by Peter Mattei
“Would you say you’re depressed?” he inquires.
“No.”
“Have you ever been diagnosed as having depression?”
“No.”
“Then how would you know what depression is?” he asks. I tell him I guess I have no idea what it is, I just know I’m not depressed, I’m highly functioning, I’m on a mission to reinvent a very large, traditional agency, and apart from a few bumps in the road such as my becoming an evil troll, it’s going swimmingly.
He uncrosses a leg and leans in toward me, deeply interested. I tell him that despite my feelings of intense self-loathing, which potentially date back to my early teens, I don’t want to off myself, it’s been done to death, so to speak, I just think about it from time to time, it’s a subject that interests me on a philosophical level, perhaps, according to Tacitus or somebody, the only question worth asking. Isn’t life, after all, as some German hipster once wrote, nothing more than one long, comical, failed (and ultimately successful?) suicide attempt? I also tell him without hesitation that I am happy, that I’ve always been happy, ever since I was a baby, more or less, so it’s confusing to me why I have so many thoughts of death but I just have them, perhaps it’s only a maudlin interest of mine, the way some people are obsessed by other dark topics such as the Civil War or World War I or World War II or the Vietnam War or the Iraq War or war in general or hunting or family dynamics or serial killers or that 4chan internet meme where they Photoshop pictures of a mutilated Miley Cyrus. Then I tell him the story of sitting at the pool at Shutters and staring out at the ocean reading about people and their smelly homes in need of privatized electronic scent enhancement. “There’s something undeniably sad and at the same time exalted about that, don’t you think?” I ask him. “Don’t you?”
“About people needing a fake scent in their homes? Or about you spending your time working to sell such a thing?”
“Both, obviously. They’re the same.”
“How do you mean?”
“Because they’re both lies, the scent itself and our firm’s representation of it in the world, and lies are a window onto the truth, something like that.”
He doesn’t say a thing for a time and then he tells me that they will keep me here another day for observation. He remarks that my period of agitation seems to have passed, so I will not be tied down, and he apologizes for the physical restraints but the insurance requires it, as well as the diazepam I was given as a chemical restraint, which I note is a benzodiazepine, otherwise known as a roofie: I’m being date raped! That makes me think of Intern, her behavior at certain times, as well as mine. Did she slip me something in one of those pomegranate-infused Belvedere-and-Veuve chamtinis? Did she slip something to herself and make the blood test a part of her pogrom against me?
As Jaktar goes on about scheduling an appointment with a psychotherapist for some “talking therapy” as he calls it, I read a flowchart on the wall behind him to give me something else to focus on. The flowchart tells what to do if a patient is confused. First, determine if the cause of the confusion is environmental or not. If it is, remove the cause of the confusion, then reassess. If confusion persists, medicate. I determine that the cause of my own confusion right now is Dr. Jaktar and his involuntary Punjabi head bobbing; I just want to go back to my room and watch television. There is a pause so I stand up, thinking he is dismissing me, but he doesn’t move and he says, in one quick burst, “Tell me about Dr. Look.”
I did not see this coming. I sit back down.
“How do you know about Dr. Look?” I ask him.
“When you were sedated we looked in your wallet to see if you had medical coverage; when you became violent you lost certain rights pertaining to your privacy. We found his business card. What can you tell me about him?”
“I don’t know anything about him,” I say. “Why?”
Jaktar gives me a squint that I believe is meant to indicate he thinks I’m lying. Then he says, “I attempted to contact this Dr. Look but couldn’t locate him. He’s not board certified in the state of New York, he’s not on anybody’s list of psychiatrists in the state of New York, I don’t think he is practicing in the state of New York.” It really bothered me how often he had said “the state of New York.”
“I was referred to him by the General Counsel of our company,” I said, “Barry Spinotti, who is effectively my boss since we don’t have a president or CEO right now, the last one having quit. Barry referred me to Dr. Look and that’s all I know about him. He has an office on Lexington Avenue. Six-eighty-six or six-sixty-eight or eighty-eight-six or something like that. In the fifties near the Citicorpse tower. He said he’d gone to Harvard.”
“I’ve never been to New York,” Jaktar admits. “Harvard you say?”
