Photo by Maksym Pozniak-Haraburda on Unsplash
I never saw the truck. It came down the hill, running the red light and passing in front of me just as I entered the intersection. I pulled the steering wheel to the right and pushed my foot down on the brake, as hard as I could. The back of the car slid to the left, and I felt a vibration as my car slammed into the curb and rolled up onto the sidewalk and then the grass on the edge of the road.
I gripped the steering wheel with both of my hands and my arms begin to shake as my car shuddered to a halt. I gasped for air and my head snapped up and back.
It took a long time before I stopped shaking and I could breathe again. Outside, the sun shone down bright through the front window of my car. I looked down, and saw my sunglasses laying on the seat next to me.
It was only later in the day that I felt it. At first, I didn’t even know what it was. I was still in my car, driving downtown through the city, when a ringing started in my ears. It was coupled with a tightening across my chest. I thought it was my heart. The tightening increased, and it moved up into my throat and I felt warmth spread out over my face.
I came to a halt in front of a stoplight. Out in front of me, a young man strolled in front of my car. He stared at me, at least I thought that he stared at me. The sun continued to shine down through the window of my car.
*
I am a Psychiatrist, and my first patient of the day appeared 15 minutes late. Michael was always late, and he always had excuses. The traffic, the weather, his kids waking up and missing the bus so they needed a ride. On and on. It was the same thing each time we met. Why was he seeing me? Why? He was depressed, depressed because he couldn’t keep his life organized.
Michael plopped down in the chair across from me, the soft leather chair that enveloped his tall lanky body. He was holding a large paper cup with the decorations of Christmas and a mermaid on the front.
Michael leaned back in the chair and a brown liquid squirted up through the tiny hole at the top of the cup. I watched the arc of the fluid through the air as it curved up and out, splattering against the white leather of my chair.
“Sorry.”, Michael said.
He brushed his hand over the coffee, smearing it over the leather. I thought of the stain, of trying to clean the leather, and the irritation bubbled up into my thoughts. How could he be so careless? He didn’t even seem to really care about what he had done.
The morning sun shone through the window behind my patient, dropping down over Michael’s face and I looked across at him, at the pale white color of his face, his face covered by a stubble of beard where he hadn’t shaved that morning. Out behind his head I saw Elliott Bay through the floor to ceiling windows of my office.
It wasn’t that my life was so organized. I struggled through my days, and lately things had been more difficult. I wasn’t getting as many referrals of patients as I had only a few months ago, and my income had dropped. Damn it. My wife and I were arguing more and more, about the need to get a bigger house, about how she wanted me to get along with her mother, about how I managed my practice.
I was 50 years old, and as I looked out towards the years ahead I saw … What did I see? I saw a long line of patients marching through my office, sad patients, anxious patients, patients with a tenuous grip on the reality around them like men and women hiking on a thin trail high in the mountains, looking down over the edge of the trail, over the abyss.
It scared me. But more than that, I felt anger rise up like a living thing into my thoughts, wriggling and twisting and shouting that it was all unfair. I thought all of this as I listened to Michael sitting across from me,
I said very little to my patient that day. I interpreted little of what he said to me of his life and frustrations and depression. When he stood up to leave, I felt a sense of relief. Michael gave me an odd look as he pushed himself up out of his chair.
“Same time next week?”, he asked.
I could hear the uncertainty in his words.
I nodded, and smiled.
The door closed behind him, and I stood up in the room. I looked at the African masks hanging on the wall of my office. From Kenya, Zambia, Ethiopia. Their expressions seemed reproachful, critical of me.
I had gone into Psychiatry to hear my patient’s stories and help them to work through their pain. To be allowed the privilege of entering into a world most of us never see, a world where things become turned up and around, where the view of reality becomes much different than that seen in the houses and work and families of the life that we see on the surface of things.
Now it all seemed to be crumbling down around me, like a retaining wall whose rocks begin to slide down the embankment. At first slowly, and then faster and faster until they are rolling over and over towards, towards me.
I saw the rest of my patients that day, moving through the hours mechanically. I tried to focus on my patient’s words, but it was difficult, and each of the people that I saw seemed to have problems for which I had no answers. The door finally closed on my last patient, swinging shut behind an elderly woman who walked unsteadily out of my office.
Outside it was raining now, the sun gone and the rain pouring down as I closed the door to my office and locked it. I had no umbrella, and the water streamed down over my head and down my back. I felt the cold rivulets pressing against my skin underneath my argyle sweater, and I shivered and the word shot up out of my lungs and into the air.
“Shit.”
