Yok

by Tim Davys

  The amputation occurred at the Lucretzia hospital in Tourquai. Vincent Hare was lucky. Thanks to the short distance from the park to the hospital, the legs could be amputated before the smoke damage to his stuffing was judged to be serious. He was assigned to a single room (Bombardelli quietly saw to it that Hare received the best imaginable care, which it took months for the hare to realize), and it was anxiety, not physical pains, that called for heavy medication well into the third week. The faint odor of smoke that lingered in his cotton was apparent every time he moved, so he tried to move as little as possible. With the pills he slept dreamlessly.

  Hare knew a little about how long the lines for spare parts were in Mollisan Town after having worked for Jack Dingo, so it was a surprise when the doctors reported that there was a pair of new legs for him after just six weeks. These were not even used limbs; a completely new pair had been sewn up. This was very unusual and required numerous dispensations and stamps, something only granted to noted athletes or stuffed animals with great power. Hare would long believe it was Lion Rosenlind who paid for the new legs, but it was Bombardelli who was behind this, too.

  Hare ought to have been relieved and happy to hear about his new legs, but he felt nothing at all, not even indifference.

  The operation was performed early one morning in May. For ninety-five minutes the patient was on the operating table, and afterward the operating team agreed that the intervention had been successful. The seams were discreet and the shade of the fabric only slightly darker than the original body. In leg reconstructions there was always the risk that the stuffing in the groin was too soft, but on the fifth day—considered the most critical—the doctors’ opinion was that the firmness was good and did not require risky supplementation. Hare was discharged after another week of observation, and referred to the rehabilitation center in Yok to which patients went during the day while they lived at home.

  But Hare did not show up at the rehabilitation center. The day after doctors discharged him from the hospital he should have signed in, but he was not seen on the second or third day either. After two weeks, staff was sent to Hare’s residence to look for him. They found him in bed, drugged and malnourished. He claimed that the new legs would not carry him. Soon it was determined that the problem was not medical. The legs were excellent and the operation had been a success. Hare still maintained he could not walk. A few days later he was sent to Lakestead House. Hare did not ask who was paying the bill now either.

  Upon arrival at the turn-of-the-century Victorian mansion by the coast, where thirty-some patients were cared for, new samples were taken and a series of tests conducted. It was found that a combination of physical stagnation and mental deconstruction was behind Hare’s condition. He was placed in a wheelchair, given antidepressant pills, and started on therapy. They had considerable experience with patients like Hare, and knew that the symptoms of psychosomatic illness were no different from any others.

  During his first year at Lakestead House, Vincent exhibited listlessness both provocative and stubborn. It was explained to him that it was important to interact with other patients as soon as possible. When a patient was taken into Lakestead House, he or she was typically stuck in thought patterns that were hard to get out of on one’s own. Along with the on-site doctors, therapists, and nurses, the other patients were decisive for recovery. Vincent showed no signs, however, of socializing. The energy that had been Vincent’s fundamental characteristic before the fire had disappeared.

  But he would not try again.

  When he woke up at Lucretzia after the operation, that was the first thought he had. He had tried to take his life, but failed. Could you sink lower? At the same time—and this feeling was worse—he regretted it. It would take time before he dared express this bitter truth, and this did not automatically mean he felt any desire to live. But he regretted it, and he would not try again.

  His room at Lakestead was small, on the bottom floor in the east wing. A bed, a white bamboo chair, two small closets for clothes, and between the closets a light blue painting so uninteresting he still couldn’t say what it depicted after several months. Next to the chair was a round glass table where you could set newspapers and books from the house’s beautiful library. But Vincent did not borrow any books. The only thing he liked about the room was the view of the sea.

  The patients took their meals in the dining room in the main building, but for several months Vincent managed to avoid the fellowship by pointing to his limp legs and requesting food in his room. It was explained to him that mealtime was not just about eating. Still he resisted. He had always been comfortable with solitude; now it was imperative.

  The therapy sessions began the same week Vincent was admitted to Lakestead, but it took time before he felt comfortable with them. Lifelong brooding had accustomed him to self-examination, but sharing this with someone else? That was a much different endeavor.

  Every day right before lunch he was rolled into Dr. Seinstein’s office. She was a panda in a white coat who sat at a very small desk where there was a notepad and pen and nothing else. She set one leg over the other and asked him in an annoyingly ingratiating way to get settled.

  Vincent gloomily observed the narrow, oblong room. On the far wall was a window that looked out over the forest north of the house. On the wall to the left hung an impressionist painting above a worn divan on which there was a gray sheepskin. There was a faint odor of disinfectant. The nurse, still holding Vincent’s wheelchair, pushed him symbolically a few more inches into the room so that the wheels were firmly on a striped rag rug, and then left him with the therapist. He heard an ominous click as the door was closed.

  “I see,” said Dr. Seinstein. “So, let’s start with your personal information . . . Your name?”

  “Vincent Hare.”

  “Fine. And, Vincent, you live on Calle de Serrano?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Fine. And what kind of work do you do?”

