You think I have social anxiety, but that you’ve brought me out of my shell because I can gaze into your eyes for hours and it never gets overwhelming. The first time you said, “You understand me so well,” I saw jumbled scenes of rejection from your childhood and honestly didn’t feel there was all that much to understand. “It’s like we’re soul mates,” you rambled on.
I cut you off early. “You love me,” I told you.
“I’m in love with you,” you specified, and melted into an effeminate mess of tears and sobs that stemmed from memories of experiences from your distant and more recent past. Totally self-absorbed, you interact with me only as far as I can figure out what you’re thinking, which forged a bond between us that exists only in your mind. You have no idea that I can figure out what anyone is thinking, as naturally as I breathe. You assumed that because I could complete your sentence, I loved you, too. That’s the first time I was sorely tempted to tell you I’m a psychic. There have been many other times, but you might report me and I’d end up having to register. I didn’t pass unperceived through the world for thirty years only to register now and be subjected to those distinctly not fashion-forward glasses and who knows what tests or prisons. So I’ll write all these ideas down and try to decide what to do.
Maybe it’s my lot in life to be misunderstood. It wasn’t long after I got here that I noticed that in Providence, Friendship is a one-way street. I was comfortable with that, because for me, it really has been. And continues to be.
2.
This little letter to you, dear husband, is going to be more useful than I thought. I have a lot to process with my newest client, and the official session notes are not the place to do it because the courts might subpoena them at any moment, given the nature of her problems.
When I found Emily on the other side of the office door, her presence forced its way into the room and I stood back to let it and her through. But when she slumped through the doorway and threw herself onto the couch, tossing a dusty backpack at the coffee table with a resonant clang, I realized all that energy was on the un-Talented level, the kind of vibes anyone can perceive. She glared dolefully right into my eyes, but I didn’t get any readings on her. In fact, on the level where I would usually sense thought energy, I heard and saw only a crackling kind of static buzz, sort of like an old broken television. I sat down in the chair across from her with our gazes locked, and yet if I hadn’t read the report, I would’ve had no idea what she was doing there. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.
Her case file is so bizarre, it nearly has its own presence atop my desk, behind the couch where the clients sit. Her sister is an incredibly rare Other-Talented Healer, but Emily did all the truly unfathomable actions in the report. I can’t blame her for disliking her current situation: she’s watched at all times and forced to go to therapy sessions in group or singly on a daily basis. The lack of freedom must seem appalling to a college student. Especially a college student who had previously been three thousand miles away from her family.
It’s unclear why the family followed Emily, who started studying at Brown two years ago. The state took control of Emily’s psychiatric health when she attempted to kidnap her anthropology TA. Some kind of Axis II personality disorder is suspected. They asked me to take her because of my stellar track record with difficult clients and such disorders are so famously intractable.
They don’t know that my therapeutic success with all those other clients has been the result of my psychic Talent. I suddenly felt like a lazy fraud, faced with this unreadable girl. I filed mentally through all the courses and textbooks from grad school to figure out what to do without being able to read her. I think I covered my panic, even though I was sitting stiffly and could feel the heat in my cheeks, because Emily’s demeanor didn’t change. We spent maybe three minutes in utter silence while I admired her straight brown hair and the way it shone in the slanted afternoon light through the blinds. All I could come up with was a stereotypically therapist way to get the client to start.
“You don’t want to be here, do you?”
“I’m not sick. Everyone else is for thinking I am,” she replied in a mumble that resisted interpretation. “But they’re wrong. About everything.” Then her lips flattened against each other as if she never intended to part them again.
The blame-casting and refusal to be self-critical can indeed be early signs of a personality disorder. But which one? I couldn’t make a diagnosis unless she told me more. Another three minutes of that low humming silence, and I started fishing again.
“My name is Patricia.”
I haven’t mentioned it to you, but I hate being called Trish or Pat or Patty or Trisha. Especially when you say it. I find that when I insist on the full name, most people think I’m being elitist, to use the politest term. But Emily went the opposite way.
She nodded. “Dr. Blundt.”
“You can call me by my first name,” I insisted.
“Dr. Blundt,” she said with what I couldn’t be sure was aggravation.
My gaze darted to the clock on the bookcase behind her. We still had 45 minutes. I didn’t want to waste the entire time, even if she was the most difficult client I’d ever had.
“I hear we have something in common,” I began yet again. She looked at me with what I would say was expectation of failure. “We both came from California and ended up in Rhode Island. What part of the state are you from?”
She shifted her weight back and forth and folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not from California anymore. I’m from Providence.”
I can understand enjoying being away from home at college, but it’s unusual to want to erase all traces of one’s childhood at such an early age. Unless there’s been abuse or something else specific the client is running from. That could explain her discomfort, so obvious in her body language.
