Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

Still, afterwards, riding the T back to Ben’s apartment on the margins of the South End, wondering if Caleigh would be home when I called her, and, when she wasn’t, sitting on the couch with Ben nursing the first of the evening’s beers while he got high, I would sense the fear I’d woken with slink back in, accusing me of failing to pay it sufficient mind, mocking the day’s respite as an illusion.

Ben, a semiprofessional knitter, had taken me in out of the kindness of his heart and a need for rent money (and also perhaps as a favor to Alec). He ran a tight ship, insisting on extreme tidiness to make room for all his wool and mail-order supplies. He regularly updated the chore regime posted on the fridge, which left me in a state of suspense as to what I would be required to sweep or scrub in any given week. But once he had put down his needles for the day and smoked a joint, he achieved an enviable calm while cooking vegetables for us and watching Simpsons reruns. We’d become friends, of the sort men often are, in that we daily confirmed each other’s existence but pretty much left it at that.

After ratatouille and an hour of cartoons, I’d try Caleigh again, and if she didn’t answer, I’d call Celia or Alec, not to confess in full the shape of the trap, because they had their own to avoid, but just to talk with someone for whom I didn’t have to mask my basic state. I knew they wanted to help. They would always ask, hopefully, how my meds were working. I’ve never stopped wanting to give them at least some reason to think I’m getting better.

Anafranil

There are years it is difficult to account for in retrospect. Most of my twenties, for instance. I can’t say exactly when it was that the vinyl shop in East Boston went out of business. Late in the first Clinton administration, maybe? Or how long it took me to find the job at the left-wing call center. We raised money for whatever not-for-profit had hired our shift to rake through old lists of Mother Jones subscribers and members of the ACLU who might be talked into giving ten or twenty dollars to endangered fish or gay people. I can say that getting paid on commission blew. You’d be soliciting some Arkansas outlier for a Native American higher-ed fund, watching the seconds disappear on the huge digital clock above the supervisor’s desk as the person you’d already given up on began explaining how the bills for her fibromyalgia treatment had cleared out her savings and was making her wonder if she’d have to give up her dog, a three-legged rescue with hypertension and hookworms, and you’d want to say, Look, lady, it’s through with you, you’re terminal, that shit’s not improving. But you know what? If you chip in fifty bucks to the college fund, someone not yet down for the count might actually get an education, so stop yakking and pay it forward. I’d like to afford that burrito in four hours and you’re not helping. And why did the owner of the call center drive a BMW? Because a bunch of essentially unemployed people managed to suck enough pocket change out of enervated hippies to fund at least one upper-middle-class existence. As for Anafranil, I put up with the tachycardia for a while, but being unable to take a shit more than every ten days proved untenable. Which is a pity given that its eradication of my libido took the edge off missing Caleigh as sorely as I still did.

Celexa

There was a downside to seeing my father’s old shrink and never paying his bills, which was that when he eventually stopped returning my calls, I didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. His unannounced withdrawal from my care after all this time seemed highly unprofessional given how essential his prescription pad had become to my daily functioning, but I figured he’d spoken to colleagues who’d suggested it was time he extracted himself from such a messy relationship. I could have used a referral, but there we are. I didn’t want to ask my mother for the money to actually pay for a psychiatrist, but what option did I have? I was on things you weren’t supposed to come off of unsupervised.

The guy I found at Boston City Hospital was only a few years older than I was and wore a wedding ring. I’m against marriage on principle — not love and trust, which I pine for, but the legal entity, given its history — so it wasn’t Dr. Bennet’s marital status per se that I envied, but the indication it gave that he, too, was one of the elect, enjoying the plenary ease of intimacy with a woman who had chosen him over and above other men. And of course he had a steady income, and all his hair, and that mild-jock physique of the former team-sports player, giving him the air of physical carelessness, that impunity which went along with even the merely passable good looks prized by women for the social capital they offer, and I suppose the pleasure. Which returns us, by the logic of opposites, willy-nilly, to the category of the loser or creep, that staple of high school which lives on in a youth-obsessed culture, hunting people into middle age — the erotically failed man whose desire is imagined to grow lascivious with embitterment until his loneliness has made him so ugly he’s a pervert, beginning then to shade into the monster of the pedophile, subject to the most righteous and violent anger of all, the rage of parents on behalf of their minor children. Which isn’t to say that meeting Dr. Bennet “triggered” anything in me, just that I wanted to be sure he wasn’t going to bluster his way into some misbegotten get-tough approach and start cutting back on my Klonopin. Luckily, he proved more humane than that. Like Dr. Gregory, he didn’t want to subtract drugs, only to add them.

Effexor

When he asked about the work I did, I told him about music as the medium for the transgenerational haunting of the trauma of slavery, and how what I needed most was a research library, a JSTOR account, and three years of postgraduate funding. To be honest, I didn’t care about the degree. I’m not an academic careerist. I would have been happy simply with the time to write. But it was hard to get at what needed to be done after eight hours of pleading with white liberals for the habitat of a frog. So I settled for a new prescription. The Effexor plus the Klonopin, combined with the lithium Bennet put me on after hearing about Dad, added up to a minor reprieve of their own, enough in any case to let me focus on applying to graduate school and get started on the reparations work Caleigh and I had been discussing for several years already.

To the extent that people consider the reparations movement at all, which most don’t, they think of General Sherman and Special Field Order No. 15, granting freed slaves the coastal lands from the Carolinas to northern Florida, the infamous promise of forty acres and a mule, and so imagine that the modern push amounts to a claim for cash for every living descendant of a chattel slave. Whereas in fact the movement’s first demand is an official U.S. government apology and recognition of the injustice of slavery, accompanied by suits against banks and insurance companies whose prior corporate entities profited directly from the uncompensated labor of the human beings they owned. And only then, a congressional allocation of billions of dollars to be spent on institution building to improve the education, health, and well-being of African-Americans generally. After all, the U.S. compensated Japanese-Americans for interning them during World War II, and Germany paid restitution to surviving victims of the Holocaust. That governments should pay for the sins of their past, even if committed by repudiated regimes, is hardly unprecedented. The caustic, knee-jerk rejection of the idea of restitution for slavery is but an indication of why it is necessary. What we ignore only persists.