Ted sat on the sofa facing the therapist’s wing chair and the large picture window beyond. Outside was a meadow showing the first signs of awakening from the winter decay.
“I’ve never been this anxious about dying,” Ted said.
“What is it you are imagining will happen?” The therapist asked. He hooked a strand of his longish grey hair, parted in the center, behind one ear.
Ted studied his loafers. He breathed deeply and looked out at the meadow, pushing his glasses tighter against the bridge of his nose.
“I suppose it’s not knowing when it will happen. Or how. If I’ll suffer. If I’ll linger in a bed with my family having to hold everything together for me. And the worst – if I’ll just give up at some point because of constant pain, fatigue and…no future…that’s more than I can take. Then, I wonder if anyone will even care if I’m suffering or if I’m gone. I’m sure that I don’t have much time. I’m overcome by the feeling that I could just die at any time…with things not finished… like I haven’t done anything that will be enduring, that I haven’t worked hard enough and I’m running out of time.”
The therapist folded his hands in his lap. Ted noticed that the lamp behind him created a glow that darkened his face and put it out of focus. The therapist came highly recommended by a friend who had since died. He, too, was struggling with mortality. The friend told Ted that the therapist had used an effective technique for lessening the level of anxiety, allowing his friend to get on with his life.
“What is it you think you’d like to do?”
“I’d like to finish my book, get it published, noticed. Praised. It means I have to focus completely on working more… but I already work all the time. I don’t know how I’ll be able to work harder than I already do to finish it. And then what if it’s a colossal flop? I’m at the age where I won’t have time to do another one.”
Ted started to sob.
“So you see where I’m at…I can’t stop and I can’t go on because I may never finish.” Ted grabbed a tissue from the box on the side table by the sofa and dabbed his eyes. “I want all this effort of all these years to have meant something. For somebody to hold my book in their hands when I’m gone and think I had something to say. For people to remember my name. And maybe even experience a little fame before I go.” He took off his glasses, smeared with tears. “I don’t understand how it got to the end so quickly. I might have 10 years, 15 maybe. That’s it. That’s the end. And I can’t believe how much time I’ve wasted…”
The therapist leaned over, resting his forearms on his thighs. Ted thought he looked like a stone gargoyle, his skin was so pale.
“What if I could tell you the day you will die, so you won’t have to have all this uncertainty. Would that help you organize your life?”
Ted sat upright. The therapist leaned back, the light behind him completely obscuring his face. Just the outline of his head, the ends of his hair curling at his shoulders.
“How can you do that?”
“It will be a date we will agree on. That will be the day we expect you will die. In the meantime, you’ll have a goal post, control of your time. You’ll be able to make choices about how you live each day you have left, instead of worrying about the unknown. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. This is not a game. It’s my life and there isn’t very much of it left.”
“I understand. It’s just a therapeutic tool – something we can both agree on that will give us the freedom to explore what’s underneath your feelings – your striving for something.”
“I think I’ve been pretty clear,” Ted said, putting his glasses back on. “I don’t know what it all means anymore. Why am I here at all? What can I do to create something lasting, something good, something everyone recognizes as mine before I die?”
“We’re coming to the end of our time together. Think about the idea of our fixing a date. I think it could help.”
The therapist stood up and walked soundlessly toward the door of the small room. The sun had begun to set, and the desk, chair, sofa and floor lamp cast elongated shadows across the floor of the darkening room. Ted stood, smoothed his slacks and offered his hand.
The therapist clasped his hands behind his back and nodded toward the door.
Ted drove home. He didn’t turn on the radio, preferring the silence and the traffic noise to fill his head. He almost drove to the university out of habit. He’d retired two years ago, but often, he found himself driving toward school. On his last day, his colleagues in the English department organized a thoughtful goodbye lunch. There were tearful words, and even a few students who had gone on to write celebrated novels who found the time to attend and thank Ted for his guidance.
At home, after the party, he was at once exhilarated and terrified. He now had time to write full time. No more hiding behind a heavy course load, thesis defense panels to prepare for, school functions to attend. He went to the library and sat at his large mahogany desk. It was his grandfather’s. Grandpa, the famous writer of American naturalistic novels. Seven books on the New York Times best seller list, eight more well-loved and taught in schools.
He opened his laptop, pulled up his latest attempt and surveyed the pile of unopened mail on the desk. He’d better tackle that first, he thought. He pulled an antique letter opener out of the top drawer of the desk and began to hack at the envelopes, placing discarded envelopes, junk mail and other discards in one pile, bills in another and letters to respond to in a third. He looked up at a little plastic calendar that he kept on his desk. It was a perpetual calendar, given to him 40 years ago during a holiday gift exchange. It had a little slide across the bottom to pick the month, then across the top, one shifted the block of calendar days left or right to line up under the day of the week. Ted thought it was a little piece of plastic genius, really.
