Magical Thinking

by Augusten Burroughs

  “Actually, I was a Catholic priest.”

  MARK THE SHRINK

  L

  ast night, Mark the Shrink invited me to dinner at Zucca, a trendy new restaurant in Chelsea, to celebrate the birthday of someone I don’t know. I was wary of crashing the party, but he said it was okay. So I arrived with him, and suddenly we were seven people instead of six. So now we had to wait an hour for a table, on top of the forty-five minutes everybody else had already been waiting before Mark and I got there. But this was not the worst thing. What horrified me most was that they were all shrinks.

  A table of shrinks, and me, the alcoholic, high-school dropout, Anne Sexton fan, advertising copywriter who was raised in a cult by a crazy psychiatrist. At first, I just wanted to slide under the table and squat among their legs, unnoticed. I felt profoundly out of place, like I should be wearing a thin cotton teddy with the back open and paper slippers. Or at the very least, some sort of electronic ankle bracelet. When one of the shrink’s whole fish arrived, I tried to make an ironic comment about how skillfully she removed its head with her knife and how perfect this was for a shrink. She looked at my forehead, smiled politely, and said, “Don’t you like fish?”

  I felt like an inpatient who suddenly found himself eating with the doctors. I felt that at any moment, a nurse would come to the table and remove me, apologizing to the others.

  Luckily, the shrinks were in a mood to blow off steam or if not to actually blow it off, to smother it with alcohol. So after about half an hour, they were all drunk and telling amusing stories about their very sick patients, all of which made me feel extremely mentally healthy and mature. “I just want to say to her, If I had your life, I’d want to kill myself, too!” one of the shrinks said, and the others howled and banged their knives on the table in recognition.

  After dinner Mark followed me toward Third Avenue and then invited himself over, making this the second night in a row that we’ve spent the night together. And the puzzling thing is, we still didn’t have sex. And I still don’t know why. I do know that he’s interested in me, physically. But I’m apparently not interested in him. And yet we never discuss the issue. We’re affectionate, but when it starts to become sexual, I shut down. I withdraw. I get my tunnel-vision thing. And I feel like I’m being smothered by wet blankets. And then all thoughts drain from my head, and my face becomes hot, and I shake. This never happened to me when I was drinking, but now that I’ve been sober for a few months, my internal rot is floating to the surface. Mark must know something is wrong with me. But he acts as though my reaction is the most natural reaction in the world, which then makes me confused. He drifts off to sleep. And I remain flat, looking at the ceiling.

  When he left this morning, he said, “Maybe we’ll talk before you go to L.A. for your shoot.” But I didn’t know if he meant talk about last night, about not having sex. Or talk in general. The odd thing is, I have no idea what he’s feeling. And he’s a shrink, for fuck’s sake. But I’m starting to go a little crazy, needing desperately to be in control of the situation and feeling terrified he won’t fall in love with me and knowing that I can’t even know what my own feelings are until I know that he’s safely in love with me so then I can decide.

  I don’t want to know what my feelings are until I know what his are. Somehow I know this can’t be right.

  Mark is strange, oddly disconnected. If you didn’t know he was a shrink, you would think that there was something wrong with him in a subtle way that you would not be able to put your finger on. Of course, then you would find out he’s a shrink, and that would be it.

  Since I left the window open, we were both bitten by mosquitoes in the night. But here’s where our reactions differed: he said, “I’ve got bites on my hand, flea bites or something,” and I thought that I had created the bites myself, with my mind and my own anxiety. So that’s the difference between a neurotic who believes it’s all his fault and a trained medical professional who naturally seeks a cause based in the facts of reality.

  He does seem to like me. He seems interested in my odd past life, what little I have told him about growing up. But he doesn’t yet know of my alcoholism and recovery and constant journal writing. He knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other sixteen. Plus, I’ve had to “minimize” my past. So while he knows my mother had a psychiatrist and that I was close to his family, he doesn’t have any idea just what happened. I wouldn’t want him to think I had a thing for shrinks.

  I love his hair. He looks like a disheveled Prada model or an indie film actor. He looks nothing like a shrink or any kind of doctor, a fact that now disconcerts instead of comforts me, because it makes him more difficult to read and understand, and thus manipulate and control as I’m compelled to do.

  Mark the Shrink doesn’t reveal much about himself. Instead, he listens closely, which encourages me to chatter constantly around him like a patient. Then later he says something that shows he listened and took copious mental notes, all of which disturbs me.

  Yet, I am obsessed. I think about him constantly, wondering if he thinks about me and listening to the score of Romeo and Juliet, the 1996 version, which has expanded in meaning from the one Des’ree song to the entire album, now that I have seen the movie (again) with him.

  I’ve known him for three weeks and look at how swiftly and completely I have fallen for him. Shouldn’t he recognize this and be alarmed? Isn’t this symptomatic of something?

