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Therapy
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|by Jordan J. Vezina
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“You were expecting him? ”
“Yeah, I guess.” I answered, almost as an after thought.
“You sound unsure.”
“I guess I just didn’t think he would really show.”
Sitting on the edge of the river I peered down at my own reflection cast back over the crystal of the water, superimposed over the sight of the body beneath its surface. After so long apart, there he lay, tangled up in some weeds under the river water. It was funny how his right arm was loose from the tangled mess and pulling into the current, making it look almost as if he were waving from beyond death. By funny I mean frightening. By frightening I mean hilarious.
Janice didn’t seem nearly as disturbed by this course of events as I was. In fact her ability to take something like this in stride was paralleled in its oddity only by the dead body waving at me from its watery grave.
“Do you remember him well?” She asked. I didn’t answer for a moment as she turned on the grass and picked up the picnic basket that she had brought. Janice had insisted on packing a good amount of food, being as neither of us had really known how long something like this would take.
“Do I remember him well?” I took a thoughtful pause,
“Mostly from the back, as he was leaving.”
“You two weren’t very close I take it.”
“He ran out before I even got to know myself, much less him.”
“You’ve been pissed off for a long time. Did you think this would be therapeutic?” She asked, unpacking a sandwich.
“I don’t know, I guess... I just wanted to know what the deal was.” I took my half of the sandwich from her, “When I saw what the message in the fortune cookie said, I just figured hey, what the hell?”
“Well, I generally find that people who base their actions on messages found in fortune cookies aren’t exactly drowning in options.”
I stared at her for a moment. I knew that what she was saying was true, but the fact was that it had worked. Here we were, and here he was.
“You’ve been carrying this around for a long time.” Janice said in-between mouthfuls of egg salad sandwich; “You’ve been carrying him around with you.”
“That’s why I came here.”
“Think about it. You’re twenty-nine years old, and you came here to this river to wait for your fathers’ body to float by. This is not the act of a rational person.”
“Well what about the person who packed the lunch and came with him?”
She smiled slyly and leaned back into the yellow-green carpet of the grass.
“Love makes women do strange things.” Janice said, “Now close your eyes.”
I did.
“Now describe me. What do I look like?” I tried to pierce the veil of physical darkness and recreate her in my mind’s eye.
“You’ve got blonde hair, green eyes. Um... “
I opened my eyes and shook my head.
“What are you looking for? You know that I know what you look like.”
“Of course you do, but that’s not the point. Think about it, you’re a writer. You’re trying to tell me that the best you can do is 'you’ve got blonde hair, green eyes, um...’ “
She laughed. I could be in flames and that laugh would still relax me. I smiled a little and thought on what she had said.
“Now close your eyes,” She paused for a moment, “And try it again. I’m supposed to be your muse, right? So use me.”
“All right.” I closed my eyes and did the same thing that I had when I began writing, I let my mind go blank. The machinery began to churn before I realized it was even happening, and her perfect image walked through the hallways of my memory.
“You do have blonde hair and you do have green eyes. You also have an almost self-destructive sense of right and wrong, and more often than not it gets you in trouble. Your fingernails are too short because you bite them when someone makes you wait too long for something, and if they really make you wait too long you start muttering under your breath in French.
“You’re self conscious about your hair, that’s why you keep it so short. You dance even though I don’t, and you do it well, but your real talent is reading people. You read me enough to get past the never-ending wall of bullshit and psychological mayhem that I throw up everyday, and that’s pretty incredible.”
“All right.” Her voice penetrated the churning machinery of my imagination, “You’ve got it. Now who are you?”
“Is this more therapy?” I asked, opening one eye. “Call it want you want. I’m just trying to dislodge that dead man from your sub conscious.” I let out a mixture of breath and apprehension.
“I’m a man who’s been chained to his dead father for most of his life.”
“Stark honesty right off the bat, that’s good.” I let a smile slip.
“And?” She asked, arching an eyebrow.
“That’s all. Up until now that’s been the gross sum of my one part.”
“And it took this for you to come to that conclusion?”
“You have to admit that these are unusual circumstances.”
“Given.” Janice nodded.
“So I’m not entirely to blame for the severity and length of my handicap.”
“Can the poetry writer boy. You stopped impressing me last December.”
“Given.” I nodded.
“So what now?”
“Finish your egg-salad sandwich.” I said.
“What about you?” She asked.
“From here on out I guess it’s okay to start adding to the sum of my parts again.” Getting up from my place on the bank I searched through some bunches of wood by the shore, and finally finding one of reasonable size and length I wrestled it from the grasp of the pile. Janice just watched as I pushed the wood into the water and against the body. It took some time, at least a couple of minutes of prodding and pushing before I could finally dislodge the corpse from the roots and underwater weeds.
As he broke free from his watery grave I stood on the river’s edge and watched the current take him. I stood on the river’s edge and watched as the body of my enemy floated away.
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