A Latecomer’s Guide to Release by Greg Golley

Release is real. These days there aren’t many left who’ll deny that. We’ve all had our glimpses. Maybe you caught someone’s eye at a bus stop in the rain, and when they smiled back it was like something heavy tearing loose inside you. You felt the future drain away through your fingertips. Not your future, the future.

In fact, release-heads are all around us. In every neighborhood of every city, living in houses and apartments much like your own. You probably pass one on the street every day, or in the hallway at work. Only for them, the profit motive is no longer in play. Even the desire for food disappears. Not the need, but the desire. They are pure souls, so to speak.

And yet this is no terrorist program, despite everything the Release Task Force tells us. It has nothing to do with drugs either, as far as I’ve seen. It’s simply an adjustment of perception, a change of heart.

You might come home one day to learn that your sixth-grade kid refuses to eat food anymore, or that your husband has just walked out on his job and he’s sitting on the grass in the backyard in his underpants, staring into the flower garden with a spooky, penetrating expression. Or maybe your daughter, a straight-A student, hands you a failing report card and won’t even deign to discuss it, but only excuses herself to go play her cello on the balcony in the snow with a distant smile on her lips. I’m taking these details from real cases. I’ve done the work. Not because I wanted to stop it, but because I wanted to understand.

I’m a social worker at University Family Therapy. I specialize in adolescent eating and mood disorders. A few years ago, a colleague and I published an article on what we called Maladaptive Tranquility Syndrome or MTS. The article didn’t get much attention at the time. And the designation “MTS” obviously never caught on. In fact, my co-author resigned his position shortly after we published to go raise mushrooms somewhere downstate – something he’d always wanted to do, apparently.  

The truth is, I forgot all about that article until I was approached last spring at a conference in Toronto by an RTF field agent, a young woman who introduced herself simply as “Vanessa.” Vanessa invited me to coffee at the hotel where I was staying. “I’ve long admired your work,” she told me when we sat down. But she was frowning when she said it, and she seemed to search my eyes for signs that her admiration was perhaps a mistake. “The department considers you to be one of the top experts in pediatric social disruption.” We had a window table overlooking the lake, and the way Vanessa was staring at me, the situation felt like a cross between a first date and a police interrogation.

“Me? That doesn’t sound right.” I was flustered. I tried to take a sip of water and dribbled a little down my chin.

“You seem surprised.”

“Well, I…” I wiped my chin with a paper napkin. “I’ve only published the one article. And that was two years ago. I’m really just a working therapist…”

“Mr. Donavan. Jack. Do you mind if I call you Jack?”

“Okay.”

“Forgive my bluntness, but you’re in a position to save hundreds, maybe thousands of American lives.”

I stared back at Vanessa, trying to keep my eyes focused on hers. Which wasn’t that easy, frankly. She was wearing a low-cut blouse that really pushed the boundaries of propriety. “Maybe you meant to meet with some other Donavan. I work at University Family Therapy? In Chicago?”

“We’re well acquainted with your credentials, Jack. There’s no need to be coy. As you must be aware, there’s an epidemic afoot. People – children, many of them – who are poised to undermine just about everything we hold dear.”

I shifted in my seat. Vanessa wore a gold pendant that sparkled and danced over the freckled shoreline of her chest. But what really intrigued me was a tear-shaped birthmark on her collar bone about the size of a half dollar. Let me be clear, I’m a married man and I’ve never been one to stray. But it was all I could do to keep from staring at that burgundy teardrop. “Well, of course I know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Do you?”

“I have some idea, sure. You’re talking about street ghosts, floaters. You’re talking about release-heads.”

“If you like,” she said coolly. “It’s our understanding your experience is rather extensive on the subject.”

“Well, I’ve never treated one, if that’s what you mean.” This wasn’t strictly true, of course. I’d worked with people in transition and kept extensive notes on their journeys. But in my profession, you learn to be pretty cagey about sharing information. It wasn’t just patients, either. Some of my colleagues, people I’d worked alongside for years, had been released almost overnight. It had caused no end of staffing problems. I poured cream into my coffee, trying to buy time. “But I suppose I might have one or two insights regarding the phenomenon…”

Vanessa smiled, humoring me. She now confided that she was working on an RTF operation, code-named “Mother-May-I.” “We believe it’s essential to focus on the youth, to gather data about the earliest stages of the disorder. I think… personally I think we have about six months before total social collapse. If we don’t act now – act decisively – by next Christmas you and I will be living in the Dark Ages.”

“Some historians prefer the term ‘Age of Faith,’” I said. “At least that’s what I heard on a podcast the other day…”

“This isn’t a joke, Mr. Donavan. This is a deadly disease we’re talking about.” She shook her head with an air of exhaustion. “At first, we suspected a drug was at the bottom of it. But it isn’t just physical pain these people are immune to. In effect, they’re free of all known vulnerabilities. You can torture a man’s child in front of him and he won’t budge. I know. I’ve watched it myself. They’re monsters, Mr. Donavan. Completely indifferent to normal human emotion.”

“The condition isn’t what it seems,” I said. I was trying to picture Vanessa standing by with a notepad while some renunciant’s child was being tortured. This actually wasn’t all that hard to picture. What I had trouble imagining was her birthmark in a setting like that. Everyone has something, some tiny part of them that’s incorruptible. That tear-shaped birthmark was Vanessa’s. “It isn’t that release-heads don’t love,” I told her. “They simply love without attachment.”

“Bullshit!” she said. “Excuse me. But now you’re just spouting propaganda. I didn’t expect that from you.”

