James in the Real World

by Owen Todhunter

  Dr quickly takes the clip from her mouth and binds the final section of her notes together.

  “What do you mean by that?” she asks.

  “I can’t help it. We never talk about Christine, but she’s always there, even though she’s not. She’s like a ghost, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not the part about Christine. What do you mean you look at James and you imagine Hal?”

  “I just mean I imagine what he would have looked like. I imagine how different it would be if he wasn’t in the car that night. He looked exactly like James when he was a baby.”

  The colour drains from Dr Shaw’s face.

  “Wait. Hal was in the car?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  She stands up. With ruthless abandon, she begins to disassemble the notes she organised just moments ago. Prescription pads and bits of paper fly about the room. Finally, she pulls out a single blank page. Attached by a paper clip is a faded Polaroid picture. She holds it up to show Richard.

  “James told me he when he dreamed about his mother her face was blurry. I suggested he bring a photo of the two of them together. I asked James to bring a family photograph from home.”

  “Okay?” Richard responds expectantly.

  “Towards the latter part of treatment, I was trialling hypnosis therapy with James. I used this photo to trigger his memory. I asked him to describe how he felt when the picture was taken. But he said it wasn’t him in the picture.”

  “Huh?”

  “He said he searched through all the family photo albums but he couldn’t find a single family shot with him and his mum together. Instead, he brought in this picture of yourself, Christine, and Hal.”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “He said this picture was taken at Hal’s second birthday party. He said he was holding the camera.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Richard scratches his head. A moment or two passes before he realises that he does in fact understand. Dr Shaw moves forward in her seat. Leaning towards Richard, she holds the photo a few inches from his face.

  “Who is the child in this photograph?”

  “It’s James. Wait…”

  Dr Shaw is already gathering her things. She stands up and faces the exit, before quickly swivelling on the spot.

  “Mr Galinski, this is far worse than I imagined. Here is my card, and I will be in touch shortly.”

  CHAPTER 22: Derealise

  Richard calls in sick the rest of the week. He sleeps the rest of the day and night in a chair beside James, leaving only to use the bathroom. The following morning a friendly nurse gently wakes him. He rubs the rough stubble on his cheeks, yawning as he checks his watch. Still in his suit and tie, he breaths into the palm of his hand and reminds himself to buy mints on the way out. He smiles as the nurse floats around him, tending to James. She drains his catheter, resupplies his morphine and checks his blood pressure. Richard had been up until the small hours, trying to decipher his conversation with Dr Shaw. He was confused by much of what she said. He was even more confused by what she did not say. Richard’s work required him to be self-assured, to project an image of calm confidence. Confusion did not sit well with him. He needed facts, not conjecture. He kisses James on the cheek and makes his exit.

  First stop is James’ room. He pulls out drawers, turns over folders and tosses aside a mountain of dirty clothes on the bed. He opens the closet, and finally finds what he is looking for. Stacked up in two perfect piles are James’ journals. Richard flicks through the first book and is astounded by the sheer amount of entries. All of them are written the same way, in thin block letters.

  He delves a little deeper into the next dozen or so books, determined to find anything decipherable. He observes the Venn diagrams. Then it’s the illustrations of tattooed faces and blood-stained bodies. whole paragraphs are dedicated to massacres. Then comes the keenest observation of all; how intricately beautiful a boy can make a girl. This is done using nothing but James’ words.

  O the next page, the words he has just read perfectly describe a full-page portrait of a girl. Drawn with nothing but a pen and Sharpie, Shavoni comes to life. James’ sad strokes brush her fringe aside as he imagines the other half of her spotless face. Despite the helpless words, the picture makes Richard smile. There was however, a glaring issue with the journals. Within each new entry, James gradually peeled away from himself. He was almost outside of his own body, describing himself as though he was an outsider looking in. The dream was real, and the world was the dream. Richard holds back tears as he re-reads the final passage.

