Chapter 6
I’m getting out of the streetcar and heading to see Stephanie for our session. The shower with Joshua had cleansed the nausea and the anguish off me for a while, but now all of a sudden the lack of sleep and the turmoil of the lasts emotions weights on me.
When I step in Stephanie’s office I feel tired beyond exhaustion and wish I were elsewhere. I simply don’t want to talk.
The feeling must be stamped on my face, because Stephanie looks at me for a moment before asking me if I am all right.
“I suppose I am”, I say
“So do you feel ready for today’s session?”, she asks me and I say sure, we can do it.
She seems to buy my answer, but once we reach the room where the session should take place she becomes inquisitive again.
“Are you sure you’re fine? We can postpone the meeting if you want”, she insists
“I’ve painted for the whole night and things have somehow come back to my mind”, I tell her and stop, not sure about how much I want to give away
“What did you paint?”, she asks
I delay the answer for a moment
“A lizard”, I say at last
“What’s the lizard to you?”, she asks
“The lizard is about something that happened when I was a kid”, I say
Stephanie waits for me to continue. It is too late to stop, I should have kept my mouth shut in the first place if I didn’t want her to know. So I tell her about whichever shreds of my past I could retrieve during tonight’s excursion into lost memories.
“Did you see who dragged you away?”, Stephanie asks after I finish the story
“No…all I know is that somebody was taking the face away from me”, I tell her
“Do you have any other memories?”, she asks
“No, not really…do you think we can just start the session? I'm tired, you know, so it won't be hard to sleep and dream for you to do whatever you need to do”, I say with unintended aggressiveness in my tone
“Ok…so what we're going to do now is have you lie and sleep. We can give you some sedatives to help. We're going to hook up electrodes on you to get some indication of how strong your emotions are while you sleep. We will link whatever we can record to what you remember. You need to tell me what you see during the dream, it matters that you do not emit details because that will help us understand what was going on. During each session we will try to continue the episode you remembered the previous time, to add up another bit to it till the whole puzzle is complete”, Stephanie explains, repeating what she had already told me the day before
The room is spinning and my head hurts. Perhaps it’s the fact that I am tired, but I am irritated at this place, at Stephanie, at her pretense of understanding who I am and of the freedom she is taking of nosing into my life. I am allowing her to, but that’s no matter.
What can she know? Even I don’t know.
But she’s intuitive, I give her that.
“Oh…I forgot to ask”, Stephanie says suddenly, “Do you want to remember? And do you trust me to go through the process with you?”
“What do you mean?”, I say
“I have the impression that you want to keep some details to yourself, and that’s understandable. These sessions make sense only if you are willing to open up and tell me what you know, otherwise it will be very hard to progress”, she tells me.
I don’t really know how much I want Stephanie to be with me on this, and I shrug.
“Can we move on? At least give this a try?”, I decide at last
“You’re the main actor in this. We can move on if you want to”
I lay on the bed and I feel the sleep dribble on me a drop at a time.
Blackness.
There is somebody behind me, he is dragging the face similar to mine away from mine, I know it without seeing him. I know it’s a man.
There's some noise, I hear the movements rather than seeing them, and there are hurried voices. Somebody tells me to be quiet, that everything will be ok. The voice is odd, the words are pronounced in a way that is foreign to me, but still I understand their meaning. I feel the person does not care about me, and yet it keeps telling me that I will be fine, and to be quiet. I sense that if I cry something will happen, I perceive that the man is scared. Then suddenly I hear cries, they are familiar cries and I understand that it's the face that has been taken away from me that it is crying. I know the face is somewhere close although I cannot see it, I can just hear the cries and the voice telling it to be quiet. I can hear the noise of the street and the noise of the car’s engine, and then there's blackness again.
And there light’s again.
I am back in Stephanie’s room.
I figure there are tears rolling down my eyes, my face is moist and I'm sweaty.
I'm incredibly sad.
Stephanie is right, do I want to remember?
It seems like memories are not helping me at all, maybe I should stop. All of a sudden the void that was with in me seems to be elated indefinitely. Now that this window on the past has opened and I can’t say who I am, I don't know what to do with myself anymore. Not that I really did before, and now it’s too late to turn back anyways.
“Are you ok?”, Stephanie asks me.
I don’t reply. I do not want Stephanie to know about my pain, about my emptiness. She feels me, and gives me a moment of quiet.
“If you want we can stop here”, she tells me
“No I want to go on…”, I say
“When you were dreaming I recorded the signals. They were intense, very intense. You cried and at a point you were screaming”, Stephanie told me
“In the car…it wasn’t me screaming…”, I say and all of a sudden the realization dawns on me
“It was my sister…my mother was with us, outside, somewhere, and there was that lizard…and we must have been kidnapped. But why?”, I say, talking to myself
“My mom…my real mom…they took us away from her…mama…”, I whisper
The wonder at the absurd idea that my mother can perceive me somehow, somewhere, wherever she is. She must be somewhere…
And I want my sister back.
I don’t know how long I have been abstracted in my memories, and only now I realize that Stephanie is there, listening to me.
She keeps quiet, she doesn't say a word and just wants to let me speak but I stop, because this is really all I can recollect, because I am exhausted.
I stay on my bed for a moment longer, not really sure about what I want to say or do next. But then I decide, suddenly, that I need my DNA results now. I will go and ask if they can rush the analyses. I will pay anything, anything. I’ll beg, cry. Anything. If my sister is there, if my mother is there and they have thought of playing the same card, then there is no time to lose.
“I have to go, right away”, I say
A question mark appears on Stephanie’s face, but she doesn’t ask.
“I went to a place to have my DNA tested because I suspected that my mother, or well, the person who calls herself my mother, wasn't my mother…”, I start, the disarrayed wording mirroring my state of mind
“And so you’re trying to find you real mother”, Stephanie says, concluding my sentence
“I don’t know what I’ll find…knowledge could be worse than ignorance, but I can’t stop just now”
Stephanie nods.
“Once you start telling the truth, there is no ending{1}…I read this somewhere, I can’t remember anymore”, Stephanie tells me, pensively
“Next time we should have you take a nap”, I say, and I giggle for the first time I have stepped in here
Stephanie laughs too, but then her laugher dims into a smile and I notice a shade of sadness in her.
“Sorry…”, I say
“Why?”, she asks and then adds, before I can answer the first question, “do you want to come back tomorrow? Always at 8?”
I feel I might make a bit more time for self-indulgence tomorrow morning since my parents are not even around. There has been a sudden emergency in the Korean subsidiary of my father’s firm and I have the whole place to myself. My father had to pack in great rush, and my hyper-loyal mother followed. That’s why they missed out on my graduation ceremony. This is why they are not around now. Crap hit the fan when I need to get rid of my adoptive parents the most – right on, I think.
“Can we see each other at 10?”, I propose
“Sure, why not”
“Right, why not?”, I say, getting up from the bed
“So long”, I add, raising my hand in a last theatrical farewell before leaving the room