Chapter 17

 It’s that feeling that everything is so good that you try to think back to earlier that day to where you missed something. Because you must have missed something for you to feel this good. I try to explain this stuff to Butler and get no reaction. It’s another thing I can’t articulate well. Whatever gets him to respond to me or recognize my existence in anyway outside of handing me things is: 

• My imminent death

End of List. 

In the mornings I’m standing outside the East Estate at 8:30 in the morning. Nothing from left to right on the horizon but flat short grass. Open country. With the woods off in the distance.

After waiting I find myself magickly in the back of a black car with black windows and Butler handing me the day’s agenda. The interior is genuine pig leather dyed seaweed green. The side paneling, mahogany, from a Mississippian burial mound. Every little detail is planned and has meaning like word choice in a chat. Today’s agenda says:  

• Therapy 
• Evening economic good fortune ritual w/ Joselyn 
• Optional: Bottomless mimosas @ Scarse w/ Everhet Byzantine 

 End of List.

Therapy is daily, which acts as like a remedial conversation skills rehabilitation, where I learn how to talk around rich people, erasing my plebian vernacular. To remove words like “awesome” and “dude”. It’s speech editing. Apparently, everything I knew about talking to people is wrong and it’s very clear that I am a very damaged individual—or so it has been relayed to me.

Scarse is a casino on a steamboat that’s parked at the same spot on the Mississippi River for half a century. I had it transported to the river that runs through the county and parked there until I decide what to do with it. You used to be able to avoid the tax laws of the land if you lived on water. Might be a useful getaway vehicle for the slowest gang of bandits ever. And apparently Morgen’s famous librarian friend has a map of major river systems unknown to the general public that can transport you to various parts of the globe.

I look at the paper. I say, “Busy day.”

Butler looks up from his device and says, “Mhm.” And looks back down.

Butler is my personal assistant now.

I’ve considered asking him what was in the drink in Ray’s Hole the first night we met, but his grumpy teenage demeanor wards me off.

He looks like Les. But everyone kind of does.

I don’t see many people consistently besides him. I wish he could see I’m sick. But no disease in medical literature has symptoms such as: leveling up in life too fast. 

An unexpected turn of good luck can cause everything to feel unreal. Where you watch your life being performed like a drama in front of you where fortune after fortune is given out of what seems like nowhere. Life is so good you can’t understand it. You do not belong here. And you must improvise all your lines lest ye be discovered and the floor to the abyss of averageness opens beneath you. It’s the crazy you see in the eyes of the regular Joe who just won the lottery. Many lottery winners from low-income backgrounds end up either bankrupt or dead from overdoses and suicide.

Soda and water are the same now for me. I don’t know if I should do something about it. And there isn’t a time where there isn’t some amount of gum in my system.

Butler’s closed apathetic lips bother me so much that I start trying to bond with him. My therapist encourages me to share with him, something personal that might bridge a connection between us. She told me, “Just say any honest thing. Show your true self to the World without shame, Sullivan.”

I look at myself in the obsidian reflection of his pupils. Like looking in the lens of sunglasses.

“Hey Butler, I’ve been drinking too much I think.” I hold my hand up. Shake it at Butler and he looks at me. I say, “This coffee cup? All whiskey. Oh, and I take like nine hundred milligrams of Adderall a day now. The family doctor prescribes them as needed.” I put a lot of coy emphasis on the “as needed” part and throw in an eyewink.

No response.

Instead of stopping, I take this as a sign to be even more vulnerable and aggressively open. 

So, I tell him how sometimes I think this life is all a prank show and the only way to win is to act like I don’t give a shit so at the very least I can say I never got duped. The ball will drop eventually, I know that. None of this fantasy is real but while I’m in it I might as well enjoy it and maybe try to learn something.

Nothing. He moves nothing. He is deceased kitchenware; the deadest of pans.

I feel Butler’s wavelength in my teeth. The ringinging has a pattern in my head. Like music that’s always playing. And everyone else is a radio station.

