The Shadow Scholar

by Dave Tomar

  I got down on one knee and pulled the ring from my pocket. Before I could finish asking the question, she fell down to her knees and wrapped her arms around me.

  “That wasn’t really an answer,” I said.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  Now that we were planning a wedding, I had to take on more work still. I wrote everything that RP could throw at me.

  I’ve never met RP, but he had a profound impact on my life, just as I, no doubt, had a profound impact on his.

  RP was well on his way to a Ph.D. For the course of at least one full year, he would do nothing but enter his credit card information into our system. He would order dozens of papers, hundreds of pages, thousands of dollars’ worth, and he would request me for each and every assignment. RP would pay my rent for a year.

  Now, to be clear, there is nothing that I gave to RP that he couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. The university system is designed for rich, lazy, and highly ambitious people like RP. RP was a member of America’s academic elite, a pillar of society, a man of letters destined to be handsomely compensated in his profession.

  RP wasn’t stupid. He had a basic handle on the English language. He understood the instructions. He didn’t even seem that distressed. And why should he have? Unless he was pitching hay at sunrise on somebody’s farm, this guy didn’t do a squirt of work all year, and possibly hadn’t his whole life. RP knew how to massage a bad system. By the time he reached this advanced level of his education, he had learned that it was all about two things: the money, which he had, and the grades, which he needed.

  He paid for tuition. He paid for housing. He paid for books. He paid for papers. What was the difference at that point? He knew what he wanted, he did a reasonably decent job of expressing himself, and he rarely ordered anything last minute. It was as though he’d carefully laid out his entire course of study in advance so that it could be completed by somebody else. Then he’d swoop in to take credit without the tiniest objection from his conscience. He’ll make a great boss some day.

  I have no idea what kind of psychologist he’ll make. Maybe not such a great one. He had dependency issues. He was hooked on my papers. His addiction was total, and the consequence of withdrawal would have been utter professional ruin. Goddamn the pusherman.

  From November of one year to October of the next, RP commissioned me two or three times a week. As soon as I finished one assignment, he’d hit me with two more. I completed all of his homework, took all of his take-home exams, and passed all of his classes. I did everything short of laying out his jammies before bed.

  RP would send me assignments like the following:

  Your writing should illustrate knowledge of the concepts through an original personal and/or professional integration of the assigned text material. If vignette application is required, please use the persons and situations within the context of your answers. If you feel that you need to quote the text, this is acceptable, you still must reference the author and indicate the page number. These answers should be 1-2 pages each. 1. What do you think a theorist representing each of the following systems of psychology would say about human nature: Mentalism; Mechanism; Determinism; and Materialism? 2. Define William Wundt’s tridimensional theory of feelings, and what do you see as Wundt’s contribution and legacy to modern Psychology? Give examples… [etc.]

  Piece o cake. I was actually enjoying the hell out of my doctoral courses. I was writing day in, day out about guys whose bits and pieces had been blown off in the war; about mothers with agoraphobia and hoarding disorders; about dudes with massive sexual insecurities stemming from absentee-father issues.

  Maybe that doesn’t exactly sound like a party. But the exercises were truly compelling. Everything was done in vignette form. It was storytelling: looking into the lives of people and trying to explain why they were the way they were. It was a lot more interesting than many of the other things I had to write about (accounting, corporate law, tax policy, call center administration, bureaucracy maintenance, etc.).

  And it was actually provoking a visceral response in me, cracking open doors, casting faint illumination into unexplored corridors. It wasn’t intentional at first. It just started to happen. I learned about the symptoms of panic disorders: the cold sweat, the racing pulse, the inexplicable dread, the mental prediction of some unspeakable thing just about to happen. I learned about how triggers work and how past events and self-fulfilling prophecy can snowball into a fear so great as to be crippling.

  I knew all of these symptoms. They greeted me at the top of a mountain trail, over the edge of a balcony, and even just when I looked up at the dizzying spires while driving across a suspension bridge.

