Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9A

  Waiting was never much fun, whether it was waiting in a queue to buy some bread or having to wait at work all day long for that special thing to arrive in the post, just to arrive home and have to wait even more. But waiting for doctors was worse; it was probably the most boring kind of waiting there was.

  It didn’t make much of a difference if it was waiting to have her itchy throat looked at by prickly nosed Dr. Evans, or if it was like today, waiting to have the funny thoughts that she had in her head fixed so that the strange feelings that made her sad all the time would go away, and she could go back to work and enjoy her favorite police show.

  It didn’t much matter.

  When she had an itchy throat, she could tell that everybody was looking at her, probably thinking that she had something much worse and always keeping a full row of seats away, not wanting to stay close to her, in case they caught whatever it was that she had.

  And she felt that way, with the stomach and the throat doctor, just as she felt now, sitting in the quiet waiting room surrounded by all sorts of crazy people, just like her, except they all looked kind of normal, like Eugene, the gardener in her building.

  Eugene had frizzy orange hair and a face that was spotted with freckles. And he always had on the biggest smile she had ever seen, especially when he leaned over the freshly mowed lawn, holding his hands behind his back and sniffing proudly and hungrily as if it were a steaming hot pie.

  “Linda,” said The Receptionist, “The Psychiatrist will see you now.”

  As she got up from her seat, she could feel every set of eyes peering at her from behind magazine covers, pretending to read, but really spying on her, to see if, in her walk, she would give a hint as to what was wrong.

  “You can leave them here,” said The Receptionist, hinting to the magazines rolled into tight balls in Linda’s hands like two glistening batons. “You can go right on in,” she said, nodding her head towards the door behind her.

  She wanted to turn and catch the people spying on her and tell them to quit it. She could feel them pointing and sniggering and giving each other high fives, because of something smart that one of them might have said. She knew, though, no matter how fast she turned, she wouldn’t be able to catch them. They would all be reading their magazines or chewing off the ends of their nails all cool like as if they weren’t spying in the first place. She’d have to go really fast, so fast that they wouldn’t have time to put away their stupid gawking faces.

  But Linda couldn’t turn that fast.

  Not yet anyway.

  “Come in, please, take a seat,” said The Psychiatrist.

  Linda liked her. She was very pretty for someone who was as old as she was and she spoke softly, really kind like as if she were blowing kisses, and her words were just the sound that they made. She looked like the type of person that would be a wonderful friend and the type of mother who would probably forgive things that weren’t your fault to begin with.

  “I am so happy to see you. How are you today Linda?” asked The Psychiatrist.

  Linda smiled and blushed. It was nice to feel thought about.

  “I’m good, sad I guess,” she said, instantly wishing she could have said something less stupid.

  Linda always found it hard to concentrate. There were so many certificates all over the walls and she went from one to the other like certified lily pads, browsing the specifics but focusing mainly on her doctor’s name and thinking how smart she must be, to have all of those pieces of paper on the wall.

  There were other things as well, like her desk for one. It looked like an island or a peninsula or something, the way it jetted out from the wall and bent and contorted in many ways around the room. She had a computer on one side and space for of her own to write in the middle and the end, the part that had no papers on it at all, it was made of glass and there wasn’t one finger print on it at all, and it didn’t look like it had a purpose, outside of looking fancy of course.

  On the floor, there were some toys and one that always caught her eye was that small blackboard that was leaning against the wall near the door. It had lots of colored chalk and the board was dirty as if someone had quickly wiped their hand over what was written. It looked like a cloudy day if the cold and the rain were the color green and red and yellow and brown. And underneath those clouds, which some mum or dad had probably quickly swept across the sky, was something that some boy or girl had been thinking and it didn’t much matter now that it was gone, except that Linda couldn’t help but wonder what it was.

  “How do we get sad? Did I catch it from someone else? Is it because I don’t eat my vegetables?”

  “Sadness is natural Linda. All emotion is natural.”

  “Are other people sad too?”

  “Of course. Just like other people are sometimes happy and bored and frustrated and excited and scared and disappointed too.”

  “Are you sad?” Linda asked, like a child.

  “Not now,” said The Psychiatrist. “But I get sad, of course.”

  “When were you sad?”

  “I was sad last month, because a friend of mine, she was sad too.”

  “Did you catch it from her?”

