Weeds

The nature of the desperation is crucial.

It must be wrenching. Intense. All-consuming. Real.

The last ditch must have already been dug, the last resort already tried, the last chance already granted and lost. The problem must be intractable. There must be an element of madness, and preferably, a distaste for introspection on the part of the summoner.

Admittedly, a rather vague definition.

For the sake of simplicity, call it Jack Underwood desperate and read on for details.

Somewhere along the line, Jack Underwood slipped into a despairing hole he could not climb out of and he called out for help and it, She, came. One of Them.

Was the act salvific? For Jack, yes, it surely was. For Her, not so much. For Her it was more like, dinner. Like being born without asking to be born and having a succulent nipple thrust into your mouth and finding out, hmm, this I could go for some more of.

It happened like this.

#

“...in the beginning, gaze upon a terrifyingly ordinary man.”

- The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse, by Ray Bradbury

#

Amy Foster had been too pretty to marry Jack Underwood, that much had been clear from the start. She had the classic Barbie doll figure, down to the hourglass curves and resplendent shoulder-length blonde hair, and all the right affectations: the vapid giggle, the ubiquitous hair flick, the lascivious blinking. She was a hottie, pure and simple. A stunner. She entered a room and the room stopped breathing.

Jack, meanwhile, was no Ken.

Jack stepped into a room and it sneezed.

He had a bald spot on the rearmost top of his scalp, a comical little yarmulke which glowed an angry, burned pink in summer but shone as pale white as the rest of him during other seasons. His left eye went lazy on him if he didn’t get enough sleep. It would ignore his commands to move and stare stupidly at the bulbous tip of his prominent, perpetually sniffing nose.

His mouth was unpleasant, thin and dissatisfied and filled with yellowish teeth. His eyes were grey and sepulchral, and the fingers on his hands were long and funereal. He could seem creepy to some.

When all this happened, Jack Underwood was twenty-eight years old. He had been well-educated. Not Ivy League, but close. He perused his daily newspaper, keeping up on current events. But he was not what you would call an opinionated man. If pressed, he would offer soft-spoken insights on politics or the news of the day at family gatherings or cocktail parties or around the coffee machine at work, always carefully worded and carefully delivered, and only if pressed. More often than not his ideas were cliched and unoriginal, and people soon were too bored to press him for any more.

He worked in the Accounting department of a big telecommunications firm. He made a good living there. Better than good, actually. Bordering on fantastic. Sometimes he crunched numbers on productivity and human resource cost and people got fired. Sometimes he got a little bonus in his next check as a result. He generally didn’t eat much for a few days after this. Meals just didn’t taste right, too bland or too cold or too, something. His appetite always came back, though, eventually. A man had, after all, to eat.

Idiosyncrasies? Where to begin?

Jack was, let’s face it, a lot more than a little anal retentive (witness the red-faced, childish fits thrown when Amy, while cleaning, disrupted however slightly the inexplicably complex order in which he had arranged his compact discs and books).

He had an occasional problem with road rage (witness the four-foot long silver scrape on the side of the Lexus, from the time he attempted to sideswipe an SUV that had cut him off on the expressway; he had missed and run his own car off the road, nearly killing himself in the process).

And as a rule, with very few exceptions, he disliked, he disdained, he detested the very notion of, texture.

Jack Underwood, above all, liked things smooth.

Gritty materials made his skin crawl: sandpaper, unfinished wood, chalkboards, terra cotta, all gave him the heebie jeebies. The sensation of bumpiness, of small disordered nodules rubbing against his sensitive fingertips, unnerved him somehow, as if he were biting into tin foil, or looking down a deep hole with nothing to hold onto. He recoiled upon coming into contact with these things, clenching his fists and hugging himself tight, or crumpling up as if kicked in the groin, in an effort to squeeze himself shut against the sensations they provoked.

This texture aversion was, for Jack, a normal abnormalcy; he had always been this way. He could remember feeling this way throughout his childhood. The same went for the anal retentiveness and, to some extent, the road rage. He had been quite the little demon on his tricycle way back when.

The weeding, though, was new.

The weeding had started shortly after his wife told him she was pregnant.

It had started the very day he noticed the first long, black hair on her cheek.

#

Before getting married Jack and Amy Underwood-to-be spent hours over lattes and gourmet meals, planning their mutual future meticulously, setting decision-making criteria beforehand, weighing with care the various pros and cons of each decision.

