Department of Veterans Affairs

The Department of Veterans Affairs is part of the narrator’s post-service medical history through a brief, unsuccessful attempt to maintain psychiatric care. Its significance in the account lies not in a broad description of the agency, but in the contrast between seeking help and being unable to re-establish contact.

Psychiatric Care After Zoë’s Departure

Years earlier, after Zoë left, the narrator saw a psychiatrist for veterans. He attended for two months, then missed an appointment because he had gone with Roy to the vehicle-registration office on the West Side and remembered the appointment only half an hour beforehand. He called the veterans’ medical services to cancel, but no one answered, so he left a message.

When he later called to arrange another appointment, no one answered then either. He left several messages and received no return call. By the time he recounted this history, three years had passed, and he and Roy were no longer friends. The episode records a specific break in care: the narrator tried to notify the service and later resume treatment, but the account gives no indication that contact was restored.

A Separate Later Consultation

The narrator subsequently began seeing another doctor, Dr. Kaufmann, at a university hospital. Those consultations were free because the doctor was government-funded to study people like him. The account does not identify this arrangement as a Department of Veterans Affairs service, so it remains distinct from the earlier veterans’ psychiatric care.

The later consultation also differs in form: Dr. Kaufmann asked the narrator to provide numerical ratings of his condition at every hour, day and night, and to record them at home. The narrator did not keep the records as instructed and felt like a criminal. Set beside the earlier unanswered messages, this episode shows that seeking treatment did not itself produce a workable connection, though the text does not attribute either difficulty to a particular policy of the Department.