  “No,” said The Psychiatrist in a mild laugh, nothing mocking, though. “She is a friend of mine. And she was sad. I felt sad because she was sad. That’s empathy, Linda. It’s ok to get sad. You don’t have to feel silly for being sad if everyone else is happy, just as you don’t have to feel guilty feeling happy when someone else is blue. People aren’t always in harmony but in the end, we all dance to the same melody.”

  Linda thought about what made her the saddest the most. She thought about Graham, and how he could be really nice one minute, but he was only nice when he wanted to do things that she didn’t want to do, stuff that she did anyway because that’s what being a girlfriend was all about. But when she was sad, when she really needed a boyfriend, he always said the meanest things as if she wasn’t nearly as important to him as he was to her. They were never in harmony either.

  “It’s important for us to feel sad Linda, to have a blue day every now and then. It helps us to build our empathy, to fill our reservoir, so then when we meet someone who is sad or hurt, we feel sympathy, and we stop whatever it is we’re doing, and we help them. If we didn’t have these blue days, we might not know what sadness feels like, so we might not be able to see it in others, and then we wouldn’t be able to help other people, like our family, our friends, the people we love and even strangers; people we’ve never met before in our lives.

  “I get sad all the time,” Linda said. “More than most people I guess. The thing is” she said, biting her lip, “I think I like feeling sad.”

  “And that’s why we’re here. Sadness Linda, it feels like a warm blanket on your heart and soul. For most people, sadness is pretty addictive. In moderation, sadness, like I said, it has a purpose. It’s excessive sadness that we want to get under control. The key to emotion is to think of your mind as your belly” said The Psychiatrist, rubbing the top of her head as if it were rumbling with hunger.

  “To be strong and healthy and to live a long life, we need to eat the right nutrients for our body and for our mind. Our subconscious is no different to our stomachs. The food that goes into our stomach is no different to the information that we take into our minds. If you want to be healthy, you have to eat healthy food – lots of vitamins and minerals and proteins and carbohydrates for energy. We know how to look after ourselves because we can see what we are eating and in most cases, we can see to the effect of eating poorly. It goes straight to our hips” she said smiling. “The same can be said for your mind. If you read only bad news all the time, if you watch only tragedy and heartbreak, which is kind of like the greasy, salt laden hamburger of emotion, then your subconscious is getting only one type of food and it’s probably not doing it much good. Just as you need to feed your stomach the right balance of necessary foods along with guilty delights, with your mind, you need to eat
positive information, happy information, stimulating information, insightful information and as well, the right amount of sad information. You need balance, a healthy diet.”

  “There are a lot of bad things in the world and a lot of bad people. But it’s not important for us to remember who they are or what they did. And it doesn’t honor any of their victims any more than the love of their mother and father would, by peering through the venetians of a television screen or a newspaper clipping, spying on their suffering and their tragedy, over and over and over and over again. It’s not your tragedy to mourn Linda. It’s not your war. It’s not your accident. It’s not your grief. It belongs to the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and the sons and daughters. It belongs to the friends of those people. It doesn’t belong to you. Peering through the newspaper is no less rude than slowing down traffic to gawk out your window at a car accident. It’s the same thing you now. For most people, it’s normal, it’s even good. When they see some child being shot in a school or dying in a crash, it makes them think of their own son or daughter, and for a second, they forget that their kids have been grieving them the last hour or so and they are reminded how fragile life is and how beautiful it is, in the contrast of death. Things go back to normal pretty quick though so for most families, you’ll find them watching five, six even ten news channels, just to see more footage or the accident so they can feel that empathy again and again and again. It’s addictive. No different to smoking marijuana. It feels good to care, especially about the people you love. And if the only way you can feel that is by watching the tragedy of others, then it’s almost as if the collective conscious, all the people together with their loving and grieving hearts, they inspire more tragedy to happen, so they can love the things in their life that so quickly become frigid and content.”

  “Do you think I made it happen? You know? The baby? By being so sad and wanting sad things to happen, like you said?”

  “No,” said The Psychiatrist adamant. “What happened to that boy was horrible. It was what it was. And I couldn’t imagine what it must be like for the mother and father of that girl, what they must be thinking. But it’s not mine to imagine. It’s not yours either. It’s their tragedy, not ours. God forbid you should ever have a tragedy of your own but if you do, nothing will ever prepare you for it, not the kind that you’re grieving over, the kind that makes the news. But if you do, the one thing you’ll want is for everyone to get the hell away, to mind their own business, to give you some peace. You won’t want to hear people telling you that they care, that they’re thinking of you, which is not true anyway. They’re not thinking of you, they are thinking about you. And that’s a different thing altogether.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about them, about the girl, not the boy. Everybody is thinking about the boy and the poor boy this and the poor boy that. I don’t think she meant to do what she did. But everyone says she should be given the needle, that she’s satanic and evil, and that they would do the same to her if they were her mum or dad. But she’s just a girl. A baby can’t be mean like that, not like a person, can they?”

