Rose never told anyone why she was always in the bathroom—her husband assumed that her “difficulties” originated in the distant past. She had been married for twelve years before she met the Doctor, and that was nearly a life-time ago when she lived in a cramped city apartment without any privacy. Not until she moved into the house in Barclay Park, with a spacious marble bathroom all her own, was Rose finally able to have a moment of peace.

And these moments came frequently. Something went off in her mind, like a trigger, that told her she had to go, she had to go. Rose hurried to the bathroom, remembering that she shouldn’t hurry, because just last week she fell and bruised her upper thigh on the hard marble tiles. Her fingers reached for the edge of the vanity top as she sidled her way to the toilet. Once she was safe inside the little chamber, behind the fogged glass door, Rose tried to shut everything out of her mind. She tried to relax. And sometimes she fell into a state of deep concentration, wherein the magazine rack on the wall, the toilet paper dispenser, and the little chamber itself disappeared. During these moments, she was absolutely alone, and the noises that had been eddying around in her mind all day long, became suddenly still. Then she would hear a quiet sound, like a stream, flowing directly beneath her.

But nothing ever seemed to come out. (Sighing.) Her focus continued—and she could almost feel something giving way—but no, there was nothing. Her imagination was deceiving her again. She always thought that she had to go to the bathroom. Maybe it was just another false alarm. She waited. Ten minutes longer. Twenty minutes. She picked up a magazine, Reform Judaism.

Rose’s bathroom looked like one of those grottos in the South of France where sunlight peeps in through a crack in the cave and reflects off the crystal ponds inside. Orchids and azaleas were set in brass at the foot of the oversized marble Jacuzzi. Bonsai plants sat on high nooks. The polished floors were grey and glistening, and mirrors gave the illusion of infinite space.

Despite the splendor and security of Rose’s bathroom, every so often her son, Lethe, tramped inside, busted open the fogged glass door, and saw his mother’s naked thighs wedged over the toilet seat. Startled by her son’s intrusion, Rose flexed the great wing-shapes of her arms. Don’t you dare come in here Lethe Bashar—she spat out at her son, shooing him away with her large, flapping arms. Don’t you dare, don’t you dare. Leave Mommy alone. I said I’m busy. Leave me alone.

Lethe reads with his father

Expelled from his mother’s bathroom, Lethe retreated down into the basement where his father sat in his pinewood study, skimming medical journals and examining X-Rays or speaking into a voice-recorder. His father’s study was the size of a guestroom, with an Italian leather sofa, a large hardwood desk and a New World globe poised on a wrought-iron stand. Four columns of bookshelves filled with encyclopedias, history books and a collection of leather bound Classics, extended across the walls on each side of the room.

Lethe’s father held X-Rays up to the light as he identified the different types of bone fractures and jotted down some notes. When Lethe stormed into his private study, he beckoned him closer with an outstretched arm, and the little boy nestled his head into the side of his father’s ribs. While Lethe could be restless at times, his father knew how to tame him by applying a small pressure to the nape of his neck. Feeling the pinch of forefinger and thumb, Lethe squirmed to get away.

“I heard your mother screaming.”

Lethe’s eyes grew big and expressionless.

“Were you bothering her again? You know you’re not supposed to be in her bathroom. Lethe? Are you listening to me? Do you want to read now?” Lethe’s father bundled him into his arms.

“Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver’s Travels.” The boy’s high-pitched voice rang out.

Together they sat on the Italian leather sofa and exchanged turns reading from Swift’s masterpiece. The Doctor had a passion for literature, and young Lethe watched his father’s face change expression, his voice become fantastical and dreamy.

“Very good, very good. Continue.” He patted his son on the head.

Sometimes after finishing a chapter, the Doctor digressed into a story about the country where he was born.

“No, I want to read more Gulliver—”

Again the Doctor affectionately pinched the nape of his son’s neck, and young Lethe responded by sinking back into the leather sofa.

“Do you know why they call Iraq the ‘the cradle of civilization’?”

The little boy shook his head, angling his eyes to the closed book on his father’s lap. “You told me this story already—”

“Iraq is called ‘the cradle of civilization’ because that’s where civilization began. The soil was rich between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. It was good for farming so people settled around these areas and built villages.”

The boy didn’t seem to be listening. “Tell me about Grandma. I want to hear the story about Grandma.”

“That’s fine. I’ll tell you the story about Grandma. But tomorrow night we’re going to talk more about Iraq’s history.”

Lethe mashed his lips together.

“You can’t ignore history, little man. History is bigger than you think. It’ll eat you up when you’re not looking”

The boy was silent. “I want to hear the story about when Grandma used to take you to all the different people’s houses.”

“That’s fine. But you’ll have to promise to go to sleep after that.”

“I promise—did you live in a big house when you were my age?”

“Yes we lived in my Grandfather’s house and there were ten of us.”

“You said it was a mansion.”

“Yes, it was very big.”

Housecleaning

After his marriage to Rose, the Doctor bought a big white house for his wife and children to live in. Rose adored this two-story ranch house and it was her obsession to make sure it never fell into a state of disorder. Depending on whom you asked, some said that Rose’s need to keep her house spotlessly clean was a neurosis, while others upheld that Rose simply enjoyed having a clean house, or that she was a perfectionist with high standards. With the exception of the Doctor’s pinewood study, everything in Rose’s house conformed to white or marble. Rose was preoccupied with the appearance of her house. Hidden spots of dust and dirt threatened her household ideal, reminding her of her previous life-time when she lived in a cramped city apartment. Every morning she walked through the halls, searching for fingerprints her two children may have left during the night.

Housecleaning was an activity that had to be engaged on many levels. There was the weekly scouring of the house—and there was the regular, daily cleaning. A grey van packed with Polish and Slavic ladies arrived at Rose’s house every Thursday morning to accomplish the former of the two missions, which entailed bleaching the grout between the tiles, cleaning out the refrigerator, vacuuming all the rooms, cleaning mirrors, wiping windows, polishing cabinets, and various other jobs that are too numerous and picayune to list here. The battalion of cleaning ladies was distinct in purpose and duty from the two regular housekeepers who also acted as nannies. In accomplishing her vision for a clean house, Rose wanted two women who could act as her right hand men.

Dora broke stride down the tiled hallway nearly twenty times a day. Her tall, lanky build and vigorous arm movements resembled the idiosyncrasies of the ostrich. The brunt of the work fell on Dora, who was younger than Mabel, and who strove to meet Rose’s often unreasonable demands for a clean house. She also worked in Rose’s art studio, building frames, stretching canvases, and banging nails into wooden beams. Often Dora and Rose worked side-by-side, whether they were scrubbing floors or cleaning paint brushes.

In addition, Dora and Mabel made the beds, changed the sheets, tidied the bedrooms, did the laundry and dusted the blinds. They also emptied the garbage cans, watered the plants, did the grocery shopping and made school lunches. On most days, they also prepared dinner. After a day’s worth of cleaning, the house looked completely anonymous, and Lethe and his sister had the strange impression they were staying in a hotel. Their rooms were in perfect order—the only thing missing—a mint on their pillows.

The Obsessive Artist

Lethe and Mazzy saw that their mother escaped downstairs into the basement and sometimes did not return to the upper floor until the next morning. During Rose’s stints of oil-painting, the housekeepers took care of the children, preparing Macaroni and Cheese dinners, or helping Lethe and his sister with their homework.

Rose worked tirelessly in her art studio, making numerous sketches, arranging scenes for her models, and hovering anxiously over a large commercial easel. Night and day, the glare of extension lights reflected off the walls in a harsh, artificial brightness. An old wine box overflowed with tubes of oil paint, and horsehair brushes soaked in turpentine. Open cans of solvents and paint thinners gave off a burning, astringent odor that lingered in the air and made your eyes water.

In the corner of the room, a breakfast scene was erected with a small table, chairs, and a television. Mabel and her husband, Ernie, modeled for Rose. Mabel was a small woman with curly, white hair. Her husband, an ex-truck driver, had round shoulders and a large, sedate body. In the pictures, Mabel usually stood beside her husband nervously, tentatively, either fixing the breakfast or getting ready to leave the house. Ernie, in contrast, was always eating at the table or napping in a wingback chair. Rose used lots of props in her paintings, some of them incongruous with the scene itself. Scattered across the floor of her studio were the objects she had collected over the years, African tribal mask, ceramic owl, mannequin, gas mask, snake cage and sailor’s trunk. In the background of Rose’s paintings, we see two geese hissing at each other. Flocks of Canadian geese lurked around the perimeter of a nearby lake and wandered into the residents’ lawns. From her studio-window, Rose looked out at the ill-tempered birds, and they came to hold a symbolic meaning for her.

In the beginning, Rose’s desire to paint was completely alien to her husband. He had never met an artist before nor did he know what motivated a person to want to create art. He saw his wife’s painting as a diversion, a hobby at best. When she transformed one of the rooms in the basement into an art studio, he raised two concerns: (1) Rose was becoming obsessed with painting and (2) She was neglecting her duties as mother and housewife.

And then, Rose began the habit of “dressing up”. When the Doctor came home one night, he found his wife wearing purple tights, a white and black striped pullover and a red silk opera hat. She had painted her face white with black teardrops under her eyes.

The Doctor exclaimed, “Honey, you look silly with that outfit on. Why don’t you go take it off?”

“After dinner—” she replied.

“But we’re eating as a family and you look like you’re in Vaudeville.”

Rose’s silverware fell to the floor—

She stood up in front of her family. Lethe and his sister were watching intently. The Doctor looked alarmed.

Using hand gestures, Rose pretended to be trapped inside an invisible box. She struggled and struggled to get out of the box. Her eyebrows flew up into her forehead and her small pupils became frantic. The two siblings broke into a fit of giggles. The Doctor stared at his wife, blankly.

Christ Church of Barclay Park

In the beginning, Rose went to church only to please her husband . . .

The Christ Church of Barclay Park, a non-denominational Christian church, received a large amount of charitable funds from the wealthy members of the surrounding area. The result of so many donations was a beautiful sanctuary that held over five hundred people, with pews of dark mahogany, royal blue carpet, and a panorama of stained glass windows. The stage of the chancel was elevated above the congregation and divided into three sections. On the far left of the stage, the choir’s high pews; in the center of the stage, a small baptismal altar; off to the right of the stage, a leafy alcove with giant Roman candles in gold stands. This is where the Reverend and the senior Pasteur sat during the service. To give his sermons, the Reverend had to descend down to the pulpit. The pulpit, a work of art in itself, was an engraved block of wood representing scenes of the Resurrection and had been commissioned by the Church Elders.

Occasionally, she had panic attacks. The Church in these moments took on a sinister aspect, and she felt, among the hordes of Christians, as if she were suffocating. She stood up in the pew, facing the congregation. The mottled faces seemed to be staring at her with a uniform look of disapproval. She scrambled out of the aisle, stepping over people’s feet in her haste. The Doctor called out to his wife and began following after her.

They stood in the empty hallway outside of the sanctuary. “What’s wrong?” the Doctor asked.

Rose’s face was flushed. “I can’t sit in there.”

“Why not?”

“I’m uncomfortable.”

“Why are you uncomfortable?”

“You’re pressuring me to be here. I’m Jewish.”

The Reverend and Rose meet

At times, Rose’s “neurotic” behavior was simply baffling to her husband. He couldn’t understand how such a compassionate environment could excite such hysterical emotions in a person. He spoke to the Reverend in private about his difficulties with his wife, stressing the importance of raising their children Christian. In a calm, self-assured voice, the Reverend told the Doctor not to worry. He asked the Doctor to arrange a meeting where he could sit down with Rose and discuss spirituality.

The living room, beige carpeted with curio shelves and a white grand piano near the window, was rarely used. Rose asked the members of her family, in fact, not to go into the living room. The room was meant to be on display. It was in this room, however, that Rose and the Reverend “discussed spirituality”. Surprisingly, she was not averse to meeting with the Reverend. They sat next to each other and Rose inhaled the Reverend’s cool scent of aftershave and peppermint Listerine. He told Rose about his Dutch-Reform upbringing, his years as a Pasteur in a small rural church, and then recently about coming to the Christ Church of Barclay Park.

He reminded her of her own father, who had died many years ago. Her father had been a man of quiet sincerity and she remembered him like an angel. The Reverend also seemed to carry that gentle bearing. Both men had clear blue eyes and a soft countenance. Rose smiled at the Reverend’s good-natured jokes and was enamored with his soft-spoken eloquence. He helped her to forget about her negative experiences in the Church. Before their meeting ended, Rose got the idea to paint the Reverend’s portrait.

“My portrait?” The Reverend asked, surprised.

“Why not?” Rose said. “If you’re willing to sit for me, I’m willing to paint you.”

“Well, I suppose we could give it a try. We might even be able to hang it in the Church.”

Rose was excited to paint the Reverend’s portrait. Her eyes lit up when he mentioned hanging the painting in the Church. She knew that the Reverend was an important member of the community and that a portrait of him could bring her notoriety. The next week, having regained her self-composure, she returned to church with her family.

The Doctor’s Christian Revival

During church service, the Doctor stole a loving glance at his wife. He was grateful that Rose was coming to church with him and hopeful about her new affinity to the Reverend. More than anything else, he wanted his wife to become a Christian like himself and to feel comfortable in the Church. He basked in the lofty ideal of family happiness, imagining that the four of them would share a sacred bond, husband and wife, sister and brother; together they would be as one.

He was also captivated by the hospitality of the church atmosphere, and since he had left Iraq, he felt part of a community. He enjoyed rubbing elbows with the sociable members; after service he engaged in fellowship as the congregation funneled into the large central meeting area, where coffee and donuts were served. There was always a line of parishioners waiting to share a word with the Reverend and the Doctor stood in this long line because he wanted to thank the Reverend for reuniting him with his wife, and bringing her into the open arms of the church.

Now that his wife was attending regularly, the Doctor felt a need to participate more in church life. During the three months that Rose was painting the Reverend’s portrait, he signed up for a church retreat, went to weekly Bible studies and enrolled in a family values seminar. He also registered his son and daughter to take confirmation classes.

The Doctor’s enthusiasm for church was sharply curtailed by his twelve-year old son’s unabashed refusal to obey his father’s orders. This caused a great uproar in the Bashar house. Almost overnight, Lethe seemed to have grown into a monster. The youth’s “unruly, obnoxious, intolerable” behavior not only threatened the Doctor’s sense of order and stability but Lethe was becoming a nemesis to his father’s lofty ideal of family happiness. While the Doctor meticulously prepared to have his family ready for church by nine-fifteen on Sunday mornings, now it was becoming a habit of Lethe’s to linger in his bedroom, waiting until the last minute to get dressed. As the gray Oldsmobile sat in the driveway with the engine running, the Doctor rang the doorbell several times. Still without his tie on, Lethe came to the door.

“Put on your shoes and get in the car.”

No answer.

“PUT-ON-YOUR-SHOES.”

No answer.

“GET-IN-THE-CAR-NOW.”

Finally Lethe grabbed his coat, slipped on his shoes and hurried to the car.

The Doctor calls his son through the intercom

The intercom system of their house, built in the 1980’s, was semi-functional, capturing only traces of the human voice, and transmitting static and incoherent echoes into the serpentine hollows and voids of the interconnecting circuitry. Because the members of the Bashar family gravitated to their own isolated parts of the house, dinner being the exception when they all met together in one room, speaking through the intercom system became the standard mode of communication. One member of the family often demanded the presence of another member in their part of the house, and no matter what the speaker’s mood, once words were catapulted through the cacophony of the intercom system, the result always felt like a babble of anger and resentment.

Lethe could barely make out his father’s words through the intercom system. But at nine o’clock every night he was expected to meet his father in the pinewood study for their reading hour. Lethe had grown to despise reading with his father. He was too old to be reading out loud. Next year he would be a freshman in high school. The last time his friends read to their parents was in the second grade. Lethe began to suspect something was wrong with him. He grew self-conscious reading out loud with his father every night.

For the Doctor’s part, he cherished the time he spent with his son in the evenings. It was a father’s job to broaden his son’s horizons, and what better way than reading Classical Literature? Of course, there was a selfish motive too, why he wanted to read with his son. This was the nostalgia Lethe’s father had for certain books, which reminded the Doctor of his own childhood and adolescence. And there was another reason. A father and a son had a duty to bond with each other—reading together provided the perfect opportunity. Sometimes, during their reading hour, the Doctor took a moment to instruct his son on beliefs and principles that were dear to him.

“Do you know the definition of the word, ‘kin’?”

“No,” his son answered wearily. “Can we be done for tonight?”

“Not yet. I want to tell you something before you go to sleep.”

“What?”

“I want to tell you about the meaning of the word ‘kin’.”

Lethe stared blankly at his father. “I’m tired. I want to go to bed.”

“It means . . . . blood relation. A family sticks together no matter what. It’s different from your relationships to your friends at school and to your teachers and other adults. ‘Kin’ are the people who are related to you through blood. Like your aunts and uncles, Grandma and Grandpa. Your Sister and me.”

“And Mom?”

