Dr. Walter Eherslander entered the building on East 69th Street where he had his clinic. He felt his chest tightening. He waited restlessly for the elevator. The depression he had awoken with would not leave him till evening. Then it would lift slightly to enable him to breathe freely. The several shots of whisky on the way home would do the rest. He had always suffered from these morning depressions. And he knew, as a psychiatrist and from his patients, that mornings are the worst for depression. But of late his depression would not leave him during the day as well. Besides, it was early spring and the sun was shining, the weather crispy; the usual time for the chronically depressed to take their own life.
Usually, such depressives endure the interminable winter, the dark clouds, the snow and the pelting rain, the half-lit short afternoons. Only when life seems to spring everywhere do they choose to snap the cord. 'Spring sensitivity' one researcher called it. Was Waiter's depression clinical, or was he just very sad? He entertained serious doubts. He tried to scrutinize himself objectively as if he were one of his patients. The dark moods, the sluggishness, the lack of interest, the emptiness of feeling, the occasional desire to cry and above all the crushing feeling of being closed in with no way out. All these symptoms were there, alternating from time to time with sudden restlessness and a great urge to do something, to extricate himself from the crushing feeling of helplessness. This mood would last two or three days at most and then gloom would envelope Waiter again. And this alternation of conflicting moods was wearing at him so much that he would, at times, sleep twelve hours at a stretch and then wake up as tired as ever. His depression must be clinical.
However, in quiet moments, when his nerves had been steadied by double whiskies and he temporarily ceased loathing ...