the merry-go-round

“I’m an imposter.”

That was what Dr. Ivana’s first patient always said. It was the same routine every time. He would knock twice on her door, take off his tweed jacket, and sit down nervously in one of the chairs in front of her desk. He would fiddle with his hands for a minute or so, never making eye contact, and then say what he always said: I’m an imposter. No greeting, no small talk, no exposition on the latest events in his life. Just, I’m an imposter.

“That’s been a theme in our conversations. What do you think keeps prompting it?” Dr. Ivana said gently but coolly. She tried always to project that calm, scientific certainty that her graduate thesis advisor—Professor Pimlico—had displayed. He had always been so rational, so brilliant; it was he who had shown her how the mind, like the rest of nature, could be analyzed with the scientific method. 

“On the one hand, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Dr. Ivana’s patient said. “I feel like an imposter because I’m a therapist, and yet I need a therapist. If my patients knew, would they trust me? Or would they, like the ancients used to, Physician, heal thyself!” He buried his head in his hands and began to weep.

Dr. Ivana muted her natural reaction of disgust and briefly directed her gaze to the wall to her right. Two pictures hung there, which always brought comfort in trials: a portrait of Professor Pimlico smiling calmly, his silver hair brushed neatly to one side, and a picture of herself as a child on a merry-go-round. Its gentle motion had always soothed her nerves. She finished drawing strength from those pictures and turned back to the patient, ready to endure the rest of the repetitive and useless session.

By the end of the session, there was an empty gnawing in her chest. She called her therapist on the drive back.

“I’m an imposter. I feel like an imposter because I’m a therapist and yet I need a therapist. If my patients knew, would they trust me? Or would they, like the ancients used to, Physician, heal thyself!” She rattled off the words from memory in frustration, but beneath the frustration was a part of her that wondered what it would feel like to mean them. That part of her made her wait a little longer before adding, “A troublesome patient.” 

Her therapist was silent a long, staticky moment before responding, probably trying to work out whether she had violated client confidentiality and how to respond. She wondered if he was staring at the portrait of someone who meant a lot to him on his wall, but she bet he didn’t need to do that: he was like Professor Pimlico. As usual, he said something wise and practical that she couldn’t remember afterward.

In the evening, she made herself some dinner and read a few pages of an old French novel. The empty gnawing had returned to her chest, and after a brief ethical struggle, she decided to drown it with a glass of white wine or two… or three. Drowsiness overcame her, and she slipped off to bed.

That night, she dreamt.

The world in her dream was bright and impressionistic like a watercolor painting. She found herself in a park—and recognized it as the park in the neighborhood where she had grown up. To one side, there was a wide green field that led into a forest of pine, spruce, and poplar. She had explored that forest with friends as a child, pretending to be things they were not. To another side lay a baseball diamond. In the center of the park, where she stood now, there were swings and slides and a merry-go-round—the very one from the photograph on her desk.

However, something about the merry-go-round seemed different. What was unusual about it was hard to say exactly: perhaps, it was the way its silver surface shone so reflectively, like a pool of mercury, or the way it seemed almost to hum with life. But whatever it was, it beckoned her with all the fascination that an enchantress in a medieval tale might wield.

As she climbed onto the merry-go-round, she was aware of being a child again. She noticed her little hands, with fingers smaller than baby carrots and tiny unsteady legs. There was something wonderful and magical about that. Those days were so far away, and so few of them remained in her memory. Other children joined her—where they come from, she could not say—but she was glad of their company. Together, they pushed the merry-go-round, and it began to spin.

It was a gentle, pleasant spin at first. But then, it began to spin faster, so fast she was afraid now to let go. Her knuckles grew white as she gripped the bars, and she shut her eyes to avoid getting sick from the whirling ground around her. She wondered if any of the other children had fallen, but when she looked, they were gone, replaced by older adults. Her heart chilled as she realized the outfits the older adults were wearing were the same as what the children had been wearing. And then that chill grew to terror as the faces of the older adults became more wrinkled and shriveled before her eyes until they turned to rotting corpses and then skeletons that crumpled into dust.

