Flight AC850 will depart from gate D42 and arrive at Heathrow, which will take me to Jomo Kenyatta, then from Kenyatta to Kigali, to a place I’ve just discovered called Somaliland, to a town called Hargeisa, and a hospital with no name that treats the mentally ill. That’s where I will go
That might not be true.
Where I am now is a territory of two directions: arrivals and departures. professionals move down either the left side of the corridor or the right, either toward the gates for departure or toward the carousel to collect baggage. Vendors divide this stretch, framed on the perimeter by multicoloured leather seats. It’s all huge windows looking out on pavement and the little helmeted, ear-muffled people in automobiles designed only for the airport. Folks murmur by, their voices rising to the ceiling. The ceiling calls back down, warns against unattended baggage.
I avoid the terminal’s left and right side; just peck my way through the middle, the vendors’ territory. A young man wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a tie holds a clipboard and swivels his head back and forth between the left and right streams. he makes eye contact with a woman in a pinstripe pantsuit and moves toward her.
She drops her gaze to the floor and quickens her pace.
“Miss, do you have one minute?” She keeps walking.
He spots me.
“Sir! hello, sir.” he steps my way. “Sir, you can save thousands of dollars in travel expenses every year. But it’s more than that. By switching to a prime Assets credit card, you open up a world of benefits and rewards beyond travel, including appliances, accommodations and discounts at premier car rental agencies and hotels.”
I look down at my naked wrist and pretend an imaginary watch tells me I’m running late. I know where this is going and this time it’s not my fault. That may not be true.
“I’m sorry. I really don’t have time for this.”
“Sir, it will just take one minute and it could save you thousands of dollars every year.”
“Do you just have a pamphlet or something?” A plea, not a question.
Rote overtakes the young man. he unleashes practised facial features— head nodding in cadence, eyebrows rising with every perk he mentions. But the mouth is the same, just opening and closing lips, teeth carving air into meaning. his eyes notice the difference between the professionals moving up and down the terminal and me: a suit but no tie, a carry-on but no briefcase, The Atlantic Monthly but no Report on Business.
“Just by signing up you collect 10,000 bonus reward points, and then you earn additional bonus points with every dollar you spend with the card. You could immediately cash that in for a cappuccino machine, a free car rental or even put it toward an airline seat.
Let’s apply right now, shall we?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “What’s your name, sir?”
Hesitation.
“George Wriggly,” I say. “W-R-I-G-G- L-Y.”
“OK, Mr. Wriggly, and your address.” He writes but doesn’t look at me.
“132 Hawkbrook crescent, Detroit, Michigan. Zip code four-eight-two-oh- one.”
“Detroit? A ways from home. Telephone number?”
“Uh, area code three-one-three. Five- four-seven. Oh-three-four-eight.”
“marital status?”
“I’m a widower.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.” He looks up from the clipboard. The facial expressions enter different territory briefly. Arched eyebrows and squinted eyes. “do you live alone, though?”
“I have pets.” Flinch. “Iguanas.”
He laughs, but it’s back to rote, eyes down.
“OK, and what was your income last year before tax?”
“Maybe a hundred and thirty thousand.”
“Wow. And your employer’s address?”
“I work from home.”
“And what do you do, Mr. Wriggly?”
“That’s a question?”
“That’s a question.” The young man tilts the clipboard toward me and points to the question on the application form.
“I make my own soda pop and sell it to local businesses.”
“That’s pretty cool.” More new facial expressions. Half a lip in a downward curl. “What’s your soda called?”
“I call it ‘Pop’s Soda’.” Stomach dropping. “I’m Pop.”
“You make any special flavours?”
“Our specialty is coconut, but I’m in town right now doing research on a lemongrass.”
“Well good luck with that, Mr. Wriggly.” That seemed genuine, but the next part isn’t. “Now if I could just see two pieces of Id, we’ll get this processed today and you should receive your card in the next three to five Weeks.”
“That’s going to be a problem.”
“Shouldn’t be, sir, everyone needs ID to get on the plane.”
“Yeah, I have ID, but I’m not actually an iguana-owning widowed independent lemongrass-flavoured soda maker from Detroit. Everything I just told you was a lie. I’m very sorry.”
A new frontier of facial expressions. Furrowed brows and open mouths.
“Are you serious?”
I pick up my carry-on, walk past the young man and head down the terminal.
“What the hell, George?” he calls after me, scrunching my application into a ball of paper.
“My name isn’t George,” I call back. “I’m very sorry.”
This is a bad start to the trip, the whole idea of the trip. I’m not contributing to mental health.
I walk to the end of the terminal where it bursts into a dozen smaller stations, each complete with rows of conjoined polyester chairs. Stopping in front of gate d42’s row of chairs, I drop my carry-on and look back to see if the young man followed me. He didn’t, so I find my cell and call Terry.
“Good afternoon; Dr. Riesman’s office.”
“Hey, Dawn, it’s Charles Hawkins. I need to talk to Terry.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Hawkins, Dr. Riesman is with a patient right now. can I take a message?”
