Murders Among Dead Trees

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  I know. I’ve been over 200 pounds since I was thirteen. I don’t even know what I weigh now. I decided when I turned fifteen that I wasn’t going to look at the scale until I felt like I’d be happy with the numbers. That was almost two years ago and every time I go to the bathroom I feel like the scale in the corner by the bathtub is looking back at me, all judgy.

  Summer’s coming and there’s a misery but at least I won’t have to suffer it at school. You know the drill. Everybody’s been to school and you’re either the moose or the hunter. Guess which one I am? Yeah, fat and in high school is like walking around with those huge moose horns that don’t fit through a fucking door.

  Hey, maybe if that bitch Tanya is cured, she’ll go from skinny bitch to moose, too. We could be friends for a while there while she’s just overweight. Then when she gets to be too moosey, I’d have to stay away from her and laugh at her in gym class and bitch her out in the cafeteria for having something to eat. Like I said, I can’t have fat friends. I can’t get any bigger. I mean, Jesus!

  Last week I had a different kind of counsellor — the stupidest species. The guidance counsellor scheduled a meeting with me (right in my free period without even asking. Math would have been much better.) Anyway, this guy who used to be the phys-ed guy, before he got arthritis or something, starts asking me about my goals. I said supermodel just to watch his face work through it. He couldn’t help himself. He glanced down at my belly and made a face like he’s got gas or something. Bitch.

  Then he asks me what I want to be when I grow up and I say, “I dunno” and he says “Me, too,” and smiles like that’s clever instead of pathetic. He was probably relating to me at my level or some shit that 50-something guys say, thinking they’re at least as cool as when they were 45.

  He talks to me about university and safety schools and shows me a few brochures to get me hot and bothered. I wonder what I’m supposed to do because there aren’t any fat girls in the brochures. There are happy black girls and smart-looking Chinese girls with glasses and all the guys look like they’re on some football team. No nerds, dweebs or fat girls need apply.

  The ex phys-ed teacher (I refuse him any title with the term “guidance” in it) says if I write some essays, I’d have a shot at some kind of scholarship because my marks in English are so high. That doesn’t seem all that impressive to me. It should come easily. Everybody speaks English.

  I’m good with a camera. That could have been cool since I could have assistants and look like a photographer all the time. I quit photography, though. I was getting some good action shots for an in-class assignment, taking photos of these two pretty girls who probably will end up as models snorting coke off each other’s ribs. Anyway, I was kneeling in front of them (it makes them look even taller when the camera angle is aimed up) when some assholes made fun of me because my ass crack was popping from my jeans. Then I had trouble getting up quick and the boys were just howling mean.

  The teacher, Mr. Call Me Mike Sandling was a good guy I guess, saying “Alright! Alright! That’s enough!” and I looked at him with my big, watery, cow moose eyes and we both knew I wouldn’t be back in that fuckin’ door.

  I wondered later if that’s why I got scheduled to see the guidance counsellor. Maybe Call Me Mike thought I should get some attention from the crippled up, phys-ed teacher, get some guidance and maybe some diet advice so I don’t come into school one day with home-made pipe bombs strapped across my moose belly. Didn’t get any diet advice and that’s fine because I’m sure I know more about dieting than any idiot who studied it in school but never actually had a weight problem. The closest he gets is, on the way out, he puts his fucking hand on my shoulder and says (real soulful you know) “You’ll figure it out, Georgie. Everybody’s got something going for them.”

  “Yeah, I can see you’ve got it all figured out,” I said.

  Then he goes back in his office, shuts the door, takes out the gun he keeps in his desk drawer to protect himself from the hockey team goons he’s scared of and blows his brains out so the back wall of the guidance office is always like art no matter how much the school custodian repaints. Well, I imagine that’s what he does, anyway. I would if I were him.

  I’ve been eating more pizza pops since my chat with the phys-ed teacher. I think what a useless bitch he is, pop another one. I think about how, even if I get some kind of bullshit English scholarship, it’s like four more years of being stuck in a bigger high school. Then I eat another pizza pop. Nobody’s going to give me a scholarship for going to a cabin on a mountain so I can commune with my moose brothers and sisters, watch TV, order in more pizza and read Twilight (in perpetual twilight ha ha) and graphic novels for the rest of my life. Then I think how all life is like being stuck in high school forever and I finish the fucking pizza pops and I’m sick of pizza pops now. But that kind of hate always wear off.

  I guess I’m looking for a rescue helicopter to haul my moose ass out of here in a big moose net. That’s why I tell Ma to call the new therapist. Look at me, so weak and young and full of hope, huh? I keep forgetting the helicopter never comes.

  I forget how many counsellors I’ve seen. Dad lives with his new and improved family now but Ma says he’s got excellent insurance through work so I can go as much as I want.

  So back to the whole psycho cult thing where, if you become one of them, you’re cured. I refused to become one of them, of course. I’m not a joiner. Ever see more than one moose at a time? Me, neither. I don’t know how they ever make moose babies.

