Authors: Jessica Knauss
Your mouth made an O, and you said, “Are you serious?” at the same time you thought it.
I stared back at you. You’re many things, but not that stupid. You limped over to the bathroom, where I could see you sitting on the toilet, trying to get all the glass out of your foot with brute force. I got out of the bed on your side and, within your clear view, I took your pillow and a blanket and put them on the dresser near the bedroom door. Then I turned out your bedside lamp and crawled under the covers, feeling a little guilty about not trying to save the floor from the bloodstains. You obediently took your pillow and blanket to the spare bedroom. I don’t know whether you’ll ever get to join me in the bed again. If only you had left well enough alone.
It’s been several months since I added to this sad little collection of thoughts and recriminations. Anyone reading might think my life would be totally different by now, divorced or separated, with session after session of success with Emily.
No. It was only a few days before you, dear husband, insinuated yourself back into the marriage bed, and nearly every day I come up here to the office early to cry. Yes, I’m indulging in feeling sorry for myself, something I warn my clients away from. I can’t seem to walk out because this house is everything to me. It’s just a house, I tell myself, but then I look around me and every fiber of every board holds a piece of my heart. Even the bloody part of the floor, which the maids valiantly scrubbed at for three consecutive sessions, and which I eventually covered with an oriental carpet I purchased at Ocean State Job Lot for the express purpose.
At least you haven’t broken any other furniture, though I still get those little fingerprint bruises on my arms on occasion. They fuel my self-pity.
As for my most difficult client, my jubilation over a breakthrough may have been wishful thinking. Maybe it’s the drugs, but we’ve settled into a stasis and I don’t know how we’ll ever get out of it. She isn’t doing anything suspicious anymore, as far as I can tell, but I have no real evidence that she’s getting better, either.
In a typical session (which they all are now), I call her into the session room. She carries herself in a neutral manner. There is none of the open hostility we began our sessions with, when she used to slump into the room, flop onto the couch, and sit with her arms and legs crossed toward me. She stands tall now with arms naturally open, nods and smiles pleasantly, and lowers her body onto the couch with aplomb. The only thing that remains the same is that shield of noisy static.
“How are you today, Emily?” I usually begin.
“I’m fine. And yourself?”
I can’t tell if she’s that polite, and I laugh.
“That’s not the point,” I often reply.
At the beginning of our sessions, she might have snapped, “What
is
the point? I’m not the one who’s crazy. That’s Beth.”
Now she smiles and waits patiently for me to begin the session, looking straight ahead.
We shoot the breeze, but the only theme of substance we touch upon is Carlos. Because of the deeply obsessive behavior evidenced in the official report and in her own writing, I suspect that Carlos is little more than a two-dimensional figure to her. I’ve tried to put this possibility to her, delicately, on many occasions. Each time, she protested that I didn’t understand love. Her “love” is so general. She’s never told me anything specific that makes Carlos lovable. Something in their first meeting must have set off an obsessive tendency that was already waiting, and Carlos’s insistent averageness is convenient because Emily is looking to get away from the specialness of her sister and be with someone who makes her look more special, not more average. Who better to compare herself to than a run-of-the-mill, overworked university TA? But these are my suppositions only, unsupported by her writing or her unreadable thought energy.
She paradoxically accepts and ignores the fact that Carlos has a wife and children. There might also be a factor of desiring someone she can’t have because she’s not ready to engage in any real relationship. Only in today’s culture would someone so un-self-actualized come so far in the world.
Sometimes the static lets up a little, and I fancy I can peek at the world from her perspective. Dear Emily, your surrender to your circumstances covers you like a shroud. But something else in you hasn’t given up. Something else claws its way out of the mire that is surrender. Each day, I can intuit the moment coming closer, though I’m not sure it’s a conscious process for you. You can’t control your deepest instincts any more than you can control your sister. Everything is working against your peaceful integration into society.
