The Bitter Pill

“You’re far too content,” said Dr. Mistle.  He scratched the ample beard stubble on his chin.  “According to my charts, you haven’t had so much as a mild episode of anxiety in sixteen months.”

Butterman fidgeted in his seat.  “What, you want me to be like those people in your waiting room?” 

Butterman had spent forty minutes in Mistle’s cramped waiting room.  He’d tried hard not to stare at the heavy set woman who’d repeatedly torn pages from a fashion magazine, rolled them into little multi-colored balls and thrown them alternately at a fern or at the short, balding man in a plaid jacket who was in the midst of a shrill altercation with the receptionist over the time of his next appointment.

“Those patients are engaged with their environment,” Mistle replied enthusiastically.  He gestured vigorously with his well-tanned hands and his gray-blue eyes gazed at Butterman with evangelical intensity.  “They take on particles of the world, handle them, grapple them like individual challenges, piece by piece.  Grasp at them hungrily.  Feeling the world against their body parts.”  Mistle flipped through the notes he’d made in Butterman’s file.  “You are drifting through life, Butterman.  Your problem is that you don’t grapple with the essential dilemmas around you.”

“What essential dilemmas?”  Butterman straightened his posture in the wrought iron chair.  Mistle’s office always made him feel vaguely uneasy, with its stark, metallic furnishings, and evenly hung, uniformly framed black and white photos of impoverished African villages, deserted weapons testing facilities and 1930s Appalachian coal miners.

“If you can’t even name any dilemmas, you clearly have an enormous lack of insight, of intrapersonal comprehension.”  Mistle stood rigidly, as though called to action and prepared to confront Butterman’s stubbornly uneventful placidity.  “You’ve been seeing me regularly now, with your unlined face, for two years.  I’ve had nothing but positive reports on your marriage, your career and your relentlessly tame leisure activities.  This is the kind of baseless tranquility that worries me.”

“My tranquility worries you?”

“It worries me deeply.  I see you in a bubble of contentment, Butterman.”  Mistle walked out from behind his desk, as though he were about to walk up to Butterman in his wrought iron chair and shake him vigorously by the shoulders.  “We have to break you out of that bubble.”

Butterman gave a look that was uncomprehending.  “I’m not in a bubble.”

“Of course you see it that way.  That’s one of the classic symptoms of irrational satisfaction.”

“How can you say I’m irrational?”

Mistle came to within touching distance of Butterman’s face.  Butterman looked at the frayed threads on the psychiatrist’s unapologetic retro tie and the scratches in his large-lensed glasses.  He could smell the old-fashioned pomade that Mistle had generously applied to his hair.  “Because you are out of touch, Butterman.  Do you want to go through life like a monkey in a painted white room that’s sealed off from all outside influence and scented with pleasant odors while being strictly regulated in regard to light and temperature?”

Butterman was silent.  He had never entertained the question before.

Mistle took Butterman’s silence as an assent.  “I thought not.  You urgently need some provoking.”  Mistle made the return journey to his chair, his mission seemingly accomplished.  “I’m going to put you on twenty milligrams of Seetherol.  It will lift you out of this bland puddle.”

“Seetherol?   I don’t see the need for any medication.”

Mistle looked at him as if he were the least intelligent boy in a suburban third grade classroom.  “Does a snake see the need for legs?  Does a mouse see the need for wine?  What you see and don’t see is exactly the problem.”