I looked around me, into the parking lot in front of me and down the sidewalk where I was walking. A young woman with a wide plastic hat that blocked the falling rain was walking towards me, and I wasn’t sure if she had heard what I had said or not. As she passed, she smiled at me.
“Have a nice day, sir.”, she said.
Was she trying to be sarcastic? Why did she smile at me? I was annoyed by her words, as I pulled up my sport coat over my head and bent forward against the wind, walking towards my car.
I climbed into my Porsche and pulled the door shut. I turned the key in the ignition, and I heard a click. A click. I turned it again, and again I heard the same sound. The engine didn’t turn over. Nothing. No rumbling sound of power. I sat in the leather seat, staring at the dashboard with all of its screens and gauges. The light shone out from the gadgetry in a soft warm glow. But no hum came from the engine, no sound of the engine emerging from under the hood of the car.
I slammed my right hand against the steering wheel.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
The words came out, coinciding with my hand hitting the steering wheel. Outside, the rain poured down harder and harder, covering the windshield so that I couldn’t see anything in front of the car.
Outside, the rain came down and I felt the cold hard late afternoon penetrate into my car. I shivered again, and tried to think of what to do next. It was dim, and I couldn’t see anyone, any movement, out in front of me. I pulled my cell phone out of my inside coat pocket and pressed my thumb into the button to turn on the phone.
I waited 2 hours for the roadside assistance to come out to help me, and another half of an hour while the man that arrived tinkered with things under the hood of my car, asking me to turn the key in the ignition and pump the gas. This went on and on, until finally the engine sputtered and coughed and I heard the roar of the motor.
I thanked the man, and paid him. As he drove off with his rig through the rain, I sat in my car and felt the heater pump warm air into the car. I tried to think of what to do now. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to strike out at the world in front of me, to somehow beat back all of the irritations that had occurred in my life that day.
That was it. That was what I wanted. I looked down at my hands, and they were shaking where they rested in my lap. My hands did not feel a part of me. They were like pieces of clay.
It was then that I felt the heat rise up and flash over my face, and I realized how angry I had become. So angry that I wanted to reach out and grab life itself and squeeze it tightly with my hands around it’s throat until it stopped tormenting me.
*
I started to drive home, driving cautiously to make sure I didn’t hit anything in the pouring rain. Traffic was backed up more than usual on the roads, and it came to a stop shortly after I merged onto the highway. I could barely see anything out in front of me, only flickering red and blue lights way up the road. An accident. It was holding all of us up, in a long line of red tail lights.
It was too much. I pushed down on the clutch with my left foot, and moved the shift into first gear. The tires spun and gripped at the wet asphalt. I turned the wheel hard to the right until the car leaped onto the shoulder of the road, and I began to move faster and faster past the cars that sat still with their motors idling in the pouring rain. I felt my anger increase, felt rage course up and through my body pulsating like the flashing blue and red lights.
The car shook and vibrated up and down as it hit the gravel on the side of the road, with the tires bouncing like they were hitting a washboard. I looked out ahead, trying to see through the pouring rain. My vision was blurred, and I couldn’t see anything clearly. I pushed down on the accelerator and felt the car lurch forward, pushing me back in my seat and my head fell against the headrest on my seat.
The car picked up speed, and I could see the blue and red lights out ahead flash and merge together in globes of light that seemed to reach out towards me. Closer and closer, they came.
The images of my day rose up in my thoughts, the near accident, the late patient, the car with the dead battery. I pushed the accelerator all of the way to the floor of the car, and the scream came out of my mouth like something not a part of me, the sound mixing with the sound of the engine and the tires bouncing over the gravel and rocks on the road. It felt good. I screamed again, and the anger came up my throat with the scream and the sound and anger mixed together in the air and my hands started to tremble on the steering wheel.
I saw the police car now, with the blue and red lights flashing and ahead of it another car pulled off to the side of the road with what looked like a crowd of people standing around it. The scene approached fast, expanding in my vision as I felt my head pushed back against the seat. I let go of the steering wheel and braced my hands against the dashboard as the car raced towards the parked car and the green paint of it’s trunk.
I looked away, and I felt the excitement bubble up behind my eyes like the teeth of a wolf. I had done it. I had done it. My anger slipped away down my throat and the rage of the day let go as I closed my eyes and waited.
Patrick Mathiasen is a writer and a psychiatrist, who lives in Seattle with his wife, two cats, and five children in a house of 11 levels hidden away right within the city itself. His passion is to write short stories in the quiet times of his life, surrounded by these things. He has published two nonfiction books and several short stories, and he has a website, seattleshortstories.com, where many of his stories can be found.