A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  “It was as if I was in a trance that day. I wasn’t in a trance really —I was just so detached. I went to a Woolworth’s store and bought a toy gun. It became instantly real to me as I carried it to my car. I even drove home and got a kitchen knife before going to see Melanie. As I waited to see her, I wanted someone, anyone, to enter the waiting room so I could tell them to stop me. But no one came, and Melanie finally opened her door and invited me in. In fact, she told me to go in while she got coffee. I sat down on her couch, and put my jacket beside me with the gun in the pocket and the knife under it.”

  In the telling, my mouth is dry. I lick my lips and continue. As I tell this story, I am back in her office, and all the details, fresh, flood back into my mind, all the feelings flow back into my body. “State-dependent memory,” I note to myself, as if sitting in one of my classes. I glance at Blumenfeld, who waits for me to go on.

  “At first I could not speak at all. I think she said something like ‘What’s going on?’ When I finally did speak, I told her that I wanted to kill her and to kill her child, her daughter. I did not mention wanting to kill myself, I just put in her child instead of me. She asked me how, and I said, ‘With a gun.’ She asked if I had one with me, and I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘In your jacket pocket?’ she asked, and moved toward me, but I reached into the pocket in a flash. I saw a look of horror come over her when she could not stop me.”

  I am so wrapped in the details of memory that I do not look at Blumenfeld at all as I speak now. But I watch his gestures carefully and listen to his breathing. He stays perfectly still and his breathing continues in the same even rhythm.

  “The voices were strangely quiet after speaking constantly to me for days, and I didn’t know what to do next.” I lick my lips again, afraid to continue. But the words come fast, and I can’t stop talking.

  “She was so afraid. She fought for breath and then closed her eyes. I made her sit back in her chair. She did that. She closed her eyes and covered them. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or not. She kept asking me why, and I couldn’t answer. I felt only hate and detachment. I felt so detached, I couldn’t break my staring. I was so powerful and so utterly powerless. She asked if she could get a cigarette. I asked her where they were and told her I’d get them. But I felt too disconnected from my body to walk.”

  “You were already in pieces,” Blumenfeld remarks quietly.

  “I begged Melanie not to move. When finally I let her get up, I asked her to move slowly. She turned and looked at me, a look of despair. ‘What does it matter now?’ she asked me. I stared and watched her light a cigarette with trembling hands and close her eyes again. She gasped for breath and said softly, ‘I feel sick.’ I wanted desperately to stop what I was doing, but also did not want to turn back from something that had already cost us both so much.”

  Blumenfeld is quiet, his breathing very steady.

  “When Melanie looked up, she said, ‘Why, Annie, what have I done that you want to kill me?’ I did not answer. She repeated the question several times. I finally said, angrily, ‘Don’t you know?’ ‘No, tell me,’ she said quietly.”

  Blumenfeld waits as I pause. I look down on the black arm of the chair where I am sitting and suddenly remember looking down at the floral print on the arm of the sofa in Melanie’s office, wondering if she would listen.

  “I did not want to begin to talk, words seemed to have no meaning then, words seemed so treacherous to me. But I began to talk. I told her that she had come to me as a mother first, and had in fact promised me she would be a mother to me, and had taken that back. She had loved me and I had loved her, and then she had removed herself, becoming more and more ‘professional’ and distant. Then, abruptly, she stopped touching me and told me she would never touch me again. Then she pushed and poked at my hate as if there was nothing but hate and evil in me. I said, ‘Now you see it. This is it and it’s ugly, isn’t it?’ ‘No, it isn’t ugly,’ she said. I contradicted her, ‘Yes it is.’ But something shifted inside me suddenly, the first tiny movement. I thought I’d only kill myself. But that would hardly matter to her, it seemed. So I said, ‘If I killed your daughter, you would hate me.’ ‘I don’t hate you, Annie,’ she said softly. I didn’t believe her. ‘Look what I’m doing to you. You hate me all right.’ ‘No, I don’t hate you. I love you,’ she said.”