She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound escaped. The dust from the skeletons began to reform on the sides of the merry-go-round into pale, ghostly forms that reached for her arms and legs. Gasping with terror, dripping with cold sweat, she shut her eyes and clawed her way toward the center. The texture began to change, turning from cool metal to something moist, soft, and tissue-like.

Don’t look, a voice in her head whispered frantically. But the urge was too strong. Her eyes fluttered open, and immediately new pits of fear opened up in her heart. The merry-go-round was covered with large, intelligent eyes. Some were full of utter terror and some with hate. Horrible hate.

She screamed and let go, hoping the centrifugal forces would launch away from the dreadful eyes, but though she let go, the merry-go-round did not let go of her. It gripped her even tighter until she could not even unstick her hands from the living eyes beneath her, the thousand staring eyes full of fright and loathing.

Then suddenly, when she thought the horror could not grow any deeper, the merry-go-round was suddenly lifted off the ground. It raced upward, away from the park and her childhood home, and into the blankness of space. Soon the blue planet she had lived on all her life was as small as a water droplet in the distance, and everything was dark.

Everything, except for the merry-go-round. It suddenly shook violently, like a horse weary off its owner, and tossed her forward—though whether it was forward, or backward, or sidewise, she could not tell in the infinite darkness.

Terrible gleams flickered from the merry-go-round’s wild spinning; it was propelled this way and that through the chasm of space, untethered in the void. It tortured her like this until all she could manage to do was turn herself into a ball, face buried in her knees, hands gripping her legs. She could feel her skin and bones aging like those little children had aged, and she was sure she would crumble into dust at any moment. But she didn’t. The merry-go-round kept spinning around her. And always, those hideous eyes watched her.

Then all at once, the merry-go-round whirled away, and vanished in a streak of light, leaving her alone.

It was an awful loneliness: there was no light, no touch, no feeling, no sound—only the sickening feeling of falling from the weightlessness of space. She knew somehow this could not be real, that humans could not survive in a vacuum. Somewhere she had read that their skin would freeze, steam, and expand, or something along those horrifying lines. But nothing happened. Nothing.

After it seemed an eternity had passed, and another eternity was about to begin, she woke up.

The dream was over, and she was in her bed. It was over. Relief flooded through her veins, and she nearly cried. It was only a dream.

She had left the window open last night for some reason. The air in the room was freezing, and a heavy, fleece blanket covered her. It ought to have been a pleasant sensation. She had liked nothing better as a child than to smother herself with blankets on a cold, winter night and curl up with a book and flashlight. It ought to have been pleasant. But it wasn’t.

There was something creeping in her soul, something slick and cool and troublesome. It was as though that empty gnawing had come to life and now was moving around inside her. And in her stomach, a residue of that dizzying freefall remained. The merry-go-round, spinning like an alien spacecraft, haunted her. She could still see it in flashes of memory, sharp and realistic, that contrasted with the watercolor world with which the dream began. What could it mean?

Her first strategy was to try to forget the dream. She took all the knickknacks and books off her shelves, dusted, and rearranged them. For some reason, the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the Bible were next to each other. “Odd bedfellows,” she remarked amusedly to herself. The amusement did not last long, and for some reason, their presence on her bookshelf troubled her.

After rearranging her house, she weeded all hundred square feet of her backyard garden, trimmed the hedges, and cut the grass. In the evening, she sought solace in a local grand restaurant, indulging in an extravagant eight-course meal accompanied by an exorbitantly priced bottle of wine. The wine was good, but it also left the world lurching; she felt she was on the merry-go-round once again.

The wine ended up in the toilet when she got home. As she wiped her face and slumped against the bathroom, drowsiness overtook her, and she dreamt again.

It was the same dream, and when it finally finished, she woke screaming. This time, she felt no relief at being awake, only dread and a deepening of that empty gnawing in her heart. She stumbled down the stairs into the kitchen and reached for the half-finished wine bottle on the counter. In one swig, she downed the rest of the warm and sour liquid, which burned as it ran down her dry throat.

What is happening to me? She wondered, tears streaking down her face. What is wrong with me?

She thought perhaps of calling her therapist. But would he understand? The dream she had had was not some common nightmare, but to say that it was different sounded platitudinous and would only occasion head nods where there was no understanding. Only someone who had lived through such a terror could comprehend it.

