by Baird Harper
“This is the kind of thing you should put into your next catharsis letter. So we can discuss it some other time.”
Dr. Simmons and his letters. They are, as far as Victor can tell, just a way for the psychiatrist to put off topics he doesn’t care to explore. Just a way to keep Victor occupied in the middle of nights rather than having the doctor paged. Occasionally, when a session gets slow, Simmons will open one—a note to Victor’s in-laws, to his dead mother, to the killer even—and read it aloud so that Victor can revisit his feelings of rage and disaster in the blunt light of day.
At one time, years ago, they were sort of friends, the psychiatrist and Victor. Or, not friends, exactly, but the kind of men who could stand beside one another at a barbecue talking while their wives genuinely enjoyed each other’s company nearby. Victor pauses to try to remember it, to carefully reconstruct in his mind the particular sound of Sonia’s laughter carrying across someone’s backyard. There was an above-ground pool in the background, full of shiny fat children, oppressive heat, mosquitoes. But whenever he’d been struck by the sense that he couldn’t stand being there another minute, Sonia’s laughter would travel across the yard and he’d be fortified with some spare measure of her patience and good cheer. But this was a long time ago, before everything, back when Lawrence Simmons was just some dope at a barbecue and Victor wasn’t anyone’s charity case.
“But there’s got to be a name for this feeling,” Victor persists. “Right?”
“Cotard’s syndrome,” Dr. Simmons says without much conviction. “It’s a delusion that one is actually deceased.”
“Cotard’s syndrome,” Victor recites as though it is the long-awaited answer to a trivia question. “Do you think that’s what my problem is?”
“Do you mean being delusional or actually being dead?” Simmons takes his own glance at the churning sky outside his office. “Your problem, Victor, is that you have depression. You never even began to cope with Sonia’s death. And on top of that, now you have some memory loss connected to a more recent trauma, which is actually quite normal. Tell me, when does your memory pick up again? After what you did?”
Victor remembers losing control, going toward the cliff, then nothing for weeks after until he recalls being shown a newspaper article with a photo of his truck hanging over the edge of the quarry, the guardrail tangled in the rear axle. The time between is a blank. The whole supposed recovery. A blur of pain and confusion, black eyes and broken ribs, a freckle of a scar where the IV had anchored, a hospital bracelet supposing he’d healed. Then home again, under orders to rest, while people appeared at his door with food. June brought meatballs. A neighbor brought lasagna. An elderly woman whose husband was buried in Oak Hill brought a different kind of lasagna. Those early days of being back home weren’t unlike after Sonia died. Nights of gifted food from plastic containers he’d have to wash and return. Or just throw away, which he may have done. He can’t remember that either. But memory appears to be losing its value anyway with life on repeat. Tragedy followed by Italian food. One day, he was just back in his daily existence again—eating meals, taking showers, going to work, three months now since running himself off the road—but all of it, every second of his life lately, is attended by the unwavering sense that he didn’t actually survive, that his ongoing experience of the present is just a flight of the mind conjured in the last moment before death.
“God, Vic, that’s some pretty grim material.” June was standing in the doorway of his office, her hands conspicuously clutching a tri-folded piece of paper. It was his first day back at Oak Hill. “Well, I’m here listening to you,” she continued, “so I’m pretty sure you’re alive.”
Victor went on to explain that her meatball tray had been thrown out by the cleaning lady.
June didn’t mind. She had others like it. And she had other things to discuss.
“So do I,” he said, his attention drifting out his office window. “Tell me, where have all my oak trees gone?”
She’d had them all cut down while he was in the hospital. A clean break, she was calling it. New trees. New life. New everything. “Now you just need to sell this place and start over. Somewhere else.”
“My wife’s buried here.”
“And you can visit her anytime,” June said. “Like a normal person.”
