I don’t like this room. It is cold, humid, a little too bright, and questionably decorated. Still, it beats the inch of foam that covers that slab of metal I lay on for almost the entire rest of my existence, even if I have to be in shackles while I sit in this room.
The door opens and someone walks in. I’m instantly greeted by the smell of sea water, scrambled eggs, and permanent marker, but those are probably unrelated. The person is a man wearing a t-shirt and shorts, no a woman in a cheap but professional looking business suit, no a person who’s gender I can’t tell wearing a suit of armor like they stepped out of a medieval storybook, no it’s back to the woman.
She sits down opposite me on the couch and looks to her clipboard after placing a small recording device on the table between us. She is my therapist, for now at least. I hear a man’s voice call out to me, “Diane, focus,” followed by the sound of a subway screeching to a halt. I shake my head and cover my ears to drown out the noise.
She looks up at me. “Is everything ok Diane?”
I answer, well my voice does but I don’t feel my mouth move. “The intrusions are getting worse.”
She nods in understanding. “I think it’s time we try a new strategy,” I hear her voice in the distance as the smell of a flowery meadow wafts into the room. The walls vanish and I see fields of tulips for miles in every direction as her voice still comes in from above as if from an unseen intercom. “The MRI came back and the anomaly you hypothesized about may be correct. It appears that parts of your brain are registering stimuli from other dimensions, times, and places.”
The validation brings me back and I am back in the room with the hideous abstract painting on the far wall hanging next to a diploma. Her mouth begins moving in sync with the words I am hearing. “I want to try something. If we can get it to work, it may help your case to get your sentence modified. It’s a centering exercise we teach people with anxiety disorders but I modified it for your situation. I want you to focus on nothing but what you can physically experience right now. What are five things you can feel physically right now?”
I close my eyes and feel for the sensations of things around me. “The soft cushion under me, the fabric of my clothes on my skin, the breeze from that open window-”
She interrupts me. “There’s no window in this room, that’s an outside stimuli.”
I nod. “The metal of my handcuffs on my wrist, the tightness of the shoes that don’t fit right, and the humidity of the air in this room.”
“Great,” she says, taking a note. The painting on the wall behind her has become a television screen showing a baseball game, no a soap opera, no a talk show, no it’s a painting again. I focus on my body and what I feel. “Now I want you to list four things you can hear right now.”
“Your voice, my own voice,” I say. There’s a cacophony, a bird chirping, a car alarm, waves crashing, a fire burning, two men discussing a business transaction between two businesses I’ve never heard of. “The whirring of your tape recorder and the hum of the fan above us.” A woman appears behind her, pacing back and forth babbling about some mission. The wall behind her morphs from painted a calming yellow to a dimly lit dark green that did not match the lights hanging from the ceiling. The woman snaps at me and calls out my name, as if I’m not paying attention to something important.
My therapist claps, the woman vanishes, and the wall reverts. “Excellent, those are all real things that exist in this reality. Now try three things you can smell.”
I close my eyes again and tried to filter out what was not real. No one was bleeding so the smell of blood was probably not real, neither was the undercurrent of sea water that had existed since she entered the room. “I smell my deodorant, as ineffective as it may be, and my shampoo.” The smell of rotten fish wafted into the room but, again, not in this world. “Pine trees, you have an air freshener.” I say.
“This may be tough,” she says “but two things you can see.”
I open my eyes, expecting to filter through a myriad of nonsense but the room is oddly empty.
“I see you and the table between us,” I say.
A voice intrudes. “Diane this won’t work, she won’t believe you.” It’s not in my head, it’s coming from behind me as if the source was sitting in the room with us, but I know it’s not there. I’ve heard this verbatim before from the guard who brought me here today.
“And what’s one thing you taste?” she asked.
I close my eyes again. “The remnants of my toothpaste,” I say.
I open them and I am seated on the same couch, in front of the same table, with the same therapist sitting opposite me. She is wearing the same business suit, staring at me from behind the same clipboard. “How do you feel?” She asked.
In my periphery, there is a bookcase except the contents keep shifting, they’re books but the spines rearrange periodically. The temperature of the room shifts abruptly but only by a few degrees in either direction.
Most importantly, there is silence, no voices, no scents, no people who aren’t there. It’s not perfect, things still feel a little off, but there is a quiet I have not felt since the incident that caused the fracture. I touch the scarring on my right wrist instinctively before looking up. “Better.”