by Anna Berry
I sob until my whole body hurts. I sob until I think I’m going to die—wish for it, even. Dieter is a dangerous drug to me, I’m hopelessly addicted, and now he’s finally cut me off. Dying is the only way I know to escape.
But I’m so far gone by this point, I don’t even know how to go about dying. I’ve broken with reality completely. Sure, I’d been flirting with insanity for a while now. Plenty of young women my age would think a free, no-strings-attached trip to Vienna is great and wonderful, even if the guy who paid for it is a jerk. I’d thought so too, at first.
But the reality is, there were always plenty of strings attached. My sanity among them. When you can’t separate yourself from the sleazy guy you’re dating, when you honestly believe that your entire world and existence rises and sets on his head—and when he dumps you and you’re a nonentity—well, no amount of beautiful Alpine scenery or Strauss waltzes will fix what ails you.
At this point, I envy the people who have the nerve to commit suicide. The black hole in my brain I’ve ignored for months now has finally swallowed me up, and there is nothing left of me to kill.
I stop sobbing when I hear the first birds of morning begin to chirp in the dark. Dieter’s unattended alarm clock goes off in the hallway, blaring obnoxious Europop with English nonsense lyrics. Suddenly hungry, I get up and shuffle into his luxe Eurokitchen in search of breakfast. But the cupboards are bare save for some German oatmeal muesli that requires heating—useless, since Dieter’s kitchen is loaded with shiny chrome Siemens appliances so complex and advanced that I can’t figure out how to turn them on.
I abandon breakfast and decide that what I really need to do is pray.
I walk the Ringstrasse for a bit and then cross over toward the center of the city. The steep, checkered roof of St. Stephen’s beckons. I’ve been inside its high gray walls once already, during one of my solo walks around the city center. I’d read the English-language pamphlet on its history and admired the stained glass windows and side chapels and sepulchers yesterday, and I’d gazed at the Holocaust memorial sculptures across the street when I came from its darkened cavernous interior back outside, blinking and squinting into the light. But today I will not go to St. Stephen’s as a tourist. Today I will go to be saved.
I reach the church doors. One of them is open a crack. I open it a little too fast and almost knock over a middle-aged nun standing just behind it in her brown orthotic shoes while she fills a holy water font. I remember a snippet of my lapsed childhood Catholicism and dip my fingers into the cool water, cross myself with it. I smile at the nun and she smiles too. “Guten morgen,” she says. I don’t answer back.
It is not yet six. There is only one other person in the cathedral this early—an elderly woman kneels in the front-most pew on the left side of the nave, just beside one of the side chapels where a single penny-candle burns. I make a point to take a seat at the extreme rear right corner, as far away from her as possible. I know there will be more early-morning faithful coming in soon, but I want my own little ring of solitude for as long as possible. I don’t want anyone to figure out that I’ve mostly forgotten what little I learned in Catholic catechism class. I’ve long since left the religion of my birth behind. It’s been almost fifteen years since I set foot in a Catholic church, unless you count the time I spent in Notre-Dame and Saint-Denis Cathedrals in Paris as an atheist college student studying French medieval architecture one summer break on scholarship. I wonder for a moment if perhaps I’ll burst into flames when I go down onto the kneeler.
