[Trigger alert: This blog post mentions the suicide of a young man. If you or someone you know is in need of mental health support, consider dialing 988 to talk to a helpful counselor at the Suicide & Crisis Hotline….In spite of the fact that this blog post talks about roteness and cliches, there is no intent to minimize the death of a teenage boy. There is certainly nothing cliché about the death of any young person.]

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The room as I remember it is down a short staircase, just past a small reception area. Or perhaps there isn’t a reception area at all, just a hallway: these details are hard to remember.

No matter.

The room is, in effect, a basement. Carpeted wall to wall. The room’s four walls are painted white, or some inoffensive neutral color. Yes: white and inoffensive. The room has no windows, or perhaps small windows up at ground level, covered by short, inoffensive curtains.

Only a single door leads in and out of the room. 

So: A basement. Carpet. No windows. Inoffensive colors and curtains. 

Need I say more? 

It is all so ordinary, so expected: so rote and cliché.

There are five or six of us, I believe. (Again, the details are hard to remember: this was, say, 1980.) The man—the shrink, the psychologist—sits behind his desk while we relax–as best we can relax—on a mish-mash of odd chairs and sofas. The psychologist is plain faced, as best as I can remember him. He is, say, in his forties or fifties. He wears wire-rimmed glasses. He has short, dark, conservative hair.  I am tempted to say he is Republican. This is also because during my one-on-one sessions with him, which occur on a different day of the week than the group sessions I am describing here, I tell him I am thinking of voting for Ted Kennedy. 

“Really?” he responds. “You would vote for a man who judges its best to leave a woman alone to drown in a car?”

I am a junior in high school. The others—the four or five uncomfortable teenagers sitting around me in the potpourri of chairs and couches during our once-a-week sessions—are my age.

So: I am sixteen. The room and the walls and the carpet are inoffensive. There is only one door. And as I say, there are five or six of us, though even of this I cannot be sure. It is all memory.

Memory! A dark and tricky art!

In any case….

We all teenagers. I think—though I can’t be sure—that only one of us is a girl. To my mind, then and now, this girl is a bit of a rebel, a bit uncomfortable in her own skin. (Naturally, we are all uncomfortable in our own skin: this too is cliché…but cliché does not mean untruth.) In the girl’s case, her discomfort becomes her: she laughs off her discomfort with a gay, breezy smile. Her hair is long and unruly, or so my mind recalls it; when my mind tracks back to the inoffensive, windowless, one-door carpeted room, the girl’s face—that is, the memory of her face—strikes me as attractive in a forthright, vulnerable way. The others I can’t seem to remember at all, except for one. He is a mild, thinnish boy, carefree (or pretends to be); outgoing (or pretends to be); plays a bit of the cynic (this he does not pretend). He is a bit acerbic, a bit of a wit and smart aleck—at his own expense. Perhaps more than a bit. He laughs cynically at his own acerbity. 

Perhaps too cynically.

(This is what dooms him.)

The six (or five) of us meet once a week. Or perhaps once every two weeks. It is hard to remember now. But we always meet in the carpeted, windowless room….I believe this was on Maple Street, in Summit, New Jersey. An affluent suburban town. A leafy suburb, to use the cliché. Or perhaps it was Springfield Avenue. Who can say? In any case, it was in a low office building, maybe three or four stories tall. I have not gone back to look it up.

No matter.

Because the room has no windows, because it is in a basement, because the walls are inoffensive and display all lack of character, because there is only a single, wooden door that leads in and out of the room, and because the psychologist always closes the single, wooden door before our sessions start, there is a dreaded sense of suffocation. Vulnerability. That one cannot escape the room—the carpet, the walls, the emptiness of windows, the silent inoffensiveness. The shrink (I think one of us so much as calls him that one week, while he sits—cliché and all–behind his desk, observing us like rats) always asks the same question to start us off. Like the walls, it appears at first to be a neutral question but eventually, because it is asked week after week, it becomes a kind of a threat. 

Does anyone have something to say? 

Or: Who would like to start us off this week? 