“Yes. And your mother. Because family is a bond you can’t ignore. It’s very hard to separate from the family. If you do it leaves scars. Permanent scars. Lethe, are you listening to me? As a family we’re dependent upon each other. We help each other out. That’s what ‘kin’ means: we’re ‘blood’. Understand?”

“I think so.”

An extended family problem

In the middle of the afternoon and then later, the telephone rang, both times an older man with a raspy voice asking for Rose’s husband. Rose told the older man that her husband wasn’t home and that he should call back after six o’clock. The second time the man called he identified himself as Uncle Japhed, the Doctor’s great uncle. He told Rose that he had not spoken to his nephew for over three years, and he was planning to visit him. Rose was silent.

“Hello? Hello?” The older man crowed.

Expressing some hesitancy, Rose mentioned that she would have to talk to her husband.

“What was there to talk about?” Uncle Japhed wanted to know. Finally had come the time, the great uncle declared, when Salem’s parents in Iraq wanted to reconcile with their son, and the rest of the family, those living in Massachusetts, also wanted to show their “happy love” toward the married couple. “The whole family—plans to be there next weekend.”

For the rest of the day, Rose painted furiously in her art studio.

When her husband came home later that evening, she told him about the unexpected calls from Uncle Japhed. An aura of happiness appeared on the Doctor’s brow. He hadn’t spoken to his aunts and uncles in years.

“Did he leave his number?”

“Before you call him back, Salem—we need to talk.”

“Talk about what?”

“About your family coming to visit.”

“Did they say they were coming to visit?”

“Yes.”

“That’s wonderful. I’ll call him right away.”

“They can’t stay at our house.”

“What do you mean? We have a guestroom, don’t we?”

“I don’t want them in my house.” Rose declared.

“But they’re family—”

“I’m family. The kids are family. In America, people stay in hotels when they come to visit. It’s ‘low class’ to have all your two dozen relatives stay at your house. Nobody does that except poor people!”

He heard her talk like this before; it was a preoccupation of hers to be seen as “low class”. But that had nothing to do with his family. His family in Iraq was wealthy. It was her family who had lived in poverty for most of their lives.

“What’s the point of a guestroom if we’re not going to use it?”

“It’s occupied. I’m using the guestroom for my artwork.”

“But you have your own ‘art studio’.”

“Yes but I keep extra canvasses in the guestroom. It’s storage space. I already told you, Salem, nobody is staying in my house.”

Was it wrong to want to see his mother and father? His wife stirred up feelings of guilt, she was good at that. He felt ashamed to invite his relatives to his house because he couldn’t provide them with the traditional Middle Eastern hospitality. He wanted his house to be open to everyone, friends, relatives, acquaintances, because that’s how it was in Iraq. But his wife wouldn’t let him. She put restrictions on him. He had to conform to her rules, which meant losing parts of his identity.

Rose unveils the Reverend’s Portrait

For the night of the unveiling, the Doctor hired a private chef and two waiters. The chef would prepare garlic mashed potatoes and rosemary braised lamb shank with mint jelly on the side.

During the day, the housekeepers were busy bringing fresh flowers into the house, preparing trays of assorted cheeses and arranging other fine delicacies from gourmet food shops. Rose too was busy as she traveled into the city to get her hair done at her favorite salon, where she told Eduardo, her stylist, that she wanted “something a little more artsy done to her hair.” Eduardo said he had an idea in mind and shaved Rose’s entire head except for a wave of hair that fell over her forehead. To add to her artistic look for the evening Rose put one long dangling silver earring in her right ear, and just a stud in her left.

As Rose prepared herself in the marble bathroom, Little Mazzy sat on the rim of the oversized Jacuzzi. Rose’s daughter had Eskimo eyes and cropped jet-black hair. She was a very tiny little girl, and her mother’s bathroom was like a palace. The bright lights and mirrors, the plants hanging from high places, the powders and perfumes pumped into the air, produced a fairy-tale-like effect in the child’s mind. She loved to sit and watch her mother try on different outfits, and fuss in her grown-up way over which necklace to wear with which dress. Once Rose had even shown her daughter how to use a lip-liner and an eyebrow pencil.

To the little girl, the enormous closet in Rose’s bathroom was forbidden world. Her mother told her never to go inside because the dresses were so expensive and she didn’t want them to get damaged. But the shiny fabrics and hundreds of pairs of shoes called out to Little Mazzy during the day, especially when her mother was painting, tempting the little girl to sneak into her mother’s closet and stuff herself in between the garments. She inhaled the heady perfumes clinging to the wardrobe in the dark.

Rose plucked her eyebrows with meticulous care. She glanced up at the mirror four or five times every thirty seconds. But then it seemed Rose had made a mistake. She had plucked too much—there was a loss of symmetry. Mazzy watched her mother become fretful.

“What wrong?” Her daughter asked.

“I’ve plucked too many eyebrows, sweetie.” Rose said taking a deep breath and moving away from the mirror.

“Never do that. Never pluck too many eyebrows. You’ll look sick, diseased. Like a cancer patient.”

“Where mommy? I don’t see anything.”

“Yes, sweetie. Just look. Look at my face. It’s obvious. I look horrible now.”

This could only be expected. Because no matter how much attention Rose devoted to her physical appearance, there would always be something that would show itself at the last moment, confounding her. For example, if her makeup was done perfectly, then she’d notice a chip in her nail polish. Or if her nails were done perfectly, then she’d find a flaw in her hair. She could never get everything perfect at the same time.

This was just how Rose felt right before the Reverend and his wife came over to her house. Before having company, she always became extremely nervous. Hosting dinner parties was nerve-wracking to Rose. She worried about her clean house. She worried about her hired help. And when the guests arrived, she was thinking about their hands and how they might have touched the walls, their glasses and how they were placed precariously on the edges of tables, their shoes and how they were spreading dirt on her white carpet.

When the Reverend arrived, a cloud of tear-jerking perfume, Poison, followed Rose from the bathroom into the lighted hallway, and then, at once, the Doctor appeared. As the Reverend introduced his family, Rose caught a sour look from his wife who was wearing a gaudy dress which she did not find very tasteful. The Reverend’s daughter was a facsimile of her mother with a long brooding face.

The much-awaited painting sat in the living room with a satin sheet covering it. The spotless, white room held an aura of suspense and mystery partly as an effect of this crimson veil and partly as an effect of the immaculate state of Rose’s house in general. The Doctor and the Reverend sauntered down the long marble hallway, commenting on what an exciting occasion this was for everyone, while Rose took the ladies for a quick tour of the house.

Over dinner Frances told the story of how she met the Reverend at Wheaton Christian College, when both of them were studying theology and “looking to strengthen their faith in marriage.” The Doctor’s thoughts, however, strayed to the painting in the other room. He couldn’t seem to keep his mind on the dinner table. He wanted this occasion to be special for his wife, but for some reason he was getting the impression that things might not go as planned.

Though well-intentioned, Frances had a nervous habit of prattling on about her husband. She heaped praise after praise onto him, as if unknowingly. The praise was so abundant that Rose thought she too should say something nice about the Reverend, if only to keep things on an even keel. Rose recalled how after a day of modeling he got up from the armchair and walked around to the front of the canvas. Surprised to see himself in the painting, he chuckled out loud, “Yes, that’s me, I suppose.” Then he became quiet all of a sudden, pensive. She told this story to the table, but the Reverend’s wife and daughter did not seem interested.

After dinner, the waiters brought out lemon-tarts on white doilies. The Doctor glanced into the adjoining room and saw a corner of the crimson sheet and nothing else. The Reverend’s daughter sipped her coffee. The Reverend seemed satisfied with his meal. At last, Rose ushered the party into the living room as the Doctor made the joke, “drum-roll please.”

The Reverend walked forward into the center of the room. His wife and daughter hung on the periphery.

Rose pulled off the satin sheet and awaited the first words of affirmation. Mother and daughter narrowed their tiny pupils simultaneously.

“It’s . . . gothic.” The Reverend’s daughter blurted out.

“I’m not very fond of it.” The Reverend’s wife rejoined.

In that moment, Rose knew that her portrait of the Reverend would never hang in the Christ Church of Barclay Park. There was glint of pain in Rose’s eyes, receding into her distracted glare. Then Frances said dryly that they could not accept the painting. Her husband looked too stern, too serious. The painting bore no resemblance to the Reverend whatsoever.

“There are two parents in this house.”

After the night of the unveiling, Rose stopped going to church with her husband. Now she stayed home on Sundays and painted in her art studio. And it was not long before young Lethe also refused to go to church.

The grey Oldsmobile was parked in the driveway, the engine humming with steady agitation, as the Doctor pressed the doorbell.

From his bedroom, Lethe could hear the chime. Rose rushed to the front door.

The door opened, the Doctor’s booming voice came in, a freight of sound traveling throughout the house all at once, “IT’S NINE-TWENTY FIVE. WE’RE GOING TO BE LATE AGAIN. I TOLD HIM THE LAST TIME THAT IF HE DIDN’T—”

“He’s not going to church today.” Rose said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Lethe is not going to church.”

“He doesn’t have a choice—”

“I’m a Jew, Salem. Remember? Which means if Lethe wants to be a Jew, he can go to temple instead.”

“Don’t start this nonsense with me again! I told him if he wasn’t ready by nine-fifteen, I’d ground him for the entire month.”

“Stop yelling at me. He doesn’t have to go to church. He’s old enough to decide. Leave him alone.”

Marrying an American woman, he had only been asking for this sort of thing. When his mother and father heard about Rose, they threatened to never speak to him again. (1) Jewish (2) Divorced (3) With a child from a previous marriage. These were three big strikes. But the Doctor married Rose anyway. He didn’t want to marry a woman from his own country. He had been attracted to Rose precisely because she was independent and strong-willed. But lately her strong will was getting in the way of their marriage. Everything between them was turning into a battle. Frustrated, the Doctor stepped back from the doorway and got into the grey Oldsmobile without his son. Little Mazzy was sitting in the backseat with her hands in her lap, like a stone effigy.

Lethe had heard the whole argument from the hallway. The youth usually hid in some corner of the house to listen to his parents feuding. The aggravated, rising tension in their voices drew his attention like steel fillings to a magnet. He liked to spy on his parents.

Rose found her son crouched beside the wall. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“There are two parents in this house. Don’t you forget that.”

“So I don’t have to go to church anymore?”

Instead of tie and jacket, Lethe threw on a pair of extra-large sweatpants. He followed his mother down into her art studio. “You can watch me paint if you want,” she said.

The paint-bespattered radio was tuned to the voice of Garrison Keillor. The room was cluttered with canvases and slats of mirror-glass leaning against the walls. Rose had already begun another painting. The Reverend’s portrait was in the closet.

Church attendance drops

Under the Doctor’s stern and demanding exterior, he too was beginning to question the weekly ritual of church-going. As a child he had attended a Jesuit high school. In Iraq, religion was interwoven into the social and public life. Nobody had given him a choice of what religion to follow as his wife was suggesting they do for Lethe. The whole family went to Church because it was a fundamental part of life.

The Christ Church of Barclay Park had its charms; the friendly atmosphere; the service; the sermons; the people; of course, the Reverend. And in a sense the Doctor was carrying on the tradition of church-going from back home. His desperate need for his wife to attend church and become a Christian was not something he reflected on very much. When Rose told him that Lethe did not have to go to church anymore, the Doctor was silent for several days. Night after night, he tried to figure out how this situation could have arisen.

And then the strangest thing happened. One or two weeks out of the month, the Doctor began skipping church service. It almost felt like he was twelve years old and playing hooky. Especially because the Church Elders had been calling him for months. They wanted to know when he was ready to become a Church Elder. But the Doctor had observed these church-fellows on Sundays, how they stood by the pews like robots, directing the congregation and handing out programs mechanically. They had hunched, smallish shoulders and a morbid seriousness about them.

The Doctor never had the “belief in Christ” that the Church Elders were always talking about. He simply enjoyed the ritual of going to Church once a week; it reminded him of back home. When it came to doctrine, he recoiled. He didn’t even know if he believed in God, though he would never tell anyone that. Instead, he told himself that the Church was too restrictive, too dogmatic. The beliefs of the Church were not his own. So he decided to part from the Church for a while. Over a period of three months, the Doctor’s weekly attendance dropped, until finally he explained to the Reverend that he was investigating “other avenues of spiritual practice and self-discovery”. The Reverend lowered his clear blue eyes and nodded his head benevolently.

In the beginning, he felt like he was indulging himself. He pictured his father and mother scolding him for his bad behavior. After awhile, however, he was able to enjoy a slightly more relaxed version of himself. Instead of reading books about Christianity, he perused a section of the bookstore called “New Age.” The members of the Church disapproved of these books, but now he could read whatever he pleased.

When he started reading some of these books, he found them hard to put down. They had a language of their own, thickly strewn with words like “spirituality,” “holistic,” “journey,” and “path”. It got him excited to think about becoming a spiritual person.

Rose decides to go to art school

Rose did not see her husband as a “spiritual person” by any means. In fact, she may have even considered him the antithesis of a spiritual person. She used words and phrases like “fanatical” and “totally insensitive” to describe her husband. The harsh language she used in their numerous fights concealed the fact that she felt ignored by him. Her first husband had never paid much attention to her. Thinking back Rose didn’t know which of her husbands were worse, her first husband who kept a half-dozen girlfriends, or her second husband who seemed incapable of relating to her in a personal way. When she first married Salem, she thought that maybe his emotional distance was because of a difference in their cultures. If that were the case, then maybe over time, living together and raising a family, the problem would be resolved. But year after year, Rose began to take another view of her husband. The man she had chosen to marry was incapable of loving her. His narcissism and self-importance formed a wall around him, a barrier, and no matter how hard she tried to get through to him, he seemed totally unaware of how to love her. Sure, he could love his children, and of course, he had no problem loving his mother, or his countless relatives from one continent to the next. But here, in this house, he walked in a cloud of complete ignorance. Either his emotions toward her were shallow, or he had no emotions at all. She tried to talk to him about his feelings, but talking to a Middle Eastern man about his feelings is like talking to a bear about making a bird’s nest. He was consumed with his work and too distracted with friends and “family” (i.e. his mother and father) to be truly with her as a husband. He gave attention to the children but didn’t seem to put any effort into the marriage. Having this conversation in her head almost every night before she went to sleep, Rose at last decided that if her husband was not going to satisfy her emotionally, then she would concentrate her energy on herself, developing herself as an individual and an artist. She could not wait for her husband to come around. She wanted to go back to school for a liberal arts degree. She wanted to continue to paint and immerse herself in making art. She could not rely on her husband anymore.

When the Doctor challenged Rose on her decision to go back to school, she said, “You know what your problem is, Salem? You’re living in the wrong century. In the United States, women have freedoms and liberties. They don’t have to stay home with the children. I’m going back to school whether you like it or not.”

Under the sewing machine table

Rose and Dora harnessed on their kneepads like two corporals girding themselves in body armor. Dora handed Rose a bunch of old rags from under the sink. Together they submerged the rags in piping hot solution and lowered themselves on all fours for combat.

In a synchronous and rhythmic pattern of chatting and scrubbing, the industrious pair, Dora and Rose, slid from one area of tiles to another, gliding and sliding across the tiles in a highly precise and ordered circuit of scrubbing, resembling the choreography of those modern dances that pay homage to our primitive origins. When cleaning, Dora and Rose bonded, and it was not uncommon for them to break into riotous peals of laughter. That day, scrubbing underneath the sewing machine table, Rose abruptly shouted: “Dora, I’m stuck.”

Chuckling, Dora replied: “I know what you’re talking about: we’re getting old.”

“No, Dora. I’m serious. I can’t turn around. I can’t move backwards.”

Dora moved the sewing machine table out of the way. Lending her arm, she pulled Rose up from the ground. They exchanged looks of concern and bewilderment.

“What do you think it could be?” Dora asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Try walking backwards.”

Rose was unable to take a single step back. She tried and her legs almost gave out. Dora stepped in closer, ready to catch Rose in case she fell.

“Maybe it’s an ear infection.”

“That’s possible . . .”

Rose made a doctor’s appointment the next morning.

Toxins

For almost five years now, Dora had been watching Rose disappear into the basement to paint in her art studio. When she was painting, Rose became intoxicated. Dora had walked into her studio several times without warning. It was during these encounters that she saw a different side of Rose. Down in the basement, Rose seemed possessed by another spirit. It reminded Dora of how some children play with themselves for hours, talking through the voices of other characters.

Dora was concerned for her boss. As she saw it, Rose was taking serious chances with her health. Her brushes were soaking in turpentine during the entire time that she was downstairs and there was no ventilation in the room. Dora had also seen Rose with the opposite end of a paintbrush in her mouth. And some of the paints that Rose used were highly toxic, such as “barium yellow”, “burnt amber”, and “chrome green”. It concerned Dora that Rose was possibly exposing herself to toxins. The latex gloves did nothing to protect her; the chemicals were still getting absorbed into her skin.

