David Hering 

---

The Crying Suite

Lachrynoma: cancer of the tears. I was sent down to a stone building
behind the hospital, where the man at the desk handed me my catcher
and led me to a panelled room. They were using the old chapel as a ward.
Twenty beds, ten each side, stretched back along the nave. A defibrillator
lay on the deconsecrated altar. Eight of the beds were full. It was not yet
crying time, and the other patients were sleeping or gazing up at the high
windows. A couple of men stared intently towards me, but it was clear
from the aimlessness of their gaze that they were blind. One bed, mine,
had screens placed around it. Once I was supine, an assistant showed me
how to attach the catcher to my face. It clipped around like a miniature
brassiere, with two small pockets of bandage resting under my eyes. Tell
me when it needs changing, he said, and wandered away.
………The sun looked through the window behind my head, leaving a curl of
light on the wood opposite, and my neighbour’s voice came into my orbit.
His three months were almost up. He’d sustained only a mild blue in the
left eye, but the right had blown out into a flat red. If I cross them I can
get purple, he joked with a tight jaw. It was all men in here. They had a
hell of a go with me at crying time, he said, took them weeks. I probably
would have been out earlier. That’s stoicism for you, pal. He laughed, but
there was nothing inside of it. The catcher was irritating me, so I applied
some of the moisturiser provided to the skin under my eyes. So you see,
the consultant had said, the object is to drain them, the ducts. But the
more we know, the more we realise that we can’t use physical instruments.
I was staring at his desk with its porcelain figurine, its scuffed head made
from an old golf ball. In fact it turns out that physically draining the ducts
seems to, well, to provoke it. So in that sense we need to leave a lot of this
up to you.
………The man by the door started howling. Not everyone looked around.
He was sat upright, a look of joy on his weeping face. His tears were
streaming down into the catcher and it was overflowing, little cloth buckets
tipping fountain water. The extremity of pain and ecstasy worked the area
around his eyes as they creased.
………I’m getting out, I’m getting out, fuck you, I’m getting out.
………My neighbour looked over smiling and made the universal twisting-
finger-at-the-temple signal to confirm, in case I wished it known, that this
one was not right in the head. He goes independent of regulations, he
said, and he’s very pleased with himself. People think they know what’s
good for them, don’t they, pal? The howler was lurching forward, heaving.
I felt that natural obligation to offer him comfort, to see if he was alright,
even though I knew why he was crying. I rose from bed and walked
barefoot across to him, asked him if he was ok. He looked up at me, his
face scoured.
………Don’t you fucking stop me, he hissed, maniacal, before turning away
and breaking down.

……..……..……..……..……..……..……..***

Crying time took place before our evening meal. It was deliberately
arranged at the low tide of salts, sugars and energy to provoke the optimum
response. The nurse came around with our files, and I looked at what
the others were doing. You chose your own materials and brought them
with you on admission. Some files contained tapes or CDs; others held
books of poetry or love letters. Nurses angled screens around us. They
had discovered early on that privacy was most conducive to success given
that people, especially men, tend not to cry in direct sight of strangers. My
file consisted entirely of photographs. The process was highly ceremonial.
………After preparations were complete the staff left the room and retired to a
makeshift tent in the lobby where, it was indicated, they could be neither
seen nor heard. I could hear my roommates wrestling with the headphones
and cables of music devices, the better to shut out the sounds of others.
It was hard to cry at first in spite of, or maybe because of, the noises I
heard around me. Some of these men were seasoned weepers now, and I
felt underprepared. Crying failed, it seemed, when it became competitive.
Eventually by scanning the photos I managed to well up a little. It was due
more to the desperation of the situation than of any emotion the photos
had provoked, but as my consultant had said, in a phrase he was obviously
used to repeating, a tear is a tear.
After they collected the catchers and the nurse gave me a condescending
and heavily diagrammed leaflet on how to cry better, there was a bone-deep
silence in the ward broken only by the squeaking of the screens being
removed. I could tell who had been here longest by how comfortable they
were looking around. Faces were streaked and knuckled red, recomposing
but bearing a trace of their brokenness in the manner of an accidentally
crumpled piece of paper. There was a sense of nervous catharsis, as if the
air had been somehow charged or altered by the tears’ ingredients, which
perhaps it had; they were not yet clear on the possibilities of contagion, as
on the question of cause. The nurses, wearing goggles and hoods in case
of contamination, were making the rounds of some of the veterans. I
kept hearing the same question again and again. Any lightening?
………The veterans of the ward bore the posture of someone resident in
bed for so long that it had become a prosthesis, a secondary spine. In
their faces I saw a kind of beatification, the countenances of men who
had been told all their lives to stop crying and who were now forced to
emote on pain of blindness. I kept remembering a photograph I had seen
in a book once, so long ago I couldn’t remember where, or whether it was
an image of the event itself or a re-enactment. It was a monk, robed and
lotused, sitting in a forest with his leg chewed off. He had felt the animal
approach, he said, had heard it sniff around in hunger, begin to lick and
then to chew. All the while he’d been in such a state of nirvanic abstraction
that the wolf ’s mouth appeared to him to be consuming a body at some
distance. He could feel the tendons snapping between the animal’s jaws,
the skin rupturing as the creature dragged its teeth along it, scoring it like
a piece of foil. It had, he said, simply not occurred to him to be concerned
about the wolf. When he was discovered, the leg was not gangrenous but
had instead healed over miraculously. In the photograph the monk, or the
man playing the monk, stared and smiled cleanly at the camera purged of
his desire and his leg. These men, long-termers, had the same charmed
expression.

