Charisma: A Novel

by Barbara Hall

  “Well. Just to be sure.”

  Be patient with him. He’s not like you.

  “So I guess there’s no real point of our continuing to talk till we rule out the tumor?” I ask.

  “We can continue to talk if you’d like.”

  “Can I ask you some questions?”

  “Certainly.”

  His body clenches a little when he says certainly. Mr. Boundaries isn’t crazy about the idea, pardon the term, but he knows he has to give me a little bit of leeway. It’s quite possible I’m the craziest person he’s ever worked with. That’s what I’d like to find out.

  “So, what area of psychiatry do you specialize in?” I ask.

  “I see cases of all kind. But I suppose you’d say I specialize in trauma.”

  “PTSD.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what does that usually look like?”

  “It presents in all forms.”

  “What are the most common forms?”

  “Anxiety attacks, panic attacks, with physical manifestations such as impaired breathing and heart palpitations. Secondary to these attacks, people develop agoraphobia. Hypochondria. Substance abuse problems. Night terrors, as you suggested. Loss of appetite. Depression. Personality changes. All kinds of things which interfere with life.”

  “Suicidal ideation?”

  “Of course.”

  “Talking to spirits?”

  “Not exactly. Sometimes people have religious conversions. Particularly when they go through the program to deal with addictions. And on occasion, people have hallucinations and delusions which eventually go away.”

  “With medication?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes on their own with recovery.”

  “So I’m not a complete freak to you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’m just delusional.”

  He smiles. It’s unpredictable, what makes him smile. Sometimes he smiles out of anxiety, such as now, and sometimes he smiles because he’s moved in some way. Even he doesn’t know the difference.

  “Well, we don’t know what you are yet,” he says.

  “But probably not touched by an angel is what you’re thinking.”

  “That’s not in the DSM.”

  “There’s one thing I want you to consider.”

  “All right.”

  “I don’t have PTSD. I don’t have any of those symptoms you described.”

  “But you have thoughts of suicide.”

  “But not because I’m unhappy.”

  “You’re just homesick for Heaven.”

  Now I smile. I heard the sarcasm in his voice. It didn’t leak out. It leapt out. I think he heard it too because he suddenly gets very busy with his notes.

  “You were cranky with me just now, Dr. Sutton.”

  “I apologize.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m trying your nerves?”

  “No. It’s sometimes difficult when you argue with me.”

  “You’re not accustomed to being argued with?”

  “I am, in fact.”

  “But I do it in a way that is especially annoying?”

  He takes his glasses off and rubs his eyes. “Ms. Lange, I apologize. This took a wrong turn when I allowed you to interrogate me. That’s against procedure. It breaks one of my rules.”

  “You do the asking. That’s the general rule?”

  “Yes. And that’s because often people avoid introspection by projecting their issues onto the therapist. It’s an unnecessary step and one that can be avoided by having a professional policy. That way, the patient can’t take it personally. Sometimes they do anyway, but that’s indicative of their…situation.”

  “Wow. That’s a big pile of therapy you just heaped on me.”

  He sighs.

  “Ms. Lange, intellectual gymnastics is also a form of deflection. I apologize for breaking my rule and allowing us to arrive at this juncture.”

  “Don’t apologize. I enjoyed it.”

  He looks at his watch. “I do think we should conclude our session for today.”

  “Okay.”

  But he doesn’t stand. He sits, staring at the notebook in his lap. I wait.

  He looks up and says, “So you’re an artist?”

  This question actually shocks me.

  “No. Who told you that?”

  “Heather.”

  “Oh. Well. Heather is one of those people who encourages. So I guess I showed her some things.”

  “What things?”

  I shrug. Now I feel really exposed but also excited, like something is about to begin. Dr. Sutton is just looking at me, waiting for a more concrete answer.

  “Some drawings,” I say. “Some poems. Nonsense, really. But Heather likes things like that. She was like having a friend in a book group or a sewing circle or something. We talked about art. It wasn’t really helpful.”

  I feel myself looking away from him. He waits, but I know my patience is stronger than his.

  Finally he says, “When did you first start to think of yourself as an artist?”

  I want to blurt it out. I want to say what always sits right under my skin, growling, wanting to decimate everything in sight. I don’t think of myself as an artist. You don’t have to think yourself into what you are. In order to live in this world, you have to will yourself into something you’re not. That’s what I am trying my best to do. That’s what he does even better than I. That’s what, I suppose, he is here to teach me.

  “I try not to think of myself at all. Isn’t that why I’m here?”

  He stares at me with a stare I can’t describe. Something between realization and denial. I don’t want to look at it anymore.

  He stands and I stand and he gestures me out of the room. I walk toward the common area thinking he’s walking with me but when I turn around I see he’s headed in the other direction without looking back.

  Chapter 6

  On the way home from the office, David gets in a car accident.

