The Birth of a Swan
by J.A. Bennett
It was 3:55. One more appointment and, finally, she would be done for the afternoon.
Doris pulled open her desk drawer and took out the bottle of ibuprofen that was tucked neatly into one corner alongside her nail clippers and an ancient tin of peppermint breath mints. The client that had just left her office had spoken for the entire hour with a nasally intonation that left Doris cringing from the beginnings of a migraine. With a sigh, she closed her eyes as she downed one tiny pink pill with a swig from her water bottle. Then, she chased it with a few quick spoonfuls of vanilla yogurt; a power snack, fuel to get her through the next session.
It was 3:57.
She reached over to turn on her computer monitor and clicked over to email, but there were no new pressing messages to read through. Instead, she glanced at the local news site; the mayor was running for re-election, a student group had held a candlelight vigil for the victim of a recent shooting, and the tropical storm brewing off the coast was due to hit the city within the next few hours. She mentally patted herself on the back for thinking to bring her umbrella with her that morning, just in case.
It was 3:58.
The thin manila file folder for her next patient lay to her left. She slid it towards her across the smooth, orderly surface of her desk, and opened it.
Name: Benjamin Choi. Age: 18. He was a pre-med freshman at Stanford, fast tracked to graduate in less than three years. His father had made the appointment. Ben had found himself a girlfriend and the relationship was effecting school. Doris tucked a stray strand of hair back into the neat twist perched on the back her head, and tugged at her earlobe as she quickly scanned over the father’s written statement of concerns.
It was 4:01. The office door opened. Jan, her assistant, ushered the boy inside and steered him towards a chair.
He looked more like he was fifteen or sixteen. His slender frame was bent and buried under a baggy university sweat shirt and faded blue jeans. Glossy jet black hair stuck up in awkward spiky bunches around his head, as if he’d picked up a bit too much static friction dragging his feet over the carpet on his way inside. Settled on the bridge of his nose was a pair of thick, black framed glasses.
He was classifiable. The school’s smartest kid. The vice-president of the math club. The well-mannered, quiet, invisible one - a perfect balance of average designed to disappear into the crowd. To not stand out. Benjamin Choi fit neatly into the categorical box she’d created for him in her well organized mind.
Nervously, he slouched into one of the cushioned armchairs across from her desk. He ran his palms down the length of his thighs, wiping away a layer of sweat as he looked around her office.
“Hello Ben,” Doris began.
“Hey,” he murmured with a small nod, glancing at her face for less than a second before looking away. He didn’t meet her eyes, and instead, bit at the dry, chapped skin of his lower lip.
“Do you know why you’re here today?”
“Yeah … my Dad says I’m ‘engaging in self-destructive behavior’.” He used his fingers to motion the quotation marks, exhibiting the first sign of defensiveness he’d betrayed so far. The young ones were always like that. They never wanted to come. She figured they viewed it somewhat similarly to being called into the principal’s office, and, if she was honest about it, she couldn’t really blame them.
“Is that what you think?”
“No ... no, I don’t think that at all.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you think?”
Ben gripped the armrests of his chair as if they were a life line and he was in danger of being swept away. He drew in a deep breath, letting it out in a noisy, frustrated sigh as he said, “He just doesn’t understand.”
“What doesn’t he understand?”
“How I feel. What I’m going through. He sees life in a different way than I do. I mean, I get it and all. He grew up in a small village in South Korea and my grandparents were really poor. He just wants me to be able to take care of myself and get a good education so I can have a good life. He wants me to be strong, like my older brothers.”
“Your brothers graduated?”
“Well, one’s in med school and the other is finishing his residency with UCSF Medical Center.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Yeah, he wanted us all to be doctors.”
“But you don’t want to …”
“No. He’s pissed off at me because I applied to change my major to English. He thinks it was just because of Em. I guess she was part of it, but that’s not the only reason.”
Doris nodded, “Tell me about Em.”
