Cocaine's Son_ A Memoir Part 4

While we waited for our food, my father's excitement metamorphosed into familiar agitation. "David," he said as he stripped a paper wrapper from a plastic straw and tore it into tiny pieces, "we've got to think of a way to communicate with each other when we're in that room-a way we can signal to each other when we've gone too far or when one of us has said something that offends the other person. Because if this is going to work, don't I have to feel free to say whatever I want in there? But whatever we say in there, it's got to stay in there and not interfere with our relations.h.i.+p out here."

"Don't worry about it, Dad," I said. "I'm sure we'll figure out something. Now that we've gotten things back on track, I don't see why either of us would do anything to screw it up again. I can't imagine what you could say in there that would set me off again." At the time, I really couldn't.

Chapter 6

What did he say? How did it go?

What was that horrible, gut-clenching couplet he used to recite in the middle of every argument, as if to show that no bit of wisdom could be contradicted if it had meter and cadence-as if to prove that nothing that rhymed could ever be wrong?

Was it this?

A man against himself convinced Is of the same opinion since.

No, that surely doesn't sound like anything my father would say. But if that's the wrong verse, why can't I remember the right one? If I can retain everything from the complete lyrics of the Beatles to the opening stanzas of The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales, from the strange, synaptic wallpaper patterns in the hallway of my childhood apartment building to my complete history of telephone numbers, why can't I keep track of two simple, stinking lines of superst.i.tious poetry?

I convinced myself that I'd always remember them, which is another way of saying I a.s.sumed I'd never be rid of them. But when I thought I was holding on to the words themselves, I was only savoring the intensity of my annoyance with them, congratulating myself for how much shrewder I was than the man who spoke them. Maybe I've lost them for good, and I'm surprised at how sad that makes me feel.

I was no more diligent about keeping track of the year that my father and I spent together in therapy. At the start of the process, I thought I might keep a diary that would chronicle our amazing journey-our rehabilitation from a pair of relatives who no longer shared anything more than some blood and chromosomes and an affinity for the Yankees and Mad Mad magazine, to a loving and fully functional parent and child. But I got lazy. magazine, to a loving and fully functional parent and child. But I got lazy.

I was so sure that the intensity of the sessions would burn themselves into my brain, but even a glance at the sun eventually fades from behind your eyelids. All that remains of the experience is partial and episodic: I know that these events occurred, but the order in which I string them may reflect the sequence in which they happened or the sequence in which it is most convenient for me to organize them. The memories dangle like charms on a bracelet that I stashed in some old tchotchke drawer, all knotted and tangled. But they're all I have left.

I. The Movie In his old age, before he died, Robert S. McNamara wore his righteousness in every part of him that was visible on the movie screen. He was wrinkled and desiccated, still mowing what few strands of hair remained on his head into the same orderly, angular cut he had favored since at least 1961. The pitched, exuberant voice he once emitted, when he stood beside John and Robert Kennedy on the winter morning his selection to the president's cabinet was announced, had been worn down by time's millstone to a bitter growl.

My father and I had been told by our therapist that we should start reengaging in more traditional social activities outside her office. A movie seemed a safe starting point; all he and I would have to do was sit and watch the screen. But it was also a potentially ambitious and even dangerous first date for us. It has long been my father's custom, after having been seated in a darkened room for any period of time, to fall into a deep and relaxing sleep. The challenge fell to me to select a film with enough action to keep him awake, yet with the least amount of on-screen s.e.x or nudity to cause any embarra.s.sment on my part. So I chose a Sunday matinee of The Fog of War The Fog of War, an Errol Morris doc.u.mentary about McNamara and his role as the architect of the Vietnam War.

McNamara seemed just the right subject, guaranteed to bring our blood to equal boil, yet for opposite reasons. I had learned to despise him for the suffering he had inflicted; my father spoke his name like a swearword because he felt he didn't inflict enough-that he did not use every means at his disposal to prevail in a battle that my father never stopped believing was winnable. I felt that McNamara had contributed to a world where war was dehumanized and destigmatized, perpetual and inevitable, while my father genuinely regretted never serving in the war that McNamara helped create.

