Charisma: A Novel Read online

  His neighborhood is old school.

  “Davey, I’m here,” Jen calls from downstairs.

  “Yes, I saw you.”

  “Is it nice up there? It’s a little windy.”

  “I’ll come down.”

  Jen has dropped her books on the kitchen table and now she is pouring a glass of wine. “I have to work tonight,” she says.

  “All right.”

  “I almost didn’t come over.”

  “Why did you?”

  “What?” She laughs. “I missed you.”

  “That’s nice to hear.”

  “I haven’t seen you for three days.”

  “Really?”

  She pinches his cheek and kisses him.

  “You are such a Libra.”

  “How does that apply?”

  “You’re an air sign. You’re in the air.”

  “Oh.”

  “And when you are focused on something, you lose track of time. Very Libra.”

  Jen is a Capricorn. He has no idea what this means but she somehow associates it with her success and uses it as an excuse whenever she’s abrasive or controlling.

  “So what is it?” she asks.

  “What is what?”

  “The thing that is making linear time disappear for you?”

  “I was thinking we should surf.”

  “Like on the internet?”

  “No, in the water.”

  She laughs and waits for him to laugh, too. When he doesn’t she grows worried.

  “Why would we do that?” she asks.

  “It looks fun. I’ve always wanted to try it. And it would be nice to have an activity together. Other than work.”

  “We don’t work together.”

  “We do a little bit. I’m consulting on a case at Oceanside right now.”

  “Really? My turf? Is that smart?”

  “I’ve done it before.”

  “Not since we’ve been together.”

  “It’s on the trauma side. We won’t see each other. So what about surfing?”

  “I don’t know. Would cute clothes be involved?”

  “Wet suits, I think.”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Let me do some Googling.”

  “You’re going to Google whether or not you want to surf?”

  She laughs, then asks, “What is it, PTSD?”

  “That makes me want to surf? No, I think it’s curiosity.”

  “I’m talking about the Oceanside case.”

  “I was taking a stab at humor.”

  “Nice. But seriously, what is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “So why is she there? Assuming it’s a she.”

  “She checked herself in.”

  “Suicidal ideation?”

  “Yes, but it’s complicated.”

  “She’s depressed.”

  “Maybe. Although sometimes she’s blissful.”

  Jen takes a long sip of wine. “Come again?”

  “She claims that she has free access to bliss.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “She’s homesick.”

  “For where?”

  “Heaven, I guess.” He finishes his scotch and goes to pour another one.

  “Oh, she’s insane.”

  “Yes, Jen, she’s insane. I’m trying to get a little more specific than that.”

  “Whoa. Who peed in your Cheerios?”

  He hates it when she says things like who peed in your Cheerios. “No one. It’s stressful. And you’re mocking my work.”

  He wonders why he’s picking a fight with her. Probably because he feels rejected over the surfing issue. It took a bit of nerve to bring it up. Then again, he knows he can’t hold her accountable for his feeling that way.

  “I’m not. If anything I’m mocking your clients.”

  “Patients. I don’t like that either.”

  “Okay, let’s change the subject.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s talk about my clients. The drunks and the junkies.”

  This makes him laugh. “You’re horrible. I can’t believe they let you near people in any sort of pain.”

  “I’m a life coach not a therapist. I don’t have to care about their pain. I just have to give them a game plan to get on with it.”

  “What about compassion?”

  “These people have had too much compassion. They need structure and ass kicking. The ones who listen to me thank me later.”

  They’ve had this discussion before. That’s not what’s getting to him.

  What’s getting to him is that he feels defensive about Sarah Lange. He does not want to know what’s on the other end of that.

  “Look,” she says, “compassion is great and that’s what you’re in it for. My job is about the next step. There’s life beyond being understood.”

  “I understand.”

  This makes her laugh again and he loosens up. She has a musical laugh. It sounds like relief would sound if it had a tone.

  “Let’s make dinner,” he says.

  This gives Jen a lot to talk about and he turns on some music and drifts on that.

  After dinner she clears the dishes off to one side and gets all of her books and noisily gets to work. David goes to his study to review his file on Allison Sarah Lange.

  He opens his computer and spends a few minutes being distracted. There’s so much to do before he has to get down to work, so many distractions. Email, Facebook, check the weather, news headlines, maybe a few strands of the New York Times crossword. Then, sometimes, he even gets distracted thinking about computers and how they work. He knows how they work. He never gets tired of thinking about it, all those electrical impulses bouncing around and the silicon conducting and not conducting at will. He even lets himself think about all the dedicated scientists who made it all come together, from Edison to Turing, and he envies their passion and even their craziness—no, that’s not the right word. Not the responsible word for a psychiatrist. He envies their willingness to completely disconnect from societal norms in pursuit of something they can’t even see. They were all scientists whose world view was larger than life. They were romantics in a sense. They were in love with the physical world. Turing died from eating a poisoned apple, for God’s sake.

