The Paper Shepherd

by Olivia Landis

  Salome picked an onion ring out of her stiff paper basket and pulled it apart with her long, acrylic finger nails. She stared at Renee, swirling pepper around in her ketchup. Since around Christmas, Salome had a new mission. Sure that her friend’s near total social isolation was not helping her with her mental problems, she rearranged her classes so that their lunch periods overlapped every day of the week. At first, Renee insisted that she needed that time to study. However, now working only two nights a week, even she had to eventually admit she could afford to be less stingy with her time and could spare half an hour without an open text book in front. Sometimes, Sal could even stretch this into an hour and drag Renee down to the pond to watch the ducks waddle around confused on the frozen water. Every once in a while, she could almost see a smile form on her young friend’s full lips when one of the ducks quacked authoritatively at its mates only to slip comically moments later on the melting island of ice. Today, the third Tuesday in April, there was no ice and there would be no walks to the pond. Right after lunch, Renee had to run off to an appointment in the behavioral health clinic. To meet with that hottie, Dr. McLeod, Salome thought. Sal had seen Renee’s new friend Pat only briefly on the psychiatric ward when she stopped by to leave a book Renee had asked for. When she saw him once more the quad with Renee in February, she tried to communicate to him that he should ask her out, hoping a little human contact, the kind Sal could not provide, would make her friend feel valuable. But Pat appeared more interested in treating Renee as a patient and Renee, reluctant to both ideas, finally relented to his. Now in a doctor-patient relationship, there was no hope they’d get together. Too bad, Sal thought as Renee packed up her belongings for the long walk across campus. They would have made a cute couple.

  Renee sighed as she hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and got up from the picnic table. She wasn’t sure what she was getting out of these meetings with Pat McLeod, but she had to try something. She wasn’t depressed. Or at least, she didn’t feel what she thought depressed people felt. In fact, she felt very little. When she was released from the psychiatric ward fall semester, she tried to keep an open mind about Dr. Matthews but quickly felt his appointments were not addressing her actual problems. Then, she tried fixing things her own way—by going to confession every Sunday before mass. She had wanted to go ever since premiering at the Fox Tail but didn’t know exactly what it was she wanted to be absolved of. Mens rea, she remembered from studying for confirmation. She could not sin if she didn’t understand what the sin was. As upsetting as his visit had been, Max had conveniently defined the sin for her. She was tempting others. She was providing a near occasion to sin. Renee went to confession the very next Sunday and felt a weight was lifted off of her. For the next few days, she felt like a new person, hopeful, invigorated. But, Thursday night came, and she had to return to the Fox Tail. On Sunday, she went back to confession again. Thus, was her routine for the next six Sundays. On the seventh, the priest told her if she was truly sorry, she would quit her job. He made it clear he wouldn’t offer her absolution again until after she promised to stop working as an exotic dancer. Renee, acutely aware of each dollar in her checking account and which creditor or utility company it was destined for, could not comply with this demand. Instead, she stopped going to confession. Without confession, and now with a tangible label for what she had done to offend God, she stopped going to communion.

  November passed and then December. Renee sat dutifully, Sunday after Sunday in the third pew in the church, watching others go to communion while she, stains accumulating on her soul, could only sit and wait. She felt slighted. Didn’t Jesus, she thought, eat with Tax collectors and lepers and prostitutes? But, she knew the rules all too well. She was trapped. For, her rejection from being left out from God’s table paled compared to the fear that, one false step, and she too could have to drop out of school forever. Renee carried on with her job and with her plan to improve her own financial security. Around Christmas, however, she noticed something was wrong. Having saved almost all the money she needed for a safety net, her anxiety was gradually melting away. Unfortunately, it was not replaced by a feeling of wellbeing. Instead, there was just emptiness where the anxiety used to be. Something was missing from her—some spark of unconventional goodness she thought defined her. She tried to reclaim it by finding some compromise between safe guarding her finances and following the morals the Franklins had instilled in her. There must be some red line she would not cross to prove she was not simply driven by greed. All she could come up with was refusing to work on St. Valentine’s day, a holiday about divine love expressed through marriage. She had to admit to herself it wasn’t much of a stand, but I’m trying!

