table. I sat with it on my lap, staring at it. I don’t know how long I sat like that. Ten minutes? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Maybe longer. Time seemed to slow to a crawl.
I tried to process what I had just seen, but I was still so stoned, I wasn’t sure what I had seen. Was it real? Or some kind of misunderstanding—some joke I wasn’t getting because I was so high?
I forced myself to read another email.
And another.
I ended up going through all of Kathy’s emails to BADBOY22. Some were sexual, obscene even. Others were longer, more confessional, emotional, and she sounded drunk—perhaps they were written late at night, after I had gone to bed. I pictured myself in the bedroom, asleep, while Kathy was out here, writing intimate messages to this stranger. This stranger she was fucking.
Time caught up with itself with a jolt. Suddenly I was no longer stoned. I was horribly, painfully sober.
There was a wrenching pain in my stomach. I threw aside the laptop. I ran into the bathroom.
I fell to my knees in front of the toilet and threw up.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“THIS FEELS RATHER DIFFERENT from last time,” I said.
No response.
Alicia sat opposite me in the chair, head turned slightly toward the window. She sat perfectly still, her spine rigid and straight. She looked like a cellist. Or a soldier.
“I’m thinking of how the last session ended. When you physically attacked me and had to be restrained.”
No response. I hesitated.
“I wonder if you did it as some kind of test? To see what I’m made of? I think it’s important that you know I’m not easily intimidated. I can take whatever you throw at me.”
Alicia looked out the window at the gray sky beyond the bars. I waited a moment.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Alicia. That I’m on your side. Hopefully one day you’ll believe that. Of course, it takes time to build trust. My old therapist used to say intimacy requires the repeated experience of being responded to—and that doesn’t happen overnight.”
Alicia stared at me, unblinking, with an inscrutable gaze. The minutes passed. It felt more like an endurance test than a therapy session.
I wasn’t making progress in any direction, it seemed. Perhaps it was all hopeless. Christian had been right to point out that rats desert sinking ships. What the hell was I doing clambering upon this wreck, lashing myself to the mast, preparing to drown?
The answer was sitting in front of me. As Diomedes put it, Alicia was a silent siren, luring me to my doom.
I felt a sudden desperation. I wanted to scream at her, Say something. Anything. Just talk.
But I didn’t say that. Instead, I broke with therapeutic tradition. I stopped treading softly and got directly to the point:
“I’d like to talk about your silence. About what it means … what it feels like. And specifically why you stopped talking.”
Alicia didn’t look at me. Was she even listening?
“As I sit here with you, a picture keeps coming into my mind—an image of someone biting their fist, holding back a yell, swallowing a scream. I remember when I first started therapy, I found it very hard to cry. I feared I’d be carried away by the flood, overwhelmed. Perhaps that’s what it feels like for you. That’s why it’s important to take your time to feel safe and trust that you won’t be alone in this flood—that I’m treading water here with you.”
Silence.
“I think of myself as a relational therapist. Do you know what that means?”
Silence.
“It means I think Freud was wrong about a couple of things. I don’t believe a therapist can ever really be a blank slate, as he intended. We leak all kinds of information about ourselves unintentionally—by the color of my socks, or how I sit or the way I talk. Just by sitting here with you, I reveal a great deal about myself. Despite my best efforts at invisibility, I’m showing you who I am.”
Alicia looked up. She stared at me, her chin slightly tilted—was there a challenge in that look? At last I had her attention. I shifted in my seat.
“The point is, what can we do about this? We can ignore it and deny it and pretend this therapy is all about you. Or we can acknowledge that this is a two-way street and work with that. And then we can really start to get somewhere.”