Free Vigil by Robert Masello

bridge, or created a dam, between the two of you?”
    “I’ve never thought of it in either of those terms,” Ezra said, trying to keep the disdain out of his voice. He could see no end to this avenue of thought. Neumann could keep on coming up with dumb metaphors and pointless questions indefinitely. He fingered the bag on his lap once more, and this time Neumann deigned to take notice.
    “I feel you’re distracted, Ezra,” she said with some asperity, “that there’s something else we need to address and get out of the way. What’s in the bag you’re holding?”
    Ezra tried not to appear too eager as he hastily untied the loop on the plastic bag. “These are the bottles from the medications I’ve been on while I was living in Israel,” he said, taking out the bottles, their labels written in Hebrew on one side and English on the other, and putting them on the little table next to her chair. “All I need, I think, are some refills.”
    Dr. Neumann took her reading glasses off the table, put them on, then started picking up the prescription bottles. “Your doctor over there was named Stern?”
    “Yes, Herschel Stern.”
    “I’ll want to get in touch with him, and see his records.”
    “That’s fine. I can give you his numbers.”
    “But I can probably refill these for now,” she said, glancing at what he recognized was his Xanax bottle, “and we’ll make any adjustments that we have to, once we’ve made some progress with our therapy.”
    As far as Ezra was concerned, they’d already made all the progress he was interested in. But now was not the time, he knew, to say so. As she reached for her pad and began to scrawl the new prescriptions, his heart soared.
     
Outside, Uncle Maury was leaning against the parking meter, having a smoke. “How’d it go?” he asked, tossing the cigarette into the gutter. “You finally sane?”
    “I will be,” Ezra said, brandishing the sheaf of prescriptions.
    On the way home, they stopped at the first pharmacy they passed, and while his order was being filled, Ezra roamed around the store picking up all the other things on his list, from surgical gloves and isopropyl alcohol to Q-tips and talcum powder. The rest of the supplies he’d need—a drafting table and computer chair, acetates, X-Acto knives and sable brushes, a magnifying glass—had all been delivered that morning, and had only to be properly arranged and put to use. He could barely wait to begin.
    At home, Ezra was delighted to discover that everyone was out; even Gertrude was grocery shopping or something. He hurried down the hall, locked his door behind him, and then immediately got to work rearranging the place. Aside from clearing away some things from the nightstand to make more room for his reading matter, he left the actual bedroom pretty much as it was.
    The adjoining chamber, which had once been his play-room, was where he’d decided he’d do his actual work. First he emptied out the bookcase, which still contained most of his books from high school and college, everything from Catcher in the Rye to the Norton Anthology, and then he dragged the empty bookcase over to the window. When his reference collection arrived from Israel, he’d put it there.
    Then, where the bookcase had been, he set up the drafting table; fortunately, it didn’t take too much work: attaching the legs, getting the top elevated to just the right angle, clamping the lamp on. The drafting table and chair now stood away from the windows, as far from the natural light as they could be—and that was good. Sunlight could do a lot of damage to materials as ancient as the ones he would be working on.
    Finally, he’d need something to hold his tools and things, and his eye alighted on an old wooden chest that had once contained his toys, next to the closet. He bent down to open it and wasn’t at all surprised to find his old model planes and comic books and bongos—how he’d driven his parents crazy with those!—still