Then again, maybe her part of California was that boring. California is big in a way Rhode Islanders can never understand, so not all of it is San Francisco or LA, and some of it has little appeal for certain girls growing up. I’m utterly puzzled by my inability to read Emily, and until she starts talking or I figure out why she’s opaque to me the way no one else ever has been, I can’t even make a diagnosis for the insurance company or the courts. But there was no breakthrough in the first session. We sat together in uncomfortable silence because I didn’t want to lead her or let on that I thought she had any kind of disorder. She looked around at the bookshelves, craning her neck but expending as little physical effort as you can imagine, and checked the time on her phone every five to ten minutes. About two minutes before the hour was up, she stood and grasped her backpack, making to leave.
I said, “I’m here to help you. Maybe you’ll feel more like talking next time.”
“Not likely,” she breathed, and headed toward the entrance door.
“Please, use the other door. It protects client privacy,” I explained.
When she opened the correct door, a woman who must be her mother was saying, “How did it go?” in a nervous tone.
“Great,” Emily replied with no hint of sarcasm. “I think therapy is really going to help me.” Then the door cut off any other words.
This could be the biggest challenge of my career and all I feel about it is dread because the authorities are watching so closely.
That sounds paranoid, but as they say, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.
3.
Today, dear husband, was yet another time I nearly blurted out to you that I can see your thoughts. They keep stacking up, these incidents, and in my imagination they’re leading up to some future magic moment when I hand you this notebook and you read the words I have never spoken to anyone.
This afternoon, I was between appointments. You had already passed through the shouting, foot-stomping frustration—I heard you, felt the vibrations come up through the floor. I came downstairs to find you stumped on some piece of code—forgive me for never
being able to retain even your most basic thoughts about the work you do from home—so you said we should walk down Thayer Street, spend some time in the university bookstore, maybe grab a bite to eat. I’m not sure why I still play along at these events. They have never turned out well. Well, yes, I am sure: the dogged devotion in your eyes, the distinct need to spend time with me, the despair, like a black void, that throws itself at me until I say yes. It’s a matter of human decency not to let you suffer. It doesn’t take a psychic to think you might be codependent.
We walked, with arms locked as much as possible on the crowded sidewalk, passing the eclectic shops and international panoply of eateries, with me mostly watching my step.
“Look up!” you said, unable to leave well enough alone. “It’s a beautiful day. You can’t waste it on being shy.”
I can hear the birds chirping and the bicyclists going by, feel the warm temperature, see the sunlight reflected on the sidewalk, all without risking seeing into some random person’s soul. “The pavement is uneven here,” I protested. “I’m keeping us both from tripping.”
You stopped short, causing a harried student and her parents to crash into you. You ignored their “Hey,” and grasped my hands in yours, painfully. Although your intent had been to give me one of your well-meaning pep talks that always end up so patronizing, the talk grew smaller in your eyes until all I could see was you, punching the father. I wrested my hands free and backed away, knowing there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Before he even said anything, you were measuring the distance. By the time he delivered the line—“Don’t you watch where you’re going?”—in his New Jersey accent, you were already halfway there. But they had already shuffled around, and you ended up with your arms around the mother—a soft landing, to be sure, but one that caused a more desperate shriek than your original target would have. You lost your footing and slid farther downward and soon were on your knees, your face even with the mother’s shorts.
All the foot traffic came to a halt. Passersby made quick decisions to get involved or to avoid the scene by ducking into the nearest shops. The father and the student stood in shock for a split second, but I watched the mother’s darting eyes as she weighed options: a full out brawl to defend her honor, or a quick trip to the powder room to straighten up. She opted for the latter.
“Aren’t you Providence folks friendly?” she said in an exaggerated, good-natured way that set the father laughing out loud.
“Can I help you up, sir?” the father said, holding his hand out to you. You took it, wincing from the pebbles I would later tweeze out of your palm.
I was still watching the mother’s gaze, and when she looked up from you, she sent me a white-hot beam of a thought wave I know can only come from a fellow psychic. She must have received the same kind of thing from me, because she sent me a brief family history and asked me a wordless question, which she wouldn’t have tried if she’d thought I was un-Talented. I answered as best I could, told her I wasn’t registered as a psychic with the government, then gave her the slight nod of recognition I give all my fellow Talents and looked back at you.
All psychics seem to have an honor code. If you aren’t registered, you let them know through thought energy and they act as if you have no Talent at all. That’s the only part of this whole mess that feels a little like belonging to an exclusive club.
I took you back home, hobbled from your scraped knees, and doused your hand in hot water in the kitchen sink before taking the smaller bits of concrete out with the tweezers. Then I opened some chicken soup for you to eat out of the can the way you like. I think that misses the point of soup and I looked away to contain my disgust. I no longer felt tempted to tell you I’m a psychic. If I had divulged it in the street, letting you know I could tell what you were about to do, would you have refrained from trying to punch the father?
