by Sandra Block
Dissection:
age in nightmare: four years old
Meaning: my age when fire occurred
hands bleeding
Meaning: sliced by metal from the house
the smell of smoke
Meaning: obvious, from fire
moonlight
Meaning: also obvious, fire at night
one-eyed blue teddy bear, Po-Po
Meaning: useless detail
a whirring sound
Meaning: no idea what this is
hiding
Meaning: unknown, why am I hiding from the fire? oxygen deprivation?
someone calling my name
Meaning:
I pause but do not fill this one in. This is the question that taunts me at three in the morning when I’m out of Xanax and the clock is glowing a malicious blue. Meaning: Did my mother die because she was trying to get me and I wouldn’t come out?
“Ahhhm, another more recent movement in memory has been the repressed memory phenomenon.”
Now my ears perk up. Repressed memory.
I know a bit about this subject. In medical school, I did a research paper on women with suppressed childhood memories from some type of trauma, mainly incest and rape. One woman I interviewed recovered a memory of her father killing her best friend. The child was three years old at the time, and she remembered his burying her friend six feet deep in the sandbox and warning her never to tell anyone, or she would end up there, too. Twenty years later, her own three-year-old started crying and throwing a tantrum in a sandbox at the local park, and the memory came hurtling back. The authorities thought she was crazy until they dug up the sandbox at her parents’ old address and found a young girl’s skeleton.
“One of the major methods to uncover these so-called lost memories, ahhhm, has been hypnosis.”
Hypnosis.
A lightbulb clicks on. Hypnosis, of course. The way to remember what your brain doesn’t want you to remember. That could be the answer to my nightmares! If the mind can bury a memory so deeply in its own sandbox—a child’s skeleton, a mother dying in a fire—maybe I just need a shovel to dig it up.
“Ahhhhm, though, due to many false memories obtained by this therapy, this theory has largely been debunked,” Dr. Wong continues.
But I am no longer listening; my brain is off to the races with endless potential. I have read about hypnosis before but never went so far as to pursue it. Then again, I wasn’t having the nightmares. I wasn’t waking up with the feel of blood on my hands, shellacked by the guilt of hiding from the woman who was trying to save me. Hypnosis: how to wrest a memory from your truculent, uncooperative subconscious.
Forget dream rehearsal, I don’t need a fireman to save me.
Chapter Ten
I forgot my Adderall this morning and my brain is on spin cycle, with my foot tapping just as fast.
I am waiting, which is generally what you do in a waiting room. And while waiting is just this side of annoying for most people, it is torture for us ADHD-ers, especially those off their meds. Sam’s waiting room reminds me of a nicely appointed bus station, dark gray walls and seats, with strangers sitting side by side, avoiding eye contact. The room is hot, inducing stupor in minutes, so you’re just hitting REM sleep when the secretary comes to get you. Glossy, black-framed prints of silver and gold abstract figures hang on the wall, each one about three millimeters crooked. The stereo plays country music in the background, an odd choice for a psychiatry office. I mean, why choose the one genre that could depress even the sunniest disposition?
The man across from me coughs, and everybody looks at him as if on high alert, then just as quickly looks back down at books, magazines, various personal electronic devices. I can tell why he’s here by the way he keeps smoothing out his magazine so the pages are exactly symmetrical: OCD. The three-millimeter-off pictures must be driving him to distraction. I have to stop myself from playing Guess That Diagnosis every time the bell rings with a new patient walking in, letting some fresh air into the Hansel-and-Gretel oven of a waiting room. The surly teenager to my right wearing a black T-shirt saying “I love my authority problem”: definite oppositional defiant disorder. And his poor, beaten-down mother sitting beside him: bad mom haircut, bad mom jeans, worn-out face.
That kid right there is the reason I will never have children. The whole thing is such a crapshoot. You roll the dice and hope for the best, but you could give birth to the punk to my right, or to Sofia Vallano, for that matter.