“Dawn, I’m sitting in the emergency room right now covered in blood because a manic-depressive patient of mine, who happens to teach the fifth grade, slit her wrists in front of her students an hour and half ago.”
“Oh my God.”
“I know, eh? We’ve stabilized her, but it’s touch and go here, Dawn. So please, tell him it’s urgent.”
“Yes, Dr. Hawkins. I’m so sorry.”
I’m put on hold. A soft instrumental version of Billy Joel’s “You may Be Right” starts to play. Preboarding begins on flight AC850. The music stops when Terry picks up.
“Charlie? Jesus, what happened?”
“Hey, Terry. Listen, don’t worry, I’m at the airport. I’m going through with it.”
“You have my secretary in hysterics over here.”
“I’m on AC850, so if that gets hijacked or something you’ll know I’m dead.”
“You couldn’t have just said ‘medical emergency’ and left it at that? Dawn has a daughter in the fifth grade.”
“I referred my patients to you. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“Where the hell did this come from, Charlie?”
“We spent three hours talking about this last weekend.”
“Well I just assumed—” He stops. “Get out of there. Get a taxi. come here. We can work through it. Africa won’t solve this.”
Preboarding is finished and general boarding begins.
“What happened with the lawyer?” He asks.
“Didn’t work out.”
“You can’t just go to Africa, Charlie, they don’t allow it. You need shots. It’s
a war zone over there. There’s a travel advisory, charlie. Hacked to death with machetes, Charlie. You’ll get AIDS off a toilet seat, Charlie.”
“AIDS off a toilet seat? How did they ever let you into med school?”
“You know what I mean. It’ll be malaria or the Spanish flu or something. This is fucking clown shoes.”
“If I stay here, nothing gets fixed.”
“The lawyers will find you there. This is malpractice; these things don’t disappear,” says Terry. “I’m not lying for you. If they come knocking, I can’t lie.”
It’s actually very easy.
“You’re fired. I’m firing you. You short little bastard.”
“You leave and you’re done. You leave, we can’t fix this.”
“I’m about to take off, Terry. I have a layover in London, I’ll call from there. Tell Dawn I’m sorry about the fifth grader thing.”
“Don’t hang up!”
I hang up.
I hope I have a window seat.
Three days before, in the office of the firm Anderson, fuller & Kaufman, I found the undiscovered country of Somaliland and claimed it for myself. This lawyer, Payton, was Terry’s idea. he’d heard good things about him, a specialist in these cases. he had the kind of office I always wanted, with a big fish tank in the waiting room, the mature-but-attractive secretary, the built-in speakers.
Payton had better magazines, too. not just Sports Illustrated, but The New Yorker. I thought to myself, I should charge my patients more. Then I could have fish, too. maybe if I charge each of my three remaining patients $12,000 a session…
That’s a lie. I have more than three patients. There are at least six.
Payton’s magazines had crisp, untouched covers with articles about important things, like poverty, disease and war in perpetuity. The one that caught my eye—“Somaliland’s Untreated: The mentally Ill and civil War’s Silent casualties.” That was the headline.
1991’s civil war…
I’m being sued, and that’s the truth. I’ll probably lose. There’s this woman I’d been treating named
Anita Exelby—an ocd case with a heightened rape anxiety and an apparent late-developing phobia of honesty—and she feels I’ve failed to fulfill my oath as a caregiver. As the attorney Mr. Payton will illuminate in the moments to come, one of the broad categories of malpractice implies physician culpability if said physician fails to anticipate a problem when his training suggests he should have. So, since I’ve studied medicine for nine years, I was supposed to foresee that our unprotected sex would lead to her sudden pregnancy. Whatever.
That’s a lie.
Actually, Mrs. Exelby and I have never had sex. And she’s not pregnant, as far as I know. She’s mad (and probably a little nervous) because she suffers from a minor anxiety disorder which is likely treatable through a course of benzodiazepines, more exercise and minor cognitive behavioural therapy. If she didn’t have the money, it wouldn’t be treated at all. Instead of telling her any of that, I told her she was inexplicably attached to the air she was breathing and suffered from acute separation anxiety every time she exhaled. my treatment plan involved limiting the amount of breathing she would do in a day and exhaling into Ziploc bags so she could catalogue and archive all the air she breathed.
Her lawyer doesn’t think I should be a psychiatrist anymore.
Neither does mine.
My mother always wanted me to be a doctor. All this time practising medicine. Just practising.
…tens of thousands killed during the four-year war…
“I hope to understand all the facts here, Dr. Hawkins,” said Mr. Payton from behind an unnecessarily large desk. Payton was a short man in a nice suit with precise sideburns. Psychiatry hasn’t been kind to short men.
“Am I to understand that you put the treatment plan—the one involving the Ziploc bags—into writing?” Payton said to me, little hands folded together.
“It’s in my notes.”
“And you record your sessions?” he said, while scratching notes on a pad.
“No,” I said.
“Dr. Hawkins, your office sent me a tape of the session in question.”
“I was just joking when I said ‘no’.”
“I see.” he stopped a moment, wrote more notes.
“I thought there was doctor/patient privilege or something? They can’t use my notes in court, right?”
