The heart is but a small vessel; and yet dragons and lions are there, and there poisonous creatures and all the treasures of wickedness; rough, uneven paths are there, and gaping chasms. There likewise is God, there are the angels, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace; all things are there.
St Macarius
It felt strange being back at the mansion. The other kids did not stare, very pointedly they did not stare. But they stole glances, looked over their shoulders, and whispered. They hadn't been expecting him to return, he knew. He wondered how much of the story they had heard, and after history class he got his answer.
Jubilee buttonholed him in the hall. She had never spoken to him before, and he was instantly on his guard. That syrupy intonation that he hated. "Hhhhhiiii, Joel."
"Hi." Improving, definitely improving. Almost normal.
"How are you doing?" She asked it with the same false earnestness as his parents' friends, who still cornered his mother at the grocery store and demanded to know how she was. Why should that bother him? Why couldn't he believe it was genuine?
"I'm all right."
"Are you back for good?"
"Until Christmas, at least."
"That's good. I'm so sorry about your dad."
What was the answer to that one? He'd forgotten. "Uh...thanks. It's okay."
Long, painful silence. She was too close to him, so close that she was craning her neck to meet his eyes, and he wished she'd back off a bit. He elaborately looked at his watch. "I should go, I, uh – I have to go to the washroom."
Well-played, McCree.
In the powder room at the end of the hall, he sat down on the toilet and rubbed the back of his neck. His whole head felt numb, as if the skin were rubber, and a needle-like ache had bloomed behind his eyes.
How many times in his life had he pulled this trick? Often, often, especially before his manifestation. Then, when his powers appeared, his brain would rescue him from uncomfortable conversations automatically. Hard to live with, yes, but now he knew too much, had too much control – it would be unspeakably rude to disappear deliberately. It would look like a snub, rather than a terrified retreat. Hence the old bathroom trick, his trademark. In high school he had told his teachers that he had a bladder condition, or rather he had brought in a forged note from his mother to that effect. They believed him; Joel was always the sort of kid they would believe. And he was the sort of kid who would have bladder problems, more importantly.
The powder room was papered in yellow, an old-fashioned pattern with farmhouses and shepherdesses, willow trees and wagons. The Professor would not have toilet stalls in his house, and Joel couldn't blame him. You had to do everything in this world to preserve your humanity, to live like an individual and not like a number or a victim. A fine Koehler toilet, a flower-shaped light fixture over the mirror, a sink with scalloped edges – it made a difference. Someone at St Rita's had scraped messages into the bathroom stalls (with nails or claws or teeth, he supposed, since nothing else was allowed). We are broken. We don't fit. In order for one to succeed others must fail.
And at the bottom of the battered door, in a different hand someone else had written, Have faith. That was always the last thing Joel read before forcing himself to leave, before giving himself up into custody. The sudden sensation of having physical weight again, then the doors banging open and the nurse with the injection. The drugs felt good but the cold feel of them entering his bloodstream made him sick. Sometimes they kept a cannula in his wrist, during bad periods.
Have faith. His father used to say "Fortune favours the bold," before making difficult phone calls or deciding on tricky questions. Joel had ten minutes before his session with Dr Xavier, and someone was knocking gently on the door.
Of course, the Professor immediately had to set him straight about Jubilee. "I'm sure she didn't mean anything by it. She's an orphan herself, you know."
"Oh shit," said Joel. It made perfect sense, and now the blackness was surfacing, that thick prickly darkness that had left him alone for weeks. He wanted to hit himself. "Oh Jesus, I didn't know that."
"No, you didn't. You aren't really...in the loop, at least regarding the other students."
"I'm such a..." Words failed him. He glanced up and saw a look of pain on the Professor's face, and realised that he wasn't shielding himself very well. "Sorry."
"It's all right," said Dr Xavier, but he didn't sound convincing. Joel let the Aphanes cover his thoughts, and the sounds of birds outside stopped, the details of the Professor's fine furniture became fuzzy. Insulation. It was comforting.
The Professor's shoulders relaxed a bit, but he leaned forward and said, "You have been doing better, though, haven't you? While you were at home. I wonder if home might not be the better place for you now."
