Authors: Alan Spencer
He unloosed his belt, and Craig imagined what his father was thinking
—How do I punish this kid enough to silence him in the future?
But Dad doesn’t know he’ll cheat on Mom in the future. Why the hell is he so worked up? How does he know what I’m saying is true? It should be nonsense to him.
Brandon was wrapping the leather of his belt around his fist, the stretch audible. “This is unacceptable. Children live in their parents’ shadow, boy, not the other way around.”
The belt was raised, prepared to deliver an expedient punishment. Brandon’s face was locked in an absent expression. He was moments from landing the animal skin across Craig’s back when the words came as a deadly warning, “You leave my son the hell alone.”
They both turned to Tina.
She cradled a .28 Brown Eagle pistol.
Brandon lowered the belt and stood in awe at the wife who finally stood up to her husband.
Dr. Krone furiously jotted notes onto his steno pad. He hid behind the crawlspace door, listening in. He completed his notations. What else would pop out of Craig’s mind, he wondered, knowing the machine would soon answer him. Enough had been accomplished in this moment that he decided it was time to move on to the next memory…
Lake Jacomo
The snow was falling in thick downy flakes. Lake Jacomo was frozen over and thick enough to ice skate on, though it was absent of people. Standing there on the lake, Craig was dressed in the same thing he wore at Dr. Krone’s office—a dress-up shirt, khaki pants, and black leather Hanover shoes. The bitter winds were howling, but he didn’t feel any of it. Shrugging the odd sensation of being numb to the elements, he scanned the area once again and caught the man standing behind the wooden bench two feet from the frozen shore.
Dr. Krone.
Craig bounded forward for the opportunity to beat him down, but he slipped on the ice. He teetered forward, landing on his hands and scraping his palms on the ice. A hand reached out to help him up.
“You’re upset,” Dr. Krone said matter-of-factly. He’d somehow cleared the distance between them in seconds to give him a hand. “The treatment is intense. But you’re over the difficult part. I even placed you in one of your favorite places to talk to you. You enjoy Lake Jacomo during the winter, right? It’s calming. Serene.”
Craig refused the man’s hand and worked back to his feet by himself. He was enraged, but questions replaced the urge to strike the doctor. “How did you know that?”
“I’m a professional.” Dr. Krone removed a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. They were 80’s Milds. “And these are your favorite cigarettes. Even though you detest your father, he smoked these. You stole a few from his stash in his toolbox every now and again. You wanted to emulate him. I guess that’s the best quality he had to emulate. It’s so sad.”
The air was sucked out from his lungs. “My God, you know everything about me. It’s like you’re—”
“—in your mind?” He handed Craig a cigarette. Craig put it in his mouth, and the doctor lit it with a match, guarding the flame with his hand. “I’m traveling these memories with you. The machine simply displays your catalogue of experiences. My job is to determine the most productive route to take for your treatment, and I stand back and observe.”
“So you’re really in there? In my head, I mean.”
“Plugged in, is all.”
The cigarette seemed real, and it was all he could trust at the moment. “I’d call this situation, what, a mind fuck?”
“That’s a bit harsh.”
“I haven’t forgotten about the fake door in your office. This is still against my will. I can’t trust you. You trapped me. You built a psychological prison around me, or something.”
“No, it’s not like that at all. And this fake door you keep mentioning, it doesn’t exist. I gave you your treatment. I did drug you to get you strapped into the machine. It was to calm you down so you didn’t hurt yourself. Maybe you’re imagining these other things. The drugs can make you do that. It’s that scary, my treatment, I admit it, because it’s intense. You were terrified even while drugged up, so imagine your experience without sedatives. I was doing you a favor. Your reaction isn’t uncommon. Past patients say exactly what you’re saying. They have delusions before the treatment—like your said ‘fake door’. But this is very real. The drugs are vital in other ways too. The early testing of the machine, patients had seizures, heart attacks, and panic attacks. You’re lucky you came along after the machine was perfected.”
