Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9B

  The Therapist was late. The Father sat in the waiting room, watching the second hand skate hastily past the strike of twelve. And following it, scores of seconds after, the minute hand, clicking once and twice and twenty times more until she was no longer early or on time, something The Father would have preferred, she was late.

  The Father didn’t count on having time to think. He didn’t count on anything. He and The Mother hadn’t discussed this at all. It had always been something they were meaning to bring up, but like a spiraling debt, there seemed no convenient time to say what was really going on and to make some kind of a plan.

  He had no idea what he was doing.

  “Hi,” a calm voice said to his right.

  The Father hated it when he had to turn to talk to people. It always made him feel off guard like the person could say or do anything and he wouldn’t have the balance to object.

  “You must be Korine’s father,” the woman said, speaking so soft and innocent that it was as if she were completely stupid to what was going on. “Forgive me,” she said, extending her hand, “I’m Korine’s therapist. My name is….”

  He saw her mouth move. He watched how her lips curled and curved when she spoke her name and he noticed too, how part of her top lip stuck to her teeth and how she brushed it with her tongue so as to set it free. For her, it would have been a reflex and it would have been in no more than an instant but for The Father, he felt time slowing down and he wasn’t bothered by the things she was saying or about her, the countless things that were going on.

  “I can’t imagine how you are feeling,” said The Therapist.

  “That’s exactly how I feel” thought The Father, unable to speak.

  The two walked down a long corridor. Everything was colored and painted. There were rainbows on every wall and beneath them were two large gum trees and a giant sprawling oak with gigantic roots that stuck out like a fighter’s veins and were taller than a house and longer than a dried up river bed.

  And there were birds tweeting and flapping their wings, flying up high in the sky and some, soaring down low to the little flowers that were just opening their petals. And there were little bees that were buzzing about and they were waiting on those petals to open with the same want as the children whose eyes stared out of the windows that looked like glass boxes, hanging from the limbs of a tree. Their inquiring stares followed The Father as he walked down the corridor, having the courage to stare each one longingly, for none of them were Korine.

  “Are they all here for the same reason?” asked The Father.

  “As Korine?”

  She paused.

  “All of the children here are the same. They are the same as every child in the world. It’s just; these children are passing through some difficulty, yes, like Korine. And all of them just want what every child wants, to go home; to be happy and to play.”

  The Father moved his head to the left and right as if he were negating her address. The walls were decorated in the colors and the life of spring, yet on the ends of every branch were the glass boxes that housed the wintered expressions of children, who were not as others. These were the looks and expressions of old men, those of who, at the end of their lives, had not a thing in common with the smiling and wondrous youth, who passed them on by.

  “Are they better? Any of them?” he asked.

  “Better takes time,” she said, touching her soft hand on the back of his.

  Time felt different.

  “No tree flowers until it has seasoned,” she said smiling.

  At the end of the corridor, there was a door. It wasn’t painted. It wasn’t even guarded. A door like this, without a guard, assumed that for those without exception, this door was more often a wall and a means for elaborate dreaming of escape, but never actually a way out.

  The Therapist entered a seven digit code and the large clunking sound of a heavy elaborate lock turning, sank The Father deeper into his dire reality until finally, it seemed like he was at the reigns of a mind and a body that had been on auto pilot for so long. And he had no idea what to do?

  “Are you nervous?” asked The Therapist.

  The Father was white. He looked lost and without an owner.

  “It’s ok,” she said, holding his clammy hand. “She’s not expecting anything more than her father. She wants more than anything, just to see you. And she is ready. She has seasoned. And I’m sure she is as nervous as you are. Excited and scared all packed up into a ball of giddy nerves.”

  The way she looked into his eyes, he had absolutely no defense.

  They entered a room with very little color, not like the rest of the clinic. Here, the walls seemed bigger than the ones outside. They looked dull and overcast. But unlike the larger bird being picked on by the bonnet of The Father’s car, here it was obvious that the smaller more colorful birds would be pinioned, should they ever raise their hands in protest. For here, the grey overcast walls cast a shadow so long that one was left astute and without imaginings.

  The Father sat beside The Therapist.

  The seat in front was empty.

  “So, how do you feel,” she said before pausing.

