They make me piss all the time. They also make me fat—or fatter!”
After a mostly sleepless night, I attended morning Mass to make up for missing the previous Saturday night. Afterward, Father Hachette asked if I was able to get Father McNamee to take his pills, and when I told him what had happened, he just nodded and smiled and then chuckled knowingly. “I’ll keep praying,” he said.
Nothing much else happened until I went to group therapy with Arnie and Max, which is when I began to feel as though maybe God was really beginning to speak to me—if only circumstantially.
I arrived in the yellow room early, before Max. Arnie was dressed in a tie, vest, and matching pants—like he was just missing the jacket of a three-piece suit—and he seemed very happy to see me.
So glad you decided to continue on with your therapy, Bartholomew,” he said. “Please have a seat.”
I sat on the yellow couch.
Arnie sat in his yellow chair.
I hear that you are no longer working with Wendy,” he said in a way that let me know he had heard much more.
I nodded.
Things got a little too personal?” he asked, but nicely.
I nodded again, because it was the easiest thing to do.
I’m sorry to hear that. Wendy is a young therapist. She’s still learning.”
Is she okay?”
Wendy?” he said, which was weird, because who else could I have possibly meant? “She’s fine. But it’s not your job to worry about her. Wendy’s not your responsibility. She was supposed to be helping you, not the other way around. She’s filled me in a little, regarding your treatment and progress, but maybe you’d like to tell me yourself.”
Tell you what exactly?”
Where you left off with Wendy. What sort of things you were working on. Your interactions with her, you could describe those. How your grief counseling was progressing.”
Do you want to hear my life goal?” I said.
Excuse me?”
My life goal. Wendy said it was important to have those. Do you want to know what mine is?”
Sure,” Arnie said, bridging his hands over his knee.
I want to have a drink at a pub with a woman my age—a woman who could one day be my wife. I believe that at the age of thirty-nine, I am ready to go on my first date—or I want to believe that, anyway. It’s been a hard thing to believe in the past—especially when my mom was around. Do you think that this life goal is obtainable for me, even though I have never before gone on a date, nor am I well practiced at consuming alcohol recreationally with women?”
Absolutely,” Arnie said without the slightest hesitation. “It is a good, obtainable, age-appropriate, healthy, and extremely all-around positive life goal, which I encourage you to complete. How can I help you achieve this?”
I was excited to know that Arnie would help me woo The Girlbrarian—so much that I was just about to tell him all about my secret crush when the door burst open.
What the fuck, hey?” Max said as he entered the room.
Welcome back to the word fortress, Max,” Arnie said. “I’m so glad to see you here.”
Max pointed at me and said, “I’ve come to rescue you. We need to get the fuck out of here right fucking now!”
What?” I said. Max looked agitated and determined. I had never been rescued before, and I have to admit—even though I didn’t yet understand what exactly I was being rescued from—that Max’s ardent concern was flattering.
Now, Max,” Arnie said. “We talked about what happened. You don’t have to participate in the study if you don’t—”
Max grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet. “Fucking trust me. Arnie is a liar. He’s not even fucking human! He wants to lock us away in a room, take us far fucking far away, and film us. We need to get the fuck out of here. Right fucking now!”
Allow me to explain, Bartholomew,” Arnie said. “Max is perhaps being a bit unreasonable here.”
Fuck you, Arnie! Fuck your word fortress. Fuck the color yellow. I won’t be your fucking lab rat. Pretending to care about us. You should be a-fucking-shamed of yourself. If you even fucking feel emotions! I trusted you! Told you everything! Even about Alice! Fuck all of this!”
Max grabbed my wrist, pulled hard, and I stumbled after him.
Bartholomew, you aren’t even going to entertain my side of the story? Max is obviously agitated, and maybe he isn’t the best person to trust at this point.”
Fuck you, Arnie! Fuck you!” Max pulled me out of the yellow room, down the steps, through the alley, and onto Walnut Street.
Arnie hurried after us, saying, “This is unfair. Don’t I even get a chance to explain? Bartholomew, I can help you. You don’t even know what happened yet. I can help you achieve your life goal.”
Max just kept saying, “Fuck you, Arnie. Fuck you, Arnie. Fuck you, Arnie,” over and over again, like it was a magical chant that could protect us while we escaped.