  David worries that he’s not in love with anything. He’s a scientist in a field where everything he examines and explores is invisible, in fact does not actually exist. For all the rambling about the psyche and the unconscious mind and the ego and the superego and the id and even the conscious mind, there was no locating any of it. It’s not as if it were possible to open someone’s brain and point to the psyche or the ego. In this way, his field is like a quantum physicist’s. No one has ever seen a particle but they have seen how they behave. No one has ever seen a person’s psyche but they have seen how they behave. It’s metaphor, he thinks. We all work in metaphor. Everything is metaphor, even the things that seem to be real and controlled by physical laws, because the laws themselves must be a metaphor for something else, something beyond the limitations of the optic nerve. Maybe it’s as the Greeks had it. Everything is just a suggestion of what is behind it. A pale reproduction of something superior that can never be experienced because of human limitations.

  But why?

  He stops at why.

  He thinks about how far his distractions have taken him and he recalls Sarah’s repeated use of that word. Is this what she means, that distractions take you away from the moment? He jots that question down on a Post-it note.

  He pulls up Allison Sarah Lange’s file and scrolls through it, looking for something he might have missed.

  Born in Danville, Virginia, July 14, 1975. Youngest child, middle class family, no serious illnesses or injury, no history of mental illness in the immediate family, though there is something about a paternal grandmother having had shock treatments.

  In 2011 there was an accident. Patient says she was nearly killed but other than th
at will not discuss the accident. See attached file. But the file is not attached. Just a note from the admitting saying that she was treated for PTSD by a Heather Hensen, MFCC, NLP and some other letters he doesn’t recognize. There are all kinds of new therapy movements that he can’t (and doesn’t care to) keep up with. He thinks he will call Heather Hensen tomorrow and make an appointment. As far as he can tell, Allison Sarah Lange has not had any proper medical treatment for her PTSD and he wonders who diagnosed her. He hopes it isn’t a self-diagnosis or a Heather Hensen diagnosis, which amounts to the same thing.

  Following the event, except for the PTSD treatment with HH, there’s no evidence of her life being affected in any way. She has worked as a journalist, a copy editor, a copy writer and a technical writer. She has worked as a graphic artist. There’s a common thread here. Someone with an artistic bent trying to support herself rather than some frenzied person searching for an identity.

  There’s no mention of marriage or children.

  There’s no glaring evidence, either, of mental illness.

  And there’s something about his own experience of her that bothers him. Her stillness. She doesn’t fidget. She doesn’t avert her eyes. She’s completely centered, other than her sudden demands for a cigarette. She doesn’t present as a mentally unstable person. She doesn’t even present as a nervous person.

  In fact, she makes him nervous.

  Tomorrow, he will dig a little deeper at the source. As Jung says, he will take a pick ax to that.

  Chapter 3

  I am in the courtyard smoking my morning cigarette when one of the crazies approaches me. I don’t know his name. We don’t all get together and bond and agree to be each other’s buddies. We know that most of us aren’t necessarily making sense and that the meds we’re on (I am not on any, by the way) will prevent us from remembering each other’s names, even if we care enough to ask. Inside the walls of a trauma ward, your concern about socializing goes right out the window. In fact, you spend a lot of time wondering why you ever bothered to connect with people and have them over to dinner and buy all that kitchen stuff. What were we all yakking about? I can barely remember. It seemed so important. Our opinions. Our views of life. We cared enough about it that we raised our voices and sometimes fights would break out. When I remember that, it seems impossible. Like it happened to someone else. But then, it did happen to someone else.

  I can’t remember the faces of my friends.

  The crazy approaches me and he looks like Sad Jesus. He’s wearing institutional clothing. This means what he came here in was not salvageable. They give those people scrubs so sometimes they look like doctors or orderlies except the scrubs are a different color and the people wearing them are obviously crazy.

  Sad Jesus looks at me and says, “You could see them. Anybody could see them. They say you can’t but you can. The squibs! The squibs! Go watch the film again.”

  “What is this?” I ask him. “JFK? Single bullet theory?”

  “The squibs! The squibs!”

  “Giant sea creatures?”

  “Go back and look at the film. You can see the squibs going off on every floor. Bam bam bam. Going off. Exploding. Demolition style.”

  This sounds familiar.

  “And none of the Jews showed up for work that day,” he whispers.

  “Oh, 9/11. Inside job.”

  “Just try telling people that. You know what happens?”

  “Sure. They put you in here.”

  “But you know. You know.”

  “I don’t know. 9/11 really isn’t my thing.”

  “You accept their story.”

  “I don’t think about it.”

  He stops and stares at me and his eyes are pinwheels. “You’re CIA.”

  “That’s right, Sad Jesus, I am CIA. You should stay away from me.”

  He takes a step back and then asks if I have another cigarette.