  I think if you’re a guy moose, it’s pretty hard to even look at a cow moose so you close your eyes and think of fucking a pretty deer with slender flanks and long eyelashes. When you’re done, you’re off on your own again pretending it never happened, not even looking at the cow moose as you pass her in the hallway outside of Chemistry class or look her way even though your locker is only twelve lockers away from hers. I digress.

  Anyway, my psycho psychotherapists would see me once a week for a while and then one day they’d sigh heavily and refer me to someone else so I’d have to dump my guts on the nice rug of the next therapist all over again. And the next. And the next.

  Sometimes they’d call me “difficult” or “combative.” That’s what they put in your file when you aren’t “cooperative.” One old Freudian called me “truculent and intransigent.” I had to look those words up. They weren’t nice.

  I’m just looking for answers. I wasn’t abused. I had a pretty boring and uneventful childhood. No priests in my deep, dark background. My parents didn’t even believe in spanking, though sometimes they couldn’t seem to help themselves.

  I remember one therapist said it was hard to help me because she couldn’t bring herself to like me. She complained that I smelled bad and the clients who came into her waiting room were turned off by the smell. She was pretty fed up, I guess. She topped it off by saying she was just trying to help me. Then she told me I was terminated.

  “What does that mean? Are you going to have me killed by a robot from the future?”

  “It means I’m dismissing you.”

  “Like in the military?”

  “I’m firing you as a patient,” she said.

  “That’s odd,” I said. “My parents pay you, so I thought you worked for me.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Can we discuss this? I’m not super fond of you right now, but I don’t want to start this all over again.”

  “Get out,” she said.

  So, yeah, she was kind of a bitch about it. We got a letter of termination later that week (together with a bill for all the services she had failed to render) and a list of three other psychotherapists I could piss of next. (I assume she picked three colleagues she hated from Psycho School.)

  However, the next one wasn’t so bad. Her name was Circe, which I messed up when I tried to pronounce it. It turns out you say it, “sear-say” which is pretty cool. I liked this new one at first because we s
tarted with her name and ended up talking about mine.

  Georgie is short for Georgette, which Mom chose because I was the cutest little blonde fat baby she’d ever seen (I must have been dropped on my head and face repeatedly later on.) Anyway, I was named after some character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I’ve never seen it, but apparently I was sickly and sweet, so Georgette it was. I told Circe that it sounded to me like I was stuck with a fat girl’s name so she suggested I change it, just like that. We batted a few ideas around and I said, “What’s the thinnest girl’s name there is?” and without hesitation she answered, “Gidget.”

  That’s what we accomplished in our first session. I came home and announced my new, improved name and Mom was pissed so I was sure I was finally on to the right therapist. The important thing in judging how intelligent someone is, is how much they agree with you. If they agree with you a lot, they must be very intelligent.

  I should have known it wouldn’t last. That first session Circe must have deked me out, disarming me with her snake charms. I never liked her so much as when she came up with Gidget. Not only did she give me the idea for my new, non-fat name, then she expected me to make over my life so I’d come up with a whole new personality to match the new name on the package.

  I was willing to try at first. I was supposed to make like my whole life was a movie script I had to write as I went.

  “Gidget is a new character,” Dr. Circe said. “What is the new you going to be like? You don’t like Georgette, so how are you going to be different from the old you?”

  The process sounded good at first, especially since it was tied up in a slogan with a red bow: “Fake it till you make it.” There was an awful lot of work wrapped up in that little phrase. It was catchy and I tried for almost a week. She had me drinking lots and lots of water. I took a bottle of water with me everywhere and that was okay. It felt like I was living in the bathroom but I stuck with it, at least until one of the skinny bitches at school started in on me about how I was killing Mother Earth with all my fucking water bottles.

  I told her Mother Earth was on my kill list, but I planned to start small by murdering my own mom in her sleep. “Let’s see how that goes,” I said. Singlehandedly taking on oh-my-aching-ass “Mother Earth” sounds like a huge project.

  I also didn’t want anybody to think I had a bladder infection or something so I cut out the water at school but kept pounding it back at home.

  Trying on a new identity felt right at first. I was sick of being me and Dr. Circe and I had worked out the differences. For instance, Georgette was pretty surly and called her therapist Dr. Circe because she was still acting like a girl.

  Gidget called the therapist by her last name, “Dr. Papua”, because she was “a grown up young woman.” I played along, though I didn’t think it made that much difference and I was still surrounded by the same bunch of assholes as I had always been.

  Dr. Circe insisted the change would come when I chose my reaction to stress instead of being a victim. That did sound good and she was the first therapist I had who actually gave me stuff to do. Everybody else just wanted to talk about my feelings until, presumably, I’d figure it all out for myself. That sounded to me like an awfully lazy way for somebody to make a living, sitting there listening to me spew.

  There were other requirements (“commitments” Dr. Circe called them.) Gidget was supposed to get to bed early, start the day working out for half an hour and then showering every day. I’m a teenager. Morning doesn’t work with my biorhythm, which I told my therapist the next week.

  She told me to work out after school but by then I was tired and just wanted to sit on the couch and read or watch TV. She told me she didn’t have any patience for patients who had a problem for every solution.

