Grief Counseling

For years Vijay Voorakkara’s life had been moving in one direction, unceasingly, toward treating people, medicating people, and saving lives. Indeed, medicine seemed to be Vijay’s calling, at least on paper, in the classroom, and as passing grades on exams. He had a propensity for recalling the names of bones and organs, pictures of bones and organs, and their locations in and around the body, pictures of bodies. He could list off viruses, bacteria, antihistamines, antidepressants, complex chemical compounds, organic compounds. To his parents’ eternal joy, Vijay was accepted upon his college graduation into a prestigious, borderline experimental medical program, in central Ohio of all places, where the yearly enrollment was less than a dozen and the graduation rate was 100 percent, “graduation” being a term of utmost inanity, as far as the program’s director, the esteemed Dr. Brian Yamagata, was concerned. Their futures were the very futures of medicine in this and other nations, Dr. Yamagata boasted, and then he assigned them all partners for their anatomy labs, where each pair of students would dissect a dead human body for the first time.

            Vijay was partnered with Joshua, a boy from New York whose curly hair already seemed to be thinning near the top. On their first day in the lab, they flipped their cadaver over, face down, so that the initiation of the experience of cutting open a once-living person would feel slightly less personal than if they’d started with the front. Their body formerly belonged to an old lady who they were told to call Caroline. Vijay started the dissection from a spot between her shoulder blades, dragged the blade of his scalpel to the bottom of her spine, then peeled her skin back like the cover of a book and started shaving away layers of yellow pustules of fat. The next week, they flipped her over again and cut her down the middle, from sternum to pubis. As Vijay did all the cutting, Joshua stared deeply into her sunken face.

            “I think I’m going to be sick,” Joshua said.

            “It’s just a dead body,” Vijay said.

            “I don’t think I can do this,” Joshua said. “What if I can’t do this?”

            “This isn’t a big deal,” Vijay said, annoyed.

            Several weeks later, Joshua leapt from the roof of the medical library and landed in the street seven stories below. After this tragically unaccountable incident, the school enrolled Vijay in grief counseling. Dr. Yamagata explained with a phone call that experiencing such a trauma this early in such a prestigious and rigorous program could adversely affect Vijay’s performance and that the school was required to attend to whatever emotional disconcertion Vijay might be experiencing so that he could perform dutifully and graduate with the honors that their students were historically known for.

            Vijay’s counselor was a young Ph.D. student named Perpétue-Jeong, a half Haitian, half North Korean woman in her fifties who had dedicated the remainder of her adult life helping strangers after having already raised a family of her own. She wore a rainbow of beads in her hair that clicked together when she shook her head, and her office was piqued with small prints of pastel still lifes.

            During the intake appointment, Vijay had signed a waiver that stated that Perpétue-Jeong could record their sessions for academic and observational purposes via a digital camcorder plugged into her computer. Often, however, Perpétue-Jeong forgot to turn off the monitor and Vijay could see a mirror image of his own face breaching just over the horizon of his counselor’s shoulders, a mirror image of his thin fingers tangled together in his lap. When Vijay was a young boy, his father had warned him against fiddling with his hands. It betrayed unease in the presence of others, an antisocial streak, Mr. Voorakkara told his son, yet Vijay couldn’t help it. His fingers wove themselves together independently of his own desires. On the screen, his hands appeared to him like subjects of a nature documentary.

            “I want you to know that you can feel free to express yourself here,” Perpétue-Jeong said during the intake appointment. “You might be feeling overwhelmed, helpless. You might be having trouble getting to sleep. These are all normal feelings. In fact, almost any feeling you have is probably normal. Does that make sense?”

            “Yes?” Vijay wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say.