For a minute or two we talk about New York and the differences between New York and LA. I tell him I love LA and used to live here, but hated the weather; he says he has some distant cousins in Queens and should really go and see them at some point. Then he crosses his other leg and sits back in his chair and nods; the second pleasantry-based section of our conversation has just ended.
“Mr. Nye,” he says, “why would the head of your company tell you to go and see a psychiatrist who doesn’t exist?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I sense I am in some kind of a battle with Dr. Jaktar only I don’t know what the rules are and I don’t know what it would mean to lose. “It all seemed kind of fishy to me as well.”
“In what way?”
“Well his office wasn’t even a real office, it was like an old apartment that hadn’t ever been renovated. It had an old kitchen in the back, and there was a couch that was so dilapidated it had been repaired with duct tape. Does that sound like a psychiatrist’s office to you?”
“No,” he says, “it does not.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Because all of this could be part of some kind of setup on the company’s part to fire me without paying my bonus. It’s all a lie. Which undoubtedly is what motivated me to lie to this Look character, to make up some story about my mom dying in a car accident when I was a boy.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. He looks at me and his expression changes; suddenly I feel we are on the same page again, we are allies in something but I don’t know what. “When did she die?”
“About twenty years ago,” I go. “I was a boy.” I say no more. He nods.
“So what I’m curious to know is why did the people at your firm tell you to see a psychiatrist in the first place?” he then asks, and the moment of our alignment, our fleeting shared membership in the human race, is gone.
“Because there’s a situation at our office, and they’re trying to drive me crazy,” I blurt out, immediately wondering if that was a good idea and then immediately thinking yes it was. “She’s an intern, she’s accused me of sexual harrassment, and it’s a completely baseless claim, and Barry said he wanted me to see the shrink because he would give me a clean bill of health. It’s all a scam, the whole thing. I mean if he wasn’t a real shrink and only pretending to be one, that’s a scam, but maybe he is a real shrink, and only pretending to be a scam artist in order to either a) rake in a little cash on the side or b) actually help people. At any rate, I think the whole thing was set up years ago by my company to help them get out of legal problems.” Then I told him, at far too great a length, about the sordid history of Tate and how the Old Man, when he was running things, was the biggest ass grabber in the history of Madison Avenue, and how the company had gotten bloated over the years so it was time to get lean and mean; I had been hired to be the agent of this much-needed-correction but had recently reached what I felt was the end of my complicity.
Jaktar thinks. If he were in a graphic novel I would have scrawled HMMM … in the thought bubble to the left of him. He nods again, I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it, and then he turns toward his computer and does some typing. I try to lean over and read it but of course the whole thing, in terms of a
ngles, conspires against me, so I see nothing.
“It’s my professional opinion that you could use some rest, Eric,” he says. “Don’t you agree?”
All hospitals are the same, all hallways lead to nowhere, and in this one the doors are locked, making circular journeys impossible. Apart from the food, which is inedible, it’s not too bad here, in fact it’s quite pleasant even though I no longer qualify for the Klonopin drip, they’ve got me on Ativan. I watch a lot of television, trying to ignore the commercials for payday loans and fabric softener and stool softener and cars that offer to make your payments if you lose your job, and I masturbate frequently in a vain attempt to rid myself of the erection that won’t stop. I also play dominos in the day room with a schizophrenic woman named Melanie who keeps shouting “WE’VE GOT SUITCASES! WE’VE GOT SUITCASES!” at the top of her lungs. I even let her win a couple of times, which makes her cry, and when she cries I hold her hand and this seems to calm her down and when she’s calm she smiles. “We’ve got suitcases,” she says quietly to no one, although for a second I think she means me.
