BUNKERS

These are the clinical notes of Dr. Casey Kaderzin for his clients in the month of July, year unspecified. As a disclaimer and reminder, Dr. Casey Kaderzin is not a doctor doctor; rather, he has his Ph.D. in Puppetry and a degree in Turf Management, two fields he worked in simultaneously for twelve years and abhorred, save for his colleagues consistently seeking his advice and his colleagues consistently praising him for advice given. After much encouragement from said co-workers to return to school and become a licensed therapist, Dr. Casey Kaderzin did one—or actually three or four—better: he did not go back to school nor did he become a therapist, he instead opened an “advice office” where individuals could seek his counsel on any one issue at a time by asking one question at session’s end and receiving one answer.

Sessions are priced at five hundred dollars and last up to ninety minutes. Clients are instructed to enter the office, relieve themselves in the gender-inclusive bathroom (whether or not they have any urge to use the facilities), wash and dry their hands, remove their street shoes in exchange for paper slides, silently enter the consultation room, and take a seat in the child-sized chair at the provided sand table. Clients are then to commence silent play at the sand table for five minutes, familiarizing themselves with the various sand tools and toys, after which time, Dr. Casey Kaderzin will enter the room and sit opposite the client in an adult-sized chair with his clipboard, pen, and audio recorder. When Dr. Casey Kaderzin clears his throat, clients should take this as the signal to begin their “rant.” Ranting can last the entire ninety-minute session or until the client deems themselves “purged.” Clients signal their purged status by placing their hands in their lap and going silent. At this, Dr. Casey Kaderzin will rise from his chair and evaluate the subliminal messages of the sand table. (Please note: this method is currently pending trademarking, as Dr. Casey Kaderzin originally conceived of this process on the golf course with his fellow turf management employees, noticing they vented the entire time they treated the greens, then went silent at the bunkers, where they raked psychologically revealing things into the sand.)

After Dr. Casey Kaderzin has assessed the sand table, clients will then ask their one question and receive their one answer. Clipboard notations and audio recordings will cease at this time. Upon exiting the consultation room, clients will place their paper slides into the recycling bin. Payment is due when services are rendered. Dr. Casey Kaderzin only accepts cash or Venmo and insists that fifty of the five hundred dollars be paid in three pounds of homemade chicken salad (no grapes), as he is currently evaluating various (grapeless) chicken salad recipes in his spare time and considers himself something of a “chicken salad enthusiast.” After each session, ingredients (again, no grapes) must be written on Tupperware containers in Sharpie.

CLINICAL NOTES FOR JULY, YEAR UNSPECIFIED

CLIENT 1: TERR3NCE002

PHYSICAL PRESENTATION: Notably ashen. Tapered khakis. Soft shoes. Jazz shoes?

RANT: When I was born, my parents named me Terrence, after some distant ancestor on my mother’s side who had sailed around an unnamed, faraway cape in a tiny wooden boat intended originally, my father often professed, for rowing a lady friend to and fro in a lily pad pond. Their unspoken but palpable hope was that I, their only son and only child, would end up doing something along these courageous lines, catapulting them from well-respected in their circle of unbearable friends to world-renowned. 

My parents were socially adored for their quick wit and abundant, insincere humility. They ran with a wealthy crowd but secretly had each grown up lower middle class in wafer-thin starter homes besieged by popcorn ceilings and crabgrass. Despite being raised on Hamburger Helper and by parents who possessed no understanding of museums or sex, my mother and father both amazingly ended up at private colleges on full rides due to strange talents—my mother’s contralto and my father’s triple jump. In those environs, and at an early age, they learned the high art of blending in and the gnawing ache of envy, what parts of themselves to suppress, express. As adults, they had perfected this game so well that old money often mistook them for ancient money. 

Still, deep down, they were voracious for some sort of legacy, hence my name and their unspoken but burdensome expectations. Imagine their instant grief when I was born limp. A flaccid, floppy baby whose physical presentation suggested a future in telemarketing done from a recliner and not intrepid boating… Now, even though they have both been dead for ten years, I still feel like something of a prop. For a while, I went to a wonderful therapist, who loved me, loved life, loved the word “prop.” Yes, yes, Terry, he would say. He’s the only person I’ve ever let call me Terry, everyone else calls me T. Let’s imagine you are actually a prop. That the world is a stage and your parents’ life was a play. What were you in that play? A lamp? A schoolhouse globe? A barometer? I bet you were a barometer. I ultimately picked barometer, but only because I couldn’t think of anything else to tell the therapist, and also because he seemed to think that “barometer” was a complex and accurate choice…

Imagine my shock when I found out last year that there had never been an original Terrence. Never a distant ancestor. Never a cape. Never a boat. It should’ve been a great relief, but it turns out it was nice to have believed I was named for someone important. I’ve been unmoored ever since.