"It's not." That came out before he could analyse it. "I mean, it's not comfortable at home. But being in Ottawa...I've been spending time with Father Gilles, and Paul. It was helping."
"Paul?"
"My friend, at St Rita's. My only friend, I guess. I didn't think we were that close – well, we weren't, really. But he's getting better, and I'm getting better. We both know what things were like in there, we've both seen each other huddled on the floor crying and screaming, you know...so we're not scared of each other."
"Hmm." The Professor steepled his fingers. "What sort of mutant is he?"
"Um, physical. He changes colours." Joel smiled, remembering one of the nurses' jokes. It never amused them at the time, but now he didn't find it so offensive. "He's a human mood ring."
Dr Xavier took a moment to work that out. "Like a chameleon, perhaps?"
"I don't think he can do patterns. Just streams of colour and light. It's very – it's pretty."
"Fascinating. And you talk with him."
"Yeah." It wasn't always talk; sometimes they merely went out and sat in the courtyard, or wandered through downtown together. Paul, excitable and conspiracy-minded as he was, radiated a gentle stillness that Joel loved. The silences were radiant, they smelled of fresh-cut grass and soft air off the Rideau. Silence born of contentment. It was a strange feeling, and Joel liked it.
"And you talk with Father Gilles."
"I was down to once a week."
"Joel—" The Professor abruptly wheeled around and hummed over to the desk. "Your mother was adamantly insisting on the phone that you still needed institutional care, and you yourself said you wanted to come back, but I do think you would be better off returning to Ottawa. You have support structures, a relationship with someone your own age, the presence of family—"
"No!" This too burst out before he could hold back. He felt like he'd been socked in the gut.
Dr Xavier looked up, astonished, his mouth even slightly agape. "Why not?"
"Why not? How could you do this?" He was back in Father Gilles' office, listening dully to the pitch, hearing the explanation: I just don't feel I can make any more progress with you. Or before, his parents looking at the pamphlets from St Rita's at the kitchen table, telling him, You need to be in a safe place.
"Joel, of course it's up to you. This is only a suggestion, not an order. But I'm trying to limit how much your life gets rearranged. Being divided between two cities that are hundreds of miles apart is not convenient for anyone. You clearly do better when you're at home, when you have someone to talk to, and I daresay when you're in your own country. And it wouldn't surprise me if you told me Dr Visineau was more than a therapist to you. Spiritual support is just as important, after all. This is for your benefit."
"I trusted you!" The whiteness was sucking at him, but he fought it, tried to claw back to reality. It hurt, and as his flesh re-materialised he was shaking, felt feverish and swollen. "You said you wouldn't, you said--"
He wanted to get up and leave, to throw something, break a window, smash his own skull open, but instead he felt a gentle, calming hand over his mind, like a handkerchief soaked in chloroform. "Leave my brain alone," he said, some of the colour drained from his voice.
"All right, I just didn't want you getting violent." Damn him, damn him, Xavier was just sitting there looking interested, Joel wanted to kill him, but couldn't, couldn't think thoughts like that for very long. Damn him in the oldest sense of the world. Joel's brain felt poisonous, irrational. Let him go to Dante's hell and be champed in the mouth of Lucifer with Judas Iscariot. Let him suffer forever, not just sit in his wheelchair with his head tilted, like he was looking at an abstract sculpture, like he was listening to a lecture on Kierkegaard.
He was afraid, Joel realised. A paralysed old man in the room with a furious eighteen-year-old, no matter what the real differences in power. The Professor didn't trust him.
But it didn't matter, it didn't matter. "I was never anything to you, was I? You couldn't be the one to fix the problem so you don't want me around anymore. You're giving up like everyone else just because I can't...can't..."
"Can't what?"
"Leave me alone!" he yelled again. He hadn't yelled so much in his life, except in dreams, except years ago at school pounding on the door when they shut him in a closet. Since he was a child. Never like this, never in an argument. "You don't care, so just leave me alone. You're just like the others, I shouldn't have said anything. Just make the call, send me home. It doesn't matter."
"I already said it's up to you, Joel," said the Professor. "I would never force a decision on you that you weren't happy with. Why are you so angry?"