Then I tell him that the other night I thought about offing myself, not because I’m depressed, but just to see if I’d actually die because my life is so good right now. 

“Imposter Syndrome.” Butler says.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re unable to accept the good things that are happening to you, even though you wanted them to, because it seems like the only way it could be happening is because you’re either completely delusional or there must be some massive catch on the end of it, no?”

And I say, “Yes. That exactly.”

“Then, yeah.” Butler says, “You’re thinking of Imposter Syndrome.”

I say, “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So, there is a name for it.” I smile and raise my cup. Take a swig. Lower it. I said the “is” in way that sounded desperate.

I say, “Thanks, Butler.” I put my hand on his arm.

“Anytime.”

He looks up at me. And I look at the pinholes in his eyes that lead to the ultimate void of black utterness. I sink inside him. And a surge of energy fires from our point of contact. I’m transferring the minty-tingly feeling by the serological response I’m causing beneath his skin.

The car’s velocity decreases.

“We’re here.” Butler says. And pulls his arm away. “And by the way. I’d be remiss not to tell you that there is a catch to all of this. I think you learned that this past weekend didn’t you?”

I prim my lips, and I feel my face go cold. Does everybody know? I step out and the black car drives away from J.C. Evans Elementary School. The bricks were originally painted the same bright red as the bottom of my loafers, but weather and time have faded them. The bricks. Not my shoes.

To increase passive income without adjusting county budgets, public schools allow teachers to rent out their classrooms for other functions.

Most of the recent FMCA updates were for mental health which was counted as a “medical” issue. Now elementary school classrooms are rented out to freelance therapists the same way tattoo parlors and hair studios do. 

After FMCA 6.1 passed last week access to baseline high speed internet became a basic human right. Fiber optic internet would still be allowed for a premium to those who could afford it. Different upgrade options allow a business to continue to make money while also allowing everyone access to their product by withholding certain enjoyable features behind a paywall. Because at the end of it all, for capitalism to function, there must always be a bottom. But this way, even at the bottom, you’re not left out of the conversation.

I sit with one knee on top of the other with my fingers laced against my belly. Making sure my Côta d’Azur kangaroo red leather bottom loafers are bobbing showing the therapist that I am a very put together and sane person. I show my ankles because I don’t wear socks because I don’t need to. Wearable objects are perfect mouthpieces for beliefs. Sometimes I treat my outfits with old relics from the Arto family collection and dress myself in VCOs that once belonged to the royalty of the ancient world.

It’s not until the therapist offers me a dish of wrapped candy that I can tell she’s wearing face paint and bunny ears. I take one of the candies and start to chew it and notice an odd taste. Damn. She’s done it again. Every week, after I wake up from another stupor I tell myself, next week I’m not going to eat anything offered to me, and every week I do. 

The therapist seems so put together and of such a vibration that it causes me to vibrate. But right when I think I can’t manage it. I can. I swear to God I don’t know why I don’t ask what’s in the things I eat or drink before I eat or drink them. I’m gonna wind up in a sewer again. Maybe I keep doing it because results are results and the therapy is good, or it could also be I secretly want to go back into the sewers and pop my head out and my life will be back to the way it was. My house will be standing. My parents will be alive and inside. And I would be nobody special. This will all have been a dream. But I’m pretty sure it’s the first one.

The edible’s influence is increasing which is making this place an ultra-bummer. The decorations left over from the previously occupying first grade class don’t help. There’s a lot of pink and red in this room. Cardboard bears dancing on clouds. Really low tables. But underneath, if you removed all the pretty pictures painted to dull the senses of toddlers off the walls, and took out all the chairs and tables, the skeleton of public schools—architecturally speaking—is no different than a hospital or a prison. Somewhere in between. Everything is starting to feel more unreal again. I get that minty-tingly sensation on my skin. Sleep and waking feel synonymous as I lean against a chair that barely reaches halfway up my back. 

