Out There: a novel (5 page)

Inside, the waiting room was occupied by a number of young guys who looked a lot like Jefferson, brown-skinned ex-soldiers, many of them lost in shell-shocked stares or chattering incessantly, compulsively. He signed in and waited until his name was called, and a nurse led him down a hall with pale blue walls and many closed doors, finally ushering him through one of the doors into a room painted a deeper blue. There was no window at all, much less one looking out on the garden of his daydreams, with its greenery, its flitting birds. He took a seat on one of two black metal chairs—he’d been wrong about the plush couch too. Someone was crying on the other side of the wall.

He’d been helping Esco make tamales on Thursday night when he told her about the doctor in Albuquerque. She’d grabbed his wrist across the bar on which the pork and chile mixture, the bowl of masa, the cornhusks, lay, squeezing him in her relief. She looked as if she was about to cry, the space between her eyebrows earnest, but then she spoke instead. “This doctor will help you, Jefferson.”

He hadn’t known what to make of his grandmother’s words. Frankly, he hadn’t been aware that he needed help, even though he had called the VA hotline late that one night. Because of that, he guessed, he’d been scheduled to see the doctor right away
.
He’d thought that his grandmother and Nigel, and even Auntie Linda, who he’d spoken to only once and then briefly from her front stoop, were feeling good about him, were proud of him, were waiting to see what he would do next. They seemed to believe in him as they always had, their faith unshaken that now that he was home from war, he would do good things. It was as if they were thinking—each time they saw him—that here was Jefferson, their sweet, smart youngest boy who’d graduated with honors from Santa Fe High and, on the authority of his own well-informed and intelligent brain, gone off and joined the army. Jefferson had not sensed any worry or judgment from any of them. And he thought he’d done a pretty good job these past few weeks of living up to their expectations. He was okay. The word had become a staple of their conversation.

Are you okay?

Yes, I’m okay.

How are you?

I’m okay.

But the truth, as Jefferson was beginning to suspect, was that he was not okay. That’s what he’d told the man on the hotline. He needed someone, maybe a doctor, to help him. He wasn’t sure what form the help would take, but he hoped it might be an answer to a question that was getting louder and louder in his mind.
Why?
Could a doctor help him answer this question?

Dr. Wesleyan arrived almost as soon as the nurse had checked his pulse and blood pressure. The door had shut briefly and then opened again, leaving him no real time to prepare. He’d hoped to be able to sing and possibly pray just a bit before beginning his conversation with her. He felt he needed to put himself in a meditative state of remembrance before he could answer the sorts of questions he imagined she might have for him, so he could ask for the help he needed.
Why?
That was the question he needed help answering.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Wesleyan,” she said, sticking out her hand.

She was young. So young that Jefferson tried to calculate the minimum number of years required to get through college and then medical school. When he’d come up with the number seven—some people graduated from regular college in three years, he knew—he looked again at Dr. Wesleyan. She must have graduated from high school at age fourteen, he decided.

“Hey, good afternoon. How’s it going?” he said finally.

“I’m doing well, thank you. It’s Jefferson, right?”

“Yep.”

She sat down across from him in the swivel chair. It looked far more comfortable than either of the two metal chairs, but it was clearly labeled “the doctor’s chair” in an unlabeled way, so he hadn’t thought of sitting in it. He chuckled a little to himself at the thought of this young woman in front of him being a medical doctor. She was probably the same age as he was.

“So what brings you in here today, Jefferson?” she began—a little too quickly, he thought. Wasn’t there going to be a warm-up joke or two? Wasn’t there going to be a moment for him to get to know her before the serious talk began? But the doctor had jumped straight in, and now she plowed right ahead in what seemed to him a droning singsong, hardly stopping to draw breath.