  “James is the name that people gave his body. James is the shell that people see. He doesn’t know if that’s his real name, or if his body is his own. He knows he’s awake, but he’s seeing the things from his dreams. Dr Shaw keeps telling him to back up his thoughts with evidence. But all the evidence says that Navoeth is real, and the real world is fake.

  Everything is black and white. The trees that line the roads are poorly drawn. The buildings on the street are two-dimensional. When James falls asleep he sees colours so unimaginable they must be on some other plain. Every tree is lush with auburn fire. Castles rise and fall with every movement of the earth. James lives within their walls. James listens to their stories. He scales each mountain to meet the clouds. James is up so high up, he can taste the rain before it falls. James is the shell people see. No one sees the real person. No one except for Shavoni. With her face so pretty in his dreams, why would James want to wake up? The real world has 2 faces. That is something I always knew. It used to be that only the surface was ugly, but the face beneath is just as hideous. James is hideous, because he comes from the real world. His body is a shell. His face is a mask.

  Richard tore the section out, his face now soaked with tears. He takes one last glance at Shavoni’s portrait and also tears it out. He had read as much as he needed to. His observations were now complete. Now he needed facts. He does what every layman does to acquaint himself with an alien concept. He Googles it. To his astonishment, Depersonalisation Disorder returns (about) 321,000 results in 0.46 seconds. Having no experience with the subcategorized symptomatic layout of WebMD, he thinks it best to start elsewhere as he dips his proverbial toe in the water.

  From the third line of a Wikipedia article, he learns that Depersonalisation is a mental disorder in which the sufferer is affected by persistent or recurrent feelings of not only depersonalised feelings, but feelings of derealisation. The explanation seems redundant to Richard. How can one attempt to define an illness using an adjective form of the base word? It is like saying insanity means having insane thoughts. He persists. Upon further reading, he learns that a recent publication from the American Psychiatric Association combined these two illnesses and aptly renamed it Depersonalisation/ Derealisation Disorder. He found this noteworthy as Dr Shaw had not mentioned it. He writes it on a spare page of James’ journal, so as to bring it up with her the next time they met.

  He also notes that derealisation was a medically prescribed word, and purely nonsensical for everyday usage. Surely you could not derealise your potential, or derealise that the sky reflects the ocean, and vice versa. Richard did not yet see it, but you could indeed derealise all these things. These things, and countless others.

  Richard was out of his depth, but he was determined. He balks at the sizable titles for treatments such as Trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. Electric brain massage seems a better fit. After tossing aside “selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors and tri-cyclic antidepressants” as pure fabrication, he at last finds something useful.

  “Although the disorder is an alteration in the subjective experience of reality, it is not related to psychosis, as sufferers maintain the ability to distinguish between their own internal experiences and the objective reality of the outside world.”

  Dr Shaw had said that James’ episodes were psychotic in nature. The journal entries reinforced that he was losing touch with reality. It was cle
ar however that James seemed focused not only on the monsters, but also Shavoni. Richard could sense James’ love for Shavoni. If he were a stranger reading the journal for the first time, he would have assumed she was his girlfriend. The infatuation was unmistakable. No matter how many demons James was battling, he still had the girl. To Richard, that did not seem psychotic. It seemed romantic. He asked himself who was wrong. Dr Shaw? Or James?

  Richard could find nothing to extend on these initial diagnoses. He begins clicking away madly on any hyperlinks he can find. It takes him to a site detailing a Central African psychedelic rainforest shrub called Tabernantheiboga. He had hit an information wall. Richard did not like breaking down walls, real or theoretical. He preferred to carefully deconstruct them brick by brick. He surmised there must be a more efficient way to critique his son’s mental affliction, without cutting a swathe through the thick jungle of medical journals.

