Tag Archives: short story

Four-thirty in the afternoon on a Friday in a quiet if uncomfortably warm office space atop a four-story building. This is not a school, a playground, or a deserted trail wherein the transient or marginal hold territorial advantage. The era wherein my mind was ever on the alert for the intrusions of the wild is well behind me, I complacently think. I have no tense readiness in my chest, my limbs, my mind. I have no flexed startle response to unfurl at the sound of disquiet. Work is scheduled neatly from one hour to the next. The spaces in between are fixed within easy parameters. A genteel, professional atmosphere prevails amongst others who have likewise arrived and long settled into civilized existence.

At home, away from the office which is suburbanly-situated, I feel nature’s playful and unthreatening incursion. Squirrels chase one another at dawn, scratching away upon rooftop tiles, acting like naughty children on Christmas morning. At night, an owl hoots with a haughty attitude and watches stolidly from a high tree. At some other time of day, woodpeckers thrash their bullet-hard heads against wood and sometimes pause, unperturbed, because their heads play a different game than mine, and have some manner of airbag behind the eyes to absorb impact. Ducks fly down upon a nearby pool, appearing to dive bomb one another, separating runts from leaders, creating havoc, but eliciting little more from me than, “hey, get over here…you gotta see this!” It all seems like a delightful spectacle until the eye catches sight of a less welcome visitor, a long-tailed rodent that scurries away like the other creatures do, but with slightly greater knowledge that its presence is somewhat more hateful and stirring of disgust.

It isn’t nice to think this of any creature, one of God’s creatures, after all. But it’s not quite the same as the mustering of rage or fear that arises from human provocation. Recently, a friend of mine received a sobering, zeitgeisty lesson from one of his daughters, straight from the frontlines of feminine trauma. It seems that a casual discussion of day-to-day life yielded an earnest question about whether women might prefer aloneness in the woods with a grizzly bear in proximity versus the same scenario with a stranger man. The daughter said the latter scene would be more unnerving, and added a touch of duh to her commentary when her father expressed surprise. The rationale was logical; that is, historically evidence-based. The daughter had never been assaulted or harassed by a stranger bear, she asserted, implying a woman’s norm. The father was disturbed yet galvanized, and moved to an empathetic awareness of women’s physical vulnerability in this world. As is my wont, I poked a hole in the message (having heard this second hand), pointing out complicating factors: of course, this fear of men versus bears bears being taken seriously by men, but what also bears observation are the flaws involved in comparing apples and oranges, as women generally do not get their intimacy needs met by, ahem, bears, so there is little emotional conflict involved in keeping a distance from them. Yes, that situation in the woods, like many, is dangerous. But most situations are dangerous in part because of the desires that place us there.

Exceptions? Hard to say. My destined-to-be-misunderstood-by-someone point presumes a heteronormative baseline, plus a belief in the inherent agency that people (okay, children excepted) feel in this world. Wait…is that view…humannormative? Am I overlooking the power that children exert over adults, as in what actually happened to me a week or so ago? I don’t get my intimacy or professional (mostly) needs met by adolescents currently, but that didn’t stop a pair of them from penetrating my complacent and privileged silo and giving me a lesson in…something. See, that’s the thing with animals and kids—neither of whom use words when exhibiting their natures—for what they have to teach me is not intended per se, but instead merely unleashed. I didn’t ask them to loiter in the hallways of my office building, looking for someone to harass or assault. And the boys in question on the fateful day I’m about to describe were not cute, as far as I was concerned.

It started, as I started with my retelling here, around about four-thirty in the afternoon when a rather diffident-looking boy of about fifteen walked before one of the windows to my office suite. This was unusual because to do this the boy was traversing a pathway that runs around the perimeter of the building’s top floor level and is only about a foot-and-a-half wide around the stretch that surrounds my office. As he passed, he made no eye contact with me and seemed impassive, as if he’d simply lost his way and was looking for a proper exit. I thought little of it and proceeded with my then telehealth-heavy day which often has me looking into my computer monitor and sometimes above it to gaze out of my window, mostly to see bucolic sights stretching towards the hills, and ever so rarely to see someone—if so, typically a building workman—navigating this narrow path, attending to some repair job or other.