One such decision, and a rather important one, had to with their schedule regarding the having of children. After much consultation and examination of their mutual and individual long- and short-term financial outlooks, they had decided to wait until they were married three years, when Amy would be twenty-eight, and Jack thirty, before trying to become parents. Amy, it was determined, would use a diaphragm for the first three years to ensure this would be the case.

Somehow, though (and didn’t Jack have his little suspicions about the how in that somehow), they were a mere six months into the marriage when Amy missed her period and came up pink on a twelve dollar test, hurling all of their carefully laid plans pretty much out the proverbial window. With the bathwater. The baby stayed put.

The extent of the upheaval this event wrought on what had been Jack’s very orderly, well-constructed existence was only amplified by the rather astounding reaction of his wife’s body to the presence of the little parasite within her. Poor Amy’s hormones ran amok, wreaking havoc in myriad ways Jack had never known possible.

During the middle of the second month she began sprouting facial hair. Within three weeks it was like a thin dark beard covering most of her cheeks from her jawline to her eyes. It gave her a circus freak’s appearance, and did not go well at all with the long blonde hair that adorned her head.

The doctors nodded, their somber faces reflecting compassion, but could do nothing for her. Hormones, they shrugged. It would pass, they said.

She plucked the hairs savagely each morning, sobbing to herself in front of the bedroom mirror. Perhaps as a result, she soon broke out in pimples, like a range of small purple volcanos sprawling over the landscape of her face, down her neck, even down as far as her clavicles.

Pimples on her clavicles, for God’s sake.

She had had such smooth skin at their wedding.

Her weight gain was considerable, too, and unanticipated. Jack had seen pictures of pregnant women before: Demi Moore, Cindy Crawford, others. They had looked the same, still stunning, still gorgeous, save for the slightly comical paunch representing their unborn child.

His wife, however, who had been gorgeous herself, yes, downright stunning, he had the wedding pictures to prove it, had gained twenty-two pounds by the beginning of her fourth month. Twenty-two pounds! The baby would not weigh that much itself until it was a full year old! Her legs had grown thick and gelatinous, and jiggled when she walked. Her previously slender arms were doughy.

And she was mean. She snapped at him incessantly over some perceived slight or other (over the weeding, for instance, or sometimes, he would swear it, over nothing at all), her pretty mouth twisted into a rictus snarl, her devastated face blotchy and discolored by anger and pimples and hair.

It had been, so much of it, unanticipated. So difficult for Jack to comprehend.

So very, very unsmooth.

#

And so it came to pass that each afternoon, upon returning from work, Jack Underwood stepped out of the Lexus, set down his briefcase, kneeled – in his business suit and trousers – and tore furiously at the crabgrass and dandelions on his front lawn.

He drove his fingers into the sun-warmed dirt with a passion best described as murderous. He fastened his long, pale fingers around the deepest part of each weed root he could find. He yanked with all he had.

The plants tore free from the earth with a series of small, satisfying pops - rended, ripped, plucked, gone.

He tossed them into the air, to land in his driveway, dead.

As the sun went down, he would move to his side yard, and to the garden out back, stalking his two-point-two-five acres in search of intruders, looking down, stooping, bending, plucking, tossing.

He would walk into his house panting and filthy, with ruined shoes, and something very much like the grimace of a lunatic twisting his narrow features.

Amy would shriek at him, demanding he explain himself. This he did not do. At some point, perhaps frightened by the manic mist that crept into her husband’s gray eyes when she pestered him too forcefully, she stopped asking so much, and they settled into something like a routine.

Jack came home; Jack weeded; Jack and Amy ate supper.

Jack came home; Jack weeded; Jack and Amy ate supper.

Jack came home; Jack weeded…

Eventually, Jack stopped eating supper.

But he did come home and he did weed. Damn it, did he ever weed. He weeded like few men have, like even fewer would want to.

Deep into the night Jack Underwood toiled, grunting, wheezing, sweat pouring over and down him like water from a shower nozzle on full blast.

He weeded his neighbor’s lawns and gardens while they slept, filling big black garbage bags with their dead plants and their unneeded dirt, hauling them over his shoulder like some absurd, backwards suburban Santa Claus and putting them into the trunk of his car.

He didn’t mind that they never thanked him. Consider it a public service, he thought.

He stopped off each day at the town transfer station, to relieve himself of the previous night’s plant corpses. Then he came home and he weeded.

Boy, did Jack Underwood weed.

#

As a man utterly ignorant of his own motives, Jack took to this weeding without very much in the way of conscious thought. He in fact reveled in acting without thought; something about the sheer foolishness of it, the sickness of it, attracted him in a way he preferred not to delve into.