"You know why I'm angry." He got up and went over to the window, he couldn't stay sitting down. If he went towards the door he was sure the Professor would stop him, but this was evidently allowed.
"I want you to tell me."
"I've been talking to you since June, since the hospital. You had your chance. You just never gave enough of a shit to put it together, and then you blame me and say I'm not cooperating, and now this passive-aggressive bullshit just because I had the gall to go to fucking confession with somebody else. Fuck you."
The Professor sighed. "Well...yes, I'm afraid there's some truth to that. But not all of it, Joel. I want you to believe me when I say that I am invested in this, I do care."
"So which part is right?"
A silence. Then: "Dr Visineau and I do have a somewhat competitive relationship. I admit that. Part of my...I did want to outdo him. It was gratifying when he referred you to me. I wanted to succeed where he had failed. Yes."
Every cell in Joel's body was drifting away from its neighbour. He was disintegrating in a sweep of cold, like when the chilled silver sedative spread through his veins from the cannula. "I knew it. You fucking bastard, I knew it."
"But Joel, that doesn't mean I never wanted the best for you, that I never felt compassion for you. Quite the opposite." He sounded almost pleading. Joel dug his fingernails into the back of his hand. "How could I stay so detached? I've been inside your mind."
Joel rested his forehead against the glass. "So why are you getting rid of me?"
"I am not getting rid of you. All I did was suggest that you may be ready to live without constant psychiatric supervision. Most people would be happy to hear that."
"Obviously I'm just doing great, yeah. Going like gangbusters."
"This reaction is a bit of a surprise, yes." Sounding almost amused, and Joel hated him again. "You're still far from well, but can't you understand that the worst is over, that you can leave the Intensive Care Unit now?"
There were tears running down Joel's cheeks, had been for some time. "You still don't get it."
"What don't I get? Explain it to me."
"Okay," said Joel. He wiped his face. "I'm nothing, nothing but an intellectual exercise to you, but you can't figure it out and you're sick of failing, and you want to move on. Father Gilles did the same thing. My father did the same thing. Obviously I'm asking for this kind of treatment somehow. I can't connect, I can't get it together. I'm sealed up in scar tissue, I'm..."
You should do it, his brain was saying. You should. The sheer horror of those thoughts, their familiarity, like being in a crowd and seeing the face of the man who raped you. "I'll tell you," he added, voice shaking, "If I'm not bad enough for the hospital now I will be in a few hours."
He turned around. The Professor, still positioned by the desk, was staring down at this hands. "Do you want a sedative?"
"I want something that'll keep me from cutting my throat."
"All right. I'll call Jean. It will be at least half an hour. You'll stay here." His voice was subdued.
He used the school intercom, rather than telepathy, and when the phone rang he wheeled away with the receiver, speaking in an undertone, in brief sentences. After he hung up, he sighed again. "Will you talk to me, while we're waiting?"
"I don't know what there is to say."
"Tell me about your father. You said he was like Dr Visineau and myself. How so?"
"He wanted me to get better and if I couldn't do that, he wanted me out of his sight. That's how."
"Why? How did you come to that conclusion?"
"Look, my father--" Joel suddenly felt like the air in the room was too thick, or too thin. It hurt to inhale. "What he wanted was...the worst thing is how I came so close to being the kind of son he wanted. He didn't have horrible demands, you know, they weren't high expectations. He wanted a son who was good in school, maybe not popular or athletic, but smart, a decent kid. I can feel that other son in the house, that's why I didn't want to stay there. I could have been that other kid. But I got sick, I got sick..."
Only the tears, for a long time. He couldn't speak, although he tried; his voice only made incoherent croaks, and he couldn't finish his sentences. "I wanted, I wanted to, but...when I got sick, I realised. Before I just thought he loved me, I was his son, there was nothing to it. But I got sick and then it wasn't the same anymore, so then I knew that he just wanted..."
The Professor made an almost inaudible sound, a sound of pity, and Joel didn't want to hear it. The emptiness unfurled inside him. "My father, my father..."
"You miss him."
"I miss him, I want him to, I want him to..."
"I know."
