Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel

by Peter Cameron

  “Yes,” I said.

  She sat there looking at me for a moment, and I could tell she was trying to decide if she should try to prolong our conversation—“draw me out,” I suppose—but apparently she decided I was beyond help. She stood up and returned to her table of laughing happy normal boys and girls.

  I realized I had to get out of there. I stood up and passed through the tables. The lobby was full of happy chattering ladies. Outside the door a few people stood about smoking, hungrily sucking the nicotine out of their cigarettes. One of them was the congressman’s wife who had met my group at the train station. It had only been three days ago, but it seemed like ages. It’s weird how slowly time passes when you’re miserable.

  “Where are you going?” she called to me as I passed by.

  “Just for a little stroll,” I said. “To get some fresh air.”

  “Well, don’t go too far,” she said. “We don’t want to lose you.”

  I ran out into the middle of the parking lot and stood there for a moment, hidden between two hulking SUVs. I felt as if I had escaped from a house on fire; I was actually panting, and I thought if I turned around I would feel the hot bright conflagration of the strip mall. So I did not turn around, I ran across the parking lot and into the field behind it. I walked toward the center of the field—it wasn’t really a field, it might have been a field once, but now it was just a sort of open, abandoned, useless garbagy space. I thought how the center is defined by the spot farthest from every point of the perimeter. Since it wasn’t a very big field it did not take me long to reach its (supposed) center. I unzipped and peed fiercely, proudly, into the ground, as if that was the one thing I could do well. Then I looked around. The four sides of the field were bounded by the strip mall’s parking lot; a highway; a row of identical subdivision houses, the back of each exactly the same, except each house had a different pattern of lighted windows, like patterns of Braille spelling out different messages: baby’s asleep, daddy’s home, nobody’s home; and a long line of trees, obscuring whatever lay beyond them. I felt I was presented with four choices, four different places to go, and as I did not want to return to the theater, or look into the lighted windows of the subdivision, or expose myself to the glare and gore of the highway, the only remaining choice was the trees, and I ran toward them, before anyone could come chasing after me and force me back into the theater.

  The trees were more substantial than I expected, and actually amassed themselves into something resembling a forest. Unlike the field, which was littered with the revolting effluvia of human lives, the forest seemed, at least in the dark, to be pristine. I don’t know why, but I often think about when any particular patch of ground was last touched by human feet or hands or regarded by human eyes. In the city, there’s a small area on the corner of LaGuardia Place and Houston Street that has been fenced in and allowed to return to its primordial state, before the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Indians for $24. I like to look at it when I pass by, although it just looks like an overgrown abandoned lot. But I always have this feeling that I’ll see something startling inside the fence—a fox or a turtle or a coyote or some animal that has miraculously returned to this little pristine patch of land. I think it’s because I want to know that time can move backward as well as forward. That we could return to that moment when Manhattan was, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “a fresh, green breast of the new world,” not the dirty brown crotch it is now. So I look every time I pass by, but usually all I see is Snapple bottles, used condoms, and losing Lotto tickets.

  I walked deeper into the woods, down a slope, and into a sort of culvert, through which trickled a narrow stream. The stream smelled a little funky and I was glad it was dark, so I couldn’t see how polluted it was. I felt very weird and shaky and I couldn’t stop thinking of the strip mall in flames, so I squatted down and covered my face, pushing the heels of my hands into the sockets of my eyes. They fit perfectly, like two halves of a whole, and my hands were exactly the right size to cradle my skull. It seemed like another example of how well human beings are designed, that you were shaped to comfort yourself. I held myself like that and made a humming crooning sound that further removed me from the world.

  After a while I remembered about the dinner theater and the bus and The American Classroom and the rest of my life. I had planned to return to the parking lot and wait until the play was over and get back on the bus with everyone else, but I knew in some weird way that by running away from the theater I had run away from much more than that, and that it was an irreversible action, that I had severed myself from The American Classroom as surely as if I had, like a fox caught in a trap, gnawed off a limb to limp away.

  I knew that once in the bus they would realize I was missing, and Susan Porter Wright would remember seeing me at intermission, and I didn’t know what they would do, but I thought it best to get as far away from there as I could.

  So I jumped over the little stream and climbed up the opposite side of the culvert and bushwhacked through the dark forest. I climbed over a chain-link fence into someone’s backyard. In the darkness I could make out a swing set a few feet in front of me, with a slide and two regular swings and one little kiddy one. And then I saw a baby sitting in that swing, toppled to one side, and I thought, Oh my God, someone’s left a baby in the swing! Then as I got closer I realized it wasn’t a baby, it was a doll. I felt like a moron and looked around as if someone might have been watching me and intuiting my thoughts. But there was no one around. I sat the doll up straight and gave the swing a hard push. At the apex of its flight the doll leaped out and flew brilliantly through the air and crash-landed on her skull in the middle of the lawn.