  I have a terrible fear of heights. It hits me right in the stomach. If I get six rungs up a ladder, I feel like I have to drop a deuce. The fear is totally automatic. I can’t do anything to talk myself out of it.

  Scenic overlooks make me nervous, balconies make me anxious, and rooftops make me sweat profusely. A gentle curve on an elevated highway feels like a white-knuckle space adventure; a Ferris wheel, like a torture method being used to break me before interrogation.

  Airplanes are the worst. I hate flying. Nothing could feel less natural to me. To make matters worse, I’m terrible at sleeping. When I was in high school, I could do seventy-two-hour sleepless stretches standing on my head. I’d watch Letterman into Conan into reruns of bad sitcoms from the eighties into weightloss infomercials into Good Morning America. Then I’d go to school cranky and bloodshot. If my own bed treats me so poorly, what chance do I have in the coach section of an airplane?

  I’ll pop a couple of Ambiens and guzzle a few glasses of Scotch at the airport bar, and I swear I’m clearheaded and conscious enough to fly the plane.

  I would kill to sleep through even just takeoff, to doze off for just one hour of that interminable limbo during which my life is at the mercy of so many statistical possibilities, to close my eyes and open them to suddenly find myself advanced thousands of miles across the map.

  But it’s never like that. I experience every second of stricken terror. I feel turbulence like a killer receiving last rites. When the plane dips suddenly, I look around at the blank faces of snoozing businessmen and magazine readers, and I conclude that either I’m irrational or all of these people have made peace with God, themselves, and the great yawning inevitable.

  Not me.

  I grip the armrests, turn up my iPod, and say to myself, Enjoy it, old boy. This could be the last song you’ll ever hear.

  So as I wrote my way through my Ph.D., I began to think of myself as a useful case study. As I did for the imaginary clients in RP’s assignments, I thought of my past in vignette form.

  Bree and I love the outdoors. And for a stretch of about one year, our schedules worked out so that we could go hiking every Monday. Soaking rain, shining sun, swamp-ass hot, or balls cold, we went out every week.

  On a clear spring day, we ascended a five-mile trail to the top of the highest point in Berks County, Pennsylvania. With half a mile to go, we were chugging along, getting on a pretty good sweat. You couldn’t really feel the elevation except in your ears. As we got higher, the wooded trail closed in on us. The dirt path grew narrower until it was just wide enough for us to shuffle our feet one in front of the other, pushing our arms and shoulders through the brush around us.

  And suddenly, a sound I’ve only heard in cartoons. It was right beneath me. I looked down, and there in the brush, maybe three inches from the front of my boot, was a coiled rattlesnake. Its head was raised, flattened, and ready to strike.

  “Oh shit!” I reached back for Bree and started pedaling us in reverse until we were twenty-five feet back down the trail.

  “What the fuck!” Bree shouted.

  “Holy crap. Did you see that? Do you see that?” It was slithering down the path in our general direction, but it was a good distance away now. We stood, frozen, watching it.

  “Oh my god,” I said excitedly. “That
was fucking amazing!”

  “Was?” Bree said frantically. “It’s still right there!”

  “No. It’s all right. He’s all the way up there. It’s fine. That was incredible! That was a close encounter!”

  “Why are you so excited?”

  “Well, no, I mean, look, we’re OK. It was a close call, for sure. But we live to tell about it, right?”

  “Well, it’s still there, so…”

  “We’re at a safe distance now,” I said.

  “I won’t feel safe until we’re back at the car.”

  “Yeah, well… what do you want to do? We’re, like, four and a half miles into a five-mile trail. Do you want to go back?”

  “What!? No! That’s ridiculous. We’re already here.”

  “Well, he’s in our path, so we’d better decide what we’re going to do soon.”

  “Fine,” she said, working her courage back up. “Fine. Let’s walk around the trail.”

  “Agreed.”

