Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

I just wanted drugs. I would do what I had to, even if it meant meeting with pedophiles.

That’s very brave of you.

It didn’t feel brave.

What did it feel like?

I think about this. The moment he reached toward me, I’d shuddered, but I replaced the fear quickly. I didn’t like the feeling, and I wasn’t willing to let him make me feel it.

Knowledge. It felt like I knew what I wanted and I knew how to get it.

You felt you had some power over him?

I felt what I think people must feel when they pray. I felt that everything would be okay.

Did you worry about how you’d pay back Lucy?

I figured I’d find a way because I had to, as though the cause of the problem presupposed its solution. I had fate on my side. I was a teenage Caesar.

And from whence did this belief derive?

From coincidence, from wanting it to be true, from not wanting it to not be true.

Or perhaps from the amphetamines?

Why does it have to be the drugs that made me think what I thought and not myself who thought what I thought? I ask. There is so little I have left. Why can’t even my faith be my own?

Because your self was not an independent variable, Miss Doyle.

Like a comedian, the doctor believes it’s all in the delivery, and yet in these sessions, she’s always the one with the punch lines.

I can’t verify the primacy of my agency in the matter, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. We can verify nothing of the future, and still people take out retirement plans. Does an investment consultant tell a client that the plan isn’t verifiably reasonable because his lifespan cannot be proven? Again, it’s the limits of empiricism.

So you are convinced that the psychostimulant pills were not affecting your psyche?

I took them for my body.

Regardless of your intention, their intended use is psychical.

Ryan once told me amphetamines had also been prescribed as diet drugs in the 1950s. The week he lost six pounds, he put his hands on his hips one day and asked if I liked his vintage look. I’m not an idiot. You can’t circumvent my reasoning by revising history.

I would never lie to you. We both know that is an obsolete prescription indication.

If I admit that you’re right, can I ask a question?

You can ask a question regardless.

Did you decide?

Decide?

About the tape. The national championship.

Oh that. Her face deflates, a sad post-party balloon.

Will you bring it for me?

Miss Doyle, can you not see that that would be inappropriate? Your parents, which is to say your legal guardians, have decided not to allow you to watch the national championships. I cannot undermine them.

I think of my mother: I don’t know why she couldn’t. I don’t know; maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she didn’t want to.

Of course you can. Didn’t you say that part of the Hippocratic oath is “that I will be an advocate for patients in need and strive for justice?”

Miss Doyle, our justice system is such that your parents decide the terms of your wellbeing.

How would they know anything about my wellbeing?

You believe they’ve failed you, she says. Yet I hadn’t said that. She is talking about my parents. They’re mine and I’m theirs, and she doesn’t know them.

You’re the one who’s failed me, doc. You’re the one who’s made me talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, and for what? They were doing their best.

I’ve appreciated your honesty with me. I think you’re making a lot of progress.

You know what Yogi Berra said? A nickel ain’t worth a dime today.

Am I to understand that you are not going to cooperate today?

Mea culpa, mea culpa.

I assume you mean you don’t want to talk now.

Oh doctor, my doctor. You know what they say when you assume?

Do you see that previously you were displeased by a lack of inference, and now you are displeased to note that I might be assuming?

Red-handed, doc. You caught me.

I cross my arms, and the doctor crosses hers. She squeezes her forehead in her hand.

Why don’t we pick up where we left off yesterday? she says.

If you’re honest, you mean I, doctor. Why don’t I pick up where I left off?

You know I’m here for you too.

I know you are, doc. But my freedom is on the line. I can’t tell her what this freedom looks like. It isn’t particularized. But I know what it doesn’t look like, and it doesn’t look like the psych wing of a hospital.

Perhaps our sessions would be less stressful if you didn’t think of them as a threat to your freedom. We would be able to use our time more effectively together if you could learn to trust me. Do you want to continue?

I don’t want to be here, but I know the only way out is doing what I don’t want to do.

Listen to me, Ali. I’d like to bring the tapes for you.

No you wouldn’t. Each day, the doctor gets to leave this place. She goes home, eats dinner. Maybe she has a husband or a child. She reads William Blake as the sun sets, or translates Rimbaud.

I really would. But sometimes we can’t do what we want. Recognizing this fact is part of being a mature adult.

You make maturity sound so disappointing, doc.

Sometimes it is.

She says it sadly, and I wonder if the doctor is happy herself. I wonder if once she didn’t want to be a doctor but something else.

What if I don’t want to be disappointed?

Most of us don’t, she says.

So then what?

Think of the matter as settled. Think of it as something of the past. Then put aside the past and continue forward with our work.

The past may be passed, but it will always catch up. This much I know.

And how do you know this?

Well for one, around the time I had started taking speed, my mother had started reading Donnie O’Donnell again.

And who is Donnie O’Donnell? She writes down the name.

I remember Donnie O’Donnell’s black and white face gleaming up from the back of a book in the car one day when my mother was dropping me off at the rink. “In 2001, Robert Tulloch and James Parker hatched a plot to slay two Dartmouth professors,” the words beneath his face read. “Later they’d admit they killed because it seemed like an adventure. This is the story of the notorious boy killers called ‘monstrous symptoms of the boredom-beleaguered youth of the aughts’ who you will love to hate.” Call it egomania. I’d wondered if my mother was afraid of me, that I would turn out to be another type of crazed teenager. I was still only thinking of myself then.

He wrote this true crime book Thrill Kill about the Dartmouth thrill killers, I tell the doctor.

I recall that your mother read his books when you were skating.

I guess like me, I say, she hadn’t gotten better.

I returned home thrilling with my acquisitions. My plan was to speed through Thanksgiving to keep the turkey off my thighs.

I stayed up half the night on Dexadrine, but fell asleep for a few hours when the sun was coming up. When I woke, I went downstairs to help my mother set the table, thinking that the downfall for Michelle Kwan in 1997 had been selecting for her long program music from “Taj Mahal,” that depicting the love between a man and empress had been a mistake when before her music had depicted winning saints’ heads. That’s how bad it had become: I couldn’t walk downstairs without thinking about skating.

In the living room, my mother held the remote and switched to Ted Bundy. A narrator spoke over bloodless, faceless reenactments— when we return from this commercial break, nature versus nurture: leading neuroscientists on the possibility of isolating a serial killer gene and the making of David Berkowitz . Onscreen, the pandemonium of legs and overturned chairs implied acts without consent.