From nine o’clock in the morning to three in the afternoon, Rose locked herself up in that small, unventilated room. After spending six hours in her studio, soaking up toxins and inhaling fumes, she hurried upstairs to take a quick shower. She had fifteen minutes before her children came home from school. The water in the shower was scorching hot and steam rolled off Rose’s body in large, white billows. In the shower, Rose “purged herself” of the chemicals. Dora knew that there was something wrong with this situation, but she was afraid her boss would become upset with her if she suggested the painting was affecting her health. Until one day Dora accidentally tripped over a can of turpentine on the floor. As she bent over to pick up the can, she noticed the warning label on the back:

Can cause irreversible neurological damage.

She rushed up the stairs, carrying the can of turpentine. Rose was resting on her bed with a warm towel over her face.

“Look,” Dora said, pointing to the warning label.

Scar Face

“Keep the smoke inside your lungs,” Scar Face said.

“I’m trying to, but I keep coughing.”

“Try holding it in—”

“I’m trying to.”

Scar Face wore lots of zip-up sweaters and heavy clothing. He had a large, fleshy face and a head that was overgrown with tangled clumps of black hair. With a sort of pride for his matted hair, Scar Face let Lethe touch the hard, dense clumps that were wrapped in layers of frizz. The rest of his body he kept covered. He didn’t like to wear shorts because of his hairy legs. Even in the summer, he wore corduroy pants.

Scar Face could be gregarious and cheerful at times. When Lethe and his friend talked in school, an amazing spark passed between them. Lethe always wanted to recapture this feeling, but after school and on the weekends his friend disappeared. Lethe tried calling his house but nobody answered.

Behind the baseball dugout, the two friends broke into wild outbursts of uncontrollable laughter. Their laughter was an incredible release. Smoking weed intensified everything.

When they returned to math class, the teacher was putting algebra problems up on the board.

“Lethe,” she called out, “Come up to the front of the room and demonstrate to the class how this problem is done.”

A tremor of paranoia ran over him. The room was hushed—pregnant with fear. Scar Face looked on, remotely.

Lethe stumbled out of his chair and made his way clumsily to the front of the room. The teacher handed him a piece of chalk, which slipped out of his hand and broke on the floor. Snickers escaped in the back of the room. Lethe turned around, confused. The whole class was staring at him. A couple rowdy students were pointing fingers and sticking their tongues out.

“Is something wrong?” The teacher asked.

“He’s stoned,” a classmate yelled, followed by a roar of laughter.

Lethe was escorted down to the Dean’s office.

Cranely College. Freshman Year.

In near proximity to the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, the small liberal arts school, Cranely College, modeled itself on the academic rigor and excellence of the Ivy League tradition. The campus sat on top of a hill like a leafy island above sea-water. The nearest city was Utica, once the mobster capital of the world, now a sparsely populated city-in-ruins.

On the first day of college, Lethe met Iron Sandwich. Iron Sandwich was totally unlike Scar Face. There was nothing discreet or mysterious about him. Sandwich reveled in a sort of crude, obnoxious narcissism. You almost became nervous around Sandwich because his body towered over six-feet tall, and his ideas for fun were as dangerous as they were extreme. In the beginning, college girls were repulsed by him. He offended them the way a foul-mouthed teenager offends the mother of his best friend. But later on, these very same college girls somehow found him charming. This Lethe could never understand.

After the first month of college, Lethe moved in with Sandwich. This arrangement worked out well. Fraternity brothers from the higher classes were talking to them and inviting them to parties. Sandwich and Lethe grew inseparable; rarely was one found without the other. They bounded around campus like two delinquent brothers, proud and self-centered to the core. They seemed to possess a natural ability to draw attention to themselves. They pulled such stunts as collecting their urine in Snapple bottles and storing them outside their window, recruiting college girls to pole dance for them, and playing Frisbee golf in the hallways of the dormitory.

Ritalin

It was common at Cranely College for students to complain about attention-deficit problems to their psychiatrists back home. Subsequently, an enormous amount of students were being prescribed study drugs such as Ritalin, whether they had a medical need for them or not. Almost every student seemed to have a prescription for Ritalin or knew someone who had a prescription. The reason so many students wanted prescriptions for Ritalin was because the drug motivated you to study. On Ritalin, you could sit down in one place and concentrate unstintingly for six or seven hours at a time. This is why the drug became such a desirable commodity on the college campus, especially right before finals week when the students were cramming for their tests.

In the beginning, Iron Sandwich shared his Ritalin with Lethe. They crushed up the pills and snorted them for “fun”. The baby blue powder clung to the hair follicles on the insides of their nostrils as they chain-smoked and talked incessantly. Ritalin made them jittery and compulsive but also intensely focused. During their dorm-room discussions, they anticipated almost every word the other person was about to say, and oftentimes the high was so intense that they believed they could read each other’s minds.

When Iron Sandwich was out of the room, however, Lethe rummaged through his things, looking for the little blue pills. He found the prescription bottle hidden underneath his roommate’s socks in his top dresser drawer, or stuffed in his roommate’s travel bag, or under his pillow. It was as if Iron Sandwich knew that Lethe was going through his things because the bottle was hidden in a different place each time. Lethe pictured his roommate suddenly opening the door and seeing him with the pill-container in his hands. He pictured the gargantuan Sandwich flaring up into a rage. His roommate could be unpredictable at times, and wouldn’t hesitate to throw Lethe across the room.

After checking his nose in the mirror to make sure the blue powder wasn’t visible, Lethe disappeared from the room. He marched to the college library, hyped up on the pharmaceutical stimulant.

****************************

Lethe spent most of his days in the library. He was an excellent student. His father had been an excellent student. In his youth, he had three or four private tutors and attended school one summer just so he could skip a grade the following term. Behind the Doctor’s discipline for study was a drive to please his parents, especially his mother. In a similar pattern, Lethe was driven to academic exhaustion. By college, his studying verged on an obsession. Even before he started taking Ritalin to study, Lethe spent hours in the library each day, reading additional chapters, outlining additional material, and making notes, endless notes. Repetitive behaviors, such as copying and recopying, or reading and rereading, had a calming effect on him. His meticulous efforts gave him the sensation that he was doing everything perfectly. Lethe’s persistence in studying was almost inseparable from a full-fledged mania. Hiding himself in numberless study rooms, young Lethe forgot about the world outside. He dedicated himself to each task (all of them imaginary tasks), until he felt a certain level of satisfaction. Like his father, he clung to the idea that things could be done perfectly.

When Lethe discovered Ritalin to study, he had the same blissful encounter that one has when they first fall in love. Just as life can seem like a mundane repetition of events at times, so studying to Lethe was rote and mechanical but necessary for him. Then when he discovered Ritalin, the burden that he had always felt while studying, immediately dissolved. Now without any effort he could escape into knowledge and disappear. He entered a trance of self-absorption. The state of concentration while studying gave him a rapturous feeling of his unlimited potential. This fantasy was gratifying and euphoric, and the longer he studied, the deeper he fell into a hazy mental abyss.

Ritalin also promoted another desire. The youth had always wanted to be better than other students; this too he learned from his father. Lethe craved an identity that would set him apart from the rest. He craved a sort of excellence that was well beyond his powers. He knew fully well that he wasn’t a genius, but the very sense of his own lack of genius, this dearth which felt like a vast expanse of barrenness in the his genes, prompted him to achieve more and more, until at last transforming himself into . . . a genius.

Now the idea of “genius” fluttered through the vast expanse of barrenness like a colorful, flapping butterfly from another world. “Can one become a genius?” He wondered.

A Disease

The Doctor was beginning to realize the gravity of the situation surrounding his wife’s illness. Years before when Rose mentioned that she thought something was wrong with her health, he had brushed her concerns aside, attributing them to her neurotic personality or the vagueness of her symptoms. But now the Doctor was admitting to himself that his wife was indeed sick and something had to be done. He could clearly see that his wife’s condition was declining—she lost her balance with more frequency, her energy level was quickly depleted, she couldn’t drive anymore. All of these things were causing her to rely on her husband’s assistance more regularly.

Being in the medical profession, the Doctor wanted to find out the exact condition she suffered from and how it might be treated. Together they visited the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he watched his wife take a number of tests and sat in on interviews with medical specialists. The final diagnosis was that Rose had the rare neurological disorder, Multiple Systems Atrophy, a variant of Parkinson’s disease. There was some speculation concerning the toxic chemicals that Rose had been using in her art studio, but the doctors at Mayo Clinic eventually dismissed this conjecture in favor of the opinion that her disease was most likely hereditary. They gave her approximately five years to live.

After learning of his wife’s degenerative disease, there was a sensation in the Doctor’s gut, a sort of dropping out of the abdomen from the inside. This uncomfortable roller-coaster sensation reminded the Doctor of when he first fell in love with Rose. He remembered a vacation they took before they got married, a vacation to Marco Beach. He couldn’t stop himself from talking about the future, words leapt out of his mouth, promises about marriage and kids. And she believed him. She wanted to marry him. After that, he couldn’t break her heart and tell her it was all a lie.

He knew Rose’s expectations. She didn’t even have to say anything—he felt her dependence on him.

And what were his options? He had to assume the role of caretaker; he didn’t have a choice. Luckily, he was good at taking care of people; that was his profession.

A Talk

One evening, Rose asked her husband to sit with her in the bedroom. He propped his wife’s back up against a couple of throw pillows, and she extended her legs on the mattress. He noticed her thighs were bulbous and pale.

At first she didn’t speak. Her chest heaved up and down with difficult breathing. Her glasses fell down to the tip of her nose and stayed there. Her small eyes darted for a moment and then rested on her husband. The bedroom had been cleaned that morning and the scent of citronella radiated off the carpet. Outside in the yard, the setting sun was casting shadows on the lawn, a small blackbird was cooing in the tall elm tree.

The Doctor perched on the edge of the bed, barely sitting. It seemed as though he might get up at any moment. Rose was much calmer but her calm was weighted down with a slight sadness. She still had not said a word. He waited silently, anxiously, hoping she would at last produce one of her sighs and say something.

“We’ll have to put some money aside for my health.” She said.

“What do mean?” Her husband asked.

“Maybe I’ll need people to take care of me. You know, eventually.”

“That won’t be necessary. I told you I’m going to help out.”

“But it might be longer than five years—”

“I told you I’m planning on taking care of you.”

“And what about the children?”

The Doctor’s face furrowed. “Isn’t it a little premature to say anything to them?”

“Premature? They need to know about their mother.”

“But is it necessary to tell them right this minute?”

“There’s nothing to keep secret, Salem. I’m sick.”

“I know you’re sick—”

“I don’t think you do. You’ve ignored my illness for the last two years.”

“What are you talking about?’

“Before the doctors diagnosed me, I told you I was sick. I told you I couldn’t keep up with you on vacations. I needed to rest all the time and you blamed me as if it were my fault.”

“You don’t have to tell me this, honey. I know you’re sick.”

“I could be dead in five years. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Please relax. You’re getting all worked up about this.”

“Salem, you don’t understand. I’m sick.”

At the Arts Festival

Downtown Albuquerque is a motley place with cobbled streets and Pueblo-revival architecture. In the month of September, the downtown area fills with an odd mixture of tourists and locals, as hundreds of artists and artisans set up booths in open plazas and along Gold Avenue and Fourth. The buildings are decorated with lights and colorful tapestries. The showcases include jewelry, painting, ceramics, photography, sculpture, wood-making, metalwork, and pastels. You can hear Native American flutes and bongo drums playing in the streets. The local food shops bring out an assortment of their finest soups and sandwiches. Venders sell trinkets and balloons. As in the crowded streets of a Turkish bazaar, the atmosphere is humming with vibrancy and perpetual movement.

Rose had mentioned the Arts Festival in Albuquerque to her husband before, but this was the first year he suggested they go. His attitude toward the arts was changing. In fact, now he took pride in having a wife who was an established artist. Just recently her artwork had been shown publicly for the first time, and she was written up in three Chicago magazines.

The Festival was in full swing when they arrived. This was the largest outdoor arts festival that Rose had ever been too. On side stages, music and dancing caught their attention, and both were enchanted by the eccentric artwork and media-displays. Rose told her husband that she wanted to meet some of the artists.

As Rose mingled with the local artists, the Doctor saw that his wife was at home in this community. He could see how comfortable and relaxed she was among the creative types. He glimpsed a side of her character he had not seen before. She was enjoying herself immensely, opening and closing her wings, as if she were a lush, transparent butterfly delighting in its surroundings. After all these years he finally understood his wife. She belonged to this community of artists. Here in Albuquerque, New Mexico Rose was celebrating herself, and the Doctor had the pleasure to partake in this celebration also.

Up in the sky, more than a dozen hot-air balloons loomed over the city. The silky reds, bright yellows, and hot pinks seemed to correspond to his amazement and awe with his wife’s purpose. As the massive floaters climbed into the blue heights, Rose turned to her husband, and squeezing his hand, she said, “The International Balloon Competition. I completely forgot.”

That weekend Rose and her husband fell mysteriously in love again. Their lovemaking had the fleeting splendor of youth. They relished each other’s company for the first time in over fifteen years.

The last day, as they were leaving the Guadalupe Chapel after a tour, Rose lost her balance and fell face forward onto the cobblestones. Within seconds the Doctor bent down to lift Rose’s head up from the ground. Her glasses were smashed and her face was cut in three places. A large group of people was forming around them and a man in a Safari jacket was calling an ambulance on his cell phone. When the ambulance arrived, the Doctor told the medic, “She has Multiple System Atrophy—it may be getting worse—this has never happened before.”

While the Doctor sat in the hospital waiting room, he replayed the accident over and over again in his mind. She had fallen straight onto the cobblestones. Her reflexes were so bad that she couldn’t even hold up her hands to block her face. “What’s happening to her?” He thought. “She’s completely vulnerable without me.” He pictured her face with its bruises and cuts from the fall—a torrent of sympathy broke inside of him. He couldn’t stop this disease from happening to her. She wasn’t going to get better. Things were only going to get worse.

A Colossal task

On some nights the Doctor waited forty-five or fifty minutes for his wife to urinate. On some nights she couldn’t urinate at all. She seemed to think that she had to go to the bathroom. But maybe she was wrong. As he waited for her, the Doctor remembered the surgeries he had scheduled for the next day, his meetings with other doctors, and matters pertaining to his office staff. In the depths of his mind, he could hear the ceaseless electric current of frenzied thoughts racing.

He worked nearly ten hours a day, and then came home in the evenings to take care of his wife. Soon he was overwhelmed, exhausted and unhappy. There was little communication between the two of them—only the heavy looks and feelings of resentment as the Doctor grudgingly obeyed his wife’s orders. He almost felt as though she were imposing her medical condition on him.

Meanwhile, a horrible spell of insomnia was taking its toll. Lying in bed, unable to sleep, he worried endlessly about what he had to do for the next day. He obsessed over his lack of sleep and his inability to perform his duties at work. Then his wife roused him out of a daze of semi-consciousness, pleading for help. In a sullen mood, he led her to the little chamber, cloddishly lowering her onto the toilet seat.

With less and less sleep, the Doctor was losing his patience and ability to concentrate at work. In the operating room, he lashed out at the nurses for not giving him the right instruments, or he complained to the anesthesiologist for not being on time. The administrative position that he had taken up was also adding to the amount of stress in his life. For some reason, he had the impression that his colleagues on the hospital board were not respecting his opinions. They wanted to push their own agendas, rather than concede to his beliefs. Despite the fact that he was expected to be president of the medical staff next year, he had the sense that he was slowly becoming surrounded by enemies.

By the end of the day, after numberless irritations, the Doctor made his forty-five minute drive home. He narrowly averted accidents on the highway more than once, falling asleep at the wheel.

Little Mazzy helps out

Though she tried to hold back her anger toward her mother, Little Mazzy had an explosive little temperament and a shrill little voice. She relied on her mother to let her go out with her friends, and when Rose refused, Mazzy threw tantrums.

Mazzy’s violent outbursts were starkly contrasted by genuine acts of kindness. For example, on Saturday mornings, she brought an apple to her mother and sat by her side. As they watched television together, Little Mazzy massaged her mother’s neck and rubbed her swollen feet. Mazzy carried some of her mother’s traits, especially the lighter, playful qualities. She stuck her finger up her nose, pretending to be mentally retarded, or hung her hair over her face like It from the Munster Family, and the two of them dissolved into a stream of bubbling laughter. In a certain mood, Rose could laugh hysterically at almost anything. She was quite susceptible to laughter and foolishness.

Because of the Doctor’s difficulties with taking care of his wife, Little Mazzy offered to sleep in her mother’s room one night a week. She didn’t mind sleeping in her mother’s bed. It reminded her of when she was younger and used to sneak into her parent’s bedroom, crawling in between them in the middle of the night. The silk sheets would get tangled between her legs and the vastness of the queen-sized bed engulfed as if she were a little sea-horse floating on the surface of the ocean. Before falling asleep, she peeked over the pillows to the large round mound of her mother’s body. Her mother had to be put into a special position before she went to bed. This position was sort of like a cow lying helpless on its side because she couldn’t move until someone lifted her up. At some point during the middle of the night, Rose let out a squeal of discomfort. This meant that she wished to be turned over in bed. Rose might have to squeal and sigh for two or three minutes before Mazzy opened her eyes. Then Mazzy walked around to the other side of the bed, stood on the side beams (because she was so short) and pulled her mother to the left or pushed her to the right. Sometimes her mother needed the position of her legs rearranged. Sometimes she needed to go to the bathroom.