SAND TABLE ASSESSMENT: All the sand has been moved to one side, as if a tsunami has occurred. On the bare end, on the pale blue paint of the sand table, Client 1 has placed a Matchbox car, a yellow Camaro, with its doors open.

CLIENT 1 QUESTION: Who am I?

DR.’S ANSWER: Terrence the First.

CHICKEN SALAD INGREDIENTS: chicken breast, Hellmann’s, diced celery, salt, pepper, and (unnoted on Tupperware in Sharpie) a pubic hair.

CHICKEN SALAD RATING: 9/10

CLIENT 2: JESSTHEMESS17

PHYSICAL PRESENTATION: A children’s tube top, men’s pants, Wall-E Crocs, pink-tinted John Lennon glasses. Visibly unimpressed.

RANT: I love my mother very much. She is reliable, like most mothers I’ve encountered on this strange planet. Like most mothers, she makes this strange planet seem tolerable by doing nice but unnecessary things, such as folding washcloths into perfect squares, insisting on using a top bedsheet, and buying me two types of dental floss from which to choose. 

Yesterday, many children were beheaded and dismembered. Disemboweled in a country without trees. Yesterday, my mother came back from CVS with two flavors of dental floss. Cinnamon or mint—she said—Which one, Jess, is more likely to make you floss more often? I answered cinnamon when I meant mint because, in that moment, I was distracted. In my mind, I was seeing a baby I’d seen earlier on the internet. The baby was missing both of its eyes, and yet a pacifier was still in its mouth, loosely. Where the eyes had been were two red voids, thumbprints of death, as if bullets had been dug out. 

My mother stood at the kitchen island holding one container of floss in each hand. A red plastic square and a green one. Stop and go. She somehow had the propensity to smile. Her nails were painted the color of mild embarrassment. How did the pacifier not fall out? How was it still in the baby’s mouth? How do you lose just your eyes and nothing else unless a person has deliberately taken the time to remove them by hand? 

This is the thing I’ve noticed with mothers, mine in particular. She can apply sunscreen in a deliberate manner while missiles go down hospital chimneys. Watch her go—in her certified, pre-owned Avalon. Carol Joyce, CJ, is obeying the speed limit, processing genocide, running errands, braking for chipmunks. If I asked her how she does what she does, I think she would just say—What other option is there? CJ believes in the future and sees into it. She sees me in a graduation gown. Me hammering a nail and hanging a diploma from it. Me depositing a paycheck. Me buying a sectional. Me raising a child with someone I will someday meet in an intermediate spin class. Because of CJ, I’ve discerned that my job on this strange planet is to keep her dream alive… 

Sporadically, I attend a local public high school dubbed Vape-N-Rape High. It’s a cinder-block calamity on an acre of thistle and cigarette butts, with a graduation rate of sixty-three percent. I have accrued twenty-seven tardies since Labor Day. I have trouble putting on pants for Macbeth. My constipation level is such that I’m unable to give a shit for the periodic table. Refugees are crossing the Central Mediterranean on closet doors, you know. Somewhere, some new, blistering disease is escaping a Petri dish. 

Regardless, some people, mothers mostly, forge onward. CJ has a remarkable, holy space within her for resilience, which is equally comforting and infuriating. She has the capacity to buy the good sausages, the ones with sundried tomatoes, and cook them low and slow in a skillet with a glass lid. She makes rice with thyme and expertly runs her thumbnail down the stem of the herb while she hums Adele. Last winter, my mother held our Boston terrier upside down by its hind legs and pulled an intact wishbone from its esophagus using her pinkie as a fishhook. Two years ago, at work, in her cubicle, CJ passed a kidney stone in a coffee cup. It’s now in a repurposed pickle jar on her nightstand as an ode to something. Perseverance, I guess. CJ never takes a day off. She always manages to make it to her managerial job, which involves managing the management of managers’ managers. All this while herds of drones clutching explosives are released from 18-wheelers, an Amazonian whine of lethal mosquitoes heading soon to a theater near you… 