  His private practice is in a bungalow in Westwood. The buildings are modern but constructed to look like Craftsman bungalows, not unlike the one he lives in. The complex consists primarily of show-business companies. Some of his clients work in these companies. That wasn’t why he set up practice there. He did it because he liked to feel at home when he worked and these bungalows reminded him of his home. The only reason he didn’t actually work out of his house was fear of his clients. Privacy issues, too, but mostly fear. In his ten years of practice he has had only a few violent patients. (He doesn’t call his patients clients as therapists do because he is a medical doctor and he doesn’t like to sugarcoat the relationship. They are not well. He is a doctor. They are the patients.) There were a few death threats and one patient who actually brought an unloaded gun into his office. But these cases made an impression on him. He didn’t want traumatized people going in and out of his home.

  The reason the car accident happens is because he is preoccupied with a cutter he is treating. She is only fourteen and her name is Selena. She has two mothers but that has nothing to do with her condition. The fact that they are lesbians, that is. The mothers have everything to do with why she is cutting. One is a Narcissist, the other is probably Borderline Personality. He cannot help analyzing the parents when he treats an adolescent—it’s rare when the parents aren’t in some way responsible for the adolescent’s self-destructive behavior. But it’s tricky because the parents are also signing his checks, so he has to find a delicate way to tell them they are a big part of the problem. Not surprisingly, they never think they are a big part of the problem.

  These mothers are high achievers. One is a violinist in the L.A. Philharmonic and the other is a linguistics professor at UCLA who has published many books on the subject, one of which he had actually read before he met the mothers. Their names are Dinah and Josephine. Josephine, the linguistics professor, is French. Dinah is pissed off. He can’t im
agine how Dinah makes anything good come out of a musical instrument. Maybe she dissociates.

  They have decided that Selena is a genius and should be well rounded. She has to get a 4.0 and sing opera and play one varsity sport. Selena is managing all that. At the same time, she is painfully thin and is cutting.

  Cutting has become the disorder of the decade. It is very in. So in that it’s practically an epidemic. It’s the new anorexia. Although the old anorexia is still going strong. He has thoughts like this. Thoughts that make him feel like he shouldn’t be a working psychiatrist anymore. He supposes that he will always be one, just as priests have to be priests for the rest of their lives, even if they leave the church. They just aren’t active. He should go inactive. But what would he do?

  As he drives, he is thinking back to how he handled the session with the two mothers and Selena. Usually he sees Selena alone but this was a sort of update. Selena requested it. She wanted him to explain things to her mothers. But he had made very little progress with Selena because she wouldn’t hold her mothers accountable for anything and wouldn’t even admit that she was overextended or particularly stressed out. She didn’t want to give up any of her activities. The only thing she knew for sure was that she had trouble processing stress and she used cutting as a means of doing that. She believed that they were only here to find her a healthier habit to replace cutting. That’s what she wanted him to tell her mothers but he couldn’t tell them that.

  Instead, he explained to all of them why cutters cut. There are many reasons but the most prominent is to create physical pain to distract them from psychological pain. Cutters do not articulate it that way. Since they are extremely insistent on not feeling their emotional distress, they would never admit to having any. Instead they say that cutting themselves helps them feel pain, which is a relief since they usually feel emotionally numb, and the pain lets them know are alive. That’s what the craftier ones come up with. The more honestly confused come up with nothing more profound than, “It just makes me feel better.”

  Selena was somewhere in between the two. She was smart and the smart are always tough. Their intellects will create elaborate mazes and you can waste elaborate amounts of time chasing them down through their defenses. It’s like getting lost in Venice (the real one) at night.

  He despised the French mother. Josephine. He hated her bossiness and the way she treated her daughter like a racehorse. Dinah just seemed disconnected, but dangerously so. Their dynamic bothered him tremendously. Josephine wanted what she wanted. She was a bully. She was probably a fit thrower. Everyone around her had disconnected in some way in order to submit to her, to avoid seeing her at her worst, to take care of the crazy.

  Josephine was yapping at him about why she thought Selena was cutting, which was to punish her (her, not her and Dinah) and that she felt Selena’s behavior was obstinate and not worthy of understanding. She didn’t want the doctor coddling her (her word); instead, she wanted David to fix the behavior. To explain to Selena that she would not be able to continue at her fancy private school and go on to a fancy Ivy League college and therefore her life would not be worth living if she wouldn’t stop cutting.

  Neither mother seemed to mind that their daughter was dangerously thin.

  During the session, Selena began to take care of Josephine.

  “Maman, let Dr. Sutton talk.”

  “I will let him talk when I’m finished,” Josephine said. Her English was perfect down to slang and idioms, but her accent was fresh off the boat.

  “No, it’s his office. We’re on his turf, Maman,” Selena calmly explained.

  “I am paying for his turf. I will talk until I have made my point.”

  And she did.

  Finally his lack of resistance wore Josephine out and she shut up abruptly.

  The four of them sat in silence for a moment.

  “So what are you doing to make this stop?” Josephine finally asked.

  “I am going to get to what’s causing it.”

  “It’s clear what’s causing it. She is trying to punish me,” Josephine declared.

  “Why would she do that?” David asked.

  “I don’t know. Why do teenagers do anything? They are ungrateful.”

  “I have to agree with you in one sense. I think she is doing it in part to send you a message. And that message is that she doesn’t belong to you.”