He thought he’d uttered some sort of answer, and then she’d gone on to ask him about when he’d first gone over to Iraq and where he’d been stationed exactly, the name of his unit, his commanding officer’s name, what his title had been, what kind of daily assignments he’d been given—“You know, just a few of the details, to give me a little of the background of your experience.” Once she’d recorded all of that, she explained, they could get on to whatever he wanted to talk about.

Jefferson heard all of this, and yet he didn’t. He was trying so very hard to concentrate on what she was asking of him—he knew it must be important but his head was beginning to have a strange watery feel to it, a dizziness that the purplish hue of the room’s fluorescent lights accentuated. Her words swam at him like the faces of people he had seen in a long-ago dream. And just as Jefferson began to grasp the fact that these words were in fact people he had known, not just ones he’d dreamed, they became butterflies escaping her mouth, lovely free creatures circumnavigating the room. He watched the doctor’s eyebrows move up and down, the up-and-down of her lips. And this odd squinting thing she did with her nose—an unattractive little antic in an otherwise soft face. He glanced back at the ceiling, where the butterflies were now disappearing into the metal grate of an air conditioning vent. Suddenly he found himself wondering why he was sitting in this blue room.

“What was the question again?”

“Right, so I know that was a lot to throw at you—but can you just tell me a little about yourself?” She smiled a sweet-seeming smile as she sat, her pen poised over the yellow legal pad that lay on her lap, and for a moment Jefferson wondered if she had practiced the expression in her bathroom medicine cabinet mirror. He wanted to believe that the doctor was on his side, that she could help him answer the question
Why?
But something inside his brain was preventing him from believing it. Jefferson knew this was most likely his own problem, that his lack of trust was due to a problem—a temporary problem, but acute at the moment—with his brain, that it had nothing at all to do with Dr. Wesleyan or her intentions. It was true that she was young and most likely inexperienced, and that she could have used a little work on her bedside manner. She probably worked too hard to have a boyfriend to loosen up her smile. It didn’t mean she was an enemy.

“My name is Jefferson Long Soldier,” he said, and stopped. As soon as he heard his own voice, the sound of his own name inside that calm, blue room, he felt he could not say any more.

The doctor wrote something on her yellow paper and looked up at him, waiting. “And you were with the Tenth Mountain Division, I see here.” She was reading from a piece of paper in her lap.  “Light artillery, I see.”  She looked at him expectantly. 

Jefferson stared up at the air conditioning vent, now absent any butterflies, and wondered where they’d all flown. It was possible that the ductwork in this building was connected to all sorts of places, that those butterflies could have ended up, for instance, in locations as varied as New York City or Atlanta or Baton Rouge. Some of the guys in his platoon had been from those places. He looked back at the doctor.

“I was a member of the Tenth Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, New York.”

“Right,” she said, writing something on her yellow paper again. “Fort Drum.”

He knew there had been other parts of the question she asked, but those words had flown so far away from him, he could not possibly remember what they had been. They could have flown all the way to Tucson by now. He stared back at the doctor’s face, questioning her. Could she help him? Did she know the answer to the question
Why?

“And what was your basic job over there?” she said, guiding him onward.

“Right,” he said, remembering the question now.  “I was a light artillery guy. We called ourselves the Rock Guns.”

She asked him a few more questions about the Rock Guns—what his specific assignment within the group had been, how many guys he had worked with, how often that had changed—but none of it struck him as anything he felt able to answer at that moment. He was aware of searching again for the butterflies up at the ceiling and wondering again where they might have gone when he became aware of the doctor’s voice again.

“So, anything else you want to say about the guys in your squad or platoon, Jefferson?”

“Nope, not really,” he said, standing up to shake out his legs and his hands, which were beginning to tremble a little. He wondered whether the doctor might want to hear about his sweet Remedios, but decided against it for the moment. She was still writing in her yellow tablet, and he guessed she was a busy woman and that probably the half hour was close to gone, so he probably shouldn’t bring up any new topics, particularly something that she hadn’t initiated, like his dog.