3.19
The next day, when I get up and get dressed and sign my discharge papers and go outside, I am wearing the same Adriano Goldschmied jeans and J. Lindeberg shirt I came in with, and I decide to walk to the beach rather than take a cab; it’s not that far and it’s early so I’ll arrive at the hotel before anyone even gets up. I’m rested and in a good mood; I do, after all, have a plan: I’ll go to the shoot, make up some story about having been mugged or kidnapped, temporary amnesia perhaps, I’ll add value at the shoot, redeem myself to the clients and the agency, thereby restoring Barry’s confidence in my abilities, at which point I will make a deal with Barry that if I agree to work for nothing my salary will be divided up among Juliette and the others, something like that. One of the good things about LA, I’ve always thought, is it’s easy to know which direction you are going; the sun rises in the east and sets in the west out here, no doubt about that, and there are hills to the east, there’s an ocean to the west, and so on. It’s simple. If you can see the beach and you go in the opposite direction you will hit the hills. If you can see the hills and go in the opposite direction you will hit the beach. And that’s what I do. I see the hills and orient myself away from them, although there’s not a through street coming off the medical center, so I have to cut across the UCLA campus. When I get to Sunset it isn’t clear which direction goes toward the ocean, because Sunset is kind of curvy around here, and as I remember it hits the beach pretty far north of Santa Monica, and Shutters is at the southern end of Santa Monica anyway, so I take a right. I figure I’ll get to some other major cross street and take that down toward the water. But as I’m trying to walk on Sunset, and cars are speeding past me on their way to the 405 and their jobs farther east or in the valley at one of the major studios, I realize that I can’t really walk on Sunset, there’s no sidewalk, at least in Westwood, and so I have to take the side streets.
I turn off Sunset at a street called Loring, beautiful homes from the 1940s, I am the only person walking on the sidewalks and I know this makes me a suspicious subject, and I turn onto Thayer and continue south. Then I turn right on Le Conte, counting the number of Mexicans cleaning their employers’ driveways with air blowers, I’m up to four at this point, and several minutes later when I get on Westholme and then back to Le Conte, I take a left on Hills. After a few minutes I hit Loring again and realize that I’ve gone in a big circle. I’m not lost exactly, even though without my phone I have no idea where I am. I keep going till I get to Hilgard and I take that to Westwood. Westwood is a street I know, and it’s wide. There’s a bus that goes down it, there are no lawns or pneumatic Mexicans, so this route should be more direct. When I get to Pico I stop at the light, remembering that in LA you can actually get a ticket for jaywalking. I have no idea which direction I should be going but judging by where the sun is I turn left. I walk.
After half an hour I realize I should have hit the beach so obviously I’m going in the wrong direction; I’m heading east toward downtown LA. It’s amazing what you miss when you’re driving here. Every block features another two or three strip malls on either side of the road, and every strip mall is a kind of highly coded, veiled respository of people’s hopes and dreams; every one is a Zolaesque Balzacian Dickens novel, a compendium, a vast collection of stories that on the surface look unconnected, random, but if you look deeper you’ll see the threads that join them into a tapestry of human narrative and feeling. I’m standing at Pico and Sepulveda. There’s a SuperCuts, SRS Shoes, Beds Etc., Good Feet, La Salsa Fresh Mexican Grill, and that’s just on one corner. A little past it, LA Overhead Garage Doors. And just past that, Pet Supplies 4 You. I could stand here and make up a million tales about these places, the people who opened them, the customers who have come here for years, or I could just let my own memories flood into me; memories of my childhood, I’m looking at the Good Feet storefront, thinking about the time I stubbed my toe on the kitchen table running after my brother and I had to go see old Dr. Granach, some podiatrist we got referred to, because I had a blood blister. He gave me anaesthetic and then he popped it and drained the blood; afterward as I left I had no feeling in my right foot and it seemed like I was hobbling with one leg like a pirate ghost. And then my mother, she was still alive then, said I could stay home from school even though my father forbade such sissiness; she knew, as obviously this must have been one of her cogent periods, that I was easily shamed, and would have felt mortified limping around those hallowed halls. This is one of my best and most cherished memories of her.
