by Adam Haslett
Usually at that time of year, in early November, when the clocks turned back and the light faded early, my mood went with it, strengthening the undertow of the pain and sluggishness that had for so long sealed me off from pleasure. But the next morning I woke early, oddly refreshed, and took a walk in Prospect Park, starting my day with the joggers and cyclists and the old people doing their tai chi. My mother had texted and called numerous times the evening before, wanting to know how my session had gone, but I hadn’t responded. I knew I would be unable to explain it to her sufficiently, and then she’d likely say something skeptical or cutting, or complain that I’d received too little for the money. How could I account for the inkling of change that I already felt?
Confidence. That’s the word that came to mind, one that I would never before have used to describe any part of my life. Of course it made no sense to say one conversation had produced that. Other than through a powerful placebo effect. But what seemed new wasn’t confidence in the usual sense of greater self-regard or a bigger stride in my step. The inkling came on more subtly than that, in the feeling that had stayed with me since I’d left Dr. Lang’s office: that I could trust her entirely. That nothing I could say or even do would create any distance or alienation between us. The confidence was in her.
Confidence. That’s the word that came to mind, one that I would never before have used to describe any part of my life.
I would have gone back the following day if the assistant had instructed me to, but she didn’t call until Monday afternoon, telling me Dr. Lang could see me that Thursday, which seemed an eternity. Still, that week the effects of my visit continued. I slept more restfully. During the day I allowed myself to reread one of the books I’d spoken to her about and found myself able to concentrate fully on it. I even went to the Met and spent time in front of my favorite paintings, which I hadn’t done in years.
My appointment was once again in the morning, and as before, I arrived a half hour early. The dapper Indian man answered the door dressed in a different blazer and cravat. He offered a nod of the head but otherwise seemed as remote as before. After he’d led me into the waiting area, he glanced at the coffee table with its single copy of Le Monde and reached down to remove it, as if the room had too many distractions, not too few.
Twenty minutes later, a middle-aged woman dressed in an immaculate gray suit emerged from the hallway that led to Dr. Lang’s office and approached the front desk. The assistant appeared behind the glass and the two of them spoke briefly in Japanese as the woman produced something from her pocketbook—her payment, I presumed.
She crossed the waiting room without acknowledging my presence, but then just as she was about to exit, she turned back and, smiling with what seemed profound relief, said to me, “We are so lucky to have found her.” Her conviction struck me so forcefully I didn’t know how to respond. I simply nodded.
When eventually I was called to the desk, I handed the young woman my phone and followed her to the office door.
“So,” Dr. Lang said after I’d taken a seat on the couch. “How have you been since our first session?”
For days I’d been rehearsing in my mind a detailed account of the subtle but marked change I’d experienced, but to my surprise once there in the office with her the inclination to deliver it vanished. I saw, without knowing what I saw, that my commentary was beside the point.
“Better,” I said.
She looked at me carefully, weighing the sincerity of my response.
“Good,” she said. “That’s as it should be.”
Was she a hypnotist? Was that it? Was the deeply calm, settled quality of her voice inducing in her patients a kind of trance? If so, so be it, I thought. I wanted to be here and nowhere else.
“I’ve thought about our conversation from last time,” she said. “I found it quite useful. In clarifying certain issues in my own work. I’d like to continue it today, to explore some other areas.”
“Of course.”
She began by asking me to describe not my memories of childhood but rather, in as much detail as possible, what it felt like to remember childhood at all. “Don’t worry about making sentences. Just whatever language comes to you—texture or atmosphere or your state of being—when these recollections occur.”
I fumbled about, not sure what she was after, but she kept encouraging me even through long silences to name just a color or a time of day or a sound that went along with how, not what, I remembered of my early years.
We went on like this for quite a while, and though I felt I hadn’t offered a satisfactory description, such experiences being as amorphous as they were, she assured me that what I’d provided her would be helpful for the treatment. Then she made me another cup of tea and sat again in her chair.
“Tell me,” she said. “Have you ever been in love?”
The question came so unexpectedly and in such a disarmingly direct manner that, just as I had in our first session, I found myself answering it more definitively than I had even to myself.
“Yes,” I said.
“And what was it that told you you were in love? How did you know?”
I was beginning to realize that what made Dr. Lang different wasn’t just that she had no interest in the particulars of the condition that had brought me to all the other doctors; more fundamental than this, she had no interest in changing me. Her questions were those a philosopher might ask, a kind one to be sure, but still a person seeking answers to problems that went beyond my individual suffering. It occurred to me that I could take offense at this, given what I had come for and how much she was being paid. But I felt the opposite of offended. I felt relieved at the sense that what we were discussing went beyond just me.
