A Christmas Blizzard Read Online Free PDF Page B

Walters who dashed off a prescription for something called Mist On The Mountains and told him to take two right away and then one a day in the morning with food (but not with celery).
    “What is this?” James said.
    “Antidepressant.”
    “But which one?”
    “What’s the problem?”
    “You can’t tell me what it is?”
    “What do you want? The chemical formula? A seminar on reuptake inhibitors? In a week you’ll feel terrific. Have a nice day.” The shrink went to the door and opened it.
    “What does it do?” said James.
    “What do you mean, ‘what does it do?’ It’s an anti-depressant. It makes you happy. It induces amnesia and it snip-snip-snips the thread of memory and all those bad memories go drifting away like dirty bathwater and you’ll be boyish and ebullient again.”
    “Will I still be able to read and write?”
    “Probably.”
    “Probably!!!”
    “ There are trade-offs,” said the psychiatrist. “But listen—you don’t want it? Fine. I’ll save it for somebody else. And good luck.” And presented a bill for $220 for consultation.
    Pump Handle Syndrome. Ever since childhood, when the temperature dropped below twenty below, he got painful stomach cramps and nausea and felt listless lassitude and modern medicine couldn’t do a thing for him, and then in Zurich once, at a party, he met a Nobel Prize-winning psycho-physiologist named Dr. Heinrich Hertz who had done interesting work in the field of polar obsessions at the Zentral Kontor zie Ordnung Zuzammenschluss Medizinisch Forschung Verbindung Geschloss and who put a blue slip of paper to Mr. Sparrow’s tongue and examined it under a microscope and murmured to himself, Gespruchen zee daskompenforshnittgennocktvairbruggendeehompen and he told Mr. Sparrow he should move to a warm climate and avoid freezing weather— Eis und Schnee—nicht! Nein!— and he recommended spending winters in Hawaii and Mr. Sparrow bought Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau. And his pump-handle problem was solved.
    Instant success! Exactly how modern science is supposed to work.
    Problems that people used to struggle their whole lives with, pushing the boulder up the hill and then it overwhelms them and rolls back down and they have to push it back up—modern science can fix this with one wave of its beautiful hand. A little man with pince-nez glasses puts blue paper on your tongue ( Ahhhhh ) and looks up and says, “I vill tell you two tinks: you must komm in out of ze coldt! Undt you must shtay out of ze coldt!”
    But he had to run a big corporation in Chicago, so he couldn’t live full time at Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau and Mrs. Sparrow was active in the arts in Chicago and not ready to give up theater and dance and music and painting for a life of collecting seashells and making necklaces of hibiscus blossoms so Mr. Sparrow stayed Chicago-bound. Meanwhile his pump-handle problem only got worse. In cold weather, he had to force himself to keep his tongue in his mouth and not put it on car door handles or the bronze busts of Studs Terkel and Ernie Banks outside the library or the railing going up the front stairs of the Bunyan Club.
    Dr. Boemer told him that he was exhibiting obsessive-compulsive behavior and that there was a medical device that might help him, but then Dr. Boemer got to talking about other OCD cases he’d seen—obsessive hand-wringing, obsessive counting of ceiling tiles, obsessive ironing and pacing and talking, obsessive Facebook updating and friending, a male patient who went to a gym three times a day to shoot free-throws, exactly three hundred each time, and how Dr. Boemer had gotten him down to one hundred. Dr. Boemer was fascinated by OCD and he told about case after case. Obsessive-compulsive piano practicing. Guitar tuning. Making of lists. Clipping articles from newspapers and filing them. Nose picking. E-mailing jokes. One of his patients obsessively brushed her teeth down to tiny stumps. Another made bomb threats, hundreds a day,