  I say, “You have no idea what’s in there. CIA cigarette.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I give him the cigarette.

  After he leaves I have a few minutes of peace. I watch the addicts strolling and gesturing at each other. I wonder what it feels like to have substances chasing and haunting you. It’s such a clear-cut thing and at the same time it’s so nebulous. Is it the actual drug they want or is it the addiction itself, as if they don’t know who they are without something dogging them? In the absence of some kind of dramatic weakness, they’d just be people working in convenience stores or law firms. Does all of this come from our terror of sameness? Insignificance? All attention is good, even if it is negative? I know I could have the answers to these questions in a heartbeat but sometimes I enjoy my ability to question, like the old days. I like musing. Musing is a lost art. Now everyone opines. Opinions have value and people like them fast and hard.

  Someone else has approached me. He has a shock of white hair, even though he is too young for it, and steely blue eyes and a placid smile that fight with each other. Maybe it’s this contradiction that makes him look crazy. I wonder if I have something outward that makes me look crazy.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hi.”

  “I see you out here.”

  “Yes. I come out here.”

  I offer him a cigarette but he shakes his head.

  “So what brings you to the crazy palace?” I inquire.

  “Sex addiction.”

  “Wow. That’s a great conversation starter.”

  He shrugs. “You asked.”

  “So you’re here because you like to have sex.”

  “Because I like to have it often and inappropriately.”

  “Is that the case?”

  “It’s what they say. In here.”

  “Did you check yourself in?”

  “No, I was given an ultimatum by my employer.”

  “Who’s your employer?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Okay.”

  He sits down and stares at his hands. His hands are chewed up. He’s a carpenter or a musician or both and his whole story about why he’s in here feels made up. I don’t want to know why he’s really in here so I don’t ask again.

  Be patient, he’s not like you.

  I am relieved to hear he’s not like me.

  “What are you here for?” he asks.

  “Crazy.”

  “Oh, seriously? I totally took you for an addict.”

  “That happens, I guess.”

  “You don’t look crazy at all.”

  “Thanks. I was just wondering about that.”

  “What’s your name?” He’s looking at the ground, as if that will minimize the significance, as if he won’t get caught.

  “I don’t think we should get into that, do you?”

  “Into what?”

  “Knowing each other. You’re a sex addict, I’m crazy, the less we connect the better.”

  “I guess.”

  He stares at the ground for another moment. My cigarette is done. I shove it into the sand ashtray. I stand up and brush off my lap but I can’t remember why and then I remember it’s because I used to wear nice clothes and I always smoothed the wrinkles out when I stood up. I can’t remember the faces of the people I smoothed out the wrinkles for.

  Whitey says, “You know you’re not crazy, right? You’re probably just hiding out, right?”

  “Oh, no, I’m batshit. But thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  And I leave him sitting there, which is one of the ongoing perks of crazitude. Being able to walk away from someone not giving a shit what they think. If I ever get out of here I am taking that one with me.

  Chapter 4

  Heather Hensen works in an industrial complex on Wilshire, and at first David is thrown by this. He has not been imagining some business-suited Dr. Melfi from The Sopranos. He pictures instead a Stevie Nicks–attired intuitive with crystals and incense and pictures of Yogananda and possibly angels on the wall. Her wa
iting room is sparse. Industrial furniture and copies of Time and Newsweek on the coffee table. He is still contemplating which magazine to choose when the door swings open and Heather Hensen is standing there.

  She is neither picture. She is a small but sturdy woman with graying blonde hair and green eyes and an open-mouthed smile that might actually be genuine. She wears a hoodie and jeans and sneakers and David is thrown anew by this. What clientele does this speak to? Who trusts this woman with her nonsensical collection of letters?

  She thrusts a hand forward. “Heather Hensen.”

  “Dr. David Sutton.”

  “Dr. Sutton, please come in.”

  There are no angels or Yoganandas in her office. There is a non-offensive oceanscape. There’s a fountain gurgling somewhere. The room smells like a spa but he can’t see the source of the smells. The cabinets and desks are of some kind of oriental bent. Thai, he thinks. He cannot get a read on anything here. When she gestures, he sits on a down sofa, which cradles but doesn’t swallow him. She sits across from him in what appears to be an upscale La-Z-Boy.

  “How can I help you?” she asks.

  He takes his laptop computer out.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he says, as if he’s smoking. He feels the technology might offend her somehow.

  “Of course not.”

  “I just want to pull up my files and take some notes.”

  “Of course,” she says. She picks up a notebook from somewhere and opens it and says, “I’m old school.”

  He smiles.

  “Yes, my girlfriend is, too.”

  He has no idea why he has just told her this.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “I do use a computer. In fact, I’m a little obsessed with my computer at home. But in here, I find it’s less distracting for my clients.”

  “Yes. I use a notebook in one-on-one sessions. Actually, my preference is not to write at all. I call on my powers of retention.”

  “Same here.”