"He loved me but, God, I can't say any more. My father. I miss him."
Impossible, impassable pain, too thick to breathe through. The sea would close over his head, he would be struck by the rudder as the ship passed by. But the tide was beginning to recede. His stomach muscles felt sore, and salt was drying on his face.
The Professor handed him a Kleenex. "I read somewhere that – in a study – they found that when a therapist hands a patient a tissue, the patient takes it as a cue to stop crying. I don't know if that's true, but you certainly don't have to stop. Tears are healthy. This kind, at any rate."
"I think I'm..." He welled up again. "No."
"That's all right. You've been holding this in for a long time, haven't you?"
"I'm having a meltdown."
"Of course you are. I had no idea that you would be so hurt, but it makes sense now that you've explained it."
"He did love me," Joel insisted, half of his mind still in the previous conversation. He felt disloyal, like a whiny teenager. "He didn't mean to."
"I think you're right. When I was in your father's mind, using Cerebro, I sensed a great deal of love for you and your mother. He hated the fact that you were in so much pain."
His face was wet again, the tissue too damp to be useful. "I'm such a piece of shit."
"Why?"
"To be tearing him apart like this."
"Anger," said Dr Xavier, "is morally neutral. I don't know for certain, but I expect your Father Gilles would say the same thing. You are not acting on that anger, only expressing it. You are not to blame for your emotions."
"But I shouldn't be angry when he didn't mean to do anything wrong. Didn't mean –- he didn't do anything wrong. I just...it was the subtext."
"Anger isn't so rational as that. It's not a court of law, where you have to prove you were wronged with malice aforethought. You can just be angry. Or hurt." The Professor paused. "Sometimes it's harder, when nobody means you any harm. When you have someone to blame – like you have Henri-Michel Marchand – it's easier, isn't it? But when it's muddy, when it's all accidents and misunderstandings, how do you make sense of that?"
"No one wants to say that I'm to blame for some of this," Joel said.
"You need to forgive yourself for whatever part you've played in your own illness, yes."
"No," said Joel, and suddenly he felt the need to make a gesture. He got up and knelt next to the Professor's chair. "You forgive me."
Dr Xavier's narrow hazel eyes searched his face, and he rested the heel of his hand on Joel's forehead. A wash of images: himself asleep in the infirmary, wired to an IV, gaunt and grey; the Roloff Beny book open to the picture of Bishop Laval's tomb; his father with the curved knife cleaning the pike. And Father Gilles, twisting back and forth in his office chair, looking smug and eating yogurt. Joel didn't remember that one.
And they were in the heart, a rotten core, the dry chewed-up centre from which the insects burrowed out. The courthouse, the dock where the accused stood. Charles Xavier's presence seemed to smile. Consider yourself pardoned.
The pressure of the connection eased, and they were back in the office. Dr Xavier brushed his hand over the top of Joel's head, held it there for a moment like a priest, then let him go. "I wish I had known sooner, that what you wanted was so simple."
"It isn't simple," said Joel.
Dr Xavier looked at him for a moment, then nodded. "Maybe not."
There was a knock at the door, and Dr Grey entered, with (thank God not a needle but) a Dixie cup and a glass of water. "Am I interrupting?"
Joel shook his head; evidently it was up to him.
Dr Grey gave him the pill, a small white one printed with LILLY.
"Zyprexa?"
She nodded. "You've had it before. You'll feel calmer when you wake up."
"I know. Thank you." He swallowed the pill. He didn't need water with them anymore, but he drank it, feeling like he'd been bled.
She walked him to his room, past the other kids who were going to class and giggling with each other. Jubilee passed by, and Joel attempted a smile, but he knew it probably looked wan. "I'm already tired. It hasn't even been twenty minutes yet."
"You need to take it easy," Dr Grey said. In his room, she took off his shoes for him, even though somewhere in his mind he realised he should stop her. Something was pinning him down to the bed and he couldn't get up. Dr Grey drew the blinds and turned the light off, leaving him in dove-grey darkness. He fell asleep immediately.