  She reached her hand to his knee. Her touch, it was so soft that had he not been looking, he would hardly have known it there. Her touch felt like a light breeze on sunburned skin. His skin shivered and the hurt that swelled the nerves beneath, somewhat subsided.

  “Really,” she said, leaning in as if almost to kiss him, “how do you feel?”

  The Father wet his lips.

  “I’m scared,” he said.

  The Therapist smiled. She took his hands in her own and she held them in a gentle bind; firm enough for them to be captured and free enough to breathe.

  “Fear is normal, nothing to build a wall around. We’re all scared. If you weren’t, there would be a problem. Fear, it’s our gauge. It lets us know that we are living. It helps us to keep alive, ourselves and the people that we care about the most. It helps us measure the distance between having love and being without it. The greater the fear, the closer you are to something beautiful.”

  “My wife and I, we haven’t really talked about what happened. I try to bring it up every now and then, but she acts like there’s nothing wrong and then we fight.”

  “And the therapy? How is it?”

  “I went once. I didn’t go again after that. My wife, she’s there every night. I just kind of sit outside until she’s done and then we go home.”

  “You didn’t like the group?”

  “I didn’t like myself, in the group´.”

  The Therapist smiled. Her two hands were still cusped around The Father’s except now, one of her thumbs, from her right hand, gently brushed back and forth against the side of The Father’s hand, as if it were a broken wing.

  “Continue. It’s ok” she said.

  The last time the Father had felt this way was when he was in school. A group of other kids had been messing around and setting traps for other kids walking buy. The Father was a part of their group, but he was not a part of their circle.

  Then one day, a child got hurt.

  And it wasn’t a joke anymore.

  The Father was called to the headmaster’s office. He sat there in the headmaster’s office, before the police came in and the headmaster, she talked to him, kind of the same way that The Therapist was talking to him now. She asked him questions and she listened. More importantly, she didn’t accuse him of anything.

  The Father was scared that day, not because he thought the other boys might hit him, but because he didn’t want them to kick him out of their group. He didn’t want to be left alone. And he told her everything. It was really hard to say the truth, just because it wasn’t something that people normally did.

  “I didn’t really see any of them getting better. The ones in the group. They were all so…”

  “So what?”

  “So fucking miserable,” said The Father.

  “Isn’t that to
be expected? They’ve all gone through some kind of loss.”

  “Yeah but… Some of these guys, I mean, I listened to a few stories and they date back quite a while, you know what I mean? It’s years down the track and they’re still there crying away as if it had just happened like…..”

  “Like you?” she said calmly, squeezing his hand.

  “Yeah. Like me. Like us. If the therapy works then why the hell are they still there?”

  “I guess they feel they need it. It works for them. It helps them to manage with the loss. It helps them to move on.”

  “None of them have moved on. It’s like they’re addicted, you know? You see them, they all tell their stories and they’re so fucking sad that even a fucking psychopath will be looking up at the ceiling you know. And then, everyone goes and hugs them and tells them that everything’s gonna be ok. And they get fucking coffee and biscuits and… They fucking hangout together, outside of group, you know? That’s kind of fucked up. If the life you build for yourself, the companions you keep, if what keeps you together is suffering. That’s fucked up. And they’re trying to get my wife into all of this. You know this camping and retreat shit.”

  “You don’t think more time healing will help?”

  “This isn’t healing. This is steeping in fucking depression. They’re death merchants. That’s what they do. They deal in death. You wanna be in their club; someone you know has to die. They don’t wanna get better.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Because feeling like shit feels really fucking good.”

  “You can’t expect to just feel good straight away.”

  “It has to happen at some point, though.”

  “How do you think that can happen? Do you have a plan?”

  “I think, you know, the premise is right. It’s just… you see for yourself. They’re all addicted. Maybe not to feeling bad and thinking about their dead kids but you see them, the looks on their faces when they’re consoled. That’s the point you know. That’s what they’re addicted to. The hugging and the shushing and the, ‘It’ll get better soon’ and the, ‘We’re with you’ and the, ‘You’re not alone’ and the, ‘You’re so brave’. All of that. Brave? You got no fucking choice.”

  “You don’t think they have a choice? To go to therapy? To face their sadness? To deal with it? You don’t think they’ve made a choice?”

