Adrift

Lisa pulled her shoulders up to her ears and closed her eyes. The collar of her Burberry coat slightly muffled the ranting poetry that poured out between the rotting teeth of a grimy street bum.
"Fifty dollar bill!" He danced a languid two step. "Get you! Wipe you out!"
"Get away from me!" she screamed. She tucked a venté decaf no foam vanilla latte under her left arm, freeing her right hand to fish in her purse for the rape whistle her mother gave her when she moved to the big city. It had to be down there somewhere. Her fingers dug deeper, under her billfold, rattling around among the pens and lipstick and keys. Coming up empty, she wondered if she might have left it in the Prada bag.
"They line the drawers! And take your eyes!" His own eyes flashed surprisingly white.
Lisa tapped impatiently at the crosswalk button until the green silhouette lit up granting her permission to leave the curb and escape the bum who continued his pestering. The sound of the city shifted ninety degrees with the released traffic.
"Wipe you out!" His voice danced around tossing in extraneous syllables like country couples doing a Allemande left. Lisa tried to make the bum disappear by focusing on the far side of the street.
"Fifty dollar bill!" The weak puffing of his breathing was right behind her. It smelled like cheap wine, rotted food and decaying teeth. A halitosis stew.
She was only a few steps from the far sidewalk. A few steps and she could join the knot of tourists photographed their way through Pioneer Square. The little crowd would be her sanctuary. Her foot landed awkwardly on the curb, twisting her ankle as the designer pump splashed into the stream of gutter water. Looking down, she hissed a curse through clenched teeth. A pointless counter to the pain in her ankle and the water stains ruining her expensive shoes. When she looked up, the bum was swaying in front of her. How did he get around her so fast? Her breathing stopped and anger reddened her skin. "Get away from me, freak!" Anger blinded her, adrenaline pumped, her hand moved to attack without waiting for her thoughts to clear. A caramel rainbow of hot espresso arced in slow motion towards the bum.
Somehow, he wasn't there anymore. Despite the heavy traffic, he popped up across the street, still reciting, "Fifty dollar bill! Wipe you out!"
"What the hell, lady?" a man growled, pointing at the coffee dripping down his black leather jacket.
Lisa ran. The leather jacket came at her. Her delicate shoes collapsed leaving a trail of Italian leather behind her.
Lisa ran. The bum jumped and waved like he had a two dollar bet down. "Fifty dollar bill! Won't save you!"
Lisa ran. Her bare feet slapped against the concrete in a rapid two beat rhythm.
Lisa ran until the leather jacket gave up. He spun to a stop, breathing heavily through a flurry of cursing and impotent threats.
Lisa stopped running. There was no sign of the bum. Leather jacket stomped off. People in small groups ignored her.
She crumpled to her knees, breathing hard and deep when a man's hand landed on her shoulder.
"Are you all right, miss?" His voice was measured, clear, soothing. The calm tone hit her like a slap, snapping her awake. Her feet started to hurt. She tightened her grip on her purse noticing the feel of the braided strap in her fingers. The man eased her up until she was on her feet looking down on his receding hairline. He had to look up to catch her eyes, but his gaze made her feel like a newborn in her father's arms.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled. His right eyebrow arched as if it knew a secret.
"What are you apologizing for?"
"I don't know. I ruined that man's jacket. I made a scene in public. I lost control." The list of things she was sorry about went on, but she stopped before she had to apologize for dumping her personal problems on this stranger.
"Hermes can be a little intense sometimes."
"Who's Hermes?"
"One of my patients. I'm Doctor Klesner. "
Lisa jumped to the correct conclusions, "You're a shrink? A shrink for bums?"
"Maybe you should call a friend to help you home?" he asked, frowning.
"I don't have friends in Seattle. I'm too busy working," she added to cut off the sympathetic look from the doctor. "Why isn't he in a hospital or something?" The tip of her tongue flicked out to moisten her lower lip.
"Who? Hermes? He doesn't need a hospital. He just needs to take his medication. Besides he couldn't afford a hospital. He lives under the bridge."
"They can't leave him out on the street. He's dangerous."
"No, no, no. I can assure you that he wouldn't have hurt you. He just needs a little extra understanding."
"He needs to understand that you don't go acting loony at people," she said.
"Normally, people don't take it so personally."
Lisa reddened, then went pale again. She clenched her hands into angry fists. She didn't need to take this from some goofy little shrink. She didn't need to be harassed by lunatics. She didn't need to get so confused. She should leave. She should get back to her day's errands. She took a step and stopped. Where was she going? No answer. The plan for the day was gone. There was only a vague sense that there had been a full schedule when she left her apartment this morning.