If her mother needed to go to the bathroom, Mazzy guided her into the little chamber and closed the door. Within ten seconds, Mazzy fell back asleep on the hard marble tiles. She re-entered her dreams from inside her mother’s cold, dark bathroom, and soon found herself chasing after a boy she liked. Then her mother would rouse her from her dreams and Mazzy would mumble incoherently, realizing that she was still on the floor of her mother’s bathroom. Standing up, only half-awake, Mazzy led her mother over to the sink to wash her hands.

Little Mazzy surrounds herself with friends

The sheer volume of phone calls that came to the Bashar house was unsettling. Little Mazzy’s growing popularity worried the Doctor because he wanted his daughter to be more like her brother, “the golden child”. He wanted her to focus on her studies and to think about college. It was only four years away.

Mazzy’s family was often a source of painful humiliation. Her friends might find out what they were like. What kind of house of weirdoes. She never wanted anyone to know that her mother was sick. That’s why she always ran to pick up the phone before anyone else did. She could still remember that one time her mother managed to pick up the phone before her. A couple days later, a friend asked her if her grandmother had Alzheimer’s.

There were papers from school that her mother had to sign. But Rose’s signature looked like the scribble of a four year old. And when Mazzy’s friends all decided to skip the period after lunch and have their mothers call them out, Mazzy couldn’t because the secretary in the Dean’s office was never able to understand her mother’s voice. It seemed unfair that her mother was sick. She was jealous of her friends because they had mothers who were healthy and young and attractive, and who could take their daughters shopping or play tennis with them. She liked to go over to friends’ houses just to be around their families. It seemed like all the other families were normal. But hers was not.

She surrounded herself with tons of friends. Most of Mazzy’s friends were drama queens; a swirling commotion followed her everywhere. Their peppy, high-pitched voices and shrill laughter distracted her enormously. She forgot about her family when she was out with her friends. She felt most comfortable in extremely large crowds.

Her father was “insane”. Everyone knew that. If the phone rang after ten o’clock, her father told her friends not to call this late. If she was already on the phone and it had just turned ten o’clock, he picked up the receiver and said in an icy tone, “It’s time for you to go to bed now, Mazzy.” This was so annoying because usually there was this one boy on the other line who she really liked. If she talked on the phone for an extra minute, her father was likely to burst into the room screaming.

The weekends were even worse. She felt like he was holding her hostage. If there was a party she wanted to go to, he wouldn’t let her go until he talked to the parents. But everyone knows that when there’s a party, the parents are never home.

The International Institute. Madrid, Spain.

As Little Mazzy was struggling for her teenage independence, Lethe was in Madrid, Spain, having a semester abroad. His classes were held at the prestigious International Institute. The Institute was a clamoring American presence situated in the center of the Spanish city.

The first day of class, the building with its Corinthian pillars and neoclassical pavilion, struck terror in Lethe. The marble and granite interior was cold and sepulchral. Every morning he arrived at the Institute in complete disarray. There was usually only one or two minutes before class started. Out of nervousness, he stole into the bathroom to check his face in the mirror. His face was usually fire-red and ringed with sweat from running through the streets of Madrid. Often he got lost on the way to school, which added more stress to his mornings. Now he could hear the international students herding through the building to get to their classes on time. Their voices were always an ominous reminder to him that class was about to begin. As he registered the stampede, he imagined them swirling up and down the marble staircase and filing into the separate classrooms on each floor. But he couldn’t leave the bathroom. Something wouldn’t let him go.

For the first three weeks of class, Lethe lingered in the bathroom on the first floor. He locked himself in one of the stalls and stared at the ceramic tiles at his feet. Or he watched the water drip from the ceiling. By one o’clock in the afternoon, the heavy door swung open. A presence entered, moving through the small space, breathing and peeing. The faucet turned on for a brief minute. Then Lethe heard the cranking of the paper towel dispenser. Between every sound, there was a moment of self-awareness, and Lethe considered changing his hiding place—until finally, the creaking hinges of the heavy door signaled that he was alone again.

How a Senora takes care of Lethe

In the early afternoon, Lethe returned to the Senora’s apartment for lunch. The study abroad program had assigned him to live with her. She cooked his meals and did his laundry. He was only expected to be polite and clean his room from time to time.

The Senora’s sister, Juanita, lived on the third floor of the same apartment building. Juanita’s left eye was permanently sealed shut. She came down for lunch every day at exactly two o’clock.

Passing the creamed broccoli, the Senora said, "The weather today is precious."

"Yes," replied Lethe. "There is wind, or no?"

"Eh?"

"Wind? A little cool?"

"Why not leave the room one day? Go to the park, a short walk down our street. The fresh air is good."

Juanita broke off a piece of fresh bread and offered it to Lethe.

"I prefer to be here with you," Lethe said to the Senora.

"Hijo. It's not good for your health."

"I'm not ready to go outside. Not yet. I need some more time."

“Bueno. Pues, nada.”

At nine o’clock every night, Lethe emerged from his bedroom with an unlit cigarette drooping over his dry bottom lip. He staggered down the short hallway toward the kitchen. The Senora was always dragging a dust mop across the kitchen tiles, pretending not to notice him.

"I haven't seen you since lunch," she said in Spanish.

"Not sleeping. Reading. And I wrote letters.”

"When you sleep in the afternoon, you have difficulty sleeping at night."

"You have reason. But this afternoon I did not take a siesta. I read a book. And I wrote a letter to my mother, and one to my father."

"Bueno. Pues nada. I will make us rice soup and a tortilla de patatas for dinner. A tortilla appetizes me tonight."

The Senora began cooking diner at nine-fifteen. Above the stove, the thick chorizo hung from a string on the wall. The Senora took the fat-blotted red sausage to the cutting board and chopped it up into a pot of rice soup. At dinner time, the pungent smell of greasy chorizo permeated the little room. At breakfast time, it was the sweet tang of apricot marmalade.

As the Senora zipped through the kitchen, Lethe sat rooted in his chair, taking slow, torturous drags off of his cigarettes. After one cigarette was finished, he lit up another. He smoked mechanically, with the indifference of a veteran smoker, and his cough grew inside of him, gathering a sort of independent existence, becoming deeper and more petulant. But he continued to smoke heedlessly, as if completely inured to the abuse his cigarettes were causing him. He couldn’t even taste his cigarettes anymore because they left a permanent bitterness in his mouth. And the residual scent of nicotine saturated his clothing and surrounded him everywhere he went.

"My cough . . . my cough." He said gasping.

"You're going to cough yourself to pieces."

"I know. Is it bad?"

"You will take the eucalyptus tonight."

"Yes, I want the eucalyptus. My cough is bad."

Every couple months the Senora traveled to Portugal where she visited her daughter, Pichu. Her daughter lived in a cottage beside a row of eucalyptus trees. The Senora always brought back a bag of eucalyptus branches, and boiled the leaves for her persistent smoker’s cough. Now that Lethe was coughing up phlegm, she boiled the leaves for him as well.

“Stand over the pot,” she ordered. “Put this towel over you head. Inhale the steam.”

"Joder!" He stepped back from the pot of boiling eucalyptus.

"Claro!” She said. "Your bowels are clogged."

"What can I do?"

"Suffer, hijo."

Despite the wretchedness of his smoking habit, Lethe loved to watch the Senora cook dinner. He was mesmerized by her agility in cooking, her dexterous hands and godlike powers to conjure up meals. The Senora sliced five whole raw potatoes with impressive celerity, the sharp blade bouncing off her thumb as the sliced potatoes flew into the pan, flashing out like a deck of cards. And her aura of energetic love for household activities, such as folding laundry or sweeping the hall, temporarily lifted Lethe out of his dull lassitude.

But his pleasure of watching the Senora zip through the kitchen was only a thin veil covering up his essential difficulty living in Spain. One night, he broke down and told the Senora the truth: he was hiding himself in the bathroom at the International Institute and not attending classes at all. The Senora was reminded of her own unhappy teenage years. As they sat on the embroidered couch in her living room, with their cigarettes burning in the ashtray, a steady plume of smoke rising up to the ceiling, she tried to convey to Lethe that adolescence is “un periodo de desafios”, which means, “a period of great challenges.” But the youth didn’t seem to grasp the meaning of her words and so she resorted to telling him a story.

“When I was in high school,” she said, “I used to have panic attacks. One day my mother told me not to go to school. She said she would teach me the subjects from home . . . The next week she taught me herself and my nerves relaxed. I was still able to play with my friends. But now my mother taught me instead of my teachers at school.” Then the Senora compared Lethe’s anxiety to “un brazo rompio,” which means, “a broken arm”. “Would you go to school with a broken arm?” She asked. “No. Of course not. You would stay home until your arm heals.”

The Senora’s words confirmed what he had been thinking ever since his difficulties began. Ever since he moved to Madrid, Lethe had the vague sense that something was wrong with him, like a disturbance taking place in his mind. But because the disturbance seemed to originate in his mind, he had no proof that something was really there. He could only act out his strange behaviors, such as hiding in the bathroom, and hope that nobody found out about him. But as the disturbance grew more obtrusive, Lethe became uncomfortable almost everywhere he went. The mental was taking on a physical reality. And yet, he was still unsure about whether something was actually wrong with him, and even if there was something wrong, he was unsure if anyone would believe him. It was almost impossible to communicate these sorts of things in Spanish.

But the Senora knew; she knew. She knew that he had a “nervous condition,” “un caso de nervios,” and the mere fact that she could give a label to his anxiety filled him with such inexpressible joy that the mental disturbance itself subsided, and the very situation that he had been originally faced with seemed to disappear. Because now he didn’t have to race through the streets of Madrid, rushing to get to school on time. And he didn’t have to look at all those foreign students, swirling up and down the marble stairs of the International Institute. And he didn’t have to sit in the bathroom either.

During the day he could do what he wanted, such as writing letters to his friends from home or writing poetry and short stories. It didn’t matter what he did—so long as he didn’t have to leave his room, so long as he continued to live in the Senora’s apartment, and eat her Spanish meals and enjoy her company. How he admired the Senora! For all her native charms, the cooking, the cleaning, the amusing anecdotes and Spanish sayings. She was like a mother to him. She didn’t think he was strange. She didn’t judge him or tell him to get out . . .

And so Lethe grew more comfortable living with the Senora. Now he was waking up early in the morning, eating breakfast and having coffee with her. They talked for about fifteen minutes and she suggested he go for a walk and “explore the city”. He laid out a map of Madrid on the breakfast table and she circled some places that might be of interest to him; Museo de Prado, Teatro Royal, Puerta del Sol, Casa de la Villa. Then he took a shower, dressed in clean, fresh clothes, and strapped on a backpack. “Adios,” he yelled, before leaving the apartment.

Until one day he realized that he had forgotten to officially drop out of the International Institute. Without an appointment, he rushed over to the Study Abroad Office, where he asked to speak to the Director.

“I am not in the right mind to continue this program,” he said. “I’ve been suffering from horrible anxiety attacks.”

“Is it possible you might still be adjusting to the foreign setting?” The Director asked.

“I don’t think so. I’ve been here for almost two months. My senora says that I’m sick and that I should stay home from school.”

The Director fingered his long mustache, and then glanced down at the papers on his desk. “This means we’ll have to terminate you from the Program. What will your parents say about that?”

“They’re fine with it, I’m sure.”

“But if you quit the program, Lethe, you can’t continue to live with Maria Angeles.”

“That’s no problem. She told me she doesn’t mind. She says I can live with her.”

“You’re missing the point, Lethe. If you quit the program, you are required to leave the residence at once. It’s in the papers you signed. I can show you . . .”

“What about my condition? She’s the only one who can help me. ”

“What condition?”

“My nervous condition. Where will I go if I can’t stay with her?”

The Director leveled his glance across the desk. “Have you thought about going home?”

“I can’t go home.”

“Why not?”

Lethe didn’t answer.

“I’m sorry, then. I can’t help you.”

How Lethe met Spanish friends

Secretly Lethe wanted to prolong his exile in Spain. He had no desire to return to his parent’s house in the suburbs of Chicago. On the pretext that he would seek psychiatric help, he convinced his parents to allow him to stay for the remainder of the year in Madrid. It was not hard to convince them because of the problems they were having at home. Other than these weekly sessions with a psychiatrist, Lethe was now free to explore Madrid as much as he pleased. His parents provided him with a monthly income that was more than generous.

Within two weeks he met a group of Spanish friends. He found them one night at the circular dead-end of a residential city street, under a canopy of leaves, drinking whiskey and Coke. The Spanish youth were allowed to drink alcohol in the streets, and often they gathered there before going out to the bars. He introduced himself to this group of Spaniards, attempting the language the best he could, and surprisingly, they talked to him. Most of them were medical students and engineering students, and Lethe asked a bunch of questions about the Spanish public universities, wondering how they differed from American colleges. He learned that the majority of the Spanish students barely opened up their textbooks during the semester because there were no official grades until the end of the term. However, at the end of the term, which was in one month, the Spanish students had to pass a comprehensive exam. As Lethe poured himself another whiskey and Coke, he could feel a warm sensation in his blood. Under the street lamp haloed by a swarm of mosquitoes, the band of Spaniards carried on their little soirée with Lethe at the center of attention, el Americano. Unlike any group of people Lethe had ever met before, the Spaniards displayed a manly and cheerful camaraderie, throwing their arms around his shoulders, toasting to his health and welcoming him into their gang. As they drank more whiskey, their gaiety grew cloudy with mirth, until finally at midnight, they took him to the bars in the plaza. The night was just beginning.

Week after week, Lethe met his Spanish friends at the circular dead-end to drink whiskey and Coke. The number of them was growing. Moroccans were bringing hashish to sell. Lethe watched how the Spaniards interacted with the Moroccans in a shady, offhand way. The Moroccans were pock-faced and surly. The Spaniards were cavalier and sleek. In the bars and discothèques, Lethe followed his new friend, Javier, into the bathroom where they snorted lines of cocaine. Sometimes the Spaniards discreetly passed around a bala, a small contraption used to shoot cocaine up into your nose. It seemed to Lethe that cocaine wasn’t that big of a deal in Spain. The culture was social and festive and had a tradition of staying out long hours on the weekends. Unlike his Spanish friends, however, who used cocaine infrequently, Lethe wanted to hold on to the vigorous mental rush all throughout the night. He found it was to his advantage to become chummier with the Spaniard who carried the drugs.

But Lethe felt guilty about bringing cocaine back to the Senora’s apartment and snorting lines in the middle of the night. He was fortunate enough to be allowed to stay in her apartment for another two weeks, especially after the Director had told him it was against the rules. Could she hear him coming home at night? Could she hear him cutting up lines on the old wooden desk in his room? The walls were thin. And that woman knew everything. He had to leave her apartment as soon as possible.

The hotel in Plaza Mayor

Lethe found a room for himself in Plaza Mayor, a vibrant, bustling section of Madrid. The colonial-style hotel had an antique piano sitting in the back of a drawing room with historical maps on the walls and ashtrays on end tables. Elderly patrons with large paunches passed through the mold-blue darkness of the lobby, smoking cigars.

In the metro station between five and six o’clock, Lethe met briefly with Javier, who was meticulous about his appointments, and always phoned beforehand to say which stop to meet at. Their clandestine rendezvous lasted a total of five minutes: they greeted each other outside of the station and took a walk around the block. Javier slipped the cellophane into Lethe’s hand and they parted anonymously.

Over the weeks of partying and drinking, Lethe found that the only reason he was continuing to meet with his Spanish friends was because he wanted to buy drugs from them. There was nothing wrong with his Spanish friends, they were full of vitality and charm, but social life was becoming a nuisance to Lethe, an obstacle to his real desire, which was to get more drugs. If, by subtracting the noisy, sweaty environment of the discothèque, Lethe could keep the cocaine for himself, then that’s what he wanted. He wanted to be alone in his room with the drugs. Then he felt he would have more freedom to enjoy himself while high, doing such things as writing poetry and reading.

Lethe had collected a large number of books in Spain. Before he lost the desire to go out on the weekends and to be seen in public, he had visited all the major bookstores in Madrid, purchasing new and used books alike. This was part of his plan. He would snort cocaine and stack the books in tall columns against the wall, according to the order in which he planned to read them. Books possessed a sort of magical aura for Lethe. His reverence for literature had been handed down to him by his father. The books that Lethe collected in Spain were like the books he used to read in his childhood, Treasure Island, Gulliver’s Travels, Great Expectations . . .

He wanted to go deep inside and discover the secrets of his own mind. Reality was mundane. Reality was boring. He had read many books—he knew other worlds existed. He didn’t want to be stuck here with everyone else. He wanted to be Someplace Else. He had dreamed of escaping many times. But he could never get the journey to begin. Maybe it was his room . . . putrid, smoky, papers strewn across the floor. Maybe it was . . . that he could never formulate a single coherent sentence. How could he explore the depths of his mind if he couldn’t record those depths? He waited for something big to happen—for the writing to burst out of him like a jet of water or to blind him with a ray of light. But nothing ever happened.

