The Two Sessions

The Two Sessions

"Nothing is wrong with your writing, James. The problem is in your head."

Michael's voice came through the speaker and cut across my breathing. He said nothing about the call I had just dropped on my wife, and he let a few seconds go by before he kept talking, low and steady.

"There's a good therapist up in Albany, a woman named Evelyn Reed. She works in hypnosis and trauma release. I booked you for 10:00 a.m. tomorrow. Go see her, James. Call it your last shot at getting yourself out of this."

I held on to the phone and looked out the window at the dead yard. I didn't want another psychologist in my life, having lived with two of them for seven years, but between Emily's divorce line and the empty space where the work used to be, I had run out of room.

The next morning I was at Dr. Evelyn Reed's office. It was a quiet room on the third story of an old building. Clary sage in the air, warm yellow light, everything in it arranged to make a person feel safe.

I got there at 9:40 and waited in a chair by the window. Three magazines lay on the low table, all from the same month. A radiator knocked twice under the sill and then went quiet, and nobody else came in the whole time I sat there.

Dr. Evelyn was a woman of about 50, with deep gray eyes and a steadiness that didn't move. She had me sit back in the leather recliner and told me to keep my hands open on the armrests. "You always want to make fists," she said, and then she started walking me down.

While she adjusted the recliner I looked past her at the desk. A manila folder lay on the corner of it with my last name typed on the tab, an inch thick. She set a legal pad down on top of it before she sat. In the waiting room I had filled out two pages.

"Stay with my count, James... When I get to one, you'll go through the door..."

Somewhere below the window a truck backed up and the beeper ran through eight tones. Her voice stayed under it, one number about every four seconds. The clary sage got heavier the longer I breathed it. The lamp on her desk had a green glass shade, and the pull chain was swinging.

Her count took me down into the dark.

Then I was gone.

When I opened my eyes the desk lamp was still on, and the room around it had changed. I was flat on the recliner with my shirt soaked through at the back.

My watch said 1:05. The session had been booked for an hour and she had started the count at 10:05. Both of my hands were open on the armrests, palms up, where she had set them. The nail on my right index finger had split down the middle.

I had nothing at all from the session, not one second of it. My head was clean, the way a tape is clean after somebody has run it back over itself.

What I couldn't get past was Dr. Evelyn's face.

The calm she had walked in with was gone. The notepad in her hand was shaking. She was looking at me the way you would look at something you had been sitting three feet from for an hour, thinking it was harmless.

She had filled a lot of the pad. The pages she had turned back hung over her wrist, 20 of them at least, and the writing on them got bigger toward the bottom of each one. Two pages in the middle had nothing on them but a column of numbers.

"Doctor... did I say something?" I pushed the sweat off my forehead.

Dr. Evelyn shut the notebook fast. Her hand was going badly enough that the fountain pen came out of it and hit the floor. She took a breath and got her voice back under her.

"I... I need you back here tomorrow for a longer session, James. We're not finished."

"What happened?" I got my feet down onto the floor. "Did I say something strange?"

Dr. Evelyn held my eyes. Her voice came down to almost nothing, the way people talk when they think there is a third person in the room.

"James... my first read on you was wrong. The dreamlessness and the block aren't coming from ordinary trauma. Going by what your reflexes did in there... I don't think your memory loss happened on its own."

"Meaning what?"

"Somebody..." She leaned in, and the gray in her eyes narrowed down. "...went into your memory on purpose, using very good technique, and laid a false layer over the top of it. You're being held in there."

I was on my feet before she finished. I took the three flights down instead of waiting for the elevator.

I got to the car and took the state highway back toward Milton. It was 3:00 p.m. and the sky had come down gray over the river flats. When I passed the rusted iron gate of the middle school I went to 33 years ago, the dismissal bell started up, brrring... brrring... brrring...

That sound, and the smell of pine pitch burning somewhere off the shoulder, put a piece of something back in front of me.

It was a winter afternoon the year I was 12, the first time I ever got any sense that there was an extra space in our house.

There was snow on the ground that week and my mother had the storm windows in. My father taught late on Thursdays and never got home before six. I know it was a Thursday because the trash cans were still at the curb when I came up the walk, and I was the one who had put them out.

That day I was down under the bed after a house key I had dropped, and the back of my hand went across an old wood frame shoved into the corner. I pulled it out into the light and found a charcoal portrait of my own face. Both eyes had been gone at with a sharpened pencil point, hard enough to tear the paper through, and what was left in their place were two black holes.

When I carried it out to the living room and asked my mother about it, her face changed. She took the picture out of my hands and put it straight into the fire. Then she reached over and smoothed my hair down and smiled at me, and held the smile a beat too long.

"That's only how somebody shows you he loves you, James. Don't be scared of it. Go up to your room and write me a story about the perfect brother... one who lives in the dark and watches you every minute."

I sat with that the rest of the afternoon. It didn't stop there.

When I got back up to my study on the second floor, there was a plate of honey cakes on my desk, still hot, the ones I liked best. My mother had not come up to the second floor once that afternoon. On the rim of the white china plate somebody had left a few smeared fingerprints in soot.

The plate was one of a pair. The other one stayed in the back of the hutch and I never once saw food on it. On the inside of my bedroom doorframe there were two pencil marks four inches apart with the same year written under both of them, in the soft pencil my mother used for everything.

While I was standing there looking at the plate, cold air came down out of the ceiling vent. It brought a smell with it, sour sweat and something like skin, and the smell filled the room.

When I looked up at the narrow louver, I would swear there was an eye up in the dark above the ceiling, holding still, watching me.

For years afterward, with a lot of help from my parents, I told myself the ruined portrait and the plate with the soot on it were props. Strange props my father and mother had set out on purpose, to get a kid thinking the way a crime novelist thinks.

Today, driving with what Dr. Evelyn had told me still in my ears, that afternoon came back, and the word props stopped covering it.

I drove the rest of the way to Milton and had to take my right hand off the wheel twice and set it on my knee to keep it still. I was through the front door when the phone went off in my pocket.

The screen said Emily.

I took a breath and got ready for the second round. When I answered, her voice came through the speaker soft.

"James... where are you?"

"I... I just got back to the old house," I said, keeping my voice flat. "I went to see that therapist Michael set me up with..."

"What did she tell you?" Her voice caught for a beat and came back warm.

I told my wife everything Dr. Evelyn had said about my memory being worked on and turned over. The other end went quiet. It stayed quiet for close to a minute, long enough that I looked at the screen to see whether the call had dropped.

"Emily? Are you there?"

"I'm here," Emily said. She let a breath out. Her voice was small and it was sorry.

"James... I'm sorry about what I said yesterday. The money and the baby got on top of me and I said things to hurt you. I'm in the car right now, on my way up to Milton. I'll go with you to see that doctor tomorrow."

The turn came so fast I had no idea what to do with it. I took it anyway.