Introspection was not a process with which Jack was familiar. There was some trigger that fired inside him to prevent self-analysis of any sort, a naked terror of what he might find if he dug within himself too deeply, or at all.

The face-reddening fury that rose like bile to his throat whenever his wife asked him about the weeding was a symptom of this. Jack treated his self like he treated the outside world: both were what they were, and were to be dealt with on their terms, not changed, but at best, managed.

So when he finally left Amy, she was not the only one surprised. He left her without leaving a note, or calling to announce it, or even deciding to leave her. He went to work one day and simply did not come home.

He drove around for hours that night, putting a little over two hundred miles on the Lexus, and dropping off in the car, in the parking lot of an all-night fast-food joint some ways from their house. At two o’clock in the morning, with the help of a couple of hemp-wearing, hemp-inhaling kids from a nearby college, he weeded the small slivers of virid grass spotting the lot. Then he smoked some of the kids’ weed, and dropped off again for a few hours. In the morning, he bought himself a croissant sandwich and headed back to work, in the same clothes he had worn the previous day.

This went on, more or less, for four days. He called Amy at odd hours to leave messages, telling her not to worry, he was OK, he just needed some time to work things out, he would be home soon. If she picked up the phone while he was leaving the message, he abruptly hung up. They did not speak.

Though he tried to tell himself differently, he had no intention of ever going home.

He picked a different parking lot each night, did a little weeding of the grounds so that he could be comfortable with his surroundings, then read a paperback or a newspaper and dropped off to sleep. He bought himself two new suits, and wore them on alternate days. He began to settle into a routine.

Jack went to work; Jack drove; Jack weeded; Jack slept.

Jack went to work; Jack drove; Jack weeded; Jack slept.

Jack went to…

He was waiting at a traffic light on the morning of the fifth day when it happened.

#

It was seven-fifteen but already stiflingly humid, and the sun was painfully bright. Glancing to his left to avoid the glare from the windshield for a moment, Jack happened to notice a small, short forest of plush vegetation on the divider between lanes. Upon further inspection it turned out to be not just any vegetation; it was a little forest of weeds. Green, straight weeds, some as high as his knees, or higher. Hundreds of weeds. Thin, reed-like weeds. Flat ones with broad green leaves, dandelions, weeds with small blue flowers. So many weeds; he marveled at their abundance, their audacity. Weeds whose thick stalks rose like corn from the earth, bent from their own weight. Perhaps more than hundreds. The neglected piece of earth, gone to seed, gone to weeds, defied him, mocking the futility of his efforts, at home and elsewhere.

The light turned green, and still Jack Underwood focused on those weeds. He felt that fingers-scraping-terra-cotta feeling, that sense of creeping disorder, those tendrils of chaos worming their way into an otherwise organized space. He recoiled, crumpling forward against the steering wheel; his knuckles rubbed vigorously at his eyes and his whole body tensed.

Cars honked behind him. Jack shifted the transmission into park, and turned on his hazard lights, and looked at the weeds. His jaw muscles were knobby lumps on his otherwise smooth face; his face filled with blood and his veins bulged, throbbing irregularly.

Cars began to go around his, angry white impressionistic faces with hostile eyes and shouting mouths, silent behind the window glass, Doppler-affected horns dwindling into the distance, gone.

The traffic light turned yellow, then back to red, and still Jack sat.

Finally, he got out of the car. He stepped over the side rail. He bent down and he weeded.

He weeded with vigor, ignoring the looks of his fellow commuters, ignoring the occasional honk of a horn or derogatory remark, focused only on the task at his hand.

He shoved his hands into the earth and he weeded, damn it, flinging the dead plants and the clumps of dirt still clinging to their roots over the railing into the other lane.

He weeded that plot flat and smooth, leaving behind nothing but a patch of flat brown soil. When he was done, he looked back upon his handiwork, and smiled the satisfied smile of one who has completed a difficult but worthwhile task. The highway asphalt around him was littered with a green and brown halo of vanquished weeds.

It might as well be a road sign, he thought.

Jack Underwood was here.

He was an hour and a half late for work, arriving as disheveled as you might imagine, with sweat-dampened hair and wet rings beneath the armpits of his shirt and fecal smudges on the knees of his pants. He had caked dirt beneath his fingernails and on his palms and on the side of his face.

His co-workers gazed upon him with undisguised wonder: clean-cut Jack Underwood, reliable company man, good soldier, faithful bean counter, never had so much as his tie askew until recently, transfigured now, before their stunned eyes, into this lunatic, filthy mess.