  “I work at an architectural firm. Or . . . I assume I’m on sick leave right now . . .”

  “Fine,” said the therapist, her voice was affectedly gentle. “My name is Panda Seinstein, and you and I are going to see each other quite a bit to start with, Vincent.”

  Panda gave Vincent an opportunity to react, but he refrained.

  “So, Vincent, how do you feel about all this? Lakestead House and the wheelchair and . . .”

  She placed her paws in her lap. The idea was that he should finish the sentence. Dr. Seinstein had thick, white eyelashes and she strove for a neutral, cultivated exterior.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I care.”

  The weeks in the hospital after the operation and the time that followed, in the apartment on Calle de Serrano where the telephone soon stopped ringing and his friends knew that he didn’t intend to open the door however much they banged, were veiled in a haze of drugs.

  “I can’t cope right now,” he continued, no longer looking at her. “I don’t have the energy to feel anything. I can’t bear to dwell on what I think about this. I’m here. That wasn’t the idea.”

  “Fine,” said the doctor. “That was a very nice beginning. Here you don’t need to cope, Vincent. We can sit quietly a while, if you want.”

  Vincent sat quietly, certain that was not what he wanted.

  “There’s no point in sitting and dwelling on things,” he said at last.

  “What do you mean by ‘dwelling’?” asked Seinstein.

  The sun barely made it through the dense foliage outside the window, and the room was pleasantly cool.

  “You never get anywhere,” said Vincent. “It’s meaningless. Nothing changes, even though we always think so.”

  Seinstein sat quietly and let Vincent tell her what he had figured out. Developments in technology had exploded, he said, and stuffed animals communicate in a way that had been sc
ience fiction just twenty years ago. Yet nothing had happened. You only had to go to old movies, age-old novels, or even older theater plays and take a look: the same revenge, the same love, same hatred, same happiness, and even the same humor now as hundreds and thousands of years ago. That was depressing.

  “Repetition,” said Vincent. “Everything is just repetition. Art, literature, and music—repetition, endless variations that don’t add to or change anything. The same triads, the same dissonances, same betrayal and love, the differences are insignificant. Everything is already thought and done. It’s damned meaningless.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Seinstein cautiously. “What is meaningless?”

  “Trying to change anything,” said Vincent. “Trying to create anything new. Trying to develop. There’s no point anyway.”

  “And the ‘variations’ that you mentioned?” said Seinstein. “Can’t development and change be small things? I understand you’re an artist, Vincent, that you paint?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Your paintings were unique?”

  “In the sense that I had made them. Otherwise, my paintings were primarily uncompleted. But whatever I decided on: motif, technique, paint, composition, concept, it had already been done. Thousands of times.”

  “And you can’t be happy that even if you used the same colors and techniques, that your expression was still unique to you?”

  “It’s not about paintings, Doctor,” Vincent muttered.

  “What is it about?”

  “It’s about the fact that we stuffed animals are not developing spiritually. The years pass and we come up with amazing, strange things, but we remain just as ridiculous. It shouldn’t be that way. You can devote your life to developing as an individual, but it’s pointless. However many books I read. Or thoughts I have. Or hours I spend in therapy.”

  Hare fell silent, and remained sitting in silence a few minutes.

  “It would be interesting,” Dr. Seinstein continued, “to hear you tell a little about yourself, Vincent. About your cubdom. Did you grow up in Mindie?”

  But Vincent had no experience of talking about his life in concrete terms, and what remained of the hour passed extremely slowly. The forest had always frightened him, and the crowns of the trees outside the window were a constant reminder of how far from the city they were.

  It did not get better during the weeks that followed. Listening to his own voice as the panda dragged the words out of his mouth about Mother and Father and school and the first years of puberty, about unhappiness and happiness, about revolt and love, about all the painful attempts to find an identity to put on top of the lost teenage body, was monotonous and suffocating besides. Sometimes he thought about the gray notebook that was in a drawer at home on Calle de Serrano, and how it would have helped him remember the kind of thing Seinstein was looking for, but what he wanted least of all was to let his younger self remind him of who he had once been.

  Vincent experienced the therapy sessions as a protracted complaint, and this disgraceful grumbling was exactly what Dr. Seinstein was looking for. If he tried to find distance, if he tried to see it from an adult perspective, he was corrected. It was the lament she wanted to hear. The hour of therapy in the middle of the day remained a torment, and he did not notice any of the progress Dr. Seinstein maintained they were making. His legs remained unusable.

  Time, however, has a habituating effect that no one can escape, and after rolling into Seinstein’s room every day for twelve months, spending an hour talking about himself, and then rolling back to the waiting lunch, the routine was a part of Vincent’s new life and the therapist’s honey-smooth voice stopped provoking him. She asked follow-up questions as if he were mentally disabled, but at this stage he knew it was about the answer, not the question, and he had to formulate the answers himself.

