by Ned Vizzini
“Have you ever noticed how on all the ads on TV, people are watching TV?” my friend is like.
“Pass it, son,” my other friend is like.
“No, yo, that’s true,” my other other friend is like. “There’s always somebody on a couch, unless it’s an allergy ad and they’re in a field—”
“Or on a horse on the beach.”
“Those ads are always for herpes.”
Laughter.
“How do you even tell someone you have that?” That’s Aaron. It’s his house. “That must be such a weird conversation: ‘Hey, before we do this, you should know…’”
“Your moms didn’t mind last night.”
“Ohhhh!”
“Son!”
Aaron lobs a punch at Ronny, the antagonist. Ronny is small and wears jewelry; he once told me, Craig, when a man puts on his first piece of jewelry, there’s no turning back. He punches back with his hand with the big limp gold bracelet on it; it hits Aaron’s watch, clanging.
“Son, what you tryin’to do with my gold, yo?” Ronny shakes his wrist and turns his attention to the pot.
There’s always pot at Aaron’s house; he has a room with an entirely separate ventilation system and lockable door that his parents could rent out as another apartment. Resin streaks outline his light switch, and his bedsheet is pockmarked with black circles. There are stains on there, too, shimmery stains which indicate certain activities that take place between Aaron and his girlfriend. I look at them (the stains, then the couple). I’m jealous. But then again, I’m beyond jealous.
“Craig? You want?”
It’s passed to me, wrapped up in a concise delivery system, but I pass it on. I’m doing an experiment with my brain. I’m seeing if maybe pot is the problem; maybe that’s what has come in and robbed me. I do this every so often, for a few weeks, and then I smoke a lot of pot, just to test if maybe the lack of it is what has robbed me.
“You all right, man?”
This should be my name. I could be like a superhero: You All Right Man.
“Ah…” I stumble.
“Don’t bug Craig,” Ronny is like. “He’s in the Craig zone. He’s Craig-ing out.”
“Yeah.” I move the muscles that make me smile. “I’m just…kinda…you know…”
You see how the words work? They betray your mouth and walk away.
“Are you okay?” Nia asks. Nia is Aaron’s girlfriend. She’s in physical contact with Aaron at all times. Right now she’s on the floor next to his leg. She has big eyes.
“I’m fine,” I tell her. The blue glow of the flat-screen TV in front of us ricochets off her eyes as she turns back to it. We’re watching a nature special on the deep ocean.
“Holy shit, look at that, son!” Ronny is like, blowing smoke—I don’t know how it got back to him already. There’s an octopus on the screen with giant ears, translucent, flapping through the water in the cold light of a submersible.
“Scientists have playfully named this specimen Dumbo,” the TV narrator says.
I smile to myself. I have a secret: I wish I was Dumbo the Octopus. Adapted to freezing deep-ocean temperatures, I’d flop around down there at peace. The big concerns of my life would be what sort of bottom-coating slime to feed off of—that’s not so different from now—plus I wouldn’t have any natural predators; then again, I don’t have any now, and that hasn’t done me a whole lot of good. But it suddenly makes sense: I’d like to be under the sea, as an octopus.
“I’ll be back,” I say, getting up from my spot on the couch, which Scruggs, a friend who was relegated to the floor, immediately claims, slinking up in one fluid motion.
“You didn’t call one-five,” he’s like.
“One-five?” I try.
“Too late.”
I shrug and climb over clothes and people’s legs to the beige, apartment-front-door-style door; I move through that, to the right: Aaron’s warm bathroom.
I have a system with bathrooms. I spend a lot of time in them. They are sanctuaries, public places of peace spaced throughout the world for people like me. When I pop into Aaron’s, I continue my normal routine of wasting time. I turn the light off first. Then I sigh. Then I turn around, face the door I just closed, pull down my pants, and fall on the toilet—I don’t sit; I fall like a carcass, feeling my butt accommodate the rim. Then I put my head in my hands and breathe out as I, well, y’know, piss. I always try to enjoy it, to feel it come out and realize that it’s my body doing something it has to do, like eating, although I’m not too good at that. I bury my face in my hands and wish that it could go on forever because it feels good. You do it and it’s done. It doesn’t take any effort or any planning. You don’t put it off. That would be really screwed up, I think. If you had such problems that you didn’t pee. Like being anorexic, except with urine. If you held it in as self-punishment. I wonder if anyone does that?
I finish up and flush, reaching behind me, my head still down. Then I get up and turn on the light. (Did anyone notice I was in here in the dark? Did they see the lack of light under the crack and notice it like a roach? Did Nia see?) Then I look in the mirror.
I look so normal. I look like I’ve always looked, like I did before the fall of last year. Dark hair and dark eyes and one snaggled tooth. Big eyebrows that meet in the middle. A long nose, sort of twisted. Pupils that are naturally large—it’s not the pot—which blend into the dark brown to make two big saucer eyes, holes in me. Wisps of hair above my upper lip. This is Craig.
And I always look like I’m about to cry.