……..……..……..……..……..……..……..***

Dispersed Light therapy involved plastic screens and a black apparatus
resembling a gun. It is hard to stare down the barrel of something that
looks like a weapon. The analysis of my tears had indicated the need to
use what they referred to as an advanced setting. All doctors are excellent
at being surprised at your condition. There was a noise of machinery
that appeared unconnected to anything. Tell me what colour you see,
the masked operator asked, pointing the laser into my eye. The light hit
my retina and dispersed outward like liquid pouring into a glass, and the
red dissolved into a deep turquoise. She held out a laminated card with a
spectrum of dots of different shades and asked me to point at the colour
I could see. The dots advanced according to severity, and the turquoise dot
was located around one third of the way along the line. In the way that one
looks at gruesome photos of infections or injuries to reassure oneself that
things aren’t all that bad, I drew some comfort from my distance from the
end of the chart. The final dot was not a discernible colour but instead
a circle of grey cross-hatched lines. I asked the doctor what this meant.
Blindness and static, she said; the worst cases get progressively redder and
darker, which means that the disease has colonised the eye. After that, I
was given to understand that the optic nerve shrugs and gives up, but not
before degenerating to a constant field of moving static, something akin
to a detuned analogue television. She explained, breezily as medics do, that
the static stage is incurable. I was then fitted with a visor, a curved piece
of transparent silicone that turned everything black and white. She rotated
her chair and revealed a jewelled silver mask, a medieval-looking thing,
that she placed over my head and neck.
The deeper colours that you’re about to see will hurt, she said, and with
her right hand began to turn a metal wheel.

……..……..……..……..……..……..……....***

Crying time became easier as the weeks drew on. I found a way to
convince myself that I was upset, a sort of sadness at a second remove.
It did bring tears, often quite readily. The nurses were impressed, and I
began to feel happy to oblige them. There was a certain prostration to this
therapy that induced a desire to please, to show Mummy and Daddy that
you have taken all your little pills in the right order, that you have tried
your best and that there is nothing wrong with showing your emotions,
that in fact you should be rewarded for being emotionally honest with
yourself and others. Some of the men occasionally requested that their
screens be taken away during crying time, seeming to draw strength from
the public dimension of their grief. It was hard to tell from the outside
if they had tapped into a source of genuine sadness or whether they had
simply become extremely good, even ambitious, at performing it. Either
way the results and, crucially, the praise was the same. They had to cry in
order to leave, and for some this was enough to induce pragmatism. The
way I see it, said one man I met on the way back from the bathroom, it
doesn’t matter if you’re really sad because your body doesn’t know. A tear
is a tear, as they say. He winked conspiratorially, and as he did so I could
see that his eyes were wet.
………I was woken one night by screaming. The howler by the door was
sitting upright holding something out in his hands. The nurses ran in and
turned on the light, recoiling when they saw his face. The sheets were red.
Tweezers. He had been working on his tear ducts in the dark. I could see
the blood running down from his eyes. His shrieking slipped into laughter,
then tears, then back to pain. There was a mark above his bed, a shadow
where some religious furniture had once been attached to the wood. They
wheeled him out and his cries faded, taking on the acoustics of the outside.