As he stood and watched her write, right there and yet so far away, he wondered what she really thought about talk therapy for veterans. Did she really believe it could help? But he didn’t ask because he didn’t want to offend her. He wouldn’t have told her this, but he hadn’t felt much of a connection with her, not like he’d hoped for. He didn’t know why he’d held out so much hope for this visit, but he had, somehow envisioning just the right listener for all his troubles. The bus ride from the train station had been interesting, and he always loved a train ride. It had been good to get out of Santa Fe for the day. And there was no reason to make the young doctor feel bad about her job.

Still, Jefferson felt himself making up his mind as he watched the doctor continue to write his few words down on her yellow tablet: his question could not be answered by a doctor like Dr. Wesleyan. He wasn’t angry at the army about this. He wasn’t angry at Dr. Wesleyan. Instead he tried to think of an appropriate quote. He paused as he began to turn toward the door and racked his brain. What would Gabriel say to this woman?

“Wait a sec,” she said, finally noticing that he was leaving. “You’re leaving? Well, here’s your paperwork. Just schedule your next appointment on the way out, okay?”

Okay.
It was the wrong word to say to him. Jefferson—caught in the middle of searching for possible quotes from Gabriel—found he could not let the word lie untouched. To do so would be irresponsible. If he truly wished to heal, Jefferson could not let anyone anywhere—not even this well-meaning young doctor assigned to him by the Department of Veteran Affairs—roll the word
okay
off her tongue at him.

“No,” he said now. “You see, I’m not okay.”

“Excuse me?”

“You just said, ‘Okay?’ as if you were asking me a question, so I’m answering. No, I’m not okay.”

The doctor seemed in that moment to be the last person in the world who could ever understand him.

“Well, of course not,” she said. “And that’s why you’re here.”

The polish of her well-thought-out dark blond waves had required a lot of time with a blow dryer and a brush, he saw now. He imagined her standing in front of the bathroom mirror, putting on makeup. He imagined her as a high school senior in the front row in Honors English, raising her hand for every question.

“You have no idea why I’m here, Dr. Wesleyan.”

He felt the bravest thing he could do was stand with his knees locked and let the words sink in. The reason he had come to this doctor’s office had now been made clear to him. He stared at the blue wall in front of him and back at the young doctor and then back at the wall again. This was not the place or the person to help him.

“I don’t want to be rude or disrespectful to you—I’m sure your intentions are good. But this coming down here on the train and talking to you is not going to work for me.”

“No one likes this the first time, Jefferson.”

“I’m not coming back, Dr. Wesleyan. I’m leaving now.”

She became very passive, as if practicing another technique she had learned in medical school. She told him that she understood, and that if he didn’t want to come back, it was certainly his decision to make, but she wondered who he had to talk to back in Santa Fe. She wondered if he wouldn’t consider scheduling another appointment next week, just in case he changed his mind. Just in case he needed someone to talk to. And then she said the thing that triggered a whole lot of what was to follow. She said, “Just in case you can’t find that perfect person who can listen to your stories.”

“But I already know who he is,” Jefferson said, realizing the truth of what he was saying as he said it. He did know the perfect person. It was as if the answer, strapped to his chest as it had been all these months, was only now making its presence known. How simple it was! What wonderful sense it made, now that he had realized it! But the doctor did not seem to be traveling along with him in the epiphany. She had a sudden strained look between her eyebrows. She said something about how nice it was that he had someone to talk to, but that he should make a follow-up appointment just in case.

She glanced at the wall clock behind him and began shuffling the papers on her lap. “Time for my next appointment, Jefferson. Best of luck to you, if I don’t see you again, though I hope I will.” She was dismissing him, no doubt already thinking about the name and rank and job description of the next guy, but Jefferson found he had a bit more to say. He didn’t want to give the wrong impression, to make her think he was a guy who didn’t care about his own mental health. He wanted the young doctor to realize that he had a plan for his own recovery, a plan taking shape right here in front of her. Maybe something he had to say would help her in her job.