  Coincidentally, around the same time, Renee had also learned in one of her biology classes that as day length gets shorter, mammals are programmed to become depressed—an alteration of brain chemistry left over from when hibernation was still a practical way to spend the winter. Surely, if she just waited until the days got longer in the spring, she would feel better. She had two plans to combat this crevasse that had opened in her soul, one religious and one scientific. When she met Pat McLeod on the quad, she still held out hope one of them, or the two together, would make her meeting with him unnecessary. She stalled, asking if they could meet in a month, hoping to give her plans a chance to work. When March came, despite being on course for another straight A semester, she felt worse than ever.

  Renee switched her heavy bag from one shoulder to the other. She enjoyed meeting with Pat. She could tell him things she could never tell Salome, who always seemed offended whenever Renee was sad or seemed uncomfortable about work. Salome always seemed on the verge of accusing Renee of being ungrateful that Salome set her up with the gig in the first place. She made it clear she didn’t think there was a god for Renee to outrage by being an exotic dancer or to disappoint if she failed to get into veterinary school. Pat considered everything Renee said without judgment, as if nothing could shock him. Despite the stack of therapy manuals on his desk whenever Renee went by his office, he talked to her more like an older friend bestowing wisdom. She suspected that was not what therapy was supposed to be and feared him turning her over to a therapist in the clinic when his rotation was over. She had even come up with a fairly stupid, superstitious excuse for why he was the only one she believed could ever help her. Sometimes, when he sat quietly listening to her and bouncing his pen thoughtfully against his lips, she wished he could be more than a friend. Renee knew that was not what she needed. After all, she reflected, sex was not a remedy for depression or a remedy for anything. It was an expression of love between two people who loved one another, and she did not love Pat. Anyway, she thought practically, don’t want to get him kicked out of medical school for dating a patient. But, it might be an ego boost to know he wanted to. After all, she thought, the first time we met, I wasn’t a patient.

  45

  “Doesn’t she look beautiful, Max?” Eleanor Franklin asked, beaming at the blushing bride.

  “She looks like an angel,” Max replied with as much emotion as he could muster.

  Jen Caponata looked away, a bashful smile on her face, as she shook Max’s hand. Max and Eleanor Franklin had worked their way to the head of the receiving line at Jay and Jen Holstead’s wedding. It was a glorious summer day and the late July sky was a brilliant cloudless blue as the wedding guests filed out of St. Jude’s Roman Catholic Church. Max could not have been more precise about Jen’s appearance. In her slim A-line dress and her halo like head piece, she looked very much like an angel—or at least like depictions of angels in western European art work. She could easily have climbed atop the manger of the St. Jude’s Nativity scene with a trumpet bearing a banner saying Rejoice, Rejoice, Emmanuel, and no one would be the wiser.

  What Max did not say was that Jen was beautiful, for above all things he sought to be honest. There was no flaw in Jen’s appearance. Barbara had worked tirelessly that morning at the Beauty Palace to get eac
h golden curl placed perfectly on her head. Her makeup could not have been better applied by a professional movie makeup artist. There was no objective way in which Jen’s appearance could be improved, not even if she were to go under Dr. Alfred’s knife. But, nothing was beautiful to Max anymore. He could lie under trees for hours and appreciate the aesthetic balance of the colors of the blooms. He could draw symbolism out of the change in their appearance over the different seasons and write a three page essay about the transitions. But, he could not feel that they were beautiful. He could not feel anything.

