Yok

by Tim Davys

  “I don’t know,” Seinstein answered. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, this motivation we’ve been talking about, isn’t that where it comes from presumably? The unwillingness to accept life’s cursed meaninglessness? I mean, something makes me get up in the morning, right? Something has always made me want more. More of everything.”

  “That sounds basically healthy.” Seinstein smiled.

  “So I thought that if it is even more intense with Maria, if I did things with Dingo that normal stuffed animals wouldn’t even dream of, then I would feel something. And the experience would be so extreme that I couldn’t dismiss it?”

  “And Rosenlind?”

  “Rosenlind’s the same thing. That’s as far as you get. And I guess I thought that if I made it all the way to him and his circle then . . . I could raise myself above all the everyday stuff.”

  “And did you?”

  “To start with, absolutely. It was amazing. Hanging out with all those self-confident stuffed animals who were swimming in money.”

  “And then?”

  “I don’t know. When the kick of being counted one of Lion Rosenlind’s friends . . . where only the cream of the crop in the city are counted . . . when the kick subsided, because it did . . . then it was more a feeling of winning.”

  “Winning?”

  “Over everyone who wanted to take life seriously. If Rosenlind and I were buddies, without my having accomplished a thing, it was like the evidence that I had chosen the fastest way.”

  “The fastest way to what?”

  “To the goal. Everything is a race. Life is a race.”

  “Do you think so?”

  Vincent was silent a few moments. “I should answer no. But here I sit with you hour in and hour out, trying to understand myself better. You may wonder why, if life isn’t a race.”

  Dr. Seinstein made a note on her pad.

  “That was fine, Vincent,” she said, looking up.

  With that, the session was over for the day.

  After the sessions with Dr. Seinstein, Vincent was often exhausted from suppressed confusion, anger, or despair, but because the rules required it, he forced down a little food before he rang for the nurse and asked to be rolled down to the sea.

  Panda Seinstein’s Comments 1

  No, I can’t say anything about that. No, I have never had reason to compare my patients with one another, and the thought is not an attractive one.

  What would set them apart? Everything sets them apart. Everyone is unique. It would be unprofessional to have any other attitude. Each and every one has his oddities, and you will never get me to comment on different degrees of difficulty. It’s a matter of experience. It’s a matter of chemistry. The relationship between therapist and patient must take time to develop and find its contours. Individuals with deep wounds in their souls take longer time. Vincent Hare was, as you know, such an individual.

  To start with? He lied. I don’t think I’ve encountered a patient who lied the same way as Vincent Hare. Not just to me; he hardly noticed it himself. No, not in that way. It was impossible to expose him. He was a master of omission. When he retold episodes and memories, he avoided the decisive emotions, he avoided telling about viewpoints and afterthoughts, and so every story became distorted and open to interpretation. True stories were no longer true. I admit that it fascinated me. Never to be caught in a lie, even though he never gave me the truth.

  Distinctive? The fear. At least the first year. He was scared to death. You don’t need a degree or therapeutic experience to realize it was his father who damaged him and put that terror in him. Vincent knew that. What he possibly did not realize, and what we worked on together a great deal, was the extent of the damage, and how it influenced him in ways large and small.

  What was out of the ordinary was the combination of indifference—you seldom meet stuffed animals who are so little concerned with the appreciation of others—and social competency. When he wanted to, he could charm anyone. Without needing to on a deeper level. That’s very special.

  Toward the end of the second year Vincent could use his legs to the extent that he no longer needed help in the room. Between the bed, the chair, and the toilet he walked by himself, clumsily and with crutches, but now he knew his legs worked. He still preferred to sit in front of his open window at night and stare out at the sea, which he could not see, but heard. Sorrow and despair might attack, as they did all the time, but he fought back with the tools Dr. Seinstein had given him. More and more often it happened, however, that Vincent sank into repose with thoughts that left him restless, and there were nights when the hours until dawn passed as if time were only a friendly blink of an eye.

  During the day he sought the calm at the shore. After lunch the nurses pushed the wheelchair across the grass and over toward the rocks. He asked them to place him hidden in the shadow of a small pine from where he could observe the other patients undisturbed as in twos or more they walked by the sea in the afternoon. Vincent did not long to keep them company. In the wheelchair, often with a patterned blanket on his lap so that he did not have to see the uneven shade of his legs, he felt old and used up. It was not a wholly unpleasant sensation.

  Not long after he came to Lakestead, Vincent had noticed a bear who often walked by himself. There was something sympathetic about the bear’s slightly slouched figure. His clothes were old and worn, his gaze amiably absent, but he did not seem to seek solitude in the same way as Vincent; it was more that solitude had found the bear.

  One day, after more than two years at Lakestead House in a self-imposed isolation that was starting to bore him (even if he did not admit it), Vincent asked his nurse who the bear was. He got the answer that this was one of the “lifers,” in other words, one of the patients who would not leave the institution until the Chauffeurs came and fetched him. Vincent experienced this as good news. If the bear would never leave Lakestead, he was safe to talk with. (Later in the evening Vincent realized that very thought meant that for the first time he was thinking about his own time at the institution as limited.)

