I LAY ON MY THERAPIST’S COUCH, a pillow over my face.
“Have you noticed that no one listens to what you say?” she asked me, her voice sympathetic.
“Yes,” I said, tilting the pillow away from my mouth. “In fact, I said those exact words to you a minute ago.”
“Ah,” she said, and I heard the sound of scribbling. “Well, I’m prescribing you an antidepressant. Can’t have you going around saying you’re going to kill yourself. Take it three times a day and you should be fine.”
On the bus home, I stared at the prescription. The drug had a long and complicated name, which is exactly what you’d want from a drug promising to cure your sick brain. I had taken drugs before, and they’d never done much for me. But maybe that was because I’d never taken them three times a day. I jotted down the number three in my diary that night and folded the prescription into a perfect isosceles triangle before tossing it in the trash.
Have you ever had a problem that, when properly examined, turns out to be an immutable fact of life? How do you solve something like gravity and rainfall? Simply put, you have to be willing to look outside yourself and blame the world. The incident at brunch proved that killing myself wasn’t going to solve anything, because the problem wasn’t me—the problem was everyone else.
***
The next day, I smiled as the sunlight struck my eyes. It always feels good to have a plan.
Step One was straightforward: I had to make everyone as sad as me. First, I put up billboards advertising the world’s most prominent miseries. People driving south on New York’s Route 91 would cock their heads and squint through the glare of their windshields to read “Famine! Corruption! Genital mutilation! All of the above and more!” in six-foot font. Those traffic-jammed in Shanghai would lean out their car windows to study my treatises on unrequited loves and acne scars. Part the curtains in a hotel window in Johannesburg and you’d stare straight into the grimacing visage of yours truly, a cartoonish speech bubble linking my mouth to a list of the world’s most shameful truths: overpopulation, undereducation, and a total lack of empathy.
I dug deep and revisited the part of me that used to love music. I bought ad time on the radio, wrote a catchy tune, and sang a jingle outlining life’s smallest—and therefore least conquerable—woes.
“Your mom may love you, but you can’t force her to like you,” I crooned. I heard the man I’d hired to play rhythm guitar gulp. “There’s no way to recreate the experience of first eating ice cream as a child. Glass shatters and gets into the rug, and you’ll never be able to find all of it. Ooo wee ooo.”
I visited the world’s cafés, filling coffee cups with salt. I dated men and women, made them fall in love with my soft smile and smart eyes, and then never called them back. I got myself invited to dinner parties with the world’s elite, wore tuxedos worth more than my hometown, and kicked the shins of lords and ladies under the table. All these things and more added up until finally, I’d made the world as sad as myself.
***
Step Two was harder. I had to make the sadness stick, which meant I had to put myself in a position to fix it.
“Step right up, step right up,” I called. I wore a red-and-white pinstripe suit and top hat. Traveling from town to town via horse-drawn wagon, I promised elixirs, self-help records, meditation techniques, and all-purpose miracle cures to fix any problem on God’s green earth.
“My dear sir, a moment of your time,” I called from the Empire State building. I was adept at using a laser pointer and megaphone to target hapless passersby on the sidewalk one thousand feet below, having practiced from the Eiffel Tower a week earlier.
“My dear sir—yes, you!—tell me: what’s carved that frown into your face? Step right up, step right up, and let me heal you. There’s nothing in this world that can’t be fixed with some careful consideration, a little-newfangled chemistry, and good old-fashioned elbow grease.”
And if you think that pitch didn’t work, you’ve never been sad enough—which means desperate enough—to try anything. My cures only lasted a few days before people turned sad again, but the momentary relief was addictive enough to turn them into repeat customers. As news of my successes spread to the four corners of the globe, I started to receive letters from all the world’s citizens begging me for help. I responded to each one in great detail, offering personalized instructions to fix their problems, if only for a short period.
And then, I stopped. I stopped writing back, I stopped traveling the world, I stopped handing out cures. So began Step Three, the one I’d looked forward to most of all.