He continued to gaze out at the culled plain of Oak Hill. Only the evergreens and willows remained, the mausoleums overlarge and menacing in the open air. “But they were my trees,” he lamented. “I would’ve liked to have said good-bye first.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” June said. “And you weren’t going to take care of it yourself.” She handed him the folded paper, typewritten with her name signed at the bottom. “You’ve become totally . . .” She searched for a word, then discarded it. “Do you know what the new girl calls you?”
“The one who’s always taking things off my desk? Didn’t I fire her?”
“No,” said June. “You’ve been threatening to fire her, for months. That’s my point. You’ve become completely inert. You’re here right now, but you’re not really here. Do you understand what I’m saying, Victor?”
He tried to place himself in time. He could have sworn he’d fired this person. In the near future she was sure to be fired. “Who even found that girl? Is Gunner hiring people?”
June motioned to the paper she’d handed him. “That’s my two weeks’ notice, Victor. Gunner’s leaving too. I know this place is special to you, but I really don’t think you should work here anymore either.”
He turned back to the window, the fresh-cut stumps like so many new markers, the dead suddenly piling up around him. He blinked and the cemetery disappeared. A storm now complicates the sky outside the psychiatrist’s office. “June’s been gone two months now,” Victor explains, “and I still haven’t fired the new girl.”
Dr. Simmons reclines at hearing this, touches his chin. “So, what was she calling you?”
Victor’s attention comes slowly back into the room. “Who?”
“The new girl.”
“She isn’t even that new anymore,” Victor says. “But I can’t remember her name. I don’t think I ever learned it.”
“But what was she calling you?”
Victor finally puts his full attention on Simmons. “ Dead man walking.”
The doctor stands up and moves to the bookshelves. He plucks a small pink stress ball off one shelf. A book titled So You’re Grieving, Now What? tilts into the vacated space. “Well, I suppose that explains your bout of Cotard’s syndrome,” he says. “But what do you think of June’s suggestion to sell the cemetery?” He turns and holds his eyes on Victor, strokes his beard. “Or, what do you imagine Sonia would think about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
Victor looks at the clock again. “It takes a lot of effort to recall my old life anymore. Mostly I just keep revisiting the crappiest parts of this years-long aftermath.”
Simmons sits down again. “Sounds more like post-traumatic stress to me.”
Victor stares at the minute hand. It seems poised to swing forward at any moment. “Actually, Sonia thought it was a little odd that a person could even own a cemetery to begin with. She thought it was one of my personality quirks, a need to possess meaningful things. Or control them. I can’t recall exactly how she put it.”
“Try to recall,” Simmons insists.
“She wasn’t being mean or anything. She was never mean, ever. She was very funny, actually, around me. With everyone else she was so completely cool all the time. I mean ‘cool,’ as in everybody thought she was cool, but also . . . cold.”
“She was cold?”
Victor gets up and moves to the wall of books, taking down So You’re Grieving, Now What? “With her parents, I mean. But they were the cold ones, really. There was always a disconnect between them, or something.” He dumps the book back on the shelf, then turns to face Simmons. “But with me, s
he was never cold. With me, she had this goofy sense of humor that no one else got to see, these lame jokes.”
“I had no idea,” the psychiatrist says.
“Sometimes, she’d take off her wedding ring and drop it in the loose change jar we kept on the counter, and say, ‘Victor, I need change!’ ”
Simmons smirks painfully. The stress ball shrinks into his fist.
“Get it? I need change?” A smile tries to lift Victor’s face, but then the nausea moves in, a kind of impending motion sickness, and he can feel it happening again, time spiriting past him.
This is how the days go missing. A series of small glitches in the continuum where memory fails to record. He’ll lie down on his couch at work for a lunch-break nap only to rise in the middle of the night following, or he’ll snap awake behind the wheel wondering how long he’s been coasting unaware since leaving Dr. Simmons’s office, inching back across Wicklow in his spray truck as a tempest rages all around. Rain and hail, the howl of tornado sirens. The whiteout against the windows is something he can’t look away from, a thrilling natural static playing on all the screens of his life. This is how it felt as he’d hurtled toward that guardrail—fear giving way to wonder, all senses muted, body closed up inside the vessel that would take him to the other side.
