52 Project #21: A Visit To The Doctor
“Now. Why don’t you sit down and relax. You can have a drink if you want. Bottled water? Juice? Soda?”
The thin boy shook his head. “No,” he whispered.
“That’s fine. You can sit down wherever you like.” This was obviously not 100% accurate, as the therapist herself was sitting in one of the chairs, so Jason couldn’t have picked that seat if he’d wanted to.
“Look, aren’t I supposed to be lying on a couch or something? That’s the way I always read about it.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have a couch, but you can lay on the floor if you want to. This is a non-judging space, Jason. You can do whatever makes you feel comfortable.”
“Well, I don’t want to! And what kind of a doctor are you if you’re offering kids soda and juice? Those things are really, really bad for you! They’ll ruin your teeth, make you fat, give you diabetes…”
“As I said, this is a non-judging space. Many children feel more comfortable with sweetened drinks, but it’s perfectly fine if you don’t want any. Nobody’s forcing you to do anything, Jason. I just want you to relax.”
“You’re forcing me to relax!”
“If you don’t want to relax, that’s fine, too. It just makes it somewhat harder to help you. You do want me to help you, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly.
“Well, then. Please sit down wherever you like. You can call me Jan, okay, Jason?”
The boy sat on the least soft of the three armchairs in the room, on the edge, with his arms tightly folded and a sullen expression. “I wanna call you Dr. Michaels.”
“All right. That’s fine too.”
“Is there anything that wouldn’t be fine?” he exploded. “I killed my little sister and you think everything I do is great! Well, it’s not! You should be punishing me, not - not telling me everything I do is fine!”
“I’m not here to punish you, Jason. I’m just here to talk to you. Why don’t you tell me about your sister?”
“She was six years old,” Jason said, miserably.
“And you’re twelve, right? So you were her big brother.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you like her? Was she fun to play with?”
“No, she was the worst pest the world has ever seen. I don’t know. I was supposed to take care of her! I was supposed to protect her, not - not-” His chest heaved, his eyes glittered with unshed tears, but whatever sobs might have wanted to burst out, he held them in.
“Tell me about what happened.”
He took a deep breath. “I was in my room, reading…”
After a moment of silence, the therapist said, “Yes?”
“And she came in. I was trying to read, and she kept bugging me. Over and over. ‘Jason, Jason, I wanna tell you about my adventure. Let me tell you about my adventure.’ She was telling me this stupid story, about how she and her imaginary playmate did something stupid. I didn’t want her to bother me anymore, and I didn’t want to hear it. So…”
“And so?” Jan prompted.
“So I killed her.”
“Tell me about that. How did you kill her?”
“I was reading this book - I’m the best reader in the class, so the teacher let me take it out. It was pretty tough to read. It was science fiction, but it was saying that, uh, I’m trying to remember how they said it… reality isn’t really just, things happen. Like, a million things might happen, but it’s the observer effect that locks down what happened. So if someone can believe hard enough in something that isn’t true, they can make it real. See, there was this guy named Bishop Berkeley, and he said that everything exists because we think it does. So if we think it doesn’t exist, well, it doesn’t.”
“But many things happen to people that they didn’t expect to happen, and many things that people don’t think exist end up existing, so how did they resolve that?”
“In the story, they said that it’s not true for everyone. Some people are, um, anchor points. They, uh, they can focus their minds on something they imagine to be true until it actually becomes true. But it’s weird because you have to know the thing isn’t true in order to believe hard enough in it that it becomes true. If you just think it’s true all by itself, you can’t focus your belief hard enough to change reality. You have to know you’re trying to change reality. That’s why only some people can be anchor points, because you gotta believe in a thing and at the same time you have to know it’s not true.”
“That sounds quite paradoxical. How could you believe something is real when you know it’s not?”
“You gotta - you gotta be able to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time where you’re not really thinking one of them, but it’s the reason you’re thinking the other one. Like, you know the game about don’t think of a swordfish?”
“I don’t think I’ve heard that one.”