It’s funny—in the days before the Talents were discovered, the folklore surrounding the people called psychics was that they could predict the future. I remember the last musings I wrote in that letter-turned-journal a few months ago, something about Emily not really having surrendered as completely as it seemed. During these last few months, even without being able to read her mind, she’s given me the impression of pressure building up under a gasket, of something about to explode. But rather than think of myself as one of those old-timey psychics with spot-on prescience, I consider myself an idiot for not understanding the signs much earlier. I mean, I had all or most of the facts laid out before me, and yet it is not through my skill as a therapist or Emily’s generosity of spirit (neither of those things really exists) that now I know exactly what’s been going on.
This week, I opened the door to Emily at the appointed hour as usual, but that was the only thing that was usual. For the first time, Emily had an aura about her. I watched it morph from a deep red line to a green haze shot through with purple lightning bolts while she stepped inside the therapy room. I gasped, but my surprise was premature, because then, she looked right at me.
At some point I collapsed, but when I came to, I processed the experience of being able to read Emily’s mind for the first time as somewhat like meeting any new person, but a hundred times less expected and a thousand times more intense. I received her life story, in a rush of color and sound, in probably less than a minute’s time.
Most pertinent, and most embarrassing for me, I saw the victory in Emily’s thoughts when her parents were granted responsibility for making sure she would never be unsupervised. She knew she could manipulate them, and I witnessed the way Emily wheedled concessions out of them. She had brought one of her friends to sign affidavits of responsibility and promises to make sure Emily would come to her therapy sessions with me. The depth of the manipulation became clear to me when, no matter where I looked in her thoughts, I couldn’t even find a name for this poor friend. She was a means to an end and I wonder if the friend ever knew how little she mattered to Emily.
The arrangement was for one of Emily’s parents to pick her up afterward, but for the friend to escort her from the house on Hope Street here to the yellow Victorian on Cushing. Emily convinced the friend to bring some little piece of aluminum each time. The friend appeared not to suspect anything—at first Emily tried to hide her real purpose by asking the friend to bring full cans of soda, but she soon tired of having to suck down the sugar-laced chemicals in the waiting room so she could crush the can and hide it deep within that awkward backpack of hers. Soon enough, it devolved into the friend bringing wadded bits of aluminum foil and odd pieces out of furniture assembly kits.
Beth’s kryptonite is aluminum, so Emily was gathering up as much of it as she could and ferreting it into the corners of the tiny room they made Emily sleep in so that Beth would be less powerful or maybe even become ill, in that room if nowhere else. And here’s where my embarrassment comes in: Emily carried these pieces of aluminum in her backpack and they were in the room when we had our sessions.
They
created the static shield that prevented me from detecting her thought energy. Aluminum is
my
kryptonite, too.
I didn’t even realize a psychic could
have
a kryptonite.
I see them all now, all those therapy sessions, from Emily’s point of view. There was plenty of that atomic element in her backpack to keep me from reading her mother that time, and if anyone else had been around, I would’ve wondered why I couldn’t read them, either. On days when she had several crushed cans of RC Cola zipped into the inner pocket, the static was worst for me, while on the days when her nameless friend could only manage to palm off a small wad of foil, to Emily’s rebuffs and chastisement, I got some little relief from the dizzying crackle and fancied I was gaining insight into my most difficult client.
And then, Beth moved away, carried away from Providence by her Talent, and Emily didn’t need the aluminum anymore. This week the friend brought a can, but Emily batted it away as if she had never drunk soda in her life, and I saw her thoughts clearly for the first time.
It might have been my idealistic hope that therapy could work, but I never imagined Emily still disdained me quite this much. She’s been putting me on, hoping she can lull me into a sense of security. She managed it. If she had continued to show such good progress and avoided mentioning that she and Carlos are meant to be together forever, even in death, for a little longer (a month, maybe), then I would have declared her cured. I might even have let her go back to classes.