  Max thought about Dr. Jobbing, his ninth grade biology teacher. Dr. Jobbing had been a neurologist before he retired from medicine and decided to teach high school. One day he taught the class about blind sight, the phenomena that occurs when a person’s eyes are intact but the part of the brain that processes sight consciously is damaged by injury or disease. The patients suffering from blind sight have no experience of seeing ever again, despite the fact that they can still walk around objects in their way and avoid obstacles. Max felt like he had been walking around blind for months now, only he was emotionally blind. The entire world was identical to the way it had always been, the colors just as vibrant, the movements just as precise. But, they had no meaning to him whatsoever.

  This change had started the previous fall but had occurred so gradually, Max barely noticed it except in hindsight. He walked past the buffet table at the reception picking out food that looked nutritive, but not seeing any that looked delicious. He looked at the shapes of the roses on the tables in the church hall and found himself classifying them according to how open they were and how dark a shade of pink they were; but, found them no more pleasurable to look at than the white table cloths or worn wooden floors.

  “Are you okay, son?” Eleanor asked, sitting next to Max at a reception table. He looked up at her confused, as if just awoken from a deep sleep.

  “Yes, mom. I’m fine,” he said quietly.

  Pat McLeod sat in Ruttiger Memorial Hall in the medical school at Brighton University balancing a bland turkey sandwich on his lap as he watched a slide presentation on irritable bowel syndrome. As he tried to inconspicuously nibble at his lunch, he reflected how thankful he was that this was the third and last time during his budding medical career that he would have to work for the internal medicine service, a discipline that considered multimedia presentations about gruesome diseases an acceptable way to spend the lunch hour six days a week. He had just begun his transitional internship at the hospital several weeks earlier. As was his typical practice when faced with such lectures, he let his mind wander. As usual, it eventually wandered onto the topic of Tiar Alfred. I hope she’s doing okay, he thought to himself earnestly. He had not seen her in over two months—not since she announced in mid-May that she was cured and would no longer be needing his services. Behind her smile, he was sure she was hiding a heart that was far from cured. Yet, he could not convince her to continue with therapy. It wasn’t really therapy, he reminded himself. Unlike the actual patients he had seen during that rotation, he did not discuss her with his supervisor or write notes about her. He did not assign her exercise from the therapy workbook. He did not have her check in with the front desk staff, to whom he had described Tiar as his sister who was visiting him once a week for lunch. What she needed, he judged, was a supportive friend to give her advice. He suspected she knew he set up the whole rotation as a ruse. He judged correctly she would not allow herself the luxury to talk to a friend an hour a week without at least the superficial pretense of academic instructions or medical orders. Poor sad girl.

  She visited him six times in an overlooked office in the behavioral health clinic filled with furniture that looked like it had been salvaged from a decommissioned World War II Navy vessel. After changing rotations, he met with her four more times in the cafeteria in a section that, due to its low ceilings, poor lighting, and rickety chairs, was chronically under utilized and offered reasonable privacy. She had disclosed almost every detail of her life to him. He imagined he knew more about her now then her own mother. She placed an odd, pseudo-religious trust in him that seemed to have nothing to do with medical training. She insisted, overly symbolically, that he was the only person she had met in years who could pronounce her name. She was convinced that he was the voice that called to her through cloud and darkness and brought her back to sanity. Tiar’s decision to stop meeting with him despite this almost superhuman power hurt Pat more then he cared to admit. But, there is nothing I can do to change that now, he thought as he sipped his can of soda.

  If Pat remembered correctly, Jen’s wedding should be coming soon. He was sure that would be a difficult event for Tiar and hoped she would weather the experience unscathed. The debate about whether to attend was one of the last topics they had discussed before the schism. The tension between them started with the cherry trees. He asked innocently why she always drew cherry tress in art therapy. Unfortunately, he had interpreted Tiar’s cryptic response I’m not ready to tell you yet, as an invitation to ask again in the future. She finally admitted, appearing quite ashamed, that she couldn’t remember why she drew them. All she could remember was that they were important. Somehow, they meant hope… or was it love? They meant something she was supposed to treasure. She had hoped drawing them would bring the memory back, but it hadn’t. It only reemphasized that there was something important and beautiful she had lost. Pat was not sure if this was true or another evasion. He was sure he had hurt her very badly by pursuing the topic and stopped asking. After all, he was not an art therapist. He was not a therapist at all. But, ostensibly, he was trying his amateur hand at cognitive behavioral therapy. So, he listened to Renee’s tales of woe and tried to break them down into their basic elements, showing her that she had built an erroneous reality for herself that lead her to judge herself and others in an unrealistically harsh manor.