I put on the hot water and splash it at my face to feel something. In a few seconds I’m going to have to go back and face the crowd. But I can sit in the dark on the toilet a little more, can’t I? I always manage to make a trip to the bathroom take five minutes.
two
“How’re you doing?” Dr. Minerva asks.
Her office has a bookshelf, like all shrinks’ offices. I used to not want to call them shrinks, but now that I’ve been through so many, I feel entitled to it. It’s an adult term, and it’s disrespectful, and I’m more than two thirds adult and I’m pretty disrespectful, so what the hell.
Like all shrinks’ offices, anyway, it has The Bookshelf full of required reading. First of all there’s the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which lists every kind of psychological disorder known to man—that’s fun reading. Very thick book. I don’t have a whole lot of what’s in there—I just have one big thing—but I know all about it from skimming. There’s great stuff in there. There’s a disease called Ondine’s Curse, in which your body loses the ability to breathe involuntarily. Can you imagine? You have to think “breathe, breathe” all the time, or you stop breathing. Most people who get it die.
If the shrink is classy, she’ll (mostly she’ll, occasionally a he’ll) have a bunch of DSMs, because they come in different editions—III, IV, and V are the most common. I don’t think you can find a DSM II. It came out in 1963 or something. It takes like ten years to put one out, and they’re working on VI.
Jeez, I could be a shrink.
Now, in addition to the DSMs, there are an assortment of specific books on psychiatric disorders, things like The Freedom from Depression Workbook; Anxiety & Panic Attacks: Their Cause and Cure; and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Always hardcover. No paperbacks in a shrink’s office. Usually there’s at least one book on childhood sexual abuse, like The Wounded Heart, and one shrink I went to caught me looking at that and said, “That book is about childhood sexual abuse.”
And I was like, “Uh-huh?”
And she said, “It’s for people who were abused.”
And I nodded.
“Were you?”
She had a little-old-lady face, this one, with a shock of white hair, and I never saw her again. What kind of question was that? Of course I wasn’t abused. If I were, things would be so simple. I’d have a reason for being in shrinks’ offices. I’d have a justification and something that I c
ould work on. The world wasn’t going to give me something that tidy.
“I’m fine. Well, I’m not fine—I’m here.”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“Absolutely.”
“You’ve been coming here for a while.”
Dr. Minerva always has such amazing outfits. It’s not that she’s particularly sexy or beautiful; she just carves herself out well. Today she has a red sweater and red lipstick that is exactly the same red. It’s as if she went to the paint store to match them up.
“I want to not have to come here.”
“Well, you’re in a process. How’re you doing?”
This is her prompt question. The shrinks always have one prompt question. I’ve had ones that said “What’s up?” “How are we?” and even “What’s happening in the world of Craig?” They never change. It’s like their jingle.
“I didn’t wake up well today.”
“Did you sleep well?”
“I slept okay.”
She looks completely stone, staring ahead. I don’t know how they do this: the psych-poker face. Psychologists should play poker. Maybe they do. Maybe they’re the ones who win all the money on TV. Then they have the gall to charge my mom $120/hour. They’re very greedy.
“What happened when you woke up?”
“I was having a dream. I don’t know what it was, but when I woke up, I had this awful realization that I was awake. It hit me like a brick in the groin.”
“Like a brick in the groin, I see.”
“I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
“And what is that nightmare, Craig?”
“Life.”
“Life is a nightmare.”
“Yes.”
We stop. Cosmic moment, I guess. Ooooh, is life really a nightmare? We need to spend like ten seconds contemplating that.
“What did you do when you realized you were awake?”
“I lay in bed.” There were more things to tell her, things I held back: like the fact that I was hungry in bed this morning. I hadn’t eaten the night before. I went to bed exhausted from homework and knew as I hit the pillow that I would pay for it in the morning, that I would wake up really hungry, that I would cross the line where my stomach gets so needy that I can’t eat anything. I woke up and my stomach was screaming, hollowing itself out under my little chest. I didn’t want to do anything about it. I didn’t want to eat. The idea of eating made me hurt more. I couldn’t think of anything—not one single solitary food item—that I would be able to handle, except coffee yogurt, and I was sick of coffee yogurt.
I rolled over on my stomach and balled my fists and held them against my gut like I was praying. The fists pushed my stomach against itself and fooled it into thinking it was full. I held this position, warm, my brain rotating, the seconds whirring by. Only the pure urge, the one thing that never let me down, got me out of bed fifty minutes later.
“I got up when I had to piss.”
“I see.”
“That was great.”
“You like peeing. You’ve mentioned this before.”
“Yeah. It’s simple.”
“You like simple.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Some people thrive on complexity, Craig.”
“Well, not me. As I was walking over here, I was thinking…I have this fantasy of being a bike messenger.”
“Ah.”
“It would be so simple, and direct, and I would get paid for it. It would be an Anchor.”
“What about school, Craig? You have school for an Anchor.”
“School is too all over the place. It spirals out into a million different things.”
“Your Tentacles.”