“It’s, sit in a corner for five minutes and don’t think of a swordfish. Except you can’t do it, or they say you can’t, because knowing that the reason you’re sitting in a corner is to not think of a swordfish makes you think of a swordfish. But I did it,” he said, almost proudly. “One time I went in the corner and I knew I was there to not think of a swordfish, so I thought of something else instead, and I got distracted by what I was thinking and I just got really into it, and then when I suddenly remembered about the swordfish, the clock said I’d been sitting there for like 20 minutes or something. So I knew, if I imagined something hard enough, I might be able to focus on it enough that I could forget about the fact that it wasn’t real.” A sob caught in his throat. “I didn’t think it would work! I didn’t mean to kill her!”
“Exactly how did she die?”
“Well, I just - I closed my eyes and I imagined life without my sister. I pretended that she died before she was born, and her room was Mom’s study, and there wasn’t any of her junk around the house, and - and I did it, I imagined it, really. I could see it exactly in my head. And then I got scared, because I knew, even before I opened my eyes, that she was gone.”
“Gone.” Jan wrote something down in her notebook.
“Yeah. Like she didn’t ever exist.”
“Why couldn’t you just imagine her to come back?”
“I tried, I tried! But I couldn’t focus anymore, I just kept thinking about the fact that I made her not exist, and I was so sad and scared, so I couldn’t get the fact that she was gone out of my head enough to imagine that she wasn’t gone. It said in the book that it’s harder to make something exist than not exist… You don’t even believe me!” The last was said in a burst of outrage.
“What makes you say that?” Jan asked, still calm and patient.
“You think I’m nuts! Everyone thinks I’m nuts. That’s why they took me to a shrink. Angie’s dead and I killed her and I’m the only one who knows she used to be alive!” As soon as the sobs started, they overwhelmed him, making him choke on his words and stutter. “It’s not fair, she was just a little kid, she didn’t deserve that, why can’t I bring her back, why can’t I bring her back-”
“Now just relax, Jason. I’m sure if you just-”
“Nobody believes me! I wish I was dead. C’mon! I don’t exist, I don’t-”
“Jason, nobody can make themselves believe they don’t exist.” There were, in fact, people with a mental illness that made them think they didn’t exist, but they had hardly made themselves believe that, consciously.
“I can’t even kill myself right!” he sobbed.
“So that’s why you took all those aspirin?”
“I was trying to die. Why did they have to save me? Why couldn’t they let me die? I killed Angie, I deserve it!”
“Now let’s go back a little bit. Was there anything you didn’t like about your family, before Angie - disappeared?”
“I don’t like you and I don’t wanna answer your questions. I know you think I’m nuts just like everyone else.”
“What makes you say that?”
Jason glared at Jan through tear-filled eyes. “What, are you a robot or something? You said that already. Are you even alive?”
“Do you think I’m not real?” the therapist asked.
“No, you’re just stupid. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll make that lamp over there go away.”
“The shiny one?”
“No, the glass one.”
“Oh, that’s a family heirloom, Jason. I’ve had it for years. Maybe you should do your trick with the shiny one.”
“You don’t believe me anyway, so why’s it matter to you?”
She sighed. “If it matters to you, Jason, that’s all that matters to me.” And if an emotionally disturbed child tried to smash the glass one to prove that it didn’t exist, that would be destructive and produce a mess, whereas if he tried to smash the brass lamp he’d only manage to destroy the bulb.
“I’m gonna do it with the glass one anyway,” he said, glaring at her. “Then you’ll believe me. If it’s a family heirloom and all.”
“I did say you could do whatever made you feel comfortable, but I’m not okay with you breaking my property.”
“I won’t break it. It’ll just stop existing,” Jason said, and closed his eyes.
The therapist got up and moved the breakable ceramic lamp out of the way just in case the boy jumped up and tried to smash it. But Jason just opened his eyes. “See?” he said. “it’s gone now!”
Looking at the ceramic lamp in her hand, the therapist said, “What’s gone now?”
“The glass lamp you used to have, right on that table!”
The therapist glanced at the table she’d just taken the ceramic lamp off of, and then at the ceramic lamp in her hand. “I’m sorry, Jason, I’ve never had a glass lamp there. This ceramic lamp was a gift from my grandmother. I’ve always had it in my office.”
Jason began to cry again.