Soon Lethe’s longing to write was turning into an obsession. On most days, he locked himself in his room and tried to write but without success. His thoughts kept circling back to the room he had not managed to escape, with his notebook open and nothing written. He had not gone anywhere. He was condemned to live in reality with everyone else.

But on the days when he met Javier in the metro station, things were different. Drugs wiped out his sense of impotency and replaced it with strength, virility and mental acuity. For a short time, the aggravating chaos in Lethe’s mind disappeared. Now he could travel to those fantastical places the Authors went. Now he could project himself into Ernest Hemingway or Virginia Woolf. Lethe reached for his tower of books and copied The Works of Great Authors. He copied them with fervor, angst, and the legendary hunger of youth.

Lines of cocaine were laid out on the writing table, next to his books and notebooks. His ceaseless copying went on for six or seven hours at a time. He lit a cigarette with one hand while continuing to copy with the other. He prepared a line and snorted it without even looking up from the page. These nights of copying were delirious and carnival-like. Glittering and vivid hallucinations occurred. Revelations. He overheard conversations of fictional characters. The echoes crooned and caroled and he knew a lively discussion was taking place. His mission had succeeded; he was indeed Someplace Else.

From the center of his bed, he laughed out loud exultantly, like a haughty, exiled Arab prince. The towers of books formed a circle around him and he gazed at the ordered columns, feeling an inordinate sense of power on his island. The immense labors of copying seemed to restore his original ambitions. He was tapping into an unlimited and all-powerful source.

One night he heard the murmur of a voice he recognized.

“Scar Face is that you?”

Standing five feet away from him was the ghost of his old high school buddy. The specter stood there staring at him with burning, insistent eyes.

“Scar Face, talk to me. What happened? Are you dead?”

The translucent cords of Scar Face’s hair dangled down, almost quivering in the light. Lethe got up from his chair. As he moved closer to his friend, the apparition faded away into motes of dust and empty air.

Lethe’s remaining five months in Spain were spent alone in his hotel room. Outside in the streets, Chinese ladies huddled in twos and threes selling boxes of chicken fried rice. He lived off the greasy rice for months. Lost dogs ran into the alley below his hotel window, and sometimes he threw the chicken pieces over the ledge.

Javier makes deliveries

When Javier called one night to arrange their meeting location, Lethe told his Spanish friend that he was too weak to leave his room. Reluctantly, Javier agreed to bring the drugs over to the hotel.

The Spaniard had met Lethe when he was vigorous and sociable; now his American friend appeared dull and melancholy and barely said a single word. Javier had never seen a person given over so slavishly to a drug. It was almost insulting to have to visit someone in this condition. There was a tradition of manly valor in his country called machismo. The male had to prove that he was master over himself. In Spain, a man lost dignity when he succumbed to the throes of addiction.

But Lethe was not a Spaniard and he was not a man. Americans were weaklings, mere victims. They couldn’t control their urges. They gave into their appetites and balked at taking responsibility. Javier never felt guilty for supplying his American friend with drugs.

Lethe groped his way through the hotel room in a limp of exhaustion, searching for his wallet to pay the Spaniard.

Part Two

Baba Omarjeet

“Today I want to talk about the body. You may have heard the saying that the body is a temple, a holy place. You may have heard that the body is sacred. But why? Why should we consider the body sacred? Eating healthy and moderately, sleeping regular hours, and exercising create the conditions for happiness in the body. Whereas overeating, consuming alcohol and drugs, and smoking cigarettes create the conditions for a physical hell. In this state, the body becomes like an empty shell that is abused and ignored . . . ”

During the 1960’s, when Omarjeet was still an optometrist, he discovered the value of transcendental meditation and began following the Indian Saint Ramana Maharshi. The world famous guru, who had been recognized by the Beatles and much of the western world, instructed Omarjeet to go into Aryuveda medicine and to bring the ancient healing techniques of India to the United States. Omarjeet followed his master’s advice, and for the next ten years, embarked on a journey of mind-body exploration and spiritual teaching. Instead of speaking in an esoteric “spiritual” language, Omarjeet spoke the language of the body—a language the Doctor could understand. Moreover, the Doctor had developed his own ideas about the connection between the mind and the body, which gave credence to Omarjeet’s message.

Baba’s seminars were typically held in upscale hotels and retreat centers because they attracted therapists, physicians, New-Age spiritualists, and psychiatrists, all of whom could afford the cost of a three-day seminar. On the first day, the Doctor was surprised to find over five-hundred people in attendance. Throngs of spiritual seekers flowed into the giant banquet hall. The Doctor merged with the throbbing crowd. He sat down next to an attractive woman who looked like she was of Eastern European descent. After a moment of sitting in silence, he casually remarked to her, “This better be good. I took three days off of work to come here.”

“You must be a doctor,” she said with a smile.

“Yes, I am. How did you know?”

“I work at Lutheran General; I think I’ve seen you before. I’m a pediatrician, my name is Gabriela.”

Before the lecture began, they talked about their families and why they had decided to come to the seminar. Meeting this friendly woman on the first day reassured the Doctor he was in the right place.

Baba paced back and forth on the stage, stopping abruptly and speaking up into the air, “Every one of us is missing the big picture: the body is sacred. My latest book is called Sacred Body, Sacred Mind. After this lecture, you’ll find it in the back of the room. Go take a look—please, flip through the pages. Read about how you’re neglecting the body—and discover how to take care of the body. In the next three days, I’m going to teach you how to do some of these things. But first buy my book. Then you will have both.”

As the short Indian man with the plum-shaped face delivered his well-practiced speech, the Doctor was having the sudden experience of revelation. His mind was reeling with enthusiasm, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes . . . . The guru’s words made groundbreaking sense to him, and yet they were nothing profound. But the words came to him at the right moment, and in the context of his wife’s sickness and his troubles with work, the spiritual message produced a great effect on his mind. There was a shift in the way he looked at things. Essentially, Baba was telling the Doctor: Take care of yourself. Take care of your body, your mind. You are the one who needs attention now. How can you help your wife or your patients before you learn to take care of yourself?

Since he had married Rose, nearly twenty-two years ago, the Doctor had been suffering from reoccurring nightmare. He was trapped inside a cavern with burning torches lit along the walls. The mouth of the cavern was closed up by a massive boulder that would not budge. He tried to move the boulder but with no success. After searching for a way out and not finding one, an overwhelming fear told him that some giant, or monster, was returning to cavern. The fear gripped him and he went down on his knees to pray. As he was praying, he heard the footfalls of the giant approaching.

His attention to his wife was unflagging. Many considered him a “model husband”. Since Rose was diagnosed with Multiple System Atrophy, the Doctor felt he had done everything in his power to take care of her and to attend to her needs. He sacrificed for his wife; he gave up those things dearest to him, such as being with friends and family. She didn’t approve of his Iraqi friends. In her eyes, they were “low class” and she refused to make friends with their wives. Rose had grown to accept Salem’s parents only after many, many years. Still she begrudged him for loving his mother . . .

This great man of spiritual insight, Baba Omarjeet, had the power to drive a spear into the eye of the monster. His words and wisdom moved the boulder and freed the Doctor from the metaphorical cave.

Streaks of daylight swept into the banquet hall. “Mr. Doctor,” Baba’s voice rang out, “Read my book. Meditate twice a day. Take up yoga. Eat healthy. Get better sleep. And you will be free.”

As the day progressed, the Doctor attended workshops, lectures and vegetarian lunches. Marveling at the charismatic Omarjeet, gratitude shined on the Doctor’s face as on the newly-converted. By the end of the third day, he was gloating over his new-found purpose.

He saw the attractive lady he met the first day, who asked him if he was taking the extension course.

“What extension course?” He asked.

“They teach you how to meditate,” she said.

The Doctor moves downstairs into the guest bedroom

After hearing Baba’s message, the Doctor knew that he had to hire somebody to take care of his wife. This person would sleep in the same room with Rose, while the Doctor moved downstairs into the guestroom. The woman who the Doctor hired was named Beruita.

Of Slavic descent, Beruita was a stout and muscular member of her sex who could lift Rose into bed, or lower her onto the toilet with ease. Beruita was one of those robust souls who, after enduring many hardships, are endowed with an abundance of goodwill for others and a cheerful optimism. Her broken English, however, was at times incomprehensible and this caused some confusion in the house. Rose handed her a Polish-English dictionary and told her to study it. Later Rose found out that Beruita was an easily excitable woman, and sometimes, hysterically emotional. Her new help might burst into a storm of diabolical laughter or begin wailing out loud for no apparent reason. Or she would talk for fifteen minutes uninterrupted without communicating an ounce of meaning.

Rose tried to accept her situation as a person dependent on other persons. Now she had to lean on someone’s arm if she wanted to walk around the house. Moving from the kitchen to the bedroom required forethought and a certain amount of planning. Her illness was getting worse. Her body was changing, slowly giving out. She was afraid of what was happening to her. Every two or three nights, she woke up from a nightmare about being put into a nursing home.

Spotting the first loss of vitality in her face, Beruita applied special moisturizers to her skin. Dora and Mabel painted her face every morning with rosy blushes and thick foundation. Despite the makeup used to enliven Rose’s complexion, bubbles of drool formed in the corners of her mouth.

Rose and her husband still went to parties from time to time, but now he left her sitting on a couch next to people she didn’t even know. She watched her husband dart through the crowd with a wine glass in his hand. He loved to socialize. He had more friends than anyone she had ever met. It was as if his love of socializing was a direct rebuff against their relationship. As if he were saying, “I can’t be happy with you, so I’m going to surround myself with friends and relatives.”

At the last party they went to, her husband was talking to another woman. He talked to her the entire night, and they were doing more than just talking. It looked like they were flirting. And then, before the party was over, he asked her to dance. From the sofa, Rose watched her husband having a ball. He looked so cheery and carefree without her.

That night she said she thought it was “rude” of him to leave her sitting by herself all night.

“What do you want me to do honey?” He replied, innocently.

“At least act like I’m your wife.”

“Don’t be silly, of course you’re my wife.”

Overall, the Doctor was very pleased with Beruita. Now he looked forward to going to bed at night. At least an hour before bedtime, he headed downstairs just so that he could read his spiritual books and enjoy the solitude of his own room.

Meditation, etc.

“During the Wisdom Seminar I told you about the importance of the body. We must care for the body. This is true. The body is sacred. Today I am going to talk about how the physical and spiritual are one. When you take care of the physical—you take care of spiritual. If you nourish the body, you nourish the soul. Meditation is how we nourish the soul. We call it ‘body-breath’ because it unites. Today I want you to notice how the breath is the doorway to the three dimensions of body, mind, and spirit.”

Omarjeet promenaded up and down the rows of cushions, his long robe undulating, his calm, honeyed voice imparting sage instruction along the way. His students sensed his presence hovering over them as he adjusted their chins and straightened their backs. Later in the afternoon, during a silent group meditation, Omarjeet knelt down beside each person and whispered a secret mantra in their ear. When the sacred words were uttered, the Doctor had his first experience of transcendence. Though unable to describe his experience in words, he would admit to all of his close friends that “something happened that day.”

After the meditation course, the Doctor woke up early every morning and applied himself with seriousness, dedication, and rigorous self-discipline. He withdrew into himself and his mantra. When he had difficulty concentrating, he projected the guru on the screen of his mind. Omarjeet’s characteristically mellifluous voice reassured him, “your thoughts will disappear”. Hearing those words, “your thoughts will disappear,” slowly the Doctor regained his composure on the mat. Soon he was able to forget the reality of his wife’s illness and the stresses of his work. He continued to practice assiduously, and for awhile the meditation seemed to be working.

But then another distraction came into the picture, disrupting the middle-aged man’s calm and measured breathing: it was that woman he met at the seminar. They had kept in touch and communicated over the phone several times since then. Now they were meeting for coffee, discussing spirituality and exchanging books. With each rendezvous, the Doctor was becoming more attracted to this woman who was also on “the path”.

She was born in Hungry and traveled to the United States to get her medical degree. The Doctor identified with her foreign background because he too was born out of the US. Her icy, blue eyes and burnished skin mesmerized him. Even the freckles on her shoulders held mystique. Gabriella was a paragon of health with shapely dimensions. During their lunch dates, she told the Doctor some of the stories from her childhood, when her father used to teach her to ski in the Alps.

But more than any of these qualities, it was Gabriella’s intellect that attracted the Doctor the most. When they met together in cafes, they had the most stimulating, thought-provoking conversations about science and religion, medicine and philosophy, Christianity and Buddhism. Gabriella had read M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled and loved it. As a pediatrician, she knew more about child psychiatry, German existentialism, and the ideas of Carl Jung, Freud and Wittgenstein than anyone he had ever met. And the Doctor was beginning to compare Gabriella to his wife, who never had any interest in intellectual ideas.

Despite his physical attraction to Gabriela, the Doctor restrained himself from entering into a sexual relationship. Naturally, he was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. Although he admired Gabriella in so many ways, he could never cheat on his wife, who was sick. But their meetings continued, and the question of his own fidelity began to re-surface in his conscience. He asked himself, “Am I even capable of cheating on my wife?”

Imperial Tower

One morning, Rose asked Ernie, Mabel’s husband, to drive her into the city. Her mother-in-law joined them and helped push Rose in a wheelchair. This was the first time that Rose was using a wheelchair. She brought it “in case of emergencies,” but with the progression of her disease, she knew she would be depending on it more and more. Once they arrived downtown, Ernie parked the car and removed the wheelchair from the trunk.

As Nadia, the Doctor’s mother, pushed Rose down Michigan Avenue in a wheelchair, shoppers and pedestrians shot inadvertent glances. Unable to hold herself up, Rose slid forward until her face was in her lap. Nadia stopped three times to prevent her from slouching.

They turned into a men’s clothing store. A well-dressed salesman in his late twenties approached them. “May I help you find something?”

Rose craned her neck and said in a muffled tone, “I want to get my husband a tie, as a surprise.”

There was a look of distraction on the salesman’s face, as if he didn’t know how to properly respond to a person in a wheelchair. He repeated his question, redirecting it to Nadia, “Was there something I could help you find?”

Rose interrupted, asking about the tie. But he continued to ignore her.

It was because of the wheelchair. She had only brought it as a precaution. She wanted to tell him that she was not disabled. But he quickly pointed out a table of men’s shirts on sale, and disappeared.

After leaving the men’s clothing store, Rose noticed an advertisement for the construction of a new luxury high-rise that would be completed in three year’s time. The location was right across from the old water tower in the heart of the city, where horses-and-buggies parked along the sidewalks. The name of the building was Imperial Tower, and it would be comprised of upscale condos, some selling for as much as two million dollars apiece.

In the past Rose had expressed a loathing for the suburbs. She felt isolated and confined living there. On many occasions she had pleaded with her husband and children to move with her to the city, but they refused, saying they preferred their home in Barclay Park. Later in her life, when Rose was going to school at the Art Institute, she began to see the suburbs as a demonic force that hampered her creativity. She desperately wanted to escape into the city, where all the action was. If she had her own apartment, she could walk to the gallery district or to performances and exhibitions.

And so Rose was smitten with nervous excitement when she found out about the Imperial Tower. This was her dream—to be living on the 57^th floor of the most lavish apartment building in Chicago. Nadia sensed her daughter-in-law’s enthusiasm as she pushed the wheelchair into the sales office. A professional-looking woman in a black business suit and high heels introduced herself. Rose expressed her interest in the new building. The woman uncovered a large graphic illustration of the Imperial Tower. Rose was stunned by the grandeur and majesty of the new building. Now she only had to convince her husband.

The Doctor agrees to buy the apartment

The Doctor wanted to do something for his wife . . .

Lately, he had been thinking a lot about his spiritual friend, Gabriella. Every time they got together, they had so much to share about their private lives. He talked to Gabriella openly about his difficulties with Rose. More than once he mentioned that his wife’s illness was “depressing to be around.”

“The whole house is infused with her sickness,” he said. “When I come home, I feel it weighing on me and I just want to go to my room.”

Gabriella was a good listener. Although she had been trained as a pediatrician, she could ease comfortably into the position of a therapist at any time. She had studied volumes of works on child psychiatry. She encouraged the Doctor to feel angry or resentful or whatever he was feeling toward his wife. When he needed advice, she gave it to him.

“I think you should do something for your wife,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your wife is probably having doubts about your marriage.”

“I’m having doubts about my marriage.”

“But still, you shouldn’t give up—”

“I’ve been married to her for almost twenty-three years.”

“Salem,” Gabriella relaxed her hand over his. “You’re a good husband. She needs to know you love her.”

On the day they went to the sales office together, the woman in the black business suit reappeared and led Rose and her husband into a conference room, offering them glasses of water with slices of cucumber. She showed the prospective buyers blueprints of various apartment layouts and then turned off the lights.

An overhead projector came down from the ceiling, displaying a virtual tour of two premium apartments in the Imperial Tower. The tour included digital views from every room, with sights of Lake Michigan between dawn and dusk. During the presentation, the saleswoman described the specific features and amenities of each apartment and went down a list of options to customize the spaces to their own personal taste.

