by Andy Cox
Blankenship shook his head. “Only child. But they say everyone has a twin. They say that, right?”
“Right.” Dr Reed sat back in her chair. It was a signal he should also relax. “Today, we’re just going to talk. Get to know one another.” She looked down at the notes on her lap. “So, you live with your daughter?”
“She’s thirteen,” he said.
“A wonderful, tough age.”
“She’s everything.” Blankenship ached as he said that.
Dr Reed glanced again at her notes. “You live in a motel. How long have you been there?”
“Since…it happened.” Blankenship ached again, but in a different place, in his stomach. He swallowed it down. This treatment was supposed to help this go away, not rise. It rose just fine on its own. “It’s an extended stay motel,” he said.
“Do you want to talk about it a little?” Dr Reed blinked. “The incident, I mean. Not the motel. But, of course, we can talk about anything you want.” She leaned closer. “But the incident, your target, as we call it, is why we’re here. Right?”
Blankenship closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look at Reed or Meridian or anyone when he said it. “My universe exploded.” He opened his eyes. Nothing had changed. “The motel is comfortable. Just like a little apartment.”
Their first house was small, a white wood cottage. Zhorah said inside reminded her of a boat. A cozy little boat. That was why they adopted ‘Blankenship’.
He suddenly felt exposed. “You aren’t allowed to tell anyone what we talk about here?” Blankenship asked. In his universe, medical professionals swore some sort of oath of silence.
“No,” Dr Reed said. The question didn’t surprise her. “Doctor-patient confidentiality. I will never disclose anything that goes on here, unless I believe you are an immediate danger to yourself or to others.”
“I’m not,” Blankenship said. He was pretty sure of that.
“Now, tell me again, in different words if you can, about your target.”
Blankenship sat forward. He decided to try again, eyes open. “My universe…” Different words. Exploded. Blew up. Disappeared. “…was destroyed.” He really wanted to make her understand. “My whole universe is gone.” He made a move with his hands, but he didn’t know an appropriate gesture. “Gone.”
SESSION TWO
The first session left Blankenship exhausted in a way he’d not experienced before. In his universe, he’d have called a car to take him home, and he would have slept straight through dinnertime. In his world, he’d never had to do that. And now, in this world, he couldn’t afford the indulgence.
He had the motel to pay for, and food, and the therapy sessions. And things for Tibbi; thirteen year old girls required a lot of supplies just for basic maintenance: lotions, lip gloss, colorful socks. Outfits. Not just clothes. Outfits.
And he was trying to save up enough to buy both of them new identities. As safe as this Seattle made Tibbi, they couldn’t stay – and Blankenship couldn’t use Ferguson’s ID numbers for too much longer without a day of reckoning.
He also wanted to pay Ferguson back for the cash they stole from him in the beginning. That wasn’t as important, since Blankenship was Ferguson; he knew he’d ultimately understand about the whole thing.
He was an understanding guy.
“That’s what you like most about yourself?” Dr Reed asked. “That you are understanding?”
“Is that OK?” he asked.
“Of course,” she answered. “I just wanted to make sure that was what you wanted me to put down as your starting ‘positive belief’. That’s going to be really important as we move forward with therapy.”
“I’m an understanding, forgiving guy.”
Dr Reed wrote that on the worksheet. He was supposed to take home this sheet after the session and practice whatever was on it.
“We’re going to find your ‘safe place’ now,” she said. “A time and place when you felt completely safe, completely happy. Or as close as possible. Could be anytime, anywhere, from earliest childhood onward.” Dr Reed wrote SAFE PLACE on the sheet. “I want you to picture it. Sights, sounds, smells. Keep your eyes open. Take your time. Let me know when you are there.”
Blankenship immediately knew his safe place. They’d built an addition on the tiny white boat cottage for the baby – half glass walls and a glass ceiling, almost like a greenhouse for their flower.