Joel awoke in the same grey dimness, nineteen hours later. It was raining outside, which made him happy. Perhaps not happy – he wasn't sure anymore what he meant by the word – but his stomach relaxed and his breath came easily. He felt that way sitting in Chapters with Paul in the afternoons, reading poetry chapbooks that he had no intention of buying and looking over Paul's shoulder at the heavy books on hockey and opera. Everything in its right place. Funny that it was such a physical feeling, settled in his shoulders and his guts.
He remembered when he had started loving the rain. Back in high school, he would only skip on rainy days, an arbitrary rule that kept him from skipping all the time. He would leave after homeform, take a 95 bus to Metcalfe and spend the day in the city library, or get off at Mackenzie King and walk up to the National Gallery. That was in the days when the permanent collection was free to visit, when you could hide for hours in the basement with the intricate Inuit carvings, semi-darkness and a recorded voice chanting in Inuktitut in the next room.
And even then it was so terrible when an old woman wandered in with headphones on, when a crowd of giggling children came in with a teacher, when he thought the security guards recognised him. But he put up with it for the sake of the clean and perfect silence there, broken only by the sounds of distant footsteps and the recorded voice of the Inuit chanting, and the drum that accompanied him.
Those days would not come back again.
"I've lost so much time," he said to the Professor during their therapy session that morning. "Nineteen hours here, two years in an institution there. I'm never getting that back."
"How do you feel about that?"
Joel was half-invisible, sometimes letting himself disappear entirely. He was still so tired that if he stayed physical too long he was afraid he would fall asleep. "Nervous. Like I have to get going."
"Get going on what? Or to what? Quo vadis?"
"Get going in general. Finish school, like that." Joel was reluctant to talk about his project, since Father Gilles had been so discouraging, but maybe the Professor – more idealistic on the whole than the priest – would feel differently. "And I want to buy a house in Montreal, for mutants."
Dr Xavier repeated, "For mutants."
"Like the Catholic Worker houses."
"Oh." The Professor blinked. "That's quite an ambition."
"You can say it. Father Gilles thought it was stupid."
"I don't think it's stupid. I think it's very generous, and very brave. Or am I embarrassing you now?"
"Yes."
"It seems to bother you less when people say cruel things than when they say the opposite."
"I don't like being patronised, that's all."
"So it's out of the question that you might deserve a compliment sometimes?"
"That's right."
"You're smiling, so you know how illogical that is. That's good. No, I don't think it's a stupid idea at all. What concerns me..."
"Uh."
The Professor looked up at him sharply. Joel lowered his eyes. "Sorry. There's always a 'what concerns me.'"
Dr Xavier looked peeved, although Joel reminded himself not to assume. The Professor sat back in his chair, rolling his Montblanc pen between his thumb and forefinger. After a few moments, he said, "I notice that we aren't talking about the things you said yesterday."
Joel suddenly felt like the bottom of his spine had been plunged into ice water. "I'm sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry about. I just think we should talk about that, and then come back to this question about the future." He smiled, a reassuring smile. "One thing that struck me, after you had left, was that...how can I put this...the boundaries between personal and professional relationships are rather porous for you."
Joel waited for the explanation, although he had an inkling of what was coming. He'd been too clingy, of course.
"As your therapist – I don't want you to take this as a rejection – my job is not to be your father. Or your brother or your uncle, or your mother either, for that matter. I'm much more like a teacher. It is a professional relationship, and it will come to an end eventually. You see the difference?"
Joel nodded. Part of his brain was screaming the usual things (you stupid shit he thinks you're a retard he thinks you're a stalker and you will never you will never oh you shouldn't have said anything, you should not have said a single word), but the effects of the Zyprexa still held that voice bound in clamps and rubber tubing, the rest of his mind listening in relative serenity, unblinking and dim like a security light in a stairwell.
"It's quite normal to unconsciously 'cast' the therapist as someone with whom you have a difficult relationship. In Freudian analysis this is even expected. But I want to make sure that you understand that when our therapeutic relationship comes to an end, it will not be – it won't be your fault. It isn't a rejection or an abandonment."
"I know that."
"Consciously, of course you do. But what you said yesterday convinced me that you've been very deeply hurt by how your parents have reacted to your illness."