And so I told her about Lili. How we’d met, blessedly off-line, a number of years ago at a bakery, where we both frequently camped with our laptops. I’d judged her too attractive to be interested in me, but sitting cat-a-corner at a four-top one day, she’d asked what I was working on, and when I told her, embarrassed but in honesty, that it wasn’t much of anything, rather than glancing back at her screen to avoid entanglement with a creep, she confessed she herself mostly read news or wrote in a journal. The café was her time off from her job as an au pair in the neighborhood. She was from a small town in Bulgaria and had been in New York only a few months. Her English was functional but far from fluent. This helped, as it no doubt does for many shy men who go out with foreign women, a degree of illegibility being a reprieve from the harshly judged self they’ve been stuck in since puberty. My attempts to explain American idioms that made no sense to her had made her laugh. The gap in comprehension had helped in bed, too, where I felt no compunction in asking literal questions about what she preferred, rather than pretending to the part of some hero-lover I had never been. Describing those months to Dr. Lang, I was able to say with clarity for the first time that I knew I was in love on the afternoon that she told me her application for a visa extension had been denied and that she would have to return to Delyan to live with her aunt and younger sister. I knew because her going seemed like a disaster. An end to my own reprieve.
“And was it?” Dr. Lang asked.
“Yes. Everything got worse after that. Until now. Until I came here.”
“The cure is love, Freud said, but,” Dr. Lang continued, “that leaves open, as he well knew, the question of what the loving thing to do is. It’s good you told me this. You’ve been very forthcoming. It eases the process. Why don’t you come with me,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
I would have guessed that the door in the corner of her office was to a closet or storage room, but as she opened it and gestured for me to pass through ahead of her, I saw instead a long, brightly lit hallway with a high ceiling and polished wood floors, the kind of expensive minimalism I’d first expected would lie behind the building’s facade. At the near end of the hall I could see a large internal window. Beyond it, every four or five yards along either s
ide of the passageway, were brushed-steel doors, each with a small pane of glass at eye level, some obscured by little blinds, others clearly visible.
“As you know, one of the things we do here,” Dr. Lang said, leading me slowly up the hall, “is gather information. Through the conversations we have, but also the records and photographs, and what we can gather from other sources. The point is to try to fill in the texture of a person’s life.”
We paused by the internal window, which to my astonishment revealed what appeared to be the data hub of some tech start-up, a room dense with servers, mounted screens, snakes of black wires, and three young men on rolling chairs sliding back and forth between fixed terminals and laptops.
“It’s not just about collecting the facts of our patients’ lives,” she said. “That’s the simple part. The challenge is to synthesize it into something that can be offered back to them in a meaningful way. Wealthier patients, like yourself, the ones who can pay, they subsidize all this production work for the others.”
She moved on, farther down the hall, bringing me up to one of the doors with its glass pane covered. She reached up to adjust the slats, opening the little blind. “Here,” she said. “Have a look for yourself.”
At first I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing—light of different colors moving and blending through a space of indefinite size, a huge concave screen hanging in an arc toward what looked like one end of an oval room, images rising and dissolving across its surface: faces, a shingled house, a grassy hillside, flickering old footage of children by a pool. It wasn’t until I looked toward the back, at the point where all this stimulus seemed focused, that I saw a white man of fifty or so seated in a black leather recliner, hands on the armrest, eyes wide open, head resting back. He appeared transfixed and, in some odd way, elated. The changing light and reflections of the big screen moved across his face like a time-lapse clip of the sun raking its way over a desert landscape. Through the metal door, I could make out the faint sound of music—Bach, if I had to guess.
“I often think back to my father coming home from one of his clinics,” Dr. Lang said, as my eyes remained fixed on the scene before me, “in Malaysia, I think it was, somewhere in any case where he was treating very sick people, and saying to me when he got home, ‘I know nothing about them, above the lives they’ve actually led, just the pain they’re in, that’s all.’ I think about that every day.”
“So this is it,” I said. “This is the treatment.”
“It’s not the complete procedure,” Dr. Lang said, “but it’s a very important part. The man you see there, he’s getting close now. This phase is about giving people a vision of their own lives Not intellectually but sensorially. I like to think it represents the true humanity of our work.”
The expression on the man’s face was one I had never quite seen before, a kind of beatific wonder, as if the innocence of earliest childhood had somehow come forward in time to inhabit him again, an innocence not ignorant of all that had since come to pass but somehow encompassing and forgiving it. It was as if gratitude were pouring from his eyes.
I looked away, up the hall, at all the other doors. “How many people are here? Are these full?”
“We usually have five or six patients a day in this stage of the treatment. To be honest,” she said, lowering her glance to the floor, sounding almost wistful, “I don’t usually show people this in advance. I’ve only done it on a few occasions. But I sensed you would understand. And I think you do, don’t you? So I wanted you to have it a bit longer, as it were, in anticipation.”
