I’m on the phone to a remote therapist whilst driving down the I90 drinking a red bull.
“If your village was on fire, would you pray to the god of flame or the god of water?”
“I’m not sure. Probably the god of water, maybe it would rain.” I say.
“ERRRR-wrong answer buddy. You need to pray to the god of flame.” Says the therapist.
“I wouldn’t be praying, I’d be trying to put the fire out.” I say, overtaking a truck. The therapist laughs, though the noise cancelling effect on the video call software makes it crackly and empty.
“This makes sense based on your personality type.”
“I don’t believe in that shit. I don’t believe in psychology.”
“Why are you using BetterHelp then?”
“I wanted to see if I was wrong.”
“And?”
“No. Turns out I was right about everything back when I was a teenager, but its always good to check.” I say. I pass Belgrade, Three Forks.
“Do you want my honest opinion?”
“You can just say opinion, its okay. You could just say, ‘here’s my opinion’. Or even just, ‘Opinion;’. What do you think?”
“I think you need to attend your nearest mental hospital and check yourself in. You’re kinda crazy low key.”
“I once visited an asylum, covering a story back when I worked at a newspaper. Was one of my first jobs, I was still a little green you know, still wore a suit to work. They called me Suit Boy. Anyway, there was a patient in there, claimed to be the reincarnation of Sigmund Freud. A lot of the staff stayed away from him, same with the other patients, he was basically isolated in this wing of the mental hospital. I went to his room, he was wearing a straitjacket and drawing on the walls with a marker he held between his teeth.”
“What was he drawing?”
“Scribbles, shapes, nothing really. He turned to me and I thought, he looks nothing like Sigmund Freud. The famous bulging forehead, strong nose and neat beard were nowhere to be seen. In fact, he bore a much stronger resemblance to Frank Vincent.”
“Was he in The Sopranos?”
“Yep. We get talking. Turns out this guy thought he was the famous psychiatrist, complaining they had locked him away in this Nervenheilanstalt and he wanted to get out. I calmed him down with a few cigarettes. This guy then starts to psychoanalyse me, right? Asking me about my unconscious mind, sublimation, superego, that kind of thing.”
“Did he use an accent?”
“He started in Viennese German, switching to English, sometimes Italian when discussing Dante. But by the end of the interview, I knew this guy was a fake. I even called him Sigmund Fraud.” I say, steering the Hyundai off the interstate and towards the Golden Sunlight mine. I pull the car up, crack open the door and light a cigarette.
“How did you know?”
“When you get reincarnated as someone, you look exactly like them. That is how your soul transfers from body to body. You seen that Tom Hanks movie, Cloud Atlas? Its like that. And the guy in there didn’t look anything like the grandfather of psychology. He looked like a mafia boss guy from The Sopranos, .”
“That’s not how reincarnation works. I’m actually a Buddhist, I can explain the concept of samsara to you.” The therapist says. I shake my head, blowing smoke out.
“Just let me finish the story. As I was saying, I called him Sigmund Fraud and started to leave but he called after me, going ‘nein, nein, du must mir glauben!’ and I turned around and then I saw something that I wish I didn’t. All those marks on the walls weren’t actually scribbles. When you stood at just the right angle, all the lines and shapes aligned to make a new image. It was startling, seeming to appear from nowhere, standing behind the man knelt on the floor who was shouting at me in eight languages.”
“It was a drawing of Sigmund Freud?”
“No. It was a drawing of Jacques Lacan. I then understood that this man wasn’t the reincarnation of a dead psychiatrist, but somehow had become supranaturally influenced by the famous French philosopher to make him believe as if he was in fact, the reincarnation of Sigmund Freud. Upon realising that, I managed to cure him.”
“Amazing.”
“He just needed six courses of CBT and he was back at home looking after his wife and kids and returned to his job on a production line, counting pieces of metal. The story made front page, I even got a promotion. They stopped calling me Suit Boy and started calling me Slick.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“I felt…absolutely nothing.” I say, ending the call. I get out of the Hyundai Sonata, walk to the edge of the open pit mine. The shape of the ground, the cuts in the rock, reminded me of ancient pyramids. I take a selfie with the cig in my mouth, then look at it for a few minutes, zooming in to my face and look at every pixellated bump, shadow, pore, reflecting in the horrible sun. A bird starts to scream.
