The Remedy (Dark Corners Collection, #6)

by Adam Haslett

I’d tried so many doctors and therapists and healers of all kinds that I didn’t see the point of entering treatment with yet another. But a friend promised me this was different. Different altogether. Expensive to be sure, but the results were dramatic.

“I’m telling you, it’s like nothing else.” I wondered if he’d joined a cult or found religion. But no, he told me, it was nothing like that.

She handed me yet another form to sign and asked if I could please give her my phone to be returned when I departed. “It’s a privacy precaution,” she explained, “for all the patients.”

She set two mugs on the table, then reached for a folder on her desk. For $20,000, I would have expected a choice of tea, but what I got was Lipton’s black. She lifted her reading glasses to her nose and glanced at the folder’s contents.

“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.”

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.

He unholstered his pistol and held the tip of it to my head. “Thank you,” I called out. “Thank you.”