Listings

The first thing the boy notices is the sofa.

It is austere-without cushioning or frills-and appears to be somewhat truncated. Visions radiate through the boy’s brain of the therapist purchasing the sofa secondhand from a cadre of midget zen buddhists. The boy imagines the buddhists living in the Lancaster hills, making jam and growing organic food alongside the Omish. He imagines the organic preserves market can’t be doing too well these days (it is a luxury good after all, you can always just put smuckers on your seven grain toast) and he imagines the midget buddhists having to pawn everything they own to buy their tiny lotus flowers. The sofa is mauve.

There is a Native American design cheaply embossed on the covering; the boy wonders if it’s an authentic design and if so, could he recognize the tribe of ancestry? He makes a mental note to study up on Native American art when he gets back to his work computer. The reminder is immediately added to his cerebral list of things he probably won’t do or have time for. It falls somewhere in between memorizing the constellations and origins behind their naming and learning how to play the harp. None of these things he will ever do. But each time he thinks how he can’t play the harp and won’t learn about Native American art, he is seized with a general panic and a sense of inadequacy. Just the thought of this imaginary agenda, without glancing at any of its contents, fills him with regret for time wasted. It is a crippling feeling of bones a day more brittle and skin a day more wrinkled.

And yet, he can’t stop adding to his mental tabulation of things he won’t ever do or have time for. The mere act of accounting his future failures allows for the slightest shot of sweet, unadulterated guilt. The list is his plunger and needle, any addition to it is the purest of narcotics. It is available anywhere. On his bike, riding down side streets. Staggering back from the bar, heady and blind.

The guilt can briefly absorb him and he has an excuse to regret. To remember and shudder. He has never found something as indulgent and consuming. His twisted logic

And even better, when he is released from arms of guilt, the sensation sticks around, like a plastic spoon dipped in peanut butter, washed, and then reused to ladle his  tomato soup. He his aware of that dissonant flavor of peanuts and salt against the sweet, tangy broth. He can remember what the spoon was just used for, and savor it; even though it does not fit.

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But he tables these thoughts as the therapist asks the boy why he has chosen to come to his office on a blustery winter day. The boy can see the American flag whip and flutter helplessly out the window opposite his position. The pulleys make a hypnotic clang on the pole. The office is warm and sleepy and red. The therapist is sitting in a sticky pleather chair across from the doppleganger lounger in which he himself is sitting. The sofa sits vacant on the south end of the office, the imagines asking if he can just give it a test lay.

He delays verbalizing all these thoughts because he fears he won’t be able to verbalize them coherently at this moment- at this moment the boy needs the therapist’s approval more than his help.

For now the boy will talk about his father and his job and his goals. He can always wax beautifully on those topics. He can share just enough to uncover a sliver of insight. The boy has mastered an incredibly effective miming of the Titanic sinking ice flotillas of the North Atlantic. He can peek over the surface to give the appearance of hiding an immensely complicated berg underwater. Yet, this is where the similarities end. There is nothing complex or changing or impressive underneath, certainly not enough to drown a luxury liner. But the therapist isn’t smart enough to see this and he’s the only one who’s authorization matters.

And the therapist will gladly hand this over, he knows this is all the boy wants from him. In return he receives money for his lunch and his wife and his mistress. He hopes the boy isn’t smart enough to figure it out.

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And eventually the boy will figure it out, but first, he will continue to puzzle over why the therapist decided to purchase such an uncomfortably short, uncomfortably ugly, uncomfortable sofa.