Session #28

To call Jeremy’s skin rosy is an insult to the flower–red splotches detonated across his face at the moment of emotional inception. Fear or embarrassment, joy or resentment, his chubby freckle-splatted cheeks reacted by transforming the boy into an overripe tomato.

For the past eternity, he seemed fine, content to doodle with crayons on the backs of Sylvia’s double-spaced thesis drafts. Jeremy had been hard at work etching out a pond, two ducks and an oversized goldfish swimming blissfully on its surface. In the top left corner, he embellished his work with the tell-tale sign of a kindergarten artist–a yellow sun beaming a squiggly smile across a half-colored sky. His little fists fiercely gripped a green crayon, time to add a lily pad, Sylvia guessed. His brow furrowed like he was solving an impossible equation, blonde hair sprouting from his round little head like coily weeds. Even so little, he looked like he carried the world on his scrawny shoulders. An overalls-clad Sissyphus. 

Sylvia knew better than to wonder where she was, but she still scanned the room for hints at familiarity. Too many layers of lumpy, off white paint smothered the walls like poorly applied makeup. The misshapen yellow couch donned a familiar red wine stain on its skirted bottom. Cloudy ice formed a murky film on the outside surface of a thick window. Of the three bulbs in the 1980s-era ceiling lamp, only one really worked–one was long dead, the other flickered with irregular bursts like inappropriate laughter. 

This was her apartment, or it was two or three apartments ago. A two-bedroom on Beacon Hill shared with a rowdy redhead getting her masters in social work. Her roommate’s ex-boyfriend was a persistent over-spender–the TV on the far-facing wall took up more than its fair share of space, an expensive Keurig sat half-cleaned on the counter behind her, a shaggy Pottery Barn rug captured dust in its frenzied microfiber kinks. The black cat they had found in the dumpster behind a bar they used to frequent (Artie’s? Arnie’s? Sylvia couldn’t remember) had found a warm spot on a threadbare cushion at the far end of the sofa, perched with a view of the falling snow. Its sugar-dipped tail swirled at a slow, constant tempo, swish, swish, swish. 

“Where is she,” Jeremy asked, the etchings of rage spindling red webs across his cherubic face.

Sylvia glanced away from the cat’s hypnotic tail, locking her eyes on the child. The boy’s focus didn’t lift from the paper in front of him, even as his grip tightened around the crayon. Too much pressure had rendered its tip blunt and its soft paper wrapping had started to furl and crumble as the shapes of his burgeoning lily pad (Sylvia was right) evolved into sharp, frustrated scrawlings. 

 “Who?” 

“You know who,” he said through pursed lips. 

“Rem, we talked about this. You have to be specific.”

The crayon made contact with the drawing with such a force that it ripped the paper open, decapitating one of the ducks and leaving a leaf-colored smudge on the white particle board coffee table. Jeremy quieted, his hands stopped their rapid, heavy-handed strokes. He sighed, the agitation palpable from across the room. The cat’s ear twitched. 

“Mommy.”

Sylvia shifted her feet under her legs, the unkempt fibers of the dirty rug standing on edge with static electricity.  “Mommy isn’t here today, Rem, it’s just me.” She moved to touch him, comfort him as she’d done an infinite number of times before. She could practically wrap her entire hand around its width if she wanted. But when her palm met the worn cotton of his sailor-striped T-shirt, she felt nothing. No warmth of his body, no fluctuation of his heartbeat or increasingly heavy breaths. 

The boy’s eyes rose to meet hers as she recoiled. “You know you’re not supposed to do that,” he seethed, an odious grin spilling across his half-toothed mouth, the skin on his face and neck glowing hot like dying coals. 

He snapped the green crayon in two, the resulting crack reverberating across the room. Once chubby and paw-like, his hands elongated, his knuckle bones surged up and out of the fleshy frame threatening to slice through a layer of freshly scarring skin. His arm inflated and sprouted thick dark hair, a dragon tattoo leaching its way up his epidermis. Veins formed under his flushed neck, bulging with every undetectable heartbeat. His missing teeth seared through his gums, crossing over one another in a staggered tangle while a trail of watery blood dripped down the corner of his chapped lips. Those sun-kissed curls drooped straight and dishwater brown as they dangled lifelessly over frenetic, dilated eyes.

A barrage of curses flooded Sylvia’s mind in unintelligible waves. Find the exit, she repeated in her mind, eyes darting recklessly from wall to wall. The couch was exactly as she remembered it, down to the thread unraveling in the far left corner where she picked at its polyblend cover. The obnoxious TV was a Christmas gift one year and ended up on Facebook Marketplace before spring break, so the iced-out window was a given. If the walls weren’t painted like that and the light worked as it should, well, that’d be a dead giveaway. 

The cat sprung up, long legs accentuating the crescent-shaped arch of its back, its tail a permanent metronome, swish swish swish. It turned its midnight-black neck aloofly in Sylvia’s direction, but there was no gaze to be held–instead two sunken sockets formed fur-covered craters where ice-blue, almond-shaped eyes had been.

“It’s Arnie. The cat is Arnie,” Sylvia said, barely above a whisper. She hit the coffee table with a balled fist in quick succession, thunk thunk thunk. “Let me out.”

***

“Welcome back, Miss Johnson.”

Sylvia rubbed her temple, feeling the lining of her mouth with her tongue. She’d been known to clench her teeth in her sleep, and with sleep like this, a chipped tooth wasn’t out of the question. She rubbed her hands along the leather of the recliner, soft and sterile, before cracking open her dust-covered eyes. Crying again, she thought to herself, great. 