They stared open-mouthed as he wambled down the aisle to his office. Their looks transmitted concern, amusement, satisfaction in roughly equal amounts. The stare he returned to each of them in turn was a challenge – you got a problem?

No, their averted gazes said back. Not me.

His supervisor came by a few minutes later, closed Jack’s door, and they had a little talk. Jack obviously needed a rest. Jack should take a break, come back in a few days, relax. Jack had a lot on his plate. Jack hadn’t taken a vacation in too long.

He sent Jack home.

Relax, Jack, the supervisor said, about thirty times, on the way out the door.

#

But Jack Underwood could not relax. Relaxation was as beyond him as the stars - a distant, pinpoint destination he had no hope of reaching. He felt his entire body pulsing with a frenetic, nasty energy that would not disperse itself. He tried listening to a classical music station on the radio. It failed to relax him. He tried breathing exercises he had learned in the three yoga classes he had managed to sit through the previous year before quitting. They failed to relax him.

He went to the gym and he ran. He sprinted for five miles. He had never run more than three miles consecutively in his life. His heart threatened to burst free of his rib cage with its hammering. He ran until he simply could not run anymore and he collapsed on the track, dropping to all fours, gasping.

Then he vomited, nearly splashing the sneakers of a passing woman. He looked at his puke and his heart went silent for a long moment. There were weeds in it. Small green weeds. The weeds had made it inside him somehow…

But on second glance they were not weeds, just slivers of undigested green lettuce from his dinner the night before.

His wrist began to throb. He looked at it.

The vein there wriggled, snaking slowly back and forth. It looked suspiciously like, yes, just like the root of a weed. He tore briefly at the skin before stopping himself.

Relax, he told himself.

In a dark cavern somewhere in his mind, something responded with mad laughter.

After deflecting the looks of concern and disgust from the fitness center employees and patrons, assuring them he was, he would be just fine, Jack showered on trembling fawn legs and left.

He drove. Eventually, the sight of his own disturbed, cracked eyes in the rearview mirror became too much to bear. While paused at a stop sign, he wrenched the mirror off the windshield and tossed it onto the passenger seat.

He drove and he drove, cursing, mumbling, running a moist hand over his face every few seconds and breathing hard, until he found a mostly empty parking lot, with no grass or bushes anywhere nearby. A large sign at the mouth of the lot read: “Coming Soon.” Smaller signs below it listed the names of about a dozen small stores that would occupy the strip mall in the process of being built.

One store, a pharmacy, was already open for business. Shoppers strolled in and out. The rest of the strip mall was in various stages of completion, much of it little more than the skeleton of a building.

Jack pulled the Lexus into a spot at the far end of the lot, in front of the least finished portion of the mall. He stopped the car and rested his sweat-soaked head against the steering wheel.

He needed help.

Oh god he needed help.

He was not a religious man. Religion invited too much introspection for his tastes. But he asked the air for help anyway, asked anyone that might be able to hear his plea.

Help, he said.

I’m desperate, he said.

And somewhere, nowhere you could find on any map, but somewhere, a pair of ears perked up like the nose of a dog at dinner time.

#

There must be a specific way to make the request. Something about the tone of the plea, but difficult to pin down. It must be desperate, yes. There must be urgent need, indeed.

But of the billions of such pleas uttered each day, by orphans, soldiers and victims of war, by the terminally ill and the deranged, only a miniscule percentage are answered in this particular way.

Call Jack Underwood lucky.

Call him special.

Or call him very, very desperate.

In any case, when he called, She came.

Orders were issued from somewhere important, commands the physical world hurriedly obeyed.

Much scurrying took place, and some sleight of hand. Things were built and help was hired, and through a pinpoint prick in the irreality of the world a substance unsenseable seeped. It coalesced rapidly into flesh, hair, teeth, eyes.

Eyelashes fluttered, spasmodic. Opened.

A smile the world had not yet seen flickered, flashed.

“Well,” said the glorious mouth forming that smile.

“Here I am.”

#

Unaware as of yet of the impact of his suffering on the cosmos, Jack Underwood sobbed for a long time, convulsive sniveling heaves over which he had no control. At some point, he summoned the will to unstick his head from the leather on the wheel and he looked up to gaze upon evidence, concrete and incontrovertible, that he had in point of fact lost his mind.

The empty shell that had stood before him not a few moments beforehand, the skeletal portion of the building with its rust-colored girders and utility lamps and no roof, was now thoroughly filled out and housed what appeared to be some kind of retail structure. Through a large window Jack could make out the details of a space that looked like the waiting room at the office of his dentist.

