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.

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.

“How would you describe your experience of your condition as a whole?”

all this led to an endless self-criticism 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.

Illness brought out condescension in most everyone. You didn’t pity your equals; you pitied children, or those reduced to the semihelpless state of children.

Her English was functional but far from fluent. This helped, as it no doubt does for many shy men who go out with foreign women, a degree of illegibility being a reprieve from the harshly judged self they’ve been stuck in since puberty.

Incel vibes or no?

The gap in comprehension had helped in bed, too, where I felt no compunction in asking literal questions about what she preferred, rather than pretending to the part of some hero-lover I had never been.

Men out here are afraid of yes or no questions.

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.

It 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.

How you remember, she had asked me, not what.

I watched them, struck with wonder, my goggles over my eyes and my flippers on, in the salt water, the waves above rocking me to and fro, no year or month or scene connected to this sudden whole body sense of being happily underwater and alone, just the buoyancy and the creatures, and the marvel of it all, and I thought, Yes, let me stay here, back in what used to be this free boy’s body.

A moment later, though, the circles, which now filled the entire screen—they grew brighter and brighter, expanding into an oblivion of pale light, a dawn of sorts, a summer dawn, hazy, and I felt bereft, stolen away from something rich, as if woken from a dream saturated with meaning to find myself once more in the narrow world.

And so as the image of her features dissolved, I sensed this welter of feeling running back out of me toward the screen, which was becoming now a wash of hundreds of overexposed images, layered atop one another, all of them in motion, making it nearly impossible to distinguish one setting or object from another, like debris swept up in a current, only a fragment here or there—of a room I’d slept in or the street outside my parents’ apartment or the side of my grandmother’s face—familiar enough to leave me with the knowledge that this was my experience, all of it, moving past me in a rush, in a river of ghosts.