Chapter 5 Soucy
The locker room empties after the optional skate.
I’m half out of my gear with a cat I don’t own still taking up a corner of my head when Marchetti comes by and grabs the back of my neck with one damp hand.
My whole body steps sideways out of it before I’ve decided to.
He doesn’t notice. He’s already three stalls down, hand on somebody else.
Touch lands on me like a thrown object and the body fields it before the brain signs off.
Lundy comes past with two coffees, hands me one, steers me toward the door with a flat hand between my shoulder blades, and it stays there the length of the hall. Nothing in me moves to correct it. Marchetti’s hand was a thrown object I have to brace against. This is not that.
“You coming to Tikh’s tonight?” he says. “Baz is doing a follow-up. He’s calling it a sequel.”
“I have a thing. With Gwen.”
“Come after the thing. I’ll save you a plate of the sequel.”
“Don’t. The first one was a casserole that fell over. A sequel to that’s a threat.”
“It’s already in the oven. You’re committed in spirit.” He peels off toward the players’ lot. “Text me how the thing goes.”
“It’s a thing. Not a game.”
“Text me anyway,” he calls back over his shoulder.
The drive across town is twenty minutes I know in my body.
Same lights. Same merge. Same gas station with the sign that’s been missing its E since October.
Bug rides along the whole way in my head, as if the weight of her is still in my lap.
The pattern went quiet under a cat I met three days ago and haven’t stopped turning that over.
That’s its own kind of data. Underneath that, lower, the goal from the blowout runs its loop.
The screen I never saw clean. It plays a few times between lights and I let it, because fighting it in traffic costs more than it’s worth, and because I know exactly where I’m taking it.
I park and get out of my car and turn towards Gwen’s building. And Berger is directly in front of me.
He’s coming out of the building as I’m walking towards it, keys already in his hand, and we both stop for a half-second longer than two guys crossing a parking lot stop. He clocks where I’m headed. I clock where he’s been. Neither of us says anything.
“Soucy.”
“Berger.”
That’s all of it. He gets in his car. I go in.
Gwen’s office has two chairs, a couch, a window with the blinds set at the angle I like.
She put them there and never moved them.
A low table holds a box of tissues I’ve never used and a small smooth stone I’ve picked up exactly once.
I take my chair. She takes hers. The cushion has worn to the shape of a man who sits very still, and there’s a comfort in a thing that holds its position on you.
She knows that’s load-bearing. She knew it before I did.
“How’s the routine?” she asks, because we start where we start.
“The same. Routine’s the same, meds are the same, sleep’s the same.”
“It’s the playoffs. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some differences.”
“The playoffs are loud. The loud’s fine. I expected it.”
“And the routine holds inside the loud?”
“So far. Forty-five minutes. That’s where we built it, that’s where it sits. Some days it runs long, fifty if the room’s wrong, but forty-five is the number. The OCD wants more. It always wants more but it’s holding right now.”
She nods. I built that number with another specialist, the summer after the diagnosis, when the checking was eating ninety minutes before they taught me how to interrupt it. Forty-five is the floor we found and I brought that floor with me to Atlanta. To Gwen.
“Good.” She lets a beat sit. She’s good at the beat, better than anyone I know at letting a silence do the work a question would only get in the way of. “You played a game. Tell me about that.”
“Third period of a blowout. Twenty minutes in the crease.”
“How was it?”
“Clean. One goal I’d want back. The crease is the crease.”
“The crease is the one place the noise stops.” She hands my own sentence back to me, the way she does when she wants me to hear it from the outside.
“It’s the one place it stops.”
She waits. I came in carrying a thing and there’s no use pretending I didn’t. She’ll wait until next Thursday if she has to, and I have film to watch.
“Something else happened,” I say. “I went over a teammate’s place a few days ago.
There were cats. Two of them, kittens, basically.
One sat on me, and then the other one came up too, and they stayed.
” I don’t give her the rest of it. The small one climbed me like a tree with no plan and no exit and decided I was furniture.
I give her the part that holds something up.
“And the hands stopped.” I look down at them, running the idle pattern against my knee.
“Not the crease way. In the crease the whole brain goes somewhere and the rest of the world turns off. This wasn’t that.
I wasn’t doing anything. I was in a chair with a cat asleep on me and the pattern just wasn’t running.