Beyond the windshield squall, he can barely make out a green light ahead. It turns yellow, then red, then blinks red, then goes out. He idles at the center of town, waiting for instructions, for Sonia. He tries to conjure her in his mind, the deep green pools of her eyes, the crimp in her cheek as she’d deliver a corny joke. But then the static melts away and the world comes back into focus, revealing a dark and dripping night strewn with aftermath. Trees lie on top of fences and cars and garages. Power lines crackle on sidewalks. The road is scattered with branches and boards and lawn furniture.
He’d been with June a moment ago, he thinks, or was it Dr. Simmons? How is it that only Sonia feels distant from these landing points?
//
At Oak Hill the power is out, but the moonlight glows on the rain-dappled window of his office, and he can see June’s resignation letter is still on his desk beside a pile of unsent bills. His employees have been afraid to mail anything since the new girl inadvertently put one of his catharsis letters in the outgoing mail last fall. Victor had actually wanted to send it, at first. He’d wanted to start some trouble for Hartley Nolan, get him beat up by the guards or thrown into a hole. But this, it turned out, was only drunken scheming. Just a man in a darkened cemetery building afraid to go back to his empty house. In the light of the next day, imagining how silly this plot would sound if read aloud by Dr. Simmons, he buried the letter in the files on his desk.
Thinking, now, of the nights he spends sleeping on his office couch, avoiding his widower’s mattress, it occurs to him that he is here once again, alone and afraid. Then he feels time about to slip past him again, the way he gets up some mornings and another year has gone by without Sonia, the way a week in the hospital vanishes from memory, the way the oak slayers—still here a month ago, wondering, like him, where their beloved trees had gone—have suddenly now disappeared too.
“Where are you?” he says, the sound of his voice waking him into the reality that he is in his truck again, weaving across the cemetery grounds dragging behind him a cloud of poison. “What is the point of this anymore?”
Victor steps on the brake and the spray truck skids on the wet turf. In the glow of his headlights the soaking willow trees glisten fantastically. The yellow cloud overtakes him from behind, an enveloping wave that churns in the high beams, blurring the view. But then, as the cloud settles into a dense blanket along the ground, he can see it clearly, a car beneath the tree ahead, a piece of cement lodged in the windshield.
Victor gets out, his long shadow staggering across the vehicle’s hood. There are faces inside. One man appears to be in late middle age, the other much older. They stare numbly into the headlights.
Victor motions to the windshield. “Storm do that?”
The men don’t move.
He skirts around the front bumper and raps his knuckle on the passenger door.
The man on the other side of the glass turns, rolls down the window, and asks in a quiet beseech, “Are you real?”
Victor squints deeper into the car. The elderly man behind the wheel doesn’t move, but the face looks vaguely familiar. If he would say something, Victor thinks he could identify him. A regular visitor, perhaps. People come to the cemetery after hours all the time, and they aren’t always teenagers. Honest mourners sneak in too. Their grief hits them in the middle of the night and they come quietly through the dark to visit a loved one.
“Cemetery’s closed,” Victor announces.
The middle-aged passenger digs into his eye sockets, then looks up again at Victor in disbelief.
“Is everything all right?” Victor asks.
“I see things,” the man finally says, “that aren’t always there.”
Victor motions to the elderly driver. “Is he all right?”
The passenger shakes his head.
“Is he dead?”
“Uh-huh.”
This happens too, now and again, people without the means to pay for services trying to bury a loved one after hours. It’s never happened here before, but it does happen. The grief, as he understands it, makes them do things they shouldn’t do.
“Sorry,” Victor says. “But you can’t just bury him yourself. There are laws. I’m gonna have to call the police.”
