Primary Obsessions. Charles Demers
out there on the couch with his idiot buddy. There was some new drama last week, some guy they’d bounced, and was he gonna be a problem, and blah blah blah.”
“The friend is a bouncer too?”
Sanjay nodded. “They work the same club. I guess they laid into this guy pretty bad, then they found out he’s all connected, owns these pubs and pizza places across the East Side…”
Annick shook her head. “It really sounds terrible, Sanjay.”
“Yeah…” Sanjay said, his eyes finding the corners of the office, his face darting as though he were thinking about all of this for the first time.
“It might not be a bad idea to take your mom up on the offer. This sort of stress also turns the temperature up on your anxiety levels, and that can make OCD symptoms feel more intense.”
Sanjay turned his palms upwards. “I know. For now, anyway, I’ve got the headphones.”
“Okay—that works as a short-term solution, but it can’t be the plan for the long haul. That sort of isolation, shutting the world out—sometimes that can exacerbate intrusive thoughts too.”
“What doesn’t?”
Annick laughed. “Fair question. Alright. I don’t want you to do any reassurance-seeking behaviours with friends or with family, okay? And again, if you really can’t sit with the thoughts, you can write them in your journal and we can look at them next time, alright?”
“Okay,” he said, standing, the mask of confidence that he’d put on when discussing his roommate slipping visibly. He winced, though it wasn’t clear at what.
“Alright. Sanjay,” said Annick. “One time.”
“Thank you.”
“You are not a killer.”
2
Four days later, Annick Boudreau was staring with great resentment and intensity at the tall man looming in the doorway to her office.
“Remind me why I do these stupid things again?”
“Because you care about clinical practice?”
“No, I don’t think that’s it.”
“Because you care about this clinic in particular?”
“No, not that, either.”
“I would remind you that while a certain degree of aloofness is charming, Dr. Boudreau, you are at this point beginning to try my patience.”
“Jesus, Cedric—if it means so much to you, why don’t you go do it? That handsome face was built for television.”
“I am well aware of my photogenic qualities, Annick. But I’ve got a group mindfulness session starting in half an hour.”
Dr. Cedric Manley made up one hundred percent of the Jamaican-Canadian Zen Buddhist community in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he took those duties very much to heart. At just over six feet, he had a full submarine sandwich–length advantage in height over Annick, but his mostly raw vegan diet kept them at roughly the same weight. In her experience, though, if she could keep at least two-thirds of that weight confined to the right areas, she still got looks of approving curiosity from across the gender spectrum. So did he, she imagined.
“Fine, I’m going to do it, but I want you to put in a good word with the Buddha for me, bump that karma up a few notches.”
“Good lord,” Cedric said, shaking his head in understated disbelief. “Even your understanding of Buddhism is Catholic.”
“Well, despite that,” Annick said as she gathered up her travel mug and her purse and pushed past Cedric towards the door of the clinic, “I do not forgive you for this.”
Annick’s mug hissed and popped with diet cola as she slipped into the waiting cab outside of the West Coast Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Clinic, a soft and mossy-smelling summer rain breaking the muggy heat for a few merciful minutes.
“I’m headed to the CBC building downtown, please?” The cabbie nodded in the rear-view mirror, started the meter and Annick sipped her aspartame at a speed that would let her finish before arriving without leaving her gassy for her television appearance.
Cedric was convinced that appearing on news panels was good publicity for the clinic, and Annick reluctantly had to agree that it probably was. She also realized that between his being a tall, very handsome middle-aged man with a musical Caribbean lilt, and her being a short, very cute thirty-five-year-old woman with just the slight hint of an Acadian accent, it would always come down to one of the two of them for public appearances. It wasn’t that their colleagues at the clinic were unpresentable—it was just that they all looked more or less exactly like what the words “cognitive behavioural therapist” conjured in the mind’s eye.
But today’s panel was not compelling. Dr. Annick Boudreau would be appearing alongside a local screenwriter to discuss the engineered controversy surrounding a newly released Hollywood gross-out comedy, a hollowed-out riff on the damaged genius formula called One Cool DJ. The cleverest thing about the movie, which was saying something, was that the first letter in each word of the title spelled O-C-D, referring to the neurotic qualities of the meticulously anal-retentive turntablist at the centre of what passed for its story, which involved a romantic infatuation with a deliberately offbeat and charmingly slovenly though pert love interest.
An online controversy had emerged (no doubt abetted by the film’s publicity team) over whether or not the reference to OCD belittled and mystified an already poorly understood disorder. Two camps had emerged in response—one denouncing rampaging political correctness, and another bemoaning the insensitivity of the ableist privileged. As always, Annick mourned the fact that there was no third box to check, besides the ones marked “Callous Prick” or “Scandalized Hall Monitor.”
Annick made her way into the CBC building through its beautiful glass and beam lobby, which had been installed just before a round of major funding cuts. She spoke to the bilingual security guard in French, a rare chance to practise her mother tongue in a city named for a British navy captain, and was beeped through the sliding security doors that brought guillotines to even the healthiest minds.
The anchor and moderator, Sam Gill, was an almost satirically good-looking South Asian man wearing perhaps the most perfectly tailored suit Annick had ever seen; her co-panellist, a rangy and not-bad-looking blonde, Cass Johannsen, had gone for the unkempt chic look preferred by the men of Vancouver’s creative class, the sleeves of a baby-blue linen shirt rolled up for maximum tattoo exposure. With some consternation, Annick realized that she was wearing the charcoal pantsuit whose chief selling point was the adorable package that it made of her bum; public broadcaster or no, the cameras were unlikely to pan her ass. At least not on the English-language side.
No sooner were polite nods exchanged and lavalier microphones affixed to lapels than Gill launched into an introduction that, predictably, set the table for a conversation built to produce lightless heat.
“Dr. Boudreau, do films like One Cool DJ make your patients feel unsafe?”
“Unsafe!” Johannsen ejaculated caustically.
“Okay, Cass, we’ll get to that. But I do want to hear from Dr. Boudreau. Do movies like this make life more difficult for your patients?”
“Well, Sam, to be honest I think my patients have other stuff on their minds, most of the time.”
“And yet, here you are,” said Johannsen. When the cameras had gone on, her co-panellist’s mien had changed almost entirely, suggesting to her that he was in the midst of a project of personal branding. He was asserting himself as a professionally relaxed teller of things as they are. She had seen it before.
“Well, I’m here because I was asked to speak to the general public’s understanding of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and of the role that cultural industries