  “Don’t listen to them Linda. Opinion is the flatulence of communication. You need a healthy balance of news, both good and bad, just like you need a healthy balance of food for your stomach. The problem is that the food for our minds, for our souls, its intangible” The Psychiatrist said, taking control of the conversation. “We cannot see or touch it. We can’t unwrap it and see if it’s still good or if it’s spoiled. This makes it harder for us, I guess, to really see the danger in what we are watching, what were are listening to and most importantly, what we are reading.”

  “Like the news,” said, Linda.

  “Sure. But not just the news. There’s movies too, music, the people at work and at your building and on the street. Most of the time, they can be more affecting than what you read in a book or in the newspaper or watch on the television. Trick is, to know when enough is enough and in your case, to know how to tune out or turn away.”

  “But I can’t stop watching the news,” said Linda drastically.

  “Why? Who is stopping you?”

  “You have to watch the news. You have to know what’s happening in the world.”

  “Why? What good does it serve you? How does knowing about shelling in Gaza make your job any better? How does it make the work you do any more proficient or consistent?”

  “It’s important to know.”

  “Why? One reason.”

  “It is, is all. You have to know, to be aware of all the bad things happening in the world. You can’t just close your eyes to it and be ignorant. It’s important to know, it just is.”

  “What’s the first thing you do when you get up every morning?”

  “Now or before?”

  “Before,” said The Psychiatrist.

  “Have my coffee and watch the news.”

  She talked about the news as if she were talking about feeding Bill Clinton, something so ridiculously obvious that if she abandoned it, like The Psychiatrist was suggesting, she would be cruel and inhumane that, for whatever stupid reason it was that The Psychiatrist wanted to hear, it was important to watch the news, it was important to know about the shelling in Gaza and it was important to tell other people about it too.

  “How do you feel when you first wake up, before your coffee?”

  Linda rolled her eyes.

  “Tired,” she said as if The Psychiatrist had asked her to point which way she thought was up and then which way she thought was the opposite of that.

  “Ok,” said The Psychiatrist. “Good. Well, when you have your first sip of coffee how do you feel?”

  “Better,” said Linda. “Less tired.”

  “Do you feel sad?

  “What do you mean?”

  “As sad as you do now. Do you feel that sad after your first sip of coffee?”

  “No. I told you. I feel good. I feel less tired. Stupid question” she said, getting short tempered and thinking that The Psychiatrist was pretty and smart and had a soft voice and all, but if she kept asking donkey questions like that then she wouldn’t want to be her friend, not all the time anyway.

  “How about after watching the news, how do you feel? Do you feel happy, excited? Do you feel like dancing?”

  “Don’t be stupid?” said Linda.

  “Well then, how do you feel?”

  “I feel sad,” she said.

  “For how long?” asked The Psychiatrist.

  “I don’t know,” said Linda. “Maybe for a bit, maybe all day.”

  “How does that help you work? How does that help you live?”

  “I don’t know ok? I didn’t make the news. It’s important is all.”

  “How can that be important, to feel like that all day long?”

  “I don’t know” Linda shouted.

  “Wouldn’t you prefer to feel good? To feel excited? To feel love? To feel happiness?”

  Linda began to fidget, scratching at her wrist as if there were a prize to claim underneath.

  “Did you do the activity?” asked The Psychiatrist.

  “Yes,” Linda said, reaching into her bag and pulling out the newspaper.

  “So how many good stories did you find in the end?”

  Linda laid the newspaper down on the table. The front page was blacked out entirely. Then she turned page by page, licking her finger slowly, enough so that it gripped the paper, but not too much so that it left a disgusting finger mark. Page after page, there were no words, only thick black marker, drawn over the headlines and the text and the expressions of the people in all of the photos.

  “How many did you find? How many good stories?”

  Page after page, Linda looked for words that were not drawn over. Page after page she looked, but she could not find one. She looked to The Psychiatrist as if she had just caught herself frowning.

  “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” said The Psychiatrist.

 
“How can it mean nothing? It has to mean something. You made me do it. There has to be a reason. There has to be.”

