Just After Sunset

  "No," he says. "I suppose not. Doc, we never discussed the root cause. I know what it is--"

  Next week we may get to that, I tell him. In the meantime, I want him to keep a chart divided into three sections: counting, touching, and placing. Will he do that?

  "Yes," he says.

  I ask him, almost casually, if he feels suicidal.

  "The thought has crossed my mind, but I have a great deal to do."

  This is an interesting and rather troubling response.

  I give him my card and tell him to call--day or night--if the idea of suicide begins to seem more attractive. He says he will. But then, almost all of them promise.

  "In the meantime," I say at the door, putting my hand on his shoulder, "keep going steady with life."

  He looks at me, pale and not smiling now, a man being pecked to pieces by invisible birds. "Have you ever read 'The Great God Pan,' by Arthur Machen?"

  I shake my head.

  "It's the most terrifying story ever written," he says. "In it, one of the characters says 'lust always prevails.' But lust isn't what he means. What he means is compulsion."

  Paxil? Perhaps Prozac. But neither until I get a better fix on this interesting patient.

  June 7, 2007

  June 14, 2007

  June 28, 2007

  N. brings his "homework" to our next session, as I fully expected he would. There are many things in this world you can't depend on, and many people you can't trust, but OCDs, unless they are dying, almost always complete their tasks.

  In a way his charts are comical; in another way, sad; in another, frankly horrible. He is an accountant, after all, and I assume he's used one of his accounting programs to create the contents of the folder he hands me before proceeding to the couch. They are spreadsheets. Only instead of investments and income-flow, these charts detail the complex terrain of N.'s obsessions. The top two sheets are headed COUNTING; the next two TOUCHING; the final six PLACING. Thumbing through them, I'm hard put to understand how he finds time for any other activities. Yet OCDs almost always find a way. The idea of invisible birds recurs to me; I see them roosting all over N., pecking away his flesh in bloody nibbles.

  When I look up, he's on the couch, once more with his hands laced together tightly on his chest. And he's rearranged the vase and the tissue-box so they are again connected on a diagonal. The flowers are white lilies today. Seeing them that way, laid out on the table, makes me think of funerals.

  "Please don't ask me to put them back," he says, apologetic but firm. "I'll leave before I do that."

  I tell him I have no intention of asking him to put them back. I hold up the spreadsheets and compliment him on how professional they look. He shrugs. I then ask him if they represent an overview or if they only cover the last week.

  "Just the last week," he says. As if the matter is of no interest to him. I suppose it is not. A man being pecked to death by birds can have little interest in last year's insults and injuries, or even last week's; he's got today on his mind. And, God help him, the future.

  "There must be two or three thousand items here," I say.

  "Call them events. That's what I call them. There are six hundred and four counting events, eight hundred and seventy-eight touching events, and twenty-two hundred and forty-six placing events. All even numbers, you'll notice. They add up to thirty-seven hundred and twenty-eight, also an even number. If you add the individual numbers in that total--3728--you come out with twenty, also even. A good number." He nods, as if confirming this to himself. "Divide 3728 by two and you come out with eighteen-hundred and sixty-four. 1864 adds up to nineteen, a powerful odd number. Powerful and bad." He actually shivers a little.

  "You must be very tired," I say.

  To this he makes no verbal reply, nor does he nod, but he answers, all the same. Tears trickle down his cheeks toward his ears. I am reluctant to add to his burden, but I recognize one fact: if we don't begin this work soon--"no ditzing around," as Sister Sheila would say--he won't be capable of the work at all. I can already see a deterioration in his appearance (wrinkled shirt, indifferent shave, hair badly in need of a trim), and if I asked his colleagues about him, I would almost surely see those quick exchanged glances that tell so much. The spreadsheets are amazing in their way, but N. is clearly running out of strength. It seems to me that there is no choice but to fly directly to the heart of the matter, and until that heart is reached, there will be no Paxil or Prozac or anything else.

  I ask if he is ready to tell me what happened last August.

  "Yes," he says. "It's what I came to do." He takes some tissues from the Eternal Box and wipes his cheeks. Wearily. "But Doc...are you sure?"

