Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

In her voice, there was only the blankness of reporting. Not a trace of sorrow.

“You’re a doctor in these parts,” she said. “You must know all about methamphetamine.”

Frank nodded. He’d seen some of it in the clinic, and heard more. It had become the drug of choice for kids out here, cheaper than coke and without the hippie connotations of pot. In the end, it wasn’t the drug itself that got people but the lack of sleep it caused. After three or four days of no rest the body collapsed or slipped into psychosis.

“I told his father he had to do something, had to go to the Greens, or down to the school, find out who they were getting it from. But Jack—he didn’t have it in him. The bank had been shut three years, he was scared of everything by then.

“I suppose I should have put Jason in the car and driven him out of here, gone with him somewhere. I didn’t, though. I just took it from him whenever I could. I searched his room every day for those little envelopes of crystals. I checked the pockets of his trousers, begged him to stop. You know, once I even told him I’d buy him marijuana instead. His own mother. When the police finally caught the two of them buying it in the parking lot down by the market, I was glad. I thought it would shake him up. He spent three months up at Atkinson, at the juvenile center.” She caught Frank’s look.

“You think that was a mistake.”

“It’s a rough place, but it was out of your hands.”

“Well, you’re right. It didn’t help. He was worse when he got back, angrier, more confused. And he still did it. I don’t think he even stopped while he was in there—how that can be, how they can run a jail where children can get drugs, I just don’t know how that can be… and of course he was so young, just sixteen, boys at that age—” She broke off. “All those hormones in him… I suppose the drug—” She stopped again, covering her mouth with her hand.

“I was here, in the living room. It was a Sunday. Jack had taken the kids over to visit his sister. Jason had been so erratic those last few days, we were trying to keep the younger ones away from him. He’d been out till dawn that morning and the morning before and then up there in his room all day, but not sleeping, I could tell he wasn’t sleeping. I was waiting for him to come down to eat something. I kept thinking, just one more conversation, we’d talk and somehow…

“I was right here on the couch. I heard his door open, and then I heard him crying. It was like years ago when he was a boy and he’d had an upset at school and I’d sit with him out there on the porch with his head in my lap as the sun went down and I’d tell him how one day we’d take a trip on a boat all the way across the Atlantic and he’d see Athens and Rome and all the places where the stories I’d read him took place, and he’d fall asleep listening to me. When I heard him cry that day I thought maybe it was all over—that he had come back to me somehow. He hadn’t cried in so long. I went up the stairs.

“My son. He was naked. He’d been rubbing himself. For hours, it must have been. He’d rubbed himself raw. He was bleeding down there. And he was crying, his tears catching in the little beard that had started growing on his cheeks, the soft little brown hairs he hadn’t learned to shave yet. When I got to the top of the stairs he looked at me like I’d severed a rope he’d been clinging to for dear life, just like that, like I’d sent him down somewhere to die. What could I do?

“I got a towel. From the bathroom. A white towel. I got gauze and ointment, and I sat him down on his bed and I cleaned him and put Band-Aids on him and I tried not to weep.”

Mrs. Buckholdt sat on the edge of the sofa, shoulders hunched forward. Her words had drained her, her face gone pale now. She stared blankly at the floor.

“I was his mother,” she said quietly, almost listlessly.

“What was I supposed to do?”

For a moment, there was silence in the room.

“The kitchen,” she said. “I was in the kitchen. Later. Making him soup. He’d always liked soup. Maybe he’d taken the drug again. I don’t know. I felt him behind me. Suddenly he grabbed my wrist, forced it down onto the cutting board, and he chopped my fingers off, the fingers I’d touched him with, chopped them off with a meat cleaver. Then he walked out naked into the backyard.”

THE TWO OF them sat there together a long time, the sun hanging low on the rim of the western sky, casting its giant columns of light down over the land, level over the yard, level through the unshaded panes of the windows, pouring over Mrs. Buckholdt’s back, casting shadow over the coffee table and the tarnished ashtray and the rounded, dark center of the densely patterned wool carpet.

In the time she had spoken, it seemed to Frank as if Mrs.

Buckholdt’s body had sunk down into itself, leaving her smaller and more frail, her earlier, imposing demeanor exhausted. He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person’s unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.

“How did your son die?” he asked.

“The two of them, he and Jimmy, they’d borrowed some friend’s truck. It was only a few days later—he never had come back to the house. They were out on the interstate, headed west. They crashed into the wall of an overpass.

Jimmy made it with some burns. He still lives out there on Valentine. I see him now and again.”

By dint of habit, the trained portion of Frank’s mind composed a note for Mrs. Buckholdt’s chart: Patient actively relives a traumatic event with intrusive recall; there are depressive features, hypervigilance, and generalized anxiety.

Diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder.

Treatment: a course of sertraline, one hundred milligrams daily, recommendation for psychotherapy, eventual titration off clonazepam. He wondered how his colleagues felt when they said these words to themselves or wrote them on a piece of paper. Did the power to describe the people they listened to save them from what they heard? Did it absolve them of their duty to care?

As the silence between them stretched out, Frank remembered the first patient he’d seen as a resident, a woman whose husband had died in a plane crash. Each hour they spent together she filled with news of her two children, her son’s play at school, a job her daughter had taken at a hotel, right down to what they had chosen to wear that morning, and she said it all gazing out the window, as though she were describing events in the history of a foreign country. He could remember lying in bed on the nights after he’d seen her, alone in his apartment, her plight weighing on him like a congregant’s soul on the spirit of a minister or a character’s fate on the mind and body of a writer. Often, lying there, he would remember an earlier night, lying in his bed as a child, soon after his family had moved to a new town.

Their house was still full of boxes, and their parents had been arguing. From the other bedroom, he heard his older brother talking to their mother in a scared tone: he hated his new school, the unfamiliar kids, the way they pushed him around, and he wanted so very badly not to go back in the morning. The fear in his voice troubled the air like an alarm.

Their mother’s voice was lower, her reassurances muffled by the distance of the hall. Frank had wept himself to sleep, pained to tears that he could do nothing to prevent his brother’s suffering.

He thought now how it had always been for him, ever since he was a boy sitting on the edge of a chair in the living room listening to his parents’ friends—a divorced woman whose hands shook slightly in her lap as she told him with great excitement about the vacation she was to take, or the man whose son Frank saw teased relentlessly at school, talking of how happy his boy was—the unsaid visible in their gestures, filling the air around them, pressing on Frank. And later in college, at a party, drink in hand, standing by a bookcase, chatting with a slightly heavy girl hanging back from the crowd, tracked into every shift of her eyes, every tense little smile, as if the nerves in her body were the nerves in his, her every attempt to disguise her awkwardness raising its pitch in him.