Therapy Session with the Vampire

“How was your week, Bruno?”

“Good, good. I finally got to read again. Some writing as well. But nothing too grandiose.”   

“That’s great! As we always say, a small advancement is infinitely greater than no advancement at all.”

Bruno adjusted himself in his chair. The therapist eyed him through the camera with that look of near-infinite patience and expectancy that only therapists have. Even Bruno thought that look was weird, and he was, as the therapist himself said, one of the most interesting patients he had ever worked with. Bruno knew that by “interesting” the doctor meant “peculiar”.  

“Would you like to share some of it, Bruno?”

“The writing? Oh, no. It is second hand quality at most. Really, more a distraction than something I take seriously.”

“But don’t you think someone who read it might like?”

“Maybe, but that is not the point. I write for myself.”

“Would you like to tell me about what you write?”

“You mean if I write about my people?”

“Well… Yes. Your people. I thought we had already passed that.”

“I cannot pass my very nature, doctor. But yes, I write about my people. Not directly, but I do.”

“How so?”

“Poetry that express the peculiarities of my- of our experience. Particular feelings and perceptions that only we could truly understand. Our relationship with the Sun, for example.”

“I would be interested in that reading, and not just professionally.”

“Maybe you would, wouldn’t you? But I didn’t write it so mortals could read it and think that it is fiction, a mere distraction, entertainment for their miserable short lives to pass even faster. No offence.”

“None taken.” said the therapist with a half-smile “Go on.”

“I cannot bear the thought of people laughing and saying ‘I love that writer’s books, he is so creative, I hope they make a movie out of it’ or something preposterous like the sort. Ricardo, I swear, if one day a movie is made out of my writings I will kill myself. I will open the damned door on daytime and walk out.”

There was a long pause. The therapist crossed his fingers and exhaled. “Bruno?”

“Yes?”

“It’s been ten years; you know how many sessions is that?”

Bruno looked away from the monitor and started filing his nails. “Hundreds? I don’t know. Nor care.”

“Six hundred and eighty two. That’s more than once a week. A decade we know each other, we do this. Now let me ask you the same thing I asked you on our very first session: Why are you here? What do you want from this?”

“You know, doctor. To me that is like a month. I think I started it out of boredom, or mild curiosity.”

“You know what you answered me the first time? ‘I want to see daylight again’. All those years I tried to open your eyes to reality, Bruno. You are not a vampire. Sunlight can’t kill you. I tried to reveal to you that the only thing afflicting you is a severe phobia, paired with some kind of identity issue. But that’s it. I want you to be happy. I want you to achieve the desire that started this journey.”

Bruno shifted on the chair and put down the file. “Thank you, Ricardo. That was a nice speech, and I appreciate your wish to help me. Truthfully I do. But I am damned, I am vampyre. If I said anything in the past that gave you the notion that you convinced me otherwise you were… naïve. But it is true that I wish to see sunlight again. On that note, I was about to ask you, have you heard of virtual reality?”

The therapist sighed “Yes, yes, Bruno, I have.”

“Amazing machine isn’t it? I bought one online yesternight.”

Ricardo let out a laugh “You did? That doesn’t sound much vampire-like.”

Bruno smiled “And that prejudgment doesn’t sound like something out of a therapist. Well, at least speaking it aloud doesn’t.”

The therapist looked down and adjusted his glasses “Sorry, you got me there. It’s just you jumped from something serious to something so random.”

“Oh, but I assure you, virtual reality has everything to do with what we were conversing before.”

“I think I’m starting to picture it.”

“Wonderful. As you know, I can, and I have experienced artificial sunlight. In imagination, through literature, dreams and meditation. In visualization through paintings, photographs, films, and, more recently… Well, videogames. A marvelous form of art really, well, not always, but that is beside the point.”

“But it’s never the same, is it?”

“No. It is not.”

“And you think that through VR it will?”

“Ah, the abbreviations and neologisms of mortals, somehow they always surprise me! No, Ricardo, I do not think that. I am sure that it won’t be the same experience. But it will be better in relation to the previous ones; it will have a sense of depth and surroundedness like no other visual stimulus.”

“And how do you feel about it?

“I feel… Hopeful. More than I felt in a long time. Maybe one day technology will be intricate enough that it would be possible to feel the heat, you know? Of Sunlight against skin.”

“That would be wonderful, Bruno. But I should remind you that that already exists, in nature.”

“Oh, please, doctor, do not be like a broken record.”

“More often than not, that is my job. Sorry.”

“It is fine.”

“But I am happy for you, Bruno. Hope, motivation, perspective for the future, for change, that is all important. I feared that you were stagnating.”

“Finally something we agree on. I dread that too. An endless twilight where every hour is the same; no new wine to taste, music to listen to, or book that says something truly new.”

There was a moment of silence between them. Bruno grimaced in such a way that his canines had a slight hint of a true vampire. Ricardo saw it, and blinked hard, thinking it a mere trick of the light. Then he exhaled, relieved, when his theory showed itself to be true.

“You know, doctor, maybe one day we will do our sessions in V.R.”

The first answer that came to Ricardo naturally was ‘Maybe we will do them in person’, and he would have stuck with that one if it was any other patient, but it was Bruno, the vampire. “Sounds wonderful” he said.

Bruno took a large sip from his glass of wine – something Ricardo had already given up complaining about – “Same day, same time, next week, doctor?”

“Of course, of course. See you then.”