  I have never had a patient ask me that, or speak to me in quite that tone of reluctant sympathy. But I tell him yes, I'm sure. My job is to help him, but in order for me to do that, he must be willing to help himself.

  "Even if it puts you at risk of winding up like I am now? Because it could happen. I'm lost, but I think--I hope--that I haven't gotten to the drowning-man state, so panicky I'd be willing to pull down anyone who was trying to save me."

  I tell him I don't quite understand.

  "I'm here because all this may be in my head," he says, and knocks his knuckles against his temple, as if he wants to make sure I know where his head is at. "But it might not be. I can't really tell. That's what I mean when I say I'm lost. And if it's not mental--if what I saw and sensed in Ackerman's Field is real--then I'm carrying a kind of infection. Which I could pass on to you."

  Ackerman's Field. I make a note of it, although everything will be on the tapes. When we were children, my sister and I went to Ackerman School, in the little town of Harlow, on the banks of the Androscoggin. Which is not far from here; thirty miles at most.

  I tell him I'll take my chances, and say that in the end--more positive reinforcement--I'm sure we'll both be fine.

  He utters a hollow, lonely laugh. "Wouldn't that be nice," he says.

  "Tell me about Ackerman's Field."

  He sighs and says, "It's in Motton. On the east side of the Androscoggin."

  Motton. One town over from Chester's Mill. Our mother used to buy milk and eggs at Boy Hill Farm in Motton. N. is talking about a place that cannot be more than seven miles from the farmhouse where I grew up. I almost say, I knew it!

  I don't, but he looks over at me sharply, almost as if he caught my thought. Perhaps he did. I don't believe in ESP, but I don't entirely discount it, either.

  "Don't ever go there, Doc," he says. "Don't even look for it. Promise me."

  I give my promise. In fact, I haven't been back to that broken-down part of Maine in over fifteen years. It's close in miles, distant in desire. Thomas Wolfe made a characteristically sweeping statement when he titled his magnum opus You Can't Go Home Again; it's not true for everyone (Sister Sheila often goes back; she's still close to several of her childhood friends), but it's true for me. Although I suppose I'd title my own book I Won't Go Home Again. What I remember are bullies with harelips dominating the playground, empty houses with staring glassless windows, junked-out cars, and skies that always seemed white and cold and full of fleeing crows.

  "All right," N. says, and bares his teeth for a moment at the ceiling. Not in aggression; it is, I'm quite sure, the expression of a man preparing to do a piece of heavy lifting that will leave him aching the next day. "I don't know if I can express it very well, but I'll do my best. The important thing to remember is that up til that day in August, the closest thing to OCD behavior I exhibited was popping back into the bathroom before going to work to make sure I'd gotten all the nose hairs."

  Maybe this is true; more likely it isn't. I don't pursue the subject. Instead, I ask him to tell me what happened that day. And he does.

  For the next three sessions, he does. At the second of those sessions--June 15th--he brings me a calendar. It is, as the saying goes, Exhibit A.

  3. N.'s Story

  I'm an accountant by trade, a
photographer by inclination. After my divorce--and the children growing up, which is a divorce of a different kind, and almost as painful--I spent most of my weekends rambling around, taking landscape shots with my Nikon. It's a film camera, not a digital. Toward the end of every year, I took the twelve best pix and turned them into a calendar. I had them printed at a little place in Freeport called The Windhover Press. It's pricey, but they do good work. I gave the calendars to my friends and business associates for Christmas. A few clients, too, but not many--clients who bill five or six figures usually appreciate something that's silver-plated. Myself, I prefer a good landscape photo every time. I have no pictures of Ackerman's Field. I took some, but they never came out. Later on I borrowed a digital camera. Not only did the pictures not come out, I fried the camera's insides. I had to buy a new one for the guy I borrowed it from. Which was all right. By then I think I would have destroyed any pictures I took of that place, anyway. If it allowed me, that is.

  [I ask him what he means by "it." N. ignores the question as if he hasn't heard it.]