Bartholomew,” Arnie said. He grabbed my shoulder, spun me around, and looked into my eyes. “Don’t you think you owe it to me to just listen? Don’t you owe it to yourself?”
He’s a fucking liar!” Max yelled, grabbed my arm, and pulled me down Walnut Street. “Can’t fucking trust him! No fucking way!”
Since he was The Girlbrarian’s brother, and I had already had such a terrible time with Wendy and therapy in general, I decided to go with Max, thinking I could talk to Arnie later if need be, and that Max was much more likely to help me accomplish my life goal of having a beer with his sister, because they were kin.
Sorry,” I said to Arnie.
Well, then. You know where to find me, Bartholomew. When you come to your senses,” Arnie said, and then he finally stopped following us. “You need help. Help that Max can’t possibly provide.”
Fuck you, Arnie!” Max yelled back over his shoulder.
I wondered how Arnie knew what I needed, when we had met only once before and had hardly even talked. Mostly we listened to Max talk. Arnie didn’t really know me at all.
I had a funny thought—since Mom died, besides you, Richard Gere, no one really knows me. No one on the entire planet. Even Father McNamee doesn’t know as much about me as you do. And there really isn’t anyone else.
Do you find that strange?
Sad?
Pathetic?
Interesting?
Where are we going?” I said to Max, once we were far enough away from Arnie.
To the fucking pub.”
What happened between you and Arnie?”
The fucking story of that requires the consumption of beer. Much fucking beer.”
We ended up in the same pub Max took me to before, at a little table in an empty corner, drinking Guinness and looking at framed photographs of the extremely green, rocky, and often misty Irish countryside. Max downed an entire pint with one tilt of his wrist, pushed his big glasses to the top of his nose, belched loudly, and ordered two more Guinness, even though I hadn’t even taken a sip.
You’ll fucking need another, once you hear this,” Max said. “Trust me!”
I took a creamy sip and then listened to his tale.
According to Max, Arnie had called him on the phone and asked if he’d like to be part of a study. “What’s a fucking study?” Max asked, and Arnie explained that sometimes therapists put patients in a “controlled fucking environment” to study their behavior, advance our “fucking knowledge” of the “human fucking race,” he said, and help the test subjects in the process. “Arnie hit me in my fucking weak spot, because he said there’d be a cat to pet, and there fucking was too!”
Apparently, Max was instructed to meet Arnie in West Philly at a “fancy fucking college,” and when he did, he was taken into a “large fucking building that looked like a hospital but wasn’t a fucking hospital, because Arnie called it a laboratory fucking facility,” which creeped out Max for many reasons, which I will explain a bit further on.
Max was taken to an office and introduced to a man wearing “a white fucking lab coat” who inquired about the possibility of asking Max questions and “digital-fucking-recording” his answers, as the lab coat turned on the camera stationed on a “fucking tripod.”
Max asked when he would be able to see the promised cat, and the doctor said that would be “the fucking dessert.”
They asked Max all sorts of seemingly random questions, most of which he refused to answer because they were “way too fucking personal.” Max said they asked him whether he had had sex with any men or women recently, and Max said, “Fucking whoa! That’s a line crosser! What the fuck, hey?” And they didn’t seem to mind that he hadn’t answered the questions, which was “fucking weird” because they kept telling Max that he was doing fine, even though he was just getting mad and refusing to answer and sweating in his chair. “I don’t fucking like this. Where the fuck is the cat?” Max kept asking, and they kept promising Max that he was very close to the part where he got to pet the cat. Max said they asked him even stranger questions next, like did he ever have “suicidal fucking thoughts,” “extreme fucking reactions to criticism,” “vivid fucking dreams,” and “did he really believe in fucking aliens,” which freaked him out because of what happened to his sister. The doctor said he was particularly interested in Max’s belief that his cat Alice had been telepathic.
Max ordered another two beers, because he had finished his second.
I had only managed to drink half of mine, so I soon had two and a half pints of Guinness lined up on my side of the table.
What happened to your sister?” I asked.
Just the mention of The Girlbrarian made my mouth dry—it felt like someone had poured hot sand down my throat.
