Therapy

“Well, I’m already suffering the side-effect,” I said, “so I might as well take the drug.” Alexandra laughed, baring her big teeth in the widest grin I have ever drawn from her. She hastily straightened her features. “There are unconfirmed reports of more serious side-effects,” she said. “Patients hallucinating, trying to mutilate themselves. There’s even a murderer who’s claiming that he killed under the influence of Prozac.” “My friend didn’t mention anything like that,” I said. “She told me it makes you feel better than well.” Alexandra looked at me in silence for a moment with her big brown gentle eyes. “I’ll put you on Prozac if you really want me to,” she said. “But you must understand what’s entailed. I’m not talking about side-effects, now, I’m talking about effects. These new SRI drugs change people’s personalities. They act on the mind like plastic surgery acts on the body. Prozac may give you back your self-esteem, but it won’t be the same self.” I thought for a moment. “What else do you suggest?” I said.
    Alexandra suggested that I should write down exactly what I thought other people were saying and thinking about me, privately or to each other. I recognized the strategy, of course. She believed that it was not the actuality of other people’s opinions, but my fear of what these opinions might be, that was making me wretched. Once I focused on the question — what do other people really think of me? — and made myself answer it explicitly, then instead of projecting my lack of self-esteem onto others, and allowing it to rebound upon myself, I would be forced to acknowledge that other people didn’t really loathe and despise me, but respected and sympathized with and even liked me. It didn’t quite work out like that, though.
    Being the sort of writer I am, I couldn’t just summarize other people’s views of me, I had to let them speak their thoughts in their own voices. And what they said wasn’t very flattering. “You’ve been very hard on yourself,” Alexandra said, when she finally saw what I’d written. It took me some weeks — I got a bit carried away — and I only sent the stuff to her last week, quite a bulky package. I went up to Rummidge yesterday for her verdict. “They’re very funny, very acute,” she said, leafing through the sheaves of A4 with a reminiscent smile playing over her pale, unpainted lips, “but you’ve been very hard on yourself.” I shrugged and said I had tried to see myself truthfully from other people’s points of view. “But you must have made up a lot of these things.” Not all that much, I said.
     
    I had to use my imagination a bit, of course. I never saw Brett Sutton’s Statement to the police, for instance, but I had to make one myself, and they gave me a copy to take home, so I knew what the format was like, and it wasn’t hard to guess what Brett Sutton’s version of events would have been. And although Amy was always very secretive about her sessions with Karl Kiss, I knew she would have been giving him daily bulletins about developments in our relationship following Sally’s bombshell, and I’ve had plenty of opportunity to study the way she thinks and talks. Most of the things she says to Karl in the monologue she said to me at one time or another, like remembering her mother slicing carrots in the kitchen while telling her the facts of life, or dreaming of the cartoon in Public Interest with me as Vulcan and Saul as Mars. The bit about her sewage-disposal problems in the Playa de las Americas hotel was an extrapolation from listening to her endlessly cranking the handle of the toilet when she was in the bathroom. The ending is a little too neat, perhaps, but I couldn’t resist it. Amy did return to England in a bouncy, self-assertive mood, saying that she was going to give Karl his “ congé ”, but the last I heard she was back in analysis again. I don’t see much of Amy, actually, these days. We tried meeting again for a meal once or twice, but we couldn’t seem to get back onto the old friendly footing. Embarrassing memories of Tenerife kept getting in the way.
    Whether Louise actually described our reunion to Stella in such detail, I have no idea, but whatever she told her would have been on the phone. Louise may have given up smoking and drinking and drugs (apart from Prozac), but she’s completely addicted to the telephone. She had her dinky Japanese portable beside