I am not my mother’s child. I live in a state of perpetual delay. The truant officer has sent his last warning. It’s on the refrigerator under a sunrise-shaped magnet. How can you make the bus every day but not the bell? My mother asks, and how do I say: Because every morning when the sun is rising pink and gentle, I’m up red and raging trying to rectify the coexistence of opposites. Kitten and ketamine. Cream puffs and cardiac arrest. Because maybe today is the day that I finally get kissed or finally get shot. Because outside the counselor’s office, there is free first-come, first-served Narcan and complimentary blueberry muffins. Because it’s not dilly-dallying, CJ, it’s petrification… 

But CJ still has big dreams in which I star. She is capable of simultaneously holding a container of waxed wintergreen in her hand and an eyeless infant in her mind, while prioritizing an attendance record that is mine alone. If you saw the big picture, like I do, Jess, saw yourself as larger than life, you’d see all the things you could be…

I rarely see my father. I rarely darken the door of his townhouse. It smells of new carpet and guilt, which smells something like steak sauce left out overnight on a plate. The plate is on a TV tray that is never folded flat, never put away. He bought the plate and the TV tray both at HomeGoods. HomeGoods is a good place to wear a “Save the Manatees” tee and ask pretty women their opinions when you have no interest in their opinions or manatees. I’ll admit I grant my father more mercy than CJ, even though he borrows my Nike SBs to go on dates with cat-named women—Tabi, Pebbles—and dyes his hair something called Jack Black and has a pineapple emoji on his dating bio. He says the pineapple means “Welcome!” in Colonial Williamsburg, and I am a welcoming individual, Jess… 

Last year, I had a girlfriend for ninety days. Her name was Serenade, and our coupling was an asexual venture. Our goal was to explore love instead of bodies, but all I secretly thought about was sex. When we went to the coffeeshop named The Grind and drank mochas and talked about our feelings, all my brain said was grind, grind, grind. Being in a relationship made me worse at love… 

My mother wants me to rise to the top, when all I want to do is get to the bottom. She wants me to elevate, I exist to excavate. I should probably also floss. But then I see a baby with no eyes, a mother standing in a sandy street, grasping a tiny foot. The foot is not attached to a body. It’s just a child’s foot that was in the street, as common there as a dropped keychain is here. Cinnamon or mint? I hear my mother ask. It’s not a hard question. 

SAND TABLE ASSESSMENT: Halfway through her rant, Client 2 produced an unlit cigarette from her pocket and pretended to light it off the foot of a Barbie, before pretending to smoke the cigarette for the remainder of the rant, before pretending to extinguish it in the sand table. As an apparent finale, the Barbie was placed in the sand table, wearing ski boots, straddling said cigarette butt.

CLIENT 2 QUESTION: Cinnamon or mint?

DR.’S ANSWER: Wintergreen

CHICKEN SALAD INGREDIENTS: “How can you talk about chicken salad at a time like this? How do you sleep after listening to tormented people all day? How are we supposed to go on living and breathing when children can’t go on living and breathing? You call yourself a doctor and say ‘wintergreen’? Everyone knows the only justifiable option is unwaxed, unflavored.”

CLIENT 3: SALESMAN2456

PHYSICAL PRESENTATION: Agitated, Reebok rugby shirt, gold chain with a sideways cross. Fat-fingered. Smells of marjoram?

RANT: I’m on this train outside Philly when this boy, pale as skim milk, appears in the doorway. He’s dressed in a battleship gray jumpsuit and slip-on shoes, and around his waist is a fanny pack. Pinned to his shirt is a large red button, the size of a smoke alarm. At first, I think it’s political in nature, but then he approaches me. I’m where you are, he says, and he points to the window seat beside me. Now, I can read the red button clearly. It says NO PEANUTS in large letters, then below it, in a smaller font: or any of the other seven common allergens. 

The boy can’t be older than eleven or twelve. What happens if you eat them? I say, Because I only play a doctor on TV. The boy doesn’t get the joke. He simply slips past me and sits down and brings out a folded crossword puzzle from his leather pouch, followed by a ludicrous ink pen, the sort a corporate banker might bring to a legal closing. 

