“I’m sorry,” I tell her, without thinking.
“John Dominic Blaxton,” she says, recognition dawning over her. “Focal Networks—”
“I’m sorry?”
She smiles—her profile’s blank. “You live in the public housing in Columbia Heights. Room R-17. Washington, DC—a temporary residence, previously of Pittsburgh and Virginia. Husband of Theresa Marie Blaxton. No children—”
“Excuse me?”
“You aren’t welcome here,” she says, shutting the door. I enter the archival override code and the door opens, what should have been Albion’s door, but the space is empty now—a small apartment, just a one bedroom, with one corner converted for use as a kitchen. The floor is unfinished hardwood. The walls are a generic cream, even the light fixtures are painted over. There’s no furniture here. There’s no woman. There’s nothing here.
“Hello?” My voice echoes in the empty room.
12, 14—
“Was this a dream?” asks Timothy.
“Parts of it were a dream, but I’m not sure what was real—”
Timothy’s office is cluttered, unlike Simka’s—stacked papers overflowing from plastic bins, bookshelves piled with true crime paperbacks and sets of leather-bound reference works, the DSM-IX in multiple volumes, dictionaries, thesauruses. His desk is clean, only a blotter, a pen and a leather-bound Bible. The chairs are mid-last-century, set around his desk as if for a meeting.
“Would you like some coffee? A drink?”
“I’d love some coffee—”
“I worry talk therapy will be counterproductive,” says Timothy. “When I look at the improvement you’ve made in this short amount of time—with a support system, supervised immersion, no drugs—it’s inspiring. Dominic, I don’t want you to identify yourself as someone who’s sick, as someone who needs to talk to a therapist. That sort of self-identification can often create problems. That’s not who you can become. Dominic, you’re healthy—”
An identity issue, he tells me. If I think that I’m sick, I will be sick. If I think I’m well, I will become well. Timothy believes in positive thinking—that physical health follows the belief of physical health, that the power of the spirit can heal the body. He tiptoes around calling his system the “power of prayer” but he quotes studies and clinical trials stating that God helps recovery much more effectively than medication. What is your identity? he asks. Do you want to be ill? Or do you want to be healthy? Who are you?
“How did you start working in the Archive?” he asks. “Were you always interested in this kind of work?”
“I was still thinking of pursuing my graduate studies after Pittsburgh,” I tell him. “Everyone was very accepting of survivors—it was easy to transfer programs. I chose the University of Virginia, moved to Charlottesville. I’d been studying Klimt and Schnitzler and Freud—”
“You aren’t a graduate student now?”
“No. Not anymore—”
“Why give it up?”
“Why?” I wonder. “Truthfully, I was already giving up on that sort of work years before. I think I know the exact moment I gave up—in my second year of classes at Carnegie Mellon, I presented a paper about Lacan. The shifting nature of desire. I showed projections of Egon Schiele’s work, some of the more pornographic stuff, and theorized in front of the class about female masturbation. I was beginning to think of myself as a sort of intellectual provocateur of the department—”
“You’re cringing,” says Timothy.
“I’m still embarrassed,” I tell him, “even after all these years, I’m still embarrassed. I used to wear a bowler hat, if you can believe that. So, there was a woman in class with me, she—I remember she used to be a ballerina, a real, professional dancer, but gave it up for French theory. After my presentation about Lacan, I was cutting across campus and she called out to me. I remember what she was wearing—this gingham dress. She told me how excited she was that I had talked about Schiele, that Schiele was one of her favorite artists. She said our areas of research were strikingly similar and she wanted to talk with me more about it. She invited me to dinner at her apartment. She said she was an excellent cook and told me that she had invested in a catalogue raisonné of Schiele with giclée reproductions of his work, but she didn’t know anyone else who might appreciate it. I was—actually, I was terrified of her. I’d always been intimidated in classes with her because she seemed to understand all the readings we were assigned. I didn’t think I could legitimately spend more than five minutes talking to her without exposing myself as a fraud. I didn’t know much about Lacan other than a few essays I’d read. Derrida was incomprehensible to me. I couldn’t figure out Bourdieu. I mispronounced all their names. I’d never bothered to read Foucault. She’d left the top few buttons of her dress undone so you could see the edge of her bra—this black, lacy thing. Imagining her apartment, imagining all the dog-eared paperbacks of theory and philosophy I knew she must have read, imagining sitting next to her looking at Schiele, the book spread open across her legs, scared me. I felt like she was playing a very adult game with me. She was very attractive, very intimidating. After that afternoon I felt like a poseur, studying Freud and Schnitzler. Schiele, for Christ’s sake. I never took her up on her offer. I stopped wearing my bowler—”
“And this was before Theresa?”
“Oh, yes—Theresa wouldn’t have… not if I was wearing a bowler hat. By the time I met Theresa I’d already given that up. I’d already talked to my adviser about switching to 20th-Century American Modernism. Wallace Stevens. T. S. Eliot. I was more interested in an MFA in creative writing, to be honest—I thought I might transfer departments. I’d already started Confluence Press. A contemporary poetry series. That was always my real passion, to publish other people’s poetry—to curate a line of poetry books. I started taking classes in the computer science department, figuring out some coding so I could theoretically maximize e-content for the poetry press. I’ve tried to write poetry since. It’s odd to me—if I read a line by, say, Philip Larkin, I’ll be struck by how beautiful the line is, how perfect or how true. But if I write that line—that same line—just seeing it in my own handwriting sickens me and I’m overwhelmed by the depthless stupidity of the words. I don’t write poetry anymore—”
“Weakness,” says Timothy.
“Maybe,” I admit. “I was a disappointment to everyone at Virginia once I showed up. I didn’t go to classes. I didn’t research. I just spent my time buying used books at Oakley’s and Daedalus—just absolutely hoarding books and newspapers, burying myself in my apartment. I was—suicidal isn’t the right word. I was taking this class about the Decameron and was failing—the professor noticed I was in a tailspin, I guess. She invited me out for coffee and I told her how unhappy I was. She thought I might be able to use more structure than a graduate student life provided—maybe work for a few years, then come back to the program. I told her that sounded fine but I didn’t know what to do with my life. Her cousin owned a research group in DC and she thought what little I’d picked up about coding would make me a perfect fit with that kind of work. She got me an interview. It turns out her cousin wasn’t hiring, but he knew a guy who was. An entry-level job with the Kucenic Group—”
“And under Simka’s care for drug abuse?”
“My boss, Kucenic, placed me in the Employee Assistance Program and that program connected me with Dr. Simka—”
“The entry-level job was an archival assistant?”
“It provided enough of a salary, and my cousin Gavril helps me quite a bit. Blog writing, copy, blurbs, that sort of thing. It’s not much of a living, but it’s all I need—”