Dr. Bean's office was on Dante Street right where it met River Road, the same street we’d been driving down when my mom had made the suggestion after the movie. In fact, now that I considered it, she’d probably thought of it precisely because of where we were during the conversation. The name “Dante” made me think of The Divine Comedy and, by the same token, of hell, but the appointment had been made and I wasn’t going to back out of it. I went straight after work on a scorching hot Wednesday, still wearing my work clothes— cargo shorts and a paint covered t-shirt. We’d been repainting a bunch of shutters that day, so I was covered in a fine layer of olive green dust from sanding and my hands were fucked up from all the paint remover I’d got on them. The secretary looked at me as if she was appalled and said, “Can I help you?” and when I told her who I was she said, “Oh, right, yes, you can go take a seat over there and I’ll call you in just a minute.” She watched me go to the seat to see if I would get paint and dust all over it.
A few minutes later, a middle-aged black woman emerged from the hallway sniffling and dabbing a tissue at her eyes. She said goodbye to the secretary, then the secretary looked at me and said, “Dr. Bean is ready for you now. You can go on back.”
The office wasn’t how I remembered it, but it was similar enough that I could tell it was the same place. I wasn’t sure if he had redecorated, or if my memory of it was just flawed, but it seemed the place had changed from predominantly blue and green to predominantly brown and red. Red seemed like an odd color for a therapist’s office— I’d heard somewhere that it subconsciously agitates people— but maybe it was part of some new subliminal strategy he was employing to make people open up. There were two chairs and a couch for me to choose from. I wondered where the last lady had been sitting and where my paint dust might be the least offensive. I wondered if the seating options were part of the test—ah he chose the wooden arm chair right away, what a fucking nut case.
Dr. Bean noticed I was deliberating over the chairs and said, “Welcome, Theo, welcome… Sit anywhere you want! Wherever you feel most comfortable.”
“I warn you, I’m covered in dust,” I said. “I came straight from work.”
“Oh that’s totally fine. Sit anywhere. And I’m glad you came, how was work?”
And so it began, with a classic opening question. Gauge the patient’s level with a disarming, neutral question. I settled on the couch, sitting down as softly as I could, and told him work had been long and tiring, I was a house painter.
“Oh wow, that’s great. How do you like painting houses?”
I gave my usual response: It’s not so bad. It can be kind of relaxing. Kind of zen, I guess. Wax on, wax off, and all that.
“Ah yes, ha ha. The Karate Kid. Great movie. Do you like movies?”
Sure.
“Your mother was telling me on the phone about something that happened the other night? When you all went to the movies together?”
“Hmmm,and what does a panic attack mean for you?”
“You felt like you were going to die, you say?”
“Wow, and how did it feel, to feel like you were going to die?”
“Like you were a failure? Like your whole life’s been a giant failure?”
“That boggles my mind, to be honest. How do you get such a thing into your head, that your whole life’s been a failure?”
He kept questioning like that, one thing after another. No matter what I said, he found a way to extract some element of my response and turn it into a question. It was like we were unpacking a russian doll. He wanted to get to the core of me. To do that he would have to keep digging one layer at a time, but he underestimated how many layers there were to unpack. Why did I feel like a failure? That question alone held a dozen different answers, any of which might have taken hours or days to properly explain, but there was one that was infinitely larger than the others, like a dead star that the others orbited around and gathered strength from. It had been the first of them, and, the way I saw it, it was the domino that set all the other failures in motion.
TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW
