ISSUE 24: WINTER 2014

Intensely Nervous People Can Be Boring, Too

A man publishes his first book. Then he spends six months in a psychiatric recovery centre in a suburb outside a medium-sized college town in a small room in which the air, even with the window shut, smells like the sulfur from the steel mill across the river.

 

Editors' Note: This story makes extensive use of the 2006 film Reprise, directed by Joachim Trier and co-written by Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt.

A

man publishes his first book. Then he spends six months in a psychiatric recovery centre in a suburb outside a medium-sized college town in a small room in which the air, even with the window shut, smells like the sulfur from the steel mill across the river. When he checks himself out of the psychiatric recovery centre he returns to his room in his mother’s house in the city. His mother has thrown out all his things she thought might remind him of his girlfriend. She believes his relationship with his girlfriend caused his breakdown. The man has a long conversation with his mother in his bedroom, during which she explains her point of view and he listens while saying almost nothing. When his mother leaves he considers calling his girlfriend. Instead, he goes out to a bar where he knows the bartender. A girl in a striped shirt and somewhat strangely shaped lips starts talking to him. His old girlfriend happens to be at the same bar. She sees him talking to the girl in the striped shirt, and he doesn’t see her. The old girlfriend goes home and lies in her bed, feeling awful. She ignores a phone call from her mother and a text from a friend. She can’t sleep. She calls him. He answers. They talk. He asks if she’s still in her writing program. She says, “I don’t know.” She is embarrassed by her history of failure. She says she’s scared. He says it’s okay. They meet the next day at a coffee shop. He comes in and she’s standing at the back of the café, waiting for two people to vacate their table. They leave, and she stands beside the empty table. He’s never been expressive and today is no exception. He greets her awkwardly. A part of her thinks this means he has integrity. He says, “I’m going to get a coffee.” She already has hers. She says, “Okay,” and sits down, but she wants to go with him to the counter. After all this time away, is it so wrong that she doesn’t want to part, at least right now? She puts her hands on the white mug on the table in front of her. Her name is Amy.

The man’s name is Adam. Adam’s friend Cameron has just published his own first book. Cameron’s editor invites Cameron to the launch for a famous author’s collected short stories, 1972–2012. Cameron invites Adam, and Adam invites Amy. The three of them are coming from different places beforehand and travel to the launch separately. They find each other in the crowd in front of the building. At the launch, Adam acts strangely. When a famous writer comes over to talk to Cameron and Adam and Amy, Adam is quiet. After the recovery centre, Adam is still readjusting to being out in public and talking to people he doesn’t know. At one point he finds himself stumbling over his words, and instead of trying to push his way through, he stops what he’s saying mid-sentence. The famous writer, who is twenty years older than the others, makes a joke of it. The conversation continues. The famous writer leaves, and Adam still doesn’t talk.

"He’s never been expressive and today is no exception."

Cameron and Amy, accustomed to Adam’s eccentric behaviour, keep talking, and laugh with each other. From their perspective, they are covering for Adam, doing him a favour. Seeing Amy and Cameron laughing with each other, Adam, who is a year older than Cameron and has always snobbishly condescended to him, has a vision of how easy Cameron’s life will always be, how the world will part for him as if by reflex, and he sees how easy and good life would be for Amy if she was with Cameron, and not him. Adam says he has to go. Amy says, “Do you want to go home?” Adam doesn’t respond to Amy’s question and says to Cameron “Sorry,” and walks between the two of them toward the door. Amy follows him outside. Through the glass doors, Cameron can see Amy and Adam stopped on the sidewalk, arguing.

There’s a party at a girl’s apartment. Everyone is there. More people arrive, with more alcohol. The people who were sitting on the couches and chairs are drawn onto the floor to dance. A guy named Travis walks into the bathroom and a girl with dyed hair and a pendulous necklace is sitting on the toilet, crying. Travis and this girl have sex in the shower stall without a condom while people bang on the door. A neighbour from the floor below calls to complain about the music and the banging on her ceiling, which is caused by people dancing. The girl who lives there turns down the music but people keep turning it back up again, and everyone keeps dancing. Cameron sees his agent making out with one of his friends by the door. Someone does the robot. Dancing people form a circle, and people take turns dancing in the middle of the circle. Cameron and Adam do shots together sitting at the kitchen table, and they hack at the harshness of it. Amy is not at the party. The neighbour calls again to complain and the girl who lives there breaks into tears and eventually leaves her own apartment for the night. Someone smashes a pillow on Adam’s head and the room explodes in white feathers. When the sun comes up Adam and Cameron bike back through the empty streets to their neighbourhood. They say goodbye at Cameron’s house and Adam bikes on. Monday morning traffic is starting. Two blocks from his house, Adam takes both hands off his bike’s handlebars and closes his eyes. “One,” he counts to himself. “Two.” He can hear the traffic on Dundas up ahead. “Three.”

Now Amy has officially dropped out of her MFA program and has moved back to the city. She has enrolled at the University of Toronto and is studying psychology. Science makes Adam’s mental health situation harder to romanticize. She and Adam now live together. They are a couple that wakes up together and shares a toilet, a shower, and a stove on top of which sit a bottle of vegetable oil, a bottle of olive oil, and two candles. Now Adam has stopped writing entirely.

“ ... his solitude is close to suicide and very much like everything he always wanted from life."

Now Cameron has moved to Berlin and is working on his next novel. He pastes chapters into e-mails sometimes, unsolicited. Now Adam stops responding to those e-mails. Now an old mutual friend gets married and the reception is in the backyard of a big house in a suburb north of the city. Now Cameron returns for the wedding, and he and Adam embrace on the house’s footpath. Now Amy is across the room, and, noticing them talking together, smiles and wrinkles her nose at them, and turns away. A writer they both used to talk about admiringly has recently killed himself and they talk about their reactions to his death over cold beers as they sit on adjacent lawn chairs on the grass. As they talk they don’t look at each other. They watch their friends and acquaintances milling on the grass and flirting, dressed up fancy, each in their own particular anti-traditional way. Now Cameron is on a plane back to Germany, where his solitude is close to suicide and very much like everything he always wanted from life. In the airplane’s seat, he thinks of his apartment. He knows which dishes have been left in the sink, and where in the sink. He feels holy, he feels good. Now Adam and Amy are sitting at a table at a café outdoors in Baldwin Village. Amy is wearing a black-and-white checkered skirt and a brown leather jacket. Adam is wearing his sweater that he wears almost every day now. He bends down to sip from his straw. Amy reaches across the table to touch his face. He looks at her. Life is incredibly hard for just about everyone, for these reasons and others.