I came as soon as I touched myself. Yeah, yeah, he said. He stared at me wild-eyed in the rearview mirror. Come up here and suck me off, he begged. I want to feel my cock in your mouth. His voice was harsh, threatening. I wanted to be home, in my own bedroom, safe. My head started throbbing and, trapped, with nowhere to run, I rolled over and escaped into a dream. I was floating in the surf. My neck was stiff; I couldn’t turn my face away from the midday sun. I threw my arms across my eyes, trying to hide from the blinding white light. I heard a voice, then felt the heat of a body between my legs. He rubbed his cheek against mine, then licked my scorched face with his tongue, trying to cool me down. He found my mouth and tried to force it open and, when I resisted, he bit my neck, an affectionate little nip. I felt him lifting my legs and his cock searching for my ass.

He’d pinned me against the mattress. I tried to kick him away, but my feet flailed over his shoulders. Hey, little buddy, relax. His voice was calm, gentle, but he pressed his forearm against my neck with just enough force to let me know how easy it would be to break it. When I started to cry, he kissed me and told me how easy this could be if I only just let it happen. Push down, he said, push, push like you’re taking a big shit. The pain lasted less than a minute, just like he promised. I don’t want to hurt your little cherry, he said. He kept his word, riding me slowly and covering my face with little kisses. I sank back into the dream, deafened by the sound of wave after wave of warm salty water crashing over me.

I opened my eyes to a white ceiling. The room was cool and clean. I turned my head on the pillow and saw a plastic bag of clear liquid hanging from a metal hook. My eyes followed the tube down to the white bandage on the back of my hand. I was naked, exposed, sandbagged in ice packs. I let my eyes drift back to the ceiling. I felt my lips crack and split when I whispered a single word. Mom. I fell asleep, my hand in hers, knowing she wouldn’t leave the chair by my bed until I was safe again. Somewhere in the room, the old man was crying.

The hospital told them a trucker had brought me to the emergency room, delirious with a fever of one hundred and four. He’d said he found me half dead at a rest stop on the interstate. My mother always regretted he hadn’t left his name and address so they could thank him for saving my life. The doctors said it was meningococcal meningitis. Randy T and me both. Highly contagious, spread by direct contact, coughing, sneezing, sharing unwashed eating utensils. I let them believe it. I knew it was a long red snake that had poisoned me.

I spent all of September and the better part of October recovering. Chicago was out of the question; a medical deferral postponed my arrival in the big city until the winter semester. The plan was to get a head start on the Great Books except that the Batman and Robin were more engaging than Gilgamesh and the epics of Homer cried out for a graphic edition, illustrated by the artists of Marvel and DC.

“You’re still weak. Don’t worry, your powers of concentration will return by the time you get to school,” my mother reassured me.

But something lingered, a sense of dread that remained after the doctors confirmed the symptoms had resolved and I’d escaped without permanent neurological damage. I rarely wandered far from the Monument to Heat and Air, passing on the Clapton and Steve Miller Band tickets offered by Randy T. The promise of road trips and the lure of marijuana had led me to the cab of a tractor trailer, wrapped in a blanket and drenched in sweat. I preferred the solitude of my room, the lights ablaze through the night. I tossed and turned, sleeping fitfully, dreaming about endless stretches of empty highway leading to a dark strange city where no Dark Knight waited to protect me. The Joker of my nightmares looked suspiciously like a scarred and painted Jimmy Dean, mocking me as a coward, too sickly and weak to defend myself.

It seemed abrupt, a spur-of-the-moment decision, when I announced that Chicago seemed too cold, too far away, that college could wait a year, maybe two. Nocera Heat and Air’s payroll could accommodate me while I decided what to do with my future.

“Like hell it will,” my father announced, surprisingly calm and rational for a man prone to combustion and outbursts. “If you don’t go now, you’ll never go,” he said.

“What makes you such an expert on higher education?” I snarled.

I’d always known I could infuriate him. Over the past few years, I’d learned it was easy to one-up him. But never before had I known I could hurt him.

“I know you think I’m stupid. You’re right. I am. I know I’m not smart like you. But listen to me. Just this once. I’m not telling you. I’m asking you. Please.”

He walked away, defeated, his hopes and dreams for me having crashed and burned.

My mother waited until he’d left the room, then pounced, angry, accusing.

“All that man wants to do is help you. Why won’t you let him do that?”

Words once used to protect me were now turned against me, as compelling as they had been when they’d vanquished my father ten years earlier.

All that boy wants is to be with you. Why can’t you give him that?

Davidson College, close to home, familiar, an unlikely nest for predators and deviants, was thrilled I wanted to fill a space vacated by a first semester dropout. How different would it have all turned out if there had never been a bout of meningitis and a long red snake? Would I have blossomed in the Windy City or would I have been crushed like a bug by the profound thinkers nurtured in the intellectual hothouse of the University of Chicago? Maybe it all turned out for the best, my being cloistered in a humid, remote Southern outpost, my stature as the leading (and only) Trotskyite unchallenged, no one around to expose my limited comprehension of the vagaries of dialectical materialism. I sure did like to say those words, though. And the girl I would marry sure liked to hear them.

Diagnosis

I tell Matt I’m Humpty Dumpty and he’s fucking with my head.

“That’s my job,” he says.

Okay, then, whose job is it to put me back together again?

He’s not happy with me tonight. He says he sees a pattern here and asks if I recognize it. I shrug my shoulders. I shouldn’t have told him about the “therapeutic” massage, complete with happy ending, in my hotel room in Orlando. He reminds me I’m on probation and the State of North Carolina wouldn’t look kindly on commercial transactions for sexual release. He asks whether I understand the meaning of the term self-destructive. I tell him he’s being melodramatic.

We move on to discussing medication. Or, rather, he’s talking about something called SSRIs and I stop listening. Something behind his right shoulder is distracting me. A small abstract watercolor. Not abstract exactly, more geometric. Squares and pyramids strategically aligned by color. It has to be new. I’ve sat in this room every week since late last summer and never seen it before.

“Is that watercolor new?” I ask.

“What watercolor?”

“The one behind you. The one with all the shapes.”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

I scan the room searching for further evidence of my waning powers of observation. Desk, chair, sofa, crucifix. Those I remember. This paperweight, the Venetian millefleur, I remember that too. The psychopharmacology reference guide on the side table. That I haven’t seen. That’s definitely new.

“You aren’t listening to me, are you?” he asks.

“Sure, of course.”

Actually I stopped listening when he told me what I didn’t want to hear. He’s gone too far. He’s overstepped his boundaries. He’s diagnosing me.

Depression.