  “Maybe. I don’ know. Maybe the first day. They decided, you know what, fuck you and you’re good advice, I’ll go along to shut you up. That’s what got me along. But I tell ya, the second they felt that warm embrace, there was nothing to be afraid of anymore there was no reason to be brave. “

  “That’s a bit dark. A bit pessimistic don’t you think? Do you really think someone would put themselves through that torture, to live that hell – and you know what I’m talking about more than anyone. Do you think someone would relive that, night after night if they didn’t think it would help?”

  “They’re not looking for a cure. They don’t wanna get better. They have what they need. It’s no different to those guys that climb mountains. They train for years and suffer horrendously so they can put their mind and body through absolute hell. But it’s worth it when they get to the top and they look out and see the world, so vast and significant. All of their problems that every morning and every night bury them like six feet of dirt. It was all so small, all so far away - all so insignificant. And I think they all feel that. They tell their stories. And each time, you know they get better at it. More articulate, more emotional. They might even change some things. It’s pretty hard, you know, over time, to know the difference between what you went through, what you saw and at your brain is showing you, to fill in the gaps. Everything in nature. It repeats. The more it repeats, consistently, the better it gets. And when there’s some threat, it evolves, for its survival, to get, at the end of the day; it’s fruit so that it can see its problems small and insignificant.”

  “Are you the threat?”

  “We were. In a way. I think for most of them, definitely, a new couple is a threat. The people who listen, they are just as worse as those speaking. They sit with their fucking eyes wide watching as if their words were whiskey filling a glass. They get drunk on one another’s depression. They love it. Sadness, it makes people better. When people are sad, they are less like the pushy demanding assholes that they need to be at work or in traffic. Nobody likes a pushy asshole but to deal with one, you have to be a pushy asshole and worse than dealing with a pushy asshole is feeling like one. Depression, though, you see people, when there’s some kind of tragedy. A plane crash. A fucking earthquake. A landslide or even some wacko shooting up a fucking library or a fucking nursery or something. When that shit happens, those people who yesterday were arrogant pushy assholes pushing around other pushy assholes, they stop. They stop being complete pricks. They stop sneaking in and out of traffic like fucking dogs, poking their heads into one another’s bowls. They stop. They stop leaving their bloody trolleys behind other people’s cars. They stop honking their horns and they stop returning movies late and making up stupid excuses when they do. They stop being assholes. Kids stop picking on other kids. Their mums and dads stop pretending it’s not happening and they actually sit with them and ask them questions and they fucking listen, they actually fucking listen. They stop. They stop being assholes for one fucking day. Or two, or three or four. They stop, though. Because they’re sad. They feel sad for the people in the plane. They feel sad for the families of the people in the plane. They feel sad for their own family, imagining if their mothers or fathers or their children or siblings were in that plane and they imagine what it would be like not having them at all. And husbands and wives kiss and parents hug and kiss their children and brothers ring sisters not because someone died, but because it would be shame, in case someone ever did. And people start acting decently. They start acting kind and wonderful and caring and their words sound soft and congealing like little fucking kisses. And they say I love you. And yeah, they said it a million times before. But they say it with the urgency of a last time, filling the words like a balloon with the thought of the person they are saying it too being dead or dying or gone or going away and knowing they’d never come back. And it feels good, the first time. Cause sadness, its fucking empathy. Sadness is love. Sadness is caring. It’s fucking consideration. You don’t think it feels good to be considerate?”

  “Well, of course. Kindness feels…” she said pausing and squeezing The Father’s hand tighter. “It feels, complete.”

  “Are you married? Do you have a boyfriend?”

  The Therapist blushed.

  “No,” she said, her hand trembling slightly as she cleared her throat.