He blinked, half-expecting the storefront to vanish like a desert oasis, like an optical illusion caused by his own derangement or the light, which it surely must have been, since structures like that did not appear spontaneously.

But it did not disappear.

He watched a stout woman with a helmet of short, brown hair enter the picture frame provided by the window. Carrying a small pile of papers, she walked over to a wall and appeared to start making copies, or sending faxes.

There was a sign above the window, a long rectangular sign with pleasant black lettering on a goldish background.

Family Counseling Services, it read.

Jack did not recall seeing anything like that on the Coming Soon sign at the entrance to the parking lot. Then again, if it was not only built, but up and running and opened already, why would it be included in a list of shops and stores that were coming soon? But if it had been there when he drove in, how had he not seen it when he pulled up right in front of it?

Jack's stomach rolled.

“Sick,” mumbled Jack Underwood. “I’m sick. A sick, sick man.”

In one corner of the window, a small square sign, red background and white letters, read:

We can help.

Oh, yeah?

Taking a quick glance at the vein still wriggling in his arm (the thing was moving of its own accord, veins just couldn’t do that) he thought, I doubt it.

Still, as he himself had recently declared, Jack Underwood was desperate. Desperate and sick. Stepping out of the car, he staggered to the door of the office. He was thankful this end of the mall was bereft of any other cars. There was no one to ogle at the sorry shape he was in.

He raised his hand as if to knock on the glass window, but the stout woman, who had made it back to her spot at what was labeled the Check-In Desk, waved him in, smiling.

“Good morning,” she sang, perky, beaming at him, as he shuffled across new carpet the color of tropical ocean water. As soon as the door closed, the room was awash in pleasant chords of some string composition Jack could not name. He liked it, though, and found it a bit more soothing than the pieces he had played for himself in the car. The décor here was pleasant, too – pastel peach and blue walls, a smattering of neutral impressionist paintings, and no mirrors. For that last detail he was immensely thankful.

“Sick,” he managed to mutter as he reached the desk.

The woman – her name tag read Becky Q. – looked upon him sympathetically. She nodded. After fumbling with several piles of paper on the desk and sifting through a couple of drawers, she handed him a clipboard with three pieces of paper attached.

“Fill this out, please, sir,” she said, plucking a black pen from a coffee mug and placing it in front of him.

He almost laughed. If this woman thought he was in any shape to be filling out long-winded forms, boy, did she have another thing coming. Then he glanced at the form. It was a long one all right, the three pages he had been given constituted a single form, and it requested the typical information: name, gender, birth date, address and phone, social security number, employer, insurance, emergency contact information, known allergies, reason for visit, and a few others.

It was already filled out. Jack strained to concentrate long enough to check the data, which all seemed correct. Even the explication of the symptoms, while succinct, was accurate:

Compulsive weeding. Marital problems. Assorted other neuroses.

That would be me, Jack thought. Then he laughed, not a pleasant sound at all, a laugh that died the instant it left his mouth. He decided not to do it again.

He signed the form and handed it back to Becky Q. It was a testament to his state of mind that he spent very little time contemplating where the information on the form had come from.

He had barely sat down, it seemed, before Becky called happily:

“The doctor will see you now, Mister Underwood.”

#

Nodding, he accepted her invitation to sit across from her.

She smiled until he looked away, then regarded him clinically across her desk. She glanced down at his papers, then up at him, then down at the papers again, tucked neatly into the manila folder in her hands.

She observed him, seeing what he himself would see.

A mess, she concluded. A mass of nervous activity, and bulging, thumping, impossible veins.

One kicked like a restless fetus in the dark pouch beneath his right eye. Another protruded like the tangled root of some massive tree from the side of his neck. Yet a third hammered away irregularly near his temple, pulsing like the belly of a fish gasping its last.

His eyes were the cracked, bloodshot red of the sleep-deprived, and his gaze darted from the floor to the walls to the ceiling of her well-appointed office, but rarely to her. The long-fingered hands folded in the valley of his leg shook from the bouncing of a fidgety leg. His tensed forearms muscles rippled, wriggling too, as if slender things squirmed there beneath his skin.

She could smell him as well, his sweat, from across her desk: the tight rubber stink of an elastic band stretched too far, or the metallic scent of a just-rung bell.

Her nostrils widened as she took a long, deep breath of him when he wasn’t looking.

She scribbled something in her notes, and nodded.

A single word.

“Yum.”