What’re the other seven? I prod. Peanuts and what? The boy reaches again into the pouch and this time produces an old-fashioned, metal stopwatch. The sort used at bygone foot races. Wheat, eggs, shellfish, dairy products—including casein, which is a family of phosphoproteins found in the milk of mammals—soy, fish—which causes a different reaction than shellfish, sometimes people refer to it as a fin fish allergy—and tree nuts, the boy says. Tree nut allergy sometimes includes coconuts, depending on who you ask, but not peanuts. Peanuts are a different allergy. Peanuts are not technically nuts but legumes, in the same family as the lima bean or common green pea, hence the name pea-nuts. Other common but lesser-known food allergens include corn, garlic, chocolate, citrus, celery, kiwi, sulfites, beef—perhaps because it was fed corn and you suffer unknowingly from an underlying corn allergy—and seeds, especially sesame seeds and sunflower seeds. Mustard can be problematic because it comes from a seed. More people are allergic to mustard than you might expect. 

The boy stops. I can’t believe what I’ve heard. Christ! I say. The only thing missing is ass! The boy doesn’t react to this one way or the other. Instead, he busies himself with an ink cartridge and his cumbersome ink pen and goes about changing the cartridge with surgical precision. At this point, I’m hoping for the cartridge to explode. 

See, I say to him. This is the problem with everyone these days. Sensitivity. The boy isn’t listening. Would you mind timing me? he asks. He holds out the stopwatch. It’s just a Monday, he says. So, I can do it right at four. Maybe three-fifty. 

I take the stopwatch in the meat of my palm. You know, it’s actually Friday, I say. The day, yes, the boy agrees. But the puzzle, no. It’s a Monday. The easiest. They get progressively harder as the week goes on. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, a breeze. Thursday, Friday? Tough. Saturday’s the most difficult. People assume Sunday is the hardest because it’s at the end of the week and because it’s so large, but its size is actually beneficial. Because it’s so big, you’re bound to get something to help you out. Saturday’s the bear. The real grizzly. It’s a complete… the boy searches. Bitch? I say. The boy doesn’t wince or smile. He re-smooths his crossword and says: I’ll count backwards from three. And you press the stopwatch at zero. 

So, I do what the boy tells me, and I press the stopwatch at zero, and before I can even think of a word, the boy goes—Time!—and then he puts down his pen and folds his hands. Four-zero-two, I say, and the boy sighs like someone’s died. I’ve done better. I pick up the puzzle and look at it, angry. 

You mean to tell me that you’ve never seen these clues before? That this puzzle was brand-spanking-new to you? The boy tilts his head to one side. Oh, I’ve seen some of these clues before. They sometimes repeat. Like this one, sixty-four down. Tiberius ‘to be.’ That’s a clue that you might see two or three times a year. But yes, as a whole, this was a new puzzle. 

I shake my head and reach over with my finger and jab at the paper. Sixty-four down. E-S-S-E. What sort of word is that? That’s not even a real word. The boy stares straight ahead at the seat in front of him. Actually, it might be one of the first words. It’s Latin for ‘to be.’ You see, Tiberius is a Latin name, so we know what they’re asking for in that particular clue is the Latin form of ‘to be.’ Sometimes you’ll see the clues Pierre ‘thank you’ or Pedro ‘hello.’ That means the puzzle is asking us for the French ‘merci’ or the Spanish ‘hola.’ Now I’m the one sighing. You’e got to be shitting me. I mean, no offense, but what’s the goddamned point? 

The boy is quiet for a moment. In the beginning, he eventually goes, there was the Word. That was how all this started. He waves his arms around. With a single word. Was it a word spoken aloud, so loudly that it caused the Big Bang? Was it a word made of carbon and gas and stardust that fell from the sky and into orbit? Or was it just a name? A secret name that, when spoken, revealed the entire universe? Maybe it was like a password, a magic, universal phrase. Who knows? Maybe it’s all of the above. Believe me, I’d like to know, but I’m pretty sure I have to die first. 

I’ve had it now. I take my hands and rub them over my face, then say: So, I take it you’re heading to some sort of crossword competition with this genius of yours. What sort of IQ is genius? Two hundred? Two hundred and fifty? Where’s the tournament? I hope it’s nowhere near a peanut factory. The boy shakes his head. I’m not going to any sort of competition. I’m on a college visit. I have an admissions interview. I pinch the bridge of my nose. You can’t be more than twelve. He shakes his head. I’m thirteen. I’m accelerated. I want to study the Classics. Latin, Greek. At least in college. But my end-plan is an etymologist. An etymologist studies the origin of words. The boy explains this like I don’t know what it means, which I don’t, but still. 