Zhorah sat in a rocking chair, next to the crib, Tibbi swaddled in a light green plaid blanket. Zhorah rocked. Tibbi slept, her fat pink cheek pressed against Zhorah’s breasts.
Blankenship sat on the ground right next to his women. His arm fell asleep from reaching up for so long to hold Zhorah’s hand underneath Tibbi’s bottom, but he ignored that as long as he could to just sit there.
Fat raindrops tapped the glass roof like fingers. Not to be let inside, but just to let them know they were there, they were everywhere, watching out for the three of them.
“I see it,” he said.
“Clearly?”
Blankenship leaned his head against Zhorah’s leg. He didn’t know if he actually did that at the time, but he could feel her and Tibbi’s warmth.
“Yes,” he said.
“We’re going to make a kind of shortcut to it. Tap your left knee,” Dr Reed said.
He tapped.
“Whenever you tap your knee there, you will call up that safe place. You will be there,” Dr Reed said. “Now, be here. Look at me.”
“OK,” he said. He immediately wanted to tap his knee again.
“Tell me about something else. Tell me about your work.”
“I used to be a film critic,” he said. “Now, I’m a bookkeeper.” Money in this universe was made of paper and metal coins, but math was the same.
“What’s your favorite movie?” she asked.
He didn’t know what to say. All the films in this universe were different. Then, he realized it didn’t matter. Like in his universe, there were so many films he could just say anything – it wouldn’t be unusual if Dr Reed had never heard of it. “The Berry.” In his universe, that was a well-known and award-winning documentary.
“Good,” she said. She paused, and then said, “Tap your knee.”
He tapped. He heard Tibbi take a breath, the kind that signaled she was about to cry. He squeezed his wife’s hand, and then lowered down his tingling arm.
“Are you there”? Dr Reed asked.
“I am.”
“Good,” she said. “Excellent. Let’s move on.”
SESSION THREE
Dr Reed wore a scarf with a distracting print. The way he had to hold his head, so his neck wouldn’t shoot pains, kept him staring right at it.
Dr Reed asked him about himself, and then about some other things. The scarf bothered Blankenship. He couldn’t focus until he heard his daughter’s name.
“What?” he asked.
“How is Tibbi coping with everything?” Dr Reed repeated.
When he got home from work the evening before, Tibbi had been flopped on her stomach, sideways across her bed. She liked the queen size mattress much more than her tiny little cot back at home.
The cot was a small bed. For a small girl in a small room in a small white house.
She rolled over as Blankenship locked the door behind him.
“Hello, precious,” he said. “How was school?”
“Hi, Baba,” she said. “When are we going to find a real apartment?”
She answered herself at the same time he did: “Soon.” Then she sighed and rolled back over onto her stomach.
“Are you feeling all right?” Blankenship asked.
“I’m not sure, Baba,” Tibbi answered. It was the most forthright she’d been in days. “I think so.”
Blankenship sat next to his daughter. She felt warm to him. Maybe she’d caught something. He gave her some Naproxen, after studying the label for warnings longer than he needed to, and let her watch whatever she wanted to on the T
V.
“She’s all right, I guess,” Blankenship answered Dr Reed. “She alternates between pretending she finds the whole mess quite boring and having stomach issues.”
“That sounds like a teenager.” Dr Reed put her hand to her throat. “Do you want me to take this off? You keep focusing on it.”
“No,” he said. “Yes.” Something about the colors, the blown-out paisley print, kept him from being able to think straight.
She untied it and then hid it beneath a leg. “Did you practice your positive belief? And going to your safe place?”
Blankenship nodded. It helped when the panicked ache rose up. But, he’d also had to force himself from not tapping his knee all the time: on the bus, in traffic; at work, staring at a screen of spreadsheets until they smeared; sitting up in his queen sized bed, listening to his daughter’s tiny, little snore.
“We’re going to do some unpleasant work for a few minutes,” Dr Reed said. “If you feel up for it.”