Ted treasured it, as a kind of penance for failing to understand the depth of happiness and pride that was given with the gift. The giver was a former jockey. He had a very promising career – touted as a possible contender for the big national races – but he fell during an important race at Saratoga in New York. He slid, taking the horse with him. It landed on his right leg, mangling it.
After months in the hospital, riding was not possible and he could not get any kind of job at the track, given the level of superstition that surrounded the culture of jockeys. Eventually, he found a job as a janitor at the school where Ted taught, which is where they met one late night. Luis was always smiling. He pulled his metal mop bucket on wheels, with its built in ringer, from hallway to office, sometimes humming, always leaning on the mop handle to steady his limp.
Ted heard the squeak of the wheels and looked up from his pile of midterm papers. Luis was silhouetted in the doorway, smiling.
“Hi Chief,” he said.
“Hello, Luis.”
“I’m no supposed to tell you but I’m your Secret Santa this year. Got you something you will love.”
Ted looked back down at his papers. “That’s thoughtful, Luis.”
Luis nodded, understanding the dismissal, and shuffled back to the center of the corridor humming.
At the Christmas Party, Luis limp-ran across the cafeteria when Ted arrived. He held the crudely wrapped package up to Ted’s chin. “For you, Chief. I look a long time before I find a thing for you. A thing you keep and use. All for you. Merry Christmas, Mr. Ted.”
Ted accepted the package without enthusiasm. More ugly socks, he thought.
“Open it, Chief,” Luis urged.
“Ok, Luis.”
Ted struggled with the brown paper and bakery string that held the wrapping together. Finally, he pulled as hard as he could to snap the string and the contents fell to the floor.
“No, no!” Luis wailed.
Ted bent over quickly and scooped up the bit of plastic, about the size of a postcard, turning it around in his hands.
“Nothing broken, Luis. What is it?”
“It is a special calendar, Chief. You can use it forever, see? Slide the bottom and the top. You see?”
Ted played with the thing, glancing around at other happy recipients accepting gift cards, luscious boxes of fancy chocolate, warm alpaca hats and scarves.
“Oh I see. You match up the calendar to how the month lays out, clever,” Ted said flatly.
Luis smiled broadly proud of the extravagance of the gift, in his estimation. “You will have it forever,” he whispered.
Ted looked at the month of March dialed up on the thing before him. It was a nondescript time of year. He played with the month slide on the bottom until he landed on October. He thought that felt far enough away, yet near enough that he could accept it. He slid the calendar block until the coming October dates lined up correctly under the days of the week.
“Thursday, October 7,” he said to no one in particular. He turned back to the laptop and wrote a quick note to the therapist.
“I’ve picked my expiration date. Thursday, October 7. I think this is more than a little asinine but I will play along. See you next week.”
He hit send, closed the laptop, turned off the desk light and went to bed.
***
The following Thursday, Ted sat in the plastic chair outside the door of the therapist’s office waiting for the light by the side of the door to blink off, indicating that he could enter. Since he picked the day he would die, which he still thought was nonsense, he did feel better somehow, as if he had a solid timeline within which to plan the work needed on his book.
In fact, the morning after he made the choice, he awoke earlier than was his usual routine, went directly to his computer and wrote for three uninterrupted hours. He didn’t stop, didn’t stand and pace, didn’t get sidetracked by all the little landmines to concentration he had strewn about his writing room. When he was finished, he sat in the kitchen, stared at the wall and felt the familiar anxiety rising in his chest and neck – he was frightened of how soon it would be until he died. He wondered if his sister would keep anything of his as a memento when she came to clean out the house.
The day after, he got up at 3 a.m., completely refreshed, and wrote for two hours, sipping green tea, half-listening to a woman with a husky voice on the radio. Later that morning, he sipped coffee, chewed slowly on his wheat toast with apricot jelly and centered his thoughts on the nausea that welled up. His therapist suggested breathing deeply and emptying his mind, imagining a pin puncturing his thoughts which would appear like cartoon bubbles of words. It didn’t work. He imagined a hospital room, himself in bed, weak, arms full of needles, with tubes snaking down his sides terminating at machines that beeped and pulsated, sending out green lines of light across a screen that were measuring how much life was left in his body. He imagined a doctor coming in to tell him that there was no more to do. Ted would be best served by remaining calm, letting nature take its course. He noticed, in his dream state, that there was no one with him. Entering and leaving this world alone, he thought. How many writers tried to hammer that point home? The next day, he reviewed and revised what he had written. Eight thousand solid words, he thought. And he fiddled with the plot a bit to make it sharper.
He was startled by the door to the therapist’s office swinging open. The therapist motioned for him to enter. Ted began to talk as he walked across the room to his usual chair. “I picked my day and since then I’ve gotten so much done. It’s like I’m free or something. Is that odd?”
