Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“But maybe I have a reason to feel the way I do.”

“That sounds like a question for a poet, not a doctor. Now here.” He handed me a second trial pack of pills.

“I don’t need these.”

They were blue. “Of course you don’t, no one does. But if you find you don’t need some more when you’re done with them, let me know and we’ll get you on a prescription.” He smiled. “Think about someone else for once. Betty took care of you today. When’s the last time you took care of her? Has it been a while? If it has, you wouldn’t be alone.”

It was overwhelming. I’d come in here thinking he’d prescribe me a sedative for the night, and now my hands were full. “But Viagra,” I said.

“We all can use a little help every now and then. Don’t be such a macho man.”

I wasn’t in a position to argue. I was still weak from the prostate exam. My zipper hung open.

“One last thing. If you get into a panic before the pills start to percolate down and take effect, I want you to find the nearest wall and slide down to the floor into a sitting position.” He held up the flat of one hand to show me he wasn’t joking. “I’d rather your pride take a hit than your head. And, oh yes.” He scribbled out a prescription, saying I could take one of these if things got especially bad.

I tried to read his writing. “Lor…”

“…azepam. They’ll make you not care about anything. But be warned. Habit-forming. So don’t let them replace your evening glass of wine.” He checked his watch. “Six minutes.” And smiled as he reached for the door: “Make an appointment before you leave. Need to see you again in ten days.”

It was almost two o’clock by the time I came out to my wife in the waiting room, so I told her I planned on calling it a day. Betty didn’t think I should drive, but after I told her the doctor had diagnosed me with nothing more serious than a panic attack, she dropped me at my car, saying she’d meet me at home.

I stopped at the Acme on the way and filled my prescription for the lorazepam — the only pills I had told Betty about. I don’t know why I didn’t say anything about the others; maybe it was simply that I didn’t feel I needed them, or didn’t want her to think that I did. Whatever the case, I kept those trial packs stashed in my jacket pocket when I came into the kitchen and found her cracking an egg into a bowl.

“Snickerdoodles,” she said. “I thought I’d surprise the kids.”

I filled a glass at the sink and shook out one of my pills, telling her I was going to relax upstairs. Minutes later I was doing just that in the great room, flipping through the channels until I heard the words of a man in pressed blue jeans and a western shirt.

“You continue to lie because you are fearful and full of pride,” he was saying. “Afraid that if you tell the truth, bad things will happen, and full of pride because you care too much what others think. The one shows a lack of faith, the other forgets that God sees all.”

He paced back and forth across the stage of some evangelical church with blue stadium seating, stopping every now and then to direct his words to another section of the audience. “Look to your Bible!” he said. “Allow yourself the blessing of a new life!”

I set the remote down beside me, the pill already making me feel like some shelled creature who’d been opened up on the table.

“The Book of Revelation,” he said, flipping open the black Bible he carried, “tells us he who overcometh shall be the Lord’s son. That’s the good news; the bad is: the fearful, the unbelieving, the abominable, the murderers and whoremongers and sorcerers of this world—”

“Sorcerers?” I said, my voice gone gauzy.

“The idolators,” he continued, “and all the liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.”

The words seemed to vibrate in my ears; the colors on the screen had grown brighter, the imagery softer. I sat there with my jaw hanging open, feeling so relaxed and content.

“Now, some of you already know this, but I only got but the one thumb.”

He stopped and held his right hand up. It was the one without a thumb.

“I was alone when that buzz saw tore through me, but it didn’t matter — I thought I was enough. Me! I was a surgeon, remember, a surgeon before I got the call, and I thought I could sew myself up.”

The crowd answered with delighted laughter.

“That’s right. Didn’t work out so well. All I did was poke myself with a pin. So I drove to the hospital, and about halfway there I realized how empty my life was. Empty!” he said. “My wife had left me, my kids didn’t care to take my calls, and my friends wouldn’t play poker with me on account of the fact that I was a known cheat.

“I finally pulled over, thinking I might as well bleed out. I was a member of the Church of Dan and didn’t no one want to come see me on Sunday, least of all myself.

“I’m told I passed out. When I woke up in the hospital, a nurse was wheeling me into the operating room on a gurney, saying a Good Samaritan in a Ford truck had stopped and picked me up. Then those doors were banging open and I was pushed in beneath a bright light. Now, the unbelievers out there will say it was the drugs they were pumping into me that made me think this, but you gotta listen here. As I moved in beneath those operating room lights, I heard a voice as clear as that nurse’s say to me, ‘You gotta let me give you a hand, Dan. Let your good buddy Jesus help you out.’

“I sat up on my elbows and looked at the Ziploc bag they had sitting on my chest. It was packed full of ice, most of it melted by now, and my thumb was swimming around inside it. That thumb was my everything — the entire future I’d once imagined for myself. Who’d trust a surgeon without a thumb? But you know what? I knew I’d be better off without it. I’d been called to tell people you can’t do it alone. So when that surgeon came in, I told him, ‘You can keep that thumb; all I need’s the Hand of God.’ Now, if this had been San Francisco, or New York City, I think you know what would have happened. But I was in the Great State of Texas, so that surgeon looked at me and said—”

Betty entered the room then, holding a plate of snickerdoodles. “We thought you’d like a cookie!”

The kids followed her in as I stabbed at the remote and flipped over to one of the news channels.

“How do you feel?” Betty asked, and the way she and the kids looked at me, you would’ve thought I was a dog at the pound they knew they couldn’t take home.

“Wonderful,” I said, and I did. It wasn’t just the drugs moving through my system, either; I truly felt great. Because I didn’t need to take any anti-anxiety medication; I only needed to confess. All great religions spoke to the need for this act, and yet my own brand of faith provided nothing more than a menu card.

So I ceded the sofa to them and crossed to the big screen, on which news about Hurricane Igor was playing. This category two storm was still out in the Atlantic, not far from the coast of Virginia. I muted the set and put the remote on top of the cable box, then turned round to face my family as a radar picture of the storm appeared on the big screen, its ghostly tendrils spinning round and round behind me while the meteorologist traced its likely path to land.

I felt my family’s anticipation as the president must feel the anticipation of the country before starting his annual State of the Union address. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of the One hundred and fifth Congress, distinguished guests, my fellow Americans…

“Betty, Priscilla, Ernest,” I began. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”