  Here Blumenfeld gasps. I follow, unthinkingly, taking in a great gulp of air, and suddenly find that I am shaking.

  “ ‘Shut up!’ I shouted at Melanie. ‘You are lying to me.’ And she was silent. Again she closed her eyes.”

  I pause, and my voice seems to echo in the dim room. I grasp the arms of the black chair. Blumenfeld’s polished shoes are marvelously still.

  “She looked up again and asked, ‘What about the past six years of work? What about your life?’ I thought her questions were only a trick though. I said, ‘I don’t need you. I can get up and leave. I don’t have to wait for you to send me away.’ She looked at me again with despair. Then I made my slip: ‘I could leave you and it would mean nothing to you.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Do you want to know what it would mean to me?’ I said nothing and she went on. She told me that she had loved me and had never worked so hard to be able to continue to care. I did not move. I did not know what to believe.”

  “You mean you did not know, of all the things she was telling you, which to believe?” Blumenfeld asks.

  “Yes. And there was a long silence after that. She said, ‘I really didn’t understand you. I really didn’t listen to you.’ It was the first thing she’d said the whole session that I could believe. I mean I felt this was true, but I didn’t know if she meant it.”

  Blumenfeld lets out a sigh, and goes back to breathing in an even rhythm.

  “I told her that I wasn’t going to let her abandon me. I wasn’t coming back, and the only way to be sure of that was to kill myself. ‘There’s another alternative, Annie,’ she said. ‘Put the gun over there, please,’ she said. I did not move, and then she added, ‘I love you.’ I didn’t know what to think. I kept looking at her, and then I remembered that she had loved me once. Abruptly, I put the gun aside and showed my knife too. She didn’t know I had the knife under my jacket, and I saw another look of horror. I told her that she could hate me and send me away. ‘Do I look like I hate you?’ she asked me. I looked and I could not tell. She asked me that question again, and I felt tears forming on my cheeks. She sat back and opened her arms, ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘I want to hold you.’ It was my turn for shock and fear. I felt a terrible longing and a terrible fear, and utter disbelief. I told her she was setting me up. I called her a liar. I screamed it at her. She opened her arms and said again, ‘I want to hold you, I want to take in some of your hurt.’ I screamed at her that she had taken away all touch and now she would offer this to take it away yet again. She told me that she had been wrong and she would not do that again. ‘And I won’t send you away,’ she added. I looked at her, her arms open, her eyes open and full. And I felt deeply confused. ‘Are you the same person I saw in the beginning? Are you the same person?’ I asked the same question over and over, and she nodded each time. I tried to understand, but could not. I tried to get up and could not.”

  “So, the little pieces, they recognized her as the mother they knew in the beginning, and still they could do nothing at all?” Blumenfeld asks.

  “Yes, nothing at all. And then Melanie said, ‘Do you want me to come to you?’ I felt a pain from inside my body and screamed, and she gathered me up on the couch and held me close, and still I screamed. I heard her say softly, ‘Oh my God.’ Then she told me to hold on to her: ‘Put your arms around me. Hold on tight, Annie,’ as if we were shipwrecked and drowning. I clung to her and cried. It hurt horribly to be held again. I felt her hands stroking my hair and cheek. I buried my face and felt her breast against me. Old anguish, longing. I wondered if I was dreaming. And all this time the voices had been silent. Now there were only the sounds of my crying. Melanie to
ld me that she didn’t know how much she had hurt me. She thought it would help not to touch me. She talked for a long time but I don’t remember what she said after those first words. I cried and cried, as if I would never stop. Nothing could comfort me then.”

  I feel my jaw tighten and my face go hard against the impending memory of this. Blumenfeld’s breathing slows down.

