“Ah.” She pauses. “Life.”
“Right.”
“Failing at school is failing at life.”
“Well. . . I’m in school! That’s the one thing I’m supposed to do. I know a lot of famous people didn’t do well at school, like James Brown; he dropped out in fifth grade to be an entertainer, I respect that. . . but that’s not going to be me. I’m not going to be able to do anything but work as hard as possible all the time and compete with everyone I know all the time to make it. And right now school’s the one thing I need to do. And I’m away from the e-mail and I can’t do it.”
“But your definition of school isn’t really one thing, it’s many different things, Craig: extracurricular activities plus sports plus volunteering. That’s not to mention homework.”
“Right.”
“How anxious would you say you are about all of this, Craig?”
I think back to what Bobby said, about anxiety being a medical thing. The e-mail has been in the back of my mind since I got here, the nagging knowledge that when I get out I’ll have to sit on the computer for five or six hours going through everything I’ve missed, answering it in reverse order because that’s the way it comes in and therefore taking the longest time to respond to the people who e-mailed me in the most distant past. And then as I’m answering them more will come in, and they’ll sit on top of my stack and mock me, dare me to answer them before digging down, telling me that I need them, as opposed to the one or two e-mails that are actually about something I care about. Those will get saved to the end, and by the time I have the time to deal with them, they’ll be so out of date that I’ll just have to apologize: Sorry, man. I haven’t been able to answer my e-mail. No, I’m not important, just incapable.
“Craig?”
“Very anxious,” I answer.
“The e-mail anxiety, and the failure talk . . . These are subjects you’ve brought up before. They’re very distressing to you.”
“I know. I’m sweating.”
“You are?”
“Yeah. And I haven’t been sweating for a while.”
“You’ve been away from your Tentacles.”
“Right. Not anymore. Now I get to go back and they’re all right there for me.”
“Do you remember what I asked you last time, about whether or not you’d found any Anchors in here?”
“Yes.”
She pauses. In order to ask a question, it is often possible for Dr. Minerva only to intimate that she might ask a question.
“I think I’ve found one,” I sigh.
“What’s that?”
“Can I get up and get it?”
“Absolutely.”
I leave the office and walk down the hall, where Bobby is leading a new recruit on his welcoming tour—a black guy with wild teeth and a stained blue sweatsuit.
“This is Craig,” Bobby says. “He’s real young, but he’s on the level. He does drawings.”
I shake the man’s hand. That’s right. I do drawings.
“Human Being,” the man says.
“That’s his name,” Bobby explains, rolling his eyes.
“Your name isn’t Craig; it’s Human Being too,” the man says.
I nod, break the handshake, and keep walking to my room. It’s literally like breaking away from a monster—the further I get from thinking about e-mail and Dr. Minerva and the fact that I’m going to have to leave here and go back to Executive Pre-Professional, the calmer I get. And the closer I get to the brain maps, to this little stupid thing I can do, the calmer I get.
I walk past Muqtada—he’s staring and trying to sleep—and take my art off the radiator cover. I cradle it in a stack past Bobby and Human Being—who’s now explaining how his real last name is Green and that’s what he needs, some green—back into the office.
“I kinda like it in here,” I say to Dr. Minerva.
“This room?”
“No, the hospital.”
“When you’re finished, you can volunteer.”
“I talked to the guitar guy Neil about that. I think I’ll try. I can get school credit!”
“Is that the reason you should volunteer, Craig—”
“No, no . . .” I shake my head. “I’m just joking.”
“Ah.” Dr. Minerva cuts her face into a wide smile. “So what do we have here?”
I plop them down on the table. There are two dozen now. No kind of crazy breakthroughs, just variations on a theme: pigs with brain maps that resemble St. Louis, my couple for Noelle joined by the sweeping bridge, a family of metropolises.
“Your artwork,” she says.
She leafs through them, going “Oh, my” at the particularly good ones. I constructed this stack last night—not just for Dr. Minerva, for anybody. The brain maps have a certain order. Ever since I’ve been doing them, they’ve been making it clear that they should be stacked for presentation.
“Craig, these are wonderful.”
“Thanks.” I sit down. We were both standing. I didn’t even notice.
“You started these because you used to do them when you were four?”
“Right. Well. Something like them.”
“And how do they make you feel?”
I look at the pile. “Awesome.”
She leans in. “Why?”
I have to think about that one, and when Dr. Minerva makes me think, I don’t get embarrassed and try to skip it. I look to the left and stroke my chin.
“Because I do them,” I say. “I do them and they’re done. It’s almost like, you know, peeing?”
“Yes . . .” Dr. Minerva nods. “Something you enjoy.”
“Right. I do it; it’s successful; it feels good; and I know it’s good. When I finish one of these up I feel like I’ve actually done something and like the rest of my day can be spent doing whatever, stupid crap, e-mail, phone calls, all the rest of it.”
“Craig, have you ever considered the fact that you might be an artist?”
“I have other stuff too,” I keep going. What’d she say? “First of all I was thinking about this perpetual candle, like a candle on the ground with another candle hanging upside-down over it, and as the first candle melts the wax is kept molten by some kind of hot containment unit and gets pumped up to the second candle and drips down like a stalactite-stalagmite thing, and then I was also thinking: what if you filled a shoe with whipped cream? Just a man’s shoe, filled with whipped cream? That’s pretty easy to do. And then you could keep going: a T-shirt filled with Jell-O, a hat full of applesauce . . . that’s art, right? That kind of stuff. What’d you say about artists?”
She chuckles. “You seem to enjoy what you’re doing here.”
“Yeah, well, duh, it’s not the most difficult thing in the world.”
“You’re not sweating now.”
“This is a good Anchor for me,” I say. I admit. I admit it. It’s a stupid thing to admit. It means that I’m not practical. But then again, I’m already in the loony bin; how practical am I going to get? I might have to give up on practical.
“That’s right, Craig. This can be your Anchor.” Dr. Minerva stares at me and doesn’t blink. I look at her face, the wall behind her, the door, the shades, the table, my hands on the table, the Brain Maps between us. I could do the one on the top a little better. I could try putting some wood grain in there with the streets. Knots of wood in people’s heads. That could work. “This can be my Anchor.” I nod. “But. . .”
“What, Craig?”
“What am I going to do about school? I can’t go to Executive Pre-Professional for art.”