  I left it there and moved closer to the house, toward the one large window that was lighted on the first floor. I crept near enough to see inside, into a family room or den or rec room or something wholesome like that. A man and a woman were sitting on the floor playing a board game and behind them a golden retriever was sleeping on a sofa. The TV was on, but I could just see the light from the screen, I couldn’t tell what they were watching. Whatever it was, they didn’t seem to be paying attention: they were very involved in their game, clapping their hands and laughing. They looked like they were in a commercial for that game, demonstrating how much fun it was. I could only see the man from the back, but the woman was facing me. She was about forty and was wearing a bathrobe and had her hair pulled back from her face with a hair band. She really seemed to be enjoying the game, and I thought it was odd and a little creepy that a husband and wife would be playing a board game at ten o’clock on a Wednesday night. I didn’t have much experience of life in the suburbs, but I didn’t think it was as wholesome as all that. Then it occurred to me that it might be one of those erotic board games couples play to restore passion to their sexless marriages. I once had the horrifying experience of finding such a game (“Keep the US in Lust”) beneath my parents’ bed. But the game this couple was playing didn’t look very sexy: they were throwing dice and moving little men around the board, counting squares. Then the dog raised his head and looked directly at me through the window and softly woofed. “Oh, hush, Horace,” the woman said to the dog. She was counting out spaces on the board and didn’t look up, but the man turned around and looked at me, and I saw that it wasn’t a man. It was a teenage boy with Down syndrome. He stared at me for a moment with his odd disturbing eyes, looking right at me, but I don’t think he could see me standing outside in the darkness. Then the dog barked again and the boy said something to his mother, and she stood up and moved toward the window and I stepped farther back into the darkness. She leaned toward the window and cupped her hands against the dark glass and peered out. I backed farther away and then ran around the side of the house and down the driveway into the street.

  I ran quite a ways up the street because I wanted to get away from that house. Everything about it spooked me—the doll left out in the swing, the husband turning into a retarded son, and the scared wa
y the mother peered out the window. The neighborhood was deserted but brightly lit with humming streetlights that seemed more like searchlights. As I turned the corner I saw a man walking a dog on the sidewalk in front of me, so I crossed the street and kept running, but the man must have been one of those neighborhood patrol alarmists because he shouted something and began chasing me. The dog barked. At the corner I saw a bus pull up to a bus shelter and open its door. A fat woman carrying a lot of shopping bags toddled down the steps and I thought, If I keep running and get on the bus the man with the dog will think I am just running for the bus and not running away from the scene of a crime, which in a way I felt I was doing because of what had happened at the spooky house. I knew I wouldn’t get arrested for trespassing and watching people play a board game through a window, but nonetheless I felt guilty, as if I had done something criminal.

  10

  June 2003

  I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING FOR A MOMENT; I JUST STARED AT DR. Adler’s bookshelves. I noticed she had relocated The Age of Innocence from its hiding place on the bottom shelf to one of the upper shelves. I wondered if there was some message for me in this gesture or if it was just a random act. Probably whoever cleaned her office put it there.

  “And then what happened?” Dr. Adler asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think you know perfectly well what I mean. It’s a fairly straightforward question.”

  “I know. I didn’t really mean what, I meant why: Why would you ask me that question? If I wanted to tell you what happened next, I would.”

  “Would you? I’m not sure you would.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Dr. Adler sighed wearily, which I thought was an unprofessional thing for a psychiatrist to do. “I think you’re smart enough to know what you’re doing,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s helping you, or us. In fact, that’s probably why you’re doing it.”

  I looked at her. She had never made pronouncements like this before, and I was startled. She looked directly back at me, her expression hard and clear and unvarying.

  “You make it very difficult for people to talk to you, sometimes. Often, in fact. You create obstacles. Why do you think you do that?”

  “Because I don’t want people to talk to me,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t.”

  “I think you do,” she said.

  “Can we just forget this? Can I just tell you what happened next?”

  “You can forget anything you want. You can tell me anything you want.”

  “What if I want to forget everything and tell you nothing?”

  “Then I suppose that, among other things, you should stop coming here to see me.” She leaned back in her chair—I hadn’t noticed that at some point she had leaned forward. She crossed her arms and looked at me gently, patiently, as if we could sit like that forever. She smiled slightly, as if she remembered something fairly pleasant from a long time ago.

  I don’t know why, but it was a nice moment. One of those moments when everything seems to be in its place. The pencils in the Guggenheim Museum coffee mug on her desk, how they fell away from each other at varying angles and directions, like those apparently casual beautiful flower arrangements that are actually the result of much artful expertise—I had a notion of them being the center of the universe and everything spreading out around them, all the other items on the desk, the office, the building, the block, the city, and the world beyond.

  “I feel very good about where everything is,” I said.

  She nodded as if she understood what I was talking about.