  We cut into the woods and walked parallel to the trail, all the while peering over to keep visual contact with the snake. At this point, it seemed he couldn’t have cared less about us. Still, we took paranoid steps, looking down at our feet and back to the trail, until we felt sure we had passed him. We popped back out onto the trail and watched him slither away.

  “Dude!” I exclaimed. “Can we talk about that shit now?”

  “No! Shut up! I feel like we’re surrounded by snakes right now! Just… let’s keep going.”

  We arrived at the peak, a grouping of flat, craggy rocks baking in the sun. Bree skipped up to the edge and started flashing pictures.

  “Not too close!” I begged her.

  Immediately, my excitement over our recent near-death experience was eclipsed by the sheer terror of the completely stable ground and the magnificent vista before us. I sat down on one of the rocks a good ten feet back from the edge and clutched things around me, expecting that at any moment the earth would shake me off like a flea.

  My doctorate in psychology was coming along nicely. I had begun to understand more about myself all the time. The rattlesnake really could have done some damage. And I had respected that enough to get out of its way. But I hadn’t feared it. As I came to understand further from my studies, snakes were simply not one of my triggers.

  They did not possess the encompassing and ultimate quality of heights. They couldn’t pull you tumbling into oblivion, with your life at the mercy of what you knew were coldhearted odds. I lacked the impulse to fear the rattlesnake, in its threatening but minuscule singularity. But gravity, the space between me and the earth, the always likely possibility that I could stumble over my own stupid feet—these were the surrounding and irresistible forces of the universe. I’m confident that the world is a place of random indifference and that I’ve done nothing to persuade it that I shouldn’t be thrown hopelessly into its bosom. It’s a very lonely feeling.

  My course in cognitive psychology touched on the isolation often experienced by victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. As I proceeded with the course, the orders began to come both in greater numbers and at greater lengths. RP would contact me and say,

  Tomar: I understrand you have been are assigned to this project as I requested I have another 4 of 5 of these papers to do over the next four weeks. So as soon as you get in the groove with this one I’ll send more, probably 3–4 days each. Let me know if you have any questions. RP

  The assignments that succeeded such a message would be far-ranging within the field. One assignment would be a nine-page critique of an article concerning pharmaceutical-based mental health plans and panic disorders. RP would fax along the peer-reviewed article.

  Another assignment would require a five-page written response to a DVD on the difficulties experienced by wounded Iraq War veterans attempting to return to normalcy following combat. RP would mail along the DVD.

  Yet another assignment would present me with the hypothetical scenario of a wounded veteran, with a description of his wartime experiences, his prewar mental history, and his current health and family circumstances. In the space of twelve pages, I would be asked to evaluate the subject and present a plan for treatment. Again, my responses in scenarios like this would be at least partially presented in vignette form.

  In some exercises, I would be assigned a hypothetical patient and asked to simulate the dialogue of a first appointment. Often, these dialogic exercises would reveal that the patient’s combination of panic attacks, intensifying paranoia relating to the outside world, and acute stress response patterns was probably related to some repressed or underestimated trauma.

  Because trauma victims will often distance themselves from the fear, pain, or dread related to the original event or series of events, it is common for the victim to begin to experience psychological symptoms after years of failing to confront the trauma. This results in the panic and anxiety disorders that are often at the root of a phobia.

  For this reason, some therapists recommend exposure therapy, in which the subject is required to gradually confront the triggers of his or her panic episodes with professional support and comfort. By confronting one’s fear and simultaneously reversing the conditioned responses that produce the psychological and chemical symptoms of panic, proponents of this treatment mode contend, one should be able to unravel the web woven by trauma.

  Upon learning of this mode of treatment, I resolved that this was the only possible way to make peace with my own inexplicable and intensifying condition. As these things tend to, it was getting worse the more I thought about it. But I had to face it. I had to take flights. I had to go on hikes. Sometimes I had to change the lightbulb ten feet above my front stoop. Life makes no allowances for fear.