Well, I’m a salesman, I counter. I can sell anything to anyone. Once, when I was just a few years older than you, I sold a bag of dog shit to an old man for twenty dollars. He paid me for dog shit because I knew exactly what to say to make him hand over twenty bucks. That’s your origin of words for you. 

The boy isn’t listening. Are you familiar with the self-mummification process practiced by select Buddhist monks in preparation for their eventual death? he asks. Of course the fuck not, I say. Well, he goes, it was a lengthy process, usually around ten years, that took place primarily in Japan, during which time the monks would eat a very limited diet of pine needles and tree bark to slowly dehydrate themselves. This diet also helped to keep their eventual dead bodies from becoming infested with insects. Basically, they pre-embalmed themselves. I look at him like he’s murdered my mother. Shoot me in the face, I say. The boy continues. It’s really quite admirable. The monks’ dedication to their own demise, their physical preparation for the inevitable. But how peculiar, as well. Spiritual men obsessed with something concrete. I laugh once. Admirable is not the word you’re looking for. 

I reach under my seat and bring out my leather briefcase, click both levers open, and raise the lid. Here’s the twenty, I say, showing him the old, archival sheet that houses the infamous Jackson. This is how you spend a life worth discussing with strangers. The boy doesn’t seem to acknowledge it. Selling dog shit? he says. Better than talking shit, I say. Better than E-S-S-E. Better than college before your balls have even dropped. What’re you going to do in college on Friday night? On Saturday night? Will they put you in a dormitory? It can’t be legal when you aren’t legal. You’ll be eaten alive. Are you on the list of common allergens? 

The boy is unfazed. When the monks are emaciated and near starvation, he says, they’re buried alive in an underground cell. They sit in the lotus position and are given a bamboo tube to breathe through. Once a day, they ring a bell to let the other monks know they’re still alive. I suppose they have a string in the cell that is attached to a bell above ground. Then, when the bell stops ringing, the above-ground monks know that the below-ground monk has finally died. Then they take away the bamboo tube, the bell, the string. They close up the hole where the bamboo tube entered. Then they wait three years. They don’t exactly exhume the monk for a funeral in three years. They first unseal the tomb to see if the body has properly mummified, and if so, they take it to the nearest temple to be venerated. Now I have to know how it ends. And if not? I ask.

The boy pauses, showing his first glimmer of emotion. What emotion, I couldn’t say. Well, if the body has not properly preserved itself, the monks perform an exorcism. I start scouring my face with my hands again. It’s illegal now, the boy says, as if this helps things. But it was originally practiced by a school of Buddhism called Shingon. Shingon is a word that means ‘true word.’ What’s the true word? Is it the same word that was The Word in the beginning? That’s what I aim to find out. That’s the whole point of etymology in my world. It’s not just about the origin of all words, but for me, the origin of The Word.

SAND TABLE ASSESSMENT: Client 3 has smoothed all the sand into an even rectangle using the smooth backside of a plastic trowel. In the very center of the rectangle, he has buried a tiny plastic baby doll up to its neck.

CLIENT 3 QUESTION: What the fuck has this world come to?

DR.’S ANSWER: It’s come to you.

CHICKEN SALAD INGREDIENTS: dark meat chicken, Miracle Whip, sweet relish, golden raisins, regular raisins, currants

CHICKEN SALAD RATING: 1.4/10. RAISINS ARE GRAPES!

CLIENT 4: JERemy85X

PHYSICAL PRESENTATION: Shiny? Oily? Shiny, I think.

RANT: Hello and good day. Violence, sadly, has never been relegated to the battlefield. Violence is happening every second of every day in bedrooms and school hallways and in church basements and online. The cause of all outer pain is inner pain. Hurt people hurt people. People have always been filled with self-hatred; it’s just that now the population is quite large, and we see more violence because there are more people. Yet we also see it because a great majority of people on this planet are without souls. 

Have you heard of the Soul Bank? It’s a very real thing that we cannot see with our eyes, but it’s out there, in the ether, where we all originate from and return to. The fact is, there are only so many souls to go around, but there are endless bodies. Bodies can be (and are!) made every day by people reproducing, consciously or not, enjoyably or not, and many of these bodies come to this planet with working brains and parts, electrical impulses and whatnot, but no real interior spirit to speak of. It’s true. 

