Severed: A Novella

by H. G. Reed

  I stand to go, returning the obligatory handshake that closes this business deal.

  “What if I wanted to come back to campus eventually?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “For a football game or to talk with my professors.”

  “All correspondence will be done via e-mail and your online support system.”

  “But what if—”

  “Today is your last day on campus, Mr. Halstead. The institution doesn’t want this transition to be more complicated than it needs to be. If necessary, we will get in contact with your legal counsel and pursue a private restraining order to ensure that all students, including you, stay safe on campus.”

  “Go suck a dick.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I turn to leave before his canned speech can sink in too deep. It isn’t until I’m outside his office and walking across the quad that I notice the clandestine glances and whispers hidden behind cowardly palms.

  The ornate iron clock slowly ticks by each second to the point where I wonder if the batteries are slow. It’s my fourth session in the course of a week and I’m no closer to my goal than when I sat in Detective Asswipe’s interrogation room.

  Josie sits at her chipped, green desk as she types out her case notes for the day and I can tell her wrists are hurting by the way she stops every few minutes, rubs the red indentions from the edge of the laptop, and then sets back to work. The corners of her lips fall into a concentrated pout, her mind too absorbed with notes to bother with monitoring facial expressions.

  “Are you going to say anything today?” she asks to break the silence.

  I’m not planning on it, but I let her think otherwise until she turns back to her laptop and keeps typing, the soft glow reflecting off her face and washing out her features. She might have been pretty once, but it’s hard to tell now with her glazed eyes and focused pout.

  I take in the rest of the sound stage living room. There are several pieces of artwork, a few potted plants that are probably fake too, and a therapist who refuses to give me answers.

  “We’ve been following this pattern for a few sessions now.”

  “What’s that exactly?” I say through tight lips, refusing to utter one more word than is necessary.

  “You sit in painful silence while I wait for you to participate. You know what I love more than anything?” she says, lifting her smiling face to peer over the laptop at me. “I love getting paid to write case notes. Just now, I’ve earned twenty bucks writing a few paragraphs about clients I’ve already seen.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “It may be your mother’s money, but it’s your time. You can choose to spend it with me working on your goal, whatever that is, or you can spend it sitting in that chair watching me write case notes.”

  “So?”

  “Your mom will keep paying your bill, but she doesn’t know what goes on in here, so you can do whatever you like. I’ll keep cashing your checks, and it’s no offense to me if you don’t talk. I kind of like the quiet.”

  “Do you? Because you won’t stop talking about yourself.”

  “Then let’s talk about something else.”

  “Me?” I roll my eyes.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I want to help Rose. And put the right guy in jail.”

  “That’s very noble of you, but what’s in it for you?”

  I look down at my folded hands, rubbing them together a few times and hoping a genie might emerge from my invisible lamp. No genie appears and I’m left in awkward silence.

  “I don’t want this thing to beat me. Like, have control over me, you know?”

  “What thing, the crime you witnessed?”

  “No, my brain. I thought I mastered it when I chose to have the surgery, but then part of me never recovered and I’m afraid it never will. It never used to bother me so badly, because I was the only one who suffered. Now things have changed and someone else…a girl might die because of me.”

  “Because of what someone else did, not because of you. And that’s a pretty big assumption considering we don’t know anything about this case.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “Your file says you knew her.”

  “Know. Present tense. She’s still out there.”

  “That’s correct. I apologize.”

  I heave a sigh, mad at myself for letting her trick me into talking. “Can you just tell me what to do so I can be done with all this?” I wave my hands around at the paper house she’s created in her office.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Then what can you do? You keep taking up my time, but I don’t see any results. I don’t need to remind you we’re on a time crunch.”

  She pulls a piece of paper from her desk drawer and starts writing something, retracing the letters over and over so they stand out against the white. I watch her for a moment before she lifts her head. She’s smiling.

  “Let me do a little mind reading since that’s basically what you’re asking for. You think I’m a phony, but I’m not sure why, and you’re angry that I can’t fix your problems for you. Am I on the right track?”

  I cross my arms.

  “Rory, I want you to look over at me. Look at me straight on.”

  I do as she says, grateful to have something to do other than just sit and talk about feelings that don’t even matter, but when I look at her she is holding a paper in her right hand, off to the side. Instinctively, I turn my head to look at it, but she drops it before I can read it.

  “Listen closely,” she instructs. “I’m going to hold this paper out to my right, but I want you to look at my face while you try to read it. Don’t move your line of sight, just read the paper using your peripheries.”

  “I know what you’re doing,” I say.

  “It’s no secret. I just need to see where we stand.”

  She holds the paper out to her right, my left, and I resist the urge to look at it straight on.

  “What does this paper say, Rory?”

  My tongue sticks. I will it to move, but it won’t. I see it. I see the words. I know the words, but they don’t know me. They don’t know my tongue or my mouth, and they remain hidden in the recesses of a dysfunctional brain. I clench my jaw and try harder.

  “This is stupid!”