  “What do you feel looking at that paper now?”

  “Nothing,” she said, staring at the black lines.

  “What did you hope you would feel?”

  “I don’t know,” Linda said. “Happy?”

  “To nothing everything returns. The opposite of sadness is not happiness. If emotion is a number line, imagine that every emotion, be it happiness, sadness, frustration, confusion – they are singularities and the opposite of one is not the other. The opposite of each is nothing or the void. For if each point is one, regardless of how happy or how sad, just like a light bulb cannot be more on than on and can be no more off than off, the opposite of each point, each singularity is zero. The opposite then of feeling sad is feeling nothing, the opposite of up is not down, it too is nothing. And the opposite of life is not death, it is nothing. And the opposite of god is not the Devil, it is nothing. From nothing, comes everything. In a flash. In an instant. Then, when you feel nothing, you can inspire yourself to feel something new, to feel happy maybe, feel anxious, if that’s a feeling that you enjoy” said The Psychiatrist.

  Linda looked at the newspaper and for the first time, it felt no heavier than a mere bundle of papers. It felt no more important too than the folded cardboard from the backs of prescription pads that she discarded without a worrying or clamant thought. And looking at the crumpled newspaper, with its words and pictures all blacked out, Linda felt no more spooked than she would, watching a scary movie with the sound turned off.

  “Think of something you love,” said The Psychiatrist.

  “I don’t know,” Linda said. “I can’t think of anything.”

  “Anything at all. It could be a particular flower, maybe your favorite smell; it could even be something you see, on your way to work. Whatever it is, it’s something that even after you explain it, no one, not even I will be able to understand it and to feel as you do. What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I like. Don’t ask me such a hard question.”

  “But why do you think it’s a hard question?”

  “I don’t know. It just is. I don’t know what I like. I can’t think right. I don’t like these types of questions. They’re stupid, donkey questions. I don’t like it when people ask me about what I like. I don’t know what I like. I just like it, ok?”

  “Relax Linda, it’s ok. There’s nothing wrong. I’m just trying to make a point. Most of us, if not all of us, we learned through opposites.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, when you were a baby, your mum and dad didn’t celebrate all the good and sometimes inane things that you did and touched. They celebrated the successes yes, but they didn’t celebrate every good thing. It would require too much of their time. Instead, they educated you with every wrong thing that you did. So every time you got near a curb or a power point or pulled on the iron cable, your mum and dad shouted ‘No’, screaming and shouting with the emotional veracity of the last few seconds of a plane crash, and they defined a new limit for you, or what we call, setting limits. A great way to educate no doubt, but you, I, all of us, we learned only by hearing the word no. Pretty soon, we were cautious about everything, looking at our mums and dads and waiting for that ‘no’ to come and if it didn’t, we would move on to something else, ignoring whatever it was that didn’t catch the attention of the only people in the universe that mattered to us. Pretty soon, we knew everything that got mum and dads attention and either we appreciated the smack on the bum and the tisking and shaking finger as some form of affection or we, by that stage, were so scared of being punished or being put in time out that we decided that we thought best to just sit quietly with our hands in our laps and wait out our scholarly sentence. Instead of showing us what we could do, our mothers and fathers pointed out only what we could not. Negative learning. Makes sense then that as we get older, we carry around this invisible bag of negativity and in it, we keep all of the things we hate and all of the places we never want to go to and all of the food we never want to try. And we remember all of the places in the world that have war and suffering, but we can’t think of one that might make us happy.”

  “Mickey,” Linda said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “And I like Goofy too. And Minnie, but she is always going the other way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I love Mickey Mouse. And I love Goofy. But I don’t like the cat because it wants to eat Mickey and then he doesn’t ever stay.”

  “I’ve never seen the cartoon,” said The Psychiatrist. “My daughter loves them, though, all of them. I’ll have to ask her what the cat’s name is. So you like Mickey Mouse?”

  Linda smiled.

  “What about Disney Land? Have you been?”

  “I like Disney Land,” said Linda. “There it’s safe and fun. But there are so many people and the lines are very long.”

  “It’s worth it, though. I went with my daughter. It’s like escaping into a dream.”

  Linda smiled once more.

  “So let’s get back to your homework. How long was the longest that you went without news? And I mean not just the television, but talking to patients at work and other tenants in your building.”

  “I don’t much like the other people in the building. They’re all donkeys. And they only talk about celebrities and stupid soap operas and the poor family who live across from me.”

  “They must be curious because you live there. Do they ask you questions?”