"I wondered if you wanted to talk about it?"
"Talk? No. No talking. I just need a minute."
"There's a coffee shop in the basement of that bookstore." He pointed to a building across the street.
"It's quiet in there."
Quiet. Yes. She needed quiet.
Dr. Klesner already had a hand on her elbow leading her across the street. Then down stone steps to a door, past a wall of posters advertising local bands. They moved to a table in the back next to a shelf full of books on World War II. Habit, more than volition, made her pull off her coat revealing a blue Donna Karen blouse and skirt. The kind of thing successful women were wearing this season.
"Hi, Dr. K," said the college student posing as a waitress. "New patient, eh?" A single glance recorded Lisa's short brown hair, slightly pretty face and matching mani-pedi. She placed two cups of tea on the table and disappeared into a cloud of kitchen gossip behind the counter.
"You must come here often," Lisa said indicating the tea that arrived without being ordered.
"Sometime I bring patients here."
Lisa tossed a glance at the waitress. "She doesn't think I'm one of your patients!" Doctor Klesner's face was unreadable. "I'm not a patient! I'm a victim," she shouted in the direction of the counter. The waitress countered with a pity smile.
"How did you feel when Hermes approached you?"
"He creeped me out. All that dancing and strange talking. Why don't the police do something about people like that?"
"I'm afraid the police are sticklers for the law. He would have had to grab you or make threats." He set his tea carefully on the table before continuing. "Or throw something at you, say a cup of hot coffee."
"Right," the word was the snort of a bull about to charge a red cape. "Now I'm the bad guy?"
"What do you think? What would the fellow in the leather jacket say?"
Lisa pressed her lips together so hard they threatened to bleed. She tried to pick up her tea, but the cup shook so badly she slammed it back down. Her hands hunted for a place to land. She stuffed them under her thighs, pulled them out again, wrestled them into her lap, finally tucked them under her arms like Houdini putting on a straight jacket.
"What do you do?" Doctor Klesner sipped his tea.
"Do? What do you mean?"
"You said you worked all the time. What kind of work do you do?"
"I am, uhh, I was, I uh. I'm between jobs right now." The damned doctor just sipped his tea. A normal person would have said something sympathetic. Something comforting. Words of encouragement. Right?
"I was an escrow officer. You know, for mortgages? With the housing market these days, they're cutting back."
A noise broke out from the doorway. The gentle tinkling of the bell overwhelmed by a muttering figure in a tall pointed hat and cape. He held a wooden staff in front of him like a shield while he recited something that sounded like Latin.
The two girls behind the counter looked at Doctor Klesner and pointed the tops of their heads at the figure in the door.
"Over here, Justin," called the doctor waving him in.
"Doc, just who I needed to see." Justin's eye darted around the room searching the shadowy corners and reaching around the shelves. "Grillman's close. Someone must have tampered with the ether stones."
"I thought we had established that Grillman wasn't a threat," said Doctor Klesner. He turn to Jill, "Justin is a wizard. His nemesis, Grillman, has been plotting against him for nearly a century."
"Damn it doc. I don't have time for your rationalizations." He lifted the brim of his hat seeing Lisa for the first time. "I'm Justin the White." His left eye seemed to have trouble focusing giving him a confused appearance. "I know you! You're the imp that tried to curse Hermes this morning."
"Were you there?" Lisa shouted, "Did you see what he did to me?"
Justin pulled at the brim if his hat, "Doc, I think you need to help her with her impulse control."
Lisa slammed her cup onto the table splashing tea in slick puddles. Justin raised his staff and turned to the Doctor, "You see?"
"That reminds me, Justin. Could you look for Hermes and make sure he is taking his medication? Let him know I'll see him this afternoon."
Justin swept his cape aside with his staff and chuckled. "That Hermes is mischief incarnate. Have no fear, I'll fulfill this quest." In an instant he was out the door.
Lisa watched him glide up the steps before leaning in confidentially. "I get it, you send a loon to catch a loon. Very clever."
"Justin is very helpful. I can't be everywhere at once you know."
"I thought you weren't supposed to encourage a crazy person's delusions. Why do you let Justin think he is a wizard?"
"It's a technique they use at some of the more successful clinics. The idea is that instead of spending therapy time in conflict and confrontation, you use the patients frame of reference to help them develop skills for coping. Take Hermes for example, He thinks he is the reincarnation of Jim Morrison, so I have him write his lyrics down. Some of them are actually quite good. " He pointed at the wall of band advertisements. "The Demonstrators play his songs sometimes."