  “What happened next was that the bus drove back into D.C. and I got out in a nice neighborhood with lots of nice hotels and I went into the nicest and used my mother’s credit card to check in. I was worried because I had no suitcase and in movies hotel clerks are always suspicious of people checking in with no bags, but it didn’t seem to be a problem at this hotel. And then I took the elevator upstairs and used my little key card to get in the room, and it was just like a hotel room should be, it was very clean and still and quiet and there was something about the stillness and the quiet that made me feel weird, like I shouldn’t speak or move or I would disturb the room. I wanted to be as quiet and still as the room. I wanted to be as little in the room as possible. To have the least effect on the room I could have. So I lay down very carefully on the bed, trying not to muss the comforter.”

  “I lay on the bed and thought about what I had done. I knew that leaving the theater was bad, not getting back on the bus was bad, but there was nothing I could do about it now. So I did nothing. I thought the best thing to do would be nothing, and in that way things couldn’t get any worse. I kept thinking about that oath that doctors take: First, do no harm, and I kept saying it to myself, over and over, first do no harm, first do no harm, first do no harm, and that was fine because I didn’t want to do anything or think anything, and at some point I fell asleep.”

  “I spent most of the next day wandering around D.C. I was a little afraid I might run into The American Classroom somewhere, or they would drive by and someone in one of the buses would look out the window and see me, but then I realized that would never happen. That I was alone and no one could find me. No one knew where I was or who I was. It was a beautiful day, I remember, warm and springlike, everything green and blooming. The trees had new leaves, clean, fresh new leaves, like baby lettuce. Filed greens.”

  “When it got dark I went back to the hotel, and had dinner in the restaurant. It was a very bad fancy restaurant, but luckily I had my American Classroom clothes on, so I looked like a nice young man and I remember sitting alone and having this very expensive (bad) dinner and thinking that other people in the restaurant were looking at me and wondering who I was, what I was doing there, eating alone.”

  “And then I went up to the room and slept the same as the night before, on top of the comforter. I think I thought that if I didn’t leave any evidence of being in the hotel room I could somehow claim I had never been there. That my mother couldn’t get angry at me for using her credit card to charge a three-hundred-dollar hotel room if I had only barely experienced it, hadn’t used the towels or the whirlpool bathtub or the complimentary organic bath products scented with ylang-ylang, hadn’t lain between the four-hundred-thread-count sheets or watched soft-core porn on my in-room entertainment center.” I paused. “Is my time almost up?”

  Dr. Adler looked past me, as if she could tell time by gazing into the future, but I knew she was only looking at the clock that was strategically placed on the bookshelf facing her. “No,” she said. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to start talking about what happened the next day if there isn’t time.”

  “Don’t worry about that. There isn’t a patient after you. What happened the next day?”

  “The next day I got up and had breakfast at Au Bon Pain and read The Washington Post. There was a small article about me being missing and a photo. The caption under the photo was ‘James Sveck: Missing Misfit.’”

  “Are you making that up?” Dr. Adler asked.

  “No,” I said. “It’s the truth. I was the missing misfit. Google it if you don’t believe me. They interviewed Nareem Jabbar because she was the last person to speak with me, and she said I was a misfit. Actually she said I didn’t fit in, but ‘James Sveck: He Didn’t Fit In and He’s Missing’ isn’t a good caption.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Go on.”

  I paused for a moment because I didn’t like the way she was directing me. “I knew no one would recognize me because the picture in the paper was my yearbook photo from junior year, when I was experimenting with long hair. I have to admit I did look rather like a misfit.”

  “After breakfast I went to the National Gallery. I love how the National Gallery is free. You can walk in and walk out and walk back in. When I find something good like that (which is practically never), I try to take advantage o
f it, so I’d go out one door and back in at another entrance because it felt so good to enter a museum for free. Anyway I spent a lot of time in the museum. It was odd, like I had never been in a museum before. It just seemed weird that you could walk in and look at all these old, beautiful, valuable paintings. You could look at them closely, with nothing between you and the painting. And I was going very slowly, looking at every painting, and I felt that there was something beautiful about each one. Even the ugly still lifes of dead fish or lynched rabbits, or the bloody religious paintings, if you just looked at little pieces of them, like a single square inch, the paint was beautiful, and I kept thinking about the difference between these rooms of paintings and the dinner theater and how good the paintings made me feel about life and how bad the dinner theater made me feel. And I knew life was not about a choice between the National Gallery and a dinner theater, but I felt that it was in some way, that the two couldn’t coexist, that if you had a world with these paintings in it, hung in these beautiful rooms that anyone could walk in off the street and see, then how could there also be TV moms acting in a terrible play while people watched them and ate chicken paprika? I suppose most people would think that it was wonderful, that the world is so varied, that there is something for everyone, and I don’t know why I felt so closed and bitter and threatened by things I did not like. I knew I was fucked up and I thought: misfit, misfit.”

  “Then I walked into a small room with only four paintings, and I remembered those paintings from the last time I had been in the National Gallery, which was on my eighth-grade class trip to Washington. They are by Thomas Cole and are called The Voyage of Life. Have you seen them?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t believe I have.”