  This lead to the second major point of tension between them. Pat, week after week, stumbled unwittingly into discrediting the source of Renee’s negative beliefs about herself. He tried to do this without attacking the Catholic Church, the inventor and keeper of the rules by which Tiar measured herself as sinful and damned. Pat knew it would be unhelpful and unethical to interfere with her faith in a church she still attended devoutly and turned to for strength. This left only one target, the man who lead Tiar to that church. Week after week, Pat tried to avoid attacking Maxwell Franklin but was eventually lead by his own logic and his own hatred to do so. It was a process Tiar refused to participate in. You win this round, Priest, Pat thought to himself with disdain. This time.

  Several hours later, Max left his mother with Mrs. Caponata and walked outside the church hall, desperately needing some fresh air. He didn’t belong here among all these happy wedding guests. It was a mockery for him to be here pretending he believed it was a good thing for people to get married. There wasn’t any work for him to do here. The whole purpose of him coming and dragging Eleanor along was... Well, at least Mom is having a good time, he thought. Rounding the back of the church, he found Matt and Prentice behind the church hall. Matt was smoking a cigarette.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” Max asked casually.

  “Hey, bud,” Prentice said, extending his hand to shake. “Your summers just keep getting shorter and shorter. How much longer do you have in school?” Matt offered Max a cigarette, which he shook off.

  “Two more years of school, and then a parish internship,” Max answered.

  “What’s a parish internship?” Prentice asked, seeming genuinely interested.

  “It’s basically like you’re a priest’s apprentice,” Max explained. “And the priest makes sure you are doing everything right.”

  “Cool. Would you do that back here?” Prentice went on. Oh, god, no, Max thought. He had made sure of that.

  “Well, a diocese has to sponsor you and pays for you to go to seminary,” he explained unemotionally. “Then you end up somewhere in that diocese working for the
m. So, since I had changed my diocese to central Ohio when I was an undergraduate, that’s where I applied from and where I’ll end up staying.”

  “Bummer,” Prentice said. “It would be awesome having you back here.” Matt snickered. “What’s wrong with you?” Prentice asked. Matt blew out a long line of smoke.

  “Nothing,” he said sheepishly.

  “You know what, you retard? I’m getting pretty sick of you,” Prentice said. “Come on, Max, want to take a walk?” Max nodded and followed Prentice around the back of the high school and onto the street.

  “What’s up with him?” Max asked. Prentice shook his head in frustration.

  “I donnoh. He’s just an idiot. I kept thinking he’ll grow out of it. But, I’m thinking I need some better people to hang out with. You know. Good guys, like you and Jay. I mean, I was no angel growing up, I know that. But, Matt still wants to be the class clown and school yard bully and I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re going to be a senior in college, you have to straighten out.’” Max listened in silence as they walked down Church Street to the park down town. He was intrigued. He always thought of Prentice and Matt as interchangeable parts, in cahoots on the basketball court, at parties, and in life. It was surprising to find out now that there was distance growing between the two of them. Max was now reminded of how different their reactions were the previous fall to finding out one of their high school classmates had become an exotic dancer. Prentice continued to rattle off his litany of objections.

  “You know, Matt wants to spend every weekend smoking pot and getting drunk and watching porn. I want to move on with my life. But, he was my best friend growing up. I don’t want to just forget about him, but he doesn’t want to change.”