Second Session

Dr. Vanessa McDowell was shaking so hard that she could barely speak. I crossed my arms across my chest and sat back. We were both sitting in our opposing wing chairs again.

"Misty Goodswells?" she finally asked between whoops of laughter.

"That was her name!" I protested.

"And Sylvia Chrysallis, the stern, sexless surgeon just waiting to shed her cocoon and turn into a butterfly?"

I sat there steaming. This was even worse than last week. When I had started to tell my story during our first session, she had continually interrupted me with questions. Did I fantasize about my mother? Was I jealous of my father? Did I resent my parent's lack of attention to me as a child? The answers to which were no, no, and of course I fucking resented it. How would she feel if she felt the need to introduce herself every evening at the dinner table?

Being the sensitive psychiatrist type, she finally realized that I was starting to resent her as well. We agreed that I would write down my story and read it at the next session. Without any interruptions. I paid her the hundred bucks and headed back home. So far, I had spent fifteen minutes — twenty-five dollars! — of this second session reading her my life's story. It cost me another buck fifty to listen to her laugh at me. I began to grow impatient waiting for her to regain her composure.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Mason," she finally said. "I am normally so much more professional than this. It's just that your story is so, um..."

"So... ?" I prompted her. "Fanciful? Far-fetched? Funny?"

"Unusual."

"Of course it's unusual! I'm a fucking superhero. What did you expect, a normal story about how my parents deprived me of love?"

She pursed her lips, looking off at something on her bookshelves as she decided how to answer me.

"You still don't believe me, do you?" I asked.

She blinked her eyes at me. Fucking bitch. During my last visit, I had ignited a candle across the room. It took no effort all; the electromagnetic field had given me the ability to control light. Properly concentrated, light produced fire. Fire ignited candles. But perhaps even normal nutballs could do tricks like that. Maybe if I...

"Mr. Mason." Dr. McDowell interrupted my reverie. "Regardless of what I believe, your story is so clinical, so devoid of emotion, that you can see why I'm not really sure that you even believe that it happened that way."

"How else would it have happened?" I asked. I was already turning red.

"With Misty Goodswells?" she asked. "And Sylvia Chrysallis?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," I lied. I couldn't have picked a Jungian, could I? Fucking Freudians.

She smiled and leaned forward to let me know that she knew that I knew full well what she was talking about.

"I need to know the truth, Mr. Mason. I need to know the truth so that I can help you get better."

I thought about telling her that she couldn't handle the truth. But who was I to judge? I gave her a big smile and leaned back in the chair, staring at her through my dark glasses. By now I could eliminate their effects without thinking about it. I studied her for a moment. Dr. McDowell was dressed in a cream suit whose skirt fell ended just above her knees. Under the jacket she wore a turquoise top with a scoop neck.

"Well?" she finally asked.

"All right, lady, you asked for it."

I nodded to the white wall above her couch. The "movie" had already started. I watched her turn and then stare. There was no sound, of course. Vanessa was just going to have to make do without. I could still hear the whole thing, of course. The memory was burned into my head. As I turned my head to watch, it was as if I was there again.

"It's almost like you're looking straight through me," Misty was saying.

The bandages had come off at four o'clock that afternoon. Dr. Chrysallis had unwrapped them slowly and then stepped back. Everyone was there: Mom, Dad, Misty, Dr. Chrysallis, and some new guy, probably Dr. Stock. Dr. Stock looked the part of a kindly old physician and played the part of a bitter curmudgeon. I was the only patient in the fifteen years of the medical center's existence that had required doctoring, as opposed to plain old nursing. He quite clearly resented having to take time away from his private practice and actually show up here.

I had learned to pay him no attention at all. My eyes flicked from Dr. Chrysallis, who looked hopeful, to Dad (bored), Mom (worried), and finally Misty.

"How do you feel?" Sylvia asked.

"Not any different," I said.

She stepped forward and shone a light in my right eye first and then my left.

"Do you see any light at all?" she asked.

"Not a bit," I lied.

She leaned back and murmured to my parents, "I'm sorry. I did the best I could."

Nobody who succeeded ever had to say they did "the best they could." I had done "the best I could" on countless tests in high school. Predictably, my parents tuned her out and turned their attention to Dr. Stock. While their conversation, about appointments with a physical therapist so that I could learn to "cope," droned on, I watched Dr. Chrysallis and Sylvia watching me.

Because it was late in the afternoon, they all agreed that it was better for me to spend one last night in the medical center. I would return home tomorrow. Mom, Dad, and Dr. Stock left in a group, discussing the details of my future. Dr. Chrysallis trailed along behind them. Nurse Goodswells remained.

"It's almost like you're looking straight through me."