The spinach and tuna mulled in my stomach. My whole body was tight. Why was I here? Why wasn’t I off somewhere studying?
Soldier, what is the problem?
I can’t eat this. I know I should be able to.
Get over it. Eat it.
I can’t.
You know why that is?
Why?
Because you’re wasting your time, soldier! There’s a reason the U.S. Army isn’t made up of potheads! You’re spending all your time at your little horn-dog friend’s house and when you get home you can’t do what you have to do!
I know. I don’t know how I can be so ambitious and so lazy at the same time.
I’ll tell you how, soldier. It’s because you’re not ambitious. You’re just lazy.
“I’ve got to be excused,” I told my parents, and I walked through the restaurant with that fast-walking gonna-throw-up gait—a run aching to get out—that I learned to perfect over the next year. I came to the chrome bathroom and let it go in the toilet. Afterward I sat, turned the light off, and pissed. I didn’t want to get up. What was wrong with me? Where did I lose it? I had to stop smoking pot. I had to stop hanging out with Aaron. I had to be a machine.
I didn’t get out of the bathroom until someone came and knocked.
When I went back to my parents, I told them: “I think I might be, y’know, depressed.”
twelve
The first doctor was Dr. Barney. He was fat and short and had a puckered and expressionless face like a very serious gnome.
“What’s the problem?” He leaned back in his small gray chair. It sounded like a callous way to put things, but the way he phrased it, so soft and concerned, I liked him.
“I think I have a serious depression.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It started last fall.”
“All right,” he took shorthand on the pad on his desk. Next to the pad was a cup that read Zyprexa, which I thought was the craziest-sounding medical name I’d ever heard. (It turned out to be a drug for psychotics, I wondered if maybe a psychotic person had called a doctor a “zyprexa” and that’s how they came up with the name.) Everything in Dr. Barney’s office was branded—the Post-it notes said Paxil on them; his pens were all for Prozac; the desk calendar had Zoloft on each page.
“I got into this high school, and I had every reason to be the happiest guy in the world,” I continued. “But I just started freaking out and feeling worse and worse.”
“Uh-huh. You completed your sheet, I see.”
“Yes.” I held up the sheet that they had given me in the waiting room. It was a standard sheet, apparently, that they gave all the new recruits at the Anthem Mental Health Center, the building in downtown Brooklyn where this brain evaluation was taking place. The sheet had a bunch of questions about emotions you had felt over the past two weeks and four checkboxes for each one. For example, Feelings of hopelessness and failure. Feeling difficulty with your appetite. Feeling that you are unable to cope with daily life. For each one, you could check 1) Never, 2) Some days, 3) Nearly every day, or 4) All the time.
I had run down the list, checking mostly threes and fours.
“They like to collect these sheets every time you come in, to see how you’re doing,” Dr. Barney continued, “but on yours right now there’s one item of concern that we should discuss.”
“Uh-huh?”
“‘Feeling suicidal or that you want to hurt yourself.’ You checked ‘3) Nearly every day.’”
“Right, well, not trying to hurt myself. I wouldn’t cut myself or anything stupid. If I wanted to do it, I would just do it.”
“Suicide.”
It felt strange to hear. “Right.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“Brooklyn Bridge.”
“You’d jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.”
I nodded. “I’m familiar with it.”
“How long have you had feelings like that, Craig?”
“Since last year, mostly.”
“What about before then?”
“Well . . . I’ve had them for years. Just less intense. I thought they were, you know, just part of growing up.”
“Suicidal feelings.”
I nodded.
Dr. Barney stared at me, his lips puckered. What was he so serious about? Who hasn’t thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it? It’s an option taken by a lot of successful people: Ernest Hemingway, Socrates, Jesus. Even before high school, I thought that it would be a cool thing to do if I ever got really famous. If I kept making my maps, for instance, and some art collector came across them and decided to make them worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if I killed myself at the height of that, they’d be worth millions of dollars, and I wouldn’t be responsible for them anymore. I’d have left behind something that spoke for itself, like the Brooklyn Bridge.
“I thought . . . you haven’t really lived until you’ve contemplated suicide,” I said. “I thought like it would be good to have a reset switch, like on the video games, to start again and see if you could go a different way.”
Dr. Barney said, “It sounds as if you’ve been battling this depression for a long time.”
I stopped. No I hadn’t. . . Yes I had.
Dr. Barney said nothing.
Then he said, “You have a flat affect.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re not expressing a lot of emotion about these things.”
“Oh. Well. They’re too big.”
“I see. Let’s talk a little about your family.”
“Mom designs postcards; Dad works in health insurance,” I said.
“They’re together?”
“Yes.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
“One sister. Younger. Sarah. She’s worried about me.”
“How so?”
“She’s always asking me whether I’m good or bad, and when I tell her I’m bad she says, ‘Craig, please get better, everyone is trying.’ Things like that. It breaks my heart.”
“But she cares.”
“Yeah.”
“Your family supports you coming here?”
“When I told them about it they didn’t waste any time. They say it’s a chemical imbalance, and if I get the right drugs for it, I’ll be fine.” I looked around the office at the names of the right drugs. If I got prescribed every drug that Dr. Barney repped, I’d be like an old man counting out pills every morning.
“You’re in high school, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And your sister?”
“Fourth grade.”
“You realize there are a lot of parental consent forms that need to be filled out for us to help you—”
“They’ll sign everything. They want me to get better.”
“Supportive family environment,” Dr. Booth scratched on his pad. He turned and gave his version of a smile, which was a slight affirmative, the lips barely curled, the lower lip out in front.
“We’re going to get through this, Craig. Now, from a personal standpoint, why do you think you have this depression?”
“I can’t compete at school,” I said. “All the other kids are too much smarter.”
“What’s the name of your high school?”
“Executive Pre-Professional High School.”
“Right. I’ve heard of it. Lots of homework.”
“Yeah. When I come home from school, I know I have all this work to do, but then my head starts the Cycling.”