Emotions, i.e., Colors
by Ryan Raymond Buell
‘Considering the scope of personal information it yields, the procedure is relatively non-invasive and takes all of two minutes.’
Dr. Webb inserts the emotional tube (... a cold glass cylinder with a syringe—except the long, microscopically thin needle flexes so as to evade sensation as it circumvents your cranial nerve, pricks your meninges, and siphons the fluid of your emotions) into your nose, sliding it all the way in, until a tingling similar to Novocain numbs your frontal lobe, leaving layers of ice-cold tissue clinging to the tube, which Dr. Webb, when you’re ready, slides back out.
‘This is your depression,’ he says, and lightly flicks it with a fingernail.
The tube is filled with opaque liquid like dishwater.
‘Now what?’ I ask. ‘I still feel bad.’
‘Now I run some tests. Come back tomorrow morning. First thing. And we will have determined the root cause of all your troubles.’
*
On the drive home, the windshield is dotted with rain. No one sees the rain falling. The drops appear on the glass like tiny cataclysms: collisions no one hears. They leave their mark.
*
In the apartment, the air is stale. The slow accumulation of lint on bookshelves must mean something.
A headache pulses at my temples. Nose is stuffed up. Sinuses? The weather is indistinct, so I don’t know.
The phone stays dark, though it’s been vibrating all morning with messages (urgent, end-of-the-world) from Danielle. I won’t be going into the office this afternoon, or tomorrow—or for a long time. Let’s see if she fires me.
I remind myself: I should consider optimism. I shoulder consider exercise. I should consider eating.
Dinner is rubber meat, microwaved on a plate. I prepare a salad of spinach leaves and halved cherry tomatoes, drizzled with poppy seed dressing, which I enjoyed once but now tastes too sweet.
I ordered the dressing through a grocery delivery service. A stranger located the plastic container on a shelf in a grocery store less than 5 minutes from the apartment (where I stare out the window in the direction of the store) and placed it in a shopping cart. An interim of unknown events takes place ... a knock on the door. A brown paper bag with poppy seed dressing is on the welcome mat. I pick up the bag and go inside. Then, add dressing to my salad.
In the cheap light of the apartment, the dressing is the same shade of off-white as the emotions-based liquid inside the emotional tube.
I pour the remaining dressing down the sink.
*
At night I sleep but don’t dream.
‘No, you have dreams,’ people tell me. ‘Everyone dreams. You just don’t remember them.’
*
In the morning, sunrise glints through the windshield on the drive to Dr. Webb’s.
‘He isn’t in at the moment,’ the front desk person says. She is younger than me by five years or more. Her lipstick and eyelashes are perfect. I have trouble holding her gaze.
‘He’s not here? He told me first thing in the morning,’ I said.
‘He’s here,’ said the woman. ‘He’s just not in.’
‘So he just stepped out for a minute,’ I said, in a clarifying tone.
‘That is not how Dr. Webb would characterize it, no. He has not “stepped out for a minute.”’
‘When do you, um, think he’ll come back?’
‘Come back?’she said, wrinkling her forehead as if in pain.
‘What time do you expect I can meet with him?’
‘Well, what time is your appointment?’
‘He told me “first thing in the morning.”’
‘So, you mean to tell me you’ve missed your appointment?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘He told you “first thing in the morning,” and yet here you are, showered, dressed—and I assume
you drove here, too, didn’t you? Or took the bus, maybe?’
‘Yeah, I drove,’ I said, and yes, I had to admit, my hair was still damp, and the clothes I wore had been put on after showering.
The young woman typed on a laptop, dictating to herself, ‘Missed appointment in favor of defecation, toothbrushing, shampoo, pants, traffic lights... Excuse me,’she said, and stopped typing to look me in the eye, ‘but this clinic is for patients intent on curing their depression. That means keeping your appointments. Please remember to write down future appointments in a calendar—that is, if you keep a calendar?’
‘I do—yes, I have a calendar. But are you saying I should have met with Dr. Webb immediately upon waking up—as in, instantaneously?’
‘That’s correct. Instantaneously. Dr. Webb is very busy and has many, many appointments. It is important to keep your appointments—if you hope to see progress, that is.’
‘I understand,’ I said, though I felt confused and troubled.
I took a seat in the waiting area. My head felt numb, as it had the day before, with the tube inserted. Maybe the front desk person was right, I thought, and I was not serious about curing my depression. Maybe I don’t want to get better, I thought. I stayed late into the afternoon, watching other patients step through the doors wearing grim masks of their own faces ... then a half hour later, emerging with placid postures, lamblike and subdued. Stripes of sunlight moved across the carpeted floor, made their way onto the wall, where they thinned out, turned orange, and dimmed. Fluorescent lights took over, and the windows were all dark. The front desk person turned off the lights and left me alone in the waiting room. I closed my eyes and seemed to stop thinking for a minute. When I woke up, Dr. Webb was standing over me. It was morning. He placed a hand on my shoulder and smiled.
‘You’re here for your appointment?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re right on time. Come in.’
*
Dr. Webb removed the glass tube from my ear and tapped at it with his fingernail. It was filled with a greenish brine, like pickle juice.
‘Well, there it is,’ Dr. Webb said, and grinned mysteriously. ‘All of your unwillingness to change. Whatever the excuses you keep making in lieu of changing your life for the better—they’re all discoverable within the formula of this brine. You see the sediment gathered there on the sides of the glass? A clear indication there is little to no hope for you to ever improve. It is difficult to improve when you are unwilling. And you, as this fluid seems to say, are as unwilling as anyone I have seen in my entire time at this clinic, and I have been here many, many years.’
‘This... is hard news to take,’ I said.
My voice was shaking.
‘I don’t know what to say. I want to change, but I guess I can’t, can I?’
‘There are options,’ he said, relishing the word.
‘Options?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Dr. Webb said, and pressed a button on the underside of his desk. A panel in the wall turned transparent, slowly revealing itself as a window into an operating room. A patient in a hospital gown is led by nurses to an operating table. The patient assumes a supine position. The nurses leave. The view through the one-way mirror glows with blue-gray light until the operating room dissolves. Only the patient remains visible. Later, I would learn how the color inside the patient overwhelms the room entirely, until there is nothing left but the emotion, i.e., the color. The patient becomes the emotion inside them and is “cured” by disappearing into this emotion. There is no more patient after that, only the emotion. The person becomes abstracted and the problem goes away.
‘Presented with the option of vanishing into pure emotion,’ said Dr. Webb, ‘many of our patients sign their names on the release form. “Release” being the pivotal word here.’
Dr. Webb’s voice calmed my worries, and I felt myself relax into the soft leather of the examination table. The papery hospital gown was loose and barely touched my skin.
‘There’s a cure for everything these days,’said the doctor with a smile. It was the warm smile of someone you can trust. And I did. He presented me a clipboard with a document and handed me a pen. It was a fountain pen, with a silver nib. I considered the release form. I studied the blank line, where my name would go. I touched the pen to paper, then stopped.
‘How much does it cost?’ I asked.
‘Do you have insurance?’ he said.
‘Through work,’ I said.
‘The procedure should be covered, as long as you’ve paid your deductible.’
‘Okay,’ I said, and brought the nib back to the line.
I left his office with a small piece of myself floating in the air above my head. I called it back down to me, but it stayed where it was.
Ryan Raymond Buell lives in Minneapolis, MN. He teaches English as a second language at an elementary school.