“I can only imagine what other snafus occurred before I came along.” Craig refused to take his eyes off of the doctor. “Did patients lose their eyes, or maybe their brains bled to death? So right now as we speak, there’s needles in my eyes and needles in my skull, and I’m sitting in that dreadful room hooked up to a piss bag.”
“Your physical body is, but right now, you transcend the hemispheres and lobes of your mind. It’s an endless labyrinth. The machine keeps you where you want to be. I’ll level with you, Mr. Horsy. You’re a pent-up man on the verge of criminal violence. You already harmed your best friend. You remember poor Willis, don’t you?”
“You saw it happen ringside. You don’t have to remind me.”
“I’m here to break you of becoming a violent individual. I’m what’s going to keep you out of prison. You’ll come out of this feeling renewed. The burden over your shoulders will be gone. I’ve arranged for you to meet with your mother after my treatment. It’s too bad your father died in that traffic pileup a year ago.”
“A real shame,” Craig sighed, the sentiment real, though there was a piece missing to his grief he failed to understand. “But I hadn’t seen him in forever before he died. I might as well not have had a father. That sounds awful, saying that.”
“It’s too bad you feel that way. But you have a mother, and she needs you. You’ll rekindle old feelings—good feelings—about your family once we're finished here.”
A problem struck Craig. How was the doctor here talking to him? Craig reached out to touch the man. He was physical. Solid.
It tickled the doctor. “You’re looking at me like I’m an alien being. How am I in your head with you, is that what you’re thinking? It’s a fair question.” He stepped closer, and Craig could smell the cigarette on his breath. “I, too, am hooked up to a machine. Does that put you at ease? I went through the same process as you did. I do every time I receive a new patient.”
“So who strapped you in?”
“Rachael, of course.”
“Oh.” He paused, reconsidering his approach to the man and his machine. “How come this treatment is so secret?”
“It’s a privacy issue. And it’s a controversial method. It’s safe, but hardly mainstream. This one can be tough to endorse too. It’s not as pretty as taking a pill.”
Craig wandered out to the ice. His steps were slower. The ice was slick and covered in white powdery snow. The sky was a dark slate gray. This was the true dead of winter.
He retraced what happened with his parents earlier. He had lashed out at Brandon as a child. Then Tina pulled a gun on him. Both those things didn’t happen in real life.
“How is the machine determining all of this?” He sucked in several breaths, challenging the winter’s cold that wouldn’t settle into his skin. “My memories have been changed. New things are happening that didn’t before. It’s…altered.”
He lowered his defenses, unclenching his fists, though he still didn’t trust the doctor.
Dr. Krone stepped out onto the ice with him. “Your mind sets up a scene for you to react to in a specific manner. The memory can change. Your father didn’t strike you with a belt. Tina never pulled a gun on your father. But in your deepest id, you wanted these things to occur. You wanted to smash a pool cue over his back and shout at him that he was a terrible husband and a terrible father. Your parents won’t understand what you’re saying in every situation, but they will react to it with the best of their ability. It all depends on what your mind can produce.”
He rubbed at his eyes. “This is so confusing.”
“It tends to be. The reason I put those images on a screen previously was to see if using the machine would be productive.” He came closer. “Your mind is
very
productive. So productive, I want to reward you. Consider it a break from your therapy.”
“Wait, how long have I been in treatment?”
He had no concept of time. He had no job to answer to or wife or girlfriend who’d check up on him. Most of his friends inhabited Half-Time bar, though he was temporarily banned from the establishment because of what he did to Willis. Dr. Krone caught him at a crossroads in his life. This was supposed to be a stepping stone to a normal life. His temper shut him out of a lot of opportunities. He was skeptical of the doctor, but also dependent. If this was the cure he needed, he would leave the practice a better man. And if this quack was bullshitting him and keeping him here against his will…
He’d have to find out the truth and soon.
