The drive across town is twenty minutes I know in my body. Same lights. Same merge. Same gas station with the sign that’s been missing its E since October. Bug rides along the whole way in my head, as if the weight of her is still in my lap. The pattern went quiet under a cat I met three days ago and haven’t stopped turning that over. That’s its own kind of data. Underneath that, lower, the goal from the blowout runs its loop. The screen I never saw clean. It plays a few times between lights and I let it, because fighting it in traffic costs more than it’s worth, and because I know exactly where I’m taking it.
I park and get out of my car and turn towards Gwen’s building. And Berger is directly in front of me.
He’s coming out of the building as I’m walking towards it, keys already in his hand, and we both stop for a half-second longer than two guys crossing a parking lot stop. He clocks where I’m headed. I clock where he’s been. Neither of us says anything.
“Soucy.”
“Berger.”
That’s all of it. He gets in his car. I go in.
Gwen’s office has two chairs, a couch, a window with the blinds set at the angle I like. She put them there and never moved them. A low table holds a box of tissues I’ve never used and a small smooth stone I’ve picked up exactly once. I take my chair. She takes hers. The cushion has worn to the shape of a man who sits very still, and there’s a comfort in a thing that holds its position on you. She knows that’s load-bearing. She knew it before I did.
“How’s the routine?” she asks, because we start where we start.
“The same. Routine’s the same, meds are the same, sleep’s the same.”
“It’s the playoffs. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some differences.”
“The playoffs are loud. The loud’s fine. I expected it.”
“And the routine holds inside the loud?”
“So far. Forty-five minutes. That’s where we built it, that’s where it sits. Some days it runs long, fifty if the room’s wrong, but forty-five is the number. The OCD wants more. It always wants more but it’s holding right now.”
She nods. I built that number with another specialist, the summer after the diagnosis, when the checking was eating ninety minutes before they taught me how to interrupt it. Forty-five is the floor we found and I brought that floor with me to Atlanta. To Gwen.
“Good.” She lets a beat sit. She’s good at the beat, better than anyone I know at letting a silence do the work a question would only get in the way of. “You played a game. Tell me about that.”
“Third period of a blowout. Twenty minutes in the crease.”
“How was it?”
“Clean. One goal I’d want back. The crease is the crease.”
“The crease is the one place the noise stops.” She hands my own sentence back to me, the way she does when she wants me to hear it from the outside.
“It’s the one place it stops.”
She waits. I came in carrying a thing and there’s no use pretending I didn’t. She’ll wait until next Thursday if she has to, and I have film to watch.
“Something else happened,” I say. “I went over a teammate’s place a few days ago. There were cats. Two of them, kittens, basically. One sat on me, and then the other one came up too, and they stayed.” I don’t give her the rest of it. The small one climbed me like a tree with no plan and no exit and decided I wasfurniture. I give her the part that holds something up. “And the hands stopped.” I look down at them, running the idle pattern against my knee. “Not the crease way. In the crease the whole brain goes somewhere and the rest of the world turns off. This wasn’t that. I wasn’t doing anything. I was in a chair with a cat asleep on me and the pattern just wasn’t running. I didn’t notice it was gone until after, when it came back.”
She doesn’t write anything down. She never writes when it matters. She writes when it doesn’t, to give her hands something to do I think, which I clocked the first month and have never mentioned.
“You know there’s a name for an animal that does that on purpose,” she says.
“And you are going to tell me, right?” I look at her and she’s smiling at me.
“An emotional support animal. And before you make a face, I want to be precise, because you’ll try to turn it into something it’s not. It won’t touch the OCD and the rumination. It won’t stop a single compulsion. The thoughts will come exactly as often and bite exactly as hard. That isn’t what it’s for.”
“Then what is it for?”
“It’s a weight. Something alive that gives your hands a place to be that isn’t the pattern, and gives you something to point at that isn’t the exits. It doesn’t make the hard thing smaller. It makes you less alone inside it.”
“I have my aquarium.”
“You can’t hold an aquarium in your lap at three in the morning.”
