Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

Star Wars.
    Dr. Z. said, The boy in you.
    Dr. H. said, The boy in me.
    Dr. Z. said, I had a patient who told me his favorite moments of every W. C. Fields movie ever made. Also all Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello plots.
    Dr. H. said, How long did that go on?
    Dr. Z., Too long.
    Dr. H., What was he doing?
    Dr. Z., Stalling.
    Dr. H., And then?
    Dr. Z., He was killed in a car crash.
    Dr. H., Not funny.
    Dr. Z., No.

 
    Â 
    two
    Anna Fishbein was home. She had arrived several weeks after the start of the second semester. She had brought with her two suitcases, a duffel bag of laundry, her bear that had shared her childhood bed, a book of Sylvia Plath poems that she always carried in her backpack, and a glazed look in her eyes. Her mother was afraid it was drugs. Her father was afraid it was alcohol. Anna glared at her parents. They had no faith in her. She was not using drugs and she was not drinking, no more than her dorm mates at least. She had come home, she said, to stay. That was all she would say.
    Anna’s mother, Beth, was on the faculty at St. John’s University. She had published two well-regarded books on Virginia Woolf. Her father, Fritz, was a biographer. His interest was American history, the Civil War in particular. His own father had escaped from Vienna and his mother had spent her early childhood in a small town in Cuba, where in an unlikely migration many Yiddish speakers had washed ashore. But it was the Civil War that held his attention. When asked by interviewers, TV anchors, or such why he had chosen this subject, he said, “If history were an MRI, the Civil War would be revealed as the site of the tumor, the place where the shadows extended outward promising a painful future.” He had said this often.
    History did not interest Anna. It was hard enough to understand the present, the moment that was disappearing even as you began to see its shape.
    You need to do something, said Beth to her daughter. Yes, said Anna. Do you want to do some research for me? asked Fritz. I’ll pay you, he added. Anna did not respond. Anna took to sleeping almost until noon. She took the dog for long walks. She washed her hair again and again. This is not all right, said Beth. Fritz said, This is not normal. This is not just a stage. Anna’s brother Meyer was studying for his PSATs. He complained that Anna stole money from him. Beth left a few hundred dollars on Anna’s bureau.
    Beth and Fritz went out to their favorite Chinese restaurant and all they could talk about was Anna. What? What? How? they asked each other. They liked each other less because of Anna. On the other hand they could barely be apart, because no one else understood their shorthand, their anxious return to the same words again and again. What, what? How?
    Which is how Anna, referred by a college friend of Beth’s who was a psychoanalyst, came to Dr. Berman’s office, on a Thursday morning, on a cold February day, bored, indifferent, with a high wall surrounding her and a very strong conviction that her life would be short and uneventful.
    She was wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and her long hair curled freely down her back, an invitation not echoed in her eyes.
    Tell me, Anna, said Dr. Berman in a voice that promised not to judge, only to listen. Tell me what makes you happy. I’m not happy, said Anna. Of course, said Dr. Berman, but even so something makes you happy. Anna said nothing. She looked out the window and saw the bare trees in the park and said nothing. Dr. Berman waited. Anna waited. Anna said I’m happy enough. Good, said Dr. Berman, then let’s talk about what makes you unhappy. Nothing, said Anna, but a few tears appeared at the edges of her eyes and her nose turned red. We can talk about that nothing, said Dr. Berman. Maybe, said Anna, and she looked down into her lap so that the doctor would not see the flicker of hope that like a sparrow in flight had passed over her face and disappeared