            Perpétue-Jeong  regarded him with the faint hint of what could almost be considered a smile. “Everyone experiences grief in different ways,” she said. “There was a case study several years back about a man who lost his wife in an automobile accident with a semi truck. Neither party, according to officials, was at fault. It simply happened. Now, this man who lost his wife, during her funeral, broke out in laughter. He did not find his wife’s death particularly funny. Indeed, he loved her more than life itself. But his reaction to her death was to laugh. The laughter took hold and he couldn’t stop. The man continues to laugh to this day. A constant, haunting laughter.”

            “Well, laughter is the best medicine,” Vijay said.

             “How have you been sleeping?”

            Vijay glanced at himself in the screen behind Perpétue-Jeong. His skin was darker under eyes, and his eyes themselves were webbed with capillaries.

            It was true he hadn’t been sleeping well, but this had nothing to do with the suicide. He was experiencing a minimal to no amount of grief about that. The problem was that his neighbor in the apartment next door was having loud, obnoxious sex every single night. At least, it seemed like every single night. He had seen her in the hallway in passing a few times. He would be coming home from class, she’d be leaving to go to the gym, already wearing her workout clothes, tight spandex, the shadow of a sports bra underneath a white T-shirt.

            One time, during one of their hallway interchanges, they made eye contact. The neighbor smiled, and Vijay panicked.

            “I hear you,” Vijay said, “at night, sometimes. You know, when you have guys over. You’re loud.”

            “Sorry? That’s . . . not appropriate.” She turned her body as if to shield herself.

            “It’s not my fault that I can hear it,” Vijay said. But she was already walking away. Vijay made sure not to stare at her from behind.

 

Vijay had never had a girlfriend himself. He was also a virgin. He’d somehow made it through college without managing to lose his cherry, or whatever the saying was. “Vijay the Virgin.” No one ever called him that, but it would have devastated him if they did. The so-called best years of his life, at least for having wanton, uninhibited sex, were over, he was sure of it. Still, he was young. There was still time. It was not something he dwelled on, but he had been thinking about it more often lately. Besides, he could always say he was saving himself for marriage, even if marriage seemed so unreal, just a massive, shapeless form in the distance, like the mountains back home.

            Home to Vijay was Los Angeles, where his parents owned and operated a series of middling dry cleaners throughout the sprawling county. Vijay loved his parents, but they put a lot of pressure on him. Their dreams revolved around Vijay, specifically Vijay the future doctor, although he would have been just as happy working at one of his dad’s cleaners during the week and going to the beach on the weekends, as he had throughout his childhood, hanging out at the pier, watching wannabe actresses playing volleyball in the sand below, their white skin tanned even darker than his own, their bikinis holding on for dear life.

            Sadly, staying in Los Angeles was not in the cards. All his parents ever talked about was having a doctor in the family. They’d sacrificed a great deal for Vijay to have the opportunities he had. The least he could do was live up to their expectations. They were old-fashioned in some ways. Mr. Voorakkara would judge his son for anything less than the highest grades, and Mrs. Voorakkara tried more than once to marry Vijay off to one of her friends’ daughters who still lived in India. The Voorakkaras’ own marriage had been arranged after all, and they still loved each other, didn’t they? There was nothing wrong with how they did things, as far as Vijay’s father and mother were concerned. Things had been done in a similar way for centuries now. Vijay would become a doctor, to their cosmic delight, a delight historically manifest.

            Only once did Vijay bring up the possibility of helping his father operate the family business, even if only for a little while. Then Vijay would go to Ohio (of all places) and become a doctor. His mother began sobbing and his father slammed the door on his way out of the room. As long as he lived, his son would never handle other men’s suits for them. Everything they dreamed about would not amount to Vijay taking out a second mortgage while his clients bought sports cars, Rolexes, big screen hi-definition TVs, all trophies won by these men, these men who brought him their suits. This was what Mr. Voorakkara wanted for his son, that Vijay might grow up to achieve, achieve, in a material and social sense, those being two of the tenets of Mr. Voorakara’s deeply held belief system.