  I've taken pictures all over Maine and New Hampshire, but tend to stick pretty much to my own patch. I live in Castle Rock--up on the View, actually--but I grew up in Harlow, like you. And don't look so surprised, Doc, I Googled you after my GP suggested you--everybody Googles everybody these days, don't they?

  Anyway, that part of central Maine is where I've done my best work: Harlow, Motton, Chester's Mill, St. Ives, Castle-St.-Ives, Canton, Lisbon Falls. All along the banks of the mighty Androscoggin, in other words. Those pictures look more...real, somehow. The '05 calendar's a good example. I'll bring you one and you can decide for yourself. January through April and September through December were all taken close to home. May through August are...let's see...Old Orchard Beach...Pemnaquid Point, the lighthouse, of course...Harrison State Park...and Thunder Hole in Bar Harbor. I thought I was really getting something at Thunder Hole, I was excited, but when I saw the proofs, reality came crashing back down. It was just another tourist-snap. Good composition, but so what, right? You can find good composition in any shitshop tourist calendar.

  Want my opinion, just as an amateur? I think photography's a much artier art than most people believe. It's logical to think that, if you've got an eye for composition--plus a few technical skills you can learn in any photography class--one pretty place should photograph as well as any other, especially if you're just into landscapes. Harlow, Maine or Sarasota, Florida, just make sure you've got the right filter, then point and shoot. Only it's not like that. Place matters in photography just like it does in painting or writing stories or poetry. I don't know why it does, but...

  [There is a long pause.]

  Actually I do. Because an artist, even an amateur one like me, puts his soul into the things he creates. For some people--ones with the vagabond spirit, I imagine--the soul is portable. But for me, it never seemed to travel even as far as Bar Harbor. The snaps I've taken along the Androscoggin, though...those speak to me. And they do to others, too. The guy I do business with at Windhover said I could probably get a book deal out of New York, end up getting paid for my calendars rather than paying for them myself, but that never interested me. It seemed a little too...I don't know...public? Pretentious? I don't know, something like that. The calendars are little things, just between friends. Besides, I've got a job. I'm happy crunching numbers. But my life sure would have been dimmer without my hobby. I was happy just knowing a few friends had my calendars hung in their kitchens or living rooms. Even in their damn mudrooms. The irony is I haven't taken many pictures since the ones I took in Ackerman's Field. I think that part of my life may be over, and it leaves a hole. One that whistles in the middle of the night, as if there was a wind way down inside. A wind trying to fill up what's no longer there. Sometimes I think life is a sad, bad business, Doc. I really do.

  On one of my rambles last August, I came to a dirt road in Motton that I didn't remember ever seeing before. I'd just been riding, listening to tunes on the radio, and I'd lost track of the river, but I knew it couldn't be far, because it has a smell. It's kind of dank and fresh at the same time. You know what I'm talking about, I'm sure. It's an old smell. Anyway, I turned up that road.

  It was bumpy, almost washed out in a couple of places. Also, it was getting late. It must have been around seven in the evening, and I hadn't stopped anywhere for supper. I was hungry. I almost turned around, but then the road smoothed out and started going uphill instead of down. That smell was stronger, too. When I turned off the radio, I could hear the river as well as smell it--not loud, not close, but it was there.

  Then I came to a tree down across the road, and I almost went back. I could have, even though there was no place to turn around. I was only a mile or so in from Route 117, and I could have backed out in five minutes. I think now that something, some force that exists on the bright side of our lives, was giving me that opportunity. I think the last year would have been a lot different if I'd just thrown the transmission in reverse. But I didn't. Because that smell...it's always reminded me of childhood. Also, I could see a lot more sky at the crest of the hill. The trees--some pine, mostly junk birch--drew back up there, and I thought, "There's a field." It occurred to me that if there was, it probably looked down on the river. It also occurred to me that there might be a good spot to turn around up there, but that was very secondary to the idea that I might be able to take a picture of the Androscoggin at sunset. I don't know if you remember that we had some spectacular sunsets last August, but we did.

