“From the word clear. To make something clear.”
“Then why don’t they call it clearifying?”
“Off the top of my head, I can’t say. But I think we’re getting off track, Stewie. With whom are you angry?”
Stewie stopped again. He was close to the window, so he looked out. There was a pigeon on the windowsill, pecking at some seeds. Stewie wondered if that meant Dr. Briggs put seeds out for the birds, which would make Stewie like him a lot more. He wondered why he’d never noticed birds on the windowsill before. It wasn’t like him to fail to notice birds.
“‘With whom?’”
“I mean who are you angry with?”
“Nobody. I’m angry all by myself.”
“Let me try this again, Stewie. Who are you angry at?”
“Oh, at. Why didn’t you say so? Well . . . maybe some of the people at Eastbridge, because they won’t help me. And I feel like they could if they really wanted to. But mostly I think I’m just mad at life, because everybody’s unhappy and that doesn’t seem fair.”
“Not everybody’s unhappy,” Dr. Briggs said.
“Everybody I know is unhappy. Why can’t people just be happy?”
“All the time?”
“Yes, all the time. Why not?”
“First of all, because if we were happy all the time, it wouldn’t even be happiness. It would just be the way we were all the time, and we would fail to even notice it after a while. I know this is a tricky concept, Stewie, but bear with me. Say, for instance, there’s a sound. If I whistled, for example.” He stopped speaking for a moment and created the whistling noise, a thin, quiet thing between his pursed lips. “First there’s no whistling. Then there’s whistling. Then there’s no whistling again. The reason you notice the whistling is because of the contrast with the moments when there’s no whistling. If that sound were present all the time, every minute of your life, if it had been going on since the moment you were born, you wouldn’t even hear it anymore. It would just be what you considered normal. Does that make sense, Stewie? Or am I not explaining it well?”
To his own surprise, Stewie returned to his seat. He perched on the edge of the big chair, his hands resting on the knees of his khaki pants.
“I actually think I might get what you mean. I think you’re saying the reason happiness is happy is because we’re not always happy.”
“Exactly. I’m glad you understand. Let me present you with another concept. The reason people are unhappy is because they’re so sure they know what they want. And then it makes them unhappy when they don’t get it. I personally think people would be happier if they weren’t so sure they knew the difference between a good thing and a bad thing.”
“That makes no sense,” Stewie said.
“It’s a very adult concept.”
“Everybody knows a good thing or a bad thing.”
“But do they, though?”
“Yes. They do. Like when my hen died. That was bad.”
“Good example,” Dr. Briggs said. “We think it’s bad when someone dies. But their body is getting older and giving out on them. They’re in more pain. Knowing that, is it really bad?”
“Well, then, it’s bad that their body gets old and gives out.”
“You would have nobody die, ever.”
“Right, exactly.”
“How would there be space for all of us in the world, if everybody who had ever lived was still here? How would there be resources? How could we grow enough food, or have enough fuel or water, for everything and everybody who had ever been born?”
Stewie realized he was holding his head, one palm on each temple, as if worried it might explode.
“This is making my head hurt,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I just want you to try on some different kinds of thinking. You think Marilyn is unhappy because she has a roommate. And Marilyn thinks Marilyn is unhappy because she has a roommate. But I think Marilyn is unhappy because she thinks having a roommate is a bad thing. Not everyone would. Some people would be lonely in a room all by themselves, and would welcome the company.”
“I think I see what you mean,” Stewie said. “But I’m not sure how it helps solve the problem.”
“I don’t know if it does. I can’t solve everybody’s problems.”
Stewie looked up quickly. Looked at the man’s face. Because he hadn’t sounded upset when he said that, which Stewie found nearly unimaginable.
“And you’re okay with that?”
“Yes,” Dr. Briggs said. Without hesitation. “Yes, it would be nice if I could solve everyone’s problems for them. But I accept that I can’t. But let’s apply this directly to your situation. You tried to solve Marilyn’s problem by getting her a private room, but you weren’t able to do it. Maybe now there’s some way you can help her see the company as not such a bad thing.”
“Hmm,” Stewie said. “She did tell me that she was upset when she got her last roommate, but then she ended up liking her.”
“Maybe it would help her to remember that.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“In that case you’ll have to fall back on accepting that you can’t solve everybody’s problems.”
“Oh,” Stewie said. “Too bad. We keep coming back to that one. And that’s the one I hate the most.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But maybe the fact that you hate it doesn’t make it a bad thing.”
“Wow. That’s so much to think about.”
A long silence fell. As though Stewie had begun thinking about it. But in reality, his brain had hit a point of exhaustion and he was thinking nothing at all.
“Just one thing, though,” Stewie said suddenly. It surprised him when the question came up in his head. He had not consciously seen it coming. “Why did you say it was interesting that I was mad?”
“Because you’ve never shown any anger in my office before. I thought that was good progress.”
“You think anger is good?”
“I think anger is a normal human emotion. And I think people getting in touch with their emotions is good. I think people tend to bury their emotions because they don’t want to feel them. And I think we can’t heal those emotions until we let them come out into the light.”
“So you think we let things come up so they can heal?”
“Exactly. That’s exactly what I think.”
“Hmm,” Stewie said. “That’s interesting.”
Stewie stood in the doorway of Marilyn’s room. He had one hand extended to steady himself against the jamb. The other lady, whose name he didn’t know, looked up at him and smiled.
Marilyn wasn’t looking up. She was lying on her bed, and she had a book in her hands, but she didn’t seem to be reading it. She seemed to be staring down at her own lap as if lost in thought. Her hair was messy.
It bothered Stewie that nobody at Eastbridge seemed to want to be sure her hair was kept neat. At least, not so far that morning. Maybe he just wasn’t giving them enough time. Still, it bothered him. It just did.
It was a Saturday morning, and it was early. Stewie had set an alarm and caught the very first bus into the city.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he said.
Her head came up, and she looked at him as though he had just wakened her from a sound sleep.
“Oh, Stewart,” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Maybe we could talk privately,” he said, casting an apologetic glance at her roommate.
Marilyn looked in the direction of the window and frowned.
“It’s awfully cold to sit outside.”
“We could go down to the dining room and eat breakfast. Unless you already ate.”
He shrugged out of his coat as he spoke, because it was hot in the hall.
“Did I eat?” Marilyn asked. “Did I? I’m trying to remember.”
“You didn’t,” her roommate said. “You been right there on that bed since you got dressed this morning.”
“Okay, then,” Marilyn said. “We’ll go down and have something to eat.”
“Just take pancakes,” Stewie said as they walked down the buffet table. “They’ll bring you the eggs special.”
“But there are eggs right there,” she said, pointing in the direction of a male resident who was spooning an absurdly large helping of scrambled eggs onto his plate.
“But they bring you better eggs.”