by Adam Haslett
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Adam Haslett
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
eISBN: 9781542040167
Published in coordination with Plympton
Cover design by Belief Agency
I’d tried so many doctors and therapists and healers of all kinds that I didn’t see the point of entering treatment with yet another. But a friend promised me this was different. Different altogether. Expensive to be sure, but the results were dramatic. Four or five visits and the most refractory cases were cured. You needed an introduction, of course. The doctor and her company had to ensure strict privacy, theirs as well as yours. The media would only misunderstand the method.
“I could refer you right now,” my friend suggested when we met up the day after his second appointment. He had a flushed, expectant look about him that I did not recognize, as if he’d been shot through with some new spirit, his usually gaunt eyes almost hectic with life. “I’m telling you, it’s like nothing else.” I wondered if he’d joined a cult or found religion. But no, he told me, it was nothing like that.
“It’s hard to describe. She understands in a way no one else does. The pain—I don’t feel guilty about it with her.”
We’d known each other since we were kids, and though as adults our struggles had been different, we recognized in each other a similar kind of dread, a cumulative heaviness that lay behind whatever our particular physical and mental complaints were. Perhaps to avoid the acknowledgment of this, we had seen less and less of each other over the years. But here he was before me, talking about his condition openly, saying it didn’t have to be this way. It was something I’d never heard him say before. It compelled me. And so I agreed.
Two weeks later I got a thick manila envelope in the mail from Remedium Corporation. I’d been expecting an office on Park or Fifth, but the address given was in a warehouse district in Queens, out by Kennedy Airport. My parents and their friends wouldn’t go to doctors on the West Side, let alone an outer borough. It seemed odd that such an exclusive practice would set up in a location that out of the way.
When I mentioned this to my friend, he chided me for my parochialism.
“The airport? Kennedy, not LaGuardia? You think New Yorkers, or even Americans, are the only ones she treats? The Europeans, the Japanese—they can be at her office ten minutes out of customs. From what I’ve heard, most of the foreigners don’t even come into the city.”
“And your parents don’t mind the price?”
“Are you kidding? They like how much it costs. It makes them feel like they’re doing all they can, that they’re getting something special. You know what it’s like.”
None of the Dr. Langs in Queens I found online seemed to have anything to do with therapy, and Remedium Corporation didn’t even have a website. In the packet I’d received, full of disclaimers, medical record releases, and a nondisclosure agreement, there was only the vaguest description of what to expect. There would be an initial interview, and if all went well, an orientation to the treatment would follow. Subsequent appointments would be arranged. Patients were requested to send electronic copies of as many photographs of family and other significant people or places as they could. A good night’s sleep before each visit was recommended, and it was advised that evening plans afterward should be kept to a minimum. They apologized for the inconvenience, but they could accept only certified checks. The charge for the first visit and evaluation was $20,000, three-quarters of which would be refunded if, in the sole discretion of Dr. Lang, you were deemed an inappropriate candidate. Each subsequent visit would be $15,000. Though the recommended duration of treatment varied, most patients, the materials said, achieved the desired outcome in five visits or less.
As to my parents and the price, my friend had called it right. After she got over her initial surprise at the cost, my mother began plying me with questions. How did my friend find out about it? Who had referred him? Was there a location in Europe? I could tell she was tempted to ask if I could refer her, for her own relief, but she held herself back, striking a serious tone and making a good show of considering the finances before saying yes.
The night before my first appointment I took an extra Xanax, hoping for the solid night’s sleep they advised, and the next morning I left my apartment at seven thirty to give myself plenty of time. The Uber driver had a hard time finding the address on 148th Avenue, a street of warehouses and gated lots full of utility vehicles, but when I saw a clean, minimalist facade of polished concrete more Chelsea art gallery than light-industrial Queens, I said, “This must be it” and pointed him to the black-framed glass doors.
Security cameras were mounted along the top of the building, and unlike the cracked and weed-strewn sidewalk in front of the aging facilities on either side of it, the pavement I stepped onto was solid slate, freshly washed. I half expected one of those would-be models in black suits who open the doors of downtown boutique hotels to usher me inside, but the only indication that I had indeed come to the right place was a tiny silver plaque to the right of the doors with the company’s name engraved on it, all in lower case. When I depressed the button beside it, nothing happened.
Being half an hour early, I thought perhaps they weren’t open yet. But as I looked up at the underbelly of a jet passing directly overhead on its way in to land at JFK, I heard the door click open and lowered my eyes to see an elegant middle-aged Indian man dressed in a cream linen blazer, open-necked shirt, and cravat holding a cigarette down at his side. He peered left and right along the street as if to make sure I had come alone, and deciding that I had, said simply, “This way.”
