David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“You seem to have a hard time holding on to a job.”

“But I get by.”

“You mean you’re wealthy?”

“I mean I have a supplemental income.”

The doctor perused a page. “Your family makes toys?”

The CraneCo thing caused some to think that Leo had grown up like the kid on Silver Spoons, riding a little train through a mansion. In fact, all it meant was that he had about eighteen hundred a month, unearned. Plus what he got from the deeper-pocketed sisters, who loved him. The doctor couldn’t hide a tiny, smug smile — people always like to see a rich kid brought low.

“Games. Not toys. It’s a public company,” Leo said.

“So you don’t need to work.”

Leo gripped the armrests of the stupid chair. “You’re right. I’m lazy and spoiled.”

“That’s not what I was saying,” countered the doctor. “But, I suppose, if you heard me saying that, it’s something we should talk about.”

“No need.”

“Do you think your life is easy? Do you think you’re lazy?” pressed the doctor.

Well, obviously, yes, my life is easy, Leo thought. But only on one level. But that is probably the level at which ease has the most meaning, the most purchase. But lazy? No, probably not lazy. Lazy people, Leo figured, would presumably derive some benefit of leisure from their lack of industry. And since leisure was not a feeling he had ever really even approached — hounded as he was from crack of morning to lip of sleep by a pack of worries and their contingent sub- and meta-worries — Leo reasoned that he could not fairly be called lazy. His problem came from being unable to trace a straight line from present state to future goal.

For Leo, the single salient observable fact about the future was that it never turned out to be what you thought it would be. So different were the expected and actual futures that he found it hard to credit the idea that the Leo of two or five or nine years ago was even the same person as the Leo of today. Sadly, this meant that most information needed to be learned over and over again, that the same experiments needed to be run again and again, with different variables controlled for.

He had been unable, as yet, to put this highly nuanced information to any professional or artistic use. And for the past fifteen years, his life had consisted mainly of holding on while he rode the sine wave in his brain. But from a young age, he had received the impression that this moodiness was a womanly trait, and if a man admitted to it, he should do so only in a paragraph about how he had overcome it, or how he intended to overcome it.

There were hard-to-credit upward swoops in his outlook, brought on by love, wind, proteins, neuro-slurry, patented pharmaceuticals, the pH of the tap water, the buzz of sodium streetlights, or some deeper current. At these times he took risks and adopted a sort of shine and swagger.

The worst was that bookstore he bought. He was twenty-six, and he’d emptied his trust fund like a kid shaking a ceramic piggy bank (plus took on as much debt as the bank would let him). What a shitshow that turned out to be. He thought the bookstore would lead to a journal edited by himself. Writers would clamor to submit. He would know everybody. He moved into a room above the store and stayed one long cold winter, his room heated only by a leaky woodstove, his store patronized by kind locals who had loved the former owner’s freakish breadth of knowledge; weekend celebrities in thousand-dollar jeans; drowsy students looking for a two-dollar Siddhartha; morose and august humanists from the college.

But not enough of any of these.

After nine months, having grossed $6,700 in his career as a bookstore proprietor, the bloom way off the rose, Leo sold his entire stock to a dealer from Florida, who arrived in a Range Rover and paid by check. Rosemary bought the building from Leo and sold it quickly, at a loss.

After the bookstore flop, he’d worked at CraneCo, briefly. But the company couldn’t really find a place for him, and he was embarrassed every moment of every day. So, though it was his birthplace and motherland, his Fern Hill, and though the cool dank zephyr that preceded a subway’s arrival from the mouth of its tunnel comforted him, he fled Manhattan and moved to Portland. A place that was kinder to people like him.

He drove a wine-delivery truck, he drove a taxi; he was a mediocre waiter, a drunken barback. The periods of hope and courage came less frequently. And as his twenties became his thirties, the landscape came to feature swamps of gloom dotted with marshy hummocks of anxiety. He worked on getting better. He tried jogging; he limited his drinking; he sprinkled seeds into his yogurt. A girlfriend got him into yoga. He practiced having a good attitude. But it was trench warfare. He lost his yoga mat and had to buy another one. Then he lost that one and couldn’t see buying a third. He watched other people claim to enjoy drinking; they baffled him. The same people spoke of hangovers almost fondly, as evidence of their propensity to dissipation. His own hangovers were whole days mined with grim, churning thoughts. He saw therapists and psychiatrists; he tried Wellbutrin, Klonopin, Effexor, Celexa, Paxil, Xanax, Zoloft, and Lexapro. Also meditation, core work, and juice fasts. He cut out meat. Kept a garden. Clawed through months of clean living, then fell back into blurred days like an acrobat into a net.

“Tell me about the people who you say were watching you,” said the doctor.

Oh, that . “You mean the paranoia, right?”

“If I call it paranoia, you will think I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t.”

“You haven’t given me anything to believe or not believe.”

Fair enough. But Leo did not know whether the constellations of meaning he had picked out were to be believed, exactly. Now, remembering some of his theories, he could see that they were incredible. But this was neither here nor there — the beautiful and true is often incredible. What he felt most keenly was the sadness at the fact that he was no longer certain. He had no wish to convince anyone else — certainly not this doctor — that, for instance, his ex-girlfriend’s ex-husband worked for whatever part of the government was tasked with compiling dossiers on wayward members of the intellectual elite.

“You told your friends that you were being followed. Why did you say that?”

“Well. For a while there, I was being followed.”

A riffle of annoyance appeared on the doctor’s face. The doctor’s face. The face of the doctor. A face is just a skin mask with two black holes for seeing and a wet cave for eating and speaking. Leo looked away, not out of disgust, but because he was suddenly aware that this might not be a doctor after all.

Actually, Leo had been followed. He knew this in a way that he did not know other things — he did not know, for instance, whether his ex-girlfriend’s ex-husband worked for the government. He could see now that the man was perhaps your more garden-variety jealous dick. She wasn’t even his girlfriend, really. She was Marilyn, the hot mom from Brand-New Day. They had tried a thing for a few weeks. It was mostly sex in the late afternoon and expensive dinners out, sometimes followed by drunken arguments on sidewalks or in her vast, sisal-carpeted apartment, usually about the morality of her profession — advertising — which Leo felt compelled to point out was a form of intellectual prostitution, but once about her very recently ex — husband. She claimed she didn’t really know what he did for a living.

“I don’t know. Consulting. He consults about stuff,” she had yelled at Leo as she stood naked in front of her refrigerator, digging in the back for more wine.