A smirk curled her full, red lips. One dark, waxed eyebrow raised mischievously. She looked immensely pleased.

#

She was very pretty when she was pleased.

No. To hell with pretty.

Jack’s new therapist was absolutely stunning.

It physically hurt him to look at her looking at him; it gave him a sharp pain in his chest and made it difficult for him to breath. He could barely summon the oxygen to cough.

She wore her dark hair wrapped in a tight bun, and stylish, smart eyeglasses. She had cocoa-colored skin, and a pair of eyes that defied description. Eyes like nothing he had encountered before, anywhere. Eyes that shifted colors in the light with every slight movement she made: starting out verdant, then rolling into brilliant turquoise, twisting into an orange like the tip of a flickering campfire flame, fading to the yellow of ripe banana skin…

...on and on, shifting…

...brick red and dove white, pewter, swirling violet ribbons, eddying streams of clear ocean blue…

He could watch those eyes for hours, he decided. Or forever.

For as long as she wanted him to.

He could not remember her name, the name he had seen on the plaque outside, and in the waiting room. He could not read the name scribbled on the various degrees posted on the white walls of her office. He could barely remember his own name. He could barely bring himself to care very much, either.

There were no pleasantries exchanged. She asked him nothing about himself, his problems. She already knew, and he knew she knew. It was simply understood.

“When you pull at the weeds, Jack, what do you feel?,” his therapist purred, adjusting the glasses on the bridge of an exquisite nose. Her voice washed over him like cool rain on a humid day, soothing. He watched, fascinated, as she raised one long, bare leg and wrapped it around the knee of the other. She raised her black pen to the corner of her belipsticked mouth and nibbled on its cap.

Sitting in a comfortable leather chair on the other side of her desk, Jack shuddered. His left eyebrow twitched. He frowned. He did not want to talk about his weeding, not with anyone, not even with her. His long white hands made strange slow motions in the air, as if warding something off. He looked away from her, with an effort, so that he could concentrate on keeping silent.

He talked anyway.

As the words spilled out, he recognized the truth of them, though he could not feel them bubbling to the surface of his mind, as his words normally did; these sentences came of their own accord, as if extracted from someplace deep within him to which he himself rarely had more than limited access.

“When I was young,” he heard himself saying. “I would get mosquito bites, and they would swell up and itch like crazy. My mother would warn me against scratching them, she would get infuriated if I scratched them, but sometimes the calamine lotion and rubbing alcohol just didn’t stop the itch and I couldn’t help it and I’d dig at them, tear at them until I ripped them open, until they were no longer bug bites but open wounds. Until they no longer itched, but they hurt.”

“The pain,” said Jack Underwood. “Was preferable to the itching.”

His therapist nodded, giving him the okay to proceed.

Jack ran a trembling hand through his thinning hair, looking around the room with the confused expression of a man waking in a strange place. A voice inside him, deep inside him, protested, but the words continued to flow, like blood drawn from a vein.

“When I weed, I feel like I’m scratching some unbearable itch, some itch I’ve been trying to ignore my whole life. I feel like a chain smoker trying to quit, who has a bad day and stops off at a convenient store on his lunch hour and buys a pack of cigarettes, and tears it open outside the store and lights one up, right there. I feel like that first long, slow, deep drag, like a lungful of smoke is rushing down my windpipe and the burden of not smoking, of trying not to smoke, is lifted, gone.

“I feel,” he continued. ”Like a degenerate alcoholic who’s been on the wagon for a year, who has just started to get his life together but decides one night it’s all too much and heads to the pub at the corner. I feel like that first drink, that first shot of hot whiskey, or the downing of that first mug of beer in one sloppy gulp, like that glimpse over the edge of the glass to its bottom when it’s tilted, that snapshot of the evening’s oblivious end.”

“I feel,” Jack said.

“Good. Home. Right.”

“I feel fucking great. Until I stop weeding.”

With that his hands came to rest on his lap, and he sat regarding the backs of his palms as if he had written something of interest there.

The therapist leaned forward, uncrossing her impossibly long legs. A button on the front of her white blouse was not fastened, and the blouse puckered open there, offering a tantalizing glimpse of brown skin Jack was terrified for some reason to look upon directly.

“Jack, did you ever hear the joke about the man who goes to a doctor and complains about his finger hurting when he touches himself in the head?”

Jack Underwood blinked.

His therapist smiled.

“The doctor tells him, ‘Stop touching yourself in the head.’”