            Almost as soon as he arrived, Vijay wanted to leave Ohio. There was no uncertainty in his feelings about that. Ohio was as cold and colorless as the skin on his cadaver, Caroline. But he couldn’t just drop out of the program. He couldn’t disappoint his parents that way. He just couldn’t bear it. Plus, it was forbidden in the program’s handbook, section six, article six, paragraph seven, although Vijay wondered how exactly they would have enforced that if the need arose.

            Then Joshua committed suicide. An exit presented itself. Vijay, claiming trauma in grief counseling, could try to convince Perpétue-Jeong to recommend him for leave. Vijay knew it was wrong to exploit his classmate’s death for his own personal gain, but the more he thought about it, the less wrong it became.

            “I think about opening up a dead body and I see Joshua,” Vijay said, viewing his performance in Perpétue-Jeong’s computer screen. “Joshua’s dead body. And I think, that’s all we are. We’re all already dead. And like, what can I do about that? As a doctor, I mean. There’s no stopping it, is there?”

            Perpétue-Jeong checked her notes. “Do you feel somehow responsible?”

            Though the question irritated Vijay, he tactfully agreed. “I run those last few days over and over my mind,” he said. “I think, if I can’t save Joshua, who can I save?”

            Perpétue-Jeong twisted one of her beads between her fingers. “Even as a doctor, you will not be able to save everyone,” she said.

            “Obviously,” Vijay said, a gut reaction. He looked away. “Sometimes I think about suicide,” said he said, glancing up again. He could see his fingers begin to move on the screen.

            “Since when?” Perpétue-Jeong asked, jotting down notes.

            “I’m not happy,” Vijay said, which wasn’t technically a lie.

            Perpétue-Jeong stopped writing in her notebook and glared with one sterling eye. “You know, Vijay, part of my training as a psychologist and a therapist includes mastering the art of body language. This means I have become very skilled at knowing when someone is lying to me. As a therapist you can only trust what your clients tell you. Unless you know how to read body language, that is. Then an entirely separate world opens up to you. Do you know what I call that world? I call that world the truth.”

            “I’m telling you the truth,” Vijay said. In the screen he could see his fingers squirming atop one another. Then he looked down at his hands and they stopped.

            Perpétue-Jeong jotted down more notes.

 

The next day, Vijay went down to the anatomy lab for the first time since Joshua killed himself. Unsurprisingly, the cadaver was there waiting for him. They were told that they could refer to this body as Caroline, though that was not her living name. Vijay didn’t know Caroline’s living name. All he knew about this woman was that she was dead and that, by the time she had died, after apparently living a long life, bright hard neoplasms had sprouted throughout her body like wormy flowers. Caroline was already cut open down the front when Vijay returned from his grief-mandated hiatus. This was as far as he’d gotten with Joshua before the incident. Now, on his own, Vijay put on some gloves, picked up a scalpel, and set to pick up where they’d left off.

            Yet something was different this time when Vijay unzipped Caroline’s black bag. He got the sense that she was watching him. In fact, her prunish eyes were wide open and moving around in her head, mimicking the act of observation. Her lips were mumbling, and Vijay, curious and afraid, leaned in close to hear what she was whispering.

            “Do you know how long I’ve been in here?” the dead woman said. Her voice escaped from her throat like air being let out of a tire. “No, I’m seriously asking.”

            It occurred to Vijay that he was possibly losing his mind. But then he imagined how Perpétue-Jeong would take the news that his anatomy lab cadaver had started speaking to him and he decided to humor the dead woman.

            “You do realize you’re dead,” Vijay said. “You shouldn’t be talking.”

            “I’m sorry,” Caroline said, “I didn’t know you were an expert on what it’s like to be dead. I guess I should stop talking because mister expert over here thinks that, just because I’m dead, I don’t still have things to say.”

            “So tell me what it’s like to be dead,” Vijay said. He worried that if he stopped asking her questions she would stop talking, and then where would he be?

            “Oh, I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise,” Caroline said.

