Today I Feel (Excerpt)

The first thing that Marta noticed about Thomas Zimmerman that day was that his feet were bare.

She only noticed this at all because she happened to be looking at the floor. The linoleum tiles were white, slick with wax, a polar landscape divided into neat and symmetrical squares. The walls of the room were white, too, but it was nearly impossible to tell anymore. Every spare inch had been papered over with posters, bright and shiny colours, snappy slogans—and faces. Lots and lots of faces. Not the same faces as the ones who sat in the hard-backed metal chairs—not tired, not grey—but perfectly round ones, with blobby, cartoonish features. Smiling face, frowning face, crying face, thinking face. If a person ever got stuck, they could pick out the one they felt closest to and say: Today, I feel happy. Today, I feel sad. Today, I feel. Today. In the counselling centre on Barrington Street, statements that started with ‘I feel’ were always safe. They were something to fall back on.

Shaw, whose turn it was to speak, was falling back on one now. “I feel like happiness is probably very different for everybody,” he said. “It’s a very—it’s a very subjective thing. I don’t really know what I’d call it. But I feel like a lot of things do make me happy, like . . .”

In his hands was the soft red ball which had made its way around the circle of outpatients, one to the other, awarding everybody their turn to talk. Shaw’s knuckles were white, his fingers sunk down all the way to the second joint in the leathery stuff of the ball. Marta figured it was only this which was stopping him from reaching up to scratch his nose or pick at his lip or rub his mustache. He did that last one a lot, she’d noticed, and in a compulsive kind of way, as if the act of rubbing would bring him good luck. As far as she could tell, it never had.

“Like, going for long walks somewhere quiet, going to the park, to the public gardens, or down to the pier, and just . . .”

Shaw looked at the ceiling while he talked, and most of the others looked at Quyen, the therapist whose job it was to lead the weekly sessions, but Marta kept her gaze fixed on the patch of linoleum directly in the centre of the circle of chairs. And that was why, when Thomas Zimmerman came in, she noticed his feet first.

They were bare, which was the most particular thing, but it took her a moment to realize this—they were so coated with mud that it was almost impossible to make out an inch of the skin underneath. What little could be seen was a coppery brown and veined, all whorls of scab-flesh, peeling flakes of dead tissue. Marta looked at his feet and at the marks they left behind, a trail of dirt across the white squares. She watched them cross the circle, then turn, shuffle, as Thomas Zimmerman lowered himself into the only empty chair. He sat, and his bare feet rocked back and forth for a moment, heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, and then lined themselves up neatly along the seam between the floor tiles.

To Marta’s left, Shaw was still talking, bravely fumbling his way to the end of the sentence. “—so, it’s, eh, it’s been really helpful, just being able to have some clarity on things,” he said, and reached up to rub his mustache. “And . . . and, yes. To contemplate things, to get perspective. So.”

He eased his white-knuckled grip on the ball and then offered it to Marta, who took it from him automatically. She cradled it against her chest.

“Thank you, Eugene,” said Quyen and then, “Marta?”

She had the ball, but nobody was looking at her. They weren’t even pretending, now. They were only watching Thomas Zimmerman.