Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

So Caleigh and I, with Myra’s assistance, set to work writing a brief, explanatory pamphlet, our modest contribution to the consciousness-raising effort. I wanted to put an eighteenth-century schematic drawing of the hold of a slave ship on the cover, to show how the ancestors of our fellow citizens had arrived here, but Caleigh favored an early-twentieth-century photograph of a black dirt farmer harnessed to his plow. We ran off five hundred copies at Kinko’s, and from then on I always made sure to have a supply in my bag so that when riding the bus or the T, I could spend a few minutes imposing them on my fellow passengers.

Lexapro

When I did get around to applying to grad school the year I turned thirty, I was surprised, given how much thought and study I’d put in, to be rejected by each and every one. Being white was probably not an advantage in my chosen field of African-American studies (though, naturally, that is an admissions preference I wholly support, no matter its effect on me). By this time, my roommate Ben had performed the hat trick of meeting a highly intelligent and alluring woman outside of his knitting circles, maintaining his sense of self-worth long enough for them to complete a course of dating, and eventually convincing her, Christine, to move in with us. As the rejection letters arrived weekly through March and April, the two of them didn’t know what to say after asking me how my day had been and hearing only another report of canceled possibility. Any more than Celia or Alec did. I’d never felt the least bit competitive with either of them (though Celia’s ease in finding a new boyfriend each time she broke up with an old one irked me at times), and I put out of my mind the fact that my sister already had a master’s in social work and that Alec had completed his journalism degree, despite being five years younger.

Wellbutrin

There continued, the following spring, to be no rational basis to resent either of them in particular when I got rejected everywhere I applied for a second time. The left-wing phone bank had cut back on staff by then and I was unemployed, which Dr. Bennet was helpful enough to remind me was a major life stressor. As in, justifying of increased doses across the board. Generalized anxiety, that’s how he now described my condition. He suggested a support group, which conveniently met just down the hall from his office. Where the support group met that would help me get over going to this support group wasn’t clear. But oh well.

I thought fibromyalgia in Arkansas was bad, but there was no telephonic remove from the Gulf War vet who slept curled around his rifle and looked at us as if we were bloody remains, or the woman being charged with child neglect because she could never clean enough to satisfy herself it was safe to feed her malnourished offspring. Our youngest colleague still wet himself at the age of twenty-two. When we weren’t hearing about melted corpses on Iraq’s highway of death, we could kick back to the tale of a bankrupt lawyer’s sixteen-hour odyssey to find a lightbulb in sufficiently undimpled packaging. Someone once said, It’s all about the parties you go to. No kidding. The facilitator was into what she called “aversion treatment.” The lawyer was instructed to go straight from the meeting to the nearest drugstore, walk to the housewares section, and pick up the first 100-watt bulb his eyes alighted upon. Not so clear that the vet should cluster-bomb downtown Attleboro for a little DIY reenactment, but the woman afraid of her groceries could force herself to cut broccoli right on the counter and then eat it with her little ones. Before my terror at the reality of these people’s lives caused me to flee the scene, I got two assignments from the facilitator myself: to leave the house just when I expected Caleigh to call, and to empty the drawer where I put all my unpaid bills and sort them in order of priority, presumably so I could figure out which one to talk with my mother about first. I completed neither.

Remeron

Flummoxed at my refractory symptoms, Dr. Bennet ran me through a complete re-eval, said I needed to stop talking about psychoanalytic theory in our sessions, and put me on enough uppers to cheer a POW. I recall a period of two or three months when my head felt compressed to the density of an anvil strapped to a potting wheel left on high speed in a sun-drenched meadow. It was like getting root-canal work while vacationing in the tropics. Indeed, the experiment came to an end when my stepped-up jaw-grinding caused me to chip a molar. But for a while there I did get out of my room at Ben’s a bit more often. I toured the remaining indie record shops on Saturday mornings when the new shipments arrived. It was on one such outing, after many dateless years, that I encountered Bethany. She had a tiny glistening nose stud, and a nearly shaved head, and was flipping through a bin of Aphex Twin. Need I say more?

Jasper was an Anglophile from Coeur d’Alene. He did his best to monogram everything he owned. Today it was a royal-blue turtleneck with his chosen initials — JHP, for Jasper Henry Philips — done in three-inch brocade letters outlined with sequins and pinned at the breast like a Michael Jackson costume still under construction. So far, he’d avoided the shelters by couch-surfing and squatting. When Michael phoned me at work, we were almost at the end of our session, which Jasper had again idled away with his fantasies, this time of befriending Princess Diana, his all-time-favorite celebrity. I had five minutes left of my weekly effort to find him a job.

I told Michael I couldn’t talk.

“What about later?” he asked. “Can we talk later?”

A girl who hadn’t shown up in three weeks was waiting outside my door. I had appointments all afternoon. I needed to go running after work.

“I’ll try you,” I said. “But it’ll be later, your time.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he’d forgotten we lived on different coasts. “Okay.”

We spoke twice a week at least, but in the evenings or on weekends. I was surprised he even knew the name of my agency to look up the number. Something had agitated him; he was calling to be assuaged.

“I’ll try you,” I said. “I will.”

“Sooo,” Jasper said as soon as I hung up, “your boyfriend’s traveling — and he isn’t your husband because you’re not wearing a ring. Where is he? Paris, London?”

To help establish a rapport during our first meeting, I’d made the mistake of mentioning I’d lived in England. Now it was all he wanted to talk about.

I suggested we look over the listings together. There were openings for baggers at the Marina Safeway, temp-driver jobs he didn’t qualify for because he didn’t have a license, a copy-shop assistant position in Oakland, and the usual volunteer stuff, distributing condoms or working at the Meals on Wheels kitchen, what the agency called “community networking opportunities.”

I needed him to focus and commit to three applications before our next session. If I’d had an hour with him, I would have asked whom he was spending his time with, if anyone was pressuring him for sex, how he was doing physically and emotionally. But that wasn’t my job. I was supposed to prevent him from becoming homeless (which he effectively already was), help him find legitimate employment, and coach him on maintaining whatever support structure he already had, which in his case consisted mostly of asking each week if he’d been in touch with his mother. My older colleagues often didn’t bother with parents when a client was no longer a minor, but according to Jasper, his mother had left his stepfather — the person he’d fled from in the first place — so it seemed at least worth a try for him to talk with her, given what his options were.