I finally decide just to sit quietly in my pew (not even a pew really, just a row of joined wooden chairs) and wait for my body and mind to remember how to behave properly in a Catholic church. My eyes scan the massive stone walls, come to rest on this artifact or that—Emperor Frederick’s tomb, Mozart’s memorial chapel—but they finally come to rest on the worn leather kneeler at my feet. I stare at the kneeler for a long time. After a while, it goes blurry. I hear the sound of water dripping. It’s a loud dripping, full of echoes, like the constant drip-drop water sounds one hears inside a cave. Drip-drop-BOOM, drip-drop-BOOM, the sound goes, amplified ten thousand times by St. Stephen’s steep-pitched stone roof. The stir of echoes links with the sound of my beating heart, and the combination is deafening, yet somehow soothing. Other than the booming echoes my tears make when they hit the kneeler in huge, widening splotches, booming and booming until they puddle up and start to spill down onto the pockmarked stone floor, my weeping makes no sound. I don’t keen, whimper, or even hiccup. My weeping becomes one with the pulse of the ancient building, and slowly builds itself up and out through the bell towers in a steady, even thrum. I am cleansed, in a way, though I don’t think God or the wandering nuns or the church building is necessarily responsible. If anything is responsible for this small moment of healing—which by no means cures the gaping black hole in my brain, it merely shrinks it just enough for me to survive the rest of my time in Vienna—it is the collective spirits of all the hundreds, thousands of people buried underneath the church or within its heavy stone walls. The knowledge that they are there, and have endured far more than I ever have or will, sustains me.
At this point, I still think that I love Dieter, as ridiculous as it might sound. I cannot separate love from hate or lust or any of the other emotions raging through me. For me, love is pain. I don’t yet know that something else is possible, but in that quiet moment there in the church, I get my first hint of it.
The church seems well-accustomed to receiving thick tear puddles on its kneelers and floor. The ancient cathedral accepts them with grace, and absorbs them into its stone heart in silence. The floor never seems to get saturated and just soaks up more and more of my spilling grief. This place, witness to plagues and fires and bombs and Nazis, this place knows sadness, knows it well.
“How long have you been involved with this man?” Dr. Chatterjee[4] asks. “This man from Austria. The one you call Dieter?”
“I don’t call him Dieter. That’s his name.”
Dr. Chatterjee blinks and looks down his long aquiline nose at me. “Of course it is.”
Dr. Chatterjee is my new psychiatrist. He’s a third-year psychiatry resident at the university hospital. I’m seeing him three times a week for free so he can have a case to write about for his board exams. I got referred to him by an intake nurse at the only clinic my crummy HMO would pay for because my insurance would only cover five sessions at the clinic.
“You’re going to need a lot more than five sessions, hon,” the nurse said, and handed me a pamphlet about a free psychiatrist-in-training therapy program. “Between your condition and your income, you’re the perfect candidate.” At first I took it as an insult, and then I realized that the nurse was right. I knew I was sick, I just didn’t understand why or what to do about it. Had I known the answer to either of those questions, I wouldn’t have sought help to begin with. And you could hardly argue with free. I went to the free program’s office that same day and they matched me with Dr. Chatterjee, who had a particular interest in depressed young women with relationship problems. It seemed like a perfect fit, since I was depressed and I had a relationship problem. Only Dr. Chatterjee and I didn’t exactly agree on what the problem was.
Dr. Chatterjee is from London. East London, to be exact. He’s a dark-skinned Indian who looks like Martin Bashir, talks like Michael Caine, and reeks of coriander curry. He wears custom-made Nehru suits and doesn’t seem to like me very much.
“Whatever you wish to call Dieter in session is fine,” Dr. Chatterjee says. “But to get back to my question—how long have you been involved with this man?”
“What exactly do you mean by involved?”
“How long have you known him? How long have you been in contact with one another?”
“I dunno—a year and a half, I guess.”
“You said in our last session that you haven’t seen Dieter in almost a year.”
“That’s right.”
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p; Dr. Chatterjee chews the end of his pen. “So, how exactly can you be involved with Dieter if you haven’t seen each other in a year?”
“Well, we like, talk and stuff. On the phone. Sometimes. And I’ve been doing some writing work for him.”
Dr. Chatterjee clears his throat. “Sounds more like a business arrangement than a relationship.”
I shrug. “Maybe. But I really think we’re going to get back together someday soon.”
Dr. Chatterjee clears his throat again. “What makes you think that?”
“Well, sometimes Dieter tells me that we will. That we might.”
