IT WAS THE DAYS, for me, of Succession. Two of them, thirty-nine episodes. You can imagine the distress. Amanda, alas, could not. The last of us came in gradual, episodic spurts and then suddenly (or however that goes). I remember vividly my disgust at her suggestion that Tom Wambsgans would emerge as Waystar RoyCo’s next CEO. Wambsgans over those of noble blood or the other foppish conspirators — mere worker bees, the fools! — plotting their takeovers at elongated tables of polished black walnut within the glistening glass of nearby conference rooms? Oh, the sleepless night I endured after that marathon Day 1session watching the first two seasons with emptied, decollated liter bottles of Coke at the ready to avoid hitting the pause button for bathroom breaks. The high pitch of uncertainty engulfed within me a suffocating despair, trapped and vacillating in some Shakespearean fever dream from which I emerged confident that I had decoded the writers’ nuanced foreshadowing, certain that the two remaining seasons would see second born son Kendall succeed Father-King Logan Roy on that coveted throne. ‘The King is dead! Long live the King!’ I screamed upon awakening. Wambsgans? Amanda’s condescending smile thrown back at me from the far end of that magnificent couch (the distance between us an omen, in retrospect). “Tom’s the sensitive one, Joe,” she said. “How can you be so naïve?” Wambsgans? The Tolkien surname enough to dismiss any thought of ascendancy. Spineless and cloying Tom Wambsgans? I haven’t seen Amanda since Season 4, Episode 2 when first born Connor sings ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ at the karaoke bar on the night of his wedding rehearsal. I broke down — how could one not? — laughing and crying in a mix of confused delight and hopelessness while she called 911. Later, Dr. Bateman called this ‘a not uncommon response for writer types like you.’ There’s little else that I recall of our final evening together other than that episode, that sublime masterpiece, other than calling back to her over the massive shoulders of those white-coated men escorting me out into the cold night to strap me into the back of a white van purring at the curb. ‘Brilliant writing! Oh dear God in heaven! Brilliant! Brilliant! Emmy! Emmy!’ One of the attendants — Lewis, his nametag read — placed an enormous hand on top of my restrained forearm, the tears running down his cheek irradiated under the dome light, whispering ‘yes, yes’ before sliding the door shut. Amanda took the couch. “I know you loved it,” she wrote in her only letter to me during my stay at the Bateman Clinic for Dissociative Streaming Dysphorias, gloating with news of the knave Wambsgans’ coronation. The endless hours sprawled under the Peruvian throw across that serene, cushioned island immersed in the pixilated genius of showrunners and writing teams. She took the blanket as well. There will be no second season for us.
*
I am cold turkey for weeks. Time is but an empty vessel for me now. There is only the textured ceiling, browned with moisture stains near the walls, to reward my gaze. My condition was diagnosed ‘severe’ at admittance, earning me a private room in ‘The Unit’ on the top floor of the clinic hospital. A sign on the massive swinging doors leading into the ward reads:
WARNING!
NO INTERNET ENABLED DEVICES
BEYOND THESE DOORS!
Severance Season 2 began without me. Three years since I have traveled those bleached halls at Lumon Industries with Mark S and the gang. Three years wondering about those goats. Three years singing along with Ms. Cobel in my head:
Kier, Chosen One, Kier/
Kier, Brilliant One, Kier/
Brings the bounty to the plains/
Through the torment, through the rains/
Oh, Milchick, bring me thy bounty of a Five Minute Music Experience. I am begging you. End my torment.
“Let them go, Joe,” Dr. Bateman tells me in our first private session. “Choose life.”
Life?
Wolf Hall is scheduled to resume a full decade since the thump of Anne Boleyn’s head on that blood-stained platform. Take my head, too, Cremuel. What use is it to me now? I am bereft.
Let them go?
After all we have been through?
What of the traditions? Binging every episode of The Wire beginning midnight Friday each Memorial Day weekend. Oh, dear Omar, you have won me over. ‘A man’s got to have a code.’ I understand that now. I do. I swear. The holidays crammed with Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Justified while slurping a gruel of uncooked Stouffer’s Stuffing and flat Coke. No more The Righteous Gemstones, White Lotus, Sons of Anarchy? No more the omnipresent Walton Goggins?
Life?
What of Bad Sisters? Barry? Dark Winds? Dead to Me? Fauda? The Handmaid’s Tale, The Kominski Method? Ted Lasso, Ozark? Red Oaks? Schitt’s Creek? Slow Horses? Somebody, Somewhere?
Nevermore?
