Duane's Depressed (27 page)

He had scarcely moved all weekend—he didn’t even know whether he could walk to the doctor’s office. Fortunately there was a phone book in his room—he took down the number of a local taxi, in case he became so weak he had to call for assistance.

Around noon he showered and cleaned up as best he could, but the fact was he had been wearing the same clothes since early Friday morning; the laundry problem, which had seemed minor enough when he was living in the cabin, had begun to seem major now that he had taken up residence at the Stingaree
Courts. Somehow or other he was soon going to have to provide himself with some clean clothes. There was a twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart not far from the motel. He could have walked there anytime during the weekend and bought clean clothes, but he had failed to do so, and now it was Monday noon and too late. His shirt was not exactly filthy, but neither was it exactly clean.

Duane was halfway to town before he concluded that one reason he felt so weak and tired was because he hadn’t eaten anything since Friday. He had remembered to feed the dog, but had forgotten to feed himself. Fortunately there was a pancake house only a few blocks from the doctor’s office. As he was walking to it Duane remembered that he had a small packet of peanuts in his shirt pocket—he had purchased them at the liquor store when he went to get whiskey and ice, but had forgotten about them during his weekend of fasting.

He munched the peanuts as he made for the pancake house. He took a booth and ordered a big breakfast; it was two in the afternoon but any time was breakfast time at the pancake house. Once the food came he found that he wasn’t particularly hungry—the idea of food appealed to him more than the reality. His farm fresh eggs and crisp bacon went mostly untouched, though he did eat a few slices of toast as he drank his coffee. The desire for food had left him, along with the desire for almost everything else. Guilty about not cleaning his plate, he left a big tip for the waitress and then went out and walked around and around the block until it became time to present himself at Dr. Carmichael’s door.

8

T
HE MINUTE
D
UANE TURNED INTO
D
R.
C
ARMICHAEL’S STREET
he began to feel better. Just the sight of her simple, well-designed house, with its nicely kept lawn and orderly flower beds, made him feel more at rest inside. The house and the yard suggested order and peace of a sort that could be achieved if one paid close attention to the harmonies of life.

There was no one in the waiting room when he arrived—he had come twenty minutes early, hoping he could finish the article about bats. He had almost finished it when the young receptionist, Natalie, appeared, smiled, and ushered him into Dr. Carmichael’s office.

This time the doctor didn’t shake hands when he came in, though she did smile.

“Hello,” she said, indicating that he was to take a seat in the same comfortable chair.

Duane was determined to make a quick start this time, and to keep in mind the fact that the clock was ticking.

“I guess I’ve been needing this more than I realized,” he said. “I spent the whole weekend doing nothing—just waiting for it to be time to come for my appointment.”

He stopped and looked at the doctor.

“Do you think that means I’m real depressed?” he asked.

Dr. Carmichael regarded him solemnly, with her quiet, grave expression, before she answered.

“It’s often a relief to have someone who really listens to what you have to say,” she said finally. “That’s one reason why there are psychiatrists. I don’t know yet how depressed you are, or whether you’re depressed at all, but if you feel the need to see me strongly enough to put your life on hold, then I imagine we need to meet more than once a week, if you can manage it.”

“Oh, I can manage it,” Duane said. “Right now I don’t have anything else
to
manage.”

“Then probably we should try four times a week, until we learn a little bit more about how you’re feeling,” the doctor said.

“Fine with me—or five times a week, if that’s not too many,” Duane said, immediately.

“It
is
too many,” the doctor said firmly. “This process can be tiring at first. Let’s stick to four.”

Duane nodded. He felt acutely conscious that his shirt wasn’t really clean—he wondered if the doctor noticed that he was wearing the same clothes he had worn on the first visit.

“I take it you didn’t walk in the eighteen miles this morning?” Dr. Carmichael said.

“Nope, I stayed in a motel,” Duane said.

“Round trip to my office four times a week is about one hundred and forty-four miles, if I’m figuring right,” the doctor said. “I like to walk myself but I doubt I could manage that.”