I spent my entire month of pediatrics in medical school wanting to stick a fork in my eye. They say doctors who go into psychiatry need their heads examined. I say ditto for pediatrics. Dress in cartoon scrubs and Mickey ties, hand out stickers, and take care of runny noses all day? Kill me. One trip to a restaurant on “kids eat free” night should convince you, with those animals fighting over crayons and which balloon is theirs. Kids are one big, gratuitous, expensive time suck. Jean Luc laughed outright when I explained my reasoning on this one, but he didn’t disagree. He is a chemist, after all, and I am empirically correct.
“Hello, little lady,” the secretary says, heading my way. This is our private joke. I am nobody’s definition of a “little lady.” I stand up and everybody looks up, then immediately back down. This is one place where no one stares at me.
When I enter his office, Sam stands in greeting and then sits as I arrange my coat, scarf, purse, phone, and iPad next to me. I have too much crap. “It’s hot as hell in there, you know.”
“I know, I’m sorry. There’s some problem with the heater.” He pauses a second, reading me. “So how are you today?”
This is a loaded question at a psychiatrist’s office. No one expects you to say “Fine.”
“I want to do hypnosis,” I say. Nothing like jumping right in. I find small talk especially annoying when off Adderall.
Sam raises his eyebrows, looking at me doubtfully. “Hypnosis?”
“Yup.”
He scratches his beard. There is a fingerprint on his tortoiseshell lenses. “You know that’s controversial, right?”
“Right. But I still want to try it.” I notice my foot tapping and stop it.
“Do you mind if I ask what brings this up, Zoe?”
I shift on the stiff couch. “Grand Rounds.”
“Okay. How’s that?”
“The topic yesterday was memory. And they talked about the memory recovery process. So hypnosis came up as part of that.”
“I see,” he says. “Did they talk about the problems with hypnosis?”
“Yes,” I admit.
“False memory syndrome, for instance?”
“Yes,” I repeat. “They did. Actually, I learned about it in medical school, too. I did some research on recovered memories.”
“So you know that it’s really grown out of favor recently. And there’s a good reason for that. Many women went through this process and ended up ‘remembering’ things that weren’t even true. Sexual abuse, for instance, that never actually occurred.”
“I have heard about that.”
“You can imagine this was quite disruptive in their lives.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” I say. “I know all this. I know it’s controversial. I know it doesn’t always work. I’m well aware of all of the potential pitfalls. But I still want to try it.”
Sam twiddles his thumbs. “Why? What are you hoping to achieve?”
I tug up my black leather boots. My legs don’t know what to do with themselves. “I had the nightmare again.”
He nods. “Okay. Did you try the dream rehearsal like we talked about?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I tried it. No go. Bust. Complete and utter failure.”
“Tell me more.”
“It didn’t work,” I say, throwing up my hands. “The fireman was a maniac.”
“Okay,” he says. I could swear he is fighting off a smile.
“Seriously, he had an ax. He swung it at me. Twice.”
�
�That’s…” He bites his lip. He is definitely trying not to laugh. “That is unfortunate.”
“Yeah. I would say. But it doesn’t matter. Because I think I figured it out.”
“The nightmare?”
“Yes, kind of. The reason I’m having the nightmare at least. Why it’s resurfaced.”
“And what did you figure out?”
My foot thwaps against the carpet, catching on some threads. “It does have to do with my mom.”
“How is that?”
“So my mom is demented, right?”
“Right,” he agrees.
“And I feel like I’m losing her.”
“Okay, I can see that.”
“That’s why I’m having the nightmare. I’m losing one mother so, somewhere, deep in my subconscious maybe, I want to find out about my other mother, my birth mother.”
“I don’t see how that follows entirely.”
“Don’t you? All my life I’ve wondered about her. My mom would tell me this and that, little things. But I’ve always felt like a piece was missing. But I guess I also felt guilty that, if I told my mom, she would feel bad, like she wasn’t a good enough mother for me. But now I have my chance. I can’t hurt my mother by finding out—she won’t even know.”
