Ubiquitous though depression seemed lately to have become, Joey still found it a little worrisome that the two females who loved him the most were both suffering clinically. Was it just chance? Or did he have some actively baneful effect on women’s mental health? In Connie’s case, he decided, the truth was that her depression was a facet of the same intensity he’d always so much loved in her. On his last night in St. Paul, before returning to Virginia, he sat and watched her probe her skull with her fingertips, as if she were hoping to extract excess feeling from her brain. She said that the reason she’d been weeping at seemingly random moments was that even the smallest bad thoughts were excruciating, and that only bad thoughts, no good ones, were occurring to her. She thought about how she’d lost a UVA baseball cap he’d once given her; how she’d been too preoccupied with her roommate, during his second visit to Morton, to ask him what grade he’d gotten on his big American History paper; how Carol had once remarked that boys would like her better if she smiled more; how one of her baby half sisters, Sabrina, had burst into screams the first time she’d held her; how she’d stupidly admitted to Joey’s mother that she was going to New York to see him; how she’d been bleeding disgustingly on the last night before he went away to college; how she’d written such wrong things in the postcards she’d sent Jessica, in an attempt to be friends with his sister again, that Jessica had never replied to them; and on and on. She was lost in a dark forest of regret and self-disgust in which even the smallest tree assumed monstrous proportions. Joey had never been in woods like these himself but was unaccountably drawn to them in her. It even turned him on that she began to sob while he endeavored to fuck her in farewell, at least until the sobbing turned to writhing and thrashing and self-loathing. Her level of distress seemed borderline dangerous, a cousin of suicide, and he was awake for half the night then, trying to talk her out of how terrible about herself she felt for feeling too terrible about herself to give him anything he wanted. It was exhausting and circular and unbearable, and yet, the following afternoon, when he was flying back East, it occurred to him to be afraid of what the Celexa would do to her when it kicked in. He considered his mother’s remark about antidepressants killing feelings: a Connie without oceans of feeling was a Connie he didn’t know and suspected he wouldn’t want.
Meanwhile the country was at war, but it was an odd sort of war in which, within a rounding error, the only casualties were on the other side. Joey was glad to see that the taking of Iraq was every bit the cakewalk he’d expected it to be, and Kenny Bartles was sending him elated e-mails about the need to get his bread company up and running ASAP. (Joey kept having to explain that he was still a college student and couldn’t start work until after finals.) Jonathan, however, was sourer than ever. He was
“That was one little mistake,” Joey said. “Shit happens, right? You just don’t want to admit that things are going well.”
“I’ll admit it when they find the plutonium and the missiles tipped with smallpox,” Jonathan said. “Which they won’t, because it was all bullshit, all trumped-up bullshit, because the people who started this thing are incompetent clowns.”
“Dude, everybody says there’s WMDs. Even
“How much you want to bet your dad’s right?”
“I don’t know. A hundred dollars?”
“Done!” Jonathan said, extending his hand. “A hundred bucks says they find no weapons by the end of the year.”
