The Book of Joe

blue when I was a kid, is now a dirty eggshell color, and the hedges growing beneath the dark picture window of the living room aren’t nearly as tall or dense as I remember, but otherwise the house is exactly the same. I stop the car and take a deep breath, anticipating some sort of emotional reaction to my childhood home, and I come up empty. I haven’t always been this dispassionate; I’m fairly certain of that. Is it a function of time and distance, or have I simply shed over the years what general sensitivity I once possessed? I try to recall a time in recent memory that I expressed any heartfelt emotion to another person, and can’t come up with a single instance of sentiment or passion.
    Turning right onto Churchill, I’m troubled by the notion that while I wasn’t looking, I seem to have become an asshole. This leads to a brief, syllogistic argument. The fact that I suspect I’m an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn’t think he’s an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I’m an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes’s Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefore, I’m not one.
    It is debates like this one, and the sneaking suspicion that I’m losing the overall capacity to give a shit, that led to my brief and ill-fated stint in therapy. One of the drawbacks I’ve discovered to being a fiction writer is that I seem never to fully inhabit the moment at hand. Part of me is always off to the side, examining, looking for context and subtext, imagining how I’ll describe the moment after it’s gone. My therapist, Dr. Levine, felt it had nothing to do with being a writer and everything to do with being egocentric and insecure, which I thought, true or not, was a pretty harsh judgment to arrive at twenty-five minutes into our second session.
    “What’s more,” he informed me at the time, “your penchant for self-analysis - which is, by the way, another manifestation of your egotism - is further complicated by immense feelings of inferiority. You don’t allow yourself to become fully engaged because deep down you feel undeserving of approval, love, success, et cetera. All of the things you crave.”
    “Don’t you think you should get to know me better before making such categorical statements?” I said, somewhat put off by his remarks.
    “Don’t be defensive,” he chided me. “It just slows down the process. You’re not paying me to be gentle.”
    “I’m not being defensive.”
    “You sound defensive.”
    “That’s because it’s patently impossible to deny being defensive without sounding defensive.”
    “Exactly!” Dr. Levine said enigmatically, sitting back in his chair and scratching the ridiculous little goatee that made his mouth look suspiciously like a vagina. I wondered if he’d grown it for just that reason, being such a resolute Freudian and all. He pulled off his gold-rimmed spectacles and cleaned them absently with his necktie. Then, replacing them on his nose, he asked me the question that all therapists invariably fall back on when creativity fails them before the hour’s up. “Tell me about your father.”
    “Oh, come on. You can do better than that.”
    “Don’t you think it’s a legitimate question?”
    “Now who’s getting defensive?”
    “I am not - ” He caught himself and flashed me a pitying smile. “Very clever, Joe. I’m sorry you feel the need to best me in these verbal jousts of yours. It demonstrates a lack of respect for me and my abilities as a professional.” My therapist was actually pouting. “I wonder why you bother coming at all.”
    So I stopped coming.
    Churchill curves around to the right, rejoining Stratfield Road just as it widens to two lanes in each direction and enters the town’s retail district. Upscale strip malls and expansive parking lots appear on both sides of the road. The next five blocks are packed with stores geared toward meeting just about every manner of suburban need. Radio Shack, K·B
    Toys, Blockbuster Video, Carvel, Party City, Home Depot, Barnes Noble, Super Stop Shop, a CVS drugstore, Coconuts Music, two jewelry stores, a plant nursery, and the Duchess Diner. On the last block, I see what used to be P.J. Porter’s flagship store, now being torn down.
    One block later, I turn right onto Oak Hill Road and pull into the parking lot of Mercy Hospital, a red brick two-story building that seems too cheerful and not nearly institutional enough