  He returns to the original Google search and clicks on the tenth page. It was a web site called www.astrangertomyself.com. It was literally his last resort. That is not to say that this was the very last result on Google. In fact, there were twenty-two more pages of search results he could have called upon. Richard however, never did venture beyond page one of this, or any other Google search. His extensive business training had taught him years ago that if one was required to click beyond page one, they were never going to find what you were looking for. Besides, an unsponsored site showed a lack of proper investiture and pro-active exposure. Low traffic to these sites meant a steady decline in a company’s profit margin, and the blame for such a trend would sit squarely on the shoulders of the Chief Financial Officer. Such talk greatly excites Richard, a troubling fact on many levels.

  This final site led immediately to a link for the Steinberg Depersonalisation Test. Richard was now intrigued. He likes to compartmentalize information. Tabular cataloguing of data meant complex sums of money, or in this case the findings of extensive medical research, could be presented to an individual, or a group of individuals in a manner much more efficient than the use of terminology and legislation specific to a given field of expertise. In other words, spreadsheets are good. Despite his fondness for spreadsheets, he does what he always does and skips to the end. The last statement reads, “I have felt invisible.” Part of his job is to make himself noticed. He wears nice suits. He turns heads. He impresses people. He drives a loud, conspicuous vehicle. He does his best to be visible at all times.

  He derides many more of the test’s statements. “I have felt as though I am living in a dream.” Richard is a realist, a pragmatist. But he also took this statement as the affirmative “dream” described by so many people, as in “I am living the dream.” This, he is not. The statement did in fact refer to the alternate state of mind “dream”, as in “I often fall asleep and had a lovely dream.” This, he does not do. Richard has not slept well since the death of his wife some years ago. When he wakes each morning, he never remembers his dreams. His mind is as blank as the empty room he sleeps in. Sleep is a vital component of dreaming in the alternate state, much different to what people describe as a daydream. Whilst this phenomenon is possible to occur within a lucid subject, it is again quite a difficult state to achieve on an empty mind.

  In summary, Richard Galinski considers the dream statement ridiculous. His life is certainly not a dream. It could best be described as a waiting room. It is bland and unexciting. It is the sinking feeling of finishing work each day and succumbing to the emptiness of a cold bed. It is the hunger of a non-existent meal in a table set for two. It is a son who does not understand you.

  Question 8 reads “at times I feel spacey.” He answers almost all the time. Then he reaches question 9. “I have had the feeling that I was a stranger to myself or have not recognized myself in the mirror.” He answers almost all the time. Questions 10 through 14, he records the same answer. When he reaches question 15, he reconsidered the statement “I have felt invisible.” If he could self-diagnose himself as a complete basket case, why could others not see he was one? Maybe they were too polite. Or maybe he was invisible. Then it finally clicked. He didn’t see James’ problems because he himself was invisible, figuratively speaking of course. His blindness meant he failed to see that Hal was still around, at least in James’ mind.

  Richard is fairly certain he isn’t crazy. No test can be definitive. But the fact he took such a test in the first place means he was acting somewhat beyond his normal state of rationality. He had taken the test, and he had passed. Or failed. He was not quite sure. In either case, he was exhibiting clear signs of a Depersonalisation/ Derealisation Disorder. In this context that proved to be a negative. The result suggested that he contact a psychiatrist or doctor to gain a referral. Richard did not have a doctor or a psychiatrist. What he did have was James’ therapist. He opens his bulging wallet, sifting through old receipts and coupon cards. He turns it upside down, emptying everything onto the table. A hail of quarters pelts against the keyboard and spills onto the carpeted floor. He finally pulls out his license, behind which he finds a card. On the card is a phone number. On the other end of the line is the person he needs.

  “Hello, this is Luanne Shaw.”

  “Dr Shaw, sorry, Luanne. It’s Richard Galinski. James’ father?”

  “Yes, hello Richard. I was going to call this afternoon.”

  “Oh sorry. Do you have a chance to talk now?”

  “I’m between clients right now. I don’t have long.”

  “This will only take a minute. Please? Luanne?”

  There was a pause, followed by a sigh.

