Primary Obsessions. Charles Demers
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Primary Obsessions
Charles Demers
Copyright © 2020 Charles Demers
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].
Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0
Epigraph excerpted from Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2007.
Edited by Caroline Skelton
Cover design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe
Text design by Brianna Cerkiewicz
Printed and bound in Canada
Printed on 100 percent recycled paper
Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Primary obsessions / Charles Demers.
Names: Demers, Charles, 1980- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200173138 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200173170 | ISBN 9781771622561 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771622578 (HTML)
Classification: LCC PS8607.E533 P75 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
for M.R.
Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.
Thomas Merton
1
“Do you want me to keep going?”
“I want you to move at whatever pace makes you feel comfortable. Don’t worry about time.”
“Okay. Well, then, like—I go to pull out the knife, but she’s still breathing. And then every, like, breath she takes is—it’s like kind of gasping? And it spatters, everywhere, blood. All over me, all over her.”
“It’s really important for me that you know that me asking about this, it’s not about judgment.”
“No, I know.”
“I’m just trying to get a fuller picture.”
“No, I know, I know,” he said, and he was beginning to cry now, ignoring the box of tissues on the stand next to him, and instead wiping his eyes, his nose, all of it with the heel of his palm. “I just don’t even like to say it out loud. Because…”
“It feels more real?”
“Yeah,” he said, the waves breaking over the shore, his cheeks flooding with salty rivulets dully reflecting the soft lamplight in the room. The overhead fluorescents were off. They were always off. “I keep stabbing her and stabbing her, her eyes, her, like—her front. Like her, her down…”
“Her genitals?”
The young man nodded and sobbed.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” he screamed quietly, grinding his teeth. “She’s my mother. She’s helpless. What kind of person does that to their own mother?”
During sessions like these, Dr. Annick Boudreau wished she still had her hair.
From her mid-teens, the impossible, untouched mane of thick, chestnut curls had been her trademark, the first thing about her. There had apparently once, in the kitchen at home, been a few snips underneath a metal bowl, an attempt by her father to trim the silken toddler locks falling down past her chubby cheeks before a family Christmas portrait, but otherwise, the hairs on her head had never been clipped, besides the routine eradication of split ends. When it hadn’t been up in one of her elaborate braids, her hair had fallen right into her lap when she sat, and she could finger it imperceptibly while she listened to whomever was talking, pored over the details of their stories. But last spring, when her niece Marie-Élaine had begun chemotherapy, Annick had surprised her over the video chat with a cue ball—two shining Boudreau domes, one on the coast of the Pacific, one back home on the Atlantic. Now the crewcut was the first thing about Annick, which was fine—she had the cheekbones to carry the look, the dark eyes with lashes so long and thick they looked storebought—but at times like these, she didn’t know what to do with her hands.
“Are you okay to continue, Sanjay?”
He nodded his head, biting back further tears. There was something still boyish about him; even in his mid-twenties, he hadn’t fully grown into himself. His hands were large and long-fingered, with matching big feet, but his wrists were like a young woman’s; he had a delicate chin, and downy sideburns not too far off of her own. He had shed none of his fragility since their first session, three months earlier.
“Obsessive-compulsive disorder comes from an error in interpretation,” she explained, in language she used several times a day—outlining concepts that she had covered thousands of times before, with hundreds of patients, including Sanjay—always trying to find a margin of improvisation or interpretation within the parameters of what she had to get across, just to keep the moments alive. “These thoughts you’re describing? Sanjay, everyone has them at one time or another. Everyone. They’re standing at the bus stop, see a young mother holding her newborn, and for a split second they think, ‘What if I pushed them underneath the bus?’ So-called normal, regular people I’m talking about, now. Or sometimes it’s the mother herself, she’s all alone with her baby, and she thinks ‘What if this child isn’t safe with me?’ or ‘What if I did something sexually inappropriate to the baby?’” Sanjay grimaced, disturbed; turning under the thought like a slug under salt.
“Jesus.”
“Sure, him too.”
“Sorry?”
“Well, sometimes I have religious patients, and they have horrible, for them, thoughts of blasphemy. Throwing the sacramental wine in the priest’s eyes, or eating trayf if they’re Jewish, hurling a Quran across the room. But these unwanted thoughts, whether they’re of violence, or inappropriate sexuality, or blasphemy—the difference between someone with OCD and someone else isn’t that they don’t have these thoughts. It’s that people without OCD know immediately that these thoughts are mental garbage. That they don’t mean anything. But people with OCD make an error in interpretation—they think, ‘I’m having these thoughts, so they must say something about me.’”
“Yeah, but I don’t… I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“Maybe everybody gets these thoughts, but I have them all the time. Doesn’t that, I don’t know—doesn’t that mean something? Every time I close my eyes,