  So I got out and moved the tree. It was one of those junk birches, so rotted it almost came apart in my hands. But when I got back into my car, I still almost went back instead of forward. There really is a force on the bright side of things; I believe that. But it seemed like the sound of the river was clearer with the tree out of the way--stupid, I know, but it really seemed that way--so I threw the transmission into low and drove my little Toyota 4Runner the rest of the way up.

  I passed a little sign tacked to a tree. ACKERMAN'S FIELD, NO HUNTING, KEEP OUT, it said. Then the trees drew back, first on the left, then on the right, and there it was. It took my breath away. I barely remember turning off the car and getting out, and I don't remember grabbing my camera, but I must have, because I had it in my hand when I got to the edge of the field, with the strap and lens-bag knocking against my leg. I was struck to my heart and through my heart, knocked clean out of my ordinary life.

  Reality is a mystery, Dr. Bonsaint, and the everyday texture of things is the cloth we draw over it to mask its brightness and darkness. I think we cover the faces of corpses for the same reason. We see the faces of the dead as a kind of gate. It's shut against us...but we know it won't always be shut. Someday it will swing open for each of us, and each of us will go through.

  But there are places where the cloth gets ragged and reality is thin. The face beneath peeps through...but not the face of a corpse. It would almost be better if it was. Ackerman's Field is one of those places, and no damn wonder whoever owns it put up a KEEP OUT sign.

  The day was fading. The sun was a ball of red gas, flattened at the top and bottom, sitting above the western horizon. The river was a long, bloody snake in its reflected glow, eight or ten miles distant, but the sound of it carrying to me on the still evening air. Blue-gray woods rose behind it in a series of ridges to the far horizon. I couldn't see a single house or road. Not a bird sang. It was as if I'd been tumbled back four hundred years in time. Or four million. The first white streamers of groundmist were rising out of the hay--which was high. Nobody had been in there to cut it, although that was a big field, and good graze. The mist came out of the darkening green like breath. As if the earth itself was alive.

  I think I staggered a little. It wasn't the beauty, although it was beautiful; it was how everything that lay before me seemed thin, almost to the point of hallucination. And then I saw those damned rocks rising out of the uncut hay.

  There were seven, or so I
thought--the tallest two about five feet high, the shortest only three or so, the rest in between. I remember walking down to the closest of them, but it's like remembering a dream after it starts to decompose in the morning light--you know how they do that? Of course you do, dreams must be a big part of your workday. Only this was no dream. I could hear the hay whickering against my pants, could feel the khaki getting damp from the mist and starting to stick to my skin below the knees. Every now and then a bush--clumps of sumac were growing here and there--would pull my lens-bag back and then drop it again so it would thump harder than usual against my thigh.

  I got to the nearest of the rocks and stopped. It was one of the five-footers. At first I thought there were faces carved in it--not human faces, either; the faces of beasts and monsters--but then I shifted my position a little and saw it was just a trick of the evening light, which thickens shadows and makes them look like...well, like anything. In fact, after I stood in my new position for awhile, I saw new faces. Some of these looked human, but they were just as horrible. More horrible, really, because human is always more horrible, don't you think? Because we know human, we understand human. Or think we do. And these looked like they were either screaming or laughing. Maybe both at the same time.

  I thought it was the quiet screwing with my imagination, and the isolation, and the bigness of it--how much of the world I could see laid out in front of me. And how time seemed to be holding its breath. As if everything would stay the way it was forever, with sunset not more than forty minutes away and the sun sitting red over the horizon and that faded clarity in the air. I thought it was those things that were making me see faces where there was nothing but coincidence. I think differently now, but now it's too late.

  I snapped some pictures. Five, I think. A bad number, although I didn't know that yet. Then I stood back, wanting to get all seven of them in one picture, and when I framed the shot, I saw that there were really eight, standing in a kind of rough ring. You could tell--when you really looked, you could--that they were part of some underlying geological formation that had either poked out of the ground eons ago, or had maybe been exposed more recently by flooding (the field had a fairly steep downward slope, so I thought that was very possible), but they also looked planned, like stones in a Druid's circle. There was no carving in them, though. Except for what the elements had done. I know, because I went back in daylight and made sure of it. Chips and folds in the stone. No more than that.