  “The first time I told my wife I loved her, I remember clear as day. I think I’d felt it for a while you know. Emotion, it’s like a fucking charge. You dive into something, someone, some whatever and you charge. Your gut, your mind, your soul, whatever the hell you wanna call it, it fills like a tank and all that energy, it has to go somewhere. I think for a few months I felt this way with my wife. I tried to you know, to vent, to channel this energy somewhere. I couldn’t say those words, though. So I started being subtle you know? Lots of metaphors and euphemisms and shit. I think I found a thousand ways to say I love you in a thousand and one different tongues, but none of them were the right fit, none of them could unlock that energy. Then one day I said it. I love you. I said it, and it would have only been a fraction of a second before she said I love you too. To me, though, I lived a folly of suspense and torture inside that fraction of a second. I was more awake and self-aware in that instant than most people are their whole fucking lives. I felt naked and exposed and weak and vulnerable and stupid. I felt like being in the ocean, just floating beside my boat and not being able to see land, only the slight difference between the sky and the sea. And you know, floating there and having no idea how deep the water is, and what’s swimming below and between my kicking
legs. I felt that just as I said the words. And I felt cold, not freezing, just a chill. All that energy had left me, in a second. And it was with her. And I remember when she told me, that she love me too. It was only a second later but when she said it, my heart fucking exploded. The coldness I felt giving her my energy, it was gone, like that. My blood warmed, my heart felt like it was expanding. It felt like a balloon would feel if it stopped to think about it, the first time it is blown up. Like, maybe the balloon had been in its packet for months or even years, stored on some shelf or in a kid’s back pocket. Then one day, out of nowhere, it’s filled with a child’s exhilaration and it expands and it never knew it could ever do that and it never knew it could ever feel like this and it floats around on the ceiling looking down at the bag that it came from and everything it knew seemed so small and insignificant. My heart felt like that balloon. It was incredible.”

  The Therapist had never felt this, not from another woman.

  For this, she yearned, though.

  And she warmed her heart upon The Father’s hands.

  “After that day, though, it never felt that same, never. We said those words all the time. I’d say I love you. She’d say I love you more. I’d tell that’s impossible and she’d say I didn’t love her like I used to. Then I’d get mad and she’d laugh cause that’s what she wanted all along and she’d say I love you again and so would I and we’d say a hundred billion times and never, ever, would it ever sound like the first time. There was no energy. There was no reason to say, except to be polite or to affirm something that we assumed as true. Like saying, I am alive or I breathe oxygen. It doesn’t stop it from being true and it wouldn’t, if you stopped breathing, do anything about it. It’s like we assume, you know as people that we can just say those words and then someone will feel the intention and the meaning. But without the energy, without the love, there is no intention, there is no meaning. It’s just a word. It’s the same for everyone. People just talk and live out of meaning, out of context. They say shit like it’s supposed to mean something. Like here” he said, flicking his hand as if he were shelling rusted pennies to the floor “take these words and feel better, feel loved, feel learned, feel important, feel influential, feel belonged. I love you, I’m sorry, I miss you, I didn’t mean it, it’ll never happen again. All this shit. When I said those words to my wife, the first time, she heard it. She felt it. Like a baby crying. It has something to fucking say before it opens its mouth and just fires that energy. And a baby never speaks unless it has something to say but my wife and I, we said I love you as if we were writing blank cheques. And the cheques, they never got banked. They just piled up with all the other shit we said and didn’t mean and planned to do but never did. We built a fucking economy out of empty words.”

  “You love her, though, yes”

  She spoke like a child, looking to a weary traveler and brushing aside his stories of icy death and frost bitten toes and regrettable and unexplainable cannibalism in the nether of North Pole to ask and be sure as only a child would that “Santa Claus is real, though, yes. You saw him? He’s there, isn’t he?

  And how could you say no?

  “No,” he said. “I loved her. Now I’m not sure. I don’t think so. If this is love, if this is what it feels like, then the universe has spun, the wrong feelings are attached to the wrong words. And if this is love that you speak of, then give me torture and humiliation and give me fucking ridicule. And please, make me your slave; give me just enough will to dream of my escape and then cripple with your consideration, so I never even try. If this is love, what I’m feeling; then heal me.”

  The Therapist let go of his hands as if she had been told, there was nothing but ice.

  “I felt it, though, one more time, love, the way I felt it before when we first said it.”

  The Therapist’s eyes lit up.

  It could be real after all.

  “After what happened…” he paused.

  He lowered his head.

  She took his hand again.

  “After what happened, I remember holding her. And I’d never felt this way before, like everything, the world around me was peeling, like the skin of my world was coming apart and my nerves felt so exposed that the slightest breath or even compassion, it stung and it made me shiver and not in a good way. It made me want to curl into a dark place and it didn’t matter what the consequence might have been. Everything just felt wrong. And I know she felt the same. She told me a million times afterwards, that I could never feel the same way she did. But I remember she was crying, not wailing, not like at the funeral. This was when we are alone, just the two of us. She looked still like she was bored. She wasn’t though. And I said it. I said it because I felt it. I told her I loved her and I felt that feeling again, like my soul was a lake of ice and I was skidding away from my own body. And I remember seeing the warmth in her eyes and she said it too, not with her words, but with the way she squeezed me and scrunched the hair on back of my neck and the way she gritted her teeth and then after, the way she cried and how long she cried for, without letting go.”