At the end of the sales meeting, the Doctor offered to buy one of the most expensive condominiums in the Imperial Tower, nearly 1.4 million dollars in 1997. Rose clasped her husband’s shirt in feverish joy.

Cranely College. Junior Year.

When Lethe returned to college, it was as if he had been erased from the collective memory of the student body. Now he wandered around campus, alone. The students carried on their lives more or less the way he remembered—a swarm of freshman buzzing like flies outside the dorms, puffing cigarettes and chatting on the stoop, or tossing Frisbee and lofting bean bags on the quad. In the distance, beyond the football field, the soccer team was practicing.

Inside the hive-like quarters of the dormitories, the din of stereo systems, hair driers, vacuum cleaners, and showers running; videogame junkies hold controllers in transfixed stupors; couples cuddle on top of bunk beds and disappear under blankets; two female rugby players perch over their desks, eating pop tarts and sending instant messages; the quiet, introverted ones are suspended in midday reveries . . .

In the basements, laundry machines vibrate concrete walls, college girls flip through health and beauty magazines, the air grows humid, their foreheads dampen. On the main floor, the communal space is empty but the television is on. A student wanders in and falls asleep on the cushions, drunk from the night before . . .

Outside, a funnel of sunlight runs through the chestnut trees throwing shadows on the winding footpaths; the quads serene, the library stoic, the science buildings, the gym, the English building, the stately fraternity and sorority houses; the red-brick walkway to the dining hall, the modern bridge, a student art exhibit on the lawn, professors chatting. Friends meet with friends; to class, to meals, to pick up their mail. He recalls some of their faces. The students cluster in their friendly bands. The shrill and gossipy notes of the sorority sisters pierce the air. The frat boys don their pinstripe Polos . . .

Ten or twelve of Lethe’s fraternity brothers still remembered him, but not exactly with pleasure. From the beginning of his freshman year, the Brothers were wary about how Lethe would turn out. When he returned from Spain, it was obvious that he was not “one of them”. Rumor spread that he dropped out of the Institute and “never left his room except to buy coke”. This did little to improve his reputation among the Brothers. In their minds, Lethe was a drug addict—they nicknamed him “crackhead”.

If Lethe felt any resentment, it was toward Iron Sandwich who now had a girlfriend and was occupied with her. When Sandwich saw Lethe on the way to class, he quickly looked away. Lethe didn’t know why Sandwich was so upset with him. He remembered certain things only faintly, such as stealing his roommate’s Ritalin.

Principessa

Instead of wallowing in his dorm room over the loss of a friend, Lethe found reason to celebrate. He invoked the lines of Henry David Thoreau: “A man must find his occasions in himself.”

His drug dealer on campus was a scrawny Arab with jet-black hair and a mustache. Shady Lou was one of those business-minded students who build a small fortune by selling drugs to their college peers. Just about every week Shady Lou returned from New York City with an assortment of illegal commodities. A hippie-like entourage lingered in his apartment, smoking hookahs and playing the guitar. Lethe turned out to be one of Lou’s best customers. He purchased a handful of colorful vials and returned to his room for a night of revelry.

But soon Lethe was hankering for conversation and human interaction. With the aid of a newer drug that had just been introduced on campus, he gained the necessary self-confidence to wander out of his room and explore the dormitory. There was a warm, fireside glow inside the building. It was a Monday night and most of the students were in their rooms studying. Lethe felt the entire warmth of the building as if it were wrapping its arms around him. In contrast to the sterile house he grew up in, the dormitory felt like home—the comfortable, lazy feeling of home. The warm, pleasant glow surrounded him until he sank into a love for all things. Soon he was waltzing through the halls, doing somersaults and pirouettes and finding every mundane college-dorm sight absolutely sublime. He waltzed into the study room and its geometric layout gratified him. “Magnificento! Perfecto!” he exclaimed in an Italian accent.

Four female students lived on the floor above him. On this particular night, Jessica Gerber, a renowned horseback rider and major in Psychology was watching TV and cutting out magazine advertisements for her Psych. 301 class, “Abnormal Human Behavior”. Molly Diamond, a snobbish old-money girl from Upper Manhattan, was typing up a world religion paper at her desk. Christina Franklin (otherwise known as “the Cute Mute”) was stretched out on her bed, reading Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice. Lethe didn’t know the name of the fourth girl.

They were staring at him because he was half-dressed in a Land’s End bathrobe—and holding a plastic sword in his hand. With the sword poised high, he struck the valiant pose of a Musketeer. They heard rumors about Lethe Bashar but never imagined this sort of thing. He tiptoed from one end of the room to the other, tapping his sword in the air at random like Merlin’s magic wand. He stared wild-eyed at a snow globe; shaking it up and watching the snow descend. Then he caught sight of a billowy scarf that was hanging on a bedpost. As the feathers touched his skin, his body seemed to melt and he swiftly removed his Land’s End bathrobe.

The four roommates broke into wavelets of laughter. Lethe studied his proportions in the full length mirror. “Call me Prin-ci-pessa,” he spoke in his favorite Italian accent.

From the bathroom, they brought a pail of beauty supplies—butter cream frosting, body mists, blackberry lip gloss, creamy lathers, metallic lipstick, and velvet matte eyeliners. Molly loaned Lethe her halter top dress. The Cute Mute painted his toenails. The renowned horseback rider shaved his legs.

The Kiss

Meanwhile, between the Doctor and Gabriela, meeting for coffee and discussing books soon became going for long walks in forest preserves and eating in fancy restaurants. On their nature walks in particular, both sensed a quiet intimacy growing between them.

And then it happened, the kiss. One afternoon in August, they were parked outside a forest preserve. They had just finished their languid, dreamy walk through the woods. Before Gabriela put the key in the ignition, she paused to look through her purse for her sunglasses. Without thinking, the Doctor bent his head forward and kissed her. Gabriella responded with pleasure.

The quivering thrill transported the Doctor to the days of his adolescence. Then too he had been sexually frustrated. The constant focus on his studies had led him to fantasize about the young maids who came to work for his mother. He loved the attention they gave to him. After studying for long hours in his bedroom, he joined them in gossip. They were flirtatious and sometimes grew excited, smothering him with kisses . . .

Or the house of Lavasha Alba where his parents brought him many times. Lavasha was a tease. He was afraid of her. He was “chicken”. The adults always became distracted, and Lavasha and Salem escaped into another part of the house. Twice, she led him into the dark, dark guestroom where they sat next to each other on the bed not saying anything. Touch me. Touch me. She took his hot, quivering fingers and placed them between her legs.

**********************************

Three days later, Gabriella apologized for what had happened in the car. Her tone was serious. She said she didn’t want to get involved with a married man, but she offered to keep their friendship. The Doctor said that would be too hard for him. They didn’t speak to each other for another four months.

An unfortunate incident with the massage-therapist

She was not particularly attractive but she did rub in between the grooves of his shoulders and neck. And she loosened the tension in his back muscles almost to the point of orgasmic release. More than once his mind drifted into a fantasy with the brawny massage therapist, but always he restrained himself. Until the day he could restrain himself no longer. As she was massaging his lower back, he had the sensation that she was touching him intimately. He wanted to respond to her and so he did. He turned around on the massage bed and embraced her uninhibitedly.

“What are you doing?” She shouted.

“Oh—I was . . . Please forgive me, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.”

She edged toward the door, picking up a pen and scribbling something down in a flustered state. “This is for you,” she said. “I’m referring you to a professional who can help you more than I can. She’s a psychologist, and a friend of mine. Please see her. You need to go now.”

With the business card in his sweaty palm, the Doctor left the massage studio. Self-loathing churned in the pit of his stomach. He felt like an idiot, like a jerk. What was he thinking, trying to make out with his massage therapist? Didn’t he know better than that?

The miraculous psychologist

The waiting room was closet-size, four feet by five, approximately. There was a small magazine rack and two chairs. A stream of classical music ran down from a speaker in the ceiling. The narrow dimensions of the waiting room reminded the Doctor of a confession booth; though he had never been to confession before. His wife had asked him to go with her to marriage counseling about ten years ago. Rose agreed to see the Doctor’s church-recommended psychiatrist, but later she complained that the psychiatrist was biased in favor of their separation. The results of every one of the marriage tests said divorce was inevitable. They never went to marriage counseling again.

The Doctor was greeted by his new psychiatrist in a cold, offhand manner. He stepped out of the closet-sized waiting room and into a slightly larger office. Her office was on the fifty-eighth floor of a Chicago building. In between five or six other high-rise buildings, the view offered cut-up rectangles of blue sky. The sun reflected off the buildings. Three or four spotted plants clung to the window ledge.

“Take a seat,” she said.

Nervously, the Doctor lowered himself onto the peeling leather couch. Not knowing where to put his hands, he reached for a Kleenex and began to blow his nose.

With a grey notebook in her lap, she took down the Doctor’s information.

“Are you sick?” She asked.

“No, Ma’am.”

“Call me Dr. Levy.” After turning her notebook to a fresh page, she said, “My girlfriend told me about what happened in the massage studio.”

“Yes . . . I feel horrible.” The Doctor’s posture on the leather couch was rigid. He held his back from sinking in, and this was causing some tension in his face.

“Tell me what’s going on with you, Salem?”

“Well, my wife is sick with a degenerative disease . . .”

Dr. Levy looked up at him. She had small, penetrating eyes.

The Doctor continued, “I realized that I couldn’t take care of my wife anymore. So we hired someone who could lift her out of bed and wash her in the mornings . . .”

After the Doctor finished the story, he wiped his neck with a handkerchief. The sweat was bleeding through his collar.

Dr. Levy jotted a few final notes. “Do you know anything about the theory of adolescence, Salem?”

“Other than that my children are in their adolescence . . . I know what they go through, I think.”

“And what can you tell me about what they’re going through?”

“My son seems to be doing fine. My daughter on the other hand has some problems. Too many friends.”

“What do you think happens during adolescence?”

“I’m not exactly sure. It’s the period of teenage independence, isn’t it?”

“That’s correct. During the period of adolescence a healthy teenager will undergo a basic change in attitude. The mark of adolescence is a strong opposition to dependency on the mother and father. Perhaps you can see some of this behavior in your children. After listening to you describe your marriage, Dr. Bashar, I’m led to believe that you too are undergoing some of these changes. You may have never fully outgrown your adolescence.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I’m talking about an unconscious teenage rebellion against your wife/mother.”

“Unconscious teenage rebellion? Up until now I’ve done everything for her. I don’t understand. I’ve done everything to please my wife.”

“Including cheating on her?”

“But that was a mistake. You can tell I’m not—”

“How can you say that you’ve done everything for your wife, when before, you just told me you didn’t think you loved her.”

“No, I don’t love her.”

“Then, how can you be a loyal husband?”

“Because I’ve stayed with Rose for almost twenty-five years.”

“Exactly my point about the theory of adolescence. You still haven’t broken away from your dependence on your mother/wife. If you had developed your adolescent independence, then you would’ve divorced your wife a long time ago. You would have broken off the marriage when you first realized things weren’t working out. But instead, you stayed in a dependency because it mirrored your dependency on your mother.”

“This may be too Freudian for me to handle!”

“You have to admit Freud changed our view of human relationships. He is hard to ignore—especially in your case.”

“I don’t know.”

“Salem, if you want, you can walk out the door right now, I won’t charge you a dime. All I’m telling you is that you haven’t been loyal to your wife. And you haven’t been faithful to her. Because of your dependency, you may think you have. But you haven’t. You’ve been lying to her for nearly two decades. If you truly cared about your wife, then you would’ve gotten out of this marriage a long time ago.”

The Doctor looked like he was on the verge of tears.

“It’s time to grow up, Salem. You may think that I’m being harsh with you. And I admit—I don’t give much leeway to my patients—I have a ‘Dr. Phil’ approach.”

“What can I do?”

“You can tell your wife the truth. Ask for a divorce. She doesn’t deserve to be lied to anymore.”

The drive up north

On a Saturday morning at the end of September, the Doctor and his wife took a long drive up north to attend a wedding of their mutual friends. Over the cornfields, a hazy sun rose into the sky and a dim, pewter light covered the plains. Every twenty miles or so, they passed wooded areas and rest stops with streaks of grayish-violet in the branches. Rose asked her husband to shut the window because she was feeling a chill. The Doctor couldn’t understand how she could possibly be feeling a chill on such a mild, autumn day.

He closed the window; but now it felt stuffy inside. He turned on the air-conditioning. But again, his wife complained about being cold.

“What do you want me to do?” The Doctor said sarcastically. “You’re always cold.”

“I know I am,” she replied.

The Doctor was thinking about the sessions with his psychologist . . . “You’re stuck in an unconscious teenage rebellion.” Was it true? Is that why he stayed with her so long? Dr. Levy’s analysis sounded a bit too “psychological”. Her confidence in summing up his life in a single sentence bothered him slightly. He knew that his relationship to Rose was more complicated than that. But Dr. Levy did help him to understand that he had been lying to his wife for all these years.

“Honey, I’ve been lying to you. I’ve been lying to me. To everyone.” But he couldn’t say it. Not yet.

Rose stared out of the window, thinking about her artwork. Last week Dora had put a small easel in her bedroom. It wasn’t even a real artist’s easel like the one she had downstairs. It was a children’s easel.

She couldn’t paint in her art studio anymore. Walking downstairs was treacherous. She could barely walk, let alone use stairs. And the canvases were too big for her. Her legs grew tired from standing; her hands began to shake. With the children’s easel, she was hoping that maybe she could paint something smaller. “Have Dora bring up a chair from the basement,” she made a mental note to herself.

As the drive continued, the Doctor looked out the windows at the haystacks and brush pastures along the way, imagining the breezy atmosphere, mournfully. Rose needed to stop at a gas station to use the bathroom. Every time they had to stop, the wheelchair needed to be taken out of the trunk and reassembled. “Unconscious teenage rebellion,” he said to himself as he pushed her toward the bathrooms.

The Encounter

“I want a divorce,” the Doctor said to his wife after twenty-five years of marriage. The words hung inside the car like a chemical agent.

He took his eyes off the road to register his wife’s reaction.

There was a placid melancholy on her face. The reaction was subtle, barely noticeable. And what emotion he thought he glimpsed in his wife’s expression was now gone. The lines on her face were disappearing. Her cheeks were becoming as flaccid as those of an eighty year old woman’s.

He pictured her as a mime, with her face painted white. She was tense, mute, rebellious. Like a deaf and dumb child. His eyes darted from the road to her face, the road to her face, and back again . . .

His thoughts were racing, “I’ve wanted to say this to you for the last ten years. But then we had children. And after the children, you became sick.”

The Doctor’s head was flooded with confusion. Her silence was making him uncomfortable. But she couldn’t say anything—she couldn’t talk.

“This has been the hardest decision in my life . . . Rose . . . I can’t live with you anymore. I need to be honest with myself and that means being honest with you. It’s not fair to either one of us anymore. I don’t know what you’re thinking right now, all I know is that this has been extremely hard for me. Maybe if I still loved you, Rose, it would be easier for me to take care of you. But I’m not at peace with myself in this marriage and my feelings aren’t there anymore. It’s like I’m an actor putting on show for everyone else. I can’t imagine what this must be like for you. You’re probably going to hate me for awhile. Please Rose, forgive me. I’ve given this decision a lot of thought. I’ve been talking to a psychologist . . .”

His voice was exhausted. Once more he looked at his wife to see her reaction—upset, confused, alarmed?

Her body was slouched into the passenger door, her face leaning against the window, her eyes lightly shut. The medication sometimes put her to sleep. He wondered how long she had been sleeping, and whether he would have to tell her again tomorrow . . .

The window came down. A gust of cool air ran into the car. His forehead was sweating—he needed some air.

The Great Escape

After he asked his wife for a divorce, Dr. Levy recommended that Salem take a vacation to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where the Eighth International Conference on Spirituality and Consciousness was being held. She described the conference as the “spiritual event of the century,” five days of seminars, rounds of meditations, lectures, dancing and “deep searching of the soul”. Three spiritual mavericks were expected to lead the conference: Mathew Fox, Joseph Khan, and Baba Omarjeet. The Doctor had read all of their books. He had a great deal of respect for these spiritual giants—they were his mentors and role models.

The idea of taking a spiritual retreat appealed to the Doctor immensely. Since he had asked his wife for a divorce (the second time while she was awake), he had the urge to disappear from the premises and be alone for awhile. The day his psychologist recommended the conference to him, he booked a flight.

********************************

As he walked toward the stone arches of the front desk, he heard the twittering of small birds hidden inside tangles of branches. The tiled foyer of the Sheraton Hotel, edged with flowering cacti and potted palms, opened into a Spanish-style lobby with bronze sculptures and an ornate fountain in the center. The Doctor sauntered through this dreamy, exotic hotel in a mood of indolence and freedom. A harpist with hair down to her ankles played beside a white grand piano. Guests wandered in and out the lobby, meeting friends and arriving for the conference.

The seekers were gathering and filling the lobby with their chatter and excitement. Typically, Salem would have struck up a conversation with any one of them. He had a lot in common with these people. To be sure, they had read The Road Less Traveled. Or he could talk to them about yoga, which he had taken up recently and was enthusiastic about.