            At his next session, Vijay recounted his conversation with Caroline to Perpétue-Jeong. Vijay suspected that his counselor suspected his attempted manipulation of their small, trusting system, and they were both slightly on edge, playing this unspoken chess match. Perpétue-Jeong regarded him now with tepidity, the curtain having been drawn.

            “So,” Perpétue-Jeong said, “what else can you tell me about Caroline?”

            “All I know is how she died,” Vijay said. For a moment this statement struck him as profound, but then just as quickly whatever illumination he’d felt fluttered away.

            Perpétue-Jeong sighed. “You know, Vijay, it’s not just me you’re resisting. You’re resisting yourself, too. I hope you realize that.” Beyond the game they were playing, this notion that he could possibly be resisting himself rather disgusted Vijay.

            “But I’m telling you the truth,” he said. His own words buzzed about his head like flies circling a corpse . . . a talking corpse, Vijay thought. He was becoming a little disoriented, he had to admit.

            “And how can I believe that?” Perpétue-Jeong said. “You see, this is the predicament we’re in. Do you know what would happen to you if you were actually telling the truth? But because you’re not telling the truth . . .” She handed him a card with the time of their next appointment then dismissed him.

            That afternoon in the lab, Vijay waited for someone to approach him, possibly Dr. Yamagata himself, who would escort him away from the cadaver and take him up to his office to discuss a leave. But no one came, and Caroline was still talking.

            “J’accuse!” she said. “I know you’ve been talking about me with them.” Her head twitched on the table, her voice fricative with momentum.

            “With who?”

            “The living!” Caroline wheezed.

            “But you’re my ticket out,” Vijay said. That morning, he’d almost expected her to be silent again but now that she was speaking he supposed it was inevitable.

            “You don’t make sense,” she said. “Nothing’s making sense.”

            “I’m trying to get kicked out,” he explained to her. “I want them to think I’m crazy for talking to a corpse and tell me to take a leave of absence.”

            “A corpse!” she muttered. “Is that what they’re saying about me these days?”

            “Well, yeah,” Vijay said. The flat light of the laboratory streaked through the stringy remains of Caroline’s hair and pooled in her eye sockets. Vijay noticed they were being watched by the other students, and he decided this was a good thing. After all, how could the school not offer him a leave if he was alarming his peers and colleagues?

            “You shouldn’t get yourself kicked out,” Caroline said. “What else would you do? Trust me. There are worse things than living your life as a slave to obligation. Take my situation for instance. I am only taken out of the bag when you’re here, and when you’re not here I am once again in the dark. What kind of life is that?”

            Vijay shivered and patted Caroline on her shriveled hand. “It’s not life,” he tried to assure her. “It’s death. You’re dead, remember?”

            “Ah, yes,” Caroline said regretfully.

            Later, Vijay sat with some of his classmates in the school’s cafeteria. They had taken to eating salads almost exclusively, having been humbled into healthfulness by the layers of yellow fat underneath their cadavers’ skin, the white lumps of cholesterol in their stiff arteries. They all seemed to be breathing less loudly.

            Finally, one of his classmates, a very serious Chinese-American boy, said, “You’ve been talking to your cadaver.”

            “Sure,” Vijay said, smiling.

            “Are you . . . O.K.?” another one asked. This one was cute, a redhead with freckles and green eyes. Vijay thought that he should ask her out, but then realized it was pretty much impossible now.

            “Of course. She’s a great conversationalist.” Vijay spoke slowly, emphatically, making certain every word registered. “You know, we’re very intimate with our cadavers on a physical level, but why not on an emotional level as well?”

            The other students monkishly withdrew their arms into their white coats and thought about this. After a while, Vijay picked up his tray and exited the cafeteria, leaving his lunchmates to their reverent silence.

 

The next day in the laboratory, the other students were now talking to their cadavers, leaning over them and whispering into their gray ears.

            During the following session, Vijay told Perpétue-Jeong about the new trend he’d started. Pulling on her beads, Perpétue-Jeong said, “Your plan backfired.”

