Tod Goldberg: The End Game

“Well,” I said, finally answering the question, “the muzzle flash would probably get you to turn on the lights, for one, which would give me an opportunity to look at your diploma a little closer, see where exactly you learned that trick with the marble.”

“Many of my clients find the marble light very comforting,” she said. “You don’t find it comforting?”

“No.”

“What do you find comforting, Michael?”

“Building explosives.”

“Do you often think about dying, Michael? Do you feel obsessed with your own demise? Do you feel that your father has, in some way, killed you before, turned you into a shell of a person?”

I checked my watch. We had about ten more minutes of this. “Yeah,” I said. “It was either him or my unborn twin.”

“Michael,” my mother said, “you know that’s not true. You never had an unborn twin.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m also not a shell of a person, and I’m beginning to strongly doubt Dr. Miyazawa is an actual doctor, so we’re all on an even playing field now.”

Dr. Miyazawa sighed. That was her go-to sound. I still couldn’t really see her. “We haven’t talked about this before, but you two might be perfect candidates for a birth reenactment.”

“I understand why Medicare won’t pay for these appointments,” I said.

“Do you ever get tired of using sarcasm as a defense?” Dr. Miyazawa asked.

“Sarcasm is actually a very advanced brain function,” I said, which was the launching point for my mother to go into an exceptionally involved story about some perceived sarcasm-based injustice done upon her by me when I was six, which led Dr. Miyazawa to ask my mother about her feelings concerning any past lives I might have had and then, well, I just stopped listening completely. When people start arguing past lives, it’s only a matter of time until someone has tarot cards on the table.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine other instances of torture that were worse than this one, see if I couldn’t localize the pain into a single trauma in my past versus actually being present in the current one. Of course, it was just as easy to ruminate on the larger arc of my life, which, at present was more like a flatline with the occasional spike along the way. So maybe the EKG of my life would be more accurate, at least since finding out a little more than a year ago that I’d been burned, my spy status turned inside out by forces beyond my control. Forces that in the last week had shown me yet again how powerless I could be.

“Do you agree, Michael?”

I opened my eyes at the sound of Dr. Miyazawa’s voice. She and my mother stared at me intently. At some point, the lights had been turned on, which was nice, because now I could actually see my accuser again. She was sitting on a rolling stool in the middle of the room, her hands folded atop her lap on a notebook that she’d apparently been writing in while I pondered the fate of my existence. Or maybe she was just doing Mad Libs. Either way, I didn’t have any idea what the doctor was querying me about, but I knew the answer.

“No,” I said.

“Why is that?” she asked.

“Why is what?”

Dr. Miyazawa exhaled through her mouth and nodded at my mother, as if my answer confirmed some especially salient point. She scooted across the room on her stool until she was only inches away from me. “I’d like you to pretend I’m your father,” she said.

“No, you wouldn’t,” I said.

“Tell me why you’re angry at me,” she said. She deepened her voice, which made her sound sort of like a fifty-something Japanese woman with a head cold. Not quite dear old Dad.

I leaned forward and patted Dr. Miyazawa on the knee. “Here’s the problem, Doctor,” I said. “You’re sweet, really. I think that you’re probably exceptionally qualified to help people who want to be helped. But if you want to do role-playing with me, it would probably be more effective if you put a knife to my throat and asked me where the secret documents were. At least then I’d be doing something enjoyable.”

“Michael,” Mom said, “she’s just trying to help us bond. You could indulge her.”

Mom turned away from me and addressed the doctor, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial level. “The doctors wanted Michael put into a body cast,” she said. “He had terrible scoliosis. He probably doesn’t remember that. Probably blacked that out entirely.”

“That’s entirely possible,” Dr. Miyazawa said.

“I can hear you, Ma,” I said.

“I can still see the X-ray,” Mom said. Her eyes welled with tears.

“Here we go,” I said.

“His spine looked like a U.”

“That explains a great deal,” Dr. Miyazawa said. “Michael, do you remember any of this?”

Yes, I wanted to say. Yes, I remember it being a scene in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. But for some reason I just didn’t have the heart. Here we were, sitting in this woman’s office, talking about feelings neither of us probably ever had, certainly not making new memories, as was the original proviso, and absolutely not bonding.

I stood up. “Ma,” I said, “why don’t we go shopping for some linens. And some towels. I could probably use some dishes, too. A few cups and saucers would be good. Fiona likes tea.”

“Really? You want to do that? With me?”

“I do,” I said. “It’s time I got a bit more comfortable here.”

“Oh, Michael, I’d love that.”

If I’d learned anything, it was that I wasn’t going anywhere soon, and wasn’t going anywhere fast. I didn’t think a trip to Sears would fix four decades of weirdness with my mother, nor stop me from looking over my shoulder for the people who burned me, but for one day, it might just make someone happy and that, well, that wasn’t something I did every day, as a spy or as a son.

We walked out of the office without another word to Dr. Miyazawa, who was nonetheless spouting some theory about re-creating the placenta through retail therapy being a false hope. Outside, the air was warm and you could smell the ocean blowing in on the wind.

And a black SUV, the windows tinted, the doors clearly armored, pulled slowly out of a parking space next to my Charger and inched out into the midafternoon traffic. On my windshield was an envelope.

“Is that a ticket?” my mother asked.

“Yes,” I said. I opened the envelope and looked inside. There was a slip of paper with a single sentence written on it in thick black marker. Don’t get too comfortable.