……..……..……..……..……..……..……..***

A red circle had settled over my vision, which was not good news. My
consultant, leaning back on the pulpit, suggested that we try Scattered
Grid therapy. It’s experimental, he said, and involves something we call
Limbic Stimulation. I was given a leaflet. He warned me gently that for a
short time after the treatment I may not be able to put names to familiar
objects, and that I shouldn’t worry if the photographs in my crying file
seemed temporarily filled with strangers. Two porters entered, and I
was propped up and wheeled out through an expensive-looking garden
accessible only to the private patients. The porters left me in the garden,
and I found myself, uncanny, bedded among the flowers and notices of
memorial and sponsorship. I was there for so long and the temperature
was so unseasonably warm that I began to fantasize that this itself was
part of the therapy, that the garden was in fact a projection and the three
conifers lined up in front of me were my consultant and his assistants in
digital disguise. I was semi-right; my consultant entered noiselessly into
the garden from a concealed door, wearing what looked like a chainmail
hood and mask for what he explained was his own protection, and told
me that the treatment was about to begin. Someone unseen approached
from behind the bed and I was injected in my temple with a blue liquid –
excruciatingly painful – and presently the garden began to rearrange itself.
Blossoms smeared into a purple wash, melding with the air around their
edges. A robin perched on a branch shared its being with the wood. A
cloud dipped imperceptibly into my vision, the earth and sky tessellating.
I began to feel undulating motion and the siderails of the bed formed an
arch over my prone body. Words appeared on objects in the garden, at first
corresponding and then finely rearranging and abstracting into something
else. Each word contained an audible echo.

Tree – Tree

……….Robin – Robin

………………………………Conifer – Conifer

……….Petunia – Petunia

………………v.Rhododendron – Rode a Dendron

Silver Birch – Killed a Birch

……………………………………..Clematis – What is this

Rosehip – Lift your eyes up

……………………..Sweet Pea – Valentine

…………..Robin – Valentine

Sparrow – You will begin to

………………………………………………………………………………….Oak – Drowned

………Conifer – That’s good, keep

Robin – Sparrow

Oak – Ash

………Ash – Ask

Tree – No

Tree – Sorry

Tree – Can we have some more of the

…………………………………………….Tree – It’s alright

………Cloud – Dyed

Bark – Bark

Bark – No, some more

…… Bark – Went under at

……………..Cloud – I thought you were

Tears – Tiers

Tears – Tears

Tears – Tears

Tears – He’s not

Tears – Ok, that’s

Tears – There we go, keep

………..Teyrs – Yes, that’s

………………………………………………Tyrs – They’re really going

……………………………………………………….Trs – New catcher

………………………………………………………………Ts – Ts

…………………………………………………………………….T – T

…………………………………………………………………………T

……..……..……..……..……..……..……....***

They screened It’s A Wonderful Life for us. James Stewart, sepia from the
wood of the wall, talked about angel wings. My catcher was irritating my
face under both eyes – a result of the rawness invoked by Scattered Grid
therapy – but the red circle in my vision had waned and purpled, and the
relief made the film more watchable. Someone at the back was wailing
away. My neighbour, crying, suggested that there might be a distinction
between sad and happy tears, a difference in the chemical consistency,
and he suspected this screening was an experiment. What they’ve done is
trained me, he said. I’ll cry at everything now. I’ve started to worry about
how I’ll control it when I get out, and then the worrying makes me cry.
They tell me it’s good for me, but I’ve lost control of my ducts. He went
quiet again. James Stewart was with his family. There was a cacophony of
‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the image faded: The End. My neighbour was still
talking.
………I heard a man sued them for this after they cured him.

