down to the digestive system and the variegated shades of brick, rose, and scarlet; the nut-brown liver; the warm pink of the smooth stomach, tight as the skin of a newborn; the intestines coiled like sleeping nudes; flaming valves and tubes Stone could not name but could not turn from; and the layered walls of the stomach in cross section, piled high like the silty deposits of an archaeological dig. Amazingly, every color of the spectrum was contained within the human body; a wondrous palette of shades and tints that made it hard to question the existence of God.
“Mr. Stone,” Dr. Xiao said, “I was asking you to give me one word to describe how you feel.”
He apologized for blanking out on her and said, “Melancholia, malaise, desolation, disconsolation. I feel alone and completely lost. I don’t know where I belong anymore.”
“Any thoughts of suicide?”
Stone said nothing. He had never really thought of killing himself so much as he had thought of being dead, flying to a better place.
“Mr. Stone? Any thoughts of suicide?”
“No. Not seriously.”
“It is normal to feel sadness and loss after the death of a loved one. Do not beat yourself up over your feelings. Grieving is part of the natural cycle of life, and pain is the other side of pleasure. Now, if you’d like, I can prescribe you something to help you get over the hump, a five-day course of diazepam. It’s an anxiolytic that will help take the edge off while you deal with the immediacy of your loss. But I am not a fan of pharmacological treatment for grief, because I believe we need to face our loss and sort things out, rather than throwing a cozy blanket over it. Escapism is not healthy.”
“What do you suggest I do?”
“Speak to somebody; a counselor, a therapist, even a good friend can be helpful.”
“But I like speaking to you,” Stone said. “I feel safe here.”
“Well, thank you,” Dr. Xiao said. “I can arrange for you to have a psychiatric consultation with my colleague. He’s an excellent therapist and can provide you with some techniques to more effectively deal with your loss.”
“I’ve been to therapists before,” Stone said. “They don’t help. I don’t know, but if I can just stay here and talk to you . . .”
Dr. Xiao smiled. “I am glad you feel comfortable speaking with me, but I’m a general practitioner, and a mental health professional will be more equipped to help you.”
Stone did not respond, the flickering fluorescent lights lending his skin a dull greenish hue. He just wanted to talk to Dr. Xiao, to keep her in the room with him as long as he could. “I had a breakdown. Junior year of college. I expected to do so well, ace my exams, write essays in my sleep and still finish at the top of my class, but things didn’t work out that way. Just before Thanksgiving, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. My mind was racing, thoughts upon thoughts upon thoughts, just piling up like an inbox that remained forever full. But those thoughts were all tangled up; they didn’t make any sense to me. Sometimes I burned myself. My girlfriend wanted me to see a therapist, but I was afraid she was just looking for an excuse to break up with me, so we got in a fight in her dorm room and I called her some terrible things and she left me. Suddenly I realized I was in the middle of nowhere, in the dead center of Connecticut with winter creeping in, and I had nothing, nothing at all.”
Dr. Xiao had been listening intently, and she lifted the sleeve of his gown above where he’d been scratching and pointed at the scars on his forearm and bicep. “Is that when you did this?”
“Yes,” Stone said. “Some.”
“Did you try to kill yourself?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. He had such high expectations for me, and I was pulling in Bs and Cs, which to him were as bad as Fs. I went into this sort of fugue state and ended up on the roof of the Fayerweather gymnasium. I think he wanted me to jump, he kept telling me to jump, but I wouldn’t and that just made him more angry. I don’t even know how I got up on the roof.”
“Who is he?”
“My father,” Stone said.
“He was there with you? At school?”
“No,” Stone said. “Of course not. But he was always there in my mind, criticizing, judging, telling me I was a failure. I was constantly in disgrace. Do you know how badly I wanted to please him? It’s just, for some reason, I couldn’t do it. Like every step I had to climb to reach him was two or three times higher than the last. I just didn’t have the strength, so I defied him at every opportunity.”
“And then what happened?” Dr. Xiao asked. “After the roof.”
“I ended up in the psych ward in Hartford Hospital.”
“And how did your father react to that?”
“He was embarrassed. For himself. He said, ‘What will people think of me? You’ve ruined my good name.’ His good name! That’s what he was concerned about. Not me, but his name. My grandfather was a famous gangster and my father did everything in his power to make a name for himself separate from his father; I think my breakdown made him feel all the work he had done to build his life up from the ground was for nothing.”
“But it’s your life, not his.”
“To be honest, it was never much of a life,” Stone said.
“I’m sure that’s not true.” Dr. Xiao looked so sympathetic, the way her brow creased when she spoke. Stone just wanted to stay with her and hold on until his desolation passed.
“He sent me to Israel, to live on some crazy settlement in the West Bank where his old friend was a community leader and rabbi. At first, I was just so happy to get away, to leave Connecticut and school behind, to leave my humiliation behind and start fresh in a new country. But things didn’t work out in a hurry. I didn’t believe in the strict ideology that land was more important than human lives, that God had granted all the land of Israel to the Jews and nothing to the Palestinians. I wasn’t even allowed to use the word Palestinians around my father’s friend without him correcting me and saying the idea of a Palestinian people was just a cynical concoction cooked up by revolutionaries and murderers to delegitimize the Jewish State of Israel.”
“So what happened?”
“I left,” Stone said.
“And your father wasn’t happy?”
“Not at first, but I told him that I was going to learn Hebrew and travel the country and learn about Israel in my own way, and I convinced him. Surprisingly that was good enough for him. Until . . .” Even after all this time Stone could not form the words, could not say out loud what had happened after he left the safety of Giv’at Barzel’s red roofs and barbed-wire fences behind. Stone fell silent but feared Dr. Xiao would leave him, so he pressed on as best he could. “Anyway, it was bad, and my father was very upset and never forgave me and I haven’t been back to Israel since.” Stone’s heart revved at the memory.
Dr. Xiao considered his words in silence, a kindly expression on her face. But then, as if abruptly aware she had a backlog of patients in the waiting room, she said, “Thank you so much for sharing your feelings with me, Matthew.” She wrote something out on a slip
