Wow

Wow…

              The narrow hallway of the eighth floor stretches westwards to a cul de sac and a small waist-high window letting in sun from a Pacific horizon. You can almost hear the echoes of an architect screaming to a builder, give ‘em some light, please. The units are a good dozen to a floor, expertly welded into a taut floor plan that allows an illusion of space being devoted elsewhere. As I walk down the wing towards Steve’s address, I note the change in color scheme and the insulated feeling. The walls are a cobalt blue exuding calm and security, a far cry from the sunburnt orange that adorned the interior when I’d first visited years ago. The once-well trodden carpet, similarly singed, has been replaced by a thicker material that fully absorbs footsteps, vacating the last sounds of an old creaking floorboard. Disconcerting, I imagine, for those residents whose ears are never far from a front door, worried that someone unauthorized might be in the building, stalking.

              I press on Steve’s doorbell and hear no sound. Even the ping of a simulated bell is subdued in this determinedly buffered setting. Steve answers the door, beams half of his amiable smile through the crack and then opens up the space after the briefest of hesitations. I walk in past a plain door, unpocked by ornate divots, with only a penny-sized spy-hole blemishing its surface. Doesn’t he trust it? I wonder, regarding Steve’s pause.

              “Hello dear boy”, he says in a slightly affected voice—his nod to my British heritage, which he thinks entails people greeting each other with overwrought expressions because that’s how they do it in period dramas or hoary Ealing comedies that somehow drift into modern minds. He gestures welcome with a wave of his palm and beckons me past a kitchenette towards a cluster of furniture and dense ephemera. Apologies follow: “sorry about the…”, and “I’ve been meaning to…”. When we lived together, once upon a time, I might have scoffed and remonstrated, depending upon my mood. In my fantasy of lived disgust, I might have kicked something, sent a console, a bucket of food, or a lounging pet flying across the room. That’s when we had standards followed by expectations, plus an appetite for conflict. It’s years later now, so like the walls and the floorspace, the feelings have softened. Anyway, nothing in this space serves as a centerpiece. It’s all a trail of bits and pieces, some discarded, others merely detained ahead of a hateful deportation. The inviolate fixtures are a wall-sized television and a triumvirate of computer screens that transform a living space into the semblance of a stock exchange floor.

              I am stepping over and in between piles of consumer and consumed goods, heading for a dead end. “Sorry”, says Steve, realizing there’s nowhere to sit. Outside, on a tight veranda overlooking a glassy vista and concrete cityscape, there’s space for a chair that looks dusty and unused and flanked by a wooden structure partially wrapped in mesh wire.

              “It’s okay for me to stay, right?” I ask uncertainly, half-plaintively.

              “Oh sure, sure,” he replies. “In fact, I might be joining you. My friend Sara also might come”.

              I stare back with a blank expression, thinking there’s a piece that’s awry in Steve’s thought. “Might come? You’re thinking of coming to my graduation?”

              Steve’s neck snaps backwards as his eyes roll upwards. It’s like I’ve delivered a blow to his right side and he’s heading down for the count. “Aw shit, that’s right! I forgot about your thing. Sorry, I’ve been all turned around lately. I thought you might be at the protest tomorrow”.

              “Nah, I don’t think so,” I respond coolly, having half-expected this misunderstanding of why I’m visiting his urban lair. Steve shrugs. “Any chance you can come by later, maybe we can have dinner together, you can meet Sara”.

              I could care less about his friend Sara. “I’ll be eating at the center with some colleagues. There’s a dinner gathering after the ceremony”. He nods faintly. He can tell by the flat tone and terse delivery that I’m annoyed he’s forgotten.

              “Got it. This is your training program you’ve been doing, huh? That Freud thing”.

              “Analytic training”

              “Right. Do you get a pipe and a tweed jacket, or something?”

              This quip merits an indulgent grin, not quite the derisive smirk I’d prefer to give. I have his half-effortful hospitality to think of, to feel grateful for, though a hotel room will seem a good alternative at this point. Making a token effort, Steve grabs a cushion, wipes a swath of litter from a couch—ostensibly my bunk for the night. Then he asks that I excuse a phalanx of cans and bottles atop an adjoining breakfast table. “I’ll get rid of them later,” he says. “They’re just rinsing out, don’t want to put them away and get mildew”. That pings a memory. Back in the day, Steve was often saying stupid things like this to justify not doing something.

              “What’s the box for on the balcony”. I don’t care about this box just beyond a sliding door any more than I do his friend, but the awkwardness of Steve’s neglect is impinging upon my nerves.

              “That’s for chickens,” he says, prefacing an impending spiel.

              Chicken shit, I’m inclined to reply. “Doesn’t look big enough,” I say, indicating the box’s seeming three-foot length, its piecemeal disposition. “Where are the chickens?”

              Steve often answers questions not yet asked, aiming for what he knows instead. “Soon”, he says. “Collecting them this weekend. Been planning this for weeks, studying the raising of foul for ages. Gonna grow my own eggs, get ahead of rising prices. I just gotta put the box together some, wrap the mesh around it, do one or two other things”.

              “So, it’s a coop”

              “Sort of, mini one. Got a southern exposure here, plenty of sunshine. No predators around, of course. Just gotta watch the weather. Should be okay in spring heading into summer, though”

              “You got enough space? Kinda tight out there, isn’t it?

              “They only need a few square feet to walk, run around in”

              “Take a shit in”

              “No kidding. Got a few bags of shavings to lay down. Gonna start with three, see how they do, whether they fight, which happens if there isn’t enough space”

              “Don’t you have a cat?”

              “Miete? She died last year. Thought you knew”

              “Maybe you told me. I would’ve remembered, I think. Sorry”

              “No worries. Anyway, you ready for your big day?”

