I dream of a cabin deep in the wilderness where I sit in a comfortable chair by the stove and shoot my supper from the window. My back is not what it used to be. And I chill easily.
Luckily I’ve got a steady aim and there are no neighbors to complain about the blasts. So, I sit solitary and wait for my prey to come to me. Like my patients do.
In my dreams, a buck can keep me fed the whole of winter. A hare gunned in spring, for the better part of a week. And, in summer, there are berries.
But my dreams haven’t solved the problem of patience.
What the hell do you have to complain about? That’s what I asked this morning silently to my patient, Mr. Armstrong, who was bitching because the service manager at the Mercedes dealership wouldn’t believe him. The sedan was going clankety clank, not claclunk claclunk like the dimwit wearing the short-sleeve shirt and clip-on tie insisted. Armstrong was outraged that 130K had bought him clankety clank up the wazoo and a revolving door at Shultz’s New and Certified Pre-Owned.
If his smartphone hadn’t dinged at our session’s half-hour mark, he could have maundered for the entire fifty minutes. Then he had the gall to ask me to deduct the last twenty minutes from his bill because he’d had to answer the phone. It wasn’t a choice, he said, but an emergency. The stock market had tumbled 3.5%.
I told him that wasn’t my problem. But he took my statement to refer to the market, not to the bill, and that made him spend more post-session time telling me that when the market tumbles it is everybody’s problem, not just a thorn for the 1% of which he is one.
I tried to control myself, without success. So, yes, I gave him the look—the expression that makes me appear wise instead of incredulous, the one I practiced countless times before I got it right. Raised eyebrow, tight smile, cocked head. It conveys that I’m in the know and that if patients stopped to think about it, they could be in the know too.
Armstrong saw the look. “You’re thinking I should be worried about my direct investment in my family, aren’t you Doc? That if I don’t account for my life, it will tumble faster than a bear market. That if I don’t buck-up and deal with my issues, the Great Depression will have nothing on me. Got it.” He curled his forefinger into his thumb in an okay sign which, crowned by the three remaining outstretched digits as it was, looked like a flying asshole heading my way. “You win,” he said. “I’ll pay the entire bill.”
The patient who had been scheduled next cancelled at the last minute because, she explained via voicemail, she had gotten better on her own.
“You know,” she said with the conviction of those untainted by knowledge, “The body heals itself 99% of the time without medical intervention. And, so does the mind.”
I mentally congratulated her on her speedy recovery, and I made a physical note to refer her to another psychiatrist when she called again in six months’ time, after rejoining that other 1% that can’t self-heal.
In my younger days I would have given her a measure of my thought. I would have stirred a dry rye Manhattan and imagined what Adler would have wryly said, or Jung. But I no longer drink. And I’ve lost my sense of whimsy. And I’ve stopped, professionally or otherwise, communing with the dead.
I’m old. I’m tired of thinking, of giving myself the look.
So here I sit wondering why it is that I keep working when I no longer need to earn my keep? Why do I rise at daybreak and drink coffee, read the paper—yes online these days, I am not a dinosaur! And why do I bathe in tepid water while listening to Poulenc’s Stabat Mater before slipping into precisely pressed clothes?
For rising, coffee, bathing, for all the humdrum questions, I have answers. But for why I still work at my esteemed profession, je ne sais pas.
Would life be better if the only quandaries I had to consider were my own? My estrangement from my family. My alienation from my friends. My detachment from my world?
My, my. An insight deserving of the look. But I’ve no mirror at hand. Only the mind’s eye with which to see it. And both the mind and its eye are as unreliable as the mouth is a narrator.
Can we ever fully trust ourselves?
It’s always the same question. Yes, one worth writing about, if only I were unaware that no one reads the professional journals anymore, except those who want to pick a bone because you once snubbed them at a conference or, worse, went commercial with a best-seller for the benefit of the 99% who heal themselves. Is it any wonder that I no longer submit?
And yet. And yet, although I’ve given up the authorial vanities, I still make my way to the office like clockwork after preparing for the part.
Why? Because, this is what we people do. We drink coffee and bathe and listen to Poulenc. We argue over payments due. We lie to one another and, most convincingly, to our own selves.
We jump to conclusions like trout to flies, because we’ve already heard it all and we are certain we understand, even before any words are uttered, what the speaker means to say.
We pass the time before it passes us. We count on the little patience we can muster to help us muster on.
Today, the twin task of finding patience and forgetting patients is the hard part.
Notice: I am not claiming it’s the hardest part!
Who better than I knows that hardest is relative? And fleet.

Zoe Blaylock
Zoe Blaylock's work has been published or is forthcoming in The Westchester Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and in other publications. Educated mostly in the school or hard knocks and droll encounters, she earned her degrees at Harvard and now lives in San Diego, California.
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