Jack leaned back in his chair, chewing her words, mouthing them himself:

Stop touching yourself in the head…

“So,” Jack began haltingly. “Since I feel bad when I stop weeding, I should...keep weeding? Weed all the time?”

Her laugh was pleasant, water droplets plinking into a half-filled glass. She shook her head.

“Why is it that you think you weed, Jack? What is this itch you scratch?”

“That was sort of your department, I thought.”

“So it is,” she said. She removed the pen delicately from her ripe red mouth and laid it on the desk in front of her, building a short wall between them. She rolled it slowly back and forth with her fingers.

Funny, thought Jack. He felt, tugged. A little like he felt sometimes on the few occasions he had smoked marijuana, as if a thin rope or cable stretching from the earth to the heavens was affixed to the top of his skull, and his head bobbed slightly as it moved. Except the tugging, the movement, was not towards the heavens here. It was all towards her, his mind reaching for Her, for his new therapist, across the desk.

“Mmm,” she said, closing her eyes and smiling, as if listening to a favorite piece of music for a few moments. She stopped rolling the pen and stood up. Jack Underwood watched her grow tall with an open mouth and wondering eyes.

“When we dream, Jack, it is commonly believed that our houses represent our selves. This extends to the grounds of the house as well. Gardening is seen as a very positive dream.

“What you are driven to do, though, Jack, is not gardening, and it is certainly not positive. You quite literally enjoy tearing yourself to pieces, and do a fine job of it.

“I ask you how weeding makes you feel, Jack, and you give me smokers and drinkers. Addicts. Compulsives. And sinners. Sinners reveling in the very wrongness of their sins. People obeying a higher law than moral law and common sense, people hurting themselves, in deference to a higher imperative, even, than self-preservation. People doing bad or stupid things, liking the bad, stupid things they do, liking the very badness of them.”

She reached behind her head and unfastened her hair clip. Long black hair fell over her shoulders, gleaming.

She removed her glasses, placing them on the desk.

Her eyes, thought Jack Underwood. He watched them change. So many colors. Emeralds, rubies, pomegranate seeds and buttered popcorn, chocolate…

“You,” he whispered, unselfconsciously. “Are beautiful.”

“Yes,” she said, walking slowly around the desk, one slender finger dragging its nail softly across the wood surface. “And you, Jack Underwood, are tortured unnecessarily. You grab at weeds when what you want are other things.

“You want to pull the black hairs from your wife’s once pretty face. You want to pluck the unintended creature from her womb. You want to smooth her complexion, to even her moods, to resettle your life. But you are conflicted. You want these things but do not want them. You want to tear your own impure thoughts, these very thoughts, from your head, too; your temptations, those seeds of chaos planted in your mind...”

“No,” said Jack Underwood, weakly.

“Yes,” said his therapist, reaching him now, running her fingers through his hair, straddling his lap, cupping his jaw with one delicate hand and bringing his face slowly to hers.

“Of course you do, sweetie.”

#

Once he dispensed with what momentary resistance he managed, Jack Underwood took to the task before him with much the same frenetic vigor he had applied to his weeding.

An instant after she’d coaxed the tongue from his mouth with her own, he was tearing open her blouse with a two-handed swipe, sending buttons scattering like dandelion motes. He thrust his hand up her skirt as if into the warm earth of his garden. He plucked at the nipples on her bare breasts, pulled hard on her hair, groped for his own root and planted it, giving in, finally giving in, and out, and in again.

They made the rounds of the large office, employing various pieces of furniture and a couple of walls, eventually finishing the deed explosively in front of the ceiling-high bookcase in the corner furthest from the office door.

Afterwards, Jack lay on his back on the carpet, naked except for one white tube sock. He was drained, gazing up at the stunning dark face suspended above him, which floated in an ocean of shimmering raven hair; multi-colored eyes and a brilliant crescent of a smile awash in the amber light streaming through the window above...

At some point Jack Underwood lost himself entirely - rended, ripped, plucked, gone.

#

“Mr. Underwood?”

Jack woke to a dim buzzing in his ears.

He opened his eyes. His therapist was sitting across from him, back behind her desk. Her hair was compressed neatly into its bun. Her clothes were unrumpled, her blouse was properly buttoned, and her lipstick was unsmeared.

He, too, had all of his clothes on.

Jack Underwood found none of this in the least bit strange.

“How do you feel, Mr. Underwood?”

“Good,” he said softly, looking down at himself as if to check that all of his pieces were still there. “Very good.”

“Do you still want to weed when you go home?”

Jack wrinkled his forehead, pondering the question. He imagined himself getting out of the car, kneeling on his lawn...god, that seemed dumb.