“I don’t need to go home much,” Duane said.

Dr. Carmichael looked at him silently for what seemed a long time. She wasn’t tense or threatening—in fact seemed quite relaxed. She kept a notepad in her lap but so far he had not seen her write on it.

“Tell me about the walking,” she said. “I’d like to know how it started and any thoughts you might have about it.”

Duane told her everything he could remember about the day he had started walking. He had had coffee at a café in Wichita Falls, driven up into southern Oklahoma to talk to one of his crews, driven back home, parked the pickup in the carport, went in his house, hid the keys in the old cracked cup, and walked away. There was nothing very unusual about any of it. His own narration seemed boring to him.

“There was no big reason for me to walk off like that,” he
said. “I don’t blame my wife for being upset. I’ve never done anything like that, and we’ve been married forty years.

“There was no big reason,” he repeated. “I just decided to do it, and when I did it, it felt right.”

“That may mean that there
was
a big reason for you to start walking,” the doctor said. “It just may be that the reason didn’t involve your wife. Marital conflict isn’t the only reason why people take sudden turns in their lives.”

Duane had not thought of that—at least hadn’t thought of it in such simple terms.

“It doesn’t seem to have presented any big practical problems, at least not until you started having to keep these appointments,” the doctor said.

“Well, laundry,” he said. “I need to arrange to get some clean clothes, and I have to be sure to keep food for my dog.”

The doctor looked at him with interest when he mentioned the dog.

“You have a dog with you, at your motel?” she asked.

“Yes, Shorty,” he said. “He’s a blue heeler.”

“Bring him tomorrow, would you?” she said. “We have nothing against dogs here. You can bring him right into the session.”

Her statement took Duane by surprise. Why would he want to bring Shorty with him to the psychiatrist? The thought of having Shorty there while he tried to talk to the doctor was disquieting, somehow. One thing he liked about the sessions so far was a sense of the privacy of the occasion. With Shorty there it wouldn’t be quite as private, although Shorty, of course, would not understand what was being said. It wouldn’t be like bringing another person into the session, but it wouldn’t be as private, either.

“He’s not a good inside dog,” he said. “He might get nervous and pee on something.”

“I expect we could survive that, if it happened,” the doctor said. “But if you feel awkward about bringing him, then we won’t keep him inside. We’ll put him in the back yard. He can bark at my ducks.”

“You have ducks?” he asked.

“Yep, I have a nice little duck pond and four ducks,” she said.

Duane said no more, but he had decided already just to forget Shorty when it came time for his next appointment. Ducks or no ducks, he didn’t want to have to worry about any potential misbehavior.

“You were talking to me about your father and mother the other day,” the doctor said. “I had to cut you off because the hour was up. I have a feeling you might have more to say about your parents.”

“No, not really,” Duane said—but then he slid right back into an account of the last fishing trip he had taken with his father just before the fatal accident. He described how patient his father had been, in instructing him how to remove a fishhook from a fish, or even from a turtle, if they happened to hook a turtle by accident.

Again, it seemed that he had barely begun before the doctor stood up and indicated to him that the hour was over.

“Don’t forget to bring Shorty, when you come tomorrow,” the doctor said, as she was showing him out. “I very much want to meet your dog.”

9

O
NCE AGAIN
Duane found himself outside the doctor’s pleasant house, on the rock path that led through her flower beds to the street. Once again, he was dazed, confused by the fact that time seemed to pass so much more quickly when he was talking to the doctor than it did when he wasn’t. Not only did he not remember much that he had said, he remembered almost nothing of what the doctor said, because she had said almost nothing. She asked about his parents and suggested that he bring his dog to the next meeting. Otherwise she had been silent.

What he mainly took away from his two hours with Dr. Carmichael was how comforting her presence was. If she had formed any opinions about his condition or the turn his life had taken she hadn’t revealed them to him. Probably he was foolish to hope that she
would
reveal them so soon but he still wished for at least a comment or two—something that would help him understand whether he was crazy or not. The only indication he had that she thought he needed help was that she wanted to see him four times a week. Surely she didn’t see all her patients four times a week. She had been silent while he babbled, and yet all he had talked about was his father, long dead, and what he remembered of his mother’s sadness—both things he assumed he had made his peace with years before.

