City: Portland
State: OR
“How do you know I don’t have insurance?”
A thick lens magnified Specht’s right eye. His leg was crossed, his right hand steepled—a patient praying mantis.
Justin felt as if he were the MRI scan, a tumor of socioeconomic, psychological disorder. His gauged ear, the holes in his baggy pant leg: he was glad to have worn a long-sleeve shirt to cover the black design on his hand.
“May I ask why the emergency contact is marked ‘Not applicable’?” Specht asked.
“You wrote it, you tell me. How’d you get all of this information?”
The doctor said, “See the referral section.”
Justin looked and saw his ex-girlfriend’s name. “Denise gave you all this?”
“She asked me to mark ‘Not Applicable’ as your emergency contact.” Out of the blue, Specht said, “May I ask about your parents?”
Justin chuffed. “You weren’t kidding.”
“Kidding?”
“That you’re unorthodox.”
Specht smiled. “Mr. Devecka, you probably know a little about self injury, correct? I mean, you must.”
“Yeah, Denise had a pamphlet. Better than Stephen King.”
“Well, as you know, many self-injurers have a history of sexual or physical abuse. Some self-mutilate to give form to some kind of chaos; some because it’s better to feel physical pain than nothing at all. So it is imperative I know about your parents.”
Justin said, “It’s right there on your form, right where it says deceased.”
“Why did they die?”
“Uh, how? Drunk driver.”
“Describe your childhood,” Specht said.
“You know, typical kid shit. Skating Burnside, smoking pot under the bridge. Fucking OMSI.”
“Ah, a wonderful museum. I was partial to the Body Worlds exhibit myself. But I did say childhood, not adolescence.”
“Fine, man, childhood was great. Sometimes my dad yelled at me. Sometimes Mom cried. But you know what, we all loved Christmas.”
“Any holes in your memory?”
Justin said, “I can’t even remember what I ate for breakfast—of course there’s holes.”
“Would you like to fill them in?”
Justin said he didn’t have the money for this shit, and stood to leave.
“Wait.” Specht pointed at the new-patient form. “There’s a backside…”
Justin flipped the page, wondering what else Denise had shared. On the reverse, someone had photographed the black design on his hand. The ends of which currently crept beneath his sleeve. He should have worn a glove.
“Where the hell did you get this?” Justin asked.
“I answered that in the referral section.”
“Denise gave you this?”
“The true question is: why your left hand?”
Justin threw the clipboard on the couch. “Maybe Denise needs therapy.” He tried to leave, but the door was stuck. “Unlock it,” he said.
Specht smirked. “Try again.”
Justin watched through the crack as he turned the knob, and the latch disengaged. Still, the door stuck.
“It’s an old building,” Specht said, as if in explanation. “They say that Old Town is the first tree ring in Portland history.”
Without segue, he reflected the photo of Justin’s skin art in a little mirror. “Are you familiar with Rorschach tests?”
Justin, about to ram his shoulder into the door, paused. He had never seen his own inky coils from that perspective, yet he recognized the mirrored pattern from…
(crucified naked)
…somewhere.
“Someone once said that even nothing means something,” said the doctor. “This inkblot for example, your tattoo: it is chaos. Meaningless, like the universe. Yet, give it symmetry…” He angled the mirror. “And it’s a butterfly, or mushrooms, or anything you wish it to be.”
“Yeah, yeah, life is but a dream. Open the door please.”
“Is that what the Rorschach means to you?” Specht asked.
“I don’t know—what’s it mean to you, doc?”
Specht smiled, not at all the reaction Justin had wanted. “Objectively, my lens shows a crawling chaos. But upon reflection…I see something born again.”
For almost a minute, they stared each other down. Specht never blinked.
“It’s a fucking tattoo,” Justin said, and to his surprise he could open the door.
“You’re welcome to join my group therapy sessions,” Specht called. “Every Wednesday and Friday night. It’s free.”
Justin said, “See ya, doc.”
He left the door wide open.
* * *
Coming out of Specht’s building, Justin lit a cigarette and started down the stoop.
“Hey, What’s-Yer-Name,” a girl called from the sidewalk, as if she knew him already, and well enough to nickname him. She was texting on a phone and never looked up. “Can I bum a smoke?”
Sunlight, filtering through the urban forest, dappled her hair. Her black dye job looked fake. And her long bangs covered the entire side of her face.
“Well?” she asked.
“Sorry,” Justin said, flicking ash. “My last one.”
She came up a few steps to meet him in the middle, her right thumb still twittering across the phone’s keypad. “I can share,” she said.
Justin kissed his smoke goodbye. “Here. You can have it.”
The girl tucked away her phone and accepted the gift; she only had eye for the cigarette, which sometimes was all a girl needed.
Justin tried again to leave. He felt as if he couldn’t find his footing on the staircase with this girl around.
“So you’re a lefty, huh?” she asked before a drag.
“Yep.”
Holding her smoke, she asked him, “Have we ever met?”
“Nope. Not that I remember.”
Blowing out, she said, “What’s your name?”
“Justin.”
“Well, Justin…” She handed the cigarette to him. “After the Big Bang, some girls enjoy a drag. So thanks.”
