The Remedy (Dark Corners Collection, #6)

by Adam Haslett

Dr. Lang did none of that. Nothing I recounted about my life seemed to surprise or impress her in the least. It didn’t even seem particularly concerning to her. She wanted to know instead about the music that I listened to at various stages of my life, about the books that I had read that had left an impression on me, and about which works of art were most important to my sense of the world.

“As you know, one of the things we do here,” Dr. Lang said, leading me slowly up the hall, “is gather information. Through the conversations we have, but also the records and photographs, and what we can gather from other sources. The point is to try to fill in the texture of a person’s life.”

“It’s not just about collecting the facts of our patients’ lives,” she said. “That’s the simple part. The challenge is to synthesize it into something that can be offered back to them in a meaningful way. Wealthier patients, like yourself, the ones who can pay, they subsidize all this production work for the others.”

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.

I found myself waking earlier and earlier each day until my walks in the park were coming before the sun had risen. There weren’t many others out in the cold twilight, which suited me all the better. Books of poetry I hadn’t thought about in years consumed whole stretches of the day, as if I were being called back to a prior self capable of absorbing their play of meanings.