“What about Duchess?” she asked.
Now, this was the part where Klaus lost his footing. He didn’t always understand such sentimentality. “Duchess?”
“My dog.”
“Yes, the dog. I think you need to let Duchess go.”
She stared at him blankly, took a deep breath, and clutched her hands together.
As soon as I uploaded a fully rendered version of her as Self and of Klaus, ten years younger, he sent me a quick face message. “Nice render! Thanks for being so fast, Archie.” He was lying on his stomach, his face cupped in a massage parlor’s padded face-holder, his cheeks and moustache stretched wide.
That boorish fucker, I thought.
I went on a tear as any good workaholic would, running through job after job.
I invented a level for a highly celebrated, high-ranking war hero who’d attempted suicide. He was a Child. It was summer. He ran through a sprinkler that shimmered in sun, over and over.
At one point, he stopped and looked around his backyard. His mother was standing nearby, wearing a two-piece.
He said, “Is this it?”
No one answered.
He ran through the sprinkler again.
I invented a level for a grieving widower in which his wife was alive and he was watching her jump off a dock into a lake where he was waiting for her.
I meant: Don’t get over her. Live here.
I invented a level for a girl who’d been raped by her neighbor in which she got to run through the woods in the body of a lion.
Nothing to catch. No hunters to outsmart. Just running for as long as she wanted to run.
I made a world for my wife where she could be happy—in an apartment across town where she wouldn’t be my wife. In the world I made for her, I still love her and drive by her apartment sometimes because it’s the only way to make my nerve endings bristle.
When Helen was about to start her gaming session, I tuned in on a sub-line.
She was in one of the gaming rooms—which are a lot like racquetball courts—and was fitted with goggles, again not unlike racquetball.
Klaus cued up her session and then left, as was the standard protocol. But he could always patch himself in from another gaming room. He’d dabbled in coding. That wouldn’t be hard.
On my small screen, Helen appeared under the built-in table in her Childhood Kitchen and it was just the way I’d made it—appliances and all. Her caustic mother and her loud father weren’t speaking yet, only clomping around in their highly detailed shoes. Helen pulled the terrier onto her lap. The cookies were in place on top of the counter. The heating vent was keeping her and Duchess warm.
Klaus had told me that the mother and father should speak in Near-Audibles. This means that the hushed tones approximate speech and the player’s subconscious will fill in the words. It had been one of the innovative techniques that made Klaus a renegade.
I rendered the rest of the house around her. It was just a rough sketch and would only come into play if Helen wandered out of the kitchen. People did, sometimes, wanting to revisit their youths. Like the Near-Audibles, the loose renderings would get filled in by the patient’s subconscious.
Things were going okay, as I said. Her mother was speaking in a Near-Audible and her father responded likewise. Helen was on task. She wasn’t absorbing their words. She was reaching from under the table to find the box of cookies, her small hand patting around nervously.
Her parents were hissing at each other. Her father took two quick lunging steps at her mother. Her mother took one small step back. He was shouting when Helen’s hand touched the corner of the cookie box. She sat up a bit to make herself taller. Duchess almost slid off her lap but she kept one hand curled around the dog’s ribs.
Her father’s shoe stepped on her mother’s dainty foot. He was pinning her to that spot.
Helen looked up and saw the loose etchings of their faces but quickly, so very quickly, her mind filled it in—her father’s wildly etched hair became actual hair. His blobby hand became sharp and clear.
The slap.
Her mother fell back on one leg to try to keep herself upright as her ribs crashed into the counter.
But Helen stayed true to herself. She pulled the Friar Tuck cookie box down. She popped the lid.
Her mother was on the marble floor crying. Her father’s shoes paused, pointed toes facing Helen. She froze, holding Duchess and the box of cookies.
Her mother, with her cheek on the floor, looked over. Their eyes locked. Her mother raised one finger to her lips, blood trickling from a cut above her eye.
And then a fire alarm started squawking overhead.
Her father cursed in a Near-Audible and staggered out. Smoke poured from the heating vent and rolled in across the floor. Helen pulled a cookie out of the box and shoved it into her mouth. She achieved her goal.
The screen should have gone blank. The next level should have started, but it didn’t.
A new pair of shoes skittered in, white suede bucks. They stopped at the built-in and a voice said, “No, no, no.”
Klaus’s face appeared, flushed and grinning. “Helen,” he said. “You didn’t start the fire.”
“But I did,” she said.
He covered his nose and mouth with his arm and shook his head. “You’re a little girl!” he shouted. “You deserve to be protected.”
It was a breach that went beyond all rules, policies, and standards of care. Therapists weren’t allowed in the Games. The Games were about the achievement of Self—a kind of healing that also empowers, a kind of healing that the patient controls and therefore owns.
Not Healing brought to you by Klaus Han.
A woman’s legs appeared—Helen’s legs. Helen as Self.
This had never happened before either. There were levels, goals that, once achieved, could move one to the next level.
But there she was, leggy and beautiful. Her pale skin, blotchy.
She crawled under the table and pulled Child-Helen out along with Duchess. She had no intention of letting go of Duchess and never had. I realized now from Child-Helen and Self-Helen’s desperation around that dog that it must have died in the actual fire. Child-Helen clung to Self-Helen, the dog’s puffy head between them. “But Mommy,” Child-Helen said.
“That’s what Klaus is here for,” Self-Helen said. “He will help Mommy because he’s a professional who helps people.”
Over Self-Helen’s shoulder, Child-Helen watched Klaus kneel next Mommy and wedge his arm under her.
Soon they were all out on the front lawn—massive and green with an empty fountain. Daddy was passed out on the grass. Klaus was easing Mommy onto a black wrought iron lawn chair. Self and Child were holding on to each other tightly while Duchess tore around the yard, yapping.
The screen went blank.
Klaus Han had gone into the virtual reality. He had entered a patient’s World. He had blurred levels. He’d let Self save Child.
It was dangerous and groundbreaking.
I heard someone running and skidding down the hallway. My office door flew open.
Klaus was beaming. “Who says you can never go in? Huh? Huh? And the two of them! Am I right?” He was breathless and triumphant. His hair slick with sweat, he was one ebullient bear. “How did I look?”
“Pretty good.”
“God damn it, you’re right!” He spun around then and headed quickly back the way he’d come, leaving my door wide open. (Helen was technically still mid-session.) How did he know I’d watch? He just knew.