A minute later I’m passing Pet Supplies 4 You, still floating in the past, remembering that we had a dog back then, and every Saturday when I went shopping with my dad one of our tasks was to buy a big bag of dog food, and we went to the discount pet store across the tracks, that’s the kind of shopper my dad was, he was well-to-do but had been raised by parents who had lived through the Great Depression, so he was always looking for a deal. My mom, when she was with it enough to know what was happening or what day it was, would get angry because she said he could afford to buy dog food at the Kroger like everyone else, and get the better brand, and how does it make sense to drive all the way across town to the discount pet store for one bag of dog food, why don’t you buy ten bags? My dad would just shrug, he didn’t really have a reason why he did it that way, he just enjoyed it, and my mom would roll her eyes, how could anyone enjoy buying dog food? They didn’t always get along. Our dog was named Race, which is not a name you could give a dog today, I don’t think, but my brother and I had not named him that for any sociological or politically concious reasons, we had named him after Race Bannon, who was a character on a 1960s cartoon called Jonny Quest that was in heavy rerun mode when we were kids in the ’80s; they even tried briefly to revive the show with all new episodes in ’86 for one season but it failed. In the cartoon, Jonny Quest and his father, Dr. Benton Quest, along with their bodyguard and pilot, Race Bannon (who had worked for a shadowy agency known as Intelligence One), travel in a jet plane to exotic locales in search of adventure. The other characters on the show were Hadji, an extraordinary Indian boy who had been adopted by Benton Quest, and Bandit, their bulldog. My brother and I had discussed at the time naming our dog Bandit, as you could imagine, with him staunchly in support of the idea and me opposed. I was eight years old but I remember making the argument that to name our dog Bandit was to merely steal someone else’s dog name, the people who made the TV show Jonny Quest, it was theirs, their intellectual property, and thus entirely unoriginal if not wrong of us to copy them; we might as well name the dog Lassie. Tim persisted and so I suggested that we name him something else from within the Jonny Quest fanverse that would be both an homage to our love of the show during that golden time (as we were already beginning to age out of it) as well as a subtly ironic take on pop culture. I don’t think I used the phrase “subtly ironic take on pop culture,” I think I might have s
aid it would be an “inside joke.” My brother, whose name is Tim, as I said, and who today is an insurance broker in Dallas, and who is a year younger than I, would have nothing of it; he wanted to name our dog Bandit, even though he wasn’t a bulldog, he was a Lab. But I continued in my insistence that it was ridiculous to name him Bandit, and everyone would think we were dolts, and that if he wanted to name him Bandit that I would from that day on have nothing to do with the animal. Parents were brought in and in the end I prevailed because I was the oldest; I believe that tears may have been involved. Whether you’re right or wrong it’s important to stand your ground and fight for what you believe in. But maybe I take these things too much to heart. Or is that simply what an Artist is? Someone who takes everything to heart? Am I an Artist? These days art is nothing but an alternative currency created for the purposes of money laundering. Walking east on Pico past blocks and blocks of Korean businesses, with signs in Korean and no English anywhere, I realize that if I had my phone with me I would call my brother and perhaps, if he failed to recognize my number and actually answered, I would apologize to him for being so insistent about naming our dog Race. That’s exactly what I would do. After all, what would it have mattered in the final analysis if we had named him Bandit? The animal is no longer around. A few years after we got him, when we were ten and eleven, Race was hit by a car and killed instantly. That’s what we were told. Much later, when I was in college and we had gone out and had a few beers together, my father told me the truth, which was that Race indeed had been hit by a car, yes, but he was not killed instantly at all, in fact he was writhing around in the middle of the street, and that Mr. Manning, our next-door neighbor in Canfield, had come out and yelled at my dad to do something about it, and my dad didn’t know what to do. He had tried to pick up the dog but Race was so crazed that he bit my dad on the hand, and my father was freaking out about that, so the neighbor went into his garage and came back with a sledge hammer and he smashed our dog’s skull with it, putting him out of his misery. Then the two men quickly put the dog in a bag and tossed him in the trash and hosed down the street before Tim and I got home from our tennis lessons. It was a Sunday. We were upset to hear that Race had died, Tim especially, me less so, as I remember it. But I’ve always had a sixth sense when it comes to lies, and I knew that something about my dad’s story didn’t add up. I don’t know why, but I knew that Race had not been taken away by the police to be buried behind the police station, that didn’t make sense to me, and so I looked in the trash and that’s when I saw the bloody bag. I didn’t open the bag but I knew there was a dead and mangled dog in it, I just knew. At first I didn’t say anything to Tim about it but then I realized he should know, it might help him deal with his grief. That night I went into his room and told him that Race was in a plastic garbage bag in the trash can that would be emptied out Monday morning, if he didn’t believe me he could go and look at it. Tim got up and we took a flashlight outside. It was late. I stepped back while Tim went up to the can and stood there, hesitating. He stood there for a minute debating, I guess, whether or not he really wanted to see his dead pet, and then turned back and looked at me.
