Stef took his time easing into Geno’s line of sight. The kid was following the rules and doing what he was told. His body was present, but his eyes often wandered off, leaving him in a blank trance. Withdrawing from the prescription pain meds and adjusting to Prozac left him struggling with nausea and complaining of an intermittent buzzing sensation in his head. By the end of the first week, Stef estimated Geno was down about four pounds, mostly in his face.
He had an interesting handsomeness, with cropped dark hair and hazel eyes. Some mix of Italian and German, Stef guessed from his name. He had yet to have an in-depth conversation with Geno. He hadn’t seen the boy smile, laugh or even slouch.
Geno held himself like a watchtower as his gaze went off to some far-away place in the distance, staring at the shitty black hole of death that used to be called his soul. This wasn’t a guy who’d want to draw pictures or practice mindful breathing. He was still in magic wand stage—looking for one lightning bolt fix that would make it all better.
Stef had to handle him carefully. Part of the handling was simply watching, dismissing the academic mind and letting his instincts guide him. Right now, instinct told him Geno was exhausted. Depleted. Not thrilled to be here but not entirely averse to being someplace safe where people made decisions for him. He was getting used to the space, the people and the meds.
Let him rest, Stef thought. Keep watching and keep making it safe for him to exist here.
Geno was required to come to the group sessions, and while he showed up in terms of attendance, his participation was nil. Usually he sat on the wide window sills and stared out at the High Line. Sometimes he flopped in one of the beanbag chairs and slept. At Stef’s request, the staff included him at the outset, then let him be. Stef covertly watched for any change in demeanor over the week. A whiff of awareness. It could be interested or contemptuous, it didn’t matter to Stef. What mattered was the absolute value removed from apathy.
“Well, he made it through the first week,” the EP director said, at a meeting she held with all Geno’s therapists. “Thoughts? Observations?”
Nolan, who ran EP’s group sessions, chimed in. “Minimal participation. Seems to be concentrating on holding himself together. He had a couple of severe panic attacks and one episode that looked like a vasovagal syncope.”
The facility’s young intern looked up. “What’s that?”
“It’s a loss or near-loss of consciousness when the vagus nerve is triggered.”
“Vagus runs from your brain to your gut,” Stef said. “Stress triggers nausea, which triggers the nerve. Blood pressure plummets and you either pass out or go into a really weird, surreal plane of almost passing out. Feels a lot like insanity.”
“Poor kid thought he was losing his mind,” Nolan said, sighing.
“He seems calm in the kitchen,” the EP director said. “He took a shift on Thursday and came back later to prep for four hours. He mentioned he did a lot of the cooking after his mother died.”
Which means he’s into food, Stef thought, or he’s a caretaker.
Toward the middle of the second week, the clouds in Geno’s eyes parted and he looked around the art room, expression curious. He still had no enthusiasm for the day’s activities, but he was slightly taken with the room’s materials, their organization and display.
Stef watched him wander. All the supplies were sorted and arranged by function and color, creating a visual inventory of possibility. Geno ran his fingers through the boxes of pens and crayons, or along the edge of paper reams.
Come play, said markers and clay and paints and pencils. Take us off the shelf. Touch us. Use us.
The art room had tons to touch. These survivors of sexual violence didn’t ever touch each other, but the touching of objects was fair game. They wanted soft, non-human things on their skin and they wanted to control how much softness and when and where. They ran dry paintbrushes along their hands and arms and faces. They drew on themselves with Sharpies. They liked to caress felt, wind pipe cleaners around their fingers, crumple tissue paper and smooth it again.
They liked controlling what the art supplies did, as well as knowing things would always perform a certain way. The red marker always drew red, the blue drew blue. Red and blue made purple, always. Glue smelled like glue and it stuck this to that and didn’t let go. Scissors cut and a heart-shaped hole punch made a heart, not a star. An eraser made a mistake go away.
Survivors liked to make a deliberate mess of their projects, and cleanup was as integral to the process as creation. At the end of a session, the muddy paint water could be thrown down the drain. Spills could be wiped up, scraps of paper swept up. It all got rinsed out in the sink and thrown in the garbage.
It could be made to go away.
Stef came into the art room one afternoon in the middle of Geno’s third week. It was free time, so he sat at one of the long tables with his own sketchpad and a cup of coffee. Geno stood at the tall windows, holding his hands in a puddle of western sunshine. He glanced back at Stef and his mouth twitched in a half-smile.
“Hey,” Stef said.
“Hey.”
“Are your hands cold?”
“Yeah.” Geno stuffed them in his pockets and stared a long time through the glass. He then turned and hitched up to sit on the windowsill. “I like your ink.”
