The Remedy (Dark Corners collection) by Adam Haslett

Author:Adam Haslett [Haslett, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2018-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

I would have guessed that the door in the corner of her office was to a closet or storage room, but as she opened it and gestured for me to pass through ahead of her, I saw instead a long, brightly lit hallway with a high ceiling and polished wood floors, the kind of expensive minimalism I’d first expected would lie behind the building’s facade. At the near end of the hall I could see a large internal window. Beyond it, every four or five yards along either side of the passageway, were brushed-steel doors, each with a small pane of glass at eye level, some obscured by little blinds, others clearly visible.

“As you know, one of the things we do here,” Dr. Lang said, leading me slowly up the hall, “is gather information. Through the conversations we have, but also the records and photographs, and what we can gather from other sources. The point is to try to fill in the texture of a person’s life.”

We paused by the internal window, which to my astonishment revealed what appeared to be the data hub of some tech start-up, a room dense with servers, mounted screens, snakes of black wires, and three young men on rolling chairs sliding back and forth between fixed terminals and laptops.

“It’s not just about collecting the facts of our patients’ lives,” she said. “That’s the simple part. The challenge is to synthesize it into something that can be offered back to them in a meaningful way. Wealthier patients, like yourself, the ones who can pay, they subsidize all this production work for the others.”

She moved on, farther down the hall, bringing me up to one of the doors with its glass pane covered. She reached up to adjust the slats, opening the little blind. “Here,” she said. “Have a look for yourself.”

At first I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing—light of different colors moving and blending through a space of indefinite size, a huge concave screen hanging in an arc toward what looked like one end of an oval room, images rising and dissolving across its surface: faces, a shingled house, a grassy hillside, flickering old footage of children by a pool. It wasn’t until I looked toward the back, at the point where all this stimulus seemed focused, that I saw a white man of fifty or so seated in a black leather recliner, hands on the armrest, eyes wide open, head resting back. He appeared transfixed and, in some odd way, elated. The changing light and reflections of the big screen moved across his face like a time-lapse clip of the sun raking its way over a desert landscape. Through the metal door, I could make out the faint sound of music—Bach, if I had to guess.

“I often think back to my father coming home from one of his clinics,” Dr. Lang said, as my eyes remained fixed on the scene before me, “in Malaysia, I think it was, somewhere in any

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