On a whim, she began to search over his online presence. Somehow, she was led to a social media page run by his ex-wife. It said a great many nasty things about him. So, what if he struggled with alcohol, had few friends, and believed he was an imposter?

Why had she expected him to be any different? Her patients must have thought the same thing about her.

According to his ex-wife, he was seeking therapy for his problems. That was a good sign, she told herself: a willingness to reckon with one’s faults and try to heal. Still, it was a disappointment. She had always thought of him as another Professor Pimlico—the epitome of scientific rationality, cool, calm, and reassuring. Then she saw something that made her veins go cold.

It was not some terrible, hidden voice or a graphic photograph. It was a name, and what is in a name? A name should not cause so much distress, but it did. She blinked and re-read it, and then re-read it again and again. The letters did not rearrange themselves or fade away into something else; they remained as they were, just as she thought she had seen them on the screen. It was the name of her patient, the one she had seen just yesterday. And he was, according to the ex-wife, her ex-husband’s therapist.

A chain of therapists led back to her. A closed loop of lies and pretense. Each of us pretending to be wise enough to help others while we are powerless to help ourselves, she thought. It was like finding out the pipes in one’s toilet led back to the sink and that when she thought she had been drinking fresh water, she had really been drinking her own waste all along. Or that one’s wife was one’s mother, like Oedipus. No, that thought didn’t make sense—it was too large a leap—but her thoughts now were wild and frantic. Why shouldn’t that make sense?

She awoke screaming again, screaming, screaming, awoke. Throat burning, head throbbing, eyes bleary, she gazed around the room. Somehow, she must’ve fallen asleep at her computer, worn down by exhaustion and alcohol. The afterimages of the dream still danced in front of her eyes, and she began to cry dry tears.

All the ideas she had treasured and lived by—scientific consensus, evidence-based methods, professional assessment, peer review, surveys, and data—it all seemed suddenly so vacuous. In a flash of insight, she could see that it was all nothing more than naked apes, all shouting meaningless sounds at each other to make themselves feel powerful, to say who was in and who was out.

Yes, it was nothing more than banging sticks together. It was nothing. Nothing! And how meaningless a nothing it was. Her thoughts grew more frantic and furious. Science, art, history, the whole human endeavor—it was all the most outrageous vanity, pitiable if it weren’t so detestable, detestable if it weren’t so pitiable. Her mind spun, like dizzy and drunk, visiting this point again and again until she was sick.

She couldn’t go on like this. It was such blind stupidity. Such sheer, meaningless vanity. More and more, she withdrew into herself, into the inmost chasm of her soul. But no matter where she fled, the nightmare always followed her: the spinning merry-go-round with its pale, perverted light. Wine had only done so much to ward off the terror, and so she turned to pain, slicing thin lines in neat columns on her arms.

But it was no help. She ignored the calls from her patients and colleagues and even her therapist. With a few quick strokes at her keyboard, she set off a flurry of automatic replies, filled with reassuring lies, to draw all attention away from herself. More and more, the black empty prison of her thoughts closed in around her like the great void of space into which the merry-go-round had carried her. A decision was being forced upon her, she could feel, that neither drunkenness nor the ecstasy of pain could delay. The great pit of despair, which lay at the bottom of her empty, pain-stricken, and anxious heart, yawned open as if to welcome her in its embrace.

Eventually, she gave in. Her poor, fragile mind could only bear so much strain—it was inevitable, wasn’t it? Something like that was among the last pleading thoughts she felt before a curtain of darkness swept down over her mind.

One morning, she was found dead in her office by the janitor, with an open pill bottle and a half-finished cup of coffee. She had not bothered to cover her poor, tortured arms; the red lines of her cuts gleamed cruelly in the morning light. Her desk was barren, save for the bottle and the cup, and two books: The Collected Works of Nietzsche and The Bible. She had underlined a passage in each.

The first was in The Parable of the Madman: “Are we not perpetually falling? Backwards, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as though through Infinite nothing?”

And the second was in Ecclesiastes: “All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say.”

On the bottom of the page, Dr. Ivana had written: In the end, the atheist and the Bible agree: life is a merry-go-round, and we are all imposters on it. Even you, dear Professor Pimlico. Especially you.