I AM DEBATING whether or not to tell my therapist that this will be my final session. On the one hand, it will be a delicious feeling to let him know I am leaving. On the other, our relationship has been changed by his testimony, and even though I am assured that any fresh sessions are re-covered by the privileges of confidentiality, now that I have born witness to how he sees me, it can’t help but color our present. The White Hot Center managed to hit my reset button, but I don’t seem perfectly immune from fresh wounds.
Sitting in front of him this final time, I realize that I can’t not talk about what I want to talk about.
“This is our last session, I’m afraid,” I say.
“Are you fearing the outcome of the trial?” We are close to a verdict, close enough that it may come between now and our next scheduled session. It’s just that I won’t be around to hear it.
“Not at all.”
“Then how could you know that this will be our last session?”
“Because I’m leaving.”
“And where are you going?”
“I’m going back. She and I are going to be together.” I think that I hear a sigh start to leak out of him, but he’s too much of a pro to give in to that temptation. He knows that if he sighs there will be a fight over the sigh and that if he’s doing his job we shouldn’t be fighting over a sigh.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I say. I believe I do. Having seen him on the stand I now know how he takes what I tell him in therapy and filters it into what he calls the patient’s “overall personal gestalt,” in short, my modus operandi.
“And what’s that?” he replies.
“You’re thinking that I’m crazy.”
“We’ve talked about this before,” he says. There’s an extra wrist flick at the end of the gesture, a dismissal.
When I returned from the White Hot Center, I told him everything. I thought, just maybe, as the therapist to fallen stars that he might have had other clients who had spent time at the WHC. We had one session between my return and the shooting, and I explained how I had been transformed, how I had been washed clean, how I had met someone and that from that moment forward I would be getting what I wanted, that I had been temporarily deflected, detoured by some failures, but that was over, my eyes were firmly fixed back on the prize, which was a lifetime of soul mating with an amazingly sensitive and nubile young woman and that after everything I’d been through, that maybe, just maybe, I deserved it.
I didn’t necessarily yet believe that last part at the time, but he pushed my buttons.
“And where is this place?” he says.
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“And how did you get there?”
“I told you before, two male models kidnapped me.”
He responds with the gesture. He is testing me for consistency in my story.
“Two male models kidnapped me, they tranquilized me and when I woke up I was on a boat. For several weeks I spent my days encased in goo sharing all of my memories, many of the same things I’ve told you over the last several years, the only difference being after I told these things to the goo I felt better, whereas when I tell them to you, I feel like I might be the lowliest shit on the planet, and if you don’t wipe that look off your face, I may leap across the room and smack you.”
He doesn’t flinch. He knows I’m not going to do anything. I hate him for knowing these things. “I wish you could see what I see,” he says.
“And what’s that?”
“I see somebody who should be working to integrate his life but instead remains rooted in a fantasy.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, for one, we both know you didn’t go anywhere.”
“And how do we know that?” I say.
“Because you are the sort of person who is kept track of and no one saw you leave your apartment. Because there is no such place like the one you describe. Because people can’t be hit in the face with a baseball and not experience broken bones. Because when people die, they stay dead. I could go on, but why should we bother?”
“If I didn’t go anywhere, how did I kick the drugs?”
“Is that what you think happened?”
There is a long silence at the end of which I say, “I’m not going to miss you.”
“I have to ask,” he says, “are you going to do something foolish?”
“I’m sure you’d think so.”
He shakes his head like a pitcher waving off the catcher’s signs. “That was my fault. I should’ve been more clear. You’re not going to harm yourself, are you?”
“Of course not.”
He stands up from his chair. Our time is up. Somehow he knows, even though he never looks at a watch or a clock. “Then I look forward to seeing you next week.”
Maybe it’s better this way. He’ll be as surprised as anyone, my little bit of revenge for him believing he knows me so well. We shake and on the way out I nod at the receptionist and she tells me to have a wonderful day as she picks up the phone to place the call that will give me exactly twenty-four minutes to be back inside my apartment. I hit the streets and put on my sunglasses and pull a cap out of my pocket and yank it down over my head and even though everybody knows me, as I walk home, nobody recognizes me.