Arcade. Drew Nellins Smith

question of “cleanliness” brought to mind a scene from the Spike Lee biopic Malcolm X, in which Denzel Washington, as Mr. X, discovers the way he is being oppressed, not merely by the citizenry of the US or the world, but by the English language itself. He looks up the word “black” in the dictionary and sees how it’s used to suggest evil and ruin, while “white” is used as a stand-in for purity and goodness.

      I wanted to have a better word than clean, whose opposite is dirty, but I never found one.

       16

      STALKING THE COP AND THE KID HADN’T BEEN MY PLAN PER se, but obsession had always been my go-to mode, even for relatively inconsequential upsets. And given that my relationship with the cop was the exact opposite of inconsequential, I was completely swept up before I had any sense of how it might be avoided.

      Before I went to work at the motel, I saw a therapist who tried teaching me to think differently, to train my brain to react in ways that would make my life better. He was forever extolling drugs that might help in our mission. He wanted to know if I’d heard of Celexa. How about Wellbutrin? Prozac? Had I heard of Zoloft? Paxil? Nardil? Had I heard of Lithium? Had I heard of Propofol? Would I consider opening myself to pharmaceuticals if it meant that I would feel happier, less worried, more in control?

      I never considered it for a minute. No way was I going to be tricked by drugs into thinking everything was all right.

      My shrink and I huddled over the coffee table between us, and he drew a line near the bottom of a piece of paper, making it look like a stock chart, with peaks and valleys, the line jerking upward and then downward.

      “This is where you are now,” he said.

      Then he drew the same kind of line near the top of the page.

      “This top line is where an average person is, a person experiencing typical peaks and valleys and periods of calm where everything is just flat and ordinary. And the bottom line is where you are, see? It’s the same thing, except that you’re starting at a lower level than most people. So your spikes into happiness are never as high as theirs. And your lows are much lower. It’s a chemistry thing, you understand?”

      There was something seductive about what he was saying, but I also knew that no one had tested my brain chemistry, so it was all pure conjecture.

      “I’ll think about it,” I said.

      “I hope you will,” he said.

      “I really just want to talk,” I said.

      I meant it. Even when I plopped down in the chair at the beginning of a session and announced that I had nothing to say, I talked. About people who had cut me off in traffic and conversations I had when I was fifteen years old that still embarrassed me. I talked about what I thought about the people I saw in the waiting room. I talked about my parents. I talked about money. I even talked about my sexual outings, though it was the one subject I never dwelled on. I told him my encounters with men meant nothing, that I did it out of boredom and horniness, interrupting his attempts at interrogation with lengthy, detailed stories about the violations against my personal space in line at the grocery store.

      I spent our sessions covering the same ground again and again, congratulating myself on my scrupulous exactitude.

      “None of your clients are as rigorous as I am,” I told him.

      I liked going to therapy, where my shrink eventually learned to laugh at me and call me on at least some of my bullshit. We probably would have made some progress eventually, but I had to quit seeing him when I went broke and started working at the motel. My hours conflicted with his schedule, and I didn’t have the money to pay for a shrink anymore anyway. It was too bad, because after the cop ended things with me I really could have used one.

      Sobbing, I told a friend it was as if part of my brain had been blocked off before the cop ended things with me. Then when he did, the dam had broken so that blood flooded the empty cavern and changed me into something other than who I had been. I would never have characterized myself as a jealous person before the cop moved the kid into his house, but afterwards it overwhelmed me until it seemed like the only thing I really knew about myself, that I loved the cop and that the kid was in my place. In a way, I had to appreciate the kid for showing me how wrongheaded I had been, but now I was ready for him to disappear again, like a cancer that revealed all my strength and courage and left me a hero and a survivor, but only if it didn’t kill me first.

      I hadn’t understood how people were driven to do the crazy things they did before then. I thought the things people did for love in movies were over-the-top fantasies about lunatics.

      Figuring out the password to the cop’s email was proof that I belonged in there. I wasn’t some criminal rooting around. I was a confidant with inside knowledge. I was like a dear friend plotting an intervention.

      He had told me everything, so it was easy guessing which words he might choose. I was in on my third try. When his inbox appeared on my screen it seemed as if my familiarity with him had earned me the right. Though really it was just his cat’s name.

      Once inside, I read his email more often than I read my own, as he and the kid sent little messages to one another several times a day. I scoured the internet to see if there was some way I might intercept their text messages too, but no. It was for the best. The emails kept me busy enough. I watched videos of them having sex that they’d taken on their phones and emailed back and forth. I looked at photos of them in bed and sitting around the cop’s house. I thought about them all the time, imagining their lives together in vivid detail, picturing every stage of their respective days, what they were doing, when and where.