Had I made the effort to look for it, I could have found palpable and vivid evidence of my father's politics in our therapy sessions, even when not a word of politics was discussed. It was all in the boisterous and certain way he conducted himself, the way his voice filled up the tiny room, and the expressive flailing of his arms and slapping of his hands against his lap that accompanied his most pa.s.sionate rants: he might open a morning's discussion with a tribute to the new computer he had just purchased and the attentive technical support he was receiving from the company, or segue into a side-by-side comparison of my and my sister's financial ac.u.men ("This one saves fifty cents out of every dollar that comes in; the other one spends every penny she's ever earned"), and finish up maybe with a beloved anecdote about something a friend had once said to him when they were drunk at a party: "He said, 'I'd rather that my son have s.e.x with my wife than have s.e.x with her myself.' I thought that was beautiful." That was supposed to ill.u.s.trate, I think, the extent to which fathers will sacrifice for their sons ("Someday, when you have a son of your own, you'll see").

There was no need for me to go in search of hidden clues to my father's emerging political bent when the evidence had been acc.u.mulating for years. Between the confluence of the 9/11 attacks and his self-imposed exile with my mother in the Catskills, the ascent of the Internet, and the emergence of twenty-four-hour conservative news channels, he had created a hermetically sealed environment in which the only depictions of the outside world he engaged with were those expressed in all-capital letters and at maximum volume. His devotion to cable-TV news had become its own kind of addiction; its programs blared simultaneously from multiple screens within his house, putting him to bed at night, staying on while he slept, and waiting for him when he woke up in the morning. The man who was epically fearful of expressing himself in writing, and who trembled at the thought of having to write anything more on a page than his own name, now had a limitless supply of prefabricated chain-email messages appearing in and being forwarded from his account that, with the click of a b.u.t.ton, could be pa.s.sed along to his business contacts, his friends, and his son, to alert them that estrogen from birth control and morning-after pills is causing male fish across America to develop female s.e.x organs-and environmentalists, who are overwhelmingly "pro-choice," have helped cover it up and America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave s.h.i.+ps, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known and the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history while the "silent majority" is cowed and extraneous.

Lately, in our therapy sessions, he had been talking a lot about the tremendous guilt he felt for never serving in the Vietnam War. His fate had been sealed on the day when he was busted for smoking pot and when his split-second response to a draft board disqualified him forever. Absent all those events, his age probably would have put him on the safe end of the eligibility curve by the time his number was called, though I remain convinced that circ.u.mstances and his lack of athleticism would have conspired to make him a name on a wall and not my father. But he was still wis.h.i.+ng almost thirty years later that he could have partic.i.p.ated in what was once America's most futile military folly.

I knew a single afternoon spent watching a combative, life-justifying interrogation of McNamara would not suddenly reverse the polarity of my father's political philosophy. But I thought it might teach me a few things, like: how did someone who was once so very like me come to believe the complete opposite of what I felt? How can you identify with and love a person who, in crucial situations, will behave very differently from you? How can you rely on him and trust him if he thinks these things?

I thought about this as we listened to McNamara recount his biography, his professional background steeped in corporate management and statistical a.n.a.lysis but devoid of any military oversight experience, and his philosophy, held then if not now, that a war could be won on paper if we we just lost fewer men on our bombing runs than just lost fewer men on our bombing runs than they they did. I probed my soul for sympathy in the moments when my father would clench his fists or grit his teeth, shake his head in disagreement with McNamara, sigh an exasperated sigh, or mutter "stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.d" under his breath. To my surprise, he never burst into the same verbal furor elicited by the television pundits with whom he agreed or disagreed so ardently that he sometimes seemed to think he was debating them in his own living room. He said nothing back to the screen, or to me as the credits rolled while we walked up the aisle and out of the theater. did. I probed my soul for sympathy in the moments when my father would clench his fists or grit his teeth, shake his head in disagreement with McNamara, sigh an exasperated sigh, or mutter "stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.d" under his breath. To my surprise, he never burst into the same verbal furor elicited by the television pundits with whom he agreed or disagreed so ardently that he sometimes seemed to think he was debating them in his own living room. He said nothing back to the screen, or to me as the credits rolled while we walked up the aisle and out of the theater.

Just as we did after each therapy session, we followed the movie by retreating to our Ukrainian diner, where, unmoved by the experience, my father ordered his eggs exactly as he always did. I waited for him to bring up the movie, and when he did not, I finally asked, "So what did you think?"

