“Desire is the first and most simple step toward change,” Margaret told him.  “Air has to want to be water before the hydrogen can bond.  The bird has to want the sky more than the ground.”

“What about penguins?”  He didn’t want it to come out crass, but he knew he had to make this conversation about something other than he and her.

She smiled, and he saw that she’d been waiting for that.  She knew him too well.  “The penguin’s desire has changed, because the sky doesn’t hold the promise it once did.  It doesn’t look as bright.  The penguin can finally see that the water has more to offer it than the cold and lonely sky ever could.”

“Oh.”

“I see that too.  At last.  Goodbye, Steven.”  She left the apartment, and all of his desires went with her.  A few new ones blossomed in their place.

***

If you knew Steven and cared enough to ask, he’d tell you that he and Margaret had met at a bar a year and a half ago.  If you were his parents, though, they met at a dinner party one of his successful friends had thrown to celebrate his latest vague triumph.

They met, though, since you are neither friend nor parent and therefore deserve a truth deeper than those, in the waiting room of Dr. Hoover’s psychiatric offices.  Usually the Doctor’s schedule was laid out in such a way as to prevent his patients from meeting, but Margaret was running late and Steven was running early and both of them had the day of their appointment written incorrectly besides.  By the time the receptionist had sorted out the error, Margaret and Steven were a couple.  It was an inauspicious beginning.

But Dr. Hoover was a renegade, a maverick, an experimentalist who everyone ignored because the fringe of some sciences is so close to magic, so close to God, that it really isn’t science anyway.  Not exactly.  His patients came from a variety of occupations, but they all shared the same profession—taking.  Whatever they wanted, they took, in one way or another.  Money, sex, power, lives—they saw what they desired and refused to live without it.

When Dr. Hoover found out that Margaret and Steven were living together, he counseled them both.  He took extensive notes.  He began to write a book, his third, though the first that a publisher had ever gotten excited about.  And he invested in the most expensive, highest spec security system he could find, both for his home and his office.

And then they broke up.

“She keeps talking about desire,” Steven told Dr. Hoover during the first of his sessions after the water had decided not to be air, or whatever it was she said.  “She’s used that word a number of times.”

Dr. Hoover nodded.  Sociopaths and desire went hand in hand.

Steven frowned.  “It isn’t a word she used before, though.  Want, sure, or wish or crave, but not desire.”

Dr. Hoover cleared his throat.  He often did that in a session to get the things he wanted to say out of the way for the things he had to say.  “And when she wished for something, what did you do? What did you say to her?”

“Nothing. I got it for her.  Roses, chocolates, dinners.  I provided.”

“And when you provided her with these things, did her want go away?”

Steven shook his head, and Dr. Hoover took copious notes. The scratch of his pen was alone in the room for a time, and then Steven’s voice joined it.  “They didn’t go away so much as grow.  She wanted flowers, I brought flowers, but the next time it had to be roses, then a bouquet, then rare breeds of exotic flowers, then rosebushes of her own, then a groundskeeper twice a week to care for them.  When he decided the roses needed blood and bone in the soil, I donated three liters and four toes.”

Dr. Hoover didn’t say anything.  He knew where the critical moments where, the ones that later students and critics of his work would point to and say ‘See?  Just here?  That is where a lesser man would have interfered.’

Steven sipped his water and made a face.  “Is this filtered?”

“Yes.”

He set the glass down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.  “She was a hole, a beast, a god.  Everything I brought her was good enough—that time—but always her desire grew.  Christ, you’ve got me talking like her, now.  Desire.”

Dr. Hoover set his notebook down on his desk and, in the same motion, nudged his top-drawer open a couple of inches.  He’d purchased the handgun he kept inside solely for its stopping power.  The couple of times he’d fired it on the range he’d punched holes in the target he could have stuck his head through.  “It appears our time is up for today.”

Steven nodded and stood up, smoothing the wrinkles from his suit.  “Thank you, Doctor.”

***

Margaret missed her first session after the break-up.  And her second.  She ignored the calls Dr. Hoover had his secretary make, and didn’t answer the phone until it was his voice on the answering machine.

“Has he started his sessions, yet?” she said when she picked up the phone.

“Margaret, my dear, how have you been?”

“Has he?”

Dr. Hoover didn’t slow down, not one little bit.  He was a man of standing in the field, and knew what to expect.  “Now, you know I can’t answer that.  All of my patients may come to me at a time of their choosing, and know that what they say and when they say it are not a matter of public record.”

Margaret hung up the phone.

***

He sent her a love story he’d written in his own blood.  It had taken him a week to modify the inkjet, but the way his dried words made the paper stiff had made it worth the time and effort

***

She sent him a newspaper.  The man who had written and sung the song that was playing when they’d had their first kiss was dead.  He’d been made to carve an apology for writing “such a sappy song for losers” into his flesh, and then skinned.  The skin was found hanging on the singer’s clothesline to dry.

***

He sent her seven zip-locked baggies.  The last breaths of cancer victims, the note told her, that he had personally collected.  He’d made every one of them whisper her name at the last.

***

She left a dozen dog collars on his welcome mat.  Some of them were frayed, and all of them were bloody, knotted and twisted together.  Bits of fur and strips of red, raw flesh clung to the metal buckles. 

“Someone is desperately looking for each of these, Steven, but no one is looking for you,” the note read.  “Nor will they ever.”

***

When her doorbell rang it was the mailman, as it had been through all of these exchanges. Margaret signed for the package and brought it inside.  There was a card taped to the front next to her address.  Steven’s handwriting was immediately recognizable, but when she opened the card it was someone else who had actually written the note.  Her mother’s rich, flowery script.

“I love you,” the card said, “more and deeper than I know how to say in words.  I love you more than anyone ever has.  More than your worthless mother ever could.”

Inside the box, her mother’s hands sat white and bloodless amidst the bubble wrap, tapered fingers intertwined as if in prayer.

***

Back and forth it went, and the neutral ground of Dr. Hoover’s office took on even more significance.  Neither of them missed an appointment, now, and his notes and the tapes of their sessions piled up.  His editor loved what he’d sent her so far, and was clamoring for more.  Margaret said she was finally willing to reconcile, or at least to talk.  Steven felt as if he’d involved the mailman too much, or not enough, but was overjoyed at the chance to patch things up.

***

Dr. Hoover stopped sending pages to the editor.

***

Margaret returned on a Thursday afternoon.  The furniture was new, and fresh color on the walls was very much to her liking.  She set her shopping bags down in the kitchen and found Steven and the mailman in the lounge.  Their feature wall had always been white as bone, but now Steven held a gun on the mailman who was painting more of his own colors across the stark surface.  When he was finished, Steven pulled the trigger and added a final splash.

Margaret clapped her hands in delight.  “I love it” she said, and meant it.  She went back into the kitchen, rifled through the bags, and came back with her gift to Steven.

“I pronounce you both cured,” she said, her voice muffle behind Dr. Hoover’s face.  “Now never fight again.”

END