One Winter's day

a surreal story of a therapist stuck in a room with a patient where the rest of the world disappears

Days blended into weeks, weeks into months, every day Samantha noticed how the sun slowly tilted the world slightly to the left in late afternoons, how the light scattered thinly across the world and illuminated cobwebs in tree branches, how the leaves began to fall and slowly bare trees fractured the white skyline, like running veins on a broken porcelain. It was starting to freeze in the mornings and a certain weight descended upon her, a hardening of sorts. Perhaps it was natural to feel this way as the world slowly hardened with winter. There was a sense of paralysis in the mechanical rotation of things. Office lights would come on with a familiar hum, and the electric button would glow red indicating a waiting client. Her door would swing open and a smile would welcome in yet another suffering soul. In the waiting you always heard a murmur, I wonder if this planet makes a similar murmur to some extraterrestrial listening ear? Murmuring confessions, tears, wanderings fears all contained in this little room, seeping into the carpets and walls, cushions and fabrics. Every object in her office stood witness to these confessions. At times this work had felt to her like an incredible honor, an opportunity to witness pain at it’s purest. To contain the pain had a messianic purpose to it. But lately she felt like a w***e, the familiarity of her clients a strange farce. She did not feel connected to these people, to their pain, to their experience. At times this feeling made her uncomfortable, like she was doing something wrong, but with this hardening that had began with the arrival of winter she found herself strangely aroused by the disconnect. As if it were some sort of an erotic game.  Something sadomasochistic in it’s rigidity.

 

Lately a recurring dream had bothered her sleep. In it, she found herself walking through a dim house, it was supposed to be her own, but she couldn’t find her way in it. The configuration of the rooms had changed, she couldn’t’ find her room, the furniture had been rearranged and there was no one there.  Finally she finds herself on a deserted street, walking up and down it, but not being able to pass through, finally the bus arrives. She gets on the bus and tries to buy a ticket to the center of the city, but the bus driver says: This bus only goes to the graveyard; there are no other roads anymore. Confused, she asks how she can get to the center, the bus driver explains that there no longer is a center, or another place, it’s only this road and it goes to the graveyard. The dream unsettled her; it brought back sad memories, and a sense of loneliness.  In the winter, the world seems to shrink. The cold contains a sense of stricter boundary. There are only predictable ways in which we travel. From point A to point B, no further, no deviation, no meandering Cs or Ds.  In the winter the center disappears, it all becomes linear and double ended. A house to a car, a car, to work, work to car, car, to house, house to car, car to store, store to car, car, to house, house to the kitchen, kitchen to the stove. Tick tock, tick, tock, tick tock, tick tock.

 

On the night of December 21^st, the dream had a different twist, the bus driver says the usual: this bus only goes to the graveyard. She says she’ll go there, he says: you can never get out of here. She wakes up sweating, horrified. She sits up in her bed; her husband’s snoring next to her. She gets up to get a glass of water, but as she walks through the dark hallway, a shiver, cold, horrible terror, comes over her and she cannot take another step. She gets back into bed, parched, but too scared to move. Tears are running from the corners of her eyes, she falls asleep.

 

Very windy on the way to work, it made the car tremble a little. The ocean seemed gray and silent, like some sort of a living soup of ash. It moved slowly, breathing underneath itself. The sky too, gazed down with discontent, dripping down its polluted mix of water and waste. The car was toasty, but the radio reception was always spotty on the road, it crackled some indistinguishable mush of garbled voices and music. It irritated the senses, so she switched it off. She sat on the side of the street, bracing herself for the weather. The office was freezing. 8 people today, she thought, and s**t, she forgot her lunch.  The first patient was 15 minutes late; she made coffee and turned on the space heater.  The heater exuded an odor of burning dust, which made the place feel antiquated. Eventually the light came on and she retrieved her patient. An overweight, middle aged woman, who had been ritually molested by her therapist do gooder dad, a woman who never felt joy in her heart since her father perverted and distorted her world beyond repair, a woman, perpetually alone and barely surviving. Her voice softly wined on vague physical complaints and irrelevancies of her daily depressed existence. Samantha tried hard to not glaze over but a terrible drowsiness came over her as she forced herself to listen. Her mind wandered aimlessly periodically tuning into her patients narrative. Like her car radio. Finally she got to work:

-       Mel, I know this might be hard to hear, but you trust that I come from a good place, correct?

-       Yes, of course, tell me.

-       You are scared to talk to me about whatever it is you need to talk about, what’s going on? Where are you? Can you even tell me what was the last thing you were saying just now?

-       Tears began to run down her puffy pink cheeks, she confessed feeling hopeless, lonely, angry….