  The next day he gave the nurse, who at lunchtime was rolling him as usual across the lawn, instructions to wait, and when the bear came walking they intercepted him on the way toward the shore.

  “Excuse me,” Vincent called out. “Excuse me, my . . . my name is Vincent Hare. We don’t know each other. But I’ve been thinking about something, and I’d like to ask your advice.”

  “Yes?”

  The bear had stopped, and observed the hare in a friendly way.

  “I have a question about patterns,” said Vincent.

  If this surprised the bear, he did not show it. He extended his paw.

  “Teddy,” he introduced himself. “Patterns?”

  Vincent thought a moment, and for once he was careful as he chose his words.

  “I’ve been thinking a bit about patterns, and repetitions. I’ve been wondering a little about the lives of stuffed animals, and if we ever, collectively, have a chance of taking ourselves out of these patterns.”

  “Oh boy,” said the bear.

  “We would like to appreciate all this,” said Vincent, indicating the lawn and the sea beyond the shore with his paw.

  “Hmm,” said the bear.

  “If the nurse pushes me over there to the pine tree,” said Vincent, pointing, “will you come join me? And talk a little? Or perhaps just listen a little?”

  “Sure, I can do that.” Teddy nodded good-naturedly, and the little troop crossed the lawn toward the tree.

  In this way a conversation and a friendship began which, during Vincent’s third year at Lakestead House, would grow each day. It turned out that Teddy Bear lived in the room above Vincent’s, in a corridor where eleven primitive paintings with maritime motifs were hanging. Already the first day, when Teddy Bear found a knotty root to lean aga
inst and sat on a couple of stones in a makeshift chair, he dismissed Vincent’s suicidal fantasies as foolishness.

  “Escaping from life through death is like resisting the temptation to scratch yourself on the back by cutting off your paw,” said Teddy Bear seriously. “I don’t want to maintain that the thought has never attracted me. Because it has. Especially after a good day, when you sense it can only get worse. But running away can’t be the idea, can it? Isn’t that too easy?”

  The Breeze brought with it the dampness and salt of the sea, which matted the bear’s fur. Patients from the building walked meditatively along the shore, and far to the south they glimpsed the piers—Hillevie’s large marina—like dark stripes out into the sea.

  “This is what I think,” said Vincent. “Year after year I repeat myself. And I don’t notice it, at least not until much later. It’s a kind of substance abuse behavior. I find something: a stuffed animal, an interest; and then I push it too far. It starts well, healthy and considered, but soon I’m manic, exaggerated, and it always ends the same way: with a crash landing. Burned bridges. I use things up, but I don’t develop anything.”

  “Hmm,” said Bear.

  The nurse who was standing behind Vincent’s wheelchair stared out over the sea and did not hear a word of the conversation between the hare and Bear. It had been a long time since she was interested in the conversations of lunatics.

  “But then I realized,” Vincent continued, “that it wasn’t just me. That it applies to all of us. We don’t develop. We go in circles. We repeat ourselves endlessly. We are delivered, we grow up, we love, we grieve, and when it’s time for the Chauffeurs to pick us up, we are not the least bit wiser than when we arrived. We haven’t managed to teach our cubs anything. We get richer. More comfortable. More modern. But spiritually we circle around the same futility we always have.”

  “Hmm,” said Bear.

  “And that is what I wanted to ask you,” said Vincent. “It seems like we are all assigned our specific fate. As a species, we have been stuck in our own limitations for decades and centuries. But even personally I’m stuck. I have to be manic in my relationships. From the time I was delivered, my fate was staked out. Every time I think I’ve torn myself loose, every time I think I’m doing something new and different, I realize over time that in reality I only managed to fool myself. But I’m not fooling my fate. And it’s obvious that in the end it’s hopeless. Everything becomes meaningless. Whatever I do, I don’t control my predestined role. Is that the way it is, Teddy? Does it have to be that way? But as a stuffed animal, don’t you have to try to make yourself free?”

  Bear nodded. It was easy for him to understand what Vincent was talking about.

  “Do you have to?” asked Bear.

  “Yes, but how?” asked Vincent. “And will it work?”

  The dinner bell rang. They both looked up at the sky, and realized that the Breeze had died down without them noticing it.

  When the nurse rolled Vincent back across the lawn, he could smell smoke. But Bear said something about someone burning leaves at the back side of the building, and then Vincent smiled involuntarily. That smell was no longer coming from him.

  “Personally I fought against evil,” Bear explained as they returned to the house. “And of course there are many who do. But I have devoted my life out here to fighting for goodness, too, and no one else does that. I’m not talking about religion, but about goodness. They are different. But don’t worry; I’m not the missionary type. I mean, you can do as you wish, Vincent. I have a hard enough time keeping myself in line.”

  Vincent laughed, and adjusted the blanket on his lap.

  “Perhaps I could have dinner in the dining room today?” he said, mostly to himself.

  “Do that,” said Bear. “It would be nice to have someone to sit with.”