  “Come on. Don’t quit now.”

  “Dammit.” I shut my eyes and open them again, staring my hag of a therapist in the face. “What the hell, Josie?”

  “Just say the words.”

  “Fuck, I can’t!”

  “I know!”

  “Then why—”

  “Because you can’t just pull this out of your ass, Rory. I don’t know why you sit and brood for an hour, but it’s not going to help you. You’re not going to wake up one day and suddenly remember.”

  “I can’t get my memories back?”

  “They haven’t gone anywhere. You just can’t look at them properly. I know how to help you, but you have to trust me.”

  “Fine.”

  “Great.” She moves the paper toward the center, just below her chin.

  I laugh. The paper reads Josie’s an asshole.

  * * *

  “You’re still working with Mr. Jones at…” Josie flips through my folder where she’s stored all my private information. I signed it over to her, but I didn’t really have a choice.

  “Student Access Center,” I finish for her. “Yes. Well, I was until the dean kindly uninvited me to attend school.”

  “Ah,” she says, still staring at the folder. She’s acting like she knows how this works, and for the first time, I believe she actually might.

  “So what are we doing today, Doc?”

  “Listening to music,” she says with a smile.

  I groan on the inside. “I’d rather figure out what the hell is going on inside my head.”

  “We’ll get to that,” Josie assures me, standing from behind her desk and joining me in w
hat I now call The Living Room.

  The Living Room is where all the work happens. It’s our sixth session, the start of a new week, and by now I’ve figured out enough about Josie to trust her. I even like her a little.

  “I’m kind of on a time crunch. Did you forget the part where—”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  Her calm exterior just pisses me off even more. But I sit and wait. She does this a lot. She likes to do something obscure and then do this big reveal about how it ties into therapy, and into my present situation. I wait this one out like I did last time, and sure enough…

  “Did you know that music can stimulate parts of the brain that might otherwise lay dormant?”

  “No, I didn’t. But you knew that already.”

  She smiles like a cat, all sly like she knows something I don’t. She looks really excited about this session, and it’s her therapist’s excitement that makes me nervous. I glance around to make sure there are no double sided mirrors people might be looking through, studying me.

  “Close your eyes, and listen to this song. Let it take you back to the incident.”

  I’ve taken to calling the crime an incident, and I’m grateful Josie is using my language. Though I feel utterly stupid, I do as she says. I trust her, remember?

  “Ugh, Josie,” I complain. “What is even the point of this?”

  “Just think about that night, what you felt, what you saw—”

  “I can’t tell you. Like I said before.”

  “I don’t want you to tell me. I want you to see it.”

  I never actually tried to remember what happened. In fact, I did the opposite, and tried to forget most of it. As I sit in her armchair that a hundred first graders have probably wiped their boogers on, I try to do as she says, listening to some song I’ve never heard and thinking about the worst night of my life.

  Flashes. White, hot flashes of images and voices and heat and rainwater and screaming.

  “Holy shit!” I blurt as I lean over in the chair and put my head between my knees.

  Everything is spinning, and I think I’m about to puke when Josie is suddenly right beside me with a hand on my back.

  “Great work, Rory. Don’t give up yet. Take deep breaths and close your eyes again.”

  “I can’t.” I shake my head and it bounces between my legs.

  “Yes, you can. I’m here. It took you a while to open up last week, but we actually got somewhere after all the silence.” She smiles in a teasing sort of way. “Resist the urge to avoid now. Remember what we talked about, and how to handle the things you uncover. Use those coping mechanisms to revisit the night.”

  I sit back up, eyes closed, focusing on the warm hand on my back.

  Warm, hot metal. Smoking gun. Chrome bumpers. Gravelly voices. Two.

  “Josie…?” I say, eyes clenched shut.

  “I’m here. You’re here with me. Keep breathing, you’re doing great, Rory.”

  I let the melody in the room permeate my thoughts again, and I see Rose. She doesn’t look like I remember. Her face is red, and she’s calling my name. She knows me. She reaches. Down. She’s reaching down. I’m on the ground. Hot gun, my scar’s on fire.

  I gasp for air and open my eyes, coming back to the room as best I can, but my mind wants to take me Elsewhere. My brain, my stupid useless brain, doesn’t want to be here with these memories and it fights against me. It takes me far away, and my eyes are open, but I see nothing. It’s quiet here.

  “Rory, stay here,” a distant voice calls. “The worst part is past, the trauma is already over, remember?”

  I don’t answer her. I can’t. I’m not where she is.

  “Let’s do a grounding exercise. Tell me what you see.”

  I blink as if coming to. And I look around as instructed.

  “Ugly ass carpet.”

  “Great. What do you smell?”

  “Your perfume.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “This snot-crusted armchair.”

  “Glad to hear you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” she says as she pats me on the back and returns to her own chair across from me.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “A grounding technique. We’ve practiced them before.”

  “I know that, but the other thing. All the images, the zoning out…”

  It’s a place I visit often, usually only when seizing, but the escape hatch has come in handy lately.

