Exley (20 page)

“Don't bug him,” the guard says.

“But I'm his mental health professional,” I say.

“Oh,” the guard says. His face relaxes somewhat, more concerned than distrustful. “Is the little guy”—and I suspect the guard is on the verge of uttering something adjectivally offensive, “nuts,” “loony,” “bonkers,” something for which I will have to scold him mentally — “sick?” he finally says.

“I'm not really at liberty to divulge that.” I am preparing to lecture him — I am in a hall of higher learning, after all — about doctor-patient confidentiality when it occurs to me that the security guard might be able to help me. “Is he always in there alone?” I ask.

“Always,” the guard says. “Every Tuesday.”

“No one is ever in there with him?” I say. “Not even a female named K.?”

“Not that I've seen,” he says.

“And you've never done anything about it?”

The guard's face turns defensive, the brow descending toward the nose, the nose rising to meet it. “He's not hurting anyone,” the guard says.

Except himself
, I think but do not say, because I'm not certain it's true. I look into the classroom. M.'s lips aren't moving anymore, although his eyes are still closed. He has a grateful, shining look on his face, like someone is about to do something nice to him or for him. I am certain he's thinking of his father or K. And then the look changes, and I know something has gone wrong: either someone hasn't done the thing M. wanted him/her to do, or he/she has done the thing M. wanted, but it wasn't so nice after all.
Poor kid
, I think again.

“What do you think he's thinking about?” the guard asks.

“Probably his father,” I say. “He was formerly a professor here.”

“A professor, huh?” the guard says. “What's his name?” I tell him. “Never heard of the guy,” the guard says. “I've been here eleven years. I thought I knew everyone who teaches here.”

I am about to respond to this when I notice M. is now walking toward the door. His eyes are still closed, and while they are still closed I consider fleeing. But then he opens them and sees me; the panic in his eyes must resemble the panic in mine. They dart here and there, as if looking for escape, but there is no place else to go. His feet must realize that, because they continue walking toward me.

“Good luck, Doc,” the security guard says, and walks away from me, from us. I turn back to the door. M. is standing in front of it. He looks minuscule, standing so close to the door; his head barely reaches the top of the window. I open the door for him, the way I've imagined opening the door for his mother at the NCMHP gala the day after tomorrow.

“What are you doing here?” M. asks, and before I can answer, he also asks: “How long have you been standing there?”

“Just a second or two,” I assure him. “I wanted to ‘watch you in action,' but alas, it looks like I'm too late. How was class?” It doesn't occur to me to speak like Dr. Pahnee, and evidently it doesn't occur to M., either. He shrugs. “It was OK,” he says. “I let them go early. But before that, I read to them.”

“From what text?” I ask. M. raises his eyebrows, as though to say,
What text do you think?
I'm becoming quite adept at “reading” him, the way M.'s father (and M. himself?) are so good at reading the aforehinted text. “Do you think your father would want you to teach
A Fan's Notes?
” I ask, and M. shrugs. “After all,” I say, “he asked you not to read the book.” “And I didn't,” M. says, “until two days ago.” Then, before I can say anything, he shrugs yet again. Oh, those shrugs! Those damnable shrugs! Sometimes I wonder: Is this really why I became a mental health professional? To be shrugged at by children? In the same vein, sometimes I wonder why people have children at all. Their parents, of course, must wonder the same thing. Although I cannot imagine M.'s lovely, loving mother wondering that. I cannot say the same thing about M.'s father, on the other hand. I tell M., “I have to say — have to say and, indeed,
must say
—that I wish I knew your father better.”

“What do you want to know?” M. wants to know.

“About K., for instance,” I say. M. glances over his shoulder at the classroom, then down at his feet. “Your father's student,” I add.

“She's
my
student now,” he says, looking up at me. M.'s eyes dare me to tell him that K. isn't his student. But a good mental health professional never accepts a patient's dare, which is fortunate, since I never dared to accept a dare before I was a mental health professional, either.

“I know she is,” I say. “But how did you know K. was your father's student?”

“What do you mean?” M. says, and then before I can tell him what I mean, he says, “I'm teaching my father's class. She was in the class when I started teaching it.”

Yes
,
and how did you come to teach your father's class in the first place?
I think but do not say. Instead, I ask, “Did your father ever mention K. before he went to Iraq? Did he ever talk about her around you or your mother?”

“No,” M. says quickly, much too quickly, and so I know the answer is yes. How to prove what I know, however, is a more difficult matter.

“Are you still journaling?” I ask M.