  This actually caused Josephine’s head to whip back.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she is an autonomous human being with free will. She is temporarily in your care.”

  Dinah woke up briefly from some reverie and said, “Dr. Sutton, she’s not adopted. Josephine carried her.”

  “I carried her in my womb. What do you mean she doesn’t belong to me?”

  “I mean you can’t own people. They outlawed it.”

  Selena laughed abruptly.

  Then the room became very quiet. Josephine was actually speechless. David felt he had accomplished the impossible and was vaguely ashamed of the satisfaction he felt. He knew what was coming next. Josephine stood up and fired him. Everyone followed her out of the room. Selena gave him a sad look but not for herself; for him. She was taking care of his feelings. She was well versed in that.

  He had let Selena get away. His need to shut Josephine up surpassed his need to help a patient and that was an indication that he should probably stop seeing patients.

  But what would he do?

  The blank landscape of his life startles him so much he can barely catch his breath and then he is in the middle of an intersection after the light has changed and an SUV is hitting his front right bumper and spinning him around. The air bag goes off and the next thing he knows his door is open and someone is pulling him out of the car. A man in a suit with sunglasses pushed up on his head is screaming at him and he can’t understand what is happening. Then the guy actually takes a swing at him and David ducks and the guy’s fist hits the car and then he begins screaming again. The second swing lands somewhere on David’s face and he sees stars. It occurs to him that he’s never been hit before and he’s fascinated by the shock of it, the cliché of the stars, and the fact that it doesn’t seem to hurt.

  Someone comes and pulls the guy off of him and finally he can hear what the guy is saying:

  “You fucking asshole! You could have killed me, you piece of shit! Fuck you! Stay off the road, you fucking lunatic!”

  David looks at his mangled Prius and at the guy’s enormous Range Rover, which has a little dimple in the bumper, and he can’t for the life of him understand what is happening.

  Chapter 7

  I am in the dining room eating my chicken cutlet and instant mashed potatoes when I notice a very large crazy person sitting down the table from me. I don’t know he’s crazy from looking at him but because they make all of us eat on the trauma side. He’s easily six-five with a nest of shaggy blond hair and a Kung Fu moustache of the same color. His glasses are blue and he wears a navy Communist worker’s hat. From his general demeanor I can discern that he’s new to this place and on a cocktail of drugs. He’s still wearing that patina of shock we bring in the door with us. After a while that gives way to something else and what that is depends upon the nature of our conditions. The ragers get angrier first, then depressed. The depressed get more depressed, then angry. And so on. I went from relief to greater relief to where we find me now, feeling a tiny flicker of agitation.

  The agitation began when Dr. Sutton asked me about the art. I don’t know why but it feels like sand in my shoes.

  Shaggy is very engaged with his plate. He’s doing everything with his food except eating it. It takes me a moment to realize he’s building something.

  “What is that?” I ask without meaning to. The first I realize I’ve actually spoken is when he looks up at me.

  “What?” he asks dully, as if I’ve just woken him up.

  “What you’re doing there. What is it?”

  “It�
�s called Fuck You Fuck Off.”

  “Nice.”

  I’m not hurt by his response, just surprised, and it only makes me want to stare harder. But I’m also afraid to stare harder. Then I do something inexplicable. I begin to build something out of my food, too. I make a moat with the potatoes and a bridge with the green beans over to the chicken. Then I start creating a tower out of the bread.

  “Hey,” he says.

  I look at him. He has a powerful stare even with the drugs.

  He says, “Stop playing with your food.”

  This makes us both burst out laughing as if we’re old friends and this is an ancient inside joke.

  The laughter brings a guy in white running toward us. The orderly looks at my plate and says, “Don’t play with your food.”

  And this makes Shaggy and me laugh harder and that brings more people in white. But before I can defend us, I hear a crashing sound. I look around to see who dropped a tray, grateful to have the attention diverted, but I realize I’m the only one who’s heard it. Then my ears are full of noise and suddenly I feel as if someone has punched me in the face. My head even whips back and I am dizzy.

  I drop my fork and cover my ears and I know that everyone is looking at me. The dining room is usually pretty peaceful because the people who are well enough to eat in there can get very focused on eating and ignore everything around them. It’s not unusual, still, for one of the Air Talkers or Hair Pullers or Face Slappers to suddenly go off and then they are gently led back to their rooms.

  I have never gone off in the dining room before because, in case you haven’t picked up on this, I am not actually crazy. I know exactly what’s going on with me and I can control it to a degree. I am here to protect myself from doing something that I know is wrong and that I will regret. I am also here to be taken care of because when I’m with the guides, I forget to eat and sleep and bathe and things like that. It’s far better to be in an environment where someone makes me do it.

  Anyway, I don’t have sudden tics or noticeable behaviors but the roaring in my ears is so loud I have to make it stop. It sounds like a train going through my head. Then I realize this is happening somewhere in the world to someone I know. That’s how it used to work. The radio in my head would pick up the distress of someone I was particularly connected to. But I’m not connected to anyone anymore. I rifle through the files of people I used to love and I can’t see them or feel them. I am about to move into the vision of it but then comes the distraction.