  We met in a way that you wouldn’t think would be a possible way to meet a shrink. I was wearing a tank top and shorts, fresh from the gym. I was walking south on University Place, on my way to get an espresso when I passed this handsome and cool guy lurking on the corner. I noticed him, then turned away and walked on. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his head turn to follow me. Then as I was walking, the person in front of me opened a door, and I was able to see a reflection in the glass that I was now being followed. With a sudden heart-pounding sense of panic at the idea of a possible meeting, I ducked into a magazine store and purposefully began thumbing through a copy of The New Yorker. A few seconds later, he came into the same magazine store and began thumbing casually through The New Republic. I felt him look at me, so I replaced the magazine on the rack and left the store. He followed. I walked quickly, and then I felt a hand on my arm.

  “Hey,” he said in a slight Southern accent.

  “Hey,” I said back to him, surprised that he was Southern and feeling immediately comfortable with him for this fact, because my parents and older brother are all from Georgia. So even though I do associate the accent with people who are either drunk or insane, it’s familiar.

  Then out of the blue he said, “You wanna get some coffee?”

  And like in some thinly plotted porn movie I said, “Sure.”

  So we went to French Roast on Seventh Avenue and drank coffee and talked, and he told me he was a shrink, and I told him that I was in advertising but wanted to be out of it and be a writer. And then he said, “Are you straight?” And I said no, why? And he said, “As soon as you said hey to me, I thought you were straight and that I made a big mistake, so I’ve been sitting here the whole time worrying that you were just some really nice and friendly straight guy.”

  So that’s how we met.

  I’ve been indoors all day wondering what he’s doing and feeling left out now that I know he’s on call tonight. I hate this.

  I wish he’d call me this evening and say “Let’s go get eggs.”

  He never eats at McDonald’s, which is right near him: a bad sign.

  For some reason, I am horrified to be an alcoholic around him and am tempted to never tell him. To simply never have been one. Never drink again and never mention a word. Have it revealed to him in years, as a surprise.

  If he were a plumber would I feel the sa
me? No. I would think he was strange, distant, and oddly disconnected. The fact that he’s a shrink makes me feel safe. Because if anybody should have a psychiatrist for a boyfriend, that’s me. And yet.

  Mark the shrink is still in bed, curled up and sleeping with the easy depth that only an exhausted doctor can. For the past five weeks he’s been coming over to my apartment after his shift and falling into bed. We never have sex. We only sleep. We never talk about it.

  I find it endearing how comfortable he is, able to just be. However, I hate him for having thick hair and being twenty-eight, while I have almost no hair and am thirty-one.

  It seems like he has always been here in my bed. He seems to just suddenly belong, like a part of something that was missing and has now been returned without fanfare. Almost like my dog-tail dream. Sometimes I dream that I look down and suddenly see that I have a dog’s tail. At first, I’m shocked, but then a second later realize, Well of course I have a dog’s tail. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and I’ve always had it but just not realized it.

  Maybe I should tell Mark the Shrink about my dog-tail dream.

  It occurs to me that I’m in a different decade than this person. No, not different, next. I am in the next decade. He is in the last one. The one that comes right after childhood. And I am in the one that comes just before middle age.

  So, basically, he’s ten. And I’m forty.

  Why does three years seem like an enormous amount when it involves crossing the line of a decade?

  Now that I know him, he seems to me to be made out of sensitivity, like it’s a substance. Like a snowman. We went to a movie, and halfway through I felt his fingers, cold, on my arm. And I didn’t move, because I wasn’t sure he had intended to actually hold onto my arm. And then I touched his hand with my finger tips. And then he sank against me, and our hands made out while we watched Al Pacino do Shakespeare. And he has intense hands. There’s something going on there with those hands. They know things.

  He’s probably not a shrink but has confused himself with his own shrink, whom he probably sees four times a week in his inpatient residential home, from which he’s gained day privileges.

  I wonder what his catch is. He can’t just be single and that good looking and a doctor. It doesn’t make any sense. It makes sense that I’m single because of my alcoholism and advertising career and entire history. There’s always some reason. What’s his?

  My friend Suzanne says to be honest with him. She says to be myself, that shrinks are wrecks and that that’s why they’re shrinks.

  But I’m afraid to tell him that, inside, I’m a mess. That my confident, outgoing exterior is just a mask that hides the fact that I am damaged at the core, have a cracked trunk. That I drank my twenties away to forget my childhood, which was beyond-belief fucked up. The other day he opened the closet to borrow a sweater, and he saw my box. And he said, “What’s this?” And I freaked out and said, “Nothing.” But I said it too quickly. And because he’s trained, he became suspicious. “It’s a big nothing. You almost have no closet left.” So I told him it was all my journals from childhood, and when he suggested we open the box and take out a journal, I told him that I’ve never opened it and that I don’t think I ever will. Clearly, this was a fucked-up moment. But he let it slide. I closed the door.

  Just for a little while I want to pretend to be normal. I want to fit in among the doctors, to sit at the table and laugh freely without having something to tell.

  Always, something to tell.

  “I have to tell you something.” Always a catch. Not just baggage, but luggage, steamer trunks, moving vans.

  I just don’t want to snap the shiny spell of Mark the Shrink thinking he’s met a normal and successful guy who is well-adjusted and can make jokes about fish at dinner with his friends.

