven©. When she first came to him she was nothing more than a weepy, mousy wreck, and she is still a wreck, but she seems to have grown stronger through the grace of time, and in the process of gaining in strength, she has also gained new dimensions of beauty.
“I had an attack this morning,” she says.
“During the meeting?” Bills asks, obviously alarmed that she may have lost their funding.
“No, but just after the meeting.”
“Did you Haven© out?”
“Yea, but I still can’t do it in public spaces, at least when I know other people are around. I had to wait until I got to the car, which made for a long, intense journey through the lobby.”
“Brenda…” He loves hearing himself say her name. Everyone else refers to her as Dr. Bravda, but they had moved beyond that kind of formality months ago. It seems now, at this point, that he has the silent permission of intimacy, and saying her name is always a reminder of the power of that permission. “We’ve talked about this before, if you just find a seat somewhere it is not anything that anyone would take special notice of.”
“I know, but I still have some anxiety about it.”
“That’s ironic since the device is designed to treat anxiety.”
“Billy, please,” she says, smiling slightly for the first time. “If we get the funding…”
“We will. I know we will.”
“Then we have to more thoroughly test the device’s effect on a patient’s appearance in public situations. We think that users can dose in public without any perceived strangeness, but I am still uncertain. If they can’t comfortably dose in public then we have a serious problem. What good is a device that treats depression, and other social disorders, especially social disorders, if the patients can’t dose in public?”
“But I’ve seen you dose. It is not an alarming reaction—not in the slightest.”
“Yea, I know, but you knew I was dosing at the time. It might be different if I just Havened© out on you without any warning. In fact, I am fairly certain you would find it peculiar. So we need to do broader testing. That is what the funding is for in the first place. Right?”
“Of course,” he says, not wanting to press the issue any further. “You look tired.”
“I am tired, Billy. Today was tough for me to get through, and the day’s not even half over yet.”
“Well, the worst part is over.” He wants to grab her hand and tell her that it will all be all right. “It will all be worth it in the end.”
“What would I do without your confidence?”
He wanted to say something reassuring, something that would make her know how important she is to his own confidence, how when he is away from her he doesn’t believe in anything. It is only through her that he has faith that they can do something positive, simply because of the way she makes him feel. Something like, ‘I don’t know what I would do without you to give me confidence’, or ‘It is you, knowing you, looking forward to seeing you every day that gives me the confidence to get out of bed every morning.’ But he doesn’t get to say anything before the phone rings.
“Hello,” Brenda says, her earlier exhaustion hidden from her voice.
“Dr. Bravda. Mark Slyden here.”
“Oh, hello Mr. Slyden.”
“We’ve had a chance to discuss your gizmo over here, and we’ve come to a decision about it. We’ll discuss it, you and I, over dinner tonight.”
“Dinner? Oh, I don’t know. Couldn’t we make it lunch? Dinner feels rather unprofessional.”
“Doctor, let me be the judge of what is and what isn’t professional. I think you’re forgetting whose asking who for money here.”
She starts to say something, stops, breathes, thinks again–but there is nothing. She has nothing to say at this point. She wouldn’t have questioned his offer if it weren’t for his behavior in the boardroom during her presentation. She knows that if he were openly making a pass at her underneath the table during their meeting, then he will not hesitate to make a pass at a dinner meeting, when they are alone.
“Hello?” Slyden yells into the phone.
“Yes, sorry. I’m here. Where are we meeting?”
“There’s a little steak place over near your lab. We’ll meet there. You know where I’m talking about?”
“Yea.”
“See ya there about six. Wear somethin’ pretty.”
“Uh…,” he hung up before she could challenge his implication.
September 18, 2006
As the Nurse walks down the long hallway toward the room where his father lies, Billy feels the hollow of the halls intensely; the echo of the soft green on the walls gives him the feeling of moving under water. The sterility of the place, the fluorescence of the lights, gives him the dizzy feeling of not being able to breathe. Normally, Billy hates being around his brother, hates how small his brother always makes him feel, but now, in this situation, Jim’s social composure is an asset.
The Nurse stops and turns toward a large wooden door, she reaches for the knob, and then coolly turns toward the police officer who has been silent up until this point. He then turns toward Billy and Jim as if he needed prompted by her reminder to perform a speech that he has delivered countless times before.
“I don’t know if either of you have ever done this before. It can be emotionally unsettling for anyone, but especially for family members. Feel free to use the bathroom at the end of this hall if necessary.” As he says this he directs a motion toward the rear end of the hallway, and with that preamble out of the way, the door is opened and the nurse leads them into the room.
Billy thought that the room would have a potent odor. He feared the smell of death, but the scent didn’t offer much of a deviation from the rest of the hospital. However, the lights were surprisingly dim and Billy was surprised when the nurse didn’t brighten them up a bit as they entered. The walls had that same dirty aquatic green about them, but the absence of so much fluorescent lighting acted as a further dirtying effect, as if there were a moldy film, a slight moss-like fuzziness, growing out of the walls.
The nurse seems very matter-of-fact about the process, walking straight up to the body on the opposing side of the bed of the brothers, never once looking up at them.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.” Jim says. The nurse looks over at Billy, he nods.
She pulls the sheet down and exposes their father’s stark, stone cold face, mouth slightly agape, with a white power all over his face. “We wouldn’t have had to call you in to identify him if he had had ID on him. All we had was his car, and that just isn’t enough.” The officer seems to be talking to fill the gaping space of quiet between Jim and Billy seeing their father’s dead face and the collected anxiety of dealing with such a personal situation.
More space passes and the weight seems to physically shake the room. Billy feels sick to his stomach in a way that is hard to characterize in any recognizable way, like his stomach is floating on the same dirty water that seems to be filling the room.
“So, is this your father?” The officer parts the silence again.
“Yes.” Both Billy and Jim say simultaneously.
“Is that airbag residue on his face?” Jim asks.
“No, if his car were equipped with an airbag he might have survived. That is make-up.”
“Make-up?” Jim asks.
“Yea, he was in full mime make-up when he was brought in.”
“Mime? What?” Jim asks, sounding exhausted and impervious. He sees the nurse smile a little at his reaction which further exacerbates his reaction.
“Yea, he had the face paint, a beret, the unitard, the works,” The officer says. He reaches down and grabs a bag from the floor beside the bag. “Everything he had on his person is in this bag.” He holds the bag out to Jim, but Jim is just staring at their father’s white face. Billy grabs the bag from the officer and quickly looks inside. Indeed, there was a beret, a rumpled up black unitard, a black-and-white striped shirt, and a watch. The watch was in its own bag, shattered, hardly resembling a watch.
“Why a mime?” Billy asks, looking up at Jim.
“This is crazy. Something’s not right about this,” Jim says.
Billy looks at the clock on the filmy, mossy green wall. It isn’t moving.
