Amateurs by Dylan Hicks Page B

figured it was time to say “great kid” or something to that effect. Instead he said, “I have mental health, FYI.”
    â€œYeah, me too,” Karyn said.
    â€œNot serious, though. Like I’m off all the meds.”
    Without sarcasm: “Good for you. My boss went off her Celexa a few months ago, and I really hope she goes back on.”
    â€œShe talks to you about that stuff?”
    â€œGod no, it’s just information I have access to.”
    â€œOh, right.”
    â€œSomething of a perk,” she said.
    â€œFor me—probably for your boss it was the wrong move—but for me, I didn’t like how the pills were flattening and maybe controlling me. Or the thought that I’d let doctors and pharmaceutical marketers convince me that I had a medical condition, as opposed to just being sad sometimes in the regular way.”
    â€œOr sad sometimes because we live in a depressing society.”
    â€œAnd the pills are just getting us to accept a situation that’s more fucked up than we are sick.” It was a less articulate version of something he’d read.
    â€œWell put,” she said.
    â€œI felt trapped, you know, ’cause when I told my therapist I was feeling good and wanted to go off the meds, she said, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”
    â€œTherapists should stick to the clichés of their field,” Karyn said.
    â€œI mean, she didn’t literally say that. Then a few years later when I explained that I was still on the meds but depressed, she advised me to up the dosage or switch to a different drug. I couldn’t stand to be part of that anymore.”
    â€œThey seem to help me.”
    â€œPlus I lost my insurance.”
    Karyn laughed again, this time a snorty, Bugs Bunny laugh. Lines fanned from her eyes like plumage. Lucas was trying to make out how old she was. A good seven to nine years older than he was, he guessed. But beautiful, beautiful in the way his wife would be beautiful if he were seven to nine years older and long married, married so happily that his wife would be more beautiful to him than ever, and when they went out together he would be proud of her beauty, which would contain and erase all the ways she’d looked before. He pictured holding her hand at a funeral.
    She said, “It’s not what I wanted.”
    â€œWhat isn’t?”
    â€œA lot of things, but you were asking about my job, and I’m sorry I shot you down back there when you were just being nice.”
    â€œNo worries.”
    â€œIt’s a good job and I’m lucky to have it, but it’s not what I wanted,” she said. “I used to like how concrete it was, how there was an answer for everything, and if the answer was no, then it was no. Outside of work, most of the questions I’m interested in are unanswerable. That makes me sound so metaphysical.” She scraped something off the table with her fingernail. “But maybe I prefer uncertainty and ambiguity to certainty and clarity. Keats’s negative capability, which I’m probably calling on just to dignify my ignorance. Sometimes the whole world’s a mystery to me.”
    â€œWord.”
    â€œEven the simplest mechanical operations.” She picked up her last scrap of toast. “How a toaster works.”
    â€œA toaster?”
    â€œBut there are other, more complicated appliances.” She filled her lips with air but didn’t sigh. “Back in the Mesolithic I thought about going to law school.”
    â€œInevitably,” he said.
    â€œMaybe I should have. Then I could be an unsatisfied lawyer.”
    â€œHey, there’s still time to pursue all sorts of unsatisfying second careers.”
    She pressed her fingers into her cheekbone. Throughout the morning she’d been touching her face, even while preparing the food. “There’s a German word,” she said, “Torschlusspanik,