She entered the building, and he took a thoughtful puff. His cigarette was lubricated with the taste of plain lip gloss.
For shame. He didn’t even know her name.
II
Her name was Theresa. Specht held group therapy twice a week in the studio above his office building, and Wednesday night Theresa attended. Justin was glad to see a familiar face, other than Specht’s.
Out of seven members, he was the only male; the only lefty, as the women were quick to point out.
“No donuts and coffee?” he asked as he settled onto the floor to complete their circle. Two of the women giggled, though he seriously had no money for dinner and had been expecting a handout.
“Let’s all go counterclockwise and introduce ourselves,” Specht said.
Most of their names slipped Justin’s mind immediately, but he remembered Sarah, the librarian who liked to extinguish cigarettes on her arm, and he remembered the club owner, Beatrice, who preferred to cut herself and pierce the scars.
On his turn for introduction, Justin felt glad for his hoodie; he wore his cuff as a fingerless glove, to cover the inky tentacles on his hand, the thing Specht had called a tattoo. He just mumbled his name and left it at that.
“I’m currently unemployed,” Theresa said during her introduction. Compared to the other woman, she looked normal: virginal skin, no evidence of self-inflicted pain. Normal, except for the dye job and mourner’s-veil bangs.
When everyone finished talking about themselves, Specht said, “Sarah, I do believe it’s your turn tonight.” Everyone stared at her. Justin felt anxious and wondered why.
Sarah nodded at Specht and stood in the middle of the circle. The room must have been a dance studio at one time. Mirrors lined both walls like LCDs playing the same thing, but each from a different angle, and each reflecting the other
.
Without hesitation, Sarah stripped into infinity.
“Hey,” Justin said as she pushed down her underwear, “you don’t have to—”
Beatrice, the woman with the piercings, shushed him.
Sarah unhooked her bra and posed, facing the length of the room instead of its mirrors, her nipple stiffened from the cold. He would have liked looking at her, if burns hadn’t covered the one half of her body with strange symbols.
“What do you see?” Specht asked the group. His monocle magnified Sarah and, at the same time, stared at Justin from the convex in its lens.
“I see crop circles,” said Beatrice.
“The flower of life,” said another.
Justin claimed to see nothing, nothing at all.
Each woman in the circle interpreted the various marks. On Specht’s turn, he said, “You may face the mirrors.”
Slowly, Sarah turned to her reflection. She looked from one burn mark to the next, as if reading a language.
“Are you able to translate it?” Specht asked.
Sarah shook her head.
The doctor nodded. “Of course you can’t. You’re missing hieroglyphics.”
Sarah squinted at her reflections. Her scatter plot of burns seemed denser in the mirrors. The inside of her thigh was white and unmarred, yet the mirrors showed a burn like two splitting cells—as if her reflections differed from her physical self.
Justin rejected the notion the minute she closed her leg. It was impossible.
“I should’ve just gone to a strip club,” he said, although a strip club wouldn’t have made him so mad. He wondered if they expected him to strip.
Beatrice turned to him. “That’s demeaning.”
Specht said, “This group is about symmetry, Mr. Devecka. Not chaos.”
“Yeah, whatever. I think it’s a creepy way to take advantage.”
“You’d be more secure without your Little Lefty,” Beatrice said, flicking her eye toward his crotch. A few of the mean-looking girls chuckled over his testicle’s new name.
Sarah, still on display, crossed her right arm over her belly to warm the gooseflesh there.
“What do you see?” Theresa asked Justin, fixing him with a feline eye. “In her?”
He glanced at Sarah, shook his head, then picked at his shoe. He could translate Theresa’s question in so many ways. He could do the same for a lot of things.
Finally Specht said, “Good job tonight, Sarah. You can dress yourself.”
She thanked him and slipped into her underwear.
Before the session had a chance to end, Justin walked out and didn’t give a shit what they had to say about it. On his way toward the stairs, he heard Specht saying to the group, “Friday will be your navel-gazing, Beatrice. I do believe.”
* * *
On the street outside, Theresa stopped him. She had followed him out of the building.
“What?” Justin asked over his shoulder, shivering against the cold night.
“Will you come on Friday?” After waiting for his reply, which never came, she added, “I’ll bring donuts.”
Justin laughed. “Nice meeting you, Theresa,” and he left her in the dark.
III
Beatrice had pierced even her labium. Hoops, clustered along the lip, shined in the studio light. Scars, from cutting, threaded her piercings in various designs.
“What do you see?” Specht asked the group.
“Some kind of scales,” Sarah replied. “Like she’s got the Innsmouth look.”
The girls all laughed.
“Mr. Devecka?” Specht asked. “What do you see?”
Justin contemplated the question. Strangely he felt more comfortable studying Beatrice than he had Sarah. He had seen Beatrice’s type in body piercing magazines; the type that sought pleasure in pain. Sarah, on the other hand, wasn’t that type.
“Kind of reminds me of a poem where this lady catches an old fish,” he said. “The fish has, like, five hooks grown into its mouth, with the fishing line still on them.”
“Hey, I’ve read that one,” Theresa said. “‘The Fish.’”