……..……..……..……..……..……..……..***

Some weeks later we were issued with new plastic catchers manufactured
by a private contractor. A representative came in, dressed pointlessly in a
full hazmat suit, said hello to a few of us, and a ceremonial photograph
was taken. I had by now settled into the rhythms of the suite. I read,
watched, cried. I appreciated the purgative dimension of crying time; it
had the same cleansing effect as a long walk in good weather. The plastic
catchers were not helpful because they kept missing the tears. The same
company had provided a small number of video headsets which produced
the digital illusion of an art gallery through which you could walk at your
leisure. Several people could use the headsets at once, but we would all
appear to be alone in the gallery. A secondary device, worn on the finger,
measured our emotional reactions to the artworks. The first image was
the gallery door, presumably to immerse us in the pretence that we were
travelling through a real space. The artworks were clearly chosen to produce
tears. I found myself in a room full of digital Pietas, moving in a circle
around a central sculpture while the gallery walls shifted and updated. A
framed page from a manuscript depicted Mary in deep, rich blue. Christ’s
body, chronologically arranged around the walls, became fuller and more
anatomical as he passed the fifteenth century. I grew interested in the
secondary textures of the digital objects, looking as closely as I could
to find the point of pixilation, where the solid blue of the robe or the
red streak of blood began to detach into strings of ones and zeros. The
sculpture in the centre, Michelangelo, flickered as I moved, one texture
overwriting another in motion. A panel painting of the descent from the
cross, medieval, an inverted T, stood at the end of an adjacent corridor. I
glided digitally to it, watching its edges render. Everyone was crying. Jesus
was long gone. Mary was beyond tears, collapsing towards a memento
mori on the ground. Skulls can’t cry, I thought; they can only smile. I could
feel that my catcher was dry. I tried another room, a solemn block of
Rothkos arranged in progressively deepening shades. I attempted to make
myself upset. I moved my head at what I thought was a sound, and the
Rothkos fractured into digital blocks that took some seconds to rearrange
themselves.
………A discrete grey box of text appeared, floating in front of the paintings.
Goodbye: The Gallery is Closing Now. It glitched. Inexplicably, I wept.

……..……..……..……..……..……..……..***

The circles were a lacy green, feathered at the edges. My consultant,
behind the gun, said my eyes were largely clean. He praised me, explaining
that some patients found it hard to readjust after such a long period of
seclusion; they reported that the world was too much for them. Some
of them were unable to stop crying, or would weep at the slightest
provocation. He recommended dark glasses for the first few weeks.
There was one more thing, he said, a new initiative. All patients who were
discharged were fitted with a small foam rubber catcher under one eye,
attached with a short-life adhesive. Any tears shed would be absorbed by
the material, and I was then to place the catcher in the plastic bag provided
and send it to the hospital for remission testing. I would see other people
around with these things. They were working to make them more discreet.
I rose to leave. You’ve been a good boy, he said.

……..……..……..……..……..……..……..***

It was a day-long evening and the winter light crawled. I took my library
of pills and went for a pointless walk. Being in a bed for months had
slowed my stride to a shuffle. Certain arrangements of sky and colour
would set me off. The glasses didn’t hide the catcher fully; it hung slightly
below the left rim, an artificial beauty spot. A man and a woman came the
other way, and when I glanced up I saw his own rubber mark. He wore
it defiantly and uncovered. As we passed each other it was clear that he
knew. He stared at me with something among pity and scorn. I hid behind
the glasses and looked directly at him; a tear ran down his face into the
rubber and was absorbed there. I didn’t know whether I had provoked
it or if it was involuntary. I felt my own eyes well, either in response or
through an emptying of the duct, automatic now.
      Winter continued to be. My eyes were distorted with tears. Some bird,
a magpie, machine-gunned its call across the branches to a mate. As I
crossed out of sight of the road, it flew across into the periphery of my
vision, streaked down like a watery line, and was gone.

 

David Hering is a writer based in Liverpool, England. His fiction and essays have appeared in 3:AM, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Double Negative, Hyped on Melancholy, The Quietus, and others. He is author of David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (Bloomsbury, 2016). In 2019 he was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize and in 2020 the Northern Book Prize. He is currently working on two novels and a short story collection. He teaches contemporary literature at the University of Liverpool.

 

This story appears in our April/May 2022 issue of The London Magazine. Purchase your copy here. 

 

---

To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.