“Maybe if you took something out, or manipulated a muscle or a bone or two,” he said. “Maybe then all these aimless… connections, these resonances… wouldn’t bother me so much.”
“We all want to know how long we have in this world,” the therapist said. “That makes you no different than the rest of us.”
“I think I may have already died,” he said. “Once or twice. Maybe more.”
Sometimes, if the conditions were right, he could feel the edges of the blades as they touched his thoughts. They entered cleanly most of the time, but occasionally there would be the slightest vibration, so that events might jar, one against the other, and the faces of the people in his memories would show their anxiety.
Dream: It has been a long kiss, a very long kiss. He thinks he may even have slept through parts of it, only to awaken again and continue his participation. The lips against his are bare, loose, almost impossibly mobile. They make him feel hard and unyielding by comparison, like metal or brick.
When he finally pulls away he sees it is Michael he has been kissing. But Michael’s lips are wider than he remembers them. Michael’s head lolls, his eyes still and fixed as a doll’s. Michael’s smile spreads loosely to both sides of his face, wide as a shark’s mouth. Michael’s smile flows to the edges of the sheets and drips off the sides of the bed.
Memory: Allison was walking down the sidewalk with the last of her packed suitcases. He imagined himself stopping her, using physical strength, or argument, or simple expressions of bereavement. He’d seen countless movies, read numerous books and short stories, and he could imagine various scenarios in which any of these techniques might or might not work. He tried to store up images of various lives he might have had with Allison, all for his future use. He imagined the faces of their children. He visualized the photographs in their albums. He experienced all her possible deaths.
All this before she got into her car, looked sadly out the window. “I’m sorry,” was what he thought she said, before she drove off for what was (maybe) the last time.
And now: He spent much of his weekend talking to the homeless, the derelicts, the bums (he didn’t know what he should be calling them). Whoever they were, they were good at acting. They could sound like his mother, his father, Michael, his lover, even his therapist—whoever they wanted to be.
“I’ve seen those blades you’re talking about,” one old man said. “They come mostly early in the evening, about the time the fireflies first come out. Sometimes you’ll see one outlined against the moon, or maybe a streetlight if the angle’s just right. They’re sharp and scary, oh, I know that. But they keep things from dying. They cut out the part where you know somebody died, or where you realized something was over—like it was on a tape or something. That way nothing ever dies, or ever ends. That ain’t so bad, is it?”
He thought, in fact, that’s horrible, but didn’t say anything.
“Leave the boy alone!” The old lady in the broken hat just seemed to climb out of the shadows around the base of the tree. “He don’t need to know about them blades!”
“You my wife or something?”
“I don’t know—I can’t rightly remember.”
“Well, I don’t remember neither, and until I do remember you just butt out, okay?”
“I need to prepare myself. Something’s going to happen,” he said to the old man and the old woman. “I’ve already figured out that things aren’t what they seem to be, they never are, and there seems to be no way to tell what they are.”
“There’s no such thing as preparation,” the old woman said. “I’m sorry, son.”
He wondered briefly if she could, indeed, be his mother, but it was too dark where she stood beneath the tree. “It’s being alone, you know? That’s what it’s all about, why it’s so bad, being alone,” he said to them.
But the blades had come down during their conversation, and severed the old man and old woman from the dark pool of shadows beneath the tree, so that they were in some other weekend of his life, involved in some other conversation.
The Therapist: “What are you most afraid of?” the therapist asked. Today he was lying on the table in the middle of the room and the therapist stood over him, most of her head in the shadows, only the heavy outline of her dark glasses showing. “That is always a good place to start.”
“I’m afraid of what is,” he replied. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“Perhaps you simply can’t accept.” The therapist made rustling noises as she removed various objects from the drawers beneath the table.
“I simply can’t forget,” he said. “That’s a lot of it. What I remember, is. And that’s become too much, far too much, to bear. One thing becomes just as real, just as important, as every other thing. I don’t know what I should ignore anymore in order to keep on functioning, living. I don’t know what I should forget.”
“Pay attention to me now,” the therapist said, slipping on her gloves.
“It’s a lot less simple than everyone thinks,” he said. “A lot less simple than I was prepared to believe.”
“And if you let it happen to you? If you let your wishes drive you, and suddenly Michael is still alive and ready to talk to you every day?” The therapist placed her instruments up on the table. He could sense their hard, sharp edges.
He shuddered. “I don’t understand, but it would be horrible. Horrible.”
“So you’d actually feel far more comfortable if Michael truly was dead, if you never had to talk to him again, if you weren’t so compelled to remember him?” The therapist hovered closer.
“Oh yes, yes.” He found himself squirming, wanting to avoid her hands.
“But how can you justify such a betrayal?” the therapist asked coldly. Her lips glowed in the dim light.
“I don’t… don’t…”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked softly.
“Yes!”
“And werewolves, and vampires?” The therapist reached across him.
“Yes!”
“And demons and beasties and hidden things without names?” She stroked his hair, played with the lines creasing his forehead.
“Yes, yes!” He felt the heat in his head flowing out through his hair to warm the surrounding air.
The therapist was quick with the blade, sending all the separate bits of life swirling, flowers and rabbits and brothers and stairs and buses and suitcases and derelicts and Allison, tumbling into oblivion.
He used to wonder what it took to wield those blades, if the surgeons were gods or demons, or if mortals might aspire. He wondered if Christ or Buddha might have been such surgeons. Or Jack the Ripper.
Whatever the case, for the patients, the most important thing was to try to classify all the severed bits and pieces as accurately as possible, so as to avoid confusion. Some sort of order was desperately required.
Dream: Every Sunday he and his wife take their children to the cemetery, where they place flowers on the graves of his parents, and on the grave of his brother Michael. The children love the bright red flowers they carry. He makes sure they wrap the flowers in tissue, so that the red color does not rub off, or drip onto the children’s brand new clothes.
The cemetery does not bother him. He loves one woman; the children are happy and satisfied. He does not dream. He had parents and a brother at one time, but no more. He is content to live and work like everyone else he knows.