Ben looked away and licked his lips. “Em was special ... she wanted to be a writer. She was really shy. She didn’t know how pretty she was,” his voice lowered to a throaty whisper.
Doris leaned forward and tilted her head to the side, subtly sending him a message with her gestures that she was sympathetic and listening. “How did you meet her?”
His expression tightened. He looked up and studied Doris’s face for a moment before answering. “She was a student with me at Stanford,” he finally began. “We met in the math tutoring lab. She came in one day needing help with her statistics homework. I worked there part time, so I sat with her for about an hour doing problems. She was going to major in English, creative writing. So math wasn’t really her thing. She had a hard time with it. Had a hard time focusing on it. When someone would come into the room, she’d say things like, ‘ look at that guy, Ben, what do you think he did last night?’ and we’d make up stories for each other, like about the date the guy went on the night before, or the party he’d been to. Stuff like that. We didn’t get much work done once she started talking, but I didn’t mind. It meant she’d have to come back the next day, right? And she did. She came back every day and eventually we starting hanging out together.”
“You started dating?”
“Not exactly that at first. We started to hang out, playing video games or just talking in the dorm. Sometimes, we’d make instant coffee and argue over who was cooler, Drizzt or Richard Rahl. She always picked Drizzt.”
“Drizzt?” Doris questioned.
“Fictional characters from books we’d read. We were both big fans of fantasy. I’ve always loved to read, but until I met Em, I never really gave much thought to writing. But she wrote all the time. She had stacks of these notebooks that she took everywhere with her, and whenever she’d see something or think of something, she’d write it down. I teased her about it at first, but she just gave me a blank one and dared me to write something, taunted me that I couldn’t do it. That was when it happened.”
“What was that?”
“Everything changed. It was like falling off a cliff, but at the same time discovering that you weren’t really falling because you, actually, could fly. I stayed up all night that night, writing and writing … I never knew that about myself, you know? I never knew that I could do that. I told Em the next day, and she just smiled. But then she kissed me. It was the first time we’d touched like that, it was even … well, it was the first time I’d kissed anyone. Now that I think about it, everything happened in that space of, like, a day … almost two. But still, it all happened so fast. We spent that night together. Afterwards, we talked and talked, about plans, about meeting each other’s parents. About where we wanted to live when we got married.”
“Oh my, you two were talking about marriage already?”
“I don’t know, maybe it does seem strange, but it didn’t feel that way then. We were perfectly in sync in that moment. It was a perfect moment. Everything was so clear. So full of possibility. And then … he ripped it all away.”
“What do you mean? Who ripped it away?”
“We were leaving my dorm the next morning to go out for breakfast, but I’d left my cell in my room, so I ran to go get it. She waited in the courtyard. I was walking towards her, she saw me and smiled … took a step towards me. She was wearing this white shirt, you know, one of those loose cotton ones, with lace on the edges. The old fashioned ones that girls like. Her hair caught in the breeze. It lifted around her, like a scene right out of a movie. The clock tower was chiming. It was nine o’clock. And Em, she sailed forward, towards me, gliding and graceful, like a swan.”
Ben closed his eyes, “I can still see it … she was so beautiful.” He paused. The buzz of the electricity racing through the walls suddenly seemed deafening. Doris waited for him to continue.
“As her foot touched the pavement, her knee buckled. She was still smiling. My first thought was that she’d tripped. I think I even laughed. How could she look so graceful one second then fall like that? They told me later it was a gunshot that hit her head. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember hearing any sound, except the chiming. I just thought she fell and hit her head. Why … why else would there be all that blood …”
“She was shot?” Doris had straightened in her chair. She blinked at him, sure she’d heard him incorrectly, but still, a knot began to form in the pit of her stomach. She looked over at her computer monitor. The knot began to swell into a wave of nausea. “The shooting … Emily Harper was the name of the student who was killed …” She scrolled down to the picture of the crowd gathered for the shooting victim’s candlelight vigil. In the front row, his face frozen in shock and misery, stood Benjamin Choi.