  Maybe I could tell him just enough about me to seem interesting, not real.

  Should I put this in a letter?

  I don’t want to go to L.A. with this on my mind. I want to be able to tell him but not force it on him like a bigger deal than it is. Although I guess it is a pretty big deal. And there’s a very real possibility that a responsible shrink would know better than to become involved with someone who has a history of alcohol abuse, among other things, and less than one year of sobriety.

  ______

  I’m in L.A. shooting a UPS commercial. The actual shoot isn’t for four days, so basically there’s nothing to do but sit around the pool and then hop in the car to go to the production office and look at the wardrobe for ten minutes, then come back to the pool.

  I called Mark the Shrink last night and woke him up. He was sleeping at seven-thirty at night because he had worked until four in the afternoon, having worked all night before. I apologized and tried to get off the phone, but he wanted to talk. He said he missed me, which made me gain sudden weight in my chest because of what I was about to tell him.

  “I have something to tell you that you’re not going to like,” I said.

  There was a pause, and then he said, “What is it? Are you HIV positive?”

  I said no. I said, “I’m an alcoholic. I don’t drink anymore, but I did, a lot and for a long time. I quit a year ago. Or, actually, I guess just slightly less than a year ago.”

  He said, “That’s incredible. Congratulations. That takes so much courage and an incredible amount of dedication. I admire you.”

  Feeling admired and shielded from his sight thanks to the three thousand miles between us, I lit a cigarette, being careful he didn’t hear the match. I did confess to him that I smoke sometimes, especially when I write. And he said that he likes to smoke sometimes, too. Since I write constantly, I smoke constantly, but I’m not going to tell him either of these things now. I need to ease him into the facts of me, not just do an information dump.

  We talked about our odd sex. I told him how it’s really difficult for me to have sex with somebody unless I know them very well and am extremely comfortable with them. This sounded better and more hopeful to me than the truth, which is I can’t have sex with somebody unless they are a stranger and I’m drunk.

  He said he’s not worried about the lack of sex between us and that he understands completely and that I should never feel any pressure and to please let him know if he ever pressures me because he doesn’t want to do this.

  So he’s perfect.

  Too perfect?

  I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something off with him. I asked him, “What is it about being a shrink that is so fascinating, that caused you to go into the profession?”

  He said, “Nothing. I never really wanted to be a shrink. It was an accident. I wanted to be a photographer, and that’s what I was gonna do. But I had to take a biology class in college, and I turned out to be really good at it and . . .” He trailed off, but I pushed for more. “And, well, I just ended up taking more and more science classes and then my parents were really happy and they said, ‘Be a doctor,’ so that’s sort of what happened.”

  I couldn’t imagine going through four years of undergrad, four years of medical school, and then a residency all by accident.

  But this is the thing about him: he doesn’t seem to be passionate about anything. He’s level-headed and sleepy. And there’s something about him that I am so drawn to, like he possesses some unknown force that causes me to cling to him. Is it because I want to figure him out? Is it because he never pressures me about anything? Is it because I can be false with him and hold back my facts or because I can tell him everything and in the end there is no difference?

  Nine months later. Mark the Shrink and I are no longer dating, but we are friends. We stopped dating when I returned from L.A. There just didn’t seem to be anything to hold on to. We weren’t going anywhere, and we weren’t pulling away. We were just floating, suspended in liquid. And I guess I want more. And I don’t know what he wants.

  We talk on the phone once a week and sometimes go to a movie. He tells me about his ex-boyfri
end, the one he spent two years with, from twenty-five to twenty-seven. The ex-boyfriend wants to date Mark again but not exclusively. He wants to date others as well. But Mark doesn’t want this. Mark wants one person. But maybe “wants” is too strong a word.

  Two weeks pass, and we don’t talk.

  I think of him but do not call because I am busy with work, and if I call him, I’ll just have to say “I can’t talk now because I’m busy, but I wanted to say hello.”

  Instead, Mark’s friend Gary calls me. He says, “Have you heard from Mark?”

  “Heard from him? What do you mean?”

  Gary says, “Nobody has seen or heard from Mark for two days. He’s missing.”

  I hear the word “missing,” and something inside me is filled with a certain though unnamed knowledge.

  An hour later Gary calls back. He is sobbing. “Mark is dead,” he says. “He checked into the Chelsea Hotel and overdosed on sleeping pills.”

  What do I say? How? What? Why?

  There is nothing to say.

  “He’d worked two shifts in a row. Then he went to the hotel, checked in, and took the pills. He had his little tape recorder with him. He left a message for his parents.”

  I want to know what he said on the tape but know that I can’t ask and will never know.

  Half a thousand people attend his funeral on the Upper East Side, including the table of shrinks I had dinner with. The president of Columbia University School of Medicine is there. He stands at the podium in an extraordinary suit and weeps openly and with utter dignity. “This is a single, catastrophic event.”

  I am astonished by the people who come to the podium to remember Mark the Shrink. They are doctors, artists, friends from the South, a few patients. I had no idea how large his life was.

  He kept this to himself. It was his secret.

  TELEMARKETING REVENGE