 

Her mind congratulated. All right Sam, at least you did something with her, you never want to have your client leave feeling ripped off.  Who’s next?

 

She didn’t remember.

 

Ah yes, a schizoid musician, so traumatized and shut down you would think he was carted out of a Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. Constantly trying to fix himself, approaching his mind like a piano tuner, tweaking various strings and still being out of tune. Samantha looked out of the window, it looked like someone had hung dirty linen across the sky, “I wonder if it’ll rain?”.

 

5 hours in a chair and things begin to get bizarre. The back pain is the beginning of it all, it’s like an electric blue current zipping up and down the spine, people’s faces start to look like moving masks, words lose their meaning, formula of mental disorders unfolds itself predictably, people are possessed, they are not living, they are not breathing, they don’t know who they are, they are mal functioning machines, they need new software, people become their disorders, disorders are words, words are the same, same words coming out of different mouths.

 

Depressed words: I don’t care. What’s the point? I’m sick of it. People disgust me. I’ll never be free as long as he/she is alive. I’m just rotten. I can’t get going, I can’t wake up, I can’t do it, I can’t stop, I can’t motivate, I can’t love. I have no purpose, I am lost, I am alone, I want it to end, I feel empty.

 

Anxious words: What if I’m wrong, What if I’m a fool, what if it doesn’t work, I can’t trust, I don’t trust, I won’t trust, I’m abnormal, I’m different, I don’t belong, no one wants to hear it, I don’t matter, I’m ugly, I’m stupid, I’m incompetent, I’m inadequate, if people knew me they wouldn’t want anything to do with me.

 

Borderline words: you can’t help me, you think you’re better then me, I hate you, I’m lonely, I don’t have anyone, fix me, love me, want me, I want to be like you, I want to hurt myself, I want to hurt others, something’s wrong with me, aren’t you scared of me?

 

Manic words: I’m confused, too much is going on, what are we talking about, I feel far away, I can’t connect, I’m feeling hot, I can’t track my own thoughts, I feel like a maniac, I think I can tell what you’re thinking, the world is strange, my mind makes things happen, I don’t care about rules, I want to feel something, I’m inspired, I want to stir it up, ‘common, let’s have a threesome, I’m in love with you, I’m angry, I can’t stop, make it stop, I’m going crazy, it’s million miles an hour, I’m out in the cosmos, I can see the edge of the universe.

 

Trauma words: I don’t feel safe, this doesn’t feel safe, I’m angry, I lose it at the drop of a hat, I wanted to kill that guy, I don’t know what’s happening to me, I can’t sleep, I keep seeing this thing. My heart, my heart just goes crazy, I can’t breath, nothing makes sense. Then I just zone out, I’m just happy go lucky, but I can’t stop drinking, I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t think I’m here.

 

 

The 6^th patient was late,  the incessant banging made her head hurt. She stepped out onto the landing to check out the scene.

 

-You guys are being really loud, it’s very disrupting, how long are you going to be here for?

 

Construction worker in a plastic helmet looked annoyed, he mumbled something to his mate and continued hammering at the metal railing.

 

-Excuse me, but we didn’t receive a notice of construction in the building, I can’t work with this noise, how long is this going to go on for?

-Ma’m, we’re just fixing the stairs here, we don’t know anything about notices, the owner said the staircase was caving in it needed to be fixed, otherwise it’s a liability. You take it up with her.

 

Samantha returned back to the office with a stronger headache and cluster of vague frustrated complaints circled in her mind. She weighed pros and cons of getting into it with the owner and decided to make a cup of tea instead. It was 20 minutes after the hour and the client still hadn’t showed, she reluctantly admitted to herself she needed to call him.

 

-Hi James, I had you down for our usual time today, what happened?

 

-I’m sorry; I thought you wouldn’t be there, with the whole street underwater.

 

-What do you mean?

 

-Well, I was on my way, but I had to turn back, Mission drive just caved in, you know the whole ground movement there; I guess it just collapsed this morning. They said it was corroding all night with the rain and all. Are you OK? How did you get to your office?

 

-It was fine when I drove in, it must have happened later in the morning. OK, I’ll have to call you back to reschedule.

 

-No problem, sorry I didn’t call you.

 

-Ok, no worries.

 

She hung up the phone and a strange sense of confusion descended upon her.  Her nightmare came flashing back for a split second, barely long enough to register, the construction noise intensified and she began to tidy the office.  While fighting a paint stain on her glass table she found herself getting irritated at the building manager and this time decided to go down and have a word. “Look, there are several things that we need to figure out, I run psychotherapy office and the neighbors are always blasting the music, I was under the impression that they were supposed to keep it down during business hours. Also, the light on the landing is always out, the bathroom supplies are always running low, the hallways are dirty and now this construction noise all day long…” the tirade ended with her requesting a break on the rent. She finally got the blue paint stain out. Threw the paper towel in the trash and noticed herself feeling slightly nauseated. She opened the door and was about to step out onto the landing as the construction worker, the one who was irritated at her earlier stopped her yelling.

