Tomorrow and Tomorrow Read Free

I ask him to help me stop remembering. He jots down notes on a yellow legal pad. He doesn’t interrupt me with too many questions. He lets me speak. When he does talk, he spends a lot of our time together asking about the Beatles—what certain lyrics mean.
    “The Beatles dropped acid and ate psychotropics when they wrote,” I tell him, “so as a mental health professional, you’re in a better position to interpret their lyrics than I am—”
    “True, true,” he says, “but I might miss literary aspects that you’re trained to find. You know, I picked up on a lot more of Baudelaire by talking with you than I did through the apps, so maybe between the two of us, we can make some sense of
Abbey Road
—”
    He suggests I should keep a journal. Just write the date at the top of the page and continue from there. Just be free with it, it will help. He gave me an ultimatum—that I’d have to at least try journaling or he wouldn’t continue signing my EAP paperwork. I don’t believe the threat, but he actually bought me this notebook—real paper, I think—and presented it to me with a download called the Progoff Intensive Journal method. He says I should write in longhand, that it will help my concentration—that dictation apps don’t have the same calming effect as penmanship. Simka is holistic—he believes the building blocks to a healthy, productive lifestyle already exist within me but that I have to learn how to stack the blocks in a new way. He suggests I listen to classical music to improve my sustained concentration skills. Feeds and streams contribute to the fracturing of our consciousness, he says. Try John Adams and listen through—at least twenty minutes a stretch, without augments, without shuffle. He hums a tune the Adware eventually identifies as “Grand Pianola Music”—
click to add to iTunes library
.
    I take my Zoloft every night, but every night I wake up dreaming of my wife
.
4 a.m. 6 a.m. The clock radio plays HOT 99.5, crap pop, but I lie deadened and listen, wishing my bed were a sinkhole and that I’d somehow die. The clock radio plays into the afternoon before I bring myself to shut it off, before I bring myself to climb out of bed. I indulge in Pop-Tarts and Mrs. Fields. I’ve been eating Ho Hos. Gavril swung by late Friday afternoon to see how I was feeling and found me eating an entire box of Ho Hos for breakfast with coffee. “No wonder you’re sick all the time,” he said, his breath like espresso and cigarettes mixed up with those blueberry Coolsa strips he chews.
    A few years ago, Simka ended a session by saying, “Dominic, a fish rots head first—”
    He suggested I rediscover personal hygiene—that no matter how bad I feel, I was sure to feel worse if I didn’t shower. So, I shower—and that has helped. I shave every morning. Long strokes with the razor, over my neck and jaw, over my skull. It’s bruised up there—black splotches, violet. Labyrinthine ridges of Adware like a street map of a foreign city embossed on my skull. I look in the mirror and follow the lines of wires as if they might lead me somewhere—anywhere other than where I really am.
    Simka says to find someplace comfortable to write. He’s described his home office to me, out in Maryland, with its oak desk and a picture window overlooking a woodland backyard. My apartment’s public housing, but there’s a fire-escape terrace with a view of the surrounding rooftops—air-conditioning units and service entries. It’s chilly out here. The neighboring terrace’s potted plants died weeks ago in the first frost but are still outside, brown and brittle. I sip my coffee and bundle in my robe and sweatpants, a gray hoodie and slipper-thick socks. The sunrise pinks the sky—beautiful. Quiet. Wi-Fi’s included in the lease, or should be, but the router’s been broken going on three years. I hear a wet click whenever my Adware tries to autoconnect—like a popping knuckle just behind my right ear—and