  Vincent Hare did not want to admit the doctors were right—it had become a matter of principle—but the counseling, physical therapy, and medication showed results shortly after Vincent met Bear. True, his legs had gradually gotten steadier and Vincent’s ability to use them had increased, but it was at the start of the third year that his physical recovery picked up speed. On some subconscious level Vincent realized at last that the foreign limbs were actually his own.

  Every other hour with Seinstein was exchanged for an extra hour with the physical therapist, a meddlesome heifer for whom Vincent had little use. He did not doubt her professional competency, but as a stuffed animal she was not much, he thought.

  The discussions with Teddy Bear deepened with time. Vincent had consciously avoided telling Seinstein about the sand of life that he started hearing again at night as it ran through the narrow waist of the hourglass. Lakestead House existed beyond time and space; that was the feeling the institution doctors consciously tried to convey to the patients, and they were successful. For that reason Vincent panicked when the sound of the sand returned, as a reminder of the life he had lived and must continue to live, and for the longest time he refused to admit even to himself that it had happened. When he was finally forced to tell someone, he chose Bear instead of Seinstein: he needed sympathy, not analysis.

  Bear proved in many ways to be a wise, thoughtful stuffed animal. His trains of thought were long, logical, and consistent, he possessed self-insight and education, and Vincent wondered why the bear had chosen to live at Lakestead House. Sometimes his twin brother came to see him, and then they gladly talked about their mother, Rhinoceros Edda, who had made a brilliant political career.

  “That would suit you,” said Vincent. “A life in politics!”

  His brother, Eric Bear, agreed politely, but Teddy did not want to talk about it. Fantasizing about a life outside Lakestead House only made him feel anxious.

  When they got to know each other even better, Vincent experienced nights when he realized how impossible the thought of an existence outside Lakestead was for Bear. Bear essentially suffered from the same lack of moderation as Vincent. He was obsessed by his theories and thoughts about evil and good, which in turn led to a long series of idées fixes that made a normal life impossible.

  Teddy Bear read in the afternoons: thick tomes, accessible popular science, and a bit of poetry. Vincent Hare would stumble his way up the stairs right after the rain (something his physical therapist warmly recommended even if Vincent used canes) and knock on Bear’s door about the time he was done and ready to tell about what he had read.

  Poetry made him melancholy.

  “Love,” said Bear, one afternoon almost a year after they had met for the first time down on the lawn, “is a feeling so strong I hardly dare think about it.”

  “Do you miss Emma?” Vincent asked kindly.

  Emma Rabbit was the love of Bear’s life. She had betrayed the bear in some way Vincent did not understand. He had forgiven her, but even so she did not return.

  “I miss her. Even though she’s here,” he said, pointing to his chest. “And here.” He pointed to his head. He sighed deeply, and then looked worriedly at his friend.

  “And you, Vincent, do you miss anyone? Because I think you do.”

  To that point during his three years at Lakestead House Vincent had refrained from mentioning Maria Goat by name. Now he said, “I miss someone, too.”

  The moment he admitted this, he experienced how the loss overwhelmed him. Outside the afternoon was getting late, the blue of the sky deepened, and the Breeze died down.

  “I miss someone,” he repeated. “More than I dare think about.”

  “Tell me about her,” Bear suggested. “It sounds like you’d like to.”

  The bear’s plainness was disarming.

  “Sure,” said Vincent. “If I only knew how.”

  But he didn’t.

  Even though three years had passed since he last saw Maria, he thought about her every day. It was easy to bring up mental images, sharp and
colorful: Maria on a park bench under a willow tree, or Maria raising a glass of red wine in the glow of a candle. Vincent had hundreds of images in storage, but he could never keep them alive for more than a few seconds. Then he was overwhelmed with pain. He could not put it into words. It was loss, it was regret, and anger, of course. He wanted to forget; that had been his strategy, refusing to mention her name and letting the images die away, but it was impossible. All the hours with Seinstein were suddenly of no use, all the intellectual bullshit stood out as empty and threadbare.

  “If it hurts, then say so,” Bear suggested.

  He was now brooding over what he would have done differently, but he knew that nothing could have been different. There was sorrow in that. He could not imagine anything more tragic than starting over with Maria, because he was certain that everything would be exactly the same again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Shortly thereafter the dinner bell rang, but the bear and the hare stayed in the room. The hare did not notice his tears running, but the pain in his chest made him unable to stand up.

  Can you tell me about your mom?” Dr. Seinstein asked, unconsciously rocking her paw so that Vincent was certain the slipper would fall off.

  But the slipper did not fall off; it never did. Outside, the treetops hid the sun that otherwise would have been shining in their eyes. The doctor had set the pad and pen on the table. It was a way of getting ready, he had learned.

  “About Mom?”

  “You seldom talk about your parents, Vincent. Yet when you do, I get the sense that your mom was close to you, right?”

  Vincent shrugged his shoulders. That was confirmation.

  “And your dad?”

  “He never really knew I existed,” answered Vincent. “Being a parent wasn’t his thing.”

  “What was his thing?”

  “Don’t know. I really don’t know what he did. I think he drove a taxi for a while. Worked in construction a few years. But I don’t know. He didn’t see me. He never talked with me.”