“Hello, Dr. Elgin.”
She is unmoved by my politeness. Perhaps I can move her with my story, and, if she’s as good as they say, she can help me get out of here. I put my reservations high up on a shelf and prepare myself to like her.
“Tell me, Margo, all about yourself.”
She leans back in her chair, and I am reminded of Destiny when she stretched out, readying herself to watch a movie. I think about where to start. When I arrived here? Why I arrived here? The Bone? Judah?
“My mother was a prostitute…” I begin. I am surprised by my willingness to talk. The ease at which I verbally claim the ugliness of my life. Perhaps this is the first time someone has asked me about myself so openly. Or perhaps I have no choice but to speak, locked in this sterile place, filled with people who don’t belong in the regular world.
I tell her about the eating house, and about the men—my father, in particular, with his chunky Rolex. Then our time is up, and we both look disappointed. My confessions have made me breathless. I feel alive; my fingertips are tingling. It’s empowering, I think. To allow a stranger to know you.
“The state requires you to have four sessions a week, Margo,” she says. “I have little room for new patients, but I will move things around for you, yes?”
“Yes,” I say. “I would like that very much.”
Dr. Elgin sees me on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday each week. Tuesdays are her day off, as she even sees patients on the weekend, she tells me. I look forward to our time together. She wants to know about Judah; she is more interested in him than she is in my mother. I ask her about her life, but she is hesitant, always switching back to me, which is expected, and also why we are both here.
But one day she tells me that she used to be married. He died, widowing her before they had the chance to have children. I don’t ask her how he died, or how she feels about it. I don’t want to think that Dr. Elgin is as messed up and sad as I am. It’s better to believe that she became this purring, beautiful person, so beloved by the criminally insane that they announced her Queen of Doctors. I imagine her deceased husband being ridiculously handsome—dark, foreign skin and hazel eyes. He was tall, and he was her first love. It is why she is still single, because no one can compare to the man she had vowed to love for all her moral life. So she wears her beautiful clothes, and eats at fancy restaurants with colleagues who wear black-rimmed glasses and discuss the theories of Gestalt and Freud.
I make up stories like these for the nurses and orderlies at the hospital too. None quite as glamorous as Dr. Elgin’s, and, if you piss me off, I’ll give you a terribly lonely life with a tray table and Cup o’ Noodles.
I did all of this to survive, my soul a beaten and trembling dog. My mind a million compartments filled with holes and questions and drug-induced thoughts that were furry around the edges. Caterpillar thoughts, as Dr. Elgin would later call them. She changes my medication so that I no longer feel so thick and moody, and she brings me a little potted cactus that I keep on the windowsill of my room. I am wholly hers, intent on proving myself, fixing myself. And I should feel manipulated, because that’s what she’s doing, but I don’t care. I kind of like it here.DR. ELGIN TELLS ME LATER, that in the letter the police found in my car, I outlined the psychotic episodes I’d been having, begging whoever found me—if they found me in time—to put me somewhere I could get help.
“So you see,” she says, “you are here of your own accord. This is something you wanted.” I nod, though I have no memory of writing the letter. I wonder if Leroy somehow coerced me into it, or if he wrote it himself. Either way, none of it is true. What I was going to do to Leroy was just. Something he deserved.
I grow suddenly depressed while contained in my new prison. One that is clumsier than the eating house and far less experienced at torture. Its white walls and the ever-present smell of bleach make me miss the brown stains and moldy character of my former prison. I speak to Dr. Elgin about my depression, hoping she can help me understand.
“Some people,” begins Dr. Elgin, “believe that it’s people like you and me who are the problem.” She pauses long enough to allow me to wonder after her words. I picture her without the many adornments on her arms and fingers, without her thick, black eyeliner and deep red lipstick, and see her imprisoned in her own eating house. Depression is a deep, black wave—so powerful, building from a swell and rising … rising. Could Dr. Elgin personally know its force?
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Our society believes that if you suffer from depression of any kind, there is something innately broken inside of you. Especially if there is nothing personal to trigger the depression, like a death in the family or a loss of some sort. If you’re just depressed for no reason, they judge you.”
“Yes…” I say, fidgeting with the hem of my shirt.
“But I wonder about the people who never suffer from depression,” she says, leaning forward. “How calloused their souls are to feel less than us.” The us rings through my head. “Are they less actualized, less pessimistic, less able to taste the tang of reality on the tips of their tongues? Why are we the broken ones—those who feel things? Who are affected by the changing tides in society?” Her eyes are bright. She’s not doing the shrink thing with me, I realize; she’s speaking to me from her own heart. I let my guard down a little, and lean into her words.
“We are not the problem, Margo,” she says. I nod my head. “It’s the people who do not feel as strongly as we do who are…”
Her words surround me. At first they are suffocating. Everything about our society teaches us that what she is saying is wrong. But then I succumb to them. My need to be normal latches on to those words—sucking … sucking.
If what she is saying is true, then the rest of the world is numb, and we who suffer from ailments of the psyche are the ones who are more advanced in nature. We see the decaying of society, the neglect of morals and human decency: the school shootings, the crimes humans commit against one another, the crimes we commit against ourselves; and we react to them in a way that is more intense than everyone else. Yes, I think. Yes, this is the truth.
I leave her office altered. Perhaps feeling not as alone as I always have. I begin again, not to question who I am, but to embrace it.