  The Therapist sniffed.

  She wiped her nose and beneath her eye.

  “That’s beautiful,” she said.

  “That was the start. The start of something sick. Something that seemed so considerate but was really sick. You know, the only reason I felt that love, the only reason we felt that way again was because of what happened. If that hadn’t of happened, we would be as we were, like two planets drifting further from the orbit of our hearts and our passion, slowly becoming cold and placate, unable to sustain life. Then that happened. And I felt so guilty. I felt like killing myself right then and there. I still do, when I think of it and when I look around my house and the room where it happened and when I think of Korine and being here today; I think of killing myself. And all of that, the guilt and hurt and suffering and blame, it filled me and I told her, I love you. And before, the first time, it was passion and want and need and desire and the fear of being without. That was the emotion, the energy that expanded my soul. But this, this was the contrary. It was considerate yeah, but it was dark brooding depression. It was a child not wanting to be alone. It was an injured puppy, shaking in the freezing cold. It was sadness. It was ‘Save me’. It was ‘Take me home’. It was impossible to ignore. And it appealed to the cavalier in my wife’s heart. She listened and she understood and she felt overwhelmed by the storm of my heart. And she felt loved. But it wasn’t love. It wasn’t love. And she says it now like we used to say it before when we used to secretly and subconsciously try to reenact whatever the hell it was that made us feel that way. Fighting would always do it, the threat or the fear of being apart. My fear now is what next? If the reason I love her is because of what happened, what happens next? That fucking scares me.”

  “You think she will do something bad?”

  “I think she’s already doing it. I don’t think she’ll hurt anyone. But I think she’s hurting herself so that she can feel loved again. She goes to those meetings and they’re all sending out the same signal. There’s no love there. There’s desperation and loneliness and guilt and blame. It’s disguised as recovery and bravery and strength, but its debilitating, it’s meant to keep them on their knees. She’s there because she wants to feel the same way she felt before, without having to hurt anyone. They’re all like that. They are addicted to the depression. They are addicted to trying to rationalize their hurt and call they call it healing. It’s fucked up.”

  The Therapist let go of his hands.

  They fell into her lap and like a dead spider, her once long and lively fingers, so slender and milky white, they curled into the palms of her hands, all crooked and twisted and colored red and pink and veiny. It was as if her last hope and all that she had worked herself to believe, what everyone around her had educated her to know as true, was a deception, a cunning elaborate lie.

  Santa Claus was not real.

  He never was.

&
nbsp; And the world had lied to her.

  Her mother and her father, they had both lied to her.

  Her professor, she had lied to her.

  And her patients, who called this healing, they had also lied to her.

  And Santa Claus was not real.

  She sat back in her chair and her look was no longer considerate.

  “Good morning everyone,” said The Doctor, standing by the open door. “What a wonderful morning. How are we?” he said jovially, speaking through his big white beard and laughing at the tail of every word with his merry hands holding back the swirl of his back fat belly. “Who feels great today?” he said.

  The Therapist turned.

  Her eyes were blurred and her cheeks blotched with her running makeup.

  The Doctor smiled wider.

  The Therapist clutched her face and screamed and ran out.

  If there was a bed somewhere in a room that could be locked and that room was hers, she would be on that bed, in that room, hidden beneath the covers and safe behind a locked door.

  “Is she ok? What happened?” asked The Doctor.

  The Father felt his stomach sink.

  It sounded like an engine, crashing through an elevator shaft.

  And a terrible thud, echoed in his mind.

  “Dada,” said Korine, letting go of The Doctor’s hand and throwing hers around her father.

  He sat there while his daughter wept and laughed and giggled and clung to him. She clung to him as if she knew that if she ever let go, she would never be found again.

  The Father looked to The Doctor.

  “What happens next?” he asked.

  “You go home,” said The Doctor.

  The girl was pinching him, digging her nails into the fat around his waist.

  “And then what?”

  “You go on living.”