Stef glanced down at his tattooed forearms. “Thanks.”
“You design it?”
“Yeah.”
After a moment, Geno slid down and came closer. Stef held his forearms out, palms to the ceiling. Showing all his horses on one arm, the Elvis Costello lyric on the other.
Alison, I know this world is killing you.
“Who’s Alison?” Geno asked.
“A girl who tried to commit suicide. I was working the hotline when she called.”
Geno crossed his arms. “She make it?”
“When I hung up she was with people and she was safe. Safer. It was a long time ago.”
“Never talked to her again?”
“No. Can’t even be sure Alison was her real name. But it sort of marked me as where I was going in life. So I decided to keep her close by.”
Geno pushed up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and showed Stef a few of his own tattoos. A lot of Hebrew lettering and mystical-looking symbols. Stef recognized the Kabbalah Tree of Life and the Flower of Life, but none of the others. He praised the work, but asked no questions about the designs themselves.
Geno pushed his sleeves down again and leaned on a chair back. “You know about me? I mean, what happened to me?”
Stef nodded.
The boy pushed his lower jaw out a bit, squinting at the table top. “Does all this stuff…” His chin jerked toward the shelves of art supplies. “Does it work?”
“Work is a relative term. Depends on what you want it to do. It helps. I’ve seen it help.”
“How?”
“It helps you say what can’t be said in words. Some things are too shitty, too heinous to talk about. But keep them inside and they’ll fester and eat away at your guts until you’re dead. I try to help people tell their story visually. To tell their story without talking.”
Geno’s fingers curled around the chair back. He drew a long slow breath in. “How do you do that?”
Stef got up and brought back a box of pastels. “Sit down if you want.”
“I’ll stand.”
Stef sat, tore off a single sheet off his pad and laid it down. “Pick two colors. Any two. One for you, one for them.”
Geno’s nostrils flared. He leaned one palm on the table and with the other, picked out a blue stick. He made a small smear with the flat side. “Okay, that’s me.”
His fingers hovered over the colors, then he took black. He turned it on its side and dragged it down, making big curved lines all around the blue smear. A forest of menacing shadows.
Stef noted the lines stayed far from the edges of the paper. Geno probably wasn’t aware, but he was already letting art both express his experience and contain it. The beauty of a sheet of paper was its four edges marking a boundary where pain could not cross.
Geno dropped the crayon and pushed the drawing across to Stef. “There you go. Me versus them. Have at it, Freud.”
Stef didn’t need to turn the paper around. It was textbook. The victim small, the attackers large.
“Why blue?” Stef asked.
“Why the fuck not?”
“What do you think of when you see blue?”
“The fucking sky, dude. It’s blue.”
Stef nodded, not expecting more.
“And it’s clean,” Geno said, looking off over Stef’s shoulder. “It’s a clean color.”
“I think so, too,” Stef said. “Blue’s dependable.”
Geno pressed his lips together tight. “I don’t think I want to do anymore.”
“Do one thing for me. Just one and I’ll let you go.”
“What?”
Stef tore off a new sheet of paper. “Draw the exact same thing. Same colors. Same composition. But make one change. Make you big, and them small.”
Geno snorted. “Oh, that’ll make it all go away?”
“Nothing makes it go away.”
Geno picked up the blue pastel. His hand arced over the paper, making one or two practice swipes but not leaving a mark. Finally he let it touch and drew a line.
“Big,” Stef said softly.
Geno pressed harder, made the azure mark nearly from top edge to bottom edge. He put the blue down, rubbing his fingertips together. He picked up the black pastel and sniffed hard, pushing the heel of his hand into one eye, the pastel between his fingers like a cigarette.
“It’s okay,” Stef said.
“Shut up.” Geno made small black marks around the base of the blue line. He rubbed his face, leaving a coal smudge like a bruise. He made more marks. Then he shoved the paper away, dropped the pastel and walked toward the window, sniffing and tugging at one ear.
“You can’t make it go away,” Stef said. “But you can make it smaller.”
Geno drew breath in through his nose. It trembled out his jaw and shoulders. “Yeah, whatever.”
“I’d like to work with you.”
Geno said nothing.
Stef neatly stacked the two sheets of paper and left them on the table. He put his business card on top, then gathered his sketchbook and coffee. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
As he walked away, two tiny words, like chimes on the wind, floated to his ear.
Stef turned back. “What’s that?”
Geno looked over his own shoulder, his expression startled. “I said, take care.”
The moment folded back on itself in a strange déjà vu. Stef unsure if he’d met Geno before, or if all the ghosts of clients past were looking at Stef through Geno’s eyes.
“‘Take care’ tells me something,” Stef said.
“What?”
“They didn’t get the best of you.”