“I see. Tell me something, Anna. Does Dieter ever talk about getting back together with you around the same time he sends you a writing project to work on?” Dr. Chatterjee leans forward, smiles. He seems pleased with himself.
I pause to think, realize that Dr. Chatterjee has discovered something that I know is true but don’t want to acknowledge. So I just shrug.
“I see I’ve touched a nerve,” he says. “Tell me something else, Anna. How long has it been since you had sexual intercourse with Dieter? You don’t have to answer the question if you don’t want to.”
“It’s been almost a year and a half,” I say.
Dr. Chatterjee sighs. “Anna, has it ever once occurred to you that your relationship with Dieter might be very, very bad for your mental health?”
“No.”
“I think it’s high bloody time it did,” Dr. Chatterjee snaps.
(Dr. Chatterjee says mean things like this to me all the time. He’s not a very nice psychiatrist. I’m only seeing him because his sessions are free. I’d never pay to get talked to like this. Never.)
Dr. Chatterjee temples his long brown fingers under his chin. “Have you ever had a successful romantic relationship, Anna?”
“I dunno.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Surely you know whether you’ve had any good relationships or not.” Dr. Chatterjee’s bushy black eyebrows raise triumphantly, as if he knows he’s pinned me under a bus with this question.
I blink. “I guess maybe that depends.”
“On what, exactly?”
I blink again. “On what you think successful means, I guess.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I dunno. Happy, I guess. Stable, maybe too.”
Dr. Chatterjee leans forward again, grins. “Have you ever had a happy, stable relationship, Anna? With anyone—romantic or otherwise?”
I don’t answer him. I just stare at the floor.
After almost five minutes of total silence, Dr. Chatterjee clears his throat. “We haven’t spent a lot of time talking about your family or childhood, Anna. I wonder if perhaps we should.”
“Why?”
Dr. Chatterjee’s hardline expression softens, just for the tiniest of moments. “Anna, young women with the kind of personality disorder I think you have very typically come from volatile family backgrounds, dysfunctional backgrounds that cripple young women’s emotional development to the point that they are incapable of having healthy, happy, stable relationships with anyone. Does that sound like you?”
What? I have a personality disorder? How could that be? I refuse to even consider the possibility. Dieter was the problem, not me. Didn’t Dr. Chatterjee know that? But instead of saying any of this aloud, I just stare at the floor.
After a few more moments of silence, Dr. Chatterjee grows impatient. “Anna, you’re getting very expensive psychiatric treatment for free. Do you really want to sit here not saying anything, acting like a spoilt child, wasting my and your time, when I could be offering these free sessions to someone else who could actually be helped by them? Or do you want to start participating like a grownup?”
“All right, fine. I’ll tell you all about my crummy childhood and crazy family. That’s what you want to hear about, right? I could go on forever. Where should I start?”
Dr. Chatterjee sighs. “Why don’t we start out with the basics. Tell me a little about your mother. Go back as far as you can. What’s the earliest memory you have of your mother?”
I chew on my thumbnail—it’s already bitten down to the quick—as I walk backward through my mind’s eye. “My earliest memory of Mom? I guess that would be when I’m about five years old.”
“Mom, why are we going around the block again? We’ve been around this same block ten times already.”
“Quiet,” Mom hisses at me from the front seat. “Quiet.” She sounds like the devil-possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist. I just watched The Exorcist on ABC Thursday Night at the Movies the week before last, and I still can’t get over how much the devil-possessed Linda Blair sounds just like my mom does when she’s driving her rattling, rusted-out ’74 Chevy Vega around and around and around the block—around and around and around.
Around and around and around the block—for hours.
“Mom, we were supposed to pick Mark up at three o’clock. It’s after four now. We’re late.”
“Shut up.”
“Mom, it’s getting dark—”
“Shuuuutttttt uppppppppp.” Mom’s voice has gone from devil-possessed Linda Blair to something out of Poltergeist—maybe even the man-eating dead tree from Poltergeist, the one that ate the little suburban boy like an Italian hoagie sandwich.