“I’m not a bad guy,” Craig said. “Sure, I seriously harmed Willis, but I mean well otherwise. I’m a pretty solitary guy these days. I don’t have a lot of friends.”
“But that’s the thing. You’re a social butterfly—at least in the past you were. You’ve been altered because of your temper. You seclude yourself to subdue your beast. This temper is something you learned. It’s time we unlearn your temper so you can truly be yourself again.”
“Then I’m open to what you’ve got in store for me next. I have no choice, so I might as well give it a shot. I can’t fight you.”
Dr. Krone
tsk-tsk
ed. “I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“It is what it is. So I guess we should continue on.”
Dr. Krone’s eyes lit up. “Wonderful. Here goes.” He smiled. “But first, I give you my reward, to show you my good faith.”
The Singles Club
The singles club met every Friday night. It was a night that created the sense of a relationship, or the dating experience without actually dating. The group frequented Quivers, a hip dance club, and tonight was ’80s night. Blue, yellow, and red squares painted each wall in wild rotations, the disco ball refracting silver light in overlapping dimensions. The dance floor was jam-packed with partiers as Duran Duran blasted the song “Girls on Film”.
Craig had sweated on the dance floor for long enough, and now he retreated to the bar for liquid refreshment. A whiskey and soda.
“You’re a camel when it comes to drinking,” Susan, his friend and fellow club member, chided him from a nearby table. She raised her voice to match the music level. “Sit down. Let’s hang. How the hell have you been?”
The singles meeting played out differently tonight. Their four other friends couldn’t make it this time. Later, Craig learned Susan arranged for their absences. The others really went to see a movie.
The Terminator
, if he recalled correctly. Susan wasn’t the kind of girl he wanted a relationship with. She was more of a friend, but with new hindsight as an older Craig Horsy, he had a completely different take on the situation.
Susan was gorgeous. Her blonde hair was silky smooth in the club’s lights, the locks flowing down to her shoulders in golden waves. She wore a silver sequined dress that bragged generously of her borderline D-cup cleavage. She had a sleek body shape at one hundred and twenty pounds. Susan wasn’t thin to the point one questioned her diet, and he liked that. There was plenty to grab from her hind quarters too, and Craig especially liked that.
She said, “I’m not drunk yet, but I’m working on it. The night’s young.”
The waiter brought her another round. A sea breeze. “Here you go, ma’am.”
Taking it to her lips, she asked, “Who ordered this for me?”
Craig raised his hand, being the guilty party. “I saw you before I hit the bar and ordered it. I owe you a drink, right? If you weren’t here, I would’ve shown up alone. How embarrassing, huh? The singles club would’ve been, well, one single guy.”
She clasped his hand. Looking at her, her eyes shined more than they would normally, as if on the verge of happy tears. She glowed. Susan was perked about something, and with that valuable insight from the past, he understood she had a crush on him. He was an idiot not to realize it at the time. He was twenty-eight in this memory. Three years after he lost Katie and his unborn child. Relationships were still tricky. Time had failed to heal his wounds.
Or you were simply a chicken shit
.
You have a right to enjoy your life. Why didn’t you see her for who she was instead of letting your goddamn emotional baggage get in the way?
Kevin and Brice, the two other men in the singles group, grilled him the following day because he’d turned Susan down for a nightcap. “You were cold to her.” “Are you that stupid? She’s head over heels for you, man.” “She practically wants to be your wife.” “You could’ve turned her down easier, or given her an honest chance first.” “Susan’s such a nice woman. And she’s been married before. She’s in the same boat as you.” “She’s a corporate secretary for a law firm, and you’re a garbage man. And she doesn’t care. She’s not fickle like those other bitches out there.” “You’re an asshole, Craig. Why don’t you forget our meetings? This is a support group, or did you forget?”
Susan reached out and touched his cheek with three fingers. “You’re blushing.”
“But it’s so dark, how can you tell?”