  “It’s called dissociation and it’s perfectly normal when doing trauma work. It’s a type of protective mechanism against anxiety. The mind and body are trying to protect you, to keep you from reliving something horrific. So you just have to fight against that and try not to float away. Deal?”

  I nod. “And the other part? The music and the memories?”

  “Exposure. Well, imaginative exposure to be exact. I’m not actually subjecting you to the thing that causes anxiety, like we would if you had a phobia. Instead, you’re imagining being back in that place the night of the incident, and then trying to keep yourself present and calm.”

  I understand what she’s trying to do, but the why still escapes me.

  “What’s the point? Other than reliving it over and over?”

  “The goal is that you’ll be able to think back on it and not have a panic attack. That’s going to take more time than we have, and it’s not your immediate goal, so that gets put on the back burner. For now, we work at envisioning it. Because if you can replay the scene, you can draw the scene.”

  She looks at me with that same excited smile. I still don’t get it.

  “And if you can draw the scene,” she continues with a slight roll of her eyes. I laugh. “You can tell us.”

  My laughter stops as the breath leaves my body. I consider putting my head between my knees again, but think better of it. I remember what Josie said about dissociating, and I try not to do that too. God, this brain sucks.

  “So there’s a way I can remember? Not just remember, but tell them what happened?”

  “Isn’t that why you came here?”

  * * *

  “Tell me what you see,” Josie says.

  I try to answer her, but the words stick on my tongue. I see the scene so clearly. They’re right there. I could reach out and touch them, but I can’t say who or what or how or anything. Josie senses I’m struggling.

  “No, what do you see here in this room?”

  I open my eyes and see Josie staring back at me. She’s doing the exposure thing again, and every time she says it, I try not to chuckle at the thought of exposing myself.

  “I see you.”

  “That’s a start. What do you taste?”

  “Metal.” I realize I’m still biting the inside of my cheek from my trip down memory lane. “It’s blood,” I clarify to let her know I’m talking about the here and now.

  That’s another therapist vocab word I picked up in the last two sessions since our first imaginative exposure trip. Josie keeps saying my emotional vocabulary is limited, but if I keep going at this rate, I’ll be a regular thesaurus.

  “What do you smell?”

  “Ugh, I’m here! I’m back from wherever I was, okay?”

  She blinks slowly, unimpressed.

  “I smell Lysol,” I tell her. “Oh my god, did you finally clean this chair?”

  “Your remarks about mucus were getting old. What do you—”

  “I’m thoroughly grounded. I swear,” I say, holding up my hands in submission to her wizardly ways. “I miss school,” I confess, and we both recognize it’s totally out of the blue. But Josie gets excited about that kind of crap, like it’s supposed to mean something.

  This time, she doesn’t say anything, and instead she looks at me like I should keep talking so I do.

  “I miss Mr. Jones, and Dr. Fynes, and just being a normal kid in college. Well, sort of normal. I thought once I went back after the surgery, it would all be fine, just like it was before. Even better than it
was before because Mom wouldn’t be down my throat about taking all those meds, and I wouldn’t be so scared about falling out in class.”

  “You mean having a seizure?”

  I nod. “But it wasn’t any of that. It was fine for the next couple of semesters. Sophomore year was great, but then Junior year started and then this. And I don’t even know what this is! I was already a semester behind, but what happens now? They won’t even let me back on campus. Oh sure, I can take the classes online,” I say, mocking the Dean, “but that’s not what I wanted. How do I get back there? Do you have any techniques for that?”

  I don’t realize I’m yelling until I stop, but Josie doesn’t seem phased.

  “I don’t know, Rory,” she says in her soft whisper of a voice. This is the one she uses when she thinks I’m about to have a breakthrough or something.

  She leans forward in her chair, clasps her hands together, and for a second I’m afraid she’s going to give me her holding pain speech; the one about how we’re a team and she’s here to hold my pain when it’s too hard to handle myself. Typical new-age bullshit.

  But she just sits there like before, an expectant look on her face. I guess I’m supposed to have a breakthrough now, or else she’s one more person I risk disappointing.

  “I think I’m ready,” I say, hoping one of us believes it.

  “Ready for what?”

  Shit. I hadn’t expected this.

  “Um…the next part. Of therapy.”

  She looks down at her feet trying to hide a smile. What a jerk. She’s laughing at me.

  “Maybe tomorrow. We’re out of time for today.”

  I check the clock to be sure. It feels like I just got here, but as soon as I stand, I feel exhausted.

  “Go home and rest,” Josie says, reading my body language and probably my mind. “We’ll start fresh again tomorrow.”

  * * *

  I walk into The Living Room at my usual time to find Josie not sitting in her half of the room, but standing near an easel and canvas.

  “What the literal f—”

  “It’s just art, Rory. Calm down.”

  I approach it with caution, like the paints and brushes and girlishness of it all will jump out and attack me.

  “You said you were ready for the next step,” Josie says. “This is it.”