Duane wandered back in the direction of the Stingaree Courts, but slowly. He didn’t cover the miles at a steady clip, as
he had become used to doing. When he began to feel tired he sat down on a curb and rested. He would never have supposed that chatting for an hour with his doctor would have such an immediate effect on his energies. The effect was so tiring that he began to wonder if he was going to be able to keep to his policy of walking everywhere. There was very little that he needed to do, yet that little—clean clothes, for example—were chores that seemed to take more energy than he had. He had either to buy new clothes or to go to Thalia and get some, and there was no way he could make it to Thalia and back on foot, as shaky as he was. Even diverting himself over to the Wal-Mart, a diversion that would only have taken an hour when he was feeling fit, seemed suddenly to be beyond his powers. He didn’t know how to account for such a large, sudden change. On Friday he had easily walked eighteen miles; this was Monday and he was having trouble making it the two miles back to the Stingaree Courts.

There was a Burger King just ahead, right on his route. Remembering that he had had almost nothing to eat for three days, he went in and ordered a milk shake and some fries. The milk shake, when it came, tasted amazingly good, and so did the fries. Before he left the Burger King he consumed two more milk shakes and another order of fries.

While he was eating it occurred to him that he must be experiencing what had once been called a nervous breakdown. That was what they had called it some years back when Sonny Crawford began to go crazy.

So far Dr. Carmichael had not mentioned a nervous breakdown—she had not even confirmed that she considered him to be depressed. Duane had no idea what she thought about his mental state, but he did know that he had ceased to be able to imagine a life that didn’t involve regular appointments with Dr. Carmichael. The visits were holding him together—at least that was how he felt. They had replaced walking, which had been what was holding him together for the last few weeks.

When Duane finished his meal he headed on back to the motel, walking along briskly for almost a mile. Then, between one block and the next, he ran out of steam, began to feel wobbly, and experienced such overpowering fatigue that he thought
he was going to have to give up and call a taxi, even though the motel was now actually in sight, not more than half a mile to the west.

He sat for a time on a large concrete block that had apparently fallen off a truck and been left by the side of the road. There was a pay phone at the liquor store where he had bought the whiskey and ice, and the liquor store was only one hundred yards away, but Duane continued to sit. He told himself it was ridiculous to call a taxi to take him half a mile—besides, for reasons he didn’t understand, the principle of walking everywhere was still important to him. Something in him didn’t want to give up on the principle of walking—a principle he had evolved suddenly, for no clear reason.

Finally, after spending more than half an hour sitting on the concrete block, Duane got up and walked on to the Stingaree Courts. When he opened the door Shorty immediately went out to race around the parking lot. Duane fell on the bed. He had no memory of letting Shorty back in, but someone must have, because he was there in the early morning when Duane awoke. What brought him awake was the sound of sleet peppering the window of his room. He had slept too heavily to notice that the room had grown chill during the night. The sound of the sleet brought him wide awake—he felt fresh and energetic for the first time since his initial session with Dr. Carmichael. He went out into the cold dawn wind, letting the sleet pepper him for a few minutes. Maybe a cold snap was what he needed to put some spring back in his step.

While Shorty was indulging in another run around the parking lot Duane went back in and showered—only to realize, when he finished, that he had no clean clothes to put on. In his fresh, invigorated mood the lack of clean clothes was intolerable. He could put on his dirty clothes and walk through the sleety norther to the Wal-Mart but the thought irritated him, mainly because he hated going in large stores. His wardrobe was simple—for years, when his shirts or jeans began to fray, Karla simply bought him a dozen more of the same size and same brand. When, now and then, she attempted to spiff him up by buying something different, something she and the children considered
fashionable, Duane simply ignored the purchases and let them hang in the closet until they found their way into one of the ambitious garage sales Karla staged every few years.