The therapist turned away from Ted, closed the door and walked noiselessly to his chair, the light behind him again obscuring his face. “Start again, please,” he said, folding his hands in his lap.
A spring freshet of words flowed from Ted. He was amused at his own enthusiasm, something he hadn’t really felt about his work for several years. He told the therapist about the story, about the routine of writing, about how good he thought the work was. This, too, was something he had never allowed himself to feel.
“What do you think changed?” The therapist asked. “Surely it must be more than just October 7 looming.”
Ted considered the question. “It’s a lot of things, really. I’m remembering moments in my life that I had forgotten, and what a rich vein of material exists there that I’ve not begun to mine. I’m noticing how the light changes throughout the day. I’m even talking to my colleagues more.”
The therapist sat in silence. Ted did, too, not moved to fill the quiet air.
“Have you begun to imagine your death?”
Ted felt the familiar tightening of his neck and chest. He turned away from the therapist. “I can’t… talk about it.”
“It’s what you’re here to do.”
“I can’t. I want to run away when I think about it – go to the bank, withdraw thousands of dollars, go to the airport and get a ticket to a place very far away. To spend days getting there, no one able to contact me and have time when I don’t feel compelled to achieve anything. And then when I get there, to go to a hotel where nobody knows me. I would check in, then take a walk. Have a coffee and watch people I don’t know. I’m not ready for it to end. I’m just starting to understand what it’s about, who I am, what I’m here to do. I don’t want it to end.”
Ted started to weep.
The therapist stood up. “It won’t end until October 7, remember? I think that’s all we’ll do today.” Hands behind his back, he nodded at the door. Ted wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, looked up at the therapist, whose right side was in shadow, and walked out the door.
***
The therapist sat at his black desk at the far end of the room, almost a separate space from where he listened to his clients. He sat before a pile of white file folders. Each had a date carefully typed on a label and affixed to the tab on the folder. His long, bony fingers opened the first one, marked August 25. His grey hair swung down both sides of his face as he leaned over the desk, absorbing the single-spaced text on the single sheet of paper in the file. A name, a date, a description of deep fears and unchecked imagination that brought clients to him. He smiled. They are all so fragile. Someone must help them. I am the only one who can, he thought.
He looked up, out the window. Spring soon. All that color. A time when most of the patients get depressed. He didn’t particularly like the unbridled eruption of life from the still earth that occurred each year. Not orderly. It would not have been his choice to arrange it this way. He closed the first file, laid it neatly to the left, and opened the next one. March 21. Next week. He must prepare for the woman who would arrive with trepidation, relief, confusion, and a basket of unanswered prayers. This one would be easy. She had been seeing the therapist for two years. She was in her early 40s and explained that she felt she had been drifting for 20 years. It was as if every time she found a promising path, the action of ocean water against the sandy beach took all evidence of it. She picked the date for no particular reason. The therapist grinned. Clients are so thoughtless sometimes. They don’t see the big picture. That’s why I’m here. He looked up at the ceiling. That’s why I’m here.
Late into the night, the therapist reviewed the contents of the white folders. When he finished, he closed the last one, moved it to the pile on the left and exhaled. It would be a busy spring.
He took a glass from the bar cart next to the desk and poured a little whisky. He looked out the window at the dark shapes of the trees, the stone fence, and sipped. When he finished his drink, he took a heavy blanket and pillow out of the office closet, put the pillow on the couch, stretched out, covered himself, and drifted to sleep.
***
Ted looked forward to the sound of walking through piles of dead leaves each year. Despite the shorter days and chilling air, he liked the fall best. There was something about the retreat of summer that fit his disposition. The sidewalk from the car to the therapist’s office was softly illuminated as the street lights began to glow as the day oozed away. The door to the therapist’s office was open – no client before him this evening. The therapist was already in his seat, the lamp on. He tented his fingers in front of his eyes and tilted his head toward the couch. Ted sat, looked at the silhouetted man.
“How have you been this week?”
“You know,” Ted said, “I’ve alternated between terror and acceptance. It’s September. Next month is the time. The book is moving, not as fast as I’d like, but I’ll have an acceptable draft for an editor to work with by the 7th. Ted Miller’s posthumous work. I never thought about that before.”
“How do you feel about not seeing the work published?”
“It makes me sad. And mad. How have I managed to wait so long to get serious about the thing I’ve wanted most for such a long time.”
“Other things, other priorities?”
“That’s what I tell myself. But I think the real answer is fear. Fear that it won’t be any good – that editor will snicker and in the office break room, will wave around my manuscript and, to an audience of others, say ‘hey listen to this…’ and everyone starts to laugh, they bang the table and some have tears streaming from their eyes, they’re laughing so hard.”
Ted sighed.
“Is there something you can do about that? Something you want to do about that?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s hopeless. Just be happy. I envy those people sometimes – the ones who just do things every day to fill up the time and don’t complain.”