"So many things, David," he said. "So many things." He wasn't yet ready to share what those things were, and I hadn't yet found a way to ask him. One prophecy from his email had come to pa.s.s: I felt cowed and extraneous, and I fell silent.

II. The Plate Saying goodbye to my parents' house in New City, the one I had lived in after we left Manhattan, was easy. It made me glad that there are words like "final" and "never," abrupt enough to convey a sense of permanent nonexistence, even if our brains can't fully comprehend the idea. I had never thought of the house as a place of residence, just a layover between the completion of high school and the start of college, between the completion of college and the start of my real life. It was the place where I kept my old comic books and a set of weights I used only once after my father bought them for me. All I had to do was pack up the comic books and discard the weights, and when I left the house, I would be leaving it for the last time. But I leave places for the last time all the time.

For my parents, the circ.u.mstances of their forced diaspora to the Catskills were much different and the stakes much higher. An old creditor of my father's, long forgotten, had suddenly returned from financial near-death, demanding repayment on an ancient loan and the exorbitant interest payments my father had agreed to at a time when his business was not so prosperous and the notion of his living a long and healthy life seemed as laughable as the idea of his ever owning a house in the suburbs or achieving sobriety. In time a court would rule these interest payments usurious and declare the debts void, but for now my father could not take any chances: he could not claim poverty while owning two houses and three cars, and he might need a lot of money very soon.

So he and my mother sold the home where they rarely resided, knew none of the neighbors, and had no friends. They spent their last days there dejectedly packing up its contents and preparing to move them to their much smaller house in Monticello, or into cold storage alongside my father's fur. It probably occurred to them, as it did to me, that in the next instance when their earthly belongings were subjected to such a thorough inventory and relocation, they would not be available to help out.

On my final visit to that house, I went out to lunch with my father on an afternoon break from the upending of his life. As we drove around town in the car, once mine and now his, that he had unhesitatingly bought for me the summer when my previous ride, a five-hundred-dollar wreck that lacked even a ca.s.sette player, died abruptly, I was taking a victory lap in my mind: past the movie theaters I had visited on Friday nights no matter what was showing, the pizza parlors that went out of business only to be replaced by other pizza parlors, the country roads where my father had taught me to drive, and the highway where he had once nearly driven us into oncoming traffic. After we ate, we were sitting in the car when my father put his hand on my arm. "David," he said to me, "can you hold on a second?

"I'm not sure how to tell you this," he went on. "I'm not even sure I have the right to do this to you. But it's always been my policy to tell you the truth, and I feel you should know it."

"Dad," I said, "what is it? Would you just say it already?"

"Okay," he said, "here goes. A few weeks ago I went in to the doctor for a routine blood test, and when the results came back-well, they think they might have noticed something with my prostate. I have to go in for a few more tests. They said it's most likely nothing, but then again, it might be something."

"So that's it?" I said. "You got me all worked up over something that's probably nothing?"

"David," he said, much more tenderly than I had responded to him, "this is something I've been wrestling with for days. I didn't know how to tell you. I know you don't like it when you feel like you've been left out of these things, and I wanted you to know as soon as I could, as soon as I was ready to tell you."

"Yeah," I said, "but did you have to tell me like this? So much...drama? Maybe you need to think about how you say things like this."

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe you need to think about how you react. react."

I had planned to bring up this exchange at our next therapy session, but my father arrived with plans of his own. He began the meeting with a not unfamiliar complaint about my sister, with whom he was having difficulty communicating in the most basic sense.

"This one," he said, "never answers her phone. And if I leave a message, do I get a call back? Maybe two days later, maybe three. Maybe never. Sometimes it's like, I wonder, hey, do I even exist?" one," he said, "never answers her phone. And if I leave a message, do I get a call back? Maybe two days later, maybe three. Maybe never. Sometimes it's like, I wonder, hey, do I even exist?"

"Do you think she's avoiding you?" said our therapist, whom my father still insisted on calling Becky.

"Hey, I don't know," he said. "Becky, let me ask you something. You've got a father, right? He calls you sometimes? You ever not return his phone calls?"

"Mr. Iss-i-koff," said Rebecca, "this isn't about me. Let's stick to you. Why do you think your daughter doesn't call you?"

