Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 67

Kate Gompert’s face writhed for a moment while the doctor was writing. ‘I fear this feeling more than I fear anything, man. More than pain, or my mom dying, or environmental toxicity. Anything.’

‘Fear is a major part of anxiety,’ the doctor confirmed.

Katherine Gompert seemed to come out of her dark reverie for a moment. She stared full-frontal at the doctor for several seconds, and the doctor, who’d had all discomfort at being stared at by patients trained right out of him when he’d rotated through the paralysis/-plegia wards upstairs, was able to look directly back at her with a kind of bland compassion, the expression of someone who was compassionate but was not, of course, feeling what she was feeling, and who honored her subjective feelings by not even trying to pretend that he was. Sharing them. The young woman’s expression, in turn, revealed that she had decided to take what amounted for her to her own gamble, this early in a therapeutic relationship. The abstract resolve on her face now duplicated what had been on the doctor’s face when he’d taken the gamble of asking her to sit up straight.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Have you ever felt sick? I mean nauseous, like you knew you were going to throw up?’

The doctor made a gesture like Well sure.

‘But that’s just in your stomach,’ Kate Gompert said. ‘It’s a horrible feeling but it’s just in your stomach. That’s why the term is “sick to your stomach.” ‘ She was back to looking intently at her lower carpopedals. ‘What I told Dr. Garton is OK but imagine if you felt that way all over, inside. All through you. Like every cell and every atom or brain-cell or whatever was so nauseous it wanted to throw up, but it couldn’t, and you felt that way all the time, and you’re sure, you’re positive the feeling will never go away, you’re going to spend the rest of your natural life feeling like this.’

The doctor wrote down something much too brief to correspond directly to what she’d said. He was nodding both while he wrote and when he looked up. ‘And yet this nauseated feeling has come and gone for you in the past, it’s passed eventually during prior depressions, Katherine, has it not?’

‘But when you’re in the feeling you forget. The feeling feels like it’s always been there and will always be there, and you forget. It’s like this whole filter drops down over the whole way you think about everything, a couple weeks after —’

They sat and looked at each other. The doctor felt some combination of intense clinical excitement and anxiety about perhaps saying the wrong thing at such a crucial juncture and fouling up. His last name was needle-pointed in yellow braid on the left breast of the white coat he was required to wear. ‘I’m sorry? A couple weeks after—?’

He waited for seven breaths.

‘I want shock,’ she said finally. ‘Isn’t part of this whole concerned kindness deal that you’re supposed to ask me how I think you can be of help? Cause I’ve been through this before. You haven’t asked what I want. Isn’t it? Well how about either give me ECT^[29] again, or give me my belt back. Because I can’t stand feeling like this another second, and the seconds keep coming on and on.’