The mother psychic had quickly assessed my situation, commiserated by giving her checkered history with her husband, and asked pointedly, “How did you end up with this bad-tempered schlub?”
The only thing I could beam back at her was, “I don’t know.”
Funny that it never occurred to me to defend you as the love of my life. In spite of all the ups and downs she showed me, and especially in spite of his fits of rage, that lady loved her husband beyond the Earth and stars.
4.
I was getting nowhere again today. I resorted to covering old ground, but from a different angle, at least. Cognitive/behavioral therapy won’t work if Emily has a personality disorder. If she really does, of course, only drugs will be any use to her at all. But in the meantime, I tried psychodynamic therapy.
“Tell me about your life growing up in California.”
“Why?”
Questions are the best, because they prove the client is truly present in the session and has some mild interest in how the process might work for them. “The place we grow up is formative, and childhood experiences mold us our entire lives, especially if we bury them or don’t acknowledge them.”
“But I didn’t form in California,” she explained with what I thought might be strained patience. “I rejected all guidance and followed my own path.”
“Some incident must have influenced you, even to reject it,” I insisted.
“There is no trace of me in California. I’m a new person with no past.”
“No past at all?” I couldn’t help showing some skepticism.
“None.” She looked at me, and from anyone else I would have seen an epic tale of relationships and impressions that led to such an extreme statement. But here, just that nasty static, growing in volume and reaching such a high pitch, I wanted to scream.
“Then who are the people living with you now? They had a daughter named Emily. Wasn’t that you? And who is Beth?”
“Beth is a dangerous psychopath.” She answered straightaway, no preparation required.
Of course she’s probably using the word “psychopath” in an inexact, pop culture sense, but I was too taken aback to try to get her to specify what she meant. Throwing that word only at her sister was different than where we’d started, when she said everyone was crazy but herself. If there was only one object of blame in Emily’s life, I needed to know more about it.
“Beth is the crazy one? What about your parents?”
“Theirs is a mild and curable insanity, just a bit touched in the head for following her every whim.”
“And what’s so severe in Beth’s case?”
She rolled her eyes. “You’ve read the report, I’m sure. I never almost killed anyone, but she did.”
“The report framed Carlos’s injury as an accident, while your attempted kidnapping of him before he was fully recovered looked like a deliberate act.”
“She’s all the more dangerous because she has a Talent she can’t control.”
I felt my skin go up in flames from my neck all the way to my hairline with embarrassment, but she can’t have known I felt called out by her statement. Meanwhile, this passionate defense of Emily’s point of view was something instead of nothing from her, and it drowned out the static for a while, but overall I was disappointed. Emily seemed to think she had outsmarted us all. Perhaps instead of a personality disorder, she only suffers delusions.
“I made inquiries. Carlos has been fully compensated for what Beth did and the whole thing is being handled in the same manner as any number of these cases each year, as a no-fault situation. And now Beth is at telekinesis school and her teachers say she has more control over her Talent every day, an exemplary student, especially for getting such a late start.”
Emily’s static ratcheted up so loud I fell backward in my chair. Her face was a stone carving. She grabbed her backpack and headed for the door.
I reached out my hand through the TV snow I perceived all around me, which abruptly disappeared when she turned away. “You can’t leave yet. It’s not time. I can’t leave you by yourself.”
“Shows what yo
u know,” she muttered as she closed the door behind her. I was so relieved to have her out of the room, I let her go. It was only ten minutes, after all. How much trouble could she get into?
I was already on a short fuse about Emily. The insurance companies were the first to start asking. Far be it from a bloated bureaucratic organization to allow a client to take the time she needs to go on a true healing journey. Apparently, I have to turn in a diagnosis within two weeks or they’ll put Emily in an institution. I wonder what her family would say about that? Whenever you’re waiting for your claim to go through, of course the insurance companies become like glaciers: slow-moving, dragging boulders. But somehow I’m supposed to perform the superhuman feat of diagnosing someone who won’t share with me what she’s thinking in any form or manner, in two more weeks.
I’ve also had inquiries from lawyers, but if you want to talk about glaciers, look to the courts.
They don’t realize I might tell them to take her just so I can get some relief from the headaches her broken TV signal sounds give me. She seems to perceive me as an inept, un-Talented therapist. Seems to—how strange to have to put it that way! I’ve got to think of something because she wouldn’t do well in an institution. I really do want to help her and, well, the mystery is drawing me in more each time. But at this rate I’ll be lucky if she shows up for her next appointment at all.
5.
The latest research indicates that it’s healthy to think about how you met your partner and imagine how you might not have met. It’s supposed to create feelings of relief that you’ve found each other and awe at the way everything was “destined” to take place. That lady on Thayer Street who loved her temperamental husband asked me how I ever ended up with you. I’ve been kicking it around ever since. All I’ve come up with, and I hate to admit it even to myself, is that we got together because of real estate.
Awash in Talent Page 16