            Vijay nodded, unable to form words.

            A dark cloud settled in Perpétue-Jeong’s face. “You are afraid of dying, but you don’t want to go on living. Am I totally off-base here?”

             “Does it matter?” Vijay said. He really wanted to know.

            Perpétue-Jeong touched her own dark lips with her slim fingers. She said, “My mother grew up in North Korea and was renowned as a wonderful dancer. She was singled out as one of the most graceful dancers in the country and was requested to perform personally for the Dear Leader. But her sister wasn’t good at anything, so she was taken to a camp and her family never saw her again. After that, her parents escaped with her to America to allow her to pursue a career as a dancer. Eventually she made a living at dancing in New York City with a well-respected company. But in the end she settled down, married my father, and gave birth to me, which is all she would have done back in North Korea. Now, my father, on the other hand, was set with his life in Haiti. He owned a banana stand in a street market and did fairly well for himself. Everyone in his town told him he sold the best bananas they’d ever eaten. He was very committed to his bananas. He devoted so much time to building his banana business that he made no time at all for socializing. Selling bananas was his life—he could have been happy without a wife and a daughter. But then an earthquake destroyed his banana trees and everything he’d worked so hard to build was taken away from him in an instant. Nothing remained. He decided his only option was to sneak into America. Their struggles, all of that wandering, and that was that. And now me, their daughter, I got a degree but decided to put my own dreams and ambitions on hold to raise a family, which I was happy to do, but now I’ve decided to pursue a doctorate in psychology, and now I’m here with you.”

            Vijay’s forehead was damp. All this talk about the epic journeys of the lives of strangers made him woozy. “What’s your point?” he asked.

            “Well,” Perpétue-Jeong said confidently. “Sometimes things just work out.” A few beads had fallen out of her head and were studding the carpet like festive beetles.

            “Just tell them I’m unfit to continue my studies,” Vijay begged. He barely recognized his own face, which looked paralyzed and aghast, in the computer screen.

            “Tell that to whom?” Perpétue-Jeong asked, chuckling. “What do you think it is we’re doing here? Who do you think is watching us?”

            Later that week was their first anatomy exam: the leg. In a stroke of inspiration, Vijay failed miserably, purposefully, seeing a way out. If he couldn’t be given a leave for mental duress, he could at least flunk out. He labeled the abdominal aorta, for instance, the profunda femoris, and so on. It was probably the most fun he’d yet experienced in his program, making a mess of everything, mocking the human body’s simple edifice.

            Finally, Dr. Yamagata called Vijay into his office. He was an austere man, like a living suit of armor. He sat behind his desk as if he’d been born there. Accompanying a plethora of diplomas on the wall behind him was a gigantic bluish marlin set into a rich wooden plaque and a bright human heart, swollen to massive proportions, encased in glass.

            “We know you are a better student than this,” Dr. Yamagata said flatly. “Failing your exam is not an option, Mr. Voorakkara.”

            “I’ve been having trouble concentrating,” Vijay said. He leaned forward and cleared his throat and Dr. Yamagata shifted in his high-backed leather chair.

            “This has been a very stressful few weeks,” Vijay said. “I’m not sure I should continue my studies. The best thing for my success would be to take a semester off.”

            “That also is not an option,” Dr. Yamagata said. “We are building something here, Vijay. Something powerful. We've already experienced one setback. We cannot experience another. And that’s something you can help me with. Do you understand? You need to accept that you are a part of that, a part of something bigger than yourself.”

            “It’s just school,” Vijay said. He looked down at his hands, the horrible tangle of his fingers trying to revive one another.

            The doctor retrieved the glassed-in heart from the shelf behind him and placed it on the desk. “Do you believe in life after death?” he asked Vijay.

            Vijay stared at the heart. “That’s complicated,” he said.