You probably work with many of these soulless people. It’s estimated that the majority of people on earth are soulless. The going percentage is 59.4. These people (most of us) are wired to not want to die and to want to survive, therefore they/we adapt in ways, and exhibit behaviors and actions and words, that many of us will attribute to a functioning soul, when in reality this person is just an electrical jumble that is responding to stimuli in complex ways in simply an effort to maintain the electricity within the electrical jumble. 

So, there is something that maybe you should consider when you bring up the topic of violence: the Soul Bank. Maybe you yourself are one of them. The soulless. Ask yourself: Do I really feel? Do I really love? Do I really care about what happens to my neighbor? Or do I just care about my own self-preservation because, at my very core, there is nothing more than an animal desire to avoid pain and death? 

Listen, a little something personal about me: I used to be a cutter, and the only way out of cutting myself was to finally cultivate a love inside myself that felt larger than the sensation of cutting. A lot of people cut just to feel something. People think people cut to numb the pain inside, but it’s to experience a sensation. Any sensation. It is not: I think, therefore I am. It is: I feel, therefore I am not dead yet. In the meantime, remember that all violence is self-violence. That the only way to stop violence is to stop the violence within yourself, and the only way to stop the violence within yourself is to retrain your subconscious to believe that you’re loved and lovable, and the only way to retrain your subconscious is through affirmations. 

If everyone did two hundred affirmations a day for two hundred days, not only would violence be eliminated, so would physical illness and mental illness and poverty and hatred. This works even on people who have no souls. It’s like downloading data. Or uploading, I guess… 

I have a very hard time in life when it comes to companionship. I’m always wanting the company of someone, but I can hardly ever find the company of someone, and when I do, they don’t stay around very long. I’ve been told that I’m very sweet and loving. Some people say I’m the sweetest and most loving man they’ve ever met. And yet, they still don’t stay around for long. Seventy-nine days is my longest relationship. 

I’ve worried that it’s my breath or my aroma. I’ve been to dentists and can assure you that I have a very nice, white smile. I’ve been told that my breath is minty at best, and neutral at worst, so I don’t think halitosis is the problem. I also went to a doctor for an honest opinion about my body odor… just the smell of me in general, like my skin and hair. My clothes. And the doctor was very accommodating. She smelled me everywhere and said she smelled nothing but soap with undertones of deodorant. Perhaps dryer sheets. She looked me in the eyes very kindly and gently when she told me this. I could tell she was being honest, and I could tell that she felt somewhat sorry for me. 

It’s a very strange feeling when someone feels sorry for you. It’s both very nice and very sad. It makes you feel seen, but also beyond help. She knew she wasn’t going to do anything more for my condition of loneliness other than to tell me the truth about how I smelled, which, it turns out, I do not. Therefore, I don’t think that an off-putting aroma is my problem, which is reassuring, but I’m back at square one. 

Is this too bold to say, but sexual technique was another concern of mine. Perhaps people were leaving me because I was bad in matters of the bedroom. So, I did much studying on technique and how to please people. Did you know that women are capable of at least ten different types of climax? I did much studying and discovered that women can achieve at minimum ten different heightened states of physical pleasure. I found this to be quite amazing and intimidating and motivating, all at once. Ten! The specific erogenous zones are located all over the body. One woman I read about in my sexual studies achieved a very powerful climax by having someone she cared about caress her arm during a movie. It would be helpful to know what movie this was, I guess, but my guess is it was neither rated X nor Pixar. It likely fell somewhere in between and can be attributed less to the movie and more to the power of the mind and the power of love. 

Most of the studying I did on sexual technique was through reading books and articles, because I didn’t want to damage my brain or sully my spirit with explicit images. I was afraid that by exposing myself to pornography, I would become too numb to everyday lovemaking, which is what most people are capable of after a long day at whatever drudgery it is they endure to pay taxes and insurance. So, after my most recent, painful breakup, in the evenings after work, I went to various libraries and websites, and I studied with the same intensity that some people employ for LSAT preparation. 