              Steve held a sudden look of cheer upon his face, suggesting I’d touched a nerve mentioning his cat. Now my life was a useful pretext for a change of subject, his chicken interest notwithstanding.

              I heave a practiced sigh. “Been ready for I don’t know how long. Feels like I’ve been doing this forever”

              “I bet. You started this…when?” I can tell he needs me to fill in all of the gaps of his unknowing, and as I do, I’ll see that his eyes glaze over and his mind will drift back to images of plywood, mesh wire and carefully marshalled chicken shit.

              “Seven years ago is when it started. You might remember the last night I stayed here overnight. I was applying still, had interviews with institute faculty at Zion hospital the next day”

              “Right. I remember that now. I seem to recall you saying it would take a few years, not seven though. Why so long?

              “Some elements are like college—you complete four years of seminar. The cases that are analytic: they have to get approved, plus you have to write an academic paper that’s more or less like a doctoral thesis. That’s what took the longest”

              “So remind me, if you don’t mind, what happens next? Do you get an extra credential?”

              “I’m a psychoanalyst”

              “Okay, you’ve said that before. But what does that mean? Could I just call you up and ask you for psychoanalysis, come lie on a couch in your office and have you interpret my dreams?”

              “That’s the last thing you’d want, believe me”

              Steve burst out a light chuckle. “Why? Am I that bad? Beyond help?”

              “Let’s just say it wouldn’t be your thing. You’re more of a go-to-a-retreat, take ketamine with somebody watching and then have what you think is a cathartic experience followed by a day at a spa.”

              “I have done something like that actually. My therapist, whom I see about four times a year recommended something similar to me, only with psilocybin, not ketamine”

              “So, did you do that?

              “Not yet. Haven’t gotten around to it. We’ve been doing EMDR, which I also find cathartic—lots of childhood stuff comes up for me. Deep stuff. You should try it. Or, you should get the certificate for it, gets lots of clients that way”

              “I did…twenty years ago. Now I do psychoanalysis, that Freudian thing I’ve mentioned a few times over the last few years. It’s different. It’s an older model of treatment: the patient speaks. An analyst listens. No drugs. No tricks. And you meet four times a week, not four times in a year.”

              “Four times a week! You’re kidding”

              I am not kidding, my face says. I’ve said this to him before, several times in fact.

              Steve’s incredulity resumes: “I mean, I know you’ve mentioned that before, I just can’t believe anyone does that. Jeez, who can do that? Who has the money for it?”

              “You’re presuming that an analyst would charge you three hundred dollars per hour like the person who watches you take acid does”

              “Well, okay, so you’re saying it’s less expensive, but still…the time…”

              “What about it?”

              “Who has the time? Plus, I don’t know. I’d run out of things to say”

              For a half-minute I remain still-faced, myself incredulous, except to think you might. I hold my mean-spirited tongue, for a moment at least. I gaze around, shoot incriminating glances at random objects that signify a random existence.

              “The time? Like the time spent staring at that trio of screens, or that massive Orwellian eye in the middle of your wall-space? The time spent binging on eye candy, brain candy, or actual candy? Run out of things to say? If you mean platitudes, banal chatter, the dinner theater of modern politics, then sure, you’d run out of things to say? If you mean catching up on what’s happening in your life, or even retaining what’s happening after the last time you spoke to someone, then sure you’ll run out of things to say. If you mean external events, or how’s your health or how’s the family doing, or the kind of stuff anyone can understand without much effort at explanation, then sure you’ll run out of things to say. If you mean the stuff that you think others will understand or not form a half-understanding judgement or sample of disgust about, then sure you’ll run out of things to say”

              At once, Steve frowns and speaks in a low, measured voice.

              “You sound annoyed. Have I annoyed you?”

              I pause for effect and hold my friend’s attention with a fixed, unblinking glare. “That’s psychoanalysis,” I say.

              He shakes his head, befuddled. “What? what is psychoanalysis?”

              “What you just did. You responded as if everything I just said had something to do with you, or you and I”

              “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to make this about me—”

              “I’m not criticizing that, you prat. It is about you and me. That’s what I’m saying—what you just did was an analytic thing to do, and a truly interpersonal thing to do, only it’s ironic because you think it’s merely self-centered”

              He shook his head again. “Right. What? What are you saying? Making it about me, or about you and I is the right thing. How can that be?”

              “It’s easy if you think about a principle that you haven’t been studying and thinking about for nearly a decade but I have. It’s this: when YOU’RE TALKING TO SOMEONE, WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY IS AT LEAST PARTLY AND SOMETIMES MOSTLY ABOUT THEM”

              “Why are you yelling?

              “I’m not…okay, I am…just because you haven’t listened, not really. Nobody really…”

              By this point Steve was staring at me like an emergency room nurse performing a mental health exam. “My big day. It is a big day, and I didn’t fully realize until today that it bums me out that you barely understand what it’s about, this big day of mine.  You think it’s a kind of joke, featuring cliches…”

              “Wow, I never said—”

              “I know you never said. You never had to say it directly. And it’s not your fault. It’s at least mine as well, the fact that we don’t get each other”. I gaze about his living space again. “I don’t get how you can live like this. That’s my judgement. You’re like those chickens you’re gonna raise. You wanna know how? They don’t have sphincters, chickens. They don’t control their shit. They just walk around and release and they don’t pick up after themselves. Someone else has to do that for them”.

              This remark freezes my old friend. He looks stunned, eternally undecided. Trying to seem poised, Steve walks over to his front door and pulls it open like he wants me to leave. With a cold, glassy shine in his eye, he asks, “How’s your wife doing?”