  “No,” Linda said, disappointed. “There are other people who say they know what happened and everybody talks to them, but I know that the family is nice people and that the little girl, she isn’t like what everybody says she is.”

  “What do they say?” asked The Psychiatrist, intrigued.

  “That she’s like a devil or something. That she was possessed to do what she did.”

  “What do you think? Is she a devil?”

  Linda looked at The Psychiatrist like a child, being encouraged to push the very red button they’d been warned to steer clear of. But she trusted her.

  “Can we talk about something else?” Linda asked.

  “Go one. I think you’re making progress. This is just… We’re expulsing. It’s a technique. Go on” she said, looking as if she had an itch behind her right eye.

  “I don’t want to talk about that. Isn’t that why I’m here? Can we talk about Graham?”

  “Graham is the least of your problems. I think we should focus here, on the family.”

  “No, I don’t want to think like that. I don’t want to feel that kind of sad. You said I have to black out the newspaper.”

  “But the story is in you. The sadness is in you” she said, licking her lips. “We need to black you out like we did the newspaper. Draw out your sadness, like a snake’s venom. What was her name, the girl?”

  “You know her name. Everyone does.”

  “But I haven’t heard you say it,” she said. “Say it. Say her name.”

  “No,” said Linda.

  “Say her goddamn name” shouted The Psychiatrist.

  “Korine,” said Linda, still and frightened. “Her name is Korine.”

  The Psychiatrist expelled a pent breath as if she had been holding onto it through a dire event and she breathed heavily as if she knew at any second, she would be thrust back into whatever wave of torrid emotion she had found herself washed up from. She gripped the pages in front of her, inhaling profoundly as if she were caught in the still wake of an exhaustive contraction.

  “What happened to the boy? What did she do? What did Korine do?”

  “No,” said Linda. “You said. No. It’s not your tragedy. It’s not my tragedy. No, it’s not fair. I don’t want to.”

  “Tell me, Linda. I want to hear it from you. You lived across from them. You know them. Nobody can tell this story like you can. What happene
d? How did he die?”

  The Psychiatrist’s face was now strained as if she were struggling to unscrew a stubborn lid.

  “I want to talk about Graham, please. Or Bill Clinton. I met a man too and I like him, his name is Roger, and I like him, even though he speaks kind of poor and he’s not rich, not like Graham and even though he eats like a pig, he’s nice, I think I like him, but I don’t know what to do next and….”

  “Korine,” said The Psychiatrist as if she were answering a question.

  “No,” Linda said. “Please, can we talk about something else?”

  “Sure” said The Psychiatrist, her face now halcyon like, looking at Linda clemently, a stark contrast to her nervous desire to know more as under the table, the long sharpened nail of her index finger continued, as it had the entire of the meeting, to scratch away at the little cuts on the inside of her leg, cuts that had never the proper time to heal.

  Her legs quivered as if the hands of her lover were tickling the back of her neck and his warm breath, gently blowing from the cusp of her skeletal ankles, up along her curved and shivering legs and between her naked thighs. “We can talk about anything you want,” she said, her breath pressed now as if she had just paused from a sprint.

  “My time is up. I want to go. You can have the change, it’s ok. I want to go” Linda said.

  “Tell me,” said The Psychiatrist, digging her nail into the cut on her leg as if it were her lover, pressing hard between her legs. “Say something, anything. Did you hear it? When it happened?” she asked, her voice, careening out of control and into a trembling whimper.

  “Thank you for help but I won’t be coming back. I’m better now, thank you.”

  “Tell me you fat fucking retard” shouted The Psychiatrist, her face looking pained and obtuse as her long sharpened nail dug deeper into the cut on her leg and her heavy breathing and her trembling whimper turned to shrilled moaning, much like the sound from her neighbor’s apartment. “Tell me what you know” she screamed. “I won’t open this door until you do. Fucking tell me. Anything? What kind of car do they drive? How often do they order pizza? What’s their favorite television show? You know this. Don’t you fucking keep it to yourself you stupid fucking bitch.”

  “Please let me out” Linda shouted. “Let me out!”

  “Tell me something about the girl first, and I’ll let you go,” said The Psychiatrist, heaving, and moaning as she scratched and picked at the inside of her leg.

  “No,” Linda said. “I don’t want to have to feel sad anymore. I just want to get better. Please, let me go.”

  “You’ll never get better,” said The Psychiatrist, lowering her skirt.

  “None of us ever will.”