“Sure.”
“We’re going to identify a ‘negative cognition’. Think of it as the opposite of your positive belief. It’s something about you that you are uncomfortable with, that causes you distress. This can be related to your target. How you reacted, for instance. Or, why you think you are so deeply affected.” Dr Reed touched her neck again, seeming surprised the scarf was not there to play with. Then she went on. “Some examples could be ‘I can’t deal with being alone’, or ‘I can’t protect my daughter’.”
“Neither of those.” He had been alone since his Zhorah died, and he did protect his daughter. They were in this universe, after all, instead of being pulverized, or atomized, or whatever happened to everyone and everything in their world. He knew the right answer. “I can’t find my place in this world.”
Dr Reed nodded. She wrote that down in her notes. “We will work on that,” she said.
“Thank you,” Blankenship said. “I hope so.”
Because, in this universe, he was a ghost. It was best if he didn’t take up much space and left only the most fleeting of impressions.
And like a ghost, he haunted. People and places.
He left work today right after lunch, extra early, so he’d have time to make a stop before his appointment. It took two busses. The house was, as they were called in this universe, a ‘craftsman’, typical for this Seattle. It set into a hillside in a neighborhood that didn’t exist in his universe. There, it was some government buildings, although he wasn’t sure which.
It was light blue, with darker blue trim and a shiny, red door. The deep porch was held up by square pillars, and a wind chime of cut metal butterflies rang like a bell in the breeze. The curtains were pretty diaphanous, and Blankenship could see right into the sitting room, a sofa, throw pillows, the exposed beams framing the bookshelf.
She wouldn’t be home. She taught a full day of classes that day, according to the university course catalog. In this university, Zhorah was a professor. Literature. It made sense. In his universe, Zhorah was a poet.
Blankenship didn’t know what this Zhorah’s husband did. He was also obviously not home. Blankenship looked at photos of him on the Internet – Maxwell Graham – but only enough to know he was not someone Blankenship knew.
Blankenship cricked his neck trying to see past the front room. He couldn’t see himself there. This was not his stuff. None of it. He also couldn’t see any evidence of children.
On the two bus rides back to and from the appointment, he looked down at his feet on the floor, ashamed. He felt like he’d done something – not criminal, but dirty, somehow. He wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. And he wouldn’t allow himself the relief of rubbing the side of his neck.
“That’s why we’re here,” Dr Reed said.
Blankenship dug his knuckles into the sore lump. It throbbed with a life of its own.
SESSION FOUR
The ring of chairs of was gone, replaced with two wide-armed wingbacks. Blankenship was glad. These were more comfortable, and the circle always made him half expect a group to show up around him.
“Would you say you’re practiced at going to your safe place?” Dr Reed asked. “I’d like to move onto your target today, if we can.”
“I am,” he said. “Let’s try.”
Dr Reed pulled a thin wand out and held it up. She pushed a small button on one end, and a blue LED light creeped across the wand, back and forth. “Are these lights too bright to focus on?” she asked.
“They’re OK.” The color reminded him of holiday lights.
“As you talk and think about and picture your target, I want you to follow the light back and forth. Blink whenever you need to.”
“Are you hypnotizing me?” Blankenship felt nervous again, like he had on the first day. He was here to process what happened, sure, but he didn’t need to go blurting out how he stole money, even if it was from himself, or how he went to his wife, not-wife’s house.
“No. Not at all.” She explained something about changing the way he stored memories, affecting his neural pathways. “Imagine the event, if you can. Place yourself there.”
Blankenship watched the lights. He was impressed at Dr Reed’s arm strength, how she could hold that out for so long without shaking.
“If it gets too much, just tap your knee and go to your safe place,” she said. “But imagine the target now. Call it up in your mind.”