"They did their best." Joel wished he could muster up more conviction, but he was exhausted. "And they did a lot better than other people have. Half of Paul's family won't talk to him."
"That's true, but Paul has his own story. You have yours. You said you believed that your father loved you, but then you got sick and it wasn't the same anymore. A realisation like that..."
"I wasn't being fair to him."
"Be fair to yourself. Be faithful to what you feel." The Professor paused. "I can see that you want to get past this, to get on with your life. But listen to me. You won't, unless you confront this."
Joel suddenly realised what was happening. "You think this is it, don't you? You think this is the answer to the big riddle?"
Dr Xavier said nothing.
"You do."
"Perhaps," said the Professor, beginning to sound annoyed, "if you gave me more to work with, I could discern the complexities and nuances better."
"You've been in my head."
"And I saw nothing there to contradict my current opinion, which is that you're a very disturbed boy with self-esteem issues that were badly exacerbated by the insensitivity of your father."
"You really don't like me, do you?" It was liberating, somehow, to say this out loud. Maybe just because it let him feel self-righteous for a few seconds. "You never have."
"Joel, I'm not going to play games."
"I don't play games." He wasn't angry, like yesterday. Rather, he felt a Buddha-like equanimity. "Isn't that what you figured out, yesterday? I know you were going through me looking for evidence that I was doing all this deliberately. And you didn't find it, but it's still the easiest explanation."
"Joel." Dr Xavier spoke sharply.
"That's why you tell yourself you can't cure me –- the patient is resisting therapy! I know that one. Or that I'm already cured and you can send me home."
The Professor turned his chair and wheeled over to the window, visibly trying to calm his breathing. He said, "You know, you spend so much time telling me how much I dislike you, and you might find it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't dislike you. That is the truth, and you can believe it or not as you please. What I dislike is the way you pick at people's weaknesses, as if nothing but perfection in thought, word, and deed is good enough for you."
Joel hadn't heard that one before. He listened, transfixed. Without the Zyprexa, he would have shut down completely by now, but he was still sedated enough to be interested, rather than hurt. He wondered if he could get a script for a regular dosage of Zyprexa, or if they would have the zombie/cow debate again.
"You're aware that I had my own reasons for taking your case," said Dr Xavier, staring out the window. "And I think you know full well that I'm a little ashamed of them. You demand ruthless honesty and then when I'm honest, you use it against me. The same with your father. When he treated you well, you thought it was a façade, and when he broke down and revealed his limitations, you judged him for that too. I don't know when or how that pattern started, and I think I'll give up the search, since you seem to find it so insulting. Trivialities at the origin of the world, as Anne Hébert wrote. But no one will ever love you perfectly. No one. Unconditionally, perhaps, but not perfectly."
Joel sat for awhile in astonished silence. What amazed him, more than Dr Xavier's words, was the fact that they had not destroyed him. Some mysterious tenderness, in fact, opened its petals inside him, and he felt – he didn't have words for how he felt.
He drifted back to physical presence, and said, "Could you write that down for me?"
The Professor stared at him for a moment, then turned over a new page on his legal pad, and clicked his fine pen. He wrote, and when he had finished, he handed it over. Joel unfolded it and read,
You are loved with all the purity that a flawed heart can muster.
Don't take it too hard.
An awkward metaphor, Joel thought, and then had to smile. "Nobody ever told me this."
Dr Xavier shook his head. "Because it's a terrible thing to say to a depressive avoidant. I've been completely unprofessional. If you weren't so sedated right now..."
"No, I mean it." Joel read the note again, and looked up to meet the Professor's eyes. "I'm sorry."
"Apology accepted."
Quotes and Notes: The bathroom graffitti is lifted from library carrels and desks around Queen's. I collect interesting vandalisms for things like this. Charles's factoid about therapists and tissues was related to me by one of my therapists, and I have no idea if it's true.
Everything in its right place: Joel was actually a Radiohead fan before I was. I felt he'd be the type to listen to a lot of Radiohead, and made myself listen to it. I was right.
Trivialities at the origin of the world: From Anne Hébert's Am I Disturbing You? (Est-ce que je te dérange?), which is one of the saddest novellas ever written. Saaaaaaad.