A Good and Happy Child: A Novel

December, Last Year It was a tidy brownstone on Ninth Street near my home, one that I had passed many times without noticing. Stone stairs and a comfortable warm light inside. On the sidewalk, a lady walked her dog, a bug-eyed Boston terrier, black. She smiled at me. I wondered if she knew somehow that I was a soul in need. My recent problem made me think of an instructor I had in college, an Israeli, who was always laughing at American naivete, who was fond of saying, "With Freud, we are all poets in our dreams." To him, analysis and dream interpretation were ways of converting our little personal miseries into big, robust myths. I had no intention of doing this when I arrived at your office. My problem, while maybe uncommon, seemed more like a hang-up than a crisis; I had no wish to dramatize myself, become the hero who asks the right questions, solves the riddles, and slays the dragon in an epic sung on the streets of Manhattan. In fact, I can honestly say I had no memory of the events I describe in these pages-meaning no conscious memory, no current memory. They are things I experienced in childhood, then tucked away in a file along with the soccer games, the Christmas presents, and the illicit midnight Nutter Butters. With both my parents now dead, and no siblings-and with many old ties severed-the only way to my past led through my own mind. Strange, then, and a tribute to you, that you exposed this the very first day you met me. The foyer smelled of damp carpet, and the lightbulb was burned out. An inauspicious start, I thought. The brownstone was obviously a private residence. There were mailboxes in the hall and a mountain bike tucked under the stairwell. I reached the apartment with the tag "DR. H. SURMAN." I knocked, and you appeared, shaking my hand, smiling, leading me inside to your office, to a wicker chair in a pleasant room with plenty of daylight (but discreet shutters on the lower halves of the windows), hanging plants, throw pillows, and a cinnamon smell that might be some kind of aromatherapy (why not? I thought, get my money's worth). You folded your hands and your greet smile changed to a nice-business smile. I ran my hands over the chair's arms and noticed dents in the wicker. "I wonder how many people have picked at that in fits of mental anguish," I said, forcing a laugh. You smiled like a sphinx. Now we were genuinely in shrink territory: I had made a revealing comment, you had dodged a bullet by refusing to disclose information about your other patients or to join me in mocking their suffering. Good for you. "So," you said, "what brings you here?" Funny, how trite we patients must be to you. Like hundreds before me, I walked in convinced that a handful of irritations and sadnesses were "my problems." And then, like hundreds of others, I was to see how the facts, laid out, began showing patterns. I sensed an underlying logic to my distress even in that first hour, but only dimly. It was just a quaver, which would later broaden and deepen and, at times, threaten to engulf me. But I was a greenhorn that first day; a city kid preparing to canoe the Amazon, smelling the damp air and feeling the first bumps of the Jeep ride and thinking, "Oh, this isn't so bad," when we hadn't even taken the boats off the roof of the car. I told you about my son. "I can't hold him," I said. I told you how in the early days it had seemed like normal anxiety: near-crazed from sleeplessness, jumping up at 3:00 A.M. to check the baby's breathing, anxiety that I might somehow break him. But, I confessed to you, days passed, and then weeks, and I could still not stand to hold him-hardly to touch him. When, for brief moments, I was alone with him, I would leave him in his crib and sit nearby, smelling his delicious baby smell and feeling terrified, as if I miJustin Evans is the author of 'A Good and Happy Child: A Novel', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307351227 and ISBN 030735122X.