“Am I
what?
”

“Journaling,
” I repeat. This is another way I am certain that M. is not really teaching his father's class. If he were truly an English professor, then he would know what it means to journal. Because I know from an article in one of the mental health profession's leading periodicals that English professors no longer have their students write essays on literary matters — literary matters and, indeed,
literature
— and instead have their students journal, a process which privileges feeling and emotion and devalues such less essential matters as form and style. The point of the article was that English professors, like the rest of society, are better off rejecting their former standards and practices and embracing the standards and practices of mental health professionals like myself. “Are you still writing down everything that's happening to you?”

“Pretty much,” M. says, and then twists his face into a question mark. “Why?”

“Just curious,” I say, and then attempt to flatten my face into an answer.

 

 

I
t was seven o'clock when I got home that night, the time I usually got home on Tuesdays. Mother's car was in the driveway. The garage floodlight was on, but the rest of the house was dark. I put down my kickstand and parked my bike in the driveway, walked inside, turned on the kitchen and living room lights, and yelled out, “Hello, I'm home!” but no one answered. This wasn't a big deal. I figured Mother was next door talking to the neighbors or something. To kill time, I went to my dad's study, took out my “journal,” and wrote down everything that had happened to me that day so far. When I was done, I put the “journal” back in the window seat, walked outside, crossed my arms, and leaned against Mother's car. As I did, I caught a whiff of myself. I smelled like K. The smell made me feel sad and lonely. But the air smelled cold and clean. I tugged on the front of my coat to make it like a tent and then started flapping it, right there in the driveway. I did this for a while, until the horn in Mother's car honked. Twice.

“What the . . . ?” I said. I jumped up away from the car and bumped into my bike. It fell and made a soft crushing sound as it landed on the crushed stones in the driveway. My heart fluttered; I could actually feel wings beating in my chest. I was standing next to the back passenger door, and I leaned down a little and looked through the window toward the front seat. Mother was sitting in the driver's seat. Her arm was hooked over the back of the seat. Her body was half turned toward me, and she was grinning.

This reminded me of a nice thing that happened. I was in kindergarten. Mother and my dad picked me up from school. I don't remember why or where we went afterward. I got in the backseat. Mother was driving. My dad was in the front passenger seat. We hadn't gone anywhere yet.
We were just sitting there, parked on the street outside Knickerbocker Elementary. My dad turned around in his seat and asked me, “What'd you learn today, bud?” He asked the same question every day, and so I knew to have an answer.

“I learned the planets,” I said, and then recited them in order, Mercury through Pluto.

“Jesus H. Keeriiisst,” my dad said. He was smiling at me. He stuck his hand over the seat, and I slapped it. Mother was nodding at me in the rearview mirror in an impressed way. “How'd you remember that? I always get Uranus and Neptune confused.”

“What do you mean?” Mother said. “They're totally different planets.”

“I know
that,
” my dad said. “But I can never remember which one is next to Pluto.”

“Ms. O. taught me how,” I said. Ms. O. was my teacher. I recited what she'd taught me. “‘My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.' That's how you remember.”

My dad repeated what I'd just said. “That's good,” he told me. “I won't forget anymore.”

“I know,” I said. “I asked Ms. O. what you called the trick, and she said it wasn't a trick. She said it was a moronic device.”

“A
what?
” Mother said. She swiveled around to look at me, and as she did, her eyes caught my dad's. Both their faces looked like they were trying to hold on to something. My dad put his right hand over his mouth; Mother's lips were pursed, her eyes crinkled. I knew something was funny, but I didn't know what it was yet, so I said, “A moronic device. It helps you remember things.”

“I think it's a
mnemonic
device,” Mother said gently. “Not a moronic device.”

“It's a moronic device,” I said, starting to guess I was wrong, but mad about it and not wanting to admit it. “The kind of device you need when you're a moron.” Because I knew what the word
moron
meant, pretty much.

“Are you sure?” Mother said. “Are you sure it's not a mnemonic device?”

“I'm sure,” I said. “You must be talking about another kind of device.”

My dad lost it then. He started laughing through his hand. And then Mother started laughing, too. Then my dad started laughing harder because Mother was. I wasn't going to laugh, because it wasn't funny. But I don't think I'd ever seen the two of them laugh together like that. I didn't want them to stop. So I started laughing, too. It might have been the nicest thing we ever did as a family. There's a picture in a frame in my bedroom of the three of us. It'd been taken at Sears, at the Salmon Run Mall, when I was seven. We were all dressed up in clothes we'd never worn before. It was clear we were unhappy, because we were all grinning and trying too hard to look happy. Mother and my dad had probably fought about something right before the picture was taken. We looked unhappy, and we were. But no one had taken a picture of us in the car. Why hadn't anyone taken a picture of that?