You see private security everywhere in the city, men in dark suits with white wires in their ears, so when I glimpsed a sidearm under his jacket as he held the door open for me, I surmised he was a more debonair version of the same, a man with fine features and discerning eyes, a sophisticate of some kind who had presumably taken such a job because of the high pay and exclusive clientele.
Given the building’s exterior, I’d expected blond-wood floors, bare white walls, furniture of leather and steel, the sort of design that put my parents at ease as they overpaid for their art. But there was none of that. Once through the doors, I was led down an empty linoleum-lined hall and into a waiting room with a vinyl couch, a few upright chairs, and a coffee table with a single issue of Le Monde on it. Through a glass partition, I could see a reception desk, and behind it a wall of old metal filing cabinets.
“Have a seat,” the guard said, putting his cigarette out in a standing ashtray in the corner. “The doctor will be with you shortly.”
After a few minutes a young Korean woman with a diamond nose stud appeared at the desk and called my name. She handed me yet another form to sign and asked if I could please give her my phone to be returned when I departed. “It’s a privacy precaution,” she explained, “for all the patients.”
I had pictured Dr. Lang as a severe woman, hair pulled back off her forehead, in a lab coat and rimless glasses, skeptical and pr
ecise. The sort of person who derived her hauteur from the wealth of the people she served. A high professional of the luxury service economy. But when the assistant ushered me into the office, the person who stood to greet me looked more like an aging and beneficent school teacher, a white woman in her late sixties with salt-and-pepper hair that came down almost to her shoulders. She was dressed in a plain, somewhat formless blue dress and a dark-green cardigan with sagging pockets. Reading glasses hung on a silver chain around her neck.
After the assistant had left us, we stood for a moment in silence, Dr. Lang looking directly at me. At the center of her round, open face were eyes that radiated an inquisitiveness so gentle and enveloping that it seemed right away like a third presence in the room, issuing from her, to be certain, but nonetheless existing in the space between us, a kind of force field into which I had just entered.
“Derrick,” she said. “Welcome. Can I get you something to drink? Tea perhaps?”
The office was almost wholly impersonal, no degrees on the walls, no shelves lined with leather-bound books or scientific periodicals. It could have been a swing space for one of the neighboring logistics companies. The only sign that it might be a therapist’s office was a leather couch with an upright chair opposite it and a coffee table in between.
“Sure,” I said, more uncertain than ever about what I had gotten myself into.
“Do have a seat . . . I’m sorry it took a while to fit you in,” she said, putting on an electric kettle that stood on a counter in the corner of the office. “Scheduling turns out to be one of the biggest parts of this job. In any case, I’m glad you’re here. Your friend spoke very fondly of you. We take the referral issue quite seriously. We want to do everything we can to make sure there’s a fit. The treatment’s not for everyone, and obviously we want to avoid putting people to the trouble and expense if we don’t think it’s appropriate.”
She set two mugs on the table, then reached for a folder on her desk. For $20,000, I would have expected a choice of tea, but what I got was Lipton’s black. She lifted her reading glasses to her nose and glanced at the folder’s contents.
“One thing,” she said. “You are a bit young. Thirty-five to sixty-five is our usual range. Under that—and you’re, what, thirty-two?—we run into some issues. There’s a question as to the course of the illness. Whether it might resolve on its own.”
“But wouldn’t that have happened by now? I’ve tried almost everything.”
“And that’s a fair point. I can see that from your medical records. It’s not for lack of effort that you find yourself here. Which is why I went ahead and scheduled you. As you probably know by now, the other modalities you’ve tried—traditional therapy, behavior modification, bodywork, the medications—they’re ameliorative. If they work, they work temporarily. Then you need more treatment, or you move on to something else. It’s a common pattern, perfectly understandable. I’ve seen it for years. Which isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of well-meaning people out there, trying to help. But what we offer is different.”
She closed the folder and rested her hand on her lap. “Let me start, then, with a question. How would you describe your experience of your condition as a whole?”
Already I knew why it had been hard for my friend to communicate what it was like to be with Dr. Lang. How many times before had I done this? Filled out copious forms that doctors and therapists seemed never to have given more than a cursory glance before they asked me to describe to them the very symptoms I had just committed to paper, and then watched them type on their computers or scribble on their pads, or in the offices of the alternative medicine professionals more often watched them nod and frown in sympathy. And here was Dr. Lang, papers on her lap, asking what seemed the same old question. Yet it wasn’t. She hadn’t requested a list of symptoms. Your experience of your condition as a whole—that’s what she wanted to know. It was as if, in a single stroke, she were undoing the very premise of all the treatments that had come before, the idea that the suffering could be anatomized and its components addressed. Her question bypassed all the particulars—the chronic pain, the mental tension, the exhaustion—in search of something else, of the person beneath all that, the one who endured the affliction.