“No,” he said. “I don’t have the least bit of an urge to weed.”

This delighted his therapist. She brought her hands together in a silent clap.

“Excellent,” she said. “Looks like our work here is done for the day. Schedule another appointment with Becky out front, won’t you?”

Jack thanked her, assured her that he would be back, he felt so good, and walked out into a waiting room that was suddenly full to bursting. All eight chairs were occupied. A woman in workout clothes, a man in a suit not unlike his, a pimply-faced teenager and a tough-looking, beefy fellow lined the left wall. A girl who looked to be about ten years old, an elderly couple, and a tanned twenty-something woman in a half-shirt and denim shorts occupied the right.

They were quiet, all of them, and solemn. For some reason the word congregation came to Jack’s mind. Then it was gone.

He was forced to schedule his next appointment on a Friday night, two weeks later; that was, Becky Q. informed him, the next available slot. All of the small orange lights on the phone in front of poor Becky were lit up, some blinking impatiently. She looked harried, but still managed to be very polite.

As he turned to leave, she said, very sincerely, “Thank you, Mr. Underwood.”

Jack nodded and left.

#

He would go home that night and he would not weed.

He would go home and he would eat supper with his wife. He would hold her slightly furry face in his hands and tell her how very sorry he was for what he had put her through, how much he loved her, how much he looked forward to raising a child with her. He would mean every word, and she would be able to tell this was so.

He would hand her a gift he had picked up on the way, a potted plant, not a weed but a lily. The flower would be a bright orange, and strikingly beautiful. When he gave it to her, she would not notice that the pot was terra cotta, and that her husband did not flinch in handling it.

Neither would Jack. He would barely give it a second thought.

And for the rest of that night, and for a good while after that, to the Underwoods on Lighthouse Lane, everything would seem very much all right.

#

Back in her office, his therapist sat back in her chair, looking out her window at the brass glory of a burgeoning summer day. She ran a hand languidly up and down her bare inner thigh. Her eyes glittered dreamily, along with her half-moon smile.

My first happy customer, she thought.

Rended, ripped, plucked.

Gone.

Her roaming index finger encountered a single, small droplet of something sticky on her leg. Scooping it carefully, as if scooping frosting from a cake, she raised the finger to her tongue.

She tasted, again, of Jack Underwood - of a small, desperate man leading a small, immensely desperate life, of metaphorical cigarette smoke and whiskey, of the death throes of plants and of torn earth. She tasted of torment and confused dissatisfaction. She tasted of all that her latest, her first, patient, unknowingly, had given her.

It had been an equal exchange; a simple and mutually satisfactory transfer of energy from one place to another.

She had made his mind smooth, weeded it flat, torn his tormenting thoughts up by their roots, and taken them for herself. Other intruders would eventually surface, of course. It was in the nature of such thoughts, as it was in the nature of weeds, to do so. But she would be here to pull them out now, to weed him clean, always.

She would be here.

Well, perhaps not always, but long enough.

To feed on his thoughts, and on the thoughts of others like him, to forage in the dark gardens in people’s minds.

She and Others like her had for centuries taken the obvious route to sustenance. They had fed off those orphans, those soldiers and victims of war, the terminally ill and the incurably poor that called them to life. There was nothing wrong with this approach; it had been successful enough. But the grand, delectable secret she had just now begun to uncover was that no demographic compared to the misery, the succulent, swirling contradiction, she would find here, in Suburbia.

She could feel it teeming with people who believed fervently, without question, that they should be happy, but were not. Those others, the orphans and the indigent, most saw unhappiness all around them. It was all they knew. True, they were miserable, yes, they were wretched, but they did not feel singled out.

These suburban people, though, these executives and soccer moms, these cops and nurses and mail carriers, saw happy people on television, and watched seemingly happy people living happy lives in the houses around them. They, many of them, made a decent living, and had nice things.

Yet they went to bed each night asking themselves the same questions, receiving the same non-answers. It was slow torture, a cruel punishment, drawn-out agony.

And it was delicious.

Jack Underwood was an extreme case, but she could already tell there was more than enough desperation here to keep her fed for a long, long time.

Yes, the soil here was very fertile indeed.

A tinny voice spoke from the intercom on her desk.

“A Mr. Jackson is here to see you, ma’am.”

The therapist smiled.

Her tongue worked. She swallowed the last of Jack Underwood.

“Yum,” murmured Thera, newly fashioned Goddess of Suburban Discontent.

“Please. Send him right in.”