When I reentered the dating marketplace last year, I knew I was entering the playing field with excellent credentials. I had good breath and no foul bodily odor. I knew that I was very sweet and loving and that I was equipped with vast sexual knowledge. Also, I’m a listener. I’m very willing to listen to anyone’s troubles and traumas, their hopes and dreams. I find people quite fascinating and lovable. 

Furthermore, there are no weapons or odd things in my apartment, you know: things that might scare someone off. For example, I don’t have a pet python or a framed picture of my mother over my bed. I recently re-caulked my bathroom. I have a wide selection of herbal teas from which to choose. In my medicine cabinet, should you go snooping, you will find Tylenol, aftershave, and a travel-sized tube of sunless tanner. Maybe that’s it? The sunless tanner? That could be considered vain or fake. I will throw that out after this. It would behoove me to be my truest self anyway, which is pale. 

Regardless of my efforts, and after several more ephemeral relationships, I’m once again alone. I’ve listened to, cried with, pleasured, and cooked for many, many people. They’re all grateful. They’re all astonished by my selflessness. And yet, all of my lovers are no longer my lovers. 

I wrote a poem and memorized it. It goes like this: One time, I smelled smoke. One time, I had this pain. One time, I had this nagging fear. One time, my car made this noise. One time, there was this thing I could not remember. You located the source of the smoke. You located the source of the pain. You named the reason for the fear. You were able to make my car make the noise on command. You remembered the thing I was trying to remember. It took you many guesses, but you did not stop guessing. I was so in love with you after all these things that I drew a Venn diagram of the two of us. You were the blue circle, and I was the yellow. When we made love, parts of us overlapped to make a small green meadow for ourselves to lie in. When we were finished, you went back to being the blue sea, and I went back (reluctantly) to being the yellow sun. 

What I wanted to tell you when we were in the grass was that: I’ve waited lifetimes for you, and I’ve been with you in many lifetimes. In some of the lifetimes, you died first, and in others, I died first. Either way, every time, we always promised to meet each other again in the next life, but we knew we would not know what each other looked like. It would be both torture and an adventure. 

Still, I believe that six months from now we will be sitting at a Chipotle in the blinding cold sun of January, talking. Not about each other, but about our love for each other as if it were a separate thing. We are too old to discuss making a child, but really, that is what our love is. A child. We will sit there in the restaurant and pass that child back and forth. How will we keep it alive? You’re the sailboat, and I’m the wind. With me, you go nowhere. Without you, I go everywhere, aimless. 

Now, enough of the poetry and back to my thoughts on violence and affirmations. If you are interested in them, my affirmations, I would be happy to share them for a reasonable fee. Do you PayPal? I do. They are twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents for two hundred. Less than fifteen cents each. I can’t think of a cheaper way to World Peace.

SAND TABLE ASSESSMENT: Client 4 has written his PayPal information into the sand.

CLIENT 4 QUESTION: Are you interested in purchasing my affirmations packet for an introductory rate of nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents?

DR.’S ANSWER: I think it might be your sheen. 

CHICKEN SALAD INGREDIENTS: This is actually a Wendy’s Taco Salad

CHICKEN SALAD RATING: 10/10

CLIENT 5: BRANDY6F51A

PHYSICAL PRESENTATION: Unnaturally blonde, generally listless. Dressed in pale yellow scrubs, the same color as her hair.

RANT: I’m a dental hygienist, addicted to nitrous oxide, both for what it makes me remember and what it makes me forget. Here’s what I remember: the television left on at my grandparents’ house, the “National Anthem” playing, then the blaring signal, the static. My grandmother’s Vantage cigarettes crushed in an ashtray shaped like a sassafras leaf. The one time I went into the bathroom and saw my grandfather naked, his privates soft and repulsive, like toadstools in mulch. Here’s what I forget: what I have to do, what I need to do, what I should do, what I didn’t get done, what I’m doing, what I did… 

Women sit around and tell their stories again and again to each other. They don’t get tired of this, but a man would. Here’s what I want a man to do for me: I’m lying on a bed face down, and he lifts up both my legs and pulls them hard, like almost out of their sockets. He makes me scrambled eggs, still glossy. He asks me to name the boy who first hurt me. I do, and we never speak of it again, but the story has taken hold in his irises—a gold line in the brown. He tells me to take off my makeup, my clothes. I sing something by someone into a karaoke microphone. What are you terrible at? he asks. The relinquishing of personal space, I answer. We’re exclusive, but he leaves me alone most of the time… 

