DRUG THERAPY
By Wanda Fries
 

You tell the doctor you’re thinking about approaching the pharmaceutical industry and the government with a proposal to put antidepressants into the water supply.  You say, don’t you see how this could work? All those hearts that have been aching for years.  All those desires exposed like fevered skin to frigid air.  You could spark a new stage in humanity’s evolution, with its own fossil history.  As the drug enters the system, the crippled hearts will be silted like fern leaves or curled shells into layers of carbon, no longer fact, but artifacts, to be dug out in the future and examined through a magnifying glass for the stories they can tell.

You tell him how you see girls younger than you, longing tender on their faces, like an abrasion or a sunburn.  You want to tell them, Wait.  You want to say, this, too, shall pass.  But what if it doesn’t?  And what if what passes leaves a space for something even worse?  And that’s why it’s best just to have the drugs.

You tell him one of the first beneficiaries of your therapy should be Marty, the secretary of the English department.  During the six years you’ve known her, Marty has lost a mother, a sister, an aunt.  Over the years, she has imagined so many lumps in her own breasts that last week, when she found a real one, she wanted to laugh in disbelief.  Except the doctor showed her on the X-ray.  Except it hasn’t gone away.

But your doctor says, Wait and see.  Your doctor says, sometimes these things turn out to be nothing.  But Marty, like you, believes in Something, the Something she has been waiting for all her life.  Think about it, you say, what she must have gone through:  the women Marty loved most were carved up and stitched back, scarred as brides of Frankenstein.  Her grandmother’s hair fell out red and grew back in gray, but her straight-haired aunt got a free permanent wave, the chemicals applied not to the hair, but from inside the scalp, through the veins.

You tell the doctor he can be optimistic, but Marty knows it must be—no, you can see how she catches herself, every time.  She won’t finish the sentence, even in her mind. She thinks, it must be—.  And the blank she leaves is a stone so heavy at the center of her heart, she can’t budge it with her lungs.  You saw her try, in the women’s bathroom the day she found the lump.  Her breath came in shallow gasps, and you wondered if she would be able to take in enough air to keep herself alive long enough to die.

You tell the doctor about Bridget, the young girl in the office who comes in every morning with her head ducked down.  Her eyes slice away from you, from the questions she imagines curled and waiting, like a scorpion’s tail, at the tip of your tongue.  She is in  love with your lover, but she is invisible to him, as you were, until your anger made you real.  When it started, she came to work every morning with her eyes shining, but you knew what she didn’t.  Now she comes in with her fragile self, her true self, tucked inside a suede coat so heavy, she bends over, wearing it.  She looks like a peony with its petals brown at the edges, as though her head has grown too heavy for its narrow stem.

You should have warned her, you say.  But your doctor says, just what makes you think you are the Mistress of the Universe.  He says, are you trying to put him out of a job.  He says, don’t you have enough to worry about, with your own history of depression.  Because that’s what it is.  You know that now.  You have a Diagnosis.  When he described your disease to you, you imagined your thoughts running like wild horses down the black diamond slopes of your mind, and you see how it is safer for everyone if they can corral them with cognitive therapy and a course of good drugs.  You used to think you were sad, but sadness has gone out of existence.  They cannot treat it.  

You say, I’m serious.  You ought to call somebody at Eli Lilly.  You offer him your idea free of charge.  After all, just look at what the drugs have done for you.  Remember how for weeks you called your lover on his cell phone, at his office, at home, and when his wife answered, you hung up.  You hated and loved the sick feeling you had at the pit of your stomach when you heard his voice, your power to strike fear in his heart, and even though he told you if you didn’t stop, he was going to have to call a judge, a lawyer, your mother, you didn’t believe him.  Then he said he was going to put a stop to your craziness, once and for all.  Even if he had hell to pay.  Even if he had to tell the truth.  And you knew then you had been right all along—you had a weapon you could wield again and again.  Because no matter how much he blustered and raved at you, you knew you could not take his threats seriously.  Because he isn’t capable of honesty.  Because he isn’t capable of paying anything at all.

Then, a month later, when you picked up the receiver, the phone heavy in your hand, you couldn’t imagine calling anybody.  It was too much trouble to remember his arms wrapped around you, his lies falling against your ear, burying you in the silence of your desire, until there was nothing but your heart beating, the despair and joy driving you toward the surface rhythmic as a swimmer’s frantic hands.  For weeks you had to play dead at the bottom of the pool, and if there was a face peering down into the blue water to look for you, you had trouble recognizing the features through the distortion of the sunlight and gallons and gallons of water that pressed your weighted body down.

You remind the doctor how before the drugs you used to go to bed at night with a bird trapped in the dark chimney of your heart.  Now, you sleep the sleep of the dead, who no longer even have to worry about their dreams.  

So, of course, you are so much better now.  He’s made you a believer, and you don’t see why anybody needs to be miserable in this day and time. Think of Hamlet, you say, if he’d had Prozac.  Maybe he would have stopped all that whining.  Maybe he’d have been able to make up his mind.  

You tell him how just this morning, you waited in the line at Kroger behind a young mother.  She had one child on her hip and tugged another along by the hand.  In front of you was an old man in a white shirt, yellowed like parchment, his pants too short and held around his waist by suspenders.  The mother had on pink sweat pants and a shirt that left a gap between her waistband and her pale skin.  When she took the wadded bills out of her pocket to pay for her groceries, for a second you wanted to—what?  Your new self laughs at the old self who sometimes still has this crazy urge to save the world.  Did you want to stock her pantry?  Baby-sit her children?  Take her home to raise?  And she’s just one lonely woman on a planet full of them.  It’s like one of those movies set in a war zone.  People keep coming and coming, running onto the tarmac, but there’s only this one small plane.

The old man was frail and reminded you of your grandfather. Of everybody’s grandfather, the doctor says, as if he was there with you, as if he thinks he’s a ventriloquist in your brain, as if, without him to interpret, you don’t have sense enough to know what you mean.  

You wrinkle your nose, playing along.  You say the old man reeked of stale tobacco smoke and sweat, and by the way has the doctor ever observed that sweaty arm pits smell just like ground cumin?  He laughs and says, now you’ve ruined tonight’s dinner at Mia Casita, and he’s been looking forward to it all day.  

This is when you begin again to hide things from him.  You do not tell him that you’re tempted to write a letter to your lover’s wife telling her everything, or that you might just send a Xeroxed copy to Bridget, which she can take or leave.  
                      
You certainly do not say that the old man’s odor reminded you of death.  Or that, when you turned your head away from his tragic and unspeakable ruin, in spite of the drugs that have made you healthy and realistic, the drugs that have been your salvation, you could not help but feel ashamed.
 

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Work by WANDA FRIES has appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. She most recently won honorable mention in the Appalachian Writer's Association fiction contest judged by Pam Duncan.