Adam Dalva

Help Your Self

I was eating al fresco with my friend Bernice when I saw my therapist get hit by a car. It happened during the sort of conversational lull that can occur when we suspect someone is interested in us, as we puzzle out the insinuations of remarks that we look great when really, somewhat intentionally, we only look decent. It was mid-spring; the breeze was a giddy novelty; the Freedom Tower loomed overhead. We had reached that confessional stretch after the server asks whether the lunch satisfied. I stared at my salmon trying to puzzle out what was wrong with me. I’d been in love with someone else for years. Was it odd that I had no interest in Bernice—Bernice of the lustrous hair; Bernice who only ever danced in wriggles?

Then the smash of broken glass.

I watched my therapist fly by, limbs contorting as he rotated. His mouth and eyes were open in silent exclamation. I froze. Everyone did. It was too shocking to immediately process. Was it really my therapist? I’d never seen him outside before.

Dr. Reed was a Freudian analyst whom I’d visited once a week for about eight years. I spent the first few months worrying that I’d run into him in public, the last feasible manifestation of the teacher-in-grocery-store phenomenon, but my anxiety passed once I grew used to his seemingly absolute confinement in his office.  Dr. Reed would crack the door open when I rang the bell and be seated in silence by the time I entered. He never stepped out to use the immaculate bathroom, even when I intentionally arrived early so I could hear the quiet murmur of other patients and his soft, rare replies. Though he always had a Milk Bar iced coffee by his side, I’d never seen him in the nearby branch. His static nature contributed to the session’s aura of security. Dr. Reed knew more about me than anyone else did and I knew less about him than anyone else I knew.

Now, after so much time spent obliquely across from Dr. Reed, I’d managed to reach certain conclusions. The wedding ring was easy, and the photos oriented away from me had gradually accumulated, indicating that children were involved (people rarely add new photos of their spouses). His Harvard undergraduate degree hovered over his head like a saint’s aura. There wasn’t much else to work with. He even always wore the same anonymous brown pants.

It sounded like Bernice was screaming in many voices, but then I realized that everyone in the al fresco area had freaked, that two Caesar salads lay betrayed on the sidewalk, that my salmon had leapt into the bread basket. I looked instinctively toward the car’s driver, a bearded man who was in hands-to-head still life. The glass from his headlight was directly in front of us. The victim had flown some fifteen feet. I stood to look. There, upon the fallen, convulsing body, were the brown pants. It was Dr. Reed. And then I realized that my therapist might have seen us, that this unprecedented opportunity to observe me in the wild could have been the reason he’d wandered into traffic and been hit.

Because Dr. Reed had likely suspected that Bernice was the woman I loved, Leah, who worked in the Freedom Tower. I wasn’t exactly sure what Leah did at The New Yorker, though she’d once explained it and her conversation carried an abundance of context clues. I think it had something to do with the poetry department. Though I’d never seen her on a byline, there was still a buzzy glamour to it. I’d met Leah during a mediocre literary website’s launch party at which I was trying to get a literary agent and she was trying to get a job at The New Yorker. Somehow, ours was the sort of easy conversation that implies continuity—favorite essayists intermingled with oddly personal details and claims that one never normally talks about this kind of thing. I was so overwhelmed that I forgot to hand out even one badly stapled copy of my novel’s first chapter with my email address written plaintively across the top. After I walked Leah to the subway, I ran the forty blocks home, over-stuffed messenger bag in hand. It wasn’t planned; I’ve never been the type who runs. My breath, usually wheezy on even a moderate uphill stroll, was rhythmic as I rushed through the night, legs detached from my body, sweat pouring through my tweed jacket, heart pumping fire, thinking only of Leah. Oh, it was amazing to feel this way after so long! A friendship quickly bloomed. There was never any romance with Leah, or much tension, and I think that’s because it was the thought of the future that moved me. I could see Leah at 40, at 60, at 80, lust fading, then sex fading, then, after many years of experiencing the terror and joy of her in equal measure, her precious mind narrowing to a point.

The peppery stink of ramps, the season’s star ingredient, intensified as patrons dislodged their soups and rushed into the restaurant or toward my therapist. Dr. Reed had recently broken a record nine-month silence to urge me to finally tell Leah how I felt, but the closest I’d come was submitting stories to The New Yorker slush with versions of her as the dramatic lead. These efforts were cruelly cast back by a succession of interns.

It’s important to note that despite the Leah-centric location, Bernice had chosen the murderous restaurant, presumably for its transparent romantic qualities. How could she have known that I’ve always hated eating on sidewalks? A back garden, sure, or a balcony, but sidewalk dining has the whiff of involuntary participation in experiential advertisement. Before Dr. Reed was hit, passersby had kept stopping to watch me eat, first inspecting the plating, then checking my facial reactions before conducting a quick survey of my body to establish a physiognomic overlap that would indicate shared culinary interests. Soft men kept nodding to themselves. How could one enjoy the delicate play of buerre blanc on a twenty-seven-dollar piece of salmon? Sans the possibility of Leah walking past, I would have insisted on an indoor table.