"I don't know," he said. "But let me tell you something about my own father. Do you know that he had a gla.s.s eye? And he was always embarra.s.sed by it. I was rifling through the glove compartment of his car one day when I found an eye that he kept in there. And later on, I told him that I had found it." He began to get choked up. "And I put my arms around him and said, 'Dad, I want you to know that I don't think any less of you because of this.' And do you know what he told me? He said, 'Gerald, if it wasn't for that d.a.m.ned eye, I could've been president.' And I said, 'Dad, don't you understand that you always could? don't you understand that you always could?'"

It was unclear to me how the story related directly to the issue of him and my sister, but before I could express this, he had moved on to another anecdote.

"Do you know," my father continued, "that it was my father who saved me from drugs? It was his idea to split up the business and to leave me in charge in New York while he went back to New Orleans. At the time I begged him not to do it. But he knew-he knew!-that it would be the best thing for me. He said, 'Gerald, I know you, and I know you're going to do whatever it takes to keep your business afloat. You're not going to let yourself go down like that.'" knew!-that it would be the best thing for me. He said, 'Gerald, I know you, and I know you're going to do whatever it takes to keep your business afloat. You're not going to let yourself go down like that.'"

Set aside, for the moment, the fact that over a decade would elapse between when my grandfather put my father in charge of the fur business and when he achieved some semblance of sobriety. Everything, it seemed, that now or ever preyed on his psyche was simultaneously issuing forth from him in a cacophonous blurt. The remembrances and the grievances were all somehow interconnected in his mind, a string he could keep pulling on and pulling on like handkerchiefs produced from a magician's sleeve. The trick in this case was getting the performer to stop.

"Dad," I interrupted, "I know all this stuff is important to you, but we're supposed to be here to talk about us."

"In all fairness, Mr. Iss-i-koff," Rebecca added, "you have been talking for a long time now. Maybe you should let David say something."

My father recoiled as if she and I had both pulled knives on him. "Hey," he cried, "isn't this supposed to be a place where I can talk about anything I want? Don't I have enough going on in my life that now I gotta fight with you two? I've got a daughter who doesn't even acknowledge that I'm a person, I'm dealing with this prostate thing, I'm losing my house." He paused, and then with all of his might: "My plate, plate," he bellowed, "is full. full."

He brought his hand down as if to punctuate his declaration with a loud slam, but there was no table in front of him, so he ended up slapping himself on his leg. I closed my eyes and let a few tears slip out and caress my cheeks.

"David," my father asked hoa.r.s.ely, "why are you crying?"

"I can't stand to see you get like this," I said. "It just reminds me too much of when you used to get high."

"Do you think that I'm high now?"

"No."

"Have I ever once gotten high in the last five years?"

"I don't know. I don't think so."

"Someday," he said, "you're going to have to learn that you can't hold everything against me just because I used to do drugs."

III. The Fan The box for the ceiling fan and lamp a.s.sembly contained eleven pieces: two teapot-shaped parts that joined together to form the motor, four plastic blades with a fake wood finish, a remote control, and four ceramic fixtures to hold the lightbulbs (not included). Its retail cost at a Home Depot in Kiamesha, New York, was about ninety dollars, but its actual cost to me, as a gift from my father, was zero. He told me these things were a snap to build, and that he had previously set up several of them in his Monticello home, and I believed him. We never imagined that in the course of putting one together, we would dismantle each other.

The whole enterprise of installing the ceiling fan in my apartment had been my father's idea. He had decided on a previous visit to my boxy fifth-floor walk-up that the cool breeze generated by my air conditioner did not carry well enough from my bedroom to my living room, in the same way that he decided my upstairs neighbors, a pair of bone-thin NYU undergraduates who barely filled out their flip-flops, made too much noise as they trampled across their floor ("Are you living underneath Frankenstein?" he wanted to know). It had been a long time since my father and I had collaborated on a project requiring physical exertion: the last time had been in the 1980s, when he helped me install a hard drive in my computer, after he came home to find me attacking the device with a hammer. Since then, I told myself, I had matured.

The ritual began in my living room on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon one summer after our therapy session and our customary lunch at the Ukrainian diner. We attached the fan's four blades to the motor unit and removed my old light fixture with graceful, professional ease. We brimmed with deceptive bravado, believing the task would be completed well before the afternoon's Yankees game. We would be done soon enough to watch Derek Jeter put our own crude displays of dexterity to shame while an energy-efficient fan circulated the air and cooled our exposed knees.