Carpooling to my older brother’s school with Mom every afternoon is like living inside my very own horror movie. Some kids my age would probably think that’s cool. But I don’t.
Mom is in her frayed aqua-green quilted polyester bathrobe, the same one she’s been wearing around the house almost every day since I was a toddler. It’s frayed and stained and old, and it stinks.
My mom stinks.
Mom hasn’t bathed in a while. Her greasy, stringy hair hangs half-in, half-out of pink plastic curlers that haven’t left her head in at least a week. The back of the quilted aqua robe has big red-brown stains from her unchecked menstrual blood. She’s muttering to herself in a language that only she understands. She’s muttering and laughing and crying all at the same time. And she’s shaking like a cement mixer.
“Mom, can we stop going around the block, please?”
“Quiet,” she hisses, devil-possessed. “I have to find them.”
“Who?”
“I have to find the people I ran over. Have to, have to, have to.”
“You didn’t run over anybody, Mom.”
I’m only five-going-on-six, but I know that no matter how many times I tell Mom she hasn’t killed anyone with her rusted-out Chevy Vega, she will never believe me. She will go around and around and around the same city block searching in vain for the dead bodies she absolutely, positively believes that she and the Vega have left in their wake. Mom believes there are dead bodies everywhere. Mom believes in finding dead bodies by the side of the road the same way that some people believe in God.
I settle in for the long haul. I figure it will be at least another hour before Mom is satisfied that all the random pedestrians and dog-walkers and little-old-ladies-hosing-down-their-driveways that she believes she has killed with her Vega have all safely gone up to heaven. If Mom decides that the bodies have gone up to heaven, then we are safe. If she decides the bodies have been raptured up to heaven without a trace, it means Mom won’t be captured and prosecuted for their deaths. But I know that Mom is nowhere near the dead-bodies-gone-up-to-heaven stage yet. She’s still stuck in the where-the-hell-are-all-the-dead-rotting-bodies-I-murdered-with-the-car stage, and she likely will be for hours to come.
I also know that by the time we get to my brother’s school, he will have already found a ride home with someone else. The dirty asphalt playground will be empty, and we’ll just go back home in the rattling, rusty Vega so my father can scream at my mother when we get there for being filthy and crazy and not cooking him his goddamned dinner.
Just another nutjob day in the nutjob neighborhood.
I unhook my seat belt and climb into the Vega’s bumpy, peel
ing-upholstery hatchback. There’s a fifty-pound bag of rock salt back there, the thick, chunky kind meant for dumping in water softeners. Mom and I went to the hardware store together a couple months ago to pick it up, back when she was still lucid enough to run errands during the few hours between me getting out of morning kindergarten at eleven-thirty and my brother getting out of first grade at three. The rock salt never made it into our water softener, though. Mom’s latest meltdown stopped it mid-errand.
I reach inside the fifty-pound bag, grab a handful of the Morton White Crystal and put it into my mouth. It tastes good, like a pretzel. I lie down on the fifty-pound bag and close my eyes, relish the knobby feeling of the rock salt rubbing into my back through its torn plastic packaging. Olivia Newton-John comes on the radio, singing “I Honestly Love You.” Olivia almost lulls me to sleep.
Almost.
Mom’s shaking like a cement mixer on cocaine now, and she’s taking the Vega along for the ride. The Vega bumps and zigzags along the suburban Evansville, Indiana, side streets—jumping curbs, stopping short when Mom stalls out the engine, nearly getting into a head-on collision with a Gremlin when Mom turns the wrong way down a one-way street. I get thrown against the side panel of the hatchback and almost choke on my mouthful of rock salt. Mom’s entire body is vibrating like a lawnmower in the driver’s seat, her trembling hands barely able to hang onto the cracked plastic steering wheel.