"I get it. Justin is a wizard so you send him on errands, but you call it a quest."
"Right. The doctor who developed the technique had several patients who thought they were Jesus, so he got them jobs in a carpentry shop. Many of these people will never get well, but sometimes we can help them manage their lives better."
"What would you have me do? I mean, if I was one of your patients."
"That depends. Who do you think you are?"
Lisa carefully sweep up spilled tea with her napkin. "I guess, I don't know."
"I think we have found your problem," he said professionally.
"You're weird for a shrink," Lisa changed the subject.
"Many would say you have to be weird to be a shrink."
"Yeah, but you're really out there. How come you don't have a fancy office and see depressed software executive for $500 an hour?"
"Because someone has to take care of these people." He gestured towards the city outside. "When the public hospitals closed in the 80's they got dumped on the streets. I decided that the least I could do was make sure they get some mental health care."
"So are you already rich or something?"
"I have a grant from the AMA to study treatment techniques for the homeless and the city kicks in a little."
"I worked for the city for awhile. The pay sucked."
"So, you are looking for a high paying job."
"I guess. I didn't go to college or anything, though."
Doctor Klesner asked a few more questions about what she looked for in a job, and why she attached value to some things and not others. Lisa found it odd that he asked such basic questions, but when she tried to answer them, they were surprisingly difficult. She realized that she had never really thought about what she wanted from a career. That was strange since the whole reason she left her mother and father behind in La Conner was for the opportunities promised by the big city.
"You haven't been back home in awhile. You haven't called your mother." It was not a question.
"What are you? Some kind of mind reader? "
"I like to call it Informed intuition."
"Well, don't do that anymore. It's spooky."
"Spooky or not, sometimes it helps to look at some of these unexamined issues."
"Don't do that."
"What?"
"Treat me like a patient." Her hand was shaking, so she slipped it under the table. "I'm not like those psychos. You won't find me talking nonsense and dancing in the street."
"I think if you did a little more dancing I wouldn't be so worried about you." There went that eyebrow again. Did they teach them that in shrink school?
"What did you tell people when you left home?"
"I don't remember," she lied. Her departure speech had been public, dramatic and cruel.
"Maybe, you burned some bridges?"
An image of her father's face flashed in her mind. His stern features dredging up everything she had done wrong. She broke her mother's heart. She spat on the community that had raised her. She couldn't hold a job. She had no friends. The image of her father shook his head. His expression was somewhere between, I told you so, and how dare you. Behind him sat her mother dabbing a dish towel at her face.
"That bad, eh?" He didn't need spooky powers, informed intuition or whatever he called it to read the tears that streaked her cheeks. She found a pack of tissues in her purse and patted at the tears hoping to preserve her makeup.
"I'm hopeless, aren't I? I was so sure of myself. I wasn't going to be like them, a bunch of unsophisticated hicks. I was going to be like those women on TV, well dressed, confident, strong. Everything you can't be in a small town."
"What did your mother say about that?"
Lisa's face dropped into her hands. The quote that haunted her came out muffled through her fingers, "Just promise me one thing, no matter what, you will always be my daughter."
"And they let you go."
"Yeah. My Dad pushed me out the door, slipped me a hundred dollars and pointed to the bus stop. That was two years ago."
"And here you are still full of questions."
She was still crying, there were no questions, no answers, no thought, just sadness and regret.
"What do you think it will take to make you happy?"
She mashed her fists into her face fighting back the tears. When she could make words, they came out like a scream, "I don't know. I don't know. I just don't know."
Doctor Klesner let her cry it out. His face was content as if he could wait a hundred years for her. It might take that long, she thought.
"Don't you need to get to your patients?"
He shrugged, "They're not going anywhere."
"But your job. Won't someone get angry at you for wasting your day talking to me?"
"My job is to help people I find on the streets. Today, you look like you need help."
She had been alone so long that his kind attention hurt. It was like trying to move your arm after it has been in a cast for a few months. "Am I going to be OK?"
"I think so," he smiled. "What you are feeling is very common. Like many young people, you are having an identity crisis."
"A crisis! That can't be good."
"Sometimes it takes a crisis to help show us the work we have to do." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver colored business card. "Take a look inside and figure out what it is you need to make you happy. And, if you need some help, give me a call." He handed over the card with his name and number. On the back were instructions for dealing with a mentally ill person. Dr. Klesner looked apologetic as she read the card.
"As you know, some of my patients can be challenging. I give these out to the regulars around here to help them know what to do."
"It doesn't say anything on here about throwing coffee at them." Her smile asked if he got the little joke.
Dr. Klesner laughed out loud, "See, you've made progress already."