Wasted Time

(Flash Fiction) "I don’t feel real. Is that normal?" Ian sat in a wooden chair, wearing a pair of headphones that wrapped around the back of his head and vibrated his temporal bones.

“Spiraling” Photo by Annie Hendrix

"I don’t feel real. Is that normal?" Ian sat in a wooden chair, wearing a pair of headphones that wrapped around the back of his head and vibrated his temporal bones.

“For some people,” said the elderly woman sitting across from him. She held a device which emitted bilateral sonic pulses at predictable intervals. They were not meant to punish. They were meant to provide predictable input to his nervous system and spread awareness across the hemispheres of his brain. They were meant to heal him.

“Do you think you should feel real?” the therapist’s voice cracked. She cleared her throat.

Ian paused and opened his eyes, observed Dr. Wells’s slumped posture, her frizzy copper hair in sparse tufts on her wide head, and the glazed stare that appeared similar to the way he felt when he was so bored and dissociated he felt dead. “If this isn’t a good time, we can reschedule,” Ian said.

Dr. Wells’s eyes flickered.

“Why wouldn’t this be a good time?” she asked. The pulses continued. Ian tried to grasp exactly the words to explain what was problematic about the way the session was going.

“The way you responded to my last statement made me uncomfortable.”

The therapist narrowed her gaze. “What about it made you uncomfortable?”

“It didn’t seem like you were paying attention.”

Dr. Wells nodded. She waited for him to go on, but Ian recognized the trap he had laid for himself. He’d fallen into it before. “Why didn’t it seem like I was paying attention?”

Another question.

Ian took a deep breath. “I understand it’s the therapist’s intention to lead clients to their own conclusions, Dr. Wells, but right now can you please just talk to me?”

She feigned genuine curiosity. “Does this frustration stem from your memories of your mother? Of how she couldn’t give you enough attention?”

The bilateral sonic pulses were no longer soothing. Now they drummed in his skull out of rhythm with his beating heart.

“I said I don’t feel real. You said ‘do you think you should feel real?’ You are a psychologist. So please tell me, was that question rhetorical or were you not paying attention?”

“Does it make you feel intelligent to demonstrate acute observation to others?” Dr. Wells issued an unyielding smirk.

The sonic pulses came in punches.

“Sorry, can you please turn off the device?” Ian asked, and Dr. Wells sighed as she fumbled with it for a moment before locating the off switch.

Ian looked at his hands. Two loaves of bread. Potatoes. Skeleton bones. Gelato. Cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Deliver the salad chopped and tossed. I’m the boss. I’m the boss. I’m the boss, he thought. The room began to spin. There was a tightness in his chest and it was almost as if his jaw were locked, but he managed to push past the cage and say—

“Do you think I should feel real?”

“Haven’t we gone over how ‘should’ is a pesky little word?” Dr. Wells became a blur in the shadows, form entangled with the blank beige wall. Cold sweat dripped from Ian’s armpits and onto his shirt. This wasn’t therapy. This was a kind of hell where he was coaxed into reliving his most painful experiences over and over again while he continued to go mad.

“You seem upset,” she stated, “Here…” and she switched the pulses back on again. Certainly, she must have been attempting to soothe.

Ian ripped the headphones from his head. It took restraint to control his voice, to hold the object steady in his hand instead of throwing it at the ground. He leaned forward in his chair, elbows propped up on his knees, head hung down. He breathed deeply then said “Why now, why are you willing to make a statement now?”

Dr. Wells put the device aside and fixed her scarf. She took a sip of her tea then coughed up a bit of phlegm. She stood up and hobbled across the carpet to Ian’s chair, leaned over him without excusing her reach, and grabbed a tissue from the side table to clean the sputum from her chin while her musk and shadow hung over him.

She looked down at Ian, “Would you like me to hold your appointment for next week or are you finished wasting my time?”