For a long time, I sat there motionless, cut open, waiting.
When I heard the footsteps in that complete darkness, I thought at first they were coming from the hallway. It seemed impossible that my session could be over. Not just impossible but intolerable. There had to be more than this. But then I understood that the steps were within the room, and that they were getting closer. From the same direction from which they were coming, I now heard a voice, a whisper. The word being repeated was too soft to make out at first but soon became clear. “Derrick? Derrick?” the voice asked. My name whispered and then spoken aloud over and over again, as the footsteps approached, and louder still as they came right up to the chair I was now gripping, and I realized, in that uncanny way you do when you hear a recording of it, that it was my voice, my own adult voice, asking, demanding, “Derrick? Derrick? Derrick?” until the sound of myself was almost deafening, and I could feel my gut clenching, that old, original pain coming back redoubled now, and spreading quickly, all my muscles beginning to contract, my head tightening and throbbing. And then a final shout, a howl directly into my ear—“Derrick!”
The silence that followed was different. The darkness was the same, the sense of floating, detached. But unlike the silences before it, and unlike, I now realized, my whole state of being since first coming to see Dr. Lang, there remained no anticipation. A vision of your life, that’s what she had said. And that’s what I had been given.
The gratitude I had seen in that man’s eyes, the one who’d sat in this same chair, it had been for this—for the truth.
The lights came on slowly, the end of the show. Exit at the door to the rear, the assistant had said. I lifted my leaden body from the chair and made my way to it.
When I pushed it open, I found myself in a large white hangar of a room. Dr. Lang stood opposite me some ten yards away. She had her glasses on and was holding a clipboard. A metal chair, affixed to the floor, stood between us.
“Hello, Derrick,” she said, looking up from her chart. “I want you to keep your eyes on mine. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now I want you to walk to the chair and sit in it.”
I was wrung out. More exhausted, it seemed, than I had ever been. Too tired in body and spirit to expect anything of her now. I made my way to the chair and sat.
“It will be hard to keep your eyes fixed on me, but I want you to try.” She raised her hand in a signal, and a barnlike door behind her slid open, pushed by the assistant. Beyond it was some sort of warehouse space. And in it a cargo container. “I’m right here,” Dr. Lang said. “Look at me.”
In the periphery of my vision, I thought I could make out something on the floor beside the container.
“You’ve been very brave, Derrick,” she said. “I spare some patients this, but I wanted you to know because I think you’re strong enough to understand . . . You can look away from me now. You can look at where your eyes want to go.”
There on the ground lay the body of the Japanese woman, a look of profound awe rigid across her face, and beside her my friend, his head leaning to one side, his wound still slick with blood.
“Some people sense it from the beginning,” Dr. Lang said. “For others, the desire remains unconscious.”
The guard, that elegant man who had first greeted me, appeared now, and I watched as he took my friend’s ankles in his hands and dragged his lifeless body into the cargo container. He returned to the body of the Japanese woman and did the same.
Dr. Lang didn’t turn to look at the scene behind her. In fact, she didn’t move at all, she just kept staring at me with those same generous, inquisitive eyes.
“You,” she said, “I think you have known it somewhere in you all along. The nature of this great work of ours. To give people their lives, to let them see what they have been, and to release them from it.”
The guard walked past Dr. Lang and came up to stand beside me as the assistant looked on. He unholstered his pistol and held the tip of it to my head.
“Thank you,” I called out. “Thank you.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2010 Brigitte Lacombe
Adam Haslett is a New York Times bestselling author, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and winner of the 2006 PEN/Malamud Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.
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