“What I’m looking at is something the people of your culture feel sure doesn’t need to be looked at. These are drug addicts, losers, gangsters, trash. The adult attitude toward them is ‘If they want to live like animals, let them live like animals. If they want to kill themselves off, let them kill themselves off. They’re defectives, sociopaths, and misfits, and we’re well rid of them.’”
“Yeah, I’d say that’s how most grown-ups feel about it.”
“They’re in a state of denial, Julie, and what is it they’re denying?”
“They’re denying that these are their children. These are somebody elses children.”
“That’s right. There is no message for you in a Jeffrey drowning himself in the lake or a Susie dying of an overdose in the gutter. There’s no message for you in the tens of thousands who kill themselves annually, who disappear into the streets, leaving behind nothing but faces on milk cartons. This is no message. This is like static on the radio, something to be ignored, and the more you ignore it, the better the music sounds.”
“Very true. But I’m still groping for your point.”
“No one would think of asking themselves, ‘What do these children need?’”
“God no. Who cares what they need?”
“But you can ask yourself that, can’t you? Can you bring yourself to do it, Julie? Can you bear it?”
I sat there for a minute, staring at nothing, and suddenly the goddamnedest thing happened: I burst into tears. I exploded into tears. I sat there completely overwhelmed by great, huge racking sobs that wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t go away, until I began to think I’d found my life’s work, to sit in that chair and sob.
When I began to settle down, I stood up, told Ishmael I’d be back in a while, and went out for a walk around the block—around a couple of blocks, in fact.
Then I went back and told him I didn’t know how to put it into words.
“You can’t put the emotions into words, Julie. I know that. You put those into sobs, and there are no words equivalent to that. But there are other things you can put into words.”
“Yeah, I suppose that’s true.”
“You had some sort of vision of the devastating loss you share with the young people we’ve been talking about.”
“Yeah. I didn’t know I shared it with them. I didn’t know I shared anything with them.”
“The first day you visited me, you said you’re constantly telling yourself, ‘I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to get out of here.’ You said this meant ‘Run for your life!’”
“Yeah. I guess you could say that’s what I was feeling as I sat here crying. Please! Please let me run for my life! Please let me out of here! Please, let me go! Please don’t keep me penned up here for the rest of my life! I’ve GOTTA run! I cant STAND this!”
“But these aren’t thoughts you can share with your classmates.”
“These aren’t thoughts I could have shared with myself two weeks ago.”
“You wouldn’t have dared to look at them.”
“No, if I’d looked at them, I would’ve said, ‘My God, what’s wrong with me? I must have a disease of some kind!’”
“These are exactly the kinds of thoughts that Jeffrey wrote in his journal again and again. ‘What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with met There must be something terribly wrong with me that I’m unable to find joy in the world of work.’ Always he wrote, ’What’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me? And of course all his friends were forever saying to him, ‘What’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with you that you can’t get with this wonderful program?’ Perhaps you understand for the first time now that my role here is to bring you this tremendous news, that there’s nothing wrong here with YOU. You are not what’s wrong. And I think there was an element of this understanding in your sobs: ‘My God, it isn’t me!’”
“Yes, you’re right. Half of what I was feeling was a tremendous sense of relief.”