Our first challenge was mounting the a.s.sembled fan to the newly created hole in my ceiling, which yawned above us somewhat higher than we'd antic.i.p.ated. From the bas.e.m.e.nt of my brownstone, I retrieved a ladder, but my father and I could not stand on the ladder simultaneously, and one of us needed to hold the mount steady while the other person screwed it into place.

"Do you have another ladder?" my father asked.

"Another ladder? I'm lucky I had ladder? I'm lucky I had one one." I went back downstairs and walked across the street to a Spanish bodega, where I borrowed a second ladder from a Banglades.h.i.+ clerk who did not even ask what I needed it for. I bought a lot of soda and Ring Dings from that place.

I had carried two ladders a total of eleven flights of stairs, and my father and I were now standing atop them at the same height, only to discover that we had a problem with the division of labor. While I held the mount, my father attempted to screw it into place with an electric screwdriver. But he could not balance the screws on the tip of the tool and drive them up into the ceiling. Each time he tried, the screws would fall to the ground, roll around on the floor, and get lost underneath furniture, to which my father would say, "Whoopst." Not "Whoops," as everyone has ever said since expressions of embarra.s.sment and dismay were first invented, but "Whoopst," with a T at the end. "Whoopst! Whoopst!" he would say, and laugh at his own mistake.

The fan was becoming too heavy for me to hold over my head. So I jury-rigged a temporary solution by placing a pillow on my head, putting the fan on top of the pillow, and holding the fan in place with the pillow on my head, while my father continued his hopeless ch.o.r.e of locking in the screws.

"Whoopst! Whoopst!" he said.

When I could not bear to hear him say "Whoopst!" one more time, we switched places. The head-pillow-fan arrangement seemed too undignified for my father, so he tried to hold it up with his hands while I operated the screwdriver. I also found it difficult to screw upward, but I was able to lock one screw in place and needed to secure only three more to finish our task. That was when, to my horror, I saw that my father's arms were trembling.

"David," he said, "I gotta let go."

"Not now, Dad!" I demanded. "We're almost finished. You have to hold on just a little bit longer."

"David," he said, "I'm sixty-five years old. I'm not a young man anymore. I know when I'm beat. I gotta come down. I'm coming down." I was sweating profusely and my father even more so. We really could have used a fan to cool us off.

He let go of the heavy, half-installed contraption, leaving it to hang awkwardly from the quarter-attached mount. He descended his ladder, sat down on the couch, and began wringing out his tired arms.

I reluctantly removed the one locked-in screw and detached the fan from its electrical wiring. I set it down on the floor and looked up at the large hole in my ceiling, with lengths of wire sticking out of it, and neither a lamp nor a fan to fill it.

"G.o.ddammit, Dad," I said. "This whole fan was your idea. I never wanted to do it in the first place. Now I have nothing. I don't have a fan. I don't even have a lamp to light this room. What am I going to do now?"

My father laughed. "David," he said, "it's not a big deal. You can hire somebody to do it for you. You can do it tomorrow."

"I think you'd better leave," I said. We didn't watch any baseball together that day. I was too defeated to return either of the ladders I had borrowed, so they stood all day in my living room beneath the ceiling hole like some art installation.

On Sunday I went on Craigslist and found a handyman who, for fifty dollars, installed the ceiling fan. He screwed the mount in place while I balanced the fan on my head with a pillow. I quickly discovered that even at its medium setting, the fan spun so quickly that it blew loose papers around my living room, and over time it was too much of a ha.s.sle to keep its fake-wood-finished blades free of dust.

A few months later, I joined a gym where a weight machine called the overhead press became my nemesis. After over a year of training on it, I was never able to lift over twenty-five pounds above my shoulders, and with each of the 3,744 reps that I estimate I did in that time, I thought of the G.o.dd.a.m.ned fan with every strenuous G.o.dd.a.m.ned lift. A few months after that, I moved out of the boxy apartment, making no effort whatsoever to disconnect the fan and take it with me. I hope that whoever lives there now does a more diligent job of dusting its blades than I did.

IV. The Card There are only two practical driving routes from Monticello to Manhattan, with the only major difference between them being the choice of the Tappan Zee Bridge or the George Was.h.i.+ngton Bridge. At most hours of the day, on most days of the week, either option should deliver a traveler to his destination in a consistently reproduceable amount of time; a Monticello resident with a regularly scheduled Sat.u.r.day-morning appointment in Manhattan should, with minimal practice, have no trouble arriving for this engagement as punctually as Mussolini's celebrated trains. Still, the trip presented my father with the occasional challenge.