“Does that mean you think I’m ready?”
“Yes,” she said, managing a smile. “I believe you are. Not today. But when you next come.”
At reception, I asked the assistant how soon I could return. She was sorting through a set of what looked like shipping documents and passports. My friend had been right. Americans were hardly the bulk of Dr. Lang’s clients.
“Sorry, what was that?” she said as she took my check and handed me my phone.
“I’d like to come back as soon as I can. Whenever she has an opening.”
The door at the rear of the little office opened, and the security guard poked his head in. “Come,” he said to the young woman. “Now.”
“We’ll call you,” she told me as she stood to follow him. “It won’t be long.”
I let myself out the front doors onto the clean slate sidewalk, so bemused and thrilled at what I’d seen that I just stood there awhile, gazing up at the massive jets cruising down out of the sky.
Eventually, I ordered a car, and as it pulled out, I happened to see the assistant and the guard a few yards behind the metal gates, which the guard had been locking the last time I’d passed that way. He was pointing his finger in her face, and though I couldn’t be sure, it looked as if she were crying. I had a flash of anger at the man, that he should act like that, causing her pain, here of all places.
Again my mother called and texted, practically pleading for information. After the first session, I had eventually phoned her back, and as predicted, she’d professed disappointment that what I’d received sounded to her like little more than an ordinary conversation with a doctor. This time I didn’t bother responding. In fact, I didn’t respond to my friend’s voice mail either. He said his own treatment was almost complete and that we should get together and talk it all over. But I felt no inclination to. It was as if my experience with Dr. Lang was granting me, in a way I had never known before, something like independence, even distance from the people I’d been intimate with the longest. And there came with that a certain unaccountable peace.
I found myself waking earlier and earlier each day until my walks in the park were coming before the sun had risen. There weren’t many others out in the cold twilight, which suited me all the better. Books of poetry I hadn’t thought about in years consumed whole stretches of the day, as if I were being called back to a prior self capable of absorbing their play of meanings. Mealtimes would go by, and I’d realize I hadn’t eaten yet wasn’t hungry. I had entered a kind of reverie, a lightening of consciousness in which everything seemed to float just outside the usual, numbing confines of measured time. This, I thought, is what Dr. Lang meant when she said she wanted me to have the experience of the treatment for a bit longer, in anticipation. She’d allowed me to glimpse how it might be to let go of the ache in my body and the exhaustion of my spirit, a condition that hadn’t miraculously disappeared these last few weeks, but toward which I felt an increasing detachment, a sense that its dominion over me would soon be at an end.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait long. A few days later the assistant called and said I should return the following afternoon. This time I arrived an hour early, in a downpour, and had to wait several minutes outside before the guard answered the door. He was unshaven and wore no cravat, but still his unseasonable linen blazer was clean and well cut.
“Come on then,” he said, gesturing impatiently with his head for me to get inside. “You’ll have to wait a bit, we’re rather full at the moment. Put your phone and check on the desk.”
In the waiting room, I had company for the first time—the elegant Japanese woman whom I’d encountered on my last visit. She smiled, bowing her head ever so slightly, but said nothing, and from her calm mien, not unlike Dr. Lang’s, I assumed she preferred silence.
The assistant called her in first, after which I sat alone another half an hour, hearing now and then the sounds of doors in the building opening and closing. When eventually the young woman returned and signaled for me to follow her, I expected to be taken once again to the office, but instead she led me through a different door directly into the hallway Dr. Lang had shown me.
“What about the doctor?” I said.
“You’ll see her after your session in the chamber. It’s the same with everyone. This is the procedure.”
Halfway down the hall, she opened the same metal door I’d peeked through standing beside Dr.
Lang, and she showed me into what indeed turned out to be an oval room with a huge arced screen spread across the entire front half. She directed me to sit in the black recliner positioned just as I remembered it.
“Once I leave and start the session, you may notice changes in the temperature or in the quality of the air, as well as sounds and so forth. None of this is anything to worry about. It’s all part of what unfolds. We keep this door to the hallway locked for privacy, so when you’re done, you’ll exit through the door behind you, there at the back. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“You just need to relax and take it in . . . If you’re ready, then, I’ll step out.”
Relax? How could I? My heart rate was already up, my blood flowing. But I understood what she meant.
She lowered the little blind over the glass in the door, and I heard a slight buzzing as the lights began to dim, and then a very faint drone sound starting up. It was barely discernible at first, little more than a ringing in my ear, but soon it grew clearer, starting to gently rise and fall. I could barely make out the edges of the blank screen that encompassed most of my vision. I wondered nervously if in wanting so badly for this whole—it suddenly struck me now as perhaps ridiculous—process to be the remedy that had eluded me for so long, I had once again let hope trick me out of misery only to be disappointed. Yet what of it now? I was here, and my faith in Dr. Lang had already done more for me than all my other failed hopes. I just needed to let this experience enter me. And so I did.
