“How so?”
“I’m accustomed to repetition and practice, and this was target practice of another kind. I kept going, trying to find my way into moments before the accident, knowing that if I could inhabit the minutes before, the hours and even days before, there might be no limit. I had seen something—done something—that I had not realized was possible, and now that I knew, I couldn’t leave it alone.”
It was only now that I sensed that her case was not only one of traumatic neurosis, but perhaps a spontaneous neurosis that had existed before that. The fixation was elsewhere. The train crash had only reminded her of it, or had triggered an associated fear or frustration, even while she insisted its main role was providing her a capacity she’d never had before: this increasingly controlled “skipping or sliding,” as she understood it.
I asked when the hand shake had begun.
“About a month after the accident.”
“Not immediately after.”
“Absolutely not.”
“And does that later period correspond with any emotional upset?”
“No. Only with the effort of visiting the past. The strain of it, mental and physical, perhaps even spiritual, I’m not sure.
“The effort of remembering.”
“No, of visiting. I haven’t gone far. I’ve not mastered it yet.”
I noted that she had, in every instance, refused to use the words “remember” or “memory.” For her, the only acceptable terms seem to be “visit,” “inhabit,” “relive,” “episode.”
I told her that remembering should be a healing process overall, not a physically injurious one.
A knock at the door. We’d run out of time, a fact that seemed to inspire her to greater candor.
“I am not remembering, Doctor.”
“If I’m to help you, I must ask you to be more clear.”
“I’ll try.”
She looked relieved, at last, and just as quickly, tense again, still holding back.
I told her we could examine her symptom and her conflict in greater detail, but I had another patient waiting and a full schedule. If she didn’t plan to be in our city for long, the options were limited. The last time I dealt with a patient with her sort of nervous problems, we met twice daily for many months.
This provoked nervous laughter. It seems a distinctly American trait, to believe every problem can be solved overnight.
On leaving, she was anxious about how we would continue with an ocean between us.
“I can recommend analysts in your country. The method in America may not be precisely the same, but at least you might find a professional confidante.”
“Impossible.”
“You could extend your stay abroad.”
“Also impossible.”
“That leaves only corresponding by mail, if you’re willing to be candid in your letters.”
“I’ll try. But if I say everything without consideration, you may stop me. Sometimes, I want to be stopped. More often, I don’t. If someone . . . an expert, a doctor . . . told me I must not keep doing this thing, that I must stop or surely I’d lose my mind and my health, both, then maybe I could stop.”
“And this is why you’ve come to me: To ask if you should stop confronting your past?”
“Yes.”
“I can assure you, I’m the last person to advise you to stop. It’s only by reliving the past that we are relieved of it.”
7
Ruth
Here, Ruth turned the page and saw, rather than the continuation of the narrative, a page written in German.
“Oh,” she said out loud, a single disappointed syllable that hung in the air like the dust motes dancing in the slanting autumn light before settling onto the scratched oak floor.
The journal’s sudden return from English to German had thrown her out of the trance in which she’d spent the last hour. Not only the switch in language, but also topic. Now she read about an unnamed patient with trouble breathing, another with ringing in his ears.
She turned the next page. The handwriting was the same, but the tone impersonal and the details dull.
Ruth read about a third patient with respiratory troubles. And fourth with sinus headaches, just as her own headache was coming on, because the handwriting took considerable time to decipher, the unfamiliar words refusing to give up their secrets as easily due to the additional barriers of a second language and medical terminology.
“Too bad,” she whispered. She didn’t even have a cat with whom to share the frustrating news.
Her phone dinged. She picked it up, hoping—what, exactly? It wasn’t like Scott had texted in ages. But it was Reece, barely home and already bothering her. For the moment, she ignored him.
Ruth closed the journal and rose from the couch, went to the bathroom, walked to the kitchen and filled a glass of water. She was in such a distracted state, she couldn’t remember if she’d just taken two ibuprofen in the bathroom as she’d intended.
There is a sense of acceleration again, of the oncoming train or the past rushing up to swallow the present, in that moment before everything speeds up, in that moment before things hurt.
Ruth thought of her own accident, that moment that had seemed to last forever: careening toward the car in front of her, then swinging away as she braked. The certainty that her car would crash through the barrier and slide off the bridge—and then everything speeding up again, all too fast. Sirens and faces. The rescuers, the bystanders. None of them knowing what she had experienced, what had run through her mind just when she thought she was about to die: out of nowhere, an image of Scott, injured and bleeding. All this time later, she’d told only her two therapists. Scott had never found out.
Ruth walked back to the bathroom and opened the bottom left drawer of the apothecary cabinet, the first piece of furniture she had ever bought herself after she’d moved back into her mother’s house, as an unsuccessful attempt to add her own adult personality to a home that would never truly be hers. The tightly fitted drawers had to be tugged in order to open. Surely she would remember having done that if she’d already taken the ibuprofen?
Ruth found herself staring at the cabinet with its five rows of drawers, remembering what she’d first loved about it: how it kept everything separate, taming the random items inside. Every pill bottle, memento or extra key had its own small dark wood-scented space.
You like old shit, Kennidy would have said.
You simply appreciate pretty things, Scott would have said.
Compartmentalization, her grad-school buddy Joe Grandlouis would have said—would still say, if Ruth ever called him, something she’d been meaning to do for ages.