“Look, if you want to subpoena my files, I’m sure you’ll find a way. But I’ll happily write up a report on all my findings.”

“Does this mean you’re interested in safeguarding American lives?”

“Sure, okay,” I said. “But I’ll only report the truth. And no names. Patients’ identities remain confidential. Otherwise, I can’t help you.”

“We’re not interested in individuals, Jack. And we would never ask you to compromise your professional principles. We only want to gain some understanding of the phenomenon. In the abstract. We believe you’re just the person to help us.”

I admit I was flattered. Who wouldn’t be? Feeling useful to one’s community satisfies an essential human need. And Vanessa really was a persuasive person, if you could get past the horror show of her character. So yes, I agreed to help. I began work on the report right away. Even on the plane home, I was making an outline, remembering cases to cite, organizing symptoms into a “hierarchy of liberation.” I had to work mostly from memory, of course, and the effort occupied me throughout the flight. There’s nothing that nourishes and calms me like a good job of work.

By the time we landed in Chicago, I knew exactly how I was going to approach the project and felt pretty good about it. From the window of my Uber I looked out at the city, a passing dream of railyards and prairie skies. A recent rainstorm had washed everything clean and even the weeds looked vibrant poking up through the broken pavement. Soon we were heading south on Du Sable Lake Shore Drive, past the sign that says YOU SHALL BE RELEASED, past the tent city near of 31^st Street Bridge and the crumbling parapets of the Powhattan apartments.

This was eight months ago now, but already things had begun to change. Many of the storefronts were abandoned, the restaurants closed. People just weren’t shopping or dining out like they used to. Instead they spent their time “floating,” moving around on the streets with no apparent purpose. Day and night you could see them wandering, hear their strange falsetto singing in the distance. They gathered in parks. They perched like starving crows on walls and on the edges of public fountains. They reclined on private lawns.

In fact, when the driver let me out in front of my townhouse there was a pair of advanced cases resting on my own tiny front lawn, an emaciated man and his lank-haired girlfriend. “Hey!” I shouted. “Private property!” That’s all it took to send the couple spidering down the sidewalk. As I watched them scurry around the corner, I noticed how many of my neighbors’ garbage bins had not been put away, even though it had been two days since pickup. The yards on either side of mine were looking pretty seedy, too.

I stood next to my carry-on bag, shaking my head at this state of affairs. That’s when I spotted my wife Lydia coming up the street. She was in shorts and a tank top, clutching a handful of dandelions in her fist. She waved at me from half a block away, and as she got closer I saw that she was barefoot. Understand, I’m talking about a professional woman here, a respected physician in the University Medical Center’s dermatology department.

“Lydia?” I said, squinting at her.

“Hiya,” she said. “I picked these for you.” Lydia offered up the weeds as though they were the rarest of orchids.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of ‘em around.” I gestured toward our neighbor’s parkway, a strip of wasteland spangled with yellow flowers and nodding seed heads.  

“I know. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Why aren’t you at work?” Wednesdays are usually one of Lydia’s long days.

“Cancelled all my clinic appointments.”

I regarded her carefully. “Are you sick, sweetheart?”

Lydia looked up, surprised. “Oh! I don’t think so.”

Of course, I suspected what was going on. I simply didn’t want to face it. Not yet. I wanted to tell her about my new government assignment, to discuss my report with her over dinner and a glass of wine. I wanted to hear about her work, too. All the gossip. Or even just the silly details of her day. In other words, I wanted the dream to continue. I didn’t want to wake up.

“I feel fine,” Lydia said. She smiled wistfully at the contents of an overturned garbage bin. “I feel just fine.”

But that night at dinner, she only picked at her food and didn’t touch her wine at all. Instead, she studied my eyes in the candlelight and asked me if I remembered what Charlie’s face looked like the week he died. Charlie’s our son, our only child. He died of leukemia when he was eleven. He would have been twenty-one last December.

“I remember,” I said. Although I didn’t precisely remember. The truth is, I could recall very little about that week, only that when it was all over, I wasn’t able to laugh anymore.

Lydia stared down at her wineglass. “I think I know what he was feeling,” she said. “That clarity.”

“Nonsense!” I told her. “You’re just hungry. You haven’t even touched your pasta.”

“Oh, but Jack. Everything’s so lovely, really. In the end.”

I’d heard this kind of talk before, recognized it from my patients and their families. I knew what was coming. “You just need a good night’s sleep,” I suggested desperately. “And some Advil.”

Lydia did take the Advil I gave her that night. But I believe those pills were the last nourishment she ever accepted from my hand. Six weeks later she was gone. In a crescendo of joy and agony, she just floated away. And so did my report on the “The Four Signs of Release: Its Treatment and Prevention.” I sort of lost interest in the project after tracking the stages of Lydia’s transition.

I never heard from Vanessa again either. Or any other RTF official, for that matter. Which is just as well, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if the meeting in Toronto ever really took place, or if it was all a dream. All I have now to keep me busy is this newsletter, this open appeal to the unreleased. Latecomers like me. Sleepers, waiting to wake up.

Sometimes when I’m writing, I think about all the people who’ve already let go. Family and friends. Colleagues and neighbors. I even think about Vanessa with her wine-dark birthmark, that tear-shaped stain etched onto her breast. The memory of it touches me still. To think that that teardrop had marked her since the day she was born, since the time she was a little baby.

Greg Golley

Image- Pixabay.com – white fluffy clouds in a blue sky.