  My first attempts at self-directed exposure therapy were not totally successful. I recorded this entry in my amateur psychology journal:

  Our good friend Felix is a gifted photographer and offered to take engagement photos for us. Felix has a great eye for context and scouted out a few gritty South Philly locations for the shoot. We were going for something less Hallmark and more Exile on Main St.

  I’ll skip ahead, through the delightful part of our day, which took place on solid ground, including some cobblestone, which you are bound to find in Philadelphia. After an hour of making sexy to the camera, we followed Felix to the final and most spectacular location. It was actually less than two blocks from our house and had always filled me with curiosity. Nestled snugly between the community hockey rink and a Vietnamese noodle house is an abandoned three-story structure without walls.

  A redbrick building dripping with tar and graffiti, it stands alone in a parking lot, tended to only by crackheads, homeless people, and the guys from the noodle house who heave bags into the adjacent dumpster. Believe me when I tell you that, removed from the experience, the resulting photographs are stunning.

  But if you had been there as we took pictures on the perimeter in preparation for our eventual foray inside, you would have known by looking that I felt a pure dread welling up in my cockles. The plan, to which I had agreed as part of an exposure therapy process about which only I knew, was to pass through the gut of a broken metal door and climb to the top floor.

  As we entered and started climbing, we stepped carefully to avoid the debris, filth, dismounted railings, and dead animals that cluttered the stairway. Each flight was covered in a muck of things I couldn’t possibly describe.

  As we reached the top of the first flight of stairs, I was sickened by the sight of an open portal leading to the second floor. In order to pass from the stairwell onto the second floor, one had to cross over a platform that was about the size of a TV tray and, I imagine, was encased by walls at one point in the building’s history. Not so today. I could see that the platform stuck out from the stairwell wall with nothingness around and nothingness below. The portal onto the floor was three gigantic, terrifying feet away from the stairwell.

  It was clear that the third story w
ould be exactly the same except one more flight up, making the certainty of my death upon falling that much greater. We passed the second-floor portal. I glanced over at it again and considered vomiting.

  I pictured myself losing my footing as I passed over the platform. I saw a bird’s-eye view of myself sprawled out and splattered below. I pictured Bree and Felix during that frantic moment of realization that I was no more.

  By the time we reached the third-floor platform, I was dripping with sweat and considering my obituary. My face was pale, and my insides were stewed. Exposure therapy, I kept reminding myself. Tell yourself something comforting, I thought.

  OK, OK. Something comforting. Hmmm. Well, these photos should be pretty bitchin’, so it’s practically worth it. And besides, this is just a conditioned response. You’re being irrational. We’re going to be just fine. It’s just a three-foot platform. You can walk three feet, can’t you? No big deal. You’ve done that before. And pretty soon, this will all be over… particularly if you plunge to your bloody death less than two blocks from your own home. Oh god. I’m going to die. I don’t want to die.

  The third floor was even worse than I had expected. That three-foot platform looked like a high wire over a football field. It was damp and cracked and covered with algae. Bree stepped across it in her high-heeled boots like it was nothing.

  This made me feel like a pretty huge pussy.

  So I held my breath, hugged the wall, and slid from the stairs to the platform. I thrust myself through the portal and onto the third floor.

  It was a big empty warehouse space that was open on all sides. You could see the city in all its glory. Pep Boys this way, the river that way, and nothing but beautiful highway in between. The only thing standing between us and the edge was our own judgment. The middle of the floor provided no comfort. Where an elevator had once been, there was now a gaping shaft that I envisioned swallowing us all whole and keeping it secret for one hundred years. It was surrounded by a moat of rainwater and scum.

  Felix followed us in and encouraged us to walk farther out onto the floor. He had a shot in mind that he was determined to get. But as we advanced farther, my steps became more labored. Each time I put a foot down, I deliberated carefully and slowly, until eventually I could go no farther. I froze.