Oh, Crumb, you serpent. You have done me in.
I haven’t even seen Game of Thrones or Mad Men.
Shall I be thus deprived?
WTF!
Life?
This is anything but life.
New Years Eve without Call My Agent?
This is hell.
*
Group was underway in the clinic’s basement when I joined the first week of my stay. The room chilly and bleak. Cracked windows within web-covered casings. Drab grey concrete block walls. Slumped bodies in a circle of unfolded metal chairs. Gaunt faces and red, hollowed eyes. A coffee urn and a plate of donuts on a table against the wall next to me at the door.
“Joe,” Doctor Bateman called when she saw me slumped into the framing. The attendant accompanying me relaxed his grip on my elbow. The good doctor patted the seat of an empty chair on her right. “We have been waiting for you,” she said. The warmth in her tone comforted me.
Maddie S was sobbing. “Are they sadists?” She stares through the ceiling, invoking someone or something to end her nightmare. Her right index finger curls and uncurls at a clutch of her long red hair falling over her shoulder. Bill M leans over from the right to provide me context.
“The Sopranos ending,” he whispers. “She was almost catatonic when she first got here.”
No words.
“That’s it!!??” Maddie S is screaming now. “A black screen? That’s it? Are you fucking kidding me?” The room is silent. She reaches out as if she is holding a remote, her thumb clicking up and down.
“There must be a clue. Let me see it just one more time.”
Bateman walks over to remove the [non-existent] device from her grip, pantomiming throwing it to the ground and smashing it under her foot.
“Tony is gone, dear Maddie,” she says. “It’s just a story.”
Just a story?! She ignores the gasps and turns to me, pointing to the seat Maddie vacated in the circle’s center.
“Joe,” she says, looking straight into my eyes for a few seconds. My heart pounds like a bass drum. Her smile warm, almost beatific. “Joe,” she says again. “The stream is seductive,” she says, waving her arm around the circle. “You are not the first to fall in and get carried away in its torrent.” Her eyes will not release me. “There is no shame. Think of us as rescuers, reaching to you from the safety of little islands to pluck you out. Please, tell us your story.”
I think of Sam in Loudermilk.
“My name is Joe and I’m a streamaholic.”
“Welcome, Joe,” the group sings back.
I am nervous, hesitant. “How’d I get here? Books, I guess. I was never without one.” It appears my journey is not unique from the laughs and nods of recognition.
“Hardy Boys, Chip Hilton, those Scholastic Books sold in the classroom. I devoured them. The required reading. Catcher in the Rye. To Kill a Mockingbird. A Separate Peace. Twain. Cather. Orwell. O’Connor. Fitzgerald. Angelou. I did my ninth grade book report on Point/Counterpoint by Huxley. It had not occurred to me, until now, that I was hooked on stories by the time I reached my teens. I obsessed in finding more challenging works. Hardcore stuff. Faulkner, Bellows, Wolff. I was always looking for the bigger ‘read’. The next best thing. Gardner. Barth. Barthelme. Percy. Roth. Pynchon. It all seemed so natural. So right. So … innocent.”
The drip of a faucet in the sink on the far basement wall the only sound.
“How white of you,” Susan A says. I shrug.
I was talking to myself now. My path to addiction is revealing itself to me. The dots connect for the first time. “I had no story of my own.” The group may as well have been in Timbuktu. “I sought it from others, I guess. Little did I realize that it was me being devoured,” I continued. “I was out of control. I lost my way; my own personal narrative.”
“It’s not too late,” Dr. Bateman says. “You are writing it now.” A murmur rises from the group. “Keep going,” she urges me. “Let it all out. Create your own island.”
My own island. Warm, soft, dry sand under my feet. The cloudless sky above. Fresh air. I think of The Swiss Family Robinson. Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels. I am floating—
“Come back to us, Joe,” Dr. Bateman says.
“Yes, sorry.” The faces around me patiently waiting for me to continue. “And then the Rubicon crossed. The leap away from books. I was aware of the dangers. Adaptations at first. Masterpiece Theatre, BBC stuff etc… Everyone in my crowd was doing it. There was a lot of pressure. It was the cool thing to do. Brideshead Revisited. To Serve Them All My Days. Upstairs, Downstairs. I went easy at first. I had rules. Classics only. No watching until I had read the book. I had seen what happened to others when they lost control. My best friend switched his major from Comparative Lit to Business Administration/Marketing with a minor in PolySci within a week after watching House of Cards.”
How naïve I was. How trusting. Warm tears run down my cheek.
“And now, you see what I am.”