“That bastard hit five people. Em was the only one he actually managed to kill,” Ben continued. “He stole her away before we even had a chance. Before she even had a chance - to live her life. And now … there’s nothing I can do for her now. All I can do is remember. All I can do is write for her, write stories that would make her smile. Write the stories she wanted to write.” His voice grew desperate and angry, “That guy … he’s going to go to prison. I can’t even kill him, you know? I can’t hunt him down and tear him apart the way I dream about doing every single night. But, in my stories, I can destroy him over and over. Kill him … over and over and over ... I can lay his ugly face onto every demon I manufacture and send him straight to hell. Like THAT I can make him pay for what he did. And THAT, is exactly what I intend to do.”
Ben’s index finger thumped, like the beating of a war drum, against the surface of her desk as he spoke. His eyes were finally fixed onto her own.
Doris gaped back at him, stunned and speechless. She blinked.
Ben crumpled, burying his face in his hands and let out a deep, throaty chuckle. “Maybe I am crazy.”
Doris had been side-swiped. For the first time in her career, she didn’t know what to say. “You loved her,” she finally managed.
Ben lifted his head and gazed, glassy eyed, into Doris’s face. The shaking began in the center of his chest and spread outwards, a visible ripple, to his shoulders, his arms, ending finally with a sharp twisting of his face and trembling of his lips. The air he held in his chest burst outward in one great, soul wrenching cry. He ripped off his glasses.
Then, he began to sob silently. His face turned red from the strain. Tears streamed from his eyes. Mucus flowed from his nose. Saliva wetted his lips. Benjamin Choi was coming apart at the seams.
Doris made her way around the desk with a box of tissue. She knelt down beside him, gently patting his shoulder and rubbing small, gentle circles onto his back as she waited for him to finish. Outside, beyond the thick, darkened glass of her office’s floor length window, the rain began to fall, as if it had been holding its breath, listening, and now wept tears of sympathy.
When he’d finally calmed, he said to her, “My grandmother lives with us. Whenever he thinks I’m being lazy, my father reminds me about how hard she worked in the fields to provide a better life for her children, to send them to school, and how we had to grow to be strong so her struggle and suffering wouldn’t be wasted. I understand what he means, what he is afraid of, you know? When he was growing up, they never knew if there would be enough food, just the concept of being able to sit and eat dinner was so precious. But I can’t live that way. I can’t sacrifice my life to that fear. If I give in now, I’ll never have a chance. This is why I have to make him see it now. This is why I’m changing my major. It’s better if he accepts it now. I won’t follow in my brother’s footsteps. I can’t … I just can’t be that person …”
Ben had grown still, contemplative. His brow furrowed and his eyes darkened with the clarity of sorrowful determination. The tears were gone, only the stains on his cheeks remained to prove they’d ever been shed. As Doris watched him, she realized that she was no longer looking at the boy she thought she’d seen enter her office. Sitting before her, instead, was a deviation, an impossibly beautiful and unique anomaly. She’d had no idea, and she felt ashamed.
Inspiration suddenly hit. She reached into her lower desk drawer and pulled out a leather bound notebook, a past Christmas gift she’d deemed too precious to waste with her own dreary daily notations.
She placed it onto his lap. He ran his fingertips over the smooth cover, as if relishing it, and then looked up at her with questioning eyes. A soft smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
“You know what to do,” was all she told him.
Ben nodded, then stood and turned towards the office door. Before stepping away, he paused, then turned back and met her gaze. “Thank you,” he said. “I haven’t had anyone to talk to about all of this. It really helped. Thank you.” Then he turned and walked away. Doris watched him leave. The nervous, awkward boy who’d entered her office had been abandoned in the armchair. In his place, a young man, tall and proudly purposeful, glided away, like a swan born before her eyes.