  “I felt afraid that I had forced her into a false choice and said so, but she said no. She asked me to look at her and I couldn’t. She lifted my chin and looked at me, as she had done years before. Brief glances, but long enough for me to see her compassion. I think it was real compassion. She leaned over and kissed me gently on the forehead. I was incredulous, stunned. She began to prepare me to leave, asking me if I had friends to stay with. She told me that she wanted me to live and to come back, and again that she loved me. ‘We survived this, Annie. You played out your worst fantasy and we survived it. Now there’s nothing left but good in you.’ I sobbed again, shaking my head no, and heard my teeth chattering in my fear. She said that she would write some things down for me. She would see me the next day and she would call me that night. I got up and put my gun, which for the first time I knew was a toy, and my knife into my backpack.”

  “No, it was not a toy. It was very real,” Blumenfeld reminds me. Again I find that I am shaking.

  “Melanie handed me a note. I stuffed it into my pocket without reading it, and began to walk to the door. The air seemed solid, heavy. Walking was very difficult, but I made it out to my car. I sat there and my teeth chattered, my knees shook. And it was so quiet. I waited for a long time, and then I drove home.”

  A silence grows in the room. I wonder what time it is, but don’t look at the clock. Blumenfeld is perfectly still.

  “You were trying to heal her, weren’t you, Annie?” he asks.

  His question seems so unlikely that I ask him to repeat it.

  “You were trying to heal her, Annie,” he says, stating it as a sentence.

  I know that he has caught something, something rare and real, in his fine net. I throw it back into the water and continue as if I have not heard him.

  “I knew when she called me that night, and again the next day, that she was very frightened. You see, I know what it feels like to know your life is at stake, and I knew I had made her feel that. I wondered if she would refuse to see me any longer. And ten days after this session, I met with Melanie for the last time. She called me two days before we were to meet and suggested that I bring a friend. I knew then that it would be our last session. In the ten days and nights before this session, I lived in dread, an unspeakable dread haunted by voices. My skin burned so badly at night that I could not sleep. Friends stayed with me. Sarah held me so that I could fall asleep. I kept telling her that Melanie was afraid and that she would abandon me. She kept saying, ‘No, you don’t know that.’ ”

  “But you knew; your body knew,” Blumenfeld says.

  “That day Melanie and I were not even alone to say goodbye. She brought her therapist, and I came with Sarah. Melanie looked at me across the waiting room, a long measured look, and I saw that every connection had been severed. Inside her office, she told me that she would not see me again, that I had ‘violated and betrayed’ her. And I had. I knew that. She said that she had searched for a way to continue to work with me, but she could not work in fear. She said, ‘You are dangerous to yourself and to others.’ I sat in shame, letting her words pour in.”

  “As if they were true,” Blumenfeld says sadly.

  “Yes. And her face was a mask, her eyes hard. Her therapist told me that she was not abandoning me, that I had severed the relationship myself.”

  “That was the blackest lie of all!” Blumenfeld spits out.

  I begin to cry again, and continue, “And then I had nothing left, no pride at all. So I begged her forgiveness, and asked her not to leave me. But she was immovable. So we left one another like that, a severing without any goodbye.”

  “And then?” Blumenfeld asks.

  “Sarah took me to another friend’s house nearby. I entered what felt like a waking nightmare. My friends and my sister stayed with me. I don’t remember it very clearly. I think sometime in the late afternoon they called a psychiatrist I had seen when I was an adolescent. I knew I had already begun a long journey into oblivion, and I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t protest very much when, late in the day, they drove me to a psychiatric hospital. Once I was there, I felt so completely defeated. I remember sitting on a stiff hospital bed in one of those thin hospital gowns after they’d left, tearing at the plastic wristband, just terrified of myself. I wanted to scrape my skin off my arms. And then I did feel hate for Melanie, hate mixed up with longing, longing with the ground of trust ripped away, love itself poisoned by something, something so completely—what? False? One of the nurses tried to rub my back, as if she knew me, and maybe she did, maybe that wasn’t even the same night. I am confused about time. But her hands could not ease my anguish. And so I slipped over into madness.”

  “And you tried so hard to heal Melanie,” Blumenfeld says.

  “No. I tried to hurt her, to kill her. She was right. Don’t you see that I tried to kill her? I was the one who severed the relationship.” My body is tense, poised for blows.

