John Updike - Rabbit Remembered

She commutes up to Brewer because funds for art therapists are drying up nationwide and the job she had in Philly was eliminated. To snotty, pouty, twice-divorced Andrea, a henna-tinged brunette with big rings she makes herself on nearly every finger, Brewer is a hick town with too many religious cranks and dumb Dutchmen.

As the morning wears on, the rain with renewed vigor whips at the basement windows so hard that water begins to dribble across the wooden sills. Years ago, before Nelson was hired, the floor was gutted and partitioned into suitable spaces-tiny offices for the staff, larger group rooms for the clients, a reception space, a kitchen where the clients make their lunch and a dining area, with six round tables, adjacent to the sofas and upholstered chairs of the milieu. In the milieu the clients not doing a group or having a consultation can read, knit, play games, and hopefully interact. When this was a kindergarten the five-year-olds learned to tie their shoelaces and fit pegs into holes but social interaction, socialization, sitting in a circle and learning to share, was the main lesson; for these dysfunctional adults it still is. There are thirty of them, theoretically present from nine to four, and a staff of eight, headed by Esther, a doctor of psychology. Nelson has resisted suggestions that he go after an advanced license or degree; he doesn't want a private practice or, after the mess he made running the Toyota agency, any administrative responsibility. He learned his limits.

Some clients straggle in, drenched and exhilarated about a hardship they are sharing with all the residents of Brewer, and others have chosen to stay at home with their delusions, anxieties, and television sets. Because of low attendance Nelson's three-times-a-week group on Relationships is absorbed into Katie Shirk's group on Goals and Priorities. Nelson uses his downtime to catch up on paperwork-progress notes, intake forms-and goes around mopping up windowsills with paper towels. Left wet, the paint peels. The rain has intensified again.

The DiLorenzos show up, though, all three of them, hurricane or not, at eleven sharp. They are desperate. Their world has come crashing down because of a few misfiring neurons. In the waiting area they give off a powerful damp odor of bafflement-graying patriarch, swag-bellied but still powerful in the arms and shoulders; mother, a touch of peasant drab still in her plain dark suit though money talks in her shoes and the silk scarf at her throat; and son, twenty, slim and good-looking, with an almost feminine delicacy, bright-eyed, wavy-haired, but going soft and pasty with inactivity, and the fear of his own strangeness giving his dark eyes an anxious bulge. His eyes fascinate Nelson with their helpless beauty-dark but not black, paler than his thick brows, an ale color, or like the dark jelly bees feed to their queen, freckled with light, life in them like a squirt of poison. He decides to take the boy first, and asks the parents to wait.

"Well, Michael. How are you feeling?" he asks when the door is closed and he is settled at his desk. His desk is of minimum size and with a fake-wood-grain top. The young man folds himself into the one-piece molded-plastic chair, orange in color, opposite. He wants to slouch to show how lightly he takes all this but the chair in its flimsy, scientifically determined form does not permit much of a slouch.

"O.K. Good. The same."

"Voices quiet?"

Michael licks his lips as if abruptly aware of a dryness. "Yes."

He is lying, Nelson knows, but he keeps his eyes down on the young man's folder, opened six months ago. "Taking your Trilafon consistently?"

"Absolutely, sir." This is another lie, Nelson can tell from a certain retraction in the young voice, a telltale flattening, but Michael wants to believe it, he wants to be cured, of an illness that seems to be nothing less than himself, a rot of his most intimate ego, that voice within, where it was nestled supposedly safe in his skull.

"Any side effects from the Trilafon you want to take up with Dr. Wu?" Howard Wu is the Center's M.D., here three half-days a week. Golden in color, stocky in form, he is much beloved, for his hearty Chinese pragmatism and large convex teeth. He is their jolly Buddha.

The boy readjusts his position, perching on the chair's edge and jerking forward. "I feel plugged up. At both ends. It's like a cold in my nose all the time. I feel sleepy all day, and then I can't sleep at night. I feel shitty," he says, and titters, as if to disown his feeling. A fission, a scatter, in his young face makes him hard for Nelson to look at.

"Do you want me to write down, 'No voices'? If I do that, Dr. Wu will see no reason to adjust the medication."

Nelson's deliberate gaze elicits from Michael a flutter of avoidance, a batting of lashes under the shapely black brows, which have that touch of a built-in frown Italian men have, a thickening toward the bridge of the nose. He must have cut a tidy swath at Brewer High, not to mention summers cruising among his peers in the convertible his parents had bought him, proud they could afford it. He peaked too early, like Dad in a way. There is still a little bravado, mannerly but dangerous, in the boy's smile, and in the slick way his bouncy black hair was tamed by the comb. The grooming is a positive sign. Or did his mother comb his hair for him today, for this appointment, and see to it that he shaved? "There were some voices," he admits, huskily, then smirks as if to dare the world to make much of it.

"What did they say, do you remember?"

No answer.

"What did the voices say?"

"Nasty stuff."

Nelson waits.

"They tell me what a miserable fuck-up I am. They tell me to kill myself. Or maybe I think of that myself, to shut them up. It might be worth it."

"Michael," Nelson said, loud and urgent enough to make the boy, whose eyes sidle and flutter, look at him. "If you ever, for a moment, think you might follow through on these impulses, you must do what?"

A long pause. "I don't know."

"You must get in touch with the Center. At any hour."

"Yeah, well, shit, I'm not apt to be calling any center at four in the morning."

"The recording gives the number for Emergency Services. Call it. Here's the number in case." He writes it out on a Fresh Start memo pad and rips the sheet off. A renewed surge of rain slashes against the window at Nelson's back. He pictures the leaks venturing, trembling, lengthening, out onto the windowsills of this old school, the paint flaky from previous soakings. "Do the voices say anything else?" Nelson can hardly hear the answer against the noise of the rain.

"They tell me to kill my parents."

This is delivered with a mumbled huskiness and yet with some defiance, a twitch of teen-age swagger and a smirk that hangs on his face forgotten. "How does that make you feel?" Nelson asks.

Michael surprises him with a surge of affect: "Horrible. I love my parents. They've been great to me, giving me everything I've ever wanted and not putting any pressure on about entering the, you know, fucking dry-cleaning business." His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain. "They sent me to college when a lot of parents would have had me go straight into the business. My dad's getting older and hasn't been strong for a while. They sent me to Penn, the finest university in the state. So what did I do? Hey, I fucked it up."

"You didn't, Michael, you got sick. We're trying to make you better. You're better now. You dress yourself, you're no longer violent-"

"I can be violent at home." He begins to brag, to someone imaginary sitting where Nelson sits. "My mother, what a naggy bitch, honest to God. She says to stop watching the old movies on TV, get up, get out, do this, do that. I don't see the use."

"The use is what we call normal psychosocial functioning. It doesn't come without effort. Let's look at your graph. You have not been in to the Center for a week, and then only twice the week before. That's why I've asked your parents to come in with you. They, and Dr. Birkits, and all of us want your attendance to improve." Birkits was the Brewer psychiatrist the DiLorenzos had taken him to on the advice of the Penn psych service after his break. Birkits, one of these demoralized post-talking-cure shrinks, referred this hot potato to Fresh Start. They don't get many clients with an intact home, and who can afford a private psychiatrist.