Sam stares out the window, nodding. Burnt-yellow leaves are scattered around the base of the tree like litter.
“I think I’m ready to find out about her now. And maybe the nightmare is like a clue. Or a message.”
“The nightmare is a memory, Zoe.”
“Yes, yes, I know.” I scoot forward on the couch to quiet my legs. “But it’s more than that. It’s also my last memory of her. My real mother.” I feel a spike of guilt for my real, real mother—the one who raised me—sitting on a rocker with a dilapidated blanket and a dilapidated brain. But mixed with the guilt, a surge of freedom. “I want you to hypnotize me back to that night.”
Sam puts his hands up like brakes. “Hypnosis can be very disruptive, as I said. You’re dismantling protective mechanisms.” He looks right in my eyes. “Zoe, sometimes there are good reasons we forget things.”
“I know,” I say. And I do know. Freud was right about a lot, and my subconscious is probably a hell of a lot smarter than my flitting, ADHD-riddled conscious ever will be. But I still want to try it.
“How about we give dream rehearsal one more try?” Sam asks. “Before we abandon it completely.”
The fireman’s ax jumps into my mind. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“We could practice it together,” Sam offers.
“Let me ask you,” I say, ignoring the suggestion. “Have you ever done hypnosis before?”
Sam clutches the front of his dark, glossy desk, the captain of his ship. “I have carried out hypnosis before,” he says, as if he is admitting he used to inject heroin.
“And how did it go?” I ask, trying not to betray the excitement bubbling in me.
“I’ve had cases where it went very well, and others where it was not at all successful. More than not successful, harmful.” So he’s injected more than once. He grips the desk, staring out the window. In a word, deciding.
“I’m not asking for a miracle,” I say. “If it works, and I remember more about that night, even a glimmer of my mom, I’ll consider it a success. If it doesn’t, and I’m hounded by that nightmare every night of my life, at least I can say we tried.”
Sam keeps staring, weighing my words. I see him reflected in a mirror on the wall, a large, dark wooden circle that looks vaguely like a ship’s wheel. “I’ve tried dream rehearsal. It didn’t work. And you yourself said there are no good therapies out there,” I continue.
He nods absentmindedly, then looks down at his notes. “So how is your mom doing?” he asks, changing the subject none too subtly.
“Not great,” I say. “She called me ‘Tanya’ a couple weeks ago.”
“Oh? Tell me more.”
“There’s not much to tell.” I lean back on the most uncomfortable couch ever made. “She’s losing it is all, like Scotty says. But it’s sad, because sometimes she’s so with it.”
“Who’s Tanya?” he asks.
“Probably some old friend of hers. I don’t really know any Tanyas. But it’s familiar somehow.”
“It’s tough,” Sam says, shaking his head. Then he pushes his chair back, which is the sign. The pewter clock has announced my departure. “I need to think about this, Zoe, and you need to think about it. Take some time.”
I nod vigorously.
“Think about the fact that if you uncover painful memories of the fire, of your birth mother, you may go back to a very scary, very raw place. A place where you may not be able to function very well, especially during residency.”
I nod again, more vigorously. I must look like a monkey.
“If you still want to do it next week, I will consider it.”
“Okay,” I say, pretending I will contemplate every angle. But I already know my answer, and hope swells in my chest as he pulls out his pad.
“You seem a little jittery today. Any problems with the Adderall?”
“Only problem being I forgot it this morning,” I say.
“Ah,” he answers with a smile. “That explains a lot.”
I wonder what the hell that means but manage to hold my tongue, even without Adderall.
“Remember the nonpharmacological things we discussed to help the ADHD,” Sam says.
“Yeah, I know,” I mumble. “I really have to get back to running.”
“Yes, you do,” he says as he scribbles off my litany of medications.
* * *
“That is completely fucked-up,” Scotty says as we enter the nursing home. Scolding elderly glances, murmurs, and tut-tuts are thrown our way. “Hypnosis?”
