The Multitude, стр. 20
The lingering echo of Carla’s most recent nocturnal adventure had the markings of true insanity, and she had no intention of falling into Elaine’s cozy trap again. The facing chairs in the middle of the room offered sanctuary. She picked one, settled onto blessedly uncomfortable wood, crossed one leg over the other, and waited for her therapist to get ready.
“Good to see you, Carla. Give me a moment.” Elaine grabbed the free chair, opened her laptop, and switched it on. As usual, the woman projected the aura of a professional but the haggardness of one whose hours were too long. She hid her attractiveness, no doubt deliberately, by fixing her blonde hair in a bun, wearing a dark business suit, and hiding her eyes behind studious glasses. The bags beneath those eyes suggested too little sleep and probably too much reading, judging by the floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books and scholarly journals on two walls of the office.
Initially, all of that stuff, along with the diplomas and plaques, had intimidated Carla, but she’d come to consider Elaine something of a friend, if not in a social context, then in a secret-sharing arrangement, albeit one-sided. She hadn’t learned much about her therapist. The game didn’t work that way.
She glanced around the office and settled her gaze on a painting she couldn’t remember from previous visits. Colorful sailboats skimmed frosty waves, and a couple stood watching, hand-in-hand, from a pier. They’d dressed in summer whites and blues, ready for a day of sailing. Elaine had probably selected the scene to soothe troubled souls. It almost succeeded, until Carla glanced at a thriving palm bursting out of its pot in a corner of the office. Once again, she’d forgotten to water her own green pet, a spider plant drooping with thirst in the window of her apartment. Journeys back and forth between one reality and another had been muddling her mind lately. That and the worry her eventual diagnosis would be schizophrenia.
She shifted her attention to Elaine’s dancing fingers. The log-on process was taking forever.
Elaine had begun using a computer during their last session, complaining of carpal tunnel syndrome from constant writing on a pad. Carla wanted to be sympathetic, but this brutally permanent method of recording her mental wanderings could lead to…what? She didn’t know. She set her hands on her legs in an effort to stop twisting them.
At last, Elaine finished pecking her keyboard and looked up with a smile. “Alrighty! What would you like to talk about today, Carla?”
“Ending my sessions? God knows I could use the money I’d be saving.”
The shot across the bow spurred Elaine to type a flurry of notes. “You came seeking answers. Have you found them?”
“Who does?”
“I’m guessing the dreams haven’t ended, then.”
“What’s the point of digging so deeply?”
“You’re edgy today.”
Carla couldn’t think of a suitably cutting answer.
Elaine motioned to a couch and coffee table positioned a safe distance from the lurking recliner. “I made tea.” A white ceramic pot and two matching cups had been set out.
“You’re trying to seduce me into sharing more secrets,” Carla said.
“That’s an interesting choice of words. Just mentioning the dreams triggers sexual associations. You see that, don’t you?”
“You think it turns me on to dream about offing myself?”
“What do you think?”
Elaine’s black-framed glasses made her seem overly studious to the point of being unapproachable with any secrets on this particular day. Carla held fast to her resolve and looked away. “I think you make me feel uncomfortable. Maybe it’s that laptop, recording my every thought.”
The therapist stood, set her computer on the chair, went to the coffee table, and poured tea. “I won’t record anything. We’ll just talk.”
“Or I will. Stick with the game plan, Elaine.”
“Did something happen to set you off?”
“I’ll say.” She gave up the chair for the couch but perched on the edge of it, keeping her back a safe distance from the comfortable cushions and letting the coffee table foil her desire to cross her legs again. Discomfort seemed the best strategy for staying mum. She talked too much when relaxed.
The therapist stared at her during a stretch of silence. Carla grabbed her teacup and looked into it.
“You seem frightened,” Elaine said.
“Don’t tell me how I seem. You know how I hate that.” She lifted the cup to steal a sip, but a brief tremor in her hand stirred a tiny leaf to the surface. “This tea is off.”
Elaine made a show of sipping her tea with relish. “Consider yourself lucky. My coffee would kill you.”
The humor in those overworked eyes weakened Carla into melting backward and becoming one with the cushions.
“You dreamed something, didn’t you?” Elaine said.
Carla kept her gaze fixed on the steam rising out of her cup.
“Tell me the setting,” Elaine coaxed.
“One setting led me to the next.”
“Let’s talk about the first one, then.”
“I asked somebody to push me in front of a subway. Satisfied?” She fought her way back to a fully upright position and bumped a knee against the table in the process.
“Suicide again?”
“Contrived death has a nicer ring to it.” She rubbed her knee and closed her eyes, skipping to the memory of a far more bearable dream, the one in a man’s kitchen—Brewster’s kitchen—a scene she could picture as clearly as if it had happened. But it hadn’t and she’d only sink deeper into malaise by pretending otherwise. She needed to stick with the fantasies she knew all too well.
She’d been having a recurring dream about life in a primitive forest for so long she regarded it as her midnight pastime. She’d initially sought counseling because of a bizarre element to the fantasy—when her dreams included dialogue, the language spoken seemed to be Latin. Yet she’d never had any waking experience with the language, or so she thought. But Elaine had suggested she’d probably heard snippets of Latin here and there in various movies or perhaps