One morning I was sitting in the lobby of our therapist's office, working systematically through a bagel and a crossword puzzle. I allowed myself one bite of the bagel for every five crossword clues solved as I waited for my father, and I tried to guess the ident.i.ties of the other families I occasionally saw enter and exit. Which parent had the substance-abuse problem? The mother? The father? Both of them? What was the substance-or were there substances plural? How much did their child or children understand about what they were going through? Were they closer to reconciling than my father and I seemed to be? It was satisfying to imagine that they were much, much further away.

It was ten minutes before the start of our session, then it was starting time, and then it was ten minutes after, and then twenty. Finally, my father ambled through the inst.i.tute's front door with a look on his face that seemed to ask: Have I seen this place before? Have I seen this place before? After giving me a perfunctory, jittery hug, he walked up to the young black man who manned the security desk and laid out an array of quarters. After giving me a perfunctory, jittery hug, he walked up to the young black man who manned the security desk and laid out an array of quarters.

"Let me ask you a favor," my father said to him. "I'm parked outside at a meter that's going to expire in another couple of minutes, while I'm upstairs with the therapist. At about half past, could you go outside and put some money in it for me? It's the red Taurus just outside."

It was as if my father had walked into a bank and asked a teller to do his laundry. I did not like that he was asking the man to do a job that fell well outside his clearly designated responsibilities; the fact that he was an old white man asking a young black man didn't make it any more comfortable. All I had to do to register my discontent was let out an exasperated sigh.

My father heard it. "What?" he snapped at me.

"This isn't his job," I said. "It's not his responsibility to put quarters in your meter."

"Hey," my father said, "let him answer for himself."

The receptionist gave no response, yes or no. He just stared blankly at the quarters my father had presented to him.

"I'm saying he shouldn't have to do this, and you shouldn't put him in this position," I said, and so saying, I swept the quarters off the countertop and into my pocket.

My father and I rode together in the cramped elevator, pressed up against each other and saying nothing. He barged headfirst into Rebecca's office, and before she could chastise us for being late, my father extended his hand, instructing her to wait.

"I have something I'd like to talk about," he said. "We were just downstairs, and I was running late, and I didn't have time to put enough money in the meter. I asked the guy behind the desk if he would feed the meter for me, and my son"-enunciated as if he were saying "my tumor"-"gets mad at me. I say what business is it of his if this guy is willing to put the quarters in for me? But what do you say, Becky? Who was right, and who was wrong?"

Rebecca started to answer in a sterner voice than she typically demonstrated. "You shouldn't ask the guard to do that for you, Mr. Iss-i-koff. That's not what he's here to do."

I should have let her finish, but I interrupted: "What does this have to do with anything? Do you understand that we're not here to have Rebecca settle every argument we ever get into? Of all the things we could be talking about in the...thirty minutes we've got left, how does this relate to you and me?"

"Hey," my father said, "it's my money, my time, and I'm going to talk about whatever I want to talk about."

"Fine, but you're going to do it without me," I said. I exited the room and, in what felt like one continuous motion, descended the inst.i.tute's long staircase, blew past the same receptionist I had been defending minutes ago, and walked out the front door.

One subway ride elapsed, and I was walking the blocks back to my apartment when my overriding sense of certainty and righteousness began to wear off. My cellphone rang, and I could see that the call was from Amy. We had been seeing each other more frequently, long enough for me to have told her that I had been going to therapy with my father and long enough for her to have known that this was the regular time of the week when I normally would be in a session. My outsize frustration that she would call me at a time when she knew I would not be reachable was outweighed by my desire for human contact, and I mistakenly took the call.

"Hi," she said cheerfully, not yet realizing that she was talking to a crazy person.

"Why are you calling now?"

"I-I was just going to leave a message," she said, startled. "Aren't you supposed to be in therapy right now?"

"I am," I said. "I was. I left."

"Is something wrong?" she asked. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Let's just say it got really bad in there today and leave it at that."

"You sound so sad right now," she said. "Can't you at least tell me what happened?"

"I will," I answered, "at some point. But not right now. I don't think you're ready to hear it. I don't want to freak you out."