But tonight was different. He wanted to be alone. With a serene smile, he watched the guests meander through the lobby. He wasn’t contemplating the divorce or even thinking about his wife. Rather he was meditating on a feeling of emptiness and tranquility. Walking alone seemed to bring up this quiescent feeling to his awareness. The hotel grounds were extensive and he could probably walk for hours tonight, around the outdoor pools, the cabanas and down the long stretch of beach . . .

Several hours later, he heard the voices of people chanting by the shore. There were torches in the ground, blazing wildly against the sea breeze. Dancers spun around in the sand like whirling Dervishes. The whole spectacle was slightly disturbing to him, and he hesitated to move any closer. But then he recognized the language they were chanting in. He listened to the words. It was the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. As a little boy, his mother had repeated those words to him every night before he went to bed. Now he was curious, so he came closer. One of the torches illuminated a woman’s face—she opened her eyes briefly and reached out her hand to bring him into the circle where the bodies were flailing. In the chaos of the dancing, he caught glimpses of others, various ages and races. Most of them were in a deep trance. An older man was smiling cheek to cheek, his face layered in a gleam of sweat. Women were dancing ecstatically, and he imitated them until he felt the energy of the group take over. As the chanting went on into the night, prayers from different faiths were sung, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Hebrew prayers.

Dinner with Gabriella

They met at a trendy sushi restaurant in downtown Chicago with techno-music thumping in the background. The Doctor sat at the table for nearly fifteen minutes before he saw Gabriella come through the revolving door in an orange sequin dress. He was starting to get worried—he remembered how they had parted last.

The waiter offered them sparkling water and a bottle of wine. The Doctor made a selection from the wine list and Gabriella accepted.

He hadn’t spoken to her in over four months. They had parted ways without knowing if they would ever see each other again. But after the conference, he wanted to tell someone about all of the wonderful things that happened to him in Puerto Vallarta. The person he thought to call was Gabriella. As he explained this to her, Gabriella’s attitude toward him seemed to have changed. She was smiling cheerfully now, emitting positive rays. Even by the way her body was slanted in his direction, the Doctor had the sense that she was making herself more open to him. Later in the evening, she told him that she was single. Before, when they kissed in the parking lot, she had been dating another man.

Digging their spoons into caramel apple pie a la mode, the Doctor mentioned, “I asked my wife for a divorce . . .”

“Really,” Gabriella looked surprised. She wiped her mouth with a napkin, and some lipstick came off.

“I don’t think I ever really loved her.”

“That’s horrible. How can you say that?”

“But it’s true. Twenty-five years of marriage. I don’t remember being in love once.”

“Come on, it wasn’t all pain and misery . . .”

“No, no, maybe you’re right. After all, we had the children together. And Rose, with her illness, you know, it wasn’t her fault. I just didn’t love her. I couldn’t.”

“Why do think?” Gabriella probed.

The Doctor was silent. He munched on the crust of the caramel apple pie and muttered, “She was trying to possess me all the time. She made me into a thing.”

“And you never tried to possess her?”

“No, not really. She wanted to be an artist. She wanted to go to school. I never said anything.”

“And when you asked for a divorce, what did you say?”

“I told her I was unhappy. I said that if had I loved her, then maybe things would have been different.”

“Mourir pour ce qu’on aime/ C’est un trop doux effort . . .”

“What’s that?”

“French. It means: To die for one you love/ Is too sweet an effort.”

“I couldn’t die for her because I didn’t love her.”

“I’m sorry.” Gabriella pouted.

“Don’t be sorry. I have the rest of my life to look forward to. It’s never too late . . .”

“Do you want to get married again?”

“I’m not sure, we’ll have to see. First things first, I need to get this divorce out of the way.”

Last Days in Barclay Park

After the Doctor moved out of the house in Barkley Park, Little Mazzy’s life changed dramatically. She was finishing up her last year of high school, and already looking forward to college. The teenage girl, who had grown accustomed to a whole list of overbearing restrictions on her social life, now reveled in her father’s absence. She didn’t feel the need to scold her dad for divorcing her mom, but instead showed her uttermost sympathy and remorse. What didn’t make sense to her was her brother’s explosive and childish reaction. Her father told her that he was now receiving threatening phone calls from Lethe.

Her mother was sick, that Little Mazzy understood; but there were other people to take care of her mother. Her father shouldn’t have to bear the responsibility for his wife’s illness, especially if he didn’t love her anymore. In Mazzy’s world, love was everything, the Alpha and Omega. If love was gone, then love was gone. You couldn’t chase after it. You couldn’t make it come back to you.

The Doctor moved into a temporary apartment in a neighboring suburb. Mazzy did what she wanted now that her father wasn’t around to enforce the rules.

After school, she went out to the back patio of the house and smoked a cigarette. Her mother mostly sat in her bedroom at the other end of the house. Little Mazzy had taken over the territory of the kitchen and back patio for herself, which was now being used to hang out with friends. There were no more restrictions on the phone, and Mazzy could talk to her friends as late as she wanted. Boys came over to the house regularly and her mother even let her shut the door of her bedroom.

Rose knew that Mazzy was partially taking advantage of her. But as a result of the divorce, the symptoms of her disease, impending death and the necessity of letting go, Rose was beginning to resign herself to the circumstances. Put simply, her desperate need for control was not practical anymore. It was futile. She couldn’t control the outside, let alone the deterioration taking place from within. Especially with her loss of speech, all she could now do was watch everything fall apart. At times her situation was morbid, a dark sadness enveloped her, but in other moments, the illness pushed Rose to higher levels of awareness and understanding.

Late at night she heard the voices of Mazzy’s friends in the kitchen. She knew they were drinking beer and probably smoking cigarettes out on the patio. But strangely, it didn’t bother her; Rose was still able to fall asleep.

Lethe and his mother

On the day Lethe arrived home for Christmas break, he found his mother sitting in her hospital chair with threads of drool coming off her mouth. Dismal daytime television was running in the background. His mother looked utterly hopeless.

Lethe knew that his father was to blame. He paced in circles around his mother’s chair, cursing out loud, “That Asshole— That Jerk— How could he leave you like this? Where’s Barbara? Barbaraaaaa! Clean up this mess—”

Lethe saw that his father had left him with a gigantic burden. And it didn’t matter that his mother had people to take care of her because it was mostly an emotional burden. All day long, Lethe had to listen to her broken mumbling, which was wearisome and frustrating and required more patience than any normal teenager could possibly have. Her speech was weak and indecipherable, tinny and annoying, smothered with heavy sighs and low guttural moans. She wanted stupid things done for her, trifles. Do this. Do that. She nagged him because he avoided her. She called for him because she was lonely and depressed.

“What Mom!!!?? WHAT?”

The moment he shut the door to the guestroom, his mother’s gasping voice beckoned him on the other side. In his sweaty hands, he held Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Every time his mother called for him, he cast a melancholy glance over the novel he hoped to read. Where was his sister during all this? Out with her friends. Just like his father, Mazzy had a knack for disappearing at the most inconvenient times.

After helping his mother change the television channel, he returned to the guestroom with a sullen face and opened up War and Peace. In his mother’s new apartment in the city, the walls were bright green with yellow shades. The upholstery was blue tartan. There were art prints hanging everywhere, Picasso, Schielle, Demuth. Everything in this room reminded him of his mother. He shifted in his chair, self-consciously, trying to get comfortable, and reached for a pillow to lay his head on.

Tolstoy was a genius. Tolstoy, who spent a lifetime in near solitude, and when he walked out into the daylight, very few people recognized him. Lethe longed for the solitary life. He longed for a safe place where he could weave his dreams endlessly. I’ve lost touch with my genius, he said to himself. My mother calls me into her room every fifteen minutes. What kind of life is that for a fledgling artist?

And why does my father get a choice? Why does he get to walk away from the family? One of these days, I’m just going to tell her that he doesn’t love her anymore. I’m going to say, “Mom. Dad doesn’t love you. Get over it. He’s a jerk and that’s that.”

“Leeeeeeth!” Barbara was calling him again.

“What the fuck?”

“Mummy. Mummy.” The caretaker said in a childish voice.

A sudden call disrupts the Doctor’s ski trip with Gabriela

The Doctor and Gabriela were vacationing in Colorado when they received a phone call in the middle of the night. It was the Doctor’s ex-wife. In case of an emergency, he had given her the number of the hotel they were staying at. On the other end of the line, it sounded like an animal had been shot with a rifle. “Your son . . .” she bleated, “drugs.”

“I can barely understand you, Rose. What’s going on?”

“Drugs.”

“What about drugs?”

“Lethe.”

“Lethe is on drugs?”

“Yes.”

The Doctor glanced over at Gabriela who was getting out of bed. “Listen, Rose,” he said, “I’ll be home in a couple days. When I get home, I promise to speak to him about this.”

Gabriella’s silver negligee disappeared into the bathroom.

Once more the Doctor reassured his wife that everything would be okay—that he would speak to his son when he got home. His wife let out another one of her squeals of discomfort. Finally, he hung up the phone.

Gabriela stood with her arms crossed, glaring down at the Doctor. He looked up from the bed, “What?”

“You need to do something about your family—”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t you see they’re controlling your life?”

“My wife called to tell me that my son’s taking drugs.”

“Ex-wife. And if your son’s on drugs, there’s nothing you can do about it. You need to protect yourself and not let your family walk all over you like this.”

The Doctor fixed his gaze on the floor.

“It’s almost two o’clock in the morning. We’re getting up in six hours. How are we supposed to go skiing without any sleep? Your ex-wife is going to ruin this vacation for us. You need to distance yourself from them. They’re bad for you.”

That night, lying up in bed, the Doctor wanted to talk to his son. It seemed like he hadn’t had a conversation with Lethe in years. He knew that his son was upset with him. Was it because of the divorce?

Lethe ventures into the Projects

The commercial iron gate swung open, clanging against a metal pole. With his hands stuffed in his pockets, Lethe crossed the hard, crumpled grass of the quadrangle. The air on his face was cold as steel. Forty feet ahead of him, two black men were rooted under floodlights. They appeared to be guarding the base of the building, their rugged profiles hidden under hooded sweatshirts. A hunched black lady with a little girl was also walking across the quadrangle.

“I need your help.” He said.

The child inched closer to her mother’s leg.

“What-u need?”

“Dope. Can you help me?”

“Do I look like a pusherman to you? Not every black person sells drugs. Can’t you see I got my baby with me?”

“I’m desperate here. I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“How much you got?”

“Fifty bucks.”

“Maybe you should stay away from dem drugs.”

“Sixty?”

“Give me two hundred.”

She strutted with a limp ahead of him. They passed the black men in hooded sweatshirts, entering the cavern-like darkness of the corridor. The stairs went up the side of the building which was shielded by chain-metal, cold air pouring through the chinks. On the ninth floor she had him wait while she went down the hall to knock on somebody’s door.

“What-u doing?” The little girl asked.

“Just waiting for your mom to come back.”

“She ain’t my momma. She my granny.”

“Sorry. Your granny—”

“Why my granny buying you drugs?”

“She’s not buying me drugs, okay. She’s doing me a favor.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever you say . . .”

“I just want to get out of here. This place freaks me out.”

“Scardy-cat.”

“Hush, will ya?”

“Crackhead.”

“What did you just say?”

“Crackhead.”

“I’m not a crackhead.”

“Crackhead. Crackhead.”

How Lethe woke up in the emergency room

His father’s Middle Eastern nose and black mustache loomed above him. The unforgettable scent of deodorant and anxiety was radiating from the Doctor’s silk shirt.

Beside the hospital drape, his mother was hunched over in her wheelchair with a bag of unopened Twizzlers on her lap. She yawned under the weight of her slouching upper body. The Doctor made a motion to the caretaker to pull her up. As her body was being raised, Rose turned her face upwards to her son. Spittle ran down the side of the mouth, which the caretaker was quick to blot with a sodden napkin.

In the fog of a semi-conscious state, Lethe tried to make out his surroundings. Coughing, he felt something lodged in his throat.

“You weren’t breathing.” His father’s voice was stern.

“I wasn’t?”

Beside Lethe, a respiratory machine emitted a constant beep. The Doctor inspected his son’s eyes.

“The police came to the apartment. They found heroin all over.”

“They did?”

From behind the partitioning drape, voices of doctors and nurses made a circling chant. Lethe’s father stepped back from his son, assessing his overall physical status.

“You’ll be moved into the psych ward later tonight.”

“I will?”

Lethe turned to his mother. Her pensive gaze was weighing on him. Was she upset? Worried?

“What mom?”

“Your mother brought you some candy.” His father said.

A Conversation with Dr. Offenbach

The confines of the mental ward produced a very strange reaction in Lethe. Whereas most of the adolescent patients rebelled against their captivity in the ward, Lethe found a certain comfort in being taken care of and treated as if he were different. The schedule for each day involved stretching in the morning, breakfast, arts and crafts, group therapy, meeting with your doctor, lunch, naptime, drug and alcohol classes, afternoon activities, and dinner. He had his own room with a double-plate glass window that looked out at a heating unit on top of a hospital building, and his mother and father usually came once a week to bring him Twizzlers.

Lethe took an extreme pleasure in meeting with his learned psychiatrist each day. Dr. Offenbach, having studied psychology for many years, was a precious resource to Lethe. As Lethe saw it, his doctor was helping him to discover the secrets of his mind. Dr. Offenbach was like his personal assistant on the journey toward self-

realization.

Dr. Offenbach wrote in his reports: “the patient says he is cultivating himself to become a genius” and “the patient says he has to return to college where he can resume his work in solitude”. When confronted about his use of drugs, Lethe told the doctor that “he occasionally took Ritalin to concentrate better”.

“But the police found heroin all over your mother’s apartment, correct?”

“Heroin? Yes, I did that.”

“But I thought you were studying to become a genius.”

“I am. I have a duty to myself, to cultivate myself. I can’t be bothered by anyone.”

“What about the heroin, Lethe? Were you taking heroin?”

“Only as an experiment.”

“But the police found fourteen separate plastic baggies of heroin in your mother’s apartment. That sounds like a little more than an experiment to me.”

“I liked the way it felt.”

“But you agree that heroin wasn’t going to help you study?”

“No, it wasn’t going to help me study. But it did more than that. It brought me to that place.”

“What place, Lethe?”

“The place—you know—where Authors go.”

In the meantime, Dr. Offenbach arranged for his patient to be flown out to Tucson, Arizona where Lethe would attend a thirty-day rehabilitation program.

Interlude • On the airplane

The Doctor opened up the sequel to The Road Less Traveled and began reading. There was a tension between father and son like an elastic band being stretched to its breaking point and held there for the duration of the flight. Lethe was writing furiously in a spiral notebook. He resented his father for leaving his mother and these feelings were coming out in a malicious rant.

Lethe was not in denial about his drug-use. Ever since freshman year in college, he had been abusing drugs—he would agree to that. He would agree that he spent six months in hotel room in Madrid snorting cocaine and copying books. He would agree that he took Ecstasy and acid to feel good on a Wednesday night. He would agree that the police found fourteen separate baggies of heroin in his mother’s apartment. But, ultimately, Lethe saw his drug-use as an effect, not as a cause.

And the cause? His father was mostly to blame. That man sitting next to him with the self-satisfied grin on his face and the perfectly trimmed mustache. The man who used to preach to him about the importance of the family. The man who took care of people for a living. The man who lectured him about treating others with respect. Now he knew his father was all bullshit. A total hypocrite.

The Doctor continued to read his book as Lethe openly ridiculed him on the plane. What his son didn’t understand was that the decision to divorce Lethe’s mother was a spiritual decision and the result of long, serious meditation. His son was immature. His perception of things was distorted. The Doctor wasn’t going to allow his twenty-year old to tell him about “reality”. The Dance of Universal Peace had showed him what was real and what was not; he would never go back to being a guilty father again. He was free of guilt and self-pity and nobody had power over him anymore. He had done the right thing with Lethe’s mother. He didn’t need to justify himself to his family. His son was a drug addict and needed help.

Creosote de Tucson, a resort for addicts

In the late 1990s, following the lead of institutions such as Hazlden and the Betty Ford Clinic, chemical dependency treatment centers began to sprout up across the country, turning over a multi-billion dollar industry. Buttressed by his father’s medical insurance plan, Lethe was admitted to one of these new-fangled 30-day treatment programs.

In the foothills of the Sonoran Desert, with over 35 acres of beautiful desert landscape, scenic hiking trails, a luxurious swimming pool, Native American mosaics, interlacing cactus gardens and ornate fountains, reposed Creosote de Tucson. Yoga instruction was offered daily. Massage therapy. Group therapy. Nature excursions. Individual counseling. And in addition: how to quit smoking, anger management, the skills of recovery, and the Twelve Steps.

Despite all of the services in modern addiction treatment that were offered at Creosote, most male and female patients gravitated to the smoking tables, which were the hubs of socialization. There they loafed on the benches most of the day, chain-smoking and talking about what they were going to do when they finally got out of rehab. Lethe, who made friends quickly, was offered a place to stay after treatment by another patient.

