Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

Looks like you know all the tricks, doc.

There is blood flooding the doctor’s cheeks now, and she’s leaning forward in her seat with her arms folded over the desk. She balls up her hands, releases them, balls them. She plucks a candy quickly and composes her mouth around the hard physicality of the candy orb, presses her eyelids together and opens them to reveal the professional gloss of a neutral stare.

Perhaps, too, you hope that I will become so angered by your challenges that we will redirect the conversation to my feelings rather than your own. But that will not work.

I had to try. I guess that’s what I can say about the threat I pose: I had to try.

When I first returned to school, the only thing that I could tell was any different from the last time I’d been in school was that everyone was a little hairier and fatter, including me. It had been almost four years. I turned through corridors of students bent apish with backpacks. They looked like hand-me-down people, all middling height, with brownish hair and washer-dulled T-shirts. I tried to imagine Ryan at school. He’d say the place smelled of working class children.

In the cafeteria, a hundred young voices cancelled each other out, grouped together like fifties rock and roll outfits. Molly Sanders and the Mediocre Girls. Mitchell Ansley and the Jocks. Joel Tipton and the Stoners. But I was no doo-wop, so I developed my own technique: when you can’t situate, the best alternative is to cram. It needn’t be real to be a comfort; a sandwich and a textbook together almost fill an empty table. I turned to a page in the middle of a book— O no! it is an ever-fixed mark. That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken —and flipped to the page on litotes: figures of speech in which a statement is expressed by denying its opposite.

“Freak,” I heard someone say in my direction.

I’m not invulnerable , I wrote. I’m not unaware. These were people who’d grow into adults with smelly jobs, I told myself.

Though I no longer needed a tutor, my mother continued inviting Mark over, saying that he seemed to do me a world of good. I had decided that it was rather pathetic to imagine a person offering a world big enough for me, but there he was several times a week. What my mother thought was most charming was that he’d sometimes read plays aloud to me— “O, out of that ‘no hope’/ What great hope have you! No hope that way is/ Another way so high a hope that even/ Ambition cannot pierce a wink beyond,/ But doubt discovery there”— though usually he’d just bring coffee or mineral water and tell me the latest on his lost cause Leonards.

Then one October afternoon, one I’d later deem fateful, he put my misery in the context of God.

“You know who Pascal was?”

I didn’t.

“Well I think you’d really like him. You should read him.”

“I don’t want to read—”

“I know, I know, you want to skate,” he said. “But he wrote this little piece of genius, Pascal’s Gambit. He says that we can’t prove the existence of God through reason but, ‘If you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then; wager that he does exist.’”

“So what’s your point?” I, unbagging books, asked.

“That you should keep trying new things because you stand to gain everything by trying and lose nothing by not trying.” This again. My mother wanted extracurriuculars, buddies in system and study, a life well-rounded for this square. Recently, she’d suggested, to my chagrin, that I try cheerleading.

“I thought you didn’t believe in God. What happened to the opiate of the masses?”

“I’m not suggesting anything about God or drugs. I’m telling you that even if very little is good about this world, something is. And it’s better to put faith in something than nothing because believing in nothing will only make you unhappy. And I want to see you happy. Pascal gives this example of someone who has no use in life. He’s a doubter who doesn’t understand what his body, senses, soul or even his doubt is. He doesn’t know which is the authentic. He says, ‘I see the terrifying spaces of the universe hemming me in.’ So my point is, do you want to feel hemmed in or do you want to be free? It’s as simple as that. You can try or you can let yourself be pushed into a corner by infinity.”

He didn’t understand that what I wanted and what I was had been estranged. He didn’t see how my body was hemming me in. “I wish I was younger,” I said. If I was younger, I’d have more time to figure out how to skate before it was too late.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.” A brutal number, flirting with adulthood, graduating from the good years.

“But soon? Soon you’ll be eighteen?”

“Not if I can help it. Are you trying to make me feel worse?”

“I’m trying to make you feel better,” he said, gathering my biceps momentarily in his hands. Then with a look, eyes hounding my face to register my comprehension: “You know, there are a lot of possibilities that will open up when you turn eighteen.”

“What, like, when God closes a door, he opens a window? Don’t get aphoristic on me, Mark.” Eighteen was supposed to have been the year of my first Olympic championships.

“You’re a tough nut.” He smiled.

“What are you smiling about?”

“You!” he said. And I felt myself smiling a little now too so I looked down at my lap. He had this effect where my body started involuntarily manifesting sickening phenomena. “Don’t you have somewhere like home to be?” I asked.

A couple of months into school, the talk of the town came down to three letters: B.A.C. A school loser, blood alcohol content of.15, died running a red through an intersection. The newscasters called it a tragedy, but the truth is, if he’d lived it would have been called a criminal case, vehicular homicide or worse, and the fact that Vincent Foster was dead meant the husband couldn’t seek justice in the courts. The car with the right of way had had the wife and daughter in it.

Besides tragedy, the spin on television was that the kid had been drinking out of depression. Into microphones, adolescent experts scared parents with everything that could happen when teenagers didn’t do anything or have anyone, and the school looked for the at-risk. It’s always the quiet ones, they came to believe. So they told me they were concerned for me, when really what they meant was they were concerned about me. They filed me code yellow, despite the fact I barely knew the kid who killed and was killed.

But they were doing something , and their motivations weren’t only for the benefit of the media spectacle. Most of them, the teachers and such, had moved to town for the same reason my parents did: to leave their doors unlocked, for tax-free sales, and for discomfort to top out somewhere between mosquito bites and the brief winter walk through an unheated two-car garage. Monogrammed towels were no rarity. Bloody death was.

One night I overheard my mother whispering to my father in the kitchen that she was certain I was genetically predisposed to alcoholism. “It’s true that Native Americans do not have a mutation of the gene for the enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase,” my father said. My mother didn’t know what that meant and neither did eavesdropping I. “Essentially, it doesn’t mean Ali will be an alcoholic; it just means it’s easier for her to become one.” The worst part of listening is hearing what you don’t want to hear, and I wasn’t comforted. Neither was my mother.