Specht nodded. “‘Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering,’” he quoted, “‘a five-haired beard of wisdom.’”
“That’s the one,” Justin said.
Beatrice glared at him. “So I’m a bearded fish?”
Before he could defend himself, Theresa replied, “No, I think he means you’ve survived.”
Justin let them all believe he was that deep.
The group finished interpreting Beatrice’s mutilations, and then Specht instructed her to face the mirrors.
Beatrice turned and studied her reflection. “Hey,” she said, waving to herself so that her doppelganger’s left hand also moved in endless iterations. “I’m a lefty too.” Her mean eye found Justin, and all the girls chuckled.
“Enough,” Specht said.
Beatrice returned to herself in the mirrors.
Justin wondered why all these women were so comfortable with their bodies, when they had so much to hide. Specht’s therapy was obscene. And yet Justin had returned and couldn’t explain why. Couldn’t explain a lot of things.
“Have you yet to translate it?” the doctor asked her.
Beatrice nodded.
“Then translate it for the rest of us.”
“Ut vulgtlagln!” Beatrice said, and a strange fervor ignited her eye; her body swelled with the pressure of it. She read the rest of the symbols that marred her immeasurable reflection. “Ut vulgtlagln—uaaah!”
Her eye found Specht’s in the mirrors. His face remained unreadable.
“Your translation is…a sentence fragment,” he said.
Justin almost laughed. If grammar was the only thing wrong with the gibberish she’d just spouted, then Justin had a lot to learn.
Beatrice’s eye glossed like a cod’s, and her loose lips opened to say something. But then she shut her mouth and looked away.
Specht smiled subtly. “The clause is dependent,” he said. “And your body work punctuates it.”
Beatrice, confused, looked down at her physical self. Specht joined her amid the circle.
“Symmetry,” he announced. “Studies have shown the less symmetry in a person, the more aggressive, sick and depressed, the less sexually appealing.”
Justin glanced at his own face in the mirror. His right side had always appeared to frown back at him.
He and Theresa briefly met eyes; he wondered how she could stand all that hair in hers.
“Physicists no longer fancy the Yin Yang of Bang-Crunch. We fancy entropy—evolution!” Specht shook his fist. “We will speciate and alienate in cold, cellular survival, better to eat you with, my dear.”
Justin started to tune out the preaching, and found himself staring at Theresa. She reminded him of someone. Of his ex, Denise, perhaps—but that wasn’t the reason his thoughts always turned to her. Theresa reminded him of someone else too. Someone vaguely familiar. A bunch of different girls, actually, depending on the angle of her expression. Every single girl he’d ever been with or had ever been attracted to.
Specht said, “We conceive an asymptotic number of parallel universes. We! With our little pea brains.” He held up a finger and said, “O Zeno: one of them must make us parabolic! Madam, I’m Adam, no Eve—no split of the Adam!”
His voice grew quieter until he was muttering about the foliated detail of stool lamina.
His eye, magnified to insectile dimensions, twitched back and forth, computing something on sub-atomic particles. Justin had seen this type of madness before, in street people. Specht quickly recovered.
“Mind over dark energy—and Beatrice, the fragment!” He turned and gestured as if he’d remembered her, the bearded fish. “Read the sentence as an ambigram, dear. A Rorschach between body and mirror.”
She glanced from her torso to her reflection, working her mouth as she puzzled together the language. “Ut, Nyarlathotep! Ut vulgtlagln Chri
st…”
“Ah,” Specht said, “yes. Our savior.” He laid a hand on Beatrice’s shoulder. “You are born again, my dear.”
She could barely suppress her smirk.
“That will be all for tonight,” the doctor said to the group. As they all got up from the circle, Justin’s tingling leg learned to walk again.
Theresa stopped him on the street. “I didn’t bring donuts,” she said. “Want to go get some?”
“Uh…no, I should probably be getting home.”
“My treat.”
“Um…”
Her smile convinced him.
IV
They ordered donuts to go because Theresa said it was a waste of time just sitting and eating. She convinced him of touring the Shanghai Tunnels instead.
“Aren’t they just a cramped little brick underground with sewer pipes above your head? Not really a good place for donuts,” Justin said.
Her playful smile suggested that Justin didn’t really know a thing.
They joined the group of tourists and the guide led everyone down a staircase through a hatch in the sidewalk. Everyone got a flashlight and turned it on as they entered the city’s foundation.
Specht had called Old Town the first tree ring in Portland’s history. So then the tunnels were the heart rot: a city grid of brick archways, irregular-stone masonry walls, and wooden supports for the businesses above. All manner of pipes and wires ran overhead, only some of them insulated.
Justin breathed shallowly for all the dust. It smothered everything, so that relics blended in as dirty lumps. Close up, Justin could make out the coil of bedsprings, the tessellations of chicken wire, and the QWERTY of an old keyboard.
“Since the 1800s,” the guide said, stopping next to an old mattress, “criminals used these tunnels to trap sailors and loggers and other able-bodied men from the taverns above.”
To demonstrate, he pulled on a rope in the ceiling, and a trapdoor swung down. A scarecrow fell through onto the mattress.
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