Some of the characters at Creosote

Out by the smoking tables, a lanky, unshaven patient named Morris thrummed on his guitar and sang country songs in the moonlight. Around eleven o’clock, Nurse Debra came out to tell him to go to bed, but he cradled his rickety guitar in his arms and kept on singing, “Oh, Ida Red, Ida Red, don’t you—don’t you do this again . . .”

From his cabin, Lethe could hear the sonorous string of laments. He always thought of Morris as a semi-talented country singer. Then, one night, Lethe couldn’t sleep and he went over to the smoking table and listened to Morris for awhile. He realized that the songs he had been listening to night after night didn’t make any sense. He had been hearing the melodies, but now, sitting next to Morris, he heard the words. There were a couple lines in the chorus that made some mention of a gal from the state of Texas or Louisiana, but everything after that was a bunch of gibberish. It seemed to Lethe that Morris was a little crazy. “I make them up as I go along,” Morris said. “I’m a television writer.”

“Really?” Lethe wanted to know.

“Have you ever seen NYPD Blue? I wrote the first season.”

“So then, you’re famous.”

“No, just a television writer. Hollywood is filled with them.”

“How did you end up here?”

“Too much Ritalin. 120 mg a day. I snorted it while I was working on scripts.”

Morris wasn’t the only patient who used to have a job in Hollywood. There was an ex-movie director at Creosote, a bald-headed man in his late fifties, who was there for depression. Lethe asked him what it was like to live in Hollywood. The ex-movie director talked about Studio 54 and Andy Warhol.

“So you never took any drugs?” Lethe asked.

“You kidding me? I did tons of drugs. But it was different back then. Everybody did drugs in the 70’s and 80’s.”

The movie director was always paired up with Chesterfield from Palm Beach. Chesterfield was nicknamed Mr. Bronze because his face was permanently copper-toned. His family owned a huge pharmaceutical company, and evidently, he never worked a day in his life. He was in his early thirties and this was his twelfth stay at Creosote de Tucson. Chesterfield had a sociable, carefree, casual relationship to the world, and was endearing and even charming until one glimpsed into the private man’s infinite self-delusion.

Lethe often talked with Chesterfield about his addiction. “I can’t do anything about it,” he used to say. “When you’re addicted to drugs, you just have to accept the fact that it’s never going to change. You’ll always be an addict. That’s what they say, right? They say no matter how much clean time you have, you’ll never be ‘cured’. I believe that man. I really believe it.”

He lit up a cigarette. Pall Malls, he smoked.

“I know when I go back to Palm Springs my disease will be waiting for me. That’s why I always keep three bottles of Valium under my mattress.”

In a good-natured way, he patted Lethe on the back, saying, “We’ll never be cured buddy. Never.”

A Group Consensus

On his twenty-seventh day of treatment (one day before completion), Lethe was told to report to his case-manager’s office. The confidential air of this order gave Lethe cause to suspect that he was being summoned for no small potatoes. As he quickened his steps along the tiled walkway, he tried to guess what he could have done wrong. Since the day he arrived at Creosote, he thought he had done everything perfectly. He was expecting to leave in less then a week.

When he entered the office, Lethe found six people gathered in a circle looking as if they were about to do a séance. They had sly smiles planted on their lips and were questionably tranquil. He picked out his psychiatrist, the director of the program, his parents who must have flown in that morning, his case-manager, and the yoga instructor. (What was the yoga instructor doing there?)

His father’s face was comical. He looked foolish and proud—just what Don Quixote must have looked like whenever he was showing Sancho Panza that he was superior.

Similarly, the Doctor saw that his son had an asinine expression on his face; Lethe was trying to undermine his authority again. To avoid looking at him, the Doctor turned his attention to the case-manager. From all sides, she was a rather large woman, ornamented with a big, bright flower dress.

“Today is a very important day in your treatment, Lethe.” She said.

Lethe glanced at his mother who was hunched over in her wheel chair, spittle dripping down her chin as usual. Her face was angled to the floor with her small black pupils peering up at him in confused apprehension.

The case-manager resumed: “Let me ask you a question, Lethe. Have you thought about your plans after treatment?”

“I plan to live on the West Coast.”

The psychiatrist and the Director exchanged a smile.

“I see,” the case-manager said, nodding her head incredulously, “the West Coast.”

“First we want you to consider,” she handed him a glossy brochure showing a wooded area with cabins and young men walking on a nature trail, “Camp Wo-tuck-a-batche.”

“What language is that?”

“I’m not sure, Lethe. Now your parents arrived here less than an hour ago and I have been talking to them about this program. This is an outstanding program for young people.”

Lethe examined the brochure.

“The Camp is located in the Nebraska backcountry,” the yoga instructor pointed out.

“Hey, there’re only guys in these pictures,” Lethe observed.

“Yes, this is a male-only program.” Another voice gave the affirmation.

Lethe bolted upright in his chair, “Nobody can make me go here.”

“Now Lethe,” the Cuban psychiatrist chimed in, “Your specific medical history requires a great deal of attention. Twenty-eight days is not enough to make a difference in your life-habits. Over the course of your stay here, we have diagnosed you with a number of other disorders including manic-depression, infantile grandiosity syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Camp Wo-tuck-a-batche has an outstanding reputation in helping adolescents deal with these issues. We feel that you would really thrive in an environment like this, and it would only be six or eight months before you could go home.”

“Six or eight months?”

“Lethe,” the Doctor’s voice was imperious. “You must do this program. There is no choice in the matter.”

“I’m not doing it! You’re not sending me to that place. I already told you I’m going to the West Coast.”

The Director of the program, who had been silent up to this point, now spoke. “I’m afraid, Lethe, if that is your final decision we are going to have to ask you to leave Creosote.”

“What?”

“Unless you agree to the treatment plan we have outlined here, I’m afraid we’ll be forced to give you an unsuccessful discharge.”

“But that’s absurd. We’re in the middle of the desert. Where am I supposed to go?”

“Go to Camp Wo-tuck-a-batche,” the room chanted.

Chesterfield and the ex-movie director help out

Lethe marched to the men’s smoking table, and venting his spleen, said, “Can you believe they’re just going to put me out on the curb?”

“When?” They asked.

“Tomorrow.”

The patients commiserated with the frustrated youth. They patted him on the back and offered him cigarettes. Then Chesterfield said, “Where would you like to go?”

“I was planning to go to the West Coast but now I’m going to be stuck here in Tucson.”

“Not if we buy you a plane ticket,” said the ex-movie director, glancing sidelong at his buddy Chesterfield.

“How does San Francisco sound?”

“Who’s going to buy me a ticket?”

“We are.”

Lethe meets Julian in San Francisco

His sheer good-fortune was astounding. He couldn’t quite figure out how one minute he was confined to a treatment facility and the next free to roam the continental United States. His parents must have thought they were leaving their son stranded in Tucson to contemplate his life of drugs (ha-ha). His case-manager, the Cuban psychiatrist, and the Director probably figured that once Lethe realized what a big mistake he was making, he’d turn right around and beg them to accept him back at Creosote. This unexpected turn of events not only revived Lethe’s confidence in his own genius, but created the wonderful illusion that he was in command of his destiny.

As Julian’s brand-new Volkswagen Bug pulled up to curb, Lethe noticed someone in the front passenger seat. She was twirling her hair distractedly, almost like a decoy.

The two friends greeted each other, and Julian introduced his girlfriend.

“So what brings you to San Francisco?” She said, angling her face to the back of the car.

“Just doing a little traveling.”

Julian put on his turn signal and tried to navigate out of a traffic buildup in the far lane. Once the car got onto the highway, Julian said, “There’s something I need to tell you Lethe—”

“What?”

“Your father called earlier.”

“Really?”

“He told me you ‘ran away’ from rehab.”

“I was going to tell you—”

“It doesn’t matter now. I’m taking you to San Jose.”

“What’s in San Jose?”

“Your father wants me to drop you off at a halfway house.”

“Erggghhh.” Lethe groaned. “I can’t believe this shit.”

A California halfway house

The halfway house sat on an unassuming corner of a suburban street. There were linden trees and a stone bird bath in the backyard. Everything about the exterior of the house suggested conventionality, cut grass, plucked weeds, white-picket fence. Lethe’s fellow residents included one gay hairdresser, one former steroid junkie/ex-body-builder, a newly-converted Mormon, a recovering heroine-addict/used car salesman, a motorcycle mechanic with ADHD, and various others. . . twelve residents in total.

Walter, the house-senior, was twenty-nine years old and worked at McDonald’s. There was a heavy awkwardness about Walter that gave one the impression he might be autistic. He was reserved and quiet and lumbered around the halfway house in his slow, heavy manner. You would never guess by looking at him that he was a recovering drug addict. He appeared too tame and defenseless to have ever picked up a dangerous substance.

For over ten years, however, he followed the Grateful Dead, selling acid in parking lots. He stayed in motels and trailer homes, and hitchhiked across the United States. He mixed drugs together, experimenting on himself. For most of his life, he had been a lonely, self-tortured individual. Few people stayed with him long enough to become his friend. But once Walter moved into the halfway house and got clean, he was introduced to the Church of Mormon. The boys in white ties and brown pants came to tell him about their religion every week. He was interested and so he went with them to church. There he met Elora Gladdis, the fourteen year old girl Walter fell in love with. After she pasted her picture on the back of his Bible, Walter took a vow of purity and abstinence.

The inside of the halfway house was shadowy and humid. In certain places, the curtains were taped to the windowsill to prevent the sun from seeping into the living room. The wall panels were imitation wood and the carpet a dull cappuccino color. Next to the kitchen, there was a payphone on the wall and an antique Apple computer with a green screen coated in dust.

Attempting a voice of authority, Walter said, “Before you come into the house you have to take off your shoes.” He was referring to the plaque of House Rules. “Also, there is no smoking. If you want to smoke, go into the garage.” The residents had built a makeshift smoking lounge with secondhand couches and a beat-up Zenith.

All of the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen were labeled. Each resident was allowed 1/3 of a cabinet and a section of the refrigerator. Walter stressed the importance of everyone having their own supply of food. Theft was obviously looked down upon. As they passed the rooms of the residents who had been living in the halfway house for a year or longer, Walter discussed seniority. Seniors were “chiefs” while newcomers were “little Indians”. If you wanted to stick around and get to be a chief, then you had to clean twice as hard on Sunday mornings. That meant the toilets in both bathrooms and the weeds out front.

Walter led Lethe up to his room. The newer residents slept in bunk beds on the second floor. Lethe counted six roommates total. The room looked like it would be a bit cramped.

“Everyone’s shoes are tucked neatly underneath the bed.” Walter highlighted.

Lethe nodded his head, following the house-senior back downstairs.

Trip to Santa Cruz

On the payphone in the front hallway, Lethe called Julian to tell him how crummy his life was living in a halfway house. He tried to make Julian feel guilty about conspiring with his father.

“What else was I supposed to do?” Julian asked, defensively.

“You could’ve let me stay at your place.”

“No—it wouldn’t have worked out.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m living with a girlfriend.”

“So?”

“What’s wrong with the recovery home?”

“Everyone hates me here. One of them says I stole his sugar.”

“And?”

“I thought it was communal sugar. How was I supposed to know?”

Julian was cursed with a brooding conscience. He felt guilty for dropping Lethe off in San Jose. To make up for it, he suggested they take a daytrip to visit Scar Face who lived in Santa Cruz. Lethe became excited and prepared his things immediately. Since he came to California, he had been thinking a lot about Scar Face. He knew that his friend was only a couple of hours away.

But midway through the trip, Julian started brooding again. Maybe Santa Cruz was not the best place to take a recovering drug addict. After all, along with his tomato patches, Scar Face grew small tracts of marijuana. Not to mention the downtown area of Santa Cruz was teeming with hoodlums and hippie dope fiends. When they got there, Lethe would want to get high, and Scar Face wouldn’t have a problem with that.

“Why are you turning the car around?” Lethe asked, anxiously.

“We can’t do this, I forgot, Scar Face is a stoner. There’ll be drugs all over his house.”

“So? Who cares?”

“You’ll want to get high.”

“I just want to see my old buddy. That’s all. I’m not planning on getting stoked.”

Lethe sounded genuinely upset. Julian was being swayed to feel guilty in his favor. The Volkswagen Bug advanced through a hilly, wooded area with flowering oaks, date palms and eucalyptus trees growing on the edge of the forest. Small ranch homes appeared tucked inside canopies of wilderness. Scar Face’s rented bungalow, basking in a pool of sunshine, looked quaint and restful, like a traveler’s oasis. Lethe got out of the car and knocked on the front door. Julian hung back, brooding over his big mistake.

Nobody answered the front door. They went around back to see if anyone was home; the sliding door was unlocked. Without hesitation, Lethe walked inside. Julian followed, cautiously.

“Scar Face?”

“You in there?”

“Heeeellooo?”

But nobody answered. The house was in a disrupted state—drawers flung open, dirty silverware, dirty plates out on the counter, an empty pizza box in the sink, the television on. The curtains were swaying from a breeze through an open window. The moss-green carpet in the living room looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. Empty beer cans littered the floor.

A cat sneaked into the kitchen to see where the noises were coming from. Lethe continued to search the rooms with Julian following closely behind him. One of the bathroom lights was on, with an open tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush lying out. Long strands of black hair were clinging to the toilet bowl, bathmat and shower. At the end of the hall was Scar Face’s room with the small church organ in view of the doorway. On top of the organ, a small plastic fan was running.

“Watch out.” Lethe said to Julian.

“What?”

“There’s a snake on his bed.”

“Jesus Christ, that thing scared the shit out of me.”

Lethe guffawed.

“Can we just get out of here?”

“First I want to check the basement.”

They followed the stairs down into the basement and groped for a light switch in the dark. Lethe felt a string with his fingertips and pulled. Julian remained on the stairs.

Heaped in the dusty shadows of the California bungalow was Scar Face. His long, limp body clung to itself in the fetal position. His right nostril was torn off but no blood poured out—only a shadow where there should have been blood. His face looked like a carved pumpkin.

“It’s a chemical imbalance in your brain,” he heard his psychiatrist’s voice.

"Why not leave the room? Go to the park, a short walk down our street. The fresh air is good.” The Senora said.

“It’s in the papers you signed. I can show you . . .” The Director . . .

“Don’t you dare come in here Lethe Bashar.” His mother . . .

“Keep the smoke inside your lungs.”

“Your mother brought you some candy.”

“Come up to the front of the room and demonstrate to the class how this problem is done.”

“Crackhead. Crackhead.”

“I think I need some dope.”

“Leeeeeeth!” The caretaker was calling him from the other room.

Lethe dug his hands into the black, frizzy hair and matted dreadlocks. Scar Face’s body wriggled loose, unfurling from the fetal position. His countenance awoke, the shadows under his nostrils disappeared. Obscene laughter came out of his mouth.

In which Lethe is asked to leave the halfway house

When Lethe returned to the halfway house, he was halted by Walter standing in the doorway. Dressed for bed, Walter was wearing his favorite red and green plaid robe and matching slippers. The house-senior looked doleful and immensely disappointed. Lethe tried to walk past him.

“Can I have a word with you?”

“What?”

“There’s something important I need to tell you.”

Lethe stopped.

“The residents have been complaining about your behavior,” Walter stuffed his hands into his pockets. “The house voted 14-2 to have you dismissed.”

“FANTASTIC!”

“I’m sorry, Lethe.”

“What are you sorry about? It’s not your fault. When do I have to be out of here?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“That soon, huh?”

“Sorry Lethe. Those are the rules.”

Walter hated to do this sort of thing. He really liked Lethe. He didn’t want to be the one to have to tell him to leave the halfway house. That night Walter went through his collection of Grateful Dead bootlegs and took out his favorite show, Las Vegas 1977. With his headphones on, he fell asleep to the music.

The next morning Walter woke up and made coffee. Lethe was lugging his army duffle bag into the front room.

“You can have some of my coffee if you want. The sugar’s on the counter.”

“Thanks.” Lethe poured a cup and went into the garage to smoke a cigarette.

Walter followed, “I forgot to tell you something last night . . . I’m the one who’s responsible for getting you kicked out.”

“Oh.” Lethe blew smoke rings. He didn’t really care anymore.

“Before you leave, I want to give you something.” Walter handed Lethe a CD.

“What is it?”

“A Grateful Dead bootleg. But don’t open it.”

“I don’t understand. Why are you giving me a Grateful Dead bootleg?”

“It’s my favorite show, Las Vegas 1977. I can’t listen to it anymore, cause of the Church. Figured I might as well give it away—”

Without thinking, Lethe opened the case; five one-hundred dollar bills sprang out.

“My wages from the last two weeks—I told you not to open it. That money’s also for you.”

“Don’t you need this money?”

“I have an inheritance coming from my grandmother when she dies. Plus, the Church says we’re not supposed to have too much money.”

Lethe took one more glance at the makeshift lounge. The second-hand couches were bursting at the seams.

“Why don’t you buy a bus ticket with the money?” Walter asked.

“And go where?”

“Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”

“No.”

“Not a bad place to be if you have loose morals. . .”

A smile appeared on Lethe’s face. He went to get his duffle bag.

To visit the writer’s website go to

www.escapeintolife.com