Mary G speaks up. “You are NOT a bad person,” she says, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “You are NOT alone.”
A chorus of love runs through me.
*
“A slippery slope,” Elaine, I mean Dr. Bateman — there is something growing between us — tells me of her refusal when I first exhort her to watch the trailer for Friday Night Lights, the scheduled topic for an upcoming Group session. Slippery for whom, I asked myself, when she doled out personal details in our increasingly intimate sessions, sharing photos of her chateau in Switzerland, the gardens of variegated colors climbing the hills surrounding her Montecito estate, the smoke curling up against that azure-blue sky from the chimney of her Berkshire’s cabin. “I was in the right place at the right time,” she shrugs with a demure smile that makes me weak-kneed. The days since COVID have been good to her. I could love her. If only she watched…
At the Friday Night Lights discussion, Chris G brings up the Amy Schumer skit defiling Connie Britton’s tour de force performance (there should be no argument on the matter) as Coach Taylor’s wife, Tami. Elaine — Dr. Bateman. We have given up the façade — scowled. She has connected deeply with Tami after binging, to everyone’s surprise, the first season in preparation for the session. (”That fucking trailer,” she tells me later.) She shuts Chris G down when he flippantly mentions the ‘utter disgust’ and ‘cognitive dissonance’ (his words, the pretentious prick) that he experienced with a White coach assuming the fatherly duties of his star Black running back, Smash Williams. Screaming out of turn that Gaius Charles’ performance should have won an Emmy, he noted that it was another indication of the show’s underlying racism. Elaine argued — impressively, I thought — that Taylor Kitsch’s ‘lily white’ Tim Riggins also drank from Coach Taylor’s seemingly endless well of paternal love mixed with wry, self-deprecating wisdom and fundamental lessons on accountability. Chris G apologized after considering her admonition. He and Elaine hugged, sobbing. “Clear eyes. Full heart. Can’t lose,” the good doctor said before slapping the door frame on the way out at session’s end.
*
The clinic is shutting down after weeks of uncertainty. There are talks of bounced checks, threats of lawsuits, employees leaving in droves. The quality of the meals has reached a new low. Someone said that Dr. Bateman was found in Switzerland and refuses to return. She had become distant in the weeks since that discussion at group. She wouldn’t leave her office, wouldn’t answer the knocks on the door. Blue light and Bob Odenkirk’s voice escaping from the transom above it.
I am scared; not ready to leave. I have made progress here.
There is a sticky-note on my condo unit door when I return home. I recognize the handwriting:
This is your fault, damn you, Bateman.
The faint smell of urine greets me in the foyer. Amanda had pretty much cleaned out the place since the night I was taken away. The utilities have been turned off. My reading chair is still there, as are the twin beds in the second bedroom. She left the TV which doesn’t surprise me. She wanted an 85”. It’s of no use with the utilities down. I have loaded up at Powell’s Books. Bill M texts me. “Season 2 of Severance is digging a bigger hole,” he writes. “Gonna take at least two more seasons to dig out. I am giddy.” His wife has taken the children and left, he adds. Maddie S is moving in with him and there’s a spare room for me for me if I wish to join them. I don’t respond.
The kitchen is bare. I survive on takeout Thai, pizza, Chinese. There are cases of Coke liter bottles stacked up against the side of the fridge. I’m reading ‘Cloud Atlas’. The collected works of David Foster Wallace are up next. That should fill some time. Someone rings me from the console at the building entrance.
“It’s Lewis,” the voice says. “I took you to the clinic that—.”
I buzz him in.
“I don’t know where to go,” he says when he stands before me. He’s lost weight and is unshaven. His eyes sunken. “I need help. Please,” he begs me. I will never forget the kindness he showed me. We hug. He hasn’t eaten in days, he says. There’s still some General Tso’s Chicken around in one of the boxes on the kitchen counter. Only a few days old. He gobbles it down in seconds.
“We’ll start anew together,” I tell him. “We’ll support each other.“
It’s getting dark.
“There’s an old boutique movie house around the corner,” I say. “It’s still playing Casablanca, I think.”
“Is there a book to read first?” he asks.
Bless his heart.
“Screw it,” he says. “Let’s go. We have no choice. We’ll rebuild. Together.”
“Wolf Hall starts next week,” I tell him. “Just sayin’.”
“We’ll need a couch,” he says.
“Lewis,” I say. “I think this may be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
— JOE MCAVOY
Joe McAvoy lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Kyle, and their English Lab, Rosie. His short fiction, essays, satire and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals across the U.S. and internationally.