I can’t figure out what’s happening, but I let him take me by the arm and we run out. I hear the door slowly closing behind us as we run, and then a crash as it’s slammed back open. Nabel is screaming. Pol gets into the pickup and starts it, and I get in on the passenger side. We back out of the driveway, and for a few seconds the headlights shine onto Arnol as he runs toward us.
Once we’re on the road we drive awhile in silence, trying to calm down. Pol’s shirt is torn—he almost lost the whole right sleeve—and he has some deep scratches on his arm that are oozing blood. Soon we approach our house at top speed, and at top speed we pass it and leave it behind. I touch his arm, about to stop him, but he’s breathing hard, with his tense hands clutching the steering wheel. He scans the black expanse to either side, and behind us in the rearview mirror. We should slow down. We could die if an animal crossed in front of us. Then I think that one of them could also cross—and it could be ours. But Pol speeds up even more, as if, in the terror his frenzied eyes belie, he were counting on precisely that.
A GREAT EFFORT
He and his father were a yellow animal, a single animal looking at itself in the mirror. It was a recurring dream. He woke up anxious, and every time he had it, it was harder to fall back asleep. During the day he felt stiffer than usual, more hunched over. His wife even asked him once if he was all right, though when he tried to explain, she seemed not to want to know too much. Then someone gave him Mrs. Linn’s name. He could go to her or some other woman; there was one in every neighborhood. The important thing, his friend told him while writing the phone number on a piece of paper, was not to let it go on.
He went to see her, and after that he returned once a week. The relief after each session helped him define his distress: his nervousness disappeared, and so did the anxiety that pulled his throat toward his stomach. The effect lasted all that day—a fullness that, according to him, was comparable to walking on air—and there was a residual peace that lasted for a few days after that. But in the end, the stiffness always came back.
In the fifth session he described the dream, and Mrs. Linn applied lavender essential oils and opened the window all the way. He sunk his head into the massage table’s generous opening and let Mrs. Linn work. Her hands, elbows, and knees were that woman’s true strength, and he let himself be influenced by them.
In the sixth session he talked about his father, about that first time his father had left home, and about the police officer, a woman, who called to let them know. He’d been found walking alone on the highway median; a driver had called 911 right away. He remembers his mother on the phone and the officer’s voice scolding her: “Do you realize he was putting everyone in danger, wandering alone along the highway like that?” Someone had to go pick him up from the station.
His mother put on her jacket over her pajamas, and he and his sister sat on the living room sofa and waited. “If you move your butts from that sofa,” their mother told them, “no more Dad for anyone.”
When the session ended, Mrs. Linn would say, “Open your eyes slowly.” It was pleasant to find the light a little more tenuous, and he wasn’t disturbed at not knowing when exactly she’d closed the curtains. In the eighth session he told about the next time his father had tried to leave them: his mother was making the shopping list, and his father was looking attentively at the tiles in the kitchen, the yellow ones.
“I know it’s strange,” he clarified for Mrs. Linn, “but I’m sure he was only looking at the yellow ones. Yellow like in my dream.”
He was afraid that among so many patients Mrs. Linn would forget the smallest details, and maybe it was there, in the yellow, where the important point lay. But Mrs. Linn’s fingers moved quickly up his back, and he understood how familiar she was with this kind of story, and he trusted that he had to go ahead with his own, without so many explanations.
“My father got up and left the kitchen,” he went on, “and it was the way he did it, a little stiffer than usual, that put me on alert. ‘Where are you going?’ my mother asked him. ‘You’re leaving without the shopping list.’ It was fairly violent, the way she stuffed the paper into his fist, like cramming an oversize letter into the mouth of a too-soft mailbox. But my mother knew what she was doing: with an order in his hands, my father would have to return.”
“Inhale and exhale deeply,” Mrs. Linn reminded him. “If you like, you can close your eyes.”
Sometimes he raised his head from the opening in the massage table to add a detail or size up Mrs. Linn’s eyes. But she dug her elbow into some strategic point of his body and put him right back in his place. Her elbows, her fists and knees approached, always shining and moist, avid. She shook the tubes of lotion before opening and squeezing them. She said it was good for the lotion to feel cold on first contact with the body, because it stimulated the epidermis and activated the muscles.
“I’m afraid,” he said in the ninth session, “afraid of a lot of things.”
He was immediately ashamed. He’d spoken without thinking; maybe the contact with the massage table put him too much at ease.