Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer

truck, he drove a taxi; he was a mediocre waiter, a drunken barback. The periods of hope and courage came less frequently. And as his twenties became his thirties, the landscape came to feature swamps of gloom dotted with marshy hummocks of anxiety. He worked on getting better. He tried jogging; he limited his drinking; he sprinkled seeds into his yogurt. A girlfriend got him into yoga. He practiced having a good attitude. But it was trench warfare. He lost his yoga mat and had to buy another one. Then he lost that one and couldn’t see buying a third. He watched other people claim to enjoy drinking; they baffled him. The same people spoke of hangovers almost fondly, as evidence of their propensity to dissipation. His own hangovers were whole days mined with grim, churning thoughts. He saw therapists and psychiatrists; he tried Wellbutrin, Klonopin, Effexor, Celexa, Paxil, Xanax, Zoloft, and Lexapro. Also meditation, core work, and juice fasts. He cut out meat. Kept a garden. Clawed through months of clean living, then fell back into blurred days like an acrobat into a net.
      
    “Tell me about the people who you say were watching you,” said the doctor.
    Oh, that . “You mean the paranoia, right?”
    “If I call it paranoia, you will think I don’t believe you.”
    “You don’t.”
    “You haven’t given me anything to believe or not believe.”
    Fair enough. But Leo did not know whether the constellations of meaning he had picked out were to be believed, exactly. Now, remembering some of his theories, he could see that they were incredible. But this was neither here nor there—the beautiful and true is often incredible. What he felt most keenly was the sadness at the fact that he was no longer certain. He had no wish to convince anyone else—certainly not this doctor—that, for instance, his ex-girlfriend’s ex-husband worked for whatever part of the government was tasked with compiling dossiers on wayward members of the intellectual elite.
    “You told your friends that you were being followed. Why did you say that?”
    “Well. For a while there, I was being followed.”
    A riffle of annoyance appeared on the doctor’s face. The doctor’s face. The face of the doctor. A face is just a skin mask with two black holes for seeing and a wet cave for eating and speaking. Leo looked away, not out of disgust, but because he was suddenly aware that this might not be a doctor after all.
    Actually, Leo had been followed. He knew this in a way that he did not know other things—he did not know, for instance, whether his ex-girlfriend’s ex-husband worked for the government. He could see now that the man was perhaps your more garden-variety jealous dick. She wasn’t even his girlfriend, really. She was Marilyn, the hot mom from Brand-New Day. They had tried a thing for a few weeks. It was mostly sex in the late afternoon and expensive dinners out, sometimes followed by drunken arguments on sidewalks or in her vast, sisal-carpeted apartment, usually about the morality of her profession—advertising—which Leo felt compelled to point out was a form of intellectual prostitution, but once about her very recently ex–husband. She claimed she didn’t really know what he did for a living.
    “I don’t know. Consulting. He consults about stuff,” she had yelled at Leo as she stood naked in front of her refrigerator, digging in the back for more wine.
      
    Now the doctor went deeper into his file. “And what about these?”
    Oh crap, thought Leo. Doc had printouts of his blog. How was that possible? He had erased all that. Leo wasn’t exactly tech-savvy (he mourned the passing of MacWrite), but he knew what a Delete All Files button was meant to do. Without leaning forward, he tried to look harder at the papers the doctor was fingering. They looked like screen-grabs, not downloads. Who could have given him those? Heather? One of Rosemary’s assistants? That was a bit much, didn’t they think? If they wanted to