“How long was I in for this time,” Sylvia asked without turning her head. The ceiling lamp in the small, dark-walled room only has one bulb, and one with an adjustable setting that was supposed to fill the room with a soothing, barely-there glow. Sylvia felt more like being a plant in a greenhouse, tricked into a 24-hour cycle to produce the most efficient fruit. For all Sylvia knew, it was broad daylight outside, the memory of entering the office was fuzzy and every attempt to search for it was met by painful pangs of Jeremy’s face contorting from childlike frustration into calculated fury. 

“Would you like that to count for one of your three questions today, Miss Johnson?” The doctor flipped another page on their clipboard and pushed their rimless glasses up another inch on her slight, arched nose, a tinge of judgement on her tongue. It’s a pointless question–dreams have no correlation to their sleeptime. A 2 hour nap can often produce finer results than a months-long coma. Sylvia knew this, she knew better. 

“No.” Sylvia cocked her head to the side. The doctor was young, must be freshly out of university, with a slicked back bun and high, tidy eyebrows. Pretty, in an aseptic sort of way. “I thought my session was scheduled with Dr. Carol today.”

“Because that’s not a question, I’ll let it slide,” the new doctor said with a tight smile, like every move of her facial muscles cost her something dear. “Dr. Carol is performing a long-term assessment and was not available to complete this session. I am Dr. O'Connor, and I will be filling in for as long as necessary.”

Sylvia swallowed and rolled her neck, producing a cascade of gentle crinkles in her ears. “Okay, then. First question. How long has he been this age?” 

Dr. O'Connor fingered through the papers on the clipboard. “It appears that the subject has stagnated at the age of approximately six years old for the past 28 sessions.” 28 sessions, Sylvia thought, counting back as far as she could. How often did she come here? She still was coming to terms with what here meant, but it felt monthly. Monthly felt normal. But 28 monthly sessions, that’s more than two years. 

“Is that normal? Isn’t the point to regress faster than the aging process?” 

Dr. O'Connor smirked. “I understand that your inquiry wasn’t meant to be comprehended as two separate questions, so I’ll let it go this time. But you very well know that the process isn’t tied to temporal constraints, regression processes happen at varying rates due to the circumstances of the subject.”

Sylvia had to close her eyes to avoid rolling them. Dr. Carol at least had some bedside manner. She hoisted herself up off the back of the recliner, not too unlike the ones she’d been sitting in for a lifetime of dentists appointments, and pulled her right arm in a stretch across her midsection. This set-up might be ideal for this procedure, but it wasn’t ideal for her tight back that felt more at ease hunched over a laptop.

Dr. O'Connor pressed one manicured hand against Sylvia’s shoulder, cold and stronger than her slight frame would let on, pushing her back and deeper into the recliner. “I’m going to have to ask you not to move until the post-assessment questionnaire is complete. I hope you understand.” The same tight smile creases across the lower half of her face, her eyes and cheeks refusing to move in unison as if frozen in place. “Would you like me to read the exit statements before you proceed with your final question?” 

Sylvia nodded, every muscle locked in shape. If the doctor touched her again, it’d take conscious effort not to snap her wrist. 

Dr. O'Connor flipped to the front page of the clipboard. “Thank you again, Miss Johnson, for participating in another session of the Brown-Hoffman Recovery and Diagnostic protocol,” she read without inflection or expression. “We hope to see you again for your next assessment. If you’d like to continue your participation in the protocol, please proceed to the Showering Station before exiting the facility. This is optional, however if you forgo a visit to the Showering Station, you will not be invited back to continue your important work with the Brown-Hoffman Institute. This decision is entirely at the will of the participant. You, as the participant, have the right to discontinue participation in the protocol at any time. Do you understand and agree to the terms laid out before you?” 

Sylvia nodded again, eyes glued on the barely perceptible light emanating off of the ceiling lamp. 

“We need verbal confirmation, Miss Johnson.”

“Yes. Yes, I understand and agree.”

“Thank you, Miss Johnson, your participation in this protocol is paramount to our research, and the insight that you provide us and the Commonwealth is invaluable.” Dr. O'Connor turned away, walking towards a steel-handled door at the far end of the office. She gripped the handle and pushed, allowing a ray of light to creep into the room, creating her replica with its own long nails and tidy clipboard in the form of a long, lean shadow. “You know the way to the Showering Station, just take this exit and go through the third door on your right whenever you’ve composed yourself.”

Willing her body not to move, Sylvia took care that her breaths don’t cause her chest to move too greatly. “Wait, wait. I still have one more question.”

Dr. O'Connor twisted the handle shut, closing the door with a gentle thud. “Of course. Miss Johnson, your question?”

“Why the cat? Arnie would be 15 years old by now, there’s no telling if he’s even still alive. I haven’t thought about him in 10 of those years.” She paused. “You got the tail wrong. It was a stub when we found him.”

Dr. O'Connor turned her head towards Sylvia, keeping her eyes lowered to the clipboard. “High-empathy participants with a history of neglect tend to associate strongly with animals, especially those that they had some sort of a caretaking relationship with.” Her hand once again gripped the door handle, which let out a soft creak. “This has been discussed with you prior. It would be helpful to remind yourself regularly so that your future sessions are less unsettling, for you and for Jeremy.” 

A flood of synthetic, cool-toned light from the hallway delivered color back into the small, dark-walled office as Dr. O'Connor wedged open the door. Sylvia’s pile of belongings–an old black puffer jacket, worn leather shoulder bag, and half empty Boston University water bottle sat haphazardly on a white plastic chair in the corner of the room. The pieces of who she is outside of this room, crammed into a space too small and rigid to ever be comfortable. 

“The Commonwealth is grateful for your contribution, Miss Johnson,” Dr. O'Connor recited detachedly. The door slammed behind her, cloaking the room once again in manufactured twilight.