            Dr. Yamagata grinned. “You see this heart, don’t you? This was my heart. Engorged with cardiomegaly, though I’m sure you knew that. I was, in essence, dead for several hours. My near-death experience was illuminating. Do you know what I saw?”

            “A white light?” Vijay suggested. “Dead relatives?”

            “Everything,” the doctor said slowly. “I saw everything. My mind was completely open. The very nature of existence was exposed to me. All possible knowledge swept into my mind, and I was taken by its current. But I couldn’t bring this knowledge back with me. I wouldn’t even be able to understand it if I did. It is not translatable, this knowledge. It is a force of complete honesty and, for lack of a better word, enlightenment, induced by a mixture of electrical impulses and dimethyltryptamine, or so it’s hypothesized. But a kernel of this knowledge nested in my brain upon my revival, and I understood for the first time that there is an afterlife, but it’s not what we think it is. It is not a place we travel to. It is not a destination. We’ve always carried it with us wherever we go. Everything we do, and how we feel about ourselves, determines our afterlife experience. There is a hell, but it’s not a pit, it’s not a black fiery hole underground. It is fear. We go to hell when we fear death, and we fear death when we fear life. Do you know why people see their doctors? This might seem fairly obvious, but people in general care little for their own health. What they do care about is death. Our purpose, then, is to assuage their fears, to put off what is inevitable for as long as we can. Yet, we can’t put off living, Vijay, can we?”

            Vijay shook his head, unable to speak. Then he was excused.

 

Inside the lab, the rest of the students were laughing and making jokes with their cadavers, playfully slapping the dead on their shoulders. One student was sharing his music player, one ear bud for him, one for his dead friend. Their test scores, Dr. Yamagata proudly reported in an email to the student listserv, were the highest on average that had ever been recorded by the school. In that email, he singled out Vijay, who, as Dr. Yamagata believed, had revolutionized the anatomy lab, as a student of the utmost promise and insight. It maddened Vijay. He tried to send an email response to the listserv, debunking this praise, but his message wouldn’t send.

            Caroline shifted restlessly when he unzipped her bag. “I haven’t slept at all. Everyone’s been making so much noise. It’s like they think death is a party. But it’s not. It’s actually a lot of work, which has been a great surprise for me, let me tell you.”

            Vijay ignored her and got to work, cutting up her forearm, exposing the pollicus lonugs and the digitorum superficialis, the stringy, awe-inspiring network of tendons that controlled her hand. Caroline watched him uneasily.

            “You don’t have to snub me,” she said. “How long has it been since we’ve seen each other? The least you could do is tell me what the weather’s like outside.” She was often asking about the weather. “Nothing makes my death more pronounced than not knowing the weather,” she’d said once, early on, whenever that was.

            “It’s raining,” Vijay said. “It’s always raining.” He wouldn’t have minded suturing Caroline’s mouth shut, but how would that look, and after such praise? It was unimaginable.

            “Hey, at least you’re still alive,” Caroline said. “If I’d have known what this would have been like, I never would have donated my body to the school. There was no way for me to have known, of course. But now I’m really paying for it. It just goes to show, you can’t take anything for granted.”

            Vijay explained to Caroline Dr. Yamagata’s version of what death was like.

            “Give me a break,” she spat.

            “I don’t know what to do,” Vijay said. There was the obvious way out, but there was something holding him back, some impenetrable, unseen force that was preventing him from taking that exit. Something that he was lucky to have, he realized. A space seemed to open in his mind, like sand being displaced from one side of a jar to the other. Oh, he missed the beaches, he really did.

            Caroline abruptly tried to lift her head from the examination table. The frail muscles in her neck—the capitis and the scapulae—tightened and her whole body shook. She brought her face close to his. Her breath smelled like rotten chicken and lemons.

            “Let me tell you a secret,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

            “What doesn’t matter?” Vijay said, trembling.

            “Nothing,” Caroline said. “Nothing matters.” She seemed to think about this. “I guess that’s easy for me to say, though. I’m already dead.”

 

END