Mother pushed a button and the back passenger-side window rolled down. I leaned into it and said, “I wish someone would take a picture of us right now.”

Mother cocked her head a little and said, “You can be a strange kid sometimes, Miller.”

I didn't know what to say to that, especially since Mother must have seen me leaning against her car and flapping my clothes like a maniac a minute earlier. I said, “What are you doing sitting in the car anyway?”

“I was watching you sit at your dad's desk,” she said. “You reminded me of him.” I wondered if Mother was going to say more than that — like ask what exactly I was doing, sitting at his desk — but she didn't. So I said, “What were you doing in the car in the first place?”

“I was on the way to pick you up at Harold's,” she said.

“What for?” I said.

Mother shrugged. “Come on,” she said. “Let's go.”

“Where?”

“Special treat,” was all Mother said. She pulled the keys out of the ignition and jingled them at me, like I was a dog who loved to be taken for a ride. I wasn't. But I got in the car anyway.

 

 

A
fter speaking with M. at JCCC, I return home, but I have no intention of staying there past seven o'clock; seven o'clock, I know, is when M. and M.'s mother are going to the Crystal to celebrate his birthday. When the clock strikes seven, I “hop” on my Schwinn and pedal to their home. Two of the downstairs rooms are illuminated; there are no cars parked in the driveway. I park my bike on the street, then reconsider and park it around the corner so as not to be seen. Am I thinking like a criminal? No, I am thinking like someone who might be
considered
a criminal if he didn't have such a good cause. This is as good a definition of a mental health professional as any.

The house is unlocked. This is as I hoped and planned, and I am not surprised: M.'s mother is a secure woman and secure women do not need to lock their doors to feel secure. I open the door that leads into the kitchen. The kitchen is unremarkable — unremarkable and, indeed,
not worth remarking upon
. I proceed through it, into the living room. M. has described this room at length; sure enough, there in the corner is M.'s father's desk. Behind the desk is the window seat. The window seat, I know, is where one can find M.'s father's copies of
A Fan's Notes
. I have one of his copies already, which is more than enough. I walk past it and head toward the stairs, then up the stairs, and into the hallway, turning on lights as I go. First, the bathroom. It, too, is as M. describes it: as with a cave, something within it drips. I turn on the light. The room is half-boy (there is a child-sized toothbrush encrusted with old paste and emblazoned with a caped cartoon superhero) and half-woman (in the shower, a “lady's razor” and a bottle of shampoo, organic, from Australia — a fact not insignificant, given that M. claims K.'s shampoo is also native to that faraway island continent). I take note of the coincidence, mentally,
and move on to M.'s bedroom. I turn on the light. I am tempted to write, “I don't know what I expected,” but this is merely something one says when one does know what one expects and one's expectations are not met. I expect the room to look
literary
, somehow, in some way, but it does not: there are bookshelves and there are books on them — some of them age-appropriate and some not. But that is the extent of its literariness: there are toys and puzzles scattered on the floor and left in various states of midplay and half completion; the wallpaper is blue and dotted with footballs; the lamp on the table next to M.'s bed (unmade) is in the form of a clown, its shade decorated with elephants, trapeze artists, and other creatures of the big top. In other words, it looks like a boy's room, a normal boy's room. Next to the lamp is a picture. I turn on the lamp to look at it. It is of M. and his parents. They are sitting in what is obviously a photographer's studio: the photo's background is pure mauve. M. is sitting between his parents. His father looks unshaven — unshaven and, indeed,
somewhat early in the process of becoming bearded
— although he is wearing a white button-down shirt and a red knit tie; his mother looks freshly groomed and beautiful as ever. They are both smiling. I'm sad to say of myself that their smiles sadden me. M. is smiling, too. His arms are linked with the parental units on either side of him. To a mental health professional, the symbolism is unmistakable: without M. between them, they would clearly not be linked. M. is clearly aware of this as well: his smile is toothy and desperate. Given what I just wrote, and felt, about M.'s parents' smiles, this should not sadden me. But it does. Even the room itself suddenly saddens me: it is a boy's room, but the boy who sleeps in it is more than a boy. Or less than one. I don't know which, and either way, I don't yet know how to restore his boyhood. As his mental health professional, I should know. This saddens me most of all.
Oh, M
., I think,
I am failing you and I am sorry
, and then I leave the room and head toward his mother's.