“It is not at all fucked-up, actually,” I answer in a whisper to avoid murmurs and tut-tuts. “It’s something I really need to do right now. For the nightmare.”
He laughs, a scoff more than a laugh. “What does it have to do with the nightmare?” he asks, pulling off his hat and shaking out his hair. “I thought you were into that dream rehearsal shit.”
“Yeah, it didn’t go so well.” I unbutton my coat, which I just notice is missing the middle black plastic button. “And I’m trying to remember some things about my mother.”
“Why don’t you just ask Mom? They were best friends.”
“Believe me, Scotty, I have been asking her…my whole life. She’s never told me much. And now, I’m not even sure she could if she wanted to.”
We are standing just inside the lobby. The automatic outside door keeps grinding open and closed, blasting us with cold, rainy air.
“What do you want to know?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Anything. Did she like gardening, for instance, or roller coasters?” I have no idea where I came up with that one.
“Yeah, right. Very important things like gardening and roller coasters. What about your real father, Zoe? Don’t you want to find out about him? How about your real third cousin once removed? Maybe he liked roller coasters.”
“Listen, Scotty. My father didn’t raise me for four years. He was basically a sperm donor.” This last part comes out a bit louder than intended, and a mother steers her young daughter away from us as they walk by. I move farther into the lobby toward the vast expanse of mauve, determined both to end the conversation and to get out of the freezing doorway.
Scotty follows me, wiping his wet, grassy sneakers on the black rubber mat. “You are seriously fucked-up, you know that? I always thought you were a little fucked-up, but you are majorly, royally fucked-up.”
“‘Majorly, royally,’ huh? What are you, twelve?”
We have finally cleared the doorway when Mom comes heading our way, swooping in to break up her squabbling children as always. Cheery Cherry is pushing her wheelchair.
“Hi,” Mom says, beaming at us. Every time she looks at me this way, I feel guilty for not vis
iting more often.
“Hi yourself,” I say, hugging her, and Scotty moves in for a hug, too. One big happy family.
“You okay, honey-doll?” asks Cheery Cherry, releasing Mom with some trepidation to her obviously less-qualified children.
“Yes, thank you,” my mom answers, turning to us. “Let’s sit here today,” she says, pointing to the dark cherry table in the lobby. The idea of us all in her square of a room, with Scotty and me about to throttle each other, does seem ill advised. I sit down by the table in a formal chair, with upholstered swirling blue and mauve, and Scotty takes a similarly floral seat next to Mom. Outside, a robin picks at a patch of grass, swiveling its head around to look out for any competition. I’m wondering when he flies down south. Do robins fly down south? I really need to take my Adderall.
“So how’s the coffee business?” Mom asks Scotty, perhaps to verify that he is indeed still in the coffee business.
“Good,” he answers. “Got a few more Web-site clients, too,” he adds, to verify that he is not a complete fuck-up. Scotty has a stack of business cards at the cash register for his Web-site design business: Spyder Web Designs. You might think actual, responsible entrepreneurs would not want to put their entire Web presence in the hands of a flaky barista, but apparently I am wrong. The cards disappear quickly, and I must admit he puts together an eye-catching Web site on the cheap. My brother is probably the next Zuckerberg.
“So,” Scotty says, apropos of nothing, “guess what? Zoe wants to find out about her real mother.”
I glare at him. Glare is not a strong enough word.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“Oh, she has this brilliant idea that she’s going to be hypnotized by her psycho doctor.”
My mom looks at me blankly. “I don’t think I understand.”
“Listen,” I say in my calmest voice, “this nightmare is very disturbing to me. And I think hypnosis might help me understand it a little better.”
Mom chews on one of her French-manicured fingernails. Most of the polish has worn off. My mother was never one to chew her nails BD. “Do you really think this is wise, Zoe?” she asks. “Don’t you think sometimes it’s better to leave well enough alone?”