Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

Office of Dr. Anthony Houston

February 11, 1998

Winston P. Gollinger, M.D.

231 Pine Street

Brookline, Massachusetts 02346

Dear Win,

You inquired about the progress of Daniel Markham. As of a week ago, he is no longer a patient at the hospital, having checked himself out.

He was under my care for three months. After coming off his initial manic high, he was moderately to severely depressed nearly every day of his stay. I tried several drug regimens, some with partial efficacy. If there was any real progress, and I’m not sure there was, it came in our twice-weekly therapy sessions.

Here he exhibited brief periods of animation. Once I’d read the transcript and listened to the tapes I was able to engage him on the topic of philosophy. This seemed to provide some bearing for him. A friend named Kyle Johnson brought him books and this appeared to boost his mood somewhat.

The nurses report that on his better days he spent most of his time reading.

Around Christmas, his father made an unfortunate visit to the hospital. He was in a full-blown manic episode, soliciting staff and nurses for investments in an offshore hedge fund.

Needless to say, the visit didn’t help Daniel, and a week later I increased his dosage of Depakote.

We both know these refractory cases are out there. We did the best we could. Without medication, I’d be surprised if Charles Markham doesn’t commit suicide within five years. Daniel’s still young, the course of his disease difficult to predict.

If I hear anything further I will contact you. If Daniel reenters treatment with you, please let me know.

THE TRAIN CLICKS past the backyards of Bradford.

One strewn with children’s plastic toys. Another with its ground churned up, ready for the sod of a new lawn. Daniel leans his head against the glass, letting his eyes drop out of focus, the trees becoming a gentle blur. Without looking, he takes the papers from his lap and places them facedown on the seat beside him. Soon the train begins to slow. At Bradford Hills, he watches the father two rows up gather his briefcase under one arm, take his young son by the hand, and walk down the aisle. Emptier still, the train moves on, past the tennis courts and baseball fields where Daniel played as a child, past the supermarket where he bagged groceries after school and the police station where he and his mother used to file the missing persons reports.

Have they picked him up, he wonders, dressed in a swimsuit in a supermarket aisle, pleading with a stranger to read a sheet of paper he clasps in his hands? Or is he at the apartment he mentioned the last time they spoke, some friend Daniel had never heard of, a woman who told fortunes? That he can sit placidly on this train and imagine any of this astonishes Daniel. That in this moment of reprieve he feels neither despair nor exaltation.

Just behind the post office, the train comes to a halt at Bradford Square. He takes up the papers, the envelope, the empty soda can, lifts himself from the seat.

The day has become warm, the dampness of the morning rain lingering in the air. He climbs the staircase into the parking lot and heads across it toward Washington Street.

The sidewalks have been redone with brick, and there are new benches and lampposts, all painted the same dark green. There are even more Mercedes and Jaguars than he remembers, even more wealthy young mothers with painted faces and gold jewelry, pushing strollers by restaurants and boutiques. He walks past the library. By the pay phone there is a garbage can, and into it he throws the file and all its contents: the test reports, the duplicate prescriptions, the blood levels, the doctors’ notes, the interviews, the predictions of experts. At the Pond Street intersection, he waits for the walk sign and then crosses. The sun is nearly out, playing faint shadows on the sidewalk, beginning to glisten against the road’s wet pavement. The tires of the passing cars make a swishing sound as they go by. A warm breeze drifts over the street and into the budding trees.

Ahead, he sees the sign for Saint Mary’s. A path leads up to the church’s brick tower and then heads off down the side of the building. He follows the path around to the gate. The cemetery is no more than a couple of acres, crowded with headstones and flowers. At the back, they’ve cleared a copse of trees to make room for a few more parishioners.

He sees the line of Kyle’s shoulders hunched over a wheelbarrow, and closing the gate behind him, makes his way over the carefully tended grass.

“Dan,” Kyle says, looking up from his work on the grave, “you made it.”

For a moment, here, in the calm he knows is only the eye of the storm, in the center of a turbulence that, despite everything anyone has ever written or said, might not mean a thing, he can only stare into his friend’s gentle face, and listen, with gratitude, to the sounds of the world around him.

THE BOY HAS given her hope, a hope Elizabeth never imagined she’d have again. Seven weeks in a row he has come to visit her. An awkward teenager, lonely she suspects, curious in ways that will not help him defeat others in the competition for success. He comes with a pad and pencils and asks her what she would like him to draw. Her walls are decorated with his work: sketches of the woods behind his house, the view from this window, but mostly self-portraits, conventional at the outset by the mirror, growing more expressive as they progress across the wall, his eyes growing small, his forehead larger, the pencil’s lead smudged to blur the lines.

His visits have given her weeks a purpose. She spends hours imagining their conversation, thinking of questions she wants to ask, and then like a nervous mother forgets them when he arrives.

From her window, Elizabeth watches the day ending out in the harbor. Cloud is filling the sky from the east, tarnishing the blue waves, leaving only a pale strip of light fading across the Atlantic horizon. Soon it will be time to eat. She will walk the tiled corridor, past the rooms of her fellow residents, into the dining hall, where Marsha, the cook, will wave to her, and she will take her seat at the table and consume the starchy food. If there is such a thing as a placid bell, then it is the bell that rings for supper at the Plymouth Brewster Structured Living Facility at five-thirty every day of the year. Hearing its soft chime, Elizabeth turns back into the room, and putting on her cardigan and slippers, commences her daily journey. Later, on her return, she sees the Primidone tablets waiting in their white paper cup on her bedside table, placed there as always by Judith, the staff nurse. For more than two decades, Elizabeth Maynard has done exactly as she is told and the voice of Hester, which has cost her so much, comes only quietly and intermittently. It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off. These last few weeks, try though she has, there have been moments during Ted’s visits when Elizabeth got stuck in the medication’s sludge, patches of time slowing to a halt. The boy has reminded her of what there is to miss. She only wants to know him as a person would. In her heart, she can’t believe this is too much to ask. It might do her good to have a little break, she muses to herself, placing the tablets at the back of her dresser drawer.

“STOP FUCKING TRYING would you!” his brother yells from downstairs as Ted stands at their mother’s bedroom door calling softly, “Are you awake?”

“If you’re not in my car in twenty seconds you’re walking!”

John shouts from the kitchen. Ted tries the handle, but as usual it’s locked. He wants to see if she’s okay, but there’s no time now so he grabs his book bag from his room and skips down the stairs.