  “You were trying to bring her a truth—you were trying to show her that all these promises she made to you and withdrew from you were killing you. You brought her the core of yourself, Annie, so that you could heal her and continue your relationship and be free to love again,” Blumenfeld says slowly.

  A quiet sound, my tears and his breathing together, as the world hangs still. I desperately want to believe him. Then my whole body relaxes in his chair.

  “Can I believe you? Can I believe in her first response, when she said she hadn’t been listening to me, when she knew it and saw the horror of it, and held me?” I ask.

  “Yes, that was her bravest moment with you, and even if she retreated from it later, you can believe in it, Annie.”

  I look at his desk and see that I have gone just a few minutes over.

  As I leave him, I turn and hold his gaze. Standing framed in the doorway, he nods to me, a little nod from this ordinary middle-aged man who must be real after all, because he sees with his heart.

  Galle and Erin and Emily, and others, and still others, watch and listen from within and nod too. I feel the fluttering of whispers within, as if a message is being passed down a long passageway. Someone is singing a Gregorian chant as I go out into the sunlight to meet Sarah.

  The poet Pamela Hadas says the self is “any true I” in a story, the true I being the one that can say with conviction, “I am alive,” or, with trust in her own vision, “The emperor wears no clothes.”

  Blumenfeld listens to me as if I am not only creditable, but an extraordinarily trustworthy narrator, a “true I.” Since I do not fully credit myself at this time, not knowing what to believe, it is critical that someone else can. I have held a story alone, a story that contains forbidden knowledge, a story I was not able to tell without recourse to madness. But as I bring this story to Blumenfeld, something about the story itself begins to change. As I listen to him, my own words start to surprise me, so that I discover, at the edge of the unspeakable, myself—as a “true I” speaking to him.

  Yet in my efforts to defend Melanie, in my repeated denials of her fear, of her invitation to me, of the monstrosity of her abandonment, I seem to be saying to Blumenfeld, “Forgive the teller for giving up her truths.” But perhaps because there was no sign of forgiveness, no understanding that might have made forgiveness possible from the person I wanted it from, I also seem to be saying to Blumenfeld, “I alone have escaped to tell you.”

  And Blumenfeld listens. As he listens not only to what I say, but also to what is yet unspeakable, he alone is able to hold together my “self” and a coherent story—which is, after all, a coherent world, one worth living in. Where we are joined, Blumenfeld and I, is at th
e tattered edges of my story, the rips and gaps in it. He seems to notice the places where I cannot claim my own most profound experiment in relationship—in this story, the attempt to “heal” my beloved therapist. It will be months and years of telling and retelling this story, playing with Blumenfeld along the tattered edges of it, before I understand my story in a new way.

  52

  After this session, I lie on the wooden swing on the screened-in front porch of the house where I am staying. The trees, charcoal-penciled against a monstrous drapery of dark clouds, strain in the wind. And then it begins to rain. The swing rocks me to and fro, weightless in cooler and warmer pockets of air. The storm—lightning and thunder playing to a crescendo—breaks overhead. Rain pounds the roof of the house, and the storm within me also breaks upon me. I cry and cry.

  Mary comes over for dinner that night, and after dinner we decide to bake a chocolate cake. When we go shopping for the ingredients, and I remind her to get “eight inches of sour cream” for the sour cream fudge frosting, she laughs. “Don’t you mean eight ounces?” “Sometimes ounces are inches,” I quip. And I laugh with her because I can hear my mistakes with words so clearly. I can play with words, not only with Blumenfeld in his office, but with my sister again.

  I dream of Melanie lying on Blumenfeld’s couch, or rather floating just inches above his couch, her eyes closed. I can see her dreams in images that appear in cartoon balloons over her head, but I don’t hear what she is saying.

  I wake up and can’t remember any of those images, but I can still hear the timbre of her voice in the room, not her words, just the innections—the sound of speech before grammar and meaning become clear—the sound of a mother.