I’m not at that fucking part of the story yet. Fuck!” Max yelled. He then said they took him to the end of a “long fucking hallway” that had no windows or doors or anything at all—just white walls, ceilings, and lights overhead. At the end of the hall was a “weird fucking box” on the wall. The doctor touched the box with the tip of his right index finger, the box started to glow green, and then a voice said, “Recognized. Door opening. Hello, Dr. Biddington,” as the door automatically unlocked and slid with a hissing noise, as if the inside atmosphere “were pressure fucking controlled, like a fucking airplane or a subma-fucking-rine.” The doctor walked in. Arnie and Max followed. Inside there were no windows and no clocks and “no fucking TV.” Everything was white—the chairs, the rugs, walls, the counters, “every-fucking-thing!” There were black balls in the ceilings of each room, and when Max asked about them, he was told there were cameras inside.
Meow!” Max heard, and a medium-sized “short-fucking-haired calico” appeared and began to purr and rub up against Max’s leg. The doctor said Max could name the cat “whatever the fuck he wanted” and she looked “a-fucking-lot like Alice—too fucking much like Alice!” She even had a black patch of “fucking fur” around her “fucking eye!” Max began to worry that they’d cloned his “dead fucking cat,” which made him “sweat fucking buckets” because “what type of mind-fuckers go around cloning people’s dead fucking cats? What the fuck, hey?” Then he began to worry that maybe he was on a spaceship, because the insides of spaceships are always “all fucking white.” And the long hallway seemed like a “fucking entrance ramp,” like “getting onto a fucking airplane.” And if he were on a spaceship, he feared that Arnie and Dr. Biddington were not human—but aliens.
Max asked what they wanted, why had they brought him to this place.
The doctor said, “How would you like to live here with the cat for a few weeks—say . . . three weeks?”
Max said he “would fucking not!”
And then Arnie started to sweet-talk him, saying that they would pay him ten times the money he would make in an entire year working at “the fucking movies” and that he could keep the cat at the end and they would give him complimentary pills that would help ease his “fucking anxiety” and the food would be “gour-fucking-met” and all he had to do was stay in the room for twenty-one days with the cat, but without coming out or having any contact with the rest of “the fucking world.”
We would observe you,” Arnie had said. “And ask you questions from time to time. But that’s it. You wouldn’t have to do a thing, except play with the cat.”
I was amazed, and wondered if Max’s story could possibly be true.
I said, “So they just wanted you to be in the room with the cat?”
What the fuck, hey?” Max said, nodding, his eyes open wide. “Fucking weird, right?”
Why would they pay you to play with a cat for three weeks?”
I don’t fucking know. But suddenly, while I was standing there fucking frozen, with the fucking clone of Alice purring at my fucking feet, I realized that the room was definitely a space-fucking-craft. Math. That’s what I used to figure it out. Fucking math.”
Math?” I said.
What the fuck, hey?” Max said, nodding confidently. “Three weeks was just enough time to travel to a different fucking galaxy if they put the craft in hyper-fucking-warp speed.”
I didn’t understand what type of math Max was using here, but he seemed so excited that I didn’t interrupt him. Maybe you understand, Richard Gere, because you are so much smarter than I am.
So it all made fucking sense. And that’s when I fucking knew . . . that fucking Arnie . . . was a goddamn . . . fucking . . . alien,” Max said, throwing in the pauses for dramatic effect. “A yellow-color-loving alien from outer-fucking-space. They’re everywhere, you know. And I won’t let you or me go through what my sister fucking went through. No fucking way. Not going to fucking happen. Not on my watch.”
Did you say alien?” I asked Max.
Don’t you fucking believe in aliens? The universe is so fucking huge. Probability is on the aliens’ side. Those fuckers exist! How can you not fucking believe?”
I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never really thought about it much.”
What I was really interested in was finding out more information about The Girlbrarian, so I said, “Max, have you ever read Jung? Have you ever read Synchronicity?”
Synchronicity? Isn’t that an album by the Police? ‘King of Fucking Pain’ is on that fucker, I think.”
No, it’s a book written by Carl Jung. It’s about coincidences and how there are none. Unus mundus.”
Unus-what-the-fuck-dus are you talking about here, hey? And what the fuck does it have to do with aliens? Or the fucking spaceship I almost ended up imprisoned in for three weeks?”
Hear me out,” I said. “Before we met, I saw your sister at the library. Many times. You might say I felt a certain connection with her. I’ve been watching her working in the library for years and—”
My sister? Eliza-fucking-beth?”