But what I saw lets me know I could never release her in good conscience. She hasn’t ever taken a single one of my prescriptions. The foremost thought in her mind, even above what she’s doing at any given moment, was that Carlos is still at Brown. She felt she needed to get back there before it became too late, and she held on to this goal so tightly that I could see metaphorical hands clasped around it. She was (still is) afraid he’ll finish his PhD and accept an adjunct position somewhere miles away, so her central concern was to get me to release her as soon as possible.
I’m still so disappointed, I can’t help but tear up a little thinking about it, but as I recall her thoughts and memories, it gets harder for me to identify which sentiments are truly my own. I saw her surrounded by her family in a hundred-year-old apartment in Boston. Through my eyes, she’s looking out the window with the paint chips on the sill and can see the bundled up people weaving through the snow banks on one of those posh shopping streets in Back Bay. I don’t—she doesn’t—want to be there. She wishes her parents could have left her to her own devices while they took Beth to her new apartment. Even after all these months of being under practical house arrest, she can’t seem to understand that she’s a threat to society and her family. I feel her frustration and the pain of being separated from Carlos, and, while it’s happening, I can almost experience what she calls love.
I understand without Emily explaining that Beth has been courted by Mass General, where she’ll cure the hopeless cases from all over the world and oversee the recruitment of physicians with Talents. She has to be individually tutored until she comes of age, like a child actor on a movie set, and that pisses Emily off. Why should she get such special treatment? She’s not special. Beth always says Carlos isn’t special, but she’s only trying to project her own mediocrity.
I start to fume in empathy with Emily. Beth gets to live by herself while she’s still a teenager, but their parents are staying in Providence to keep an eye on Emily. Why should Emily ever have to spend time with these losers when she has important things she could be doing in Providence if they would only leave?
She gives Beth the obligatory kiss and hug and at last she gets on the T with her parents to where her mom parked the car because she’s afraid of driving in Boston, and she’s back on the road. I feel a tremendous lightness because Emily’s main obstacle is out of the way. Beth was always mewling for Emily to pay attention to her, trying to distract Emily from the fact that she’s already found true love and needs no one else in the world. Now Emily has to shake the constant surveillance of her parents.
It should be easy. After all, they have no reason to watch Emily all the time. What do they think she’s going to do?
That thought draws my attention to a persistent memory. Emily loves to relive what happened and massage it for emotional gratification to keep her idea of love alive. As I examine the memory, I, too, feel the passion behind Emily’s decision while Carlos was sitting in his wheelchair outside her apartment. Even the sun seems bright and warm in her memory and I can smell the dust gathering on the windowsill. I don’t know if I’ve ever had such an intense sensory experience of my own, much less vicariously. Her emotion is electric as she grasps the wheelchair handles, and my lungs strain as Emily runs up Hope Street with Carlos seated in front of her, almost senseless. She runs faster and faster and I realize that in this version of the memory, Beth does not rain on Emily’s parade.
Suddenly, with the sort of logic I usually only find in dreams (others’ or my own), Emily and Carlos are standing side by side—the wheelchair is nowhere to be seen—gazing upon an idyllic landscape with a beach house painted blue with shell decorations and the water beyond. Is it the Atlantic? They clasp hands and splash into the water, doing deep breast strokes until they meet in the open ocean, take each other in their arms, and share true love’s kiss.
This is no memory. This is Emily’s fondest wish in spite of everything I’ve been trying to get her to understand. I pull out of the memory/fantasy a little with the understanding that Emily is trying to use me to get her court-ordered restrictions lifted, and then she’s going to stalk Carlos and nab him at the most opportune time.
The shock of the realization brought me back to consciousness. Emily was standing over me and I was splayed out on the therapy room’s carpet. In spite of the compromised position, I went into therapist mode and analyzed: did Emily have the means to carry out her plan? I looked into her bizarrely blue eyes and saw that the beach house really exists. It’s on the Cape and her friend’s family owns it or timeshares it. But how exactly she would get Carlos there is an imponderable, multiplied (in my criticism of her plan) by the fact that he probably wouldn’t go willingly.