Yes, I can’t deny it, there was an undeniable thrum to our proximity to Leah and the Freedom Tower, especially since Bernice was so striking. If he’d seen us, Dr. Reed must have thought, “no wonder, no wonder” as he wandered into the street. It had been impossible to describe Leah to Dr. Reed—what could I really even say about Leah’s eyes, her hair? Only that I loved her eyes and her hair. Only that I thought that they were wonderful.

The bearded man was sobbing into his cell phone; farther back there were only the honks of the temporarily ill-informed.  I’d long since overcome the initial reason I went to see Dr. Reed, a persistent superimposed transparent vision. The simplest way to explain it is as a fire consuming a ten-story-high bronze clock whose works crumbled to the ground. The massive vision was paralyzing. It lurked at random outside apartment windows, down avenues, and inside my fluttering eyelids. I was very scared of the giant clock, and even worse, I had absolutely no idea what it signified. Things intensified after a disastrous visit to the South Street Sea Port Bodies Exhibition. At first, I enjoyed the bones, organs, nervous systems, but as time passed, the flayed humans—later discovered to be prisoners who hadn’t given their consent—made me uneasy. I left. Outside, a pigeon flew by. I saw it separating into feathers and skulls and tendons. Within hours, it was happening with every pigeon, and worse, the vivisected birds would conjure the burning clock. There are a lot of pigeons in New York. I called Dr. Reed, who was suggested by a friend. He was primarily a children’s psychologist, which I was drawn to, imagining my hallucinations would seem more interesting than your run-of-the-mill juvenilia. After two years of weekly monologues, the giant clock vanished.

The first person who’d reached Dr. Reed’s prone figure had started hyperventilating and was now being comforted by the second person who’d reached them. If Dr. Reed had been interested enough in my lunch date to lose focus on his surroundings, it was proof that he cared, that he didn’t simply punch the clock of emotional investment when I rang his bell and forget about me the instant I backed obsequiously out of his office. There had been no honk that I could remember—would he have heard the impact before he felt the pain? 

How soon after you’re hit by a car do you understand that you’ve been hit by a car? Had his brain gone blank with fear as he soared down the street, or were there still residual flashes of Bernice, of me?

Many people around us were calling 911 and even more were yelling for someone to call 911, though they had cell phones of their own and were resorting to cliché in the early stages of panic. It was happening so fast—I needed more time to get upset. Dr. Reed had regained consciousness and was trying to roll himself over. I slowly parted the low barrier that was supposed to separate our al fresco meal from the city and began walking toward him. Then, I looked back at Bernice. She resembled a child. Without the additional layer of realization that I was struggling through, she’d quickly come to terms with the idea that something bad had happened.

I recently read about a therapist who’d gone to his longtime patient’s funeral. He saw the death notice in the paper, and though he knew it was a bad idea, temptation struck. After he walked into the church and sat in the back pew, he realized that he could pick out nearly every attendee. What a pleasure! There was the much-bemoaned wife, the crummy older brother, the loved son, the difficult co-workers, and none of them knew who he was. They say that every good funeral boasts a woman in red who no one knows—does every New York funeral feature a middle-aged therapist with conflicting impulses? And so it was for Dr. Reed. The accident must have been about me. It would be even more of a coincidence if it were otherwise. The sirens were already coming, though only a few seconds had passed. I was impressed.

How was I going to start over with someone new? There were six Moleskine notebooks of personal exposition sitting in his inviolable office. And how could I possibly see a therapist about my therapist getting hit by a car in front of me? No, it would be impossible. I broke into a run, the Freedom Tower looming overhead with the implied negative space of a stillborn twin. I have the idea that every time I’ve come close to dying, a splinter universe opens that my consciousness is transferred into. It’s a sort of living purgatory, a personal infinity of alternatives where I live as long as possible, perhaps forever, but all along I die, and I die, and I die. That theory applies to my therapist too. So, there’s a version of this story where he sees me hit by the car as I scamper into the street after Leah as she briskly walks by, always moving as if she’d forgotten an appointment. Or he bumps into Leah two blocks earlier without knowing who she is, and recognizes something in her manner, in her marvelous constellations of acne, and it slows him down just enough that he makes it across the windswept street to me only to learn that I’m eating with Bernice, never learning that the very object of his curiosity saved him. There’s a version where Leah and I kiss the second time we meet and I stop seeing Dr. Reed. A version where I decide during appetizers to ask Bernice if we can date, and I am holding her slightly chapped hand to my lips, and Dr. Reed doesn’t notice me. A version where I never met Leah, and am spending a happy life with Bernice in which I’ve previously confessed that I hate sidewalk dining and am eating my buttery salmon inside the dark restaurant. A  version where an initial tweak in my serotonin levels leaves me just fine from the get-go and Dr. Reed lives.

I again hoped it wasn’t him. It could have been some other slim man in brown pants careening through the air. He might one day still be able to tell me that I was better. That I had made it through. I pushed past the crowd. Dr. Reed had managed to turn himself over. He was gasping. His eyes widened a bit when he saw me, but not with familiarity. His brows furrowed and his mouth opened. I heard paramedics shouting. Bernice put her hand on my shoulder. I wondered if I should tell her.