Goosebumps like a million nanoscopic spiders biting in robotic unison.

Her lips are rising and falling in slow motion but no sound emits.

The therapist takes off the bunny ears and leans to set them on the floor.

If there’s cleavage in the surrounding area, I look at it. But I’m so tired of thinking about it. It’s a tick called cisness. Where registering someone as a human isn’t enough. I have to push it a step further. Where I look at chests more as an impulse to double check if it’s woman and if there’s any seams anywhere. Or how wide the valley between knuckles. Facial hair.

“Sul-li-van.” The therapist’s voice catches me off guard. She says, “Did you hear me?”

I say, “What? Sorry.” My lizard brain was too busy thinking about how your voice would sound and how your mouth would look if you were moaning with pleasure.

The therapist is paid quite a premium by the Artos. You can’t imagine how much trust that is. The kind where your life is dependent on it. I ask her to repeat the last thing she said.

 “Never mind. No worries.” Her voice bruised with tenderness. She says, “Is there anything you want to talk about, Sullivan?”

I do an arc route with my eyes that goes from floor to ceiling to floor. I say, “Nope.” If Butler knows, does she know what goes on at the cabin?

If she wraps this up soon, I can get to Scarse early before Everhet and work out some karma before he gets there. I’m due for some. I gotta talk to him about his proposal.

Time limits on therapy inherently destroy the ability to grow for me because all I have to do is seem fine for an hour and I’m free. It’s no different than waking up on a Sunday morning for church to feel good about yourself.

“What about how your week went? What did you do this weekend?” Her voice perks up. She says, “Did you and Morgen do anything social together like we talked about?”

Here’s something I’ve learned: There are things you don’t tell the therapist. Especially things that don’t hold any significance yet. And especially not if they hold the potential to. I mentioned once about how often I work out my karma and she had the audacity to ask me if I thought that was a helpful thing. She then encouraged me to cut back on the amount of karma work I’m doing.

The therapist once laughed at my theory of how my karma was brought upon me. That it was done by some whore version of myself in one of my past lives who made mistakes. And now I am paying their debts for the sake of spiritual balance in the universe. And how this propels me on my path to perfect Buddhahood.

She taps her clipboard. “Are you sure you didn’t start meditating and telling everyone about it to get back at your Christian parents?”

The therapist said overdramatic things like how I could “ruin this” and make it a “public thing” because chewing gum and working out karma in public bathrooms is “wrong” according to the media. Then she showed how impulsive karma work is due to some asexual trauma that I’ve internalized into a ritual for high stress situations.

And I’m like, sure. Whatever.

I had no idea that what I thought was a fun and very normal childhood was actually extremely traumatizing until I brought it up in therapy.

I wonder if it was my therapist that was traumatizing me. It’s a very valid, very good customer retention model that has been perfected by the Western Judeo-Christian movement and many other copycats and subsidiaries over the past few centuries.

Guilt traps people.

It’s like debt without money. A debit you incur for a soul loaned. 

I already tried telling the therapist in our first session that I didn’t start doing all this crazy shit until I flunked out of college, but it’s only gotten worse since Everhet moved into the West Estate. I told the therapist pointing with a force strong enough to displace the gold watch on my wrist. She doesn’t believe me. I told the therapist they drink blood in there. They’re batshit. And I don’t feel there’s any way out of it.

It doesn’t matter if she believes me. I don’t know if I believe myself. Whatever I tell the therapist, I always sound like the crazy one.

I could see how last weekend’s walk to Joselyn’s cabin with Morgen could be interpreted as an “experience” that was “damaging”, but not as damaging as what happened when we got there.

 

James Jacob Hatfield is a displaced engineer, a painter, and many other contradictions. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Barely South Review, Chaleur Magazine, Havik, and others. His ekphrasis poem “torrents of lahar, No. 36” was anthologized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. He is a Sterling Fellow and a Weymouth Fellow. He is the creator and curator of the Gemini Sessions Substack. He lives in Durham, NC.

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