Blankenship didn’t think of the explosion. Instead, he remembered appearing in this universe. Tattered, bloody. Onlookers thought he was attacking Tibbi, and it wasn’t until they pulled him off that they realized he was shielding her.
Someone called emergency services.
Tibbi didn’t understand what had happened, and Blankenship couldn’t say it yet, so the paramedics and police filled in the blanks.
The social worker couldn’t find him under Blankenship, but found a Seth Ferguson. His face matched the license photo. They found no records at all for Tibbi, but that didn’t concern them since she was only thirteen. “She won’t actually need her social until she gets her first job,” the social worker told him. “But it isn’t a bad idea to get it soon.”
He’d nodded. Doctors treated them, and an off-duty fireman dropped them off at Ferguson’s house.
This universe offered them one immediate kindness: Ferguson was not home.
“What’s come up?” Dr Reed asked. “How do you feel?”
“I feel horrible,” Blankenship whispered.
“On a scale of zero being fine, and ten being the worst you have ever felt?”
“A six,” he said.
He fit in Ferguson’s clothes. Tibbi helped her father fold some clothes into a suitcase from the back of the hall closet. Ferguson, like Blankenship, had an emergency fund stuffed inside a hollowed out book – just took three shelves before Blankenship found it. Neither of them knew how much a stack of paper that size was worth.
Turns out it was enough for a nice motel. And food. And a few outfits for Tibbi until he found a job.
“Talk to me, Blankenship,” Dr Reed said.
“I used to be a film critic,” he said. “But in this universe, I haven’t seen any of the films. I lied to become a bookkeeper, because math, math is the same.” The lights seemed to move faster and faster, but he knew it was his imagination. “There’s another me here, and my wife is married to someone else.”
“Good, good.”
Then he touched his knee.
SESSION FIVE
The receptionist explained that Dr Reed was running a few minutes behind, and did he mind sitting and waiting?
He didn’t mind. He signed in and sat down.
The receptionist was new. She had the ombré hair stylish in his universe, shaded dark at the roots down to light blonde at the tips. Tibbi had begged to dye her hair like that. “Your hair is pretty,” Blankenship told the receptionist. “My daughter wants her hair just like it.”
The receptionist pulled up a few strands and frowned at it. “This? Ugh.
It’s a bad bleach job growing out.” Then she smiled at Blankenship. “Thanks, anyway.”
Blankenship sat. He had no interest in the magazines, so he bobbed his leg in time to the background music.
The song had twangy, stuttering guitars. A simple melody, moving up and down the scales. Consequent notes, it was called, in his universe. Consequent. Like the disease: Consequent Distress Condition. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The receptionist sang along. “You said I love you like the stars above…” she sang. “La-la-la-la-la…movie song…”
“What song is this?” Blankenship asked, after a line about how love songs were supposed to be.
She seemed embarrassed to realize he’d been listening. “This guy I started seeing made me a mix. It has a lot of old stuff on it.” She held up her phone, and stroked the little screen. “Let me see. Oh, yeah. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits.”
“I like it,” he said. “It’s really sad.”
“And romantic,” the receptionist said. “Just like Romeo and Juliet.”
“Who were they?” Blankenship asked.
The receptionist laughed, and then shut up, as if she first thought he was kidding. She tucked her shaded hair behind one ear, eyes wide. “You never had to read Romeo and Juliet?”
Blankenship shook his head. Now, he was embarrassed. It was, apparently, basic to know in this universe.
“You’re the first person I’ve met who wasn’t forced to read any Shakespeare,” she said. “It’s about two lovers. Very sad and romantic.”
He wanted to hear the song again, but the receptionist already thought he was strange. And she didn’t turn on any more music. He wished he had a pen and paper to write some notes. Romeo and Juliet. Dire Straits. Shakespeare. He repeated them to himself. Dire Straits, Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. After a few minutes of that, Blankenship stood up.
“You know,” he said. “I should get back to work. Tell Dr Reed I’ll call to reschedule.”