There’s an oil stain on my driveway in the shape of a heart. A love that can’t be snowed or rained or blown or worn or power-washed away. It will outlast the bleeding heart of the car it came from. When the car is hauled to the dump and smashed as flat as a soda can and stacked like a fish scale on top of other cars, the stain will still be there, reminding somebody how hard it is to do away with love. You say you don’t want it, love, but then the next day, there’s the growling and growling, it’s louder than your stomach, because a heart is so quickly starved…

Here are three things I know for sure: killer whales shouldn’t be in a tank, a scar is an experience, if you wake up before dawn and don’t allow yourself to think, you’ll receive wisdom from the other realm… 

My mother likes euphemisms. She says “overcast” not “cloudy.” A “home” instead of “insane asylum.” When girls are growing up, they look at what their parents do for them as something they would like to do for their own children someday. Boys look at what their parents do for them as something they would like their wife to do for them someday… 

The only time my great-grandmother was ever in a hospital was when a doctor convinced her to have a hysterectomy. She did as she was told, but after the operation, she said she was never able to cry again or taste certain foods like garlic and coffee. She told me: I do not recommend a hysterectomy if one is ever offered to you. Keep bleeding as the good Lord intended is what I say, otherwise be prepared to suffer all sorts of symptoms like being very hot then very cold, having the sensation you are being watched, thinking about fornication all the time but not wanting it. Craving cheesecake… 

In relationships, my partners always harvest something from me that they can’t grow themselves. I’m a fruit tree they pick bare. Look how much I love you, they say. I’m addicted and you’re destroyed. My parents’ generation walked through the forest. I walked through the forest fire. My children will walk past the burned-out cars, sit in them and tell jokes, do drugs…

I knew a girl in college. She had interesting hands. They were slender with long, unpolished nails, and she wore several silver rings, the sort purchased at hookah shops or in the parking lots of music festivals. I never saw her hold anything in her hands. She just used them to form a cup as if she were at a petting zoo and ready to receive grain. A handful of people were there, she’d say, showing her grain cup. Not many at all. Every time we talked, she used the word handful in conversation. 

Once, she took the Greyhound bus the same time I did from Rochester to Poughkeepsie. We both dated hockey players at a small college. We’d both stay in the same dormitory on these visits. It was as if we didn’t know each other once under the spell of our boyfriends, and yet as if we knew one another better. We’d pass speechless in the night hallway to use the sordid male bathroom, knowing full well each of us had offered our bodies up moments before. Knowing full well each of us was unsatisfied, empty. Her parents are older, more than one person had told me. Her boyfriend gets rough with her. On the ride back on the Greyhound, I visually inspected her for bruises while she slept… 

On my cousin’s honeymoon, on the first morning after the wedding night, she told me she brought out the vibrator she’d bought at Hustler. She sat on the bed waiting, and when her new husband came out of the shower, he was fully dressed for something other than sex. He had on an aqua golf shirt so pressed it looked like he might be selling vacuum cleaners… Here’s another thing I’ve noticed: Connection but not alignment. Chemistry but not commitment. Memories but not plans… 

The college I went to was just over the border from Canada, yet still somehow in America, in a town known for its suicide rate and two factories: one of which made DC-10 turbine blades and the other, applesauce. A boy named Preston from Saratoga Springs once asked me if I wanted a tab of acid. Enamored of boys with pompous hair and zero personality, I eagerly said Yes, yes! Me, me! as if I were still an eighth-grade kiss-ass, begging my geography teacher to let me run the VCR. The tab of acid was pink and stamped with a tiny, red hoot owl. Underneath the hoot owl had been the word WHO with no question mark, like the World Health Organization and not WHOO. All I thought about on that trip was that all we leave behind are bones. Because of that, I think about my bones all the time. Will they be beautiful limbs of marble? Or will they be pitted, porous, twigs of barkless birch? 

You should know that there was one beautiful boy. Every day with him was perfection. We viewed one another, at all times, as if we had just made amends from a terrible argument. It was raw and bare and very gutted. We didn’t hug, we clung. Kissing was devouring. It was how you feel when a storm passes, and all your laundry has been blown from a clothesline and is in the street.

SANDTABLE ASSESSMENT: Client 5 has not touched the sand table.

Question: Client 5 has no question

Answer: Without a question, there is no answer

Chicken Salad Ingredients: Client 5 is vegan.