  A few weeks went by and she kept asking me if I really wanted the life Gidget was offering since Georgie was still on the couch plowing through chips. I said it was hard and she called me a whiner, which kind of devolved the therapeutic relationship, I thought.

  When the letter came, I can’t say I was totally taken by surprise, fired again by an employee. Still, I thought she’d have me come into the office one more time so she could at least charge for one more session and tell me to my face how much I suck.

  “Oh, Georgie!” Ma said. “I mean…oh, Gidget!” Ma hadn’t completely made the transition to the new me, but I guess I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t committed to the therapeutic process. She read me the letter, which used the phrase “impediments to therapeutic process” twice, which I thought was excessive as a euphemism and poor English composition. With a name like Circe Papua, obviously English isn’t her first language.

  “It means I’m not enough of a robot for her treatment to work,” I explained.

  “It means you have to want to change,” Ma explained back at me.

  “I know that, dumb ass,” I said. “But apparently I’ve got so many issues I need a magazine rack here. Fuck! If I’m so broken these people can’t fix me, what does your excellent insurance pay for? I mean, shouldn’t part of the therapeutic process be that the therapists make me want to change?”

  “You said you wanted to change,” Ma said.

  “Sure. But not enough to actually change. Not yet. Isn’t that what all this counselling is for? To make me see the light…or something?”

  I went up to my room and didn’t eat until supper and then decided Dr. Circe was the closest thing to somebody useful I’d seen so I needed to get back together with her. Ma threatened to make me work in the back of her sewing shop after school to keep me out of trouble (here I think “trouble” means “fridge.”) Anyway, psycho girls do not need to spend more time with their mothers if improved mental health is the goal.

  So that Friday afternoon I went to Dr. Circe’s office to try to make up. If that didn’t work, I was prepared to settle for a terrible vengeance. You’ve heard hell has no fury like a woman scorned. Well, look out if the woman is young and prone to mood swings and impulsive outbursts. (And did I mention I’m a cutter? Yeah, my forearm looks like a road map of downtown Detroit. Fuck you, don’t judge me. It’s one way to feel something besides fat.)

  I go in late Friday hoping to catch her and there’s this dude sitting in her outer office looking fidgety. I never saw anyone else in the waiting room since you go, you wait, and about the time somebody’s coming in, you’re going out the back stairs so you never have that awkward moment of looking into another patient’s eyes and thinking, In what perverted way are you all fucked up? And in what perverted way are you assuming I’m all fucked up?

  He sat there in a suit that was obviously way too big for him. I wanted to ask him what his diet secret was but I figured starvation was probably involved so fuck that. I tried that and it made me hungry.

  There’s a desk in the outer office. It’s always empty except for a little hot plate and a tea pot. I sat down at the desk and pulled my journal out of my backpack and looked through it, looking urgent. “I’m sorry. I don’t seem to have you scheduled for this afternoon.”

  He looked up like he was surprised I could talk, as if the fern in the corner had suddenly sprouted lips. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry, there must be some mix-up. I don’t have you scheduled for this afternoon.”

  “I’m here to see Dr. Papua.”

  “Well, obviously.”

  “And?”

  “Dr. Papua cancelled your appointment. One of her patients is on the South Street bridge and she had to talk the girl down…I mean, so she’d take the slow way down.” I almost laughed but his look stopped me.

  His eyes went wide and for a minute I worried that he was some kind of anger management freak like me. One of us in one room focusses the mind. With two, matter meets anti-matter and the universe explodes. Instead he started to tear up. “Th-that’s t-terrible!”

  “Yeah.” Beat. “Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get the call. There’s probably a message on your voice mail
or something.”

  He nodded and spent a full minute fishing some stiff, grungy tissues out of his jacket pocket. Great. He’d bought it, but he wasn’t getting up to leave, either.

  “Um, what should we do?”

  “About what?”

  “Well, can I reschedule with you or — ”

  The longer he stayed there, the riskier things got so it occurred to me that pretending to be a secretary would get iffy quickly. “Hey, I usually just clean the office and water the plants. Dr. Papua will call you as soon as she’s done convincing some wingnut that life is worth living.”

  He went white. “That’s not very — ”

  “Sorry. Look. What do you want?” Then inspiration struck. “I’m just here to water the plants and uh…lock up the office. Circe must have been in a big hurry. You know, it’s like, an emergency. Maybe that’s why you didn’t get her message to cancel.”

  “What should I do?”

  Jesus! No wonder this guy needed shrinking. “Go,” I said, “home, I mean. She’ll call you.”

  I looked at the clock. Five minutes to four. A therapeutic hour is only 55 minutes long. That’s just one more way they cheat you. Whoever was in there with her right now would be finishing up and going out the rear exit. Dr. Papua would soon emerge from the inner office and find the crier and me sitting there. If that happened, I was willing to bet the crier would throw a sadness tantrum, which wasn’t part of my plan.

  He finally got up and went for the door. “You shouldn’t call people wingnuts,” he said, another tear sliding down his cheek. “We come here because we’re troubled. Life is very difficult for some of us.”