63
The writer goes to art therapy. Art therapy has destroyed pieces of her with shattering noise, leaving the imprint of her like chalk, her head bashed against the wall, in the dark black room. This is the writer’s trace that no amount of psychological restructuring can erase, and she will for the rest of her life be turning her head and seeing it but not quite seeing it, like the blind spot on a car.
Now the difficult part begins.
The second session is in a closet. She’s instructed to write.
“What am I supposed to write about?” the writer asks the specialist, a short woman named Anna who has the only genuine smile the writer has ever seen. If only Anna smiled more.
“Whatever you want,” Anna said.
“What if I just write nonsense?”
Anna said, “I think you’re smart enough to figure out what will be useful and what won’t be.”
In art therapy, the writer is shut in a closet with a laptop and sits hunched over a desk for fourteen hours. As she writes, she must also tend to a plant that is kept on her desk in the dark. It’s a night-blooming plant, but it’s kept there to prevent Solipsism Syndrome and remind her that other things are still alive while she works. She names the plant Elle. She has this habit of naming her pets and plants human names. She thinks giving them silly names, or cute names, reduces their importance.
The writer stares at the plant for a solid half hour.
She begins to write:
The interesting thing about memory and human behavior is that memory can override the present moment, because the brain adapts response based on the normal result of an interaction. It’s a shortcut, and a useful one, so that we don’t have to be constantly reevaluating our surroundings to make split-second decisions about how we should react to the present moment.
The difficulty is present when the human enters a situation in which the expected response is no longer an accurate representation of reality and the human is unable to reevaluate her decisions in an accurate light, causing her to rework the structure of her situation until she recreates the original scenario implanted into her memory, resolving her cognitive dissonance and continuing to repeat the mistakes of her past.
The writer stops and rereads what she wrote.
“Well this is fucking bullshit,” she says.
64
The writer busts open the door of her writing closet and walks down the hall, halting and angry, her steps heavy. She thinks “murder” while she walks, each step like a gunshot. She bursts into Anna’s office and begins screaming.
“I am going home and I demand you discharge me right now!”
But Anna is not in her office. It is the cleaning robot from the hallway, watering the night flower on Anna’s desk.
Everyone in the station is instructed to care for a plant. Whether or not this is a successful operative to reduce apathy is inconclusive.
The robot cocks his head at the writer. The writer and the robot do not have a good relationship. The writer often yells at the robot to go fuck itself. This hurts the robot’s feelings, but the robot doesn’t show this. It lacks the language to express its sadness. The writer, who despite being an empathic being, has somehow missed this in the restructuring process. It’s best she doesn’t find out she hurt the robot’s feelings, it may haunt her for the rest of her life.
“I do not have the authority to discharge you,” the robot says. “Would you like me to wait here with you until Anna returns?”
And the robot does not have eyes, but the writer pauses and realizes that she’s always thought of the robot as having eyes. And its fingers, made of molded plastic and flexible titanium, she’s always thought of as soft and gentle, like the hands of a geisha, or a spider. How she wished someone had loved her who had hands like that, hands they could wrap around her waist and pull her close without feeling like she was being bruised, or stolen, or controlled.
And the robot’s silent machinery, how did it regard her? Did the robot look at her and think of fingers and eyes and hips, when it processes language, did it have its own mirror neurons, its own prefrontal cortex, simulated, of course, processed through nanites or chips or tubes or whatever the hell robots ran on these days, lizard blood and mothballs maybe? And did it feel the pain of the writer’s voice, reverberating through its core?
Probably not.
“Nevermind, forgot I said anything,” the writer said, backing up toward the door, “I’ve got to go back to art therapy.”
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and my website. You can also buy one of my books here.
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