How you remember, she had asked me, not what.
The darkness now was complete. Within it, there was only the building and falling away of the sound, which over the course of several minutes began to resolve into more discrete tones, and then eventually into something close to a series of musical notes. I tried to discern a pattern but could make out none until it sped up slightly, and I could hear it was something like a pop tune or a jingle, a vaguely familiar one, and then a deeply familiar one, but somehow unplaceable, one I couldn’t name. I sat for what seemed quite a long time, in that perfect darkness, racking my brain for where I’d heard the tune before, but nothing came. Then, all of a sudden, I felt a wave of warm, damp air, scented air—the seashore, salt water and seaweed, uncannily exact, as if I were on a beach in the dead of a cloud-covered night, the humidity and the smell encompassing my whole body. How you remember, she had asked me, not what. I looked to my left and saw on the wall a vertical line of pale-yellow light, just a sliver, and suddenly I was holding my breath—the light I used to see from the darkness of my bedroom, coming from out in the hallway in our house on the water when I’d ease myself to sleep listening to the radio. In another instant, the light was gone, and I thought, Don’t be silly, these are just effects, you’re the one adding the meaning. But the thought fell away as I noticed, in the blackness of the screen, dark little circles beginning to glow, sea green with ragged edges, three of them evenly spaced, pulsing gently, hypnotically, like tiny creatures at the bottom of the ocean, little floating membranes, absorbing the lightless light of the deep, drawing me into their world, which after what again seemed a long but now-drifting time, was infused with a new sound, a slow heartbeat that filled the room, as if the room itself were a heart, and I was in the body of some giant, amorphous being whose breathing, I realized, I could now hear as well, rising and falling in the same, slow rhythm. In front of me, the dim green circles began to expand, widening ever so slightly with each beat, with each inhalation. And as they grew larger, there came other, more-distant sounds—a boat’s horn, gulls—and the circles began to undulate, like enormous jellyfish, the heart sound perhaps their hearts, or mine, as I watched them, struck with wonder, my goggles over my eyes and my flippers on, in the salt water, the waves above rocking me to and fro, no year or month or scene connected to this sudden whole body sense of being happily underwater and alone, just the buoyancy and the creatures, and the marvel of it all, and I thought, Yes, let me stay here, back in what used to be this free boy’s body. A moment later, though, the circles, which now filled the entire screen—they grew brighter and brighter, expanding into an oblivion of pale light, a dawn of sorts, a summer dawn, hazy, and I felt bereft, stolen away from something rich, as if woken from a dream saturated with meaning to find myself once more in the narrow world. And there in the arc of light before me, emerging from points within it, were the freckles and blue eyes and strawberry hair of my cousin, these features of hers not quite joined but floating, out of focus, an essence, not a face, and I felt myself to be on the edge of tears for my love of her and how kind she had been to me as a kid, how playful and curious, and eager to cheer me up, and how badly, I now realized, I had missed seeing her after she moved away, though I never thought of her anymore and so had had no sense such desire remained in me. All of this was given back now in a flood, an immersion, not in the waters of a moment ago but in a social longing, a wish to be close to her, to have her arm around me, but the wish was too much to contain, too heavy to keep dammed inside me. And so as the image of her features dissolved, I sensed this welter of feeling running back out of me toward the screen, which was becoming now a wash of hundreds of overexposed images, layered atop one another, all of them in motion, making it nearly impossible to distinguish one setting or object from another, like debris swept up in a current, only a fragment here or there—of a room I’d slept in or the street outside my parents’ apartment or the side of my grandmother’s face—familiar enough to leave me with the knowledge that this was my experience, all of it, moving past me in a rush, in a river of ghosts. It was so captivating, so defeating, that it took me some time to notice that the air had changed again, still warm but closer now, drier, with the scent of bread and sugar, of a bakery. All the earlier sounds had died away except for a low humming, a phrase of a song maybe. Before I could place it, I began to see on the once-more-transforming display the singular but faint image of the back of a young woman’s head. A woman with dark hair in a coat and red scarf. She was walking ahead of me, and along with the humming, I could hear the sounds of the city street all around us, and now the tears began to run from my eyes as I walked again behind Lili, listening to her hum a tune, trying to keep up with her, but slowly step by step her head was becoming smaller and the song dimmer, and arrested there in my chair, I could do nothing to catch up with her. I could only watch her form recede until she appeared impossibly far away, no more than a dot, the street sounds the only ones left now. And then they too faded away, along with the light of the screen itself, and everything in the room became still and dark and very quiet.