The Remedy (Dark Corners Collection, #6)

by Adam Haslett

We’d known each other since we were kids, and though as adults our struggles had been different, we recognized in each other a similar kind of dread, a cumulative heaviness that lay behind whatever our particular physical and mental complaints were.

She hadn’t requested a list of symptoms. Your experience of your condition as a whole—that’s what she wanted to know. It was as if, in a single stroke, she were undoing the very premise of all the treatments that had come before, the idea that the suffering could be anatomized and its components addressed. Her question bypassed all the particulars—the chronic pain, the mental tension, the exhaustion—in search of something else, of the person beneath all that, the one who endured the affliction.

“It’s become who I am,” I said spontaneously. In my first answer to her first question, I was stating my sense of what my life had turned out to be more directly than I had to anyone, even to myself. “It’s the person I’ve become.”

that I was failing to accomplish whatever I might be capable of, a prophecy that seemed to fulfill itself more with each passing year as I fell behind friends and acquaintances in their patchwork progress toward building their adult lives.

You didn’t pity your equals; you pitied children, or those reduced to the semihelpless state of children.

Confidence. That’s the word that came to mind, one that I would never before have used to describe any part of my life.

The expression on the man’s face was one I had never quite seen before, a kind of beatific wonder, as if the innocence of earliest childhood had somehow come forward in time to inhabit him again, an innocence not ignorant of all that had since come to pass but somehow encompassing and forgiving it. It was as if gratitude were pouring from his eyes.

was as if my experience with Dr. Lang was granting me, in a way I had never known before, something like independence, even distance from the people I’d been intimate with the longest. And there came with that a certain unaccountable peace.

She’d allowed me to glimpse how it might be to let go of the ache in my body and the exhaustion of my spirit, a condition that hadn’t miraculously disappeared these last few weeks, but toward which I felt an increasing detachment, a sense that its dominion over me would soon be at an end.