 

-Watch out miss!!!! You’ll fall!!!

 

What the hell???? She looked below her feet only to find the entire landing missing, her office door opened into thin air, the construction worker stood on the staircase that was now partially detached from the building.

 

-Excuse me but what the hell is going on here?!!!! She yelled.

 

-Yeah, there was an issue, the landing just gave in as we were restructuring the

Staircase, I’m afraid it’s going to take a few days.

 

-Ummm… how am I supposed to get down from here?

 

-We can get you a ladder miss…

 

-Yeah… would you do that please?

 

She felt furious, somehow the whole thing seemed absurd, the banging became accompanied by jack hammering and the cacophony of sound penetrated her whole being, it felt as if she were jack hammered from inside out, the pain took charge of her head from the base of the neck to the front of her eyes, it felt like someone was squeezing her head at the temples, her ears were about to leek brain. She decided to lay down. The noise stopped abruptly and a white sheet of sleep covered her immediately. She was at a bus stop again, this time she recognized the bus driver.

 

-Hey Mikey, take me to the graveyard

 

She hands him a dollar bill for the ticket

 

-It’s closed down

 

She is confused again; the dream disintegrated into some senseless meandering and seemed to go on forever. A clicking sound brought her back to her office she opened her eyes and landed her gaze on the red light button. To her surprise it was on. She figured she must have forgotten to turn it off after her last patient, but decided to check the waiting room out of habit.

 

-Oh… hi Mikey? ‘C’mon in, I’ll be with you in a second.

 

Utterly bewildered she ushered the client into her office and opened the office front door. It still had no landing, and no ladder, the construction workers were gone, there was no one around, the strange thing was the building seemed to hover in the air; there was no sign of ground beneath it. The sky was an overcast white blanket across the universe; there was no sign of streets, or trees or anything for that matter. There was an endless white all around her and it felt stuffy. “I must be dreaming”. She returned back to her client and plopped her self into a chair.

 

-I thought our appointment was on Wednesday?

-No you changed it, don’t you remember? You called me an hour ago and luckily I could make it in.

 

-How did you get here?

 

He smiled and pointed toward the briefcase resting by his feet.

 

-What? You Marry Popins now?

 

-No, but if you have a rope about you, you might as well be. It’s amazing what a little piece of string can do.

 

None of this made any sense, a feeling of dread descended upon her. If this was a dream it wasn’t a good one and if it wasn’t then she was living a nightmare. Mickey is a bipolar client with sociopathic tendencies. He is obsessed with Samantha and has been for many years. And now, she is trapped, trapped in her own office with him and the world has disappeared.

 

Samantha at times thought she loved Mickey, but he frightened her, there was something about him that was wild, unpredictable, like a spider, he seemed to have many legs that could move in any direction. He could be strangely vulnourable and scared, desperate for love and direction and at other times predatorial, controlling, omniscient and venomous. Mickey was brilliant, he was a poet and an outlaw, he perpetually lived on the edge of reality, it excited her.

 

Perhaps, the world was never there, she always lived inside her head, either her head or some one else’s. She never left the house, she never even got on the bus, she resided among dreams and ghosts, now finally she was home. Home that was the box containing dreams and ghosts, home with the ghost that loved her forever, beyond time and reason. He had a rope in his briefcase, perhaps the rope that they could both hold on to and chose whether to hang with or escape, escape into the white abyss that was the outside space. Empty and vast, uninhabited, unending and lonely. There was something about Mickey that day that made Samantha notice his body, the way he moved was slow and fluid, it made her wonder, to her surprise what his fingers might feel like inside her. How he might know exactly where and when to apply pressure, to make her contract. She imagined contracting on his hand as he bit on her n****e. May be he would use the rope to tie her hands. She often felt like he tied her hands in sessions, he made it impossible for her to do anything he didn’t want her to do.

 

-All right… why don’t you show me what you do with your rope?

Author's Note

any feedback is welcome!

Reviews

[Franco]

Well written. I couldn't stop reading. Interestingly enough this isn't really my style of genre but perhaps this is where your talent shines because I found it entertaining. The story is kind of a psychological thriller in many ways. I like that you conveyed the idea that perhaps the psychotherapist had some sort of psychological issue as well; or at least that's what I thought at the end where she actually loved her patient as well as, feared him. Also her disassociation from reality was a red flag as well. All in all, I liked the story. Thank you for taking the time to type this up.