“No, that privacy privilege is only extended to lawyers and their clients, and sometimes police informants. These notes and recordings would be admissible.” he finished writing his notes in silence.
I wish I had my own note pad.
“Mr. Payton, am I going to get out of this one?”
“We’ll do our very best, Dr. Hawkins.”
“But if you were to handicap it, can I still be a doctor?”
“It’s difficult to be optimistic in the face of this much evidence. We will do our best. With a settlement, and perhaps relocation, the matter should evaporate. It is serious, although you might not think it.”
“Relocation? So I could go practise somewhere else? Like a different continent even?”
“Every jurisdiction has its own requirements, Dr. Hawkins. There is much to do before raising those questions,” Payton said. Then he went back to writing in silence.
“I don’t want you to feel too much pressure, Mr. Payton,” I said. “I can get by if I lose my licence.” I craned my neck to try to see what Payton was writing down. “Maybe I can come work with you. I have a law degree.”
He stopped writing, placed the pen down on the desk and looked up at me.
“Dr. Hawkins, may I ask you a personal question?”
“Shoot.”
“Do you have a problem with lying?” I looked up at his degrees hanging on the wall behind his desk. Three of them. That’s one more than I have. I thought of how high they hung, how he must have used a ladder. And not just a stepladder, something much more severe. I stood up.
“You’ve obviously taken sides here. You’re fired. I’m firing you. You short little bastard. I hate your office.”
I turned and left and then thought better of it and stopped halfway through the door.
“Am I still getting billed for this?” “Assuredly.”
“I’m really sorry about everything.” “Leave.”
The inhumanity of the war has claimed countless unseen victims, those devastated psychologically… Shanty mental hospitals… Helpless families… “The majority of these patients have never been attended to by a psychiatrist,” said an advocate…
These people are desperate. They’ll take anyone’s help. mine, even. I need to find a map.
Mythomania is a sickness and every admitted lie is an act of healing. I really believe that. That’s not true, no I don’t.
Psychiatrists say it isn’t clinical because we mythomaniacs know we’re lying, therefore the lying is
only a symptom of some greater psychological malady. I cleared out of my office today, locked up my apartment and am on a plane to Africa because of mythomania, which they tell me doesn’t exist.
My parents haven’t believed a word I’ve said since I was seven years old. Okay, more like 14. Actually, I shouldn’t say parents; my mother died of cancer when I was 12. Oh god, what a terrible lie to tell. I feel like I should call my mother now. I don’t know why I would say something like that.
But no, my parents don’t trust me. I told them I’m moving to Africa to make my life right and find the one person who needed the most help and fix them, and I told them that this process of healing and self-discovery would take many months of harrowing concentration, likely with long bouts of solitude and deep reflection, and that I may find myself in remote locations where communication with the outside world would be impossible, so I may go many months between talking to them, and that they should prepare themselves for terrible conclusions, conclusions that might point to them as being the source of my disability, and as such I may have to remove their presence completely from my life, so if I never see them again, while it would be difficult for all of us, they must know in their hearts that, although I would have to abandon them, I would love them always and our separation would be for the best.
“Right,” Dad said. “We’ll see you Sunday night for dinner.”
No one in my profession believes in mythomania. Well, a couple of them do, but the rest of us think they’re quacks and at conferences all of us competent, popular psychiatrists go out drinking after sessions and we don’t invite the others and we ridicule them something awful.
No, that’s a lie; I’ve never been invited out to the after-session drinking. What I previously stated was a lie I concocted in an attempt to paint a picture of myself as being more popular and competent than I truly believe myself to be. That’s the hypothesis that served as the bedrock of my peer-reviewed study. At seven separate conferences I’ve given lectures on the validity of mythomania.
That’s not true either. I’ve never lectured at a conference or had anything peer-reviewed. But pathological lying is not a recognized clinical disorder. Let me repeat that because it’s true: pathological lying is not a recognized clinical disorder. I said it twice, so it must be true. The last sentence was a lie. I don’t actually believe that my saying something twice means it’s true.
The longest relationship I’ve had in the last 15 years was the three months I dated Amanda Ziegler in my freshman year. People call me “Doctor,” I make a lot of money, wear a suit every day and can write prescriptions for anything—but three months is it. I have sex, though, mostly with my 22-year- old secretary. We have a variety of positions.
That’s a lie, we only have two positions.
That’s a lie, I don’t have a secretary.
That’s a lie, I do have a secretary but he’s 47.
Also a lie. I’ll stop now.
They’re desperate. They’ll take anyone’s help. Mine, even.
Last weekend I told Terry I was going to Africa to make up for everything: the lawsuit, my parents and—although at the time I said it I didn’t know I would owe him too—credit card guy. When I had said it, it was a lie. But here I am, on a nine-hour flight to Heathrow, sitting next to a woman who believes I’m on my way to Brussels to meet my biological father for the first time. So it’s not a lie anymore. The Brussels thing is, but I mean Africa. I’ve made it come true. Lies are just words, but I’m doing it. It’s not a lie if I’m doing it.
Andrew Barbero is a law student at the U of C. He lives in Calgary, speaks nine languages and can bench press 1,400 kg.