“What is the book about?”
“About a woman who runs away with a circus. She leaves a family, a job, her friends – everything she’s ever known to join a circus and train as an aerialist. She knows it’s completely irresponsible but she can’t help herself – it’s as if some otherworldly force is pulling her into the center of something she can’t quite see.”
“Do you know how the book will end?”
“I do. It’s the hardest part to write. But I can’t talk about it yet. I’m into it and not quite sure if it will go where I intend.”
“We’ll end here, then.”
The therapist, face obscured by the light behind him stood and nodded toward the door.
“I don’t feel like I’m finished.”
“That’s all we have time for, Ted.”
“Could I pay for just a few more minutes?”
The therapist looked at the door.
Ted understood their wordless conversation. Despite his oddness, he thought the therapist had a deep knowledge of what roiled and bubbled inside him. He was a bit scared of the man. He could appear menacing at times – not that Ted thought the therapist would attack him, but that there were currents underneath the surface that were best taken seriously. And he had almost no digital footprint, which Ted found strange. Given that his work required potential clients to find him, learn about him, there was only scant information available, none of it very detailed. Ted found out more from his friend than he did by researching the man.
He shuffled through the leaves, back to his car. Looking back at the window of the office, he saw the outline of the therapist’s figure. A light snapped off and the room was a black slab in a row of glowing windows on the brick building’s first floor.
***
At about 4 o’clock, the therapist pulled a white file from the pile, placed it carefully in front of him and opened it. October 7. He read the single page three times, closed the file and looked up. He didn’t know why this day felt more difficult than the many ginned up “death days” he had contrived with clients over the years. He remembered the first time he used the technique. He had been practicing in Arizona. His client had accomplished so much anticipating the day. And the man in Wisconsin he took on. He ceased the five year war he’d been waging with himself and found two months of peace. This is why I enjoy this work, he thought. Today would be an especially memorable one.
Ted was five minutes early. He clutched a fat file of papers which he presented to the therapist. The therapist took the file and set it on a table next to his chair and sat.
“Today is the day I was supposed to die and I haven’t. All day, I’ve had the feeling that this is just the beginning. The manuscript is done. I feel like I can do it again. I think it’s good,” Ted said as he sat on the sofa. “I hope you’ll read it and give me some feedback. I’ve come to think of you as a trusted early reader. And it’s October 7…6 p.m. But here I am. Nothing has happened, nothing is going to happen, and I’ve finished my novel. I have to tell you, I thought that picking the date was nonsense for a couple of months. But as I got into the novel, I began to understand how brilliant the concept is. I’m so grateful that you though that this approach would help me.”
“That’s what we set out to do, isn’t it, Ted?” The therapist got up and walked to his desk. “You’ve done well. It is time for us to end our work together.”
Ted felt his chest tighten. He stood up and walked to the therapist’s desk. “I think we’re just making progress. I really want to continue…understand more.”
“No, Ted. Our time is through. I’m proud of you.” The therapist opened his desk drawer.
“Please. The book… I’m going to need support through the editing process…I need you.” He stepped closer to the desk.
“Don’t beg, Ted. I hate when they beg.”
The therapist withdrew his hand from the desk drawer with a Glock 17 in it. He raised his arm and aimed at Ted’s forehead.
“Today’s the day, Ted.”
He fired, and Ted crumpled to the floor. The therapist took a wet wipe out of the desk drawer and wiped the gun. He dropped the gun and wipe into the waste basket behind him by the door. The metallic plunk of the gun made the therapist smile. He looked over at the manuscript on the table. He walked around the desk, avoiding Ted’s body, its head facing the therapist’s chair, blood spatter up the side of its light blue upholstery. The therapist avoided stepping in the pool of blood that had formed around Ted’s head, and picked up the manuscript. He knelt next to Ted’s twisted body and extracted his car keys from the pocket of his slacks. Good thing he landed this way, the therapist thought. Easy. He walked toward the door, stopping to drop the manuscript into the can, it’s papers fanning around the circumference of the basket, obscuring the gun and the wipe.
The therapist tucked his long grey hair behind his ears and walked out the door. He looked up at the dark sky. The chilly air made him feel awake and alive. He opened Ted’s car door, inserted the key, and listened for the reassuring thrum of the engine. He made his way out of the parking lot and to the interstate. He looked in the mirror for a moment. Maybe Kansas next, he thought.
[Image Credit : Photo by mymind on Unsplash]
Ellen Spear is the editor of Berkshires Week, the art/culture/food website of The Berkshire Eagle, an independent daily newspaper in western Massachusetts. In addition to pieces on culture, she writes about food for the paper. She has had careers in public broadcasting and directing museums in the New England area. Out of the journalism arena, Spear writes short stories and serial fiction.