I have to hand it to her; Dr. Minerva picked up on my lingo pretty quickly. Tentacles is my term—the Tentacles are the evil tasks that invade my life. Like, for example, my American History class last week, which necessitated me writing a paper on the weapons of the Revolutionary War, which necessitated me traveling to the Metropolitan Museum to check out some of the old guns, which necessitated me getting in the subway, which necessitated me being away from my cell phone and e-mail for 45 minutes, which meant that I didn’t get to respond to a mass mail sent out by my teacher asking who needed extra credit, which meant other kids snapped up the extra credit, which meant I wasn’t going to get a 98 in the class, which meant I wasn’t anywhere close to a 98.6 average (body temperature, that’s what you needed to get), which meant I wasn’t going to get into a Good College, which meant I wasn’t going to have a Good Job, which meant I wasn’t going to have health insurance, which meant I’d have to pay tremendous amounts of money for the shrinks and drugs my brain needed, which meant I wasn’t going to have enough money to pay for a Good Lifestyle, which meant I’d feel ashamed, which meant I’d get depressed, and that was the big one because I knew what that did to me: it made it so I wouldn’t get out of bed, which led to the ultimate thing—homelessness. If you can’t get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.
The opposite of the Tentacles are the Anchors. The Anchors are things that occupy my mind and make me feel good temporarily. Riding my bike is an Anchor. Doing flash cards is an Anchor. Watching people play video games at Aaron’s is an Anchor. The answers are simple and sequential. There aren’t any decisions. There aren’t any Tentacles. There’s just a stack of tasks that you tackle. You don’t have to deal with other people.
“There are a lot of Tentacles,” I admit. “But I should be able to handle them. The problem is that I’m so lazy.”
“How are you lazy, Craig?”
“I waste at least an hour every day lying in bed. Then I waste time pacing. I waste time thinking. I waste time being quiet and not saying anything because I’m afraid I’ll stutter.”
“Do you have a problem with stuttering?”
“When I’m depressed, it won’t come out right. I’ll trail off in midsentence.”
“I see.” She writes something down on her legal pad. Craig, this will go on your permanent record.
“I don’t—” I shake my head. “The bike thing.”
“What? What were you going to say?” This is another trick of shrinks. They never let you stop in midthought. If you open your mouth, they want to know exactly what you had the intention of saying. The party line is that some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle, but I think they do it to make us feel important. One thing’s for sure: no one else in life says to me, “Wait, Craig, what were you going to say?”
“I was going to say that I don’t think the stuttering is like, a real problem. I just think it’s one of my symptoms.”
“Like sweating.”
“Right.” The sweating is awful. It’s not as bad as the not eating, but it’s weird—cold sweat, all over my forehead, having to be wiped off every two minutes, smelling like skin concentrate. People notice. It’s one of the few things people notice.
“You’re not stuttering now.”
“This is being paid for. I don’t want to waste time.”
Pause. Now we have one of our silent battles; I look at Dr. Minerva and she looks at me. It’s a contest as to who will crack first. She puts on her poker face; I don’t have any extra faces to put on, just the normal Craig face.
We lock eyes. I’m waiting for her to say something profound—I always am, even though it’ll never happen. I’m waiting for her to say “Craig, what you need to do is X” and for the Shift to occur. I want there to be a Shift so bad. I want to feel my brain slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before the fall of last year, back when I was young, and witty, and my teachers said I had incredible promise, and I had incredible promise, and I spoke up in class because I was excited and smart about the world. I w
ant the Shift so bad. I’m waiting for the phrase that will invoke it. It’ll be like a miracle within my life. But is Dr. Minerva a miracle worker? No. She’s a thin, tan lady from Greece with red lipstick.
She breaks first.
“About your bike riding, you said you wanted to be a messenger.”
“Yes.”
“You already have a bike, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you ride it a lot?”
“Not that much. Mom won’t let me ride it to school. But I ride around Brooklyn on weekends.”
“What does it feel like when you ride your bike, Craig?”
I pause. “…Geometric.”
“Geometric.”
“Yeah. Like, You have to avoid this truck. Don’t get hit in the head by these metal pipes. Make a right. The rules are defined and you follow them.”
“Like a video game.”
“Sure. I love video games. Even just to watch. Since I was a kid.”
“Which you often refer to as ‘back when you were happy.’”
“Right.” I smooth my shirt out. I get dressed up for these little meetings too. Good khakis and a white dress shirt. We’re dressing up for each other. We should really go get some coffee and make a scandal—the Greek therapist and her high school boyfriend. We could be famous. That would get me money. That might make me happy.
“Do you remember some of the things that made you happy?”
“The video games.” I laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“I was walking down my block the other day, and behind me was a mother with her kid, and the mother was saying, ‘Now, Timmy, I don’t want you to complain about it. You can’t play video games twenty-four hours a day.’ And Timmy goes, ‘But I want to!’ And I turned around and told him, ‘Me too.’”
“You want to play video games twenty-four hours a day?”
“Or watch. I just want to not be me. Whether it’s sleeping or playing video games or riding my bike or studying. Giving my brain up. That’s what’s important.”
“You’re very clear about what you want.”
“Yeah.”
“What did you want when you were a kid? Back when you were happy? What did you want to be when you grew up?”