When the boy disappeared from view, I shook my head, briefly distracted and bemused, if not quite amused, and then I went about my business. But within the hour I felt a commotion beyond my office door in the hallways. Someone or thing was scurrying about, creaking the sturdy boards beneath the well-carpeted floors. If it could talk, the foundation would say, we’re not used to this, but we can take it. At that moment, I thought I could take it also, because it hadn’t yet impinged upon me. That changed moments later when I heard and felt a violent rapping upon my office door. Someone was banging their fists upon its mid-riff. Were they alerting me to an emergency? Was it an assailant looking to crash through the barrier and do me harm? Was it ICE coming to get me? Actually, only that third possibility did not occur to me in that fleeting spell of inquiry. Amidst the shock of intrusion, my head spun around and then back again to my computer screen, to the nonplussed expression of my meeting visitor, who apparently had not heard the noise. Did you hear that? I asked. He shook his head uncomprehendingly. That added to my disbelief. Had it really happened? I excused myself momentarily, went to door, opened it, and looked about the hallway, which was foolish if indeed this was a violent assault still in process.

Nothing. The hallway was empty, the miscreant gone. At the end of a long stretch, a door at the far corner was ajar, revealing the escape, plus a warning: the intruder was still around. They could come back, do what they just did, again. What did they want? What had I done to deserve this? It’s interesting to note how fear and guilt mingle in such moments, as if random incidents are an indictment from the cosmos, yielding a Hitchcockian turn of events. In the realm of the unconscious, which encompasses all, such incidents have meaning. Actually, nothing is random. Everything is purposeful, I’m reminded. Crazy thought, I then self-reproach. Moments later, with my poise recovered, I resumed the meeting with lighthearted references to the inexplicable interruption—my fellow meeting participant still as undisturbed as he’d been throughout. Such privilege, I now envied, to be so undisturbed.

It will have seemed an aberrant event save for what happened the next day. This was worse. This time, a visitor was in my office, sitting opposite me, and adjacent to the window that looked onto and past that thin slice of pathway through which my intruder—soon to seem like my stalker—had snaked his way by. This time, there was no scurrying footwork rumbling beyond my door and through the hallways, heralding a violent assault upon my office. This time, the intruder appeared in the corner of the window like an intent spy performing a reconnaissance of his latest mischief. His beady, rat-eyes poked into the frame of the window, meeting mine as I immediately caught glance of him. He darted backwards, just like a rodent that sees itself being seen, that then must retreat to its dark hole. “Excuse me”, I will have muttered to my visitor who, just as in the previous instance, had not seen a thing out of the ordinary. It was as if others were simply not destined for whatever lesson I was being taught.

I opened my door, again inspecting the space in the hallway, though looking to see now what could be done—what might be done differently this time. Soon, after the current meeting, I’d make a call, alert the property manager that a problem exists in the building: we have intruders, stalkers, something like that, and something must be done! I nervily resumed my meeting, informing my visitor of the truth but reassuring that no danger existed…as far as I knew. We ended a few minutes earlier than scheduled with my offer to escort the person—a woman who may or may not fear bears, rats, men, or adolescents—to the parking lot. This belied somewhat the prior reassurances, but the gestured was appreciated. What a nice, understanding man I am. Upon my return via an elevator, I calculated that I had spare minutes in which I’d could make that call to the landlord and level my complaint. Exiting the lift, I turned left and rounded the corner to the stretch that led to my office suite. There in the short distance I saw a lithe, floppily t-shirted figure stood before my door, his fists raised. Then he launched them against the hard wood, matching the ferocious sound and impact of the day before. “Hey”, I yelled, and then dashed towards him. Without turning fully, the youth spun to his left and leapt towards the fire escape door that was four feet across from my office. By the time I’d slipped through the same gap, he and his conspirator—the beady-eyed boy who had performed the spying task minutes earlier–were already two-thirds down the staircase, cackling excitably. I stopped at the second landing and barked a profanity, feeling bold yet suddenly restrained. Who am I kidding? What would I do even if I did catch them up?

I plodded back up the one flight of stairs, catching my breath and nursing the feint twinge in my middle-aged right knee. Time for a phone call. No more messing around. My sense of entitlement was further emboldened when moments later I was speaking to a property manager who took the call as if summoned from a magic lamp. She was sympathetic yet restraining a guffaw. Kids? I felt her wanting to say, reminiscently. She advanced a theory, suggesting the mischief-makers were from the family therapy agency on the second floor: teens who were enrolled in that program were meant to sit patiently in waiting areas, and behave. Who are we all kidding, we were both thinking? Still, decisive action would be taken and an officious finger would be duly wagged at the boys in question via the agency that held the mooted responsibility. With my voice calmed and my heart no longer pounding with indignant rage, I thanked my landlord’s agent for the adult attention that would restore my world to its much-earned (not “privileged”) order.

Now the episode is over. The villains are gone and the disturbance has passed, swept back into an unconscious narrative that will dissolve until ducks, squirrels, possibly rats and men and bears, come to resurrect it. What protests exist that stir from the cracks, taking revenge and flipping the scripts of who or what has power, if only for a hot minute of time.

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?”