“You’re freaking me out,” the man says. “Walking out of the fog like that, in a cemetery, at night.”
“I own this place. You’re trespassing.”
“Isn’t a cemetery like public property?”
Victor looks at the dead man’s face again. “Was he your father or something?”
“No.”
“He looks familiar.”
“I wasn’t trying to bury him.”
“What were you trying to do then?”
The man shrugs. “I’m not exactly sure anymore. I was acting heroically, and then, I don’t know, when it was over I started feeling less heroic about it.”
“What I’d like to know,” says Victor, “is why the dead guy’s behind the wheel.”
The passenger takes a breath and nods as if this is a question that he too has been wrestling with. He then seems to drift, momentarily lost in thought, before abruptly jerking his attention back into the present. “But you are here right now, right?”
Victor tries again to remember waking up in the hospital, tries to fill in the missing time. It seems important to recall his return to life to believe in it. But also, he needs to know how he felt about it at the time, to decide once and for all whether his fortunes have turned for better or worse. The before he remembers well enough—the weeks of debilitating panic, the relentless insomnia, the sharp turn beside the quarry—then what? Home again, with Italian food. A house call from Dr. Simmons.
“No charge,” the psychiatrist had said in a magnanimous voice, pressing into Victor’s living room and digging himself a seat among the piles of dirty laundry and dried-out food trays.
“I wasn’t aware I’d been paying you in the first place,” Victor replied.
“You haven’t.”
“Good, because it isn’t working.”
“Well, I’m not here as your therapist today anyway,” said Simmons. “I’m taking off my doctor hat here. I’m speaking to you as a friend.”
“I don’t think we are friends.”
“Maybe not, but I knew you back when Sonia was alive, and I’ve been meeting with you because I liked her. Everybody did.” Simmons took a breath and looked at Victor with a face that seemed to wonder what a person like Sonia had ever seen in him. And then he spoke for a time on the merits of reaching rock bottom, all paths leading upward, and so on, until Victor had passed through feelings of annoyance and boredom to plain fatigue. And then Simmons realized he’d been
droning on and he cleared his throat and said, again, “Look, Victor, my doctor hat’s off now, okay?”
Victor slumped against the couch arm, but pain radiated through his rib cage, and he sat up straight. “What is it you’re getting at, Larry?”
“Forgive me for bringing this up, but . . .” The doctor trailed off again, sucking his teeth and looking around, interrupting himself with tangential apologies and streams of psychojargon, until finally he’d managed to ask if what his wife had heard was true, that someone had stolen the wedding ring off Sonia’s finger during the wake.
Right out of the casket, Victor confirmed. His head shook as he recounted it, the minor perversion of petty crime atop such monstrous tragedy. It took him four days to realize the simple opportunity he’d missed to make things right. But it was his cemetery, wasn’t it? So he rose from his office couch in the middle of the night, pulled on his work boots, and under cover of a thick yellow haze, he dug up the casket himself and put his own ring inside with her.
That part of the story, Simmons admitted, he hadn’t heard before. And for the first time the doctor looked uncomfortable, regretful, it seemed, that he’d asked. So it was Victor’s turn to be magnanimous, to mercifully change the subject. He said, trying to conjure the best memory of all, “Did you know that Sonia and I met for the first time in Oak Hill, before I bought the place?”
But Simmons wanted to hear more of the heavy stuff after all. “So you saw her again, when you opened the casket,” he said. “You saw her one last time?”
Victor nodded, but he tried not to think of it. He sent his mind chasing after any other memory, even those most grim moments of static and doubt as the guardrail rushed toward him.
The psychiatrist leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. He had his doctor hat back on, Victor could tell. He said, “Do you wish you hadn’t done it?”
Victor exhaled, wincing as his broken rib cage contracted. He lifted his shirt to touch gently the most tender spot on the left side. “What do you mean by ‘it’?”