We Think the World of You

.

For months Allen Jensen moped ceaselessly, then fell into something deeper. He blamed his job at first, then the unexpected death of a cousin he had never really known, but finally he concluded that there was no reason at all for his feelings of sadness and dread. He, himself, was the reason.

That sensation one gets when in the midst of setting out on a task or making a statement the mind pauses, loses its thread, and the only choice is to turn to something new—his whole soul was trapped inside that feeling; it was as if his consciousness had slipped into the silent instant inside a stutter. It wasn't the first time this had occurred, but in the past there had always been something to pull him out of it: a desire for his parents' approval, which was slightly out of reach, a desire to get away from Hudson Falls; for a long time there was the simple desire for sex, which was then gradually replaced by the desire for a beautiful wife and beautiful children and a home he could be proud of. Before these later desires had turned to substance, he had also wanted to write. In high school and college he had read a number of novels that had moved him incredibly, moved him the way he supposed religion moved others, and he had wanted desperately to emulate them. But right before graduating he fell in love with Tracy, and she surprised him by loving him back, and he used that love as a springboard for a comfortable life.

And then one day that comfort was not enough; nothing was. He took the pictures of his family off his desk and put them in his drawer. He stared out the window of his office on the twenty-seventh floor of the Amoco Building, stared out at the comfortless iron landscape. He thought about how quick the snap of pavement would be, closed his door and wept, forced himself to call Tracy at work and say, holding his head in his hands, I don't know why, but I've got this feeling the world would be a better place if I weren't in it.

He spent four weeks in the psychiatric ward of Northwestern Memorial, not eating, not sleeping, barely getting out of bed. When he did try to talk or move or go to the bathroom, his muscles felt dull and heavy, as if he were trying to run underwater. The doctors started him on a hefty dose of Zoloft. When he promised them he was no longer having fantasies about shooting himself or injecting ink into his veins, they let him go home. He spent two months recuperating in his house, unable to return to the advertising agency where he had worked for over ten years. Tracy was not pressuring him, but he had begun to hear frustration beneath her concern. She would say, I ran into Bret at the supermarket. He says the whole office hopes you're doing well. He wants you to know they all think the world of you, and he'd hear, If you're not back soon, they'll cut their losses. She'd kiss him and say, I love you, and he'd hear, I love the man you were before. When can I expect to have him back? Maybe this translation arose from something slightly mechanical in her embraces or the charged pitch of her voice. Or maybe it was just distortion. He hoped for the former, that her frustration was real and not delusion; there was dignity at least in fighting for a marriage; fighting for one's sanity was more precarious.

They were approaching their twelfth anniversary, and though he had not spent much time contemplating their relationship in the abstract, he believed that their years together had been happy. Tracy had been an actress before she went to law school, and she had a great talent for entertaining people. In the early years of their marriage, when making...