***
My absence caused a global panic equitable only to the last Ice Age. Communities tore themselves apart with grief; fires ravished whole continents. Those lucky few with any wherewithal remaining were appointed as delegates to a new international congress. There were representatives from each major group of sad people: the anxious, the demoralized, the indecisive, and so on. Hundreds of delegates filled a great marble hall, the walls echoing with wails and debate. And they invited me to speak.
I refused a dozen times, burned their telegrams on candle wicks, dropped my phone into the toilet, and finally gave in when I turned on the TV and saw that world was on the brink of collapse. I hung my red-and-white pinstripe suit in the back of the closet and selected a simple outfit of shorts and a t-shirt.
“Oh, thank you, sir, thank you.” I kept my expression blank, shook hands as they were presented to me. The entire Congress stood to applaud my entrance. I winced at the sound, though secretly it filled my chest with fireworks.
They seated me on the stage at a long table next to a podium. To my right was a beleaguered bureaucrat, her face sweaty. To my left, a pitcher of water and a single glass, as I’d requested. While a high-ranking representative introduced me from the podium, taking his time to lay out my lofty accomplishments, I drank greedily from the glass. By the time he’d finished, and I was asked to take my place at the microphone, I’d finished the entire pitcher.
The day before, I’d taken the time to write a comprehensive evaluation of their pain. It laid out all the world’s problems in plain and simple terms. It pointed blame at everyone and everything that deserved it. It offered up solutions, alternatives, and common sense. I had penned it on a yellow legal pad, then copied it onto notecards, then tossed them out a window. There would be no need for such a speech, but it’s always wise to do the research.
I tapped the microphone and asked if there were any questions from the room. Everyone spoke at once, making it impossible to hear anything. I pointed to one representative.
“You,” I said. The hall went silent. “Ask your question.”
The man rose slowly from his seat, his hands trembling. He leaned forward and placed his palms on the table in front of him.
“Why did you leave us?” he asked. He said it so softly, it was a miracle I heard him.
I shrugged. “It isn’t my job to fix you,” I said. The hall burst into a roar, and I waved a hand to shush it once more. I pointed to a new representative and motioned for her to stand. She did, her expression far less deferential than the man who just spoke.
“You can’t just leave us now,” she said. A murmur of agreement rose around her, giving her voice strength. “We need you.”
“Yes,” I said, sneering. “That’s what makes you most pathetic.”
Howls broke out that you wouldn’t believe could come from human beings. I saw men and women tear at their hair, their teeth, their tongues. People shook each other like it was the end of the world. The hall—with its high, domed ceiling and semi-circle concert seating—proved a perfect echo chamber for their cries. I took it in and smiled.
And just when it seemed they might take each other apart, and by extension take me with them, I raised a hand and snapped my fingers. I snapped four times, and on the fourth snap everyone froze. The hall went silent and still.
I opened my mouth to speak, and I saw everyone’s eyes widen with anticipation. A thousand faces, gaunt with longing, stared back. Breathing had stopped, lips had snapped shut; fingers were digging into tables and chairs, peeling away at strips of wood.
I snapped one more time, cleared my throat, and gestured toward the empty glass and pitcher to my left.
“Could I trouble you?” I rubbed my hand against my face to keep from smiling. “Just a bit more, please. Could I trouble you over something so small?”
JEAN-LUC BOUCHARD is a writer living in New York City whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Monkeybicycle, Pithead Chapel, Bodega, apt, Gravel, and other journals and anthologies. He is also a contributor to The Onion and the creator of the Inbox Full newsletter. He is the winner of Epiphany Magazine’s 2016 “Writers Under 30” contest, was included on Wigleaf’s 2018 longlist for best short stories and was also selected for Honorable Mention by the Speculative Literature Foundation for their Working Class Writers Grant. His work can be found at jeanlucbouchard.com and he can be followed on Twitter @jlucbouchard.
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