“How would you describe your experience of your condition as a whole?”
“My experience as a whole?”
I felt an emotional release simply restating her question. Her eyes held me in their embrace. Was it my association of her with a teacher, some motherly grade school figure concerned for the feelings of a frightened boy? Was that what seemed to be opening me up so quickly? Or was it just the force of her apparent empathy? I couldn’t tell.
“It’s become who I am,” I said spontaneously. In my first answer to her first question, I was stating my sense of what my life had turned out to be more directly than I had to anyone, even to myself. “It’s the person I’ve become.”
She smiled, more to herself than to me. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for telling me that.”
Looking away, down at the table, she paused for a moment.
“Wherever I practice—and I have clinics in many countries, wealthy as well as poor—people ask me, Why did you start this work? And I tell them about my father. He was a doctor, you see. We moved around a lot when I was a child—Asia, Africa, Latin America. An infectious disease specialist. My mother was from Nova Scotia; her whole extended family lived there in just a couple of villages. They didn’t approve of my parents moving us about the way they did. Home was supposed to be one place, where you stayed all your life. But we saw many things as children, many remarkable things. And people. Such an unending variety of people. Yet always suffering, such great suffering. It wore my father down eventually. He’d grown up in the Midwest, been a doctor in World War II—he had that tremendous American optimism of the time. But somewhere along the way he started to drink, to anesthetize himself, I think, and he never really stopped. He felt helpless, in the end, in the face of what he’d seen, of how many people he’d been unable to save.
“So early on, as a child, I decided I would never do what he did. I would never put myself through that. Instead, I’d read and write. And I did. I read all the great religious texts, the mystics, the philosophers. I studied the artists from many traditions. And somewhere along the way, thinking I had left my father’s work behind, I had an idea. About something I could do that would help people in ways he had never been able to. And I couldn’t get it out of my head, this idea. And so decades later, here I am.”
She removed her glasses. “Why am I telling you all this? I suppose it’s because your answer to my question tells me a great deal. And forgive me for the intimacy of this, but I find it moving. I think you’ve come to the right place. That said, I shouldn’t let my intuition run away with me. We have to get to know you as well as we can in a short period of time. That’s why we gather all your records in advance. And the photographs, were you able to send those?”
“Yes.”
“Good, I look forward to seeing them.”
What followed between us was a conversation unlike any I had ever had. Over the years, any number of therapists had solicited from me a version of my life by now more or less canned: how as an adolescent I’d started to feel a pain in my gut, which had grown worse over the years despite all the doctors my parents had paraded me around to, and which made it hard to sleep, causing me exhaustion during the day; how it became hard at a certain point to distinguish this exhaustion from the bleak moods and the panic that became, by college, my normal state; and then hard to tell if this in turn was causing the pain to spread into my chest and head, until it encompassed more or less my entire body. And how all this led to an endless self-criticism that I was failing to accomplish whatever I might be capable of, a prophecy that seemed to fulfill itself more with each passing year as I fell behind friends and acquaintances in their patchwork progress toward building their adult lives. The professionals I had told t
his story to, one after the other, had been sympathetic to a fault. Their facial expressions—and who knows, perhaps their spirits too—had strained to impress on me how deeply they regretted my suffering and how sincerely they hoped to redress it.
Dr. Lang did none of that. Nothing I recounted about my life seemed to surprise or impress her in the least. It didn’t even seem particularly concerning to her. She wanted to know instead about the music that I listened to at various stages of my life, about the books that I had read that had left an impression on me, and about which works of art were most important to my sense of the world. My parents weren’t the only ones who had infantilized me. Illness brought out condescension in most everyone. You didn’t pity your equals; you pitied children, or those reduced to the semihelpless state of children. But Dr. Lang spoke to me as if I might possess wisdom, as if my experience might add up to something more than a complaint, and my answers to her questions could be of value to her, and not just as diagnostic data but as insights unto themselves, as statements and reflections about the nature of things. A nature, her whole manner suggested, that we after all shared.
By the time the assistant led me back down the corridor and returned my phone, I had entered a kind of daze. I’d been expecting some physical intervention or exploratory chemical dosing. That’s what I’d thought the whole business of a good night’s sleep and no plans afterward was about. All I had been through was two hours of conversation. But now I saw their point. I was dangerously relaxed. Sensing this, the assistant asked if I knew how I would be getting home.
“I’ll get a car service, I’ll be fine,” I told her.
“We’ll be in touch about your next appointment,” she said. “Quite soon.”
When the car arrived, I slunk into the back seat, and as we drove past the adjoining warehouse, I saw that tastefully dressed security man, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He was securing a padlock on the chain that held the entrance gates together. He put the key in his pocket and took a drag on his cigarette, eyeing me as I departed.