  “Certainly. What’s on your mind?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about James’ condition.”

  There was another pause.

  “Yes? What about his condition specifically?”

  “Does he think Hal is still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long has he thought this?”

  “Well, according to James, he never died.”

  “So how is that possible? I was reading about the condition you mentioned, Depersonalisation?”

  “Yes.”

  “It says that patients can generally distinguish the difference between a fantasy world and the real world. I’ve been reading through his journals and from what you’ve told me, it seems like there is no difference between the two. I mean the girl, and “Nevoth” or whatever he calls it. It all seems so real when you see it through his eyes. So, what is wrong with him?”

  “I can’t answer that question Richard. This information only came to my knowledge yesterday. This is part of the reason I hadn’t called you yet.”

  “Is he losing his mind?”

  “I don’t know Richard. I’m sorry, I wish I could be more helpful. Right now, we just need to be there for him. If he wakes up, I mean when he wakes up, he needs to fix himself physically. That’s the first hurdle.”

  “I, I just can’t lose him. I’ve lost too much. I can’t lose James as well.”

  “Richard, I do believe he will get better, physically and psychologically. We will get him back. I can see his love for Shavoni is real. He just needs help to transfer those feelings.”

  “I was going to mention her. I found a picture he drew of her. It was beautiful. I didn’t know he was such a good artist.”

  “She is the object of all he holds dear. She is everything he thinks is missing from his life.”

  Richard can feel the sting of the words, even over the phone.

  “Why does he hate me? I’m still here. I’ve always been here for him.”

  “He doesn’t hate you, Richard. His resentment is a defense mechanism. He believes that you will someday leave him. That thought must terrify him. My guess is that he does the same thing he does with everybody else.”

  “Which is…?” Richard asks obligingly.

  “He keeps you at a safe distance. But Shavoni is always there for him. She is the one constant, so he puts all his love and energy into the
idea of her.”

  “Why the name Shavoni? I don’t understand.”

  “Granted, it is a strange name for an imaginary girlfriend. Then again, it’s strange for a college freshman to have an imaginary girlfriend.”

  “There was one thing that I noticed in his journal,” Richard puts forward cautiously.

  “Yes?”

  He looks down at a scrunched-up page of James’ journal on the ground. On it is drawn a cartoonish picture of James, repeatedly shouting Shavoni’s name at a door that is beginning to crack.

  “He said that the first time you hypnotised him he saw something, a Face.”

  “Yes.”

  “He said you saw it too.”

  Several seconds go by.

  “Dr Shaw? You do know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see something?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “He said you taped the session. What was on the tape? What did you see? Could I listen to the tape?”

  “I’m afraid I cannot divulge that information. It would be a clear breach of doctor/ patient confidentiality.”

  “Dr Shaw? Luanne, please. I just want answers. I need to understand what James is going through. I want to help him. As a father, I am begging you.”

  “Look, I can move around a few of my appointments in the morning. But I can’t meet you here. I will come see you at the hospital again.”

  “Yes, yes, thank you. I’ll be there around 9:30. Thank you Luanne.”

  Richard hangs up the phone. It was already getting late and he was exhausted. He collapses into bed in all his clothes. He lays there thinking intently about his meeting with Dr Shaw the following day. He wonders what he should wear. Ultimately, it did not matter, but it was something he could control. He wonders what she might wear. Switching off the light, his mind begins to drift. He pictures her naked body. It is wrong to think of his son’s therapist in this way, but still, the thought more than excites him. It fills his mind with something greater than the emptiness of every night before this one. He sleeps well. He even dreams. He cannot remember the dream exactly, but when he wakes up his thoughts are clearer, and his heart beats slower. He springs out of bed, brushes his teeth, combs his hair, and quickly dresses. He wears a Jag polo and faded blue jeans. He feels happy for two distinct reasons. He is going to the hospital to help his son. Furthermore, that help would come from Dr Shaw.