Or, once or twice (because I am shy; because I speak only when I am spoken to): William, would you like to tell the group something about what happened to you this past week?

Yes, a neutral question to have us start down the laboratory’s maze so the researcher can observe the young, self-conscious rats puzzle out the routes to their own rewards….And because I am shy, because I only speak when I am spoken to, because I have understood too intently that I need only answer teachers’ questions correctly, solve the calculus homework, write the term paper, conjugate the Spanish verbs, I feel the obligation, the claustrophobia, the suffocation more keenly than I otherwise should. Because there are no correct answers here, no single way to scurry through the labyrinth…. 

Perhaps Dr. Barber (the shrink, the psychologist) records my answer. Perhaps he notes it only mentally; perhaps later—after the five or six of us have left, after we have walked back up the short flight of stairs and past the reception area (if there is a reception area); after we have biked back home or shut the door of our parents’ car: when Dr. Barber is alone in the carpeted basement room with the neutral walls and the lacking windows and the single door, perhaps he jots down my answer in a notebook.

Perhaps I, too, learn something from these sessions. Perhaps I gain maturity, perhaps I take a step forward in my life.

Perhaps.

But there are only three other items I remember of the sessions the five or six of us attended. 

Item First: One week, the girl—the only one whom I come to admire, the only one who seems worthwhile, in spite of—or perhaps because of—her unruly nature—tells the group that someone at school called her a jockette. Or she called a classmate a jockette. Either way: there in the carpeted room, she laughs. Smartly. Uncomfortably. “Yeah. Jockette. Like, a girl jock. I figured out that word for myself.”

This she says proudly. With a spirited laugh. 

(To her credit, she could laugh at herself. Where did she learn that? What teacher taught her that lesson?)

Item Second: One week, the girl stares at me. Right, directly at me. She nods; perhaps she even gestures to me with her hand. Then with a knowing, game look in her eyes, she says: “You’re smart, aren’t you?”

(Yes, I think as I write this fifty years later, I was smart. Too smart for my own good….)

Item Third: One week, after Dr. Barber closes the single, wooden door there are four or five of us in the room. Not five or six.

Four or five…not five or six.

(Because this is all rote and cliché,  you can see what’s coming, can’t you?)

Perhaps Dr. Barber cleared his throat when he sat down at his desk. This would have suited the cliché that were the four or five of us. Perhaps he pushed his glasses up his nose. (This, too: cliché!) 

In any case: when he told us what he told us, I think someone gasped. 

Otherwise, silence. 

Perhaps Dr. Barber asked us how we felt. Perhaps some of us answered. Perhaps some of us were too tired of the suffocation, the claustrophobia, sniffing our ways to find the path through the labyrinth. Perhaps some of us, later that day, after climbing back up the stairs and walking home…after riding our bikes or shutting the car doors, told our parents. (But truth be told, our parents already knew: Dr. Barber’s office had called them earlier that day.)

Perhaps some of our parents asked us how we felt about it. Four or five, not five or six. Perhaps we answered, perhaps we did not know how to answer. How could we answer? We knew the boy one hour a week (or one hour every two weeks: I have already told you this is hard to remember), always in a windowless, carpeted, inoffensive room…Is that any way to get to know a person…or to somehow understand that person’s death? How are we supposed to mourn a person like that—a boy so troubled he conceives his own death?

So, in the end: all we have is the tragedy, the fact of death. 

Tragedy and cliché. 

And the years, the decades that go by, with only this realization: the girl with the unruly hair, the only girl in the room—the one who gestured at me?

She is the smart one. She. In my mind I imagine her discovering the way out of the maze, hurrying into the bright and promising unknown. Whereas I am left watching her go, looking through the maze’s glass walls, only a staggering and unhelpful intelligence as my companion.

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[A note: If you were a patient of Dr. Barber (Dr. Barbar?) in Summit, New Jersey, and are comfortable sharing your experience, please feel free to contact me at WOppen5469 AT aol DOT com. Please mention Dr. Barber/Barbar in your subject line.]