  At her encouragement Vincent tried to take up painting again. He knew he had talent, but when she asked what had become of his paintings, he could not reply. Maybe the half-finished canvases were still up in the attic at Calle de Serrano, maybe he had thrown them out? Seinstein made sure resources were put at his disposal, but after a few weeks in front of the easel he gave up. He had nothing to communicate.

  Panda Seinstein had worked at Lakestead House for six years when Vincent was admitted to the institution. She also had a practice in Lanceheim but was only there one or two days per week. At Lakestead there was also a sense of collegiality she lacked at her own practice, and the patient base was more challenging than the stressed-out career animals she saw in the city.

  Work was Seinstein’s life. She recorded all her sessions, and could spend whole nights going through transcripts from patient conversations without feeling tired. She lived alone and had given up on finding a partner. She had degrees in psychology as well as literature and philosophy, but she never referred to her extensive education, because most often it frightened the patients.

  She had not made the consultation rooms at either Lakestead or Lanceheim warm and cozy. There were therapists who believed in wall-to-wall carpeting, curtain arrangements, and the aroma of fresh-baked rolls. Seinstein was their opposite, preferring bare but functional furnishings.

  “You often talk about Lion Rosenlind,” she observed one month in Vincent’s second year at Lakestead House, when his therapy sessions had been cut back to every other day. “But I get the impression you don’t know him particularly well. Why do you think he has become such an important reference point in your life?”

  Vincent restrained his irritation.

  “Maybe I wasn’t one of Lion’s closest friends,” Vincent answered defensively, “but I enjoyed his company, and I think he enjoyed mine.”

  From the first day at Lakestead House, Vincent had talked about his life in the past tense. He experienced that he was in a place, mentally as well as physically, that was an end point. He had meant to take his own life, fate wanted something else, but that did not change the conditions. Vincent did not intend to return to what had been.

  “Maybe I wasn’t Lion’s best friend,” he said, “but I didn’t need to schedule a time with his secretary.”

  “Do you think he was more important to you than the other way around?” Seinstein asked in a soft, gentle voice.

  “Yes, but that’s obvious, isn’t it?” said Vincent, irritated. “Lion Rosenlind is one of this city’s most influential . . . one of the richest animals alive. And I was . . . no one special. Of course I wasn’t particularly important to him.”

  “And why was he so important to you? Aren’t such things usually mutual?”

  Vincent waited with his reply. He stared at the painting on the wall, an explosion of colors and forms on which the patient could project anything from wild happiness to deep desperation, and then answered.

  “I was never looking for friendship. I guess I didn’t care whether I was particularly important to Rosenlind. As long as he invited me to his parties and talked to me when we met at the bar.”

  “But you said you did business together? You have hinted that these were important matters?”

  “He used me sometimes,” Vincent replied, shrugging his shoulders, “when none of his regular business contacts dared. On paper I was responsible for a number of different operations. I was on a number of boards that never met. I was just a name on legal documents. I didn’t ask any questions. No one knew who I was. I was perfect, don’t you think?”

  “So he exploited you?”

  “We exploited each other.”

  “You exploited him by going to his parties?”

  “He was a trophy, Seinstein. Don’t you get it? Lion Rosenlind. All I had struggled for—”

  “Struggled? I haven’t had the impression that you struggled. Don’t you always say that exertions aren’t in your line?”

  All staff members at Lakestead House wore similar slippers
. They were plastic and could go in the washing machine, and over time became formless. Doctors and nurses shuffled along through the corridors in these ugly things, but no one wore them as carelessly as Dr. Seinstein. Vincent had often been on the verge of asking her to take them off during their sessions, because it irritated him that they were always about to drop off her paws.

  “Revolting against life is not free,” he observed, raising his eyes. “Society is based on the idea that nothing is free. Toil now so you’ll be rewarded later. Be bored in this life, you’ll have fun in the next one. I guess during part of my life, the idea was to prove that’s not so. That it was a device to keep us in check. If we don’t have anything to believe in, what’s left?”

  Dr. Seinstein hummed in the manner Vincent had learned to loathe; as if she understood something he didn’t understand himself.

  “I thought you had decided that everything was just meaningless?” she said.

  “Then you haven’t been listening,” he exclaimed. “It’s clear as hell that everything is meaningless. But accepting it . . . goes against the grain. My whole life has been based on looking for clues. Isn’t that what knowledge is about? Can anyone really be happy with how absurd this life is? What do you think about waking up every morning your whole miserable life and feeling that nothing means anything? Never feeling anything—not for real, not in your heart, because every miserable emotion is constantly being undermined by how completely idiotic life is?”

  “Do you want to feel?”

  “That’s obvious!” he exclaimed.

  “And how do you act in order to make that happen?”

  He lost the thread.

  “What do you mean?”

  But she did not develop the question. Instead she let it grow inside the hare until there was an answer.

  “I’m taking it too far. Is that what you mean?” he asked. “A few steps too far. To start with I don’t feel anything, no happiness, no satisfaction, and then I think that if I take a few more steps, a few more hours, then maybe it will happen. That applies to work. It applies to relationships. It applies to Lion Rosenlind. Is that what you mean?”