I didn’t notice it was gone until after, when it came back. ”
She doesn’t write anything down. She never writes when it matters. She writes when it doesn’t, to give her hands something to do I think, which I clocked the first month and have never mentioned.
“You know there’s a name for an animal that does that on purpose,” she says.
“And you are going to tell me, right?” I look at her and she’s smiling at me.
“An emotional support animal. And before you make a face, I want to be precise, because you’ll try to turn it into something it’s not.
It won’t touch the OCD and the rumination.
It won’t stop a single compulsion. The thoughts will come exactly as often and bite exactly as hard. That isn’t what it’s for.”
“Then what is it for?”
“It’s a weight. Something alive that gives your hands a place to be that isn’t the pattern, and gives you something to point at that isn’t the exits. It doesn’t make the hard thing smaller. It makes you less alone inside it.”
“I have my aquarium.”
“You can’t hold an aquarium in your lap at three in the morning.”
“I travel half the year. We’re in the playoffs right now.
And the apartment is the way it is on purpose.
I keep it empty so there’s less for the brain to chew on, and a cat isn’t less.
A cat is a moving object with opinions that knocks things off counters at four a.m. for sport.
” I have the rest of the list ready. Litter.
Vet bills. The road. The list I build so I can counter any argument before it costs me anything. She watches me build it.
“All true.”
“So it doesn’t work.”
“I didn’t say it works for you. I said there’s a name for what the cat did to you.
” She lets it go where she lets things she wants me to carry out the door.
“You don’t have to do anything about it.
I’m naming it because you walked in here still thinking about a cat who sat in your lap days ago.
You don’t keep things unless they’re holding something up. ”
“It was a good night.”
“So it was a good night,” she agrees, and writes nothing. Then, because she’s done this for years and knows exactly when to turn the conversation. “How many times have you watched the goal?”
“Which goal?” We both know which goal she’s asking about.
“Julien.”
“...some.”
“Some?” Her eyebrow arches up. And she waits for my answer.
“Forty. Around forty.”
“And what does the forty-first watch give you that the fortieth didn’t?”
“That’s the problem. I don’t know yet.” I run my fingers through my hair. “That’s the whole reason I need to watch a forty-first time.”
“There’s always a forty-first. That’s the trap, and you know it’s the trap.
We’ve named it more times than you’ve watched the goal.
” She leans back. “The watching feels like it’s walking you toward certainty.
It isn’t. It gives you temporary relief.
Then the relief fades, and the forty-second time becomes the one you think will give you certainty.
You keep mistaking relief for certainty at three in the morning. ”
“I know.”
“You knowing has never once stopped your hand from reaching for the tablet. So here’s the assignment you’re going to hate.
Watch the goal twice more this week, with intent.
You watch it twice. And the third time the hand goes for the tablet, you let the reach not finish.
You sit in the not-knowing. You let the chord hang unresolved and you don’t die of it. ”
The chord is the right word, which is why she uses it. There’s a sound a song makes when it stops one step short of finishing. The whole body leans after the note that doesn’t come. My brain spends its nights leaning after that note about a goal that changed nothing in a game we won.
“I hate that assignment.”
“I know. You’ll do it anyway, because you’ve put in more reps than anyone who sits in that chair, and the practice is the only lever this thing respects.” She lets that be the last of it. “We won, Julien. We are leading the series two to one.”
“The number’s never been the point and you know that better than anyone.”
“I do. I just like saying it. Humor an old woman.”
We do the rest of the work. The slow kind. By the end, the goal is a little quieter, the way it goes quiet when I’ve handed it to the one person who doesn’t tell me it doesn’t matter.
In the car afterwards, I sit a minute before I start it. Then I text Berger.
What happens in that building stays in that building. I won’t say anything to anyone.
The dots come and go twice. Appreciate it.
I’m setting the phone down when it goes again. And if you ever want to not say anything in person, I do that too. There’s a place near the rink that doesn’t ask questions.
I look at it a while. Two guys who found the same door from different hallways, and he thinks he’s the one with something to hand me.
Anytime, I send. I start the car. I drive home through a city that has no idea any of this is happening.
The routine is waiting. The tablet is waiting.
I’ll watch the goal twice, with intent. The third time I’ll sit on my hands and let the chord hang in the dark and not die of it.
Somewhere across town a cat I don’t own is asleep on a chair that isn’t mine, holding down a corner of my head it never agreed to give back.