FIRST SESSION

About 2133 words

FIRST SESSION

By E. Theo King

“No,” I said. “It’s your move.” I felt tired, leaning lifelessly against the sandpaper hard window ledge. I gazed blankly through metal mesh into an ulterior world. There were few trees, and other buildings nearby appeared as gray as the clouds hovering innocently above. The blue sky was not innocent. It lied. As it had on all the prior days: no change.
There never was.
No change.

Then the voice began again, “Mr. Brendt, if your condition is to improve you must cooperate with us.” Calm, orderly, reasonable sounding concern. Each time it spoke it sounded more artificial than the first time. Almost it made me re-taste the undigested flour paste that I had forced down in my last meal. Bile burned the lining of my throat.

I think this was the third day. Hard to tell since there were no windows here. Just solid dark grey stone illuminated by a small ring of greyish blue light in the center ceiling of the space. But it felt like the third day. The third session since my little accident. Three days from that Friday the 13th morning when bad things happen in groups of three. The news feed cut out from the data stream just before I was figuring how to get dressed. A message came in on my phone notified me that the business loan I submitted was rejected unaccountably. I killed a man I didn’t even know.
Yeah. I mean that is what they keep trying to make me believe. By they, I mean the cowards, fearfully behind this dark hovering monstrosity tapping into parts of my brain I didn’t know I had.

It fed information into my brain that I was waiting … I mean had been waiting at the corner of Nickel Street and Whedding Avenue in my aging, cobbled together, Pontiac. They say time sense is the first thing you lose in this machine.

Anyway, the light had just turned red. There was a dark-haired Hispanic man standing on the curb. The next image was of him lying, face against curb, framed in red. It was a load of stone bull. Keaton Brendt does not, could not, go around killing total strangers and not remembering about it. I would not do that. There is right, and there is wrong. He was just another living being. I don’t have those kinds of feelings. Do I?
I think that was several days ago … or perhaps weeks. Hard to think with that hum in my head. I remembered at the time, being strongly persuaded by the uniformed arms of Security officers and the hot end of an electric taser to come to this, the Center for Psychic Engineering, Justice department. Or, as we citizens affectionally called it, the Tomb.

I was reclining enough that I had to readjust my position. The cold vinyl made my bare forearm jump. By now I expected it. Bracing myself, I leaned straight back against the mushy pads and took a long drag of chilly air. Made me shiver a bit. My pants hung loosely about my spidery legs, now sprawled to each side. I felt my hand itch from the restraints. The back of my left hand ached from a cut yesterday. I figured it must have been a rough session. They never let you remember. Rubbing it against the metal bars at the side of the gurney like recliner I was on didn’t seem to help. “How bout’ a stink’n bandage?” I demanded into the void. I didn’t expect a response from the dark geometric shadow. Manchines don't care if I get infected.
The only light or sound came from the Psychic extender which stood just beyond the overhead light edge until it was ready. Now it slowly approached, apparently unmoved by my request or concerns.
“Son of a …” I let the thought hang. Soon they would begin again. Soon I would forget that there was nothing I could do now. Nor that I was feeling pain. I remembered that much.

My eyes began to throb. Lights began to appear as flashes out of the corners. Eventually they coalesced into a human face. It was the face of that Hispanic man burned into my memory like a hot needle. I knew him. Friend or fow? My thought was still unconnected with a place. That face. “Why are you doing this?” I screamed. Like food untasted for days much was lost to the senses. It had been so long. I tried to shake off the thought. I still remembered this was today. Today. We had that thick meal they served here. Tasteless. It kept me alive. Which was all that I deserved.
I thought to myself, that last thought was not my own. I remembered. Living in this purgatory and learning to fear it. It was all I would ever get. Many times, I had learned to fear things I knew no fear of before. This was their way. A cell within a cell.

The image changed. Vile filtered sunlight oscillated with dull static clouds. I heard the first unsuccessful drops of rain hit bare glass and I encouraged them like an expectant coach. It did not rain. However, drops have a kind of rhythmic pattern like a slow steady triple drumbeat. It repeated again and again in my head. Getting faster. My eyes darkened, as if I had closed them. Then I drifted off to a sound, sneaking into the back of my mind. I fought to stop it. Deliberately it grew louder. I shivered. Not because of the cold this time. I felt nothing. There was no reason. I mean, I’ve never feared music.

The music continued, slow, and easy. It was old. Familiar. “After the love is …” That was from my music files. I opened one eye and found it staring into the reflection of a dark Panasonic flat screen. Beyond it, I saw a revealed, simple room. An efficiency? My efficiency? “How long had it been?” The rhetorical question remained unanswered. But to whom?

I sat or lay surrounded and cradled by the soft mushiness of a/my black bean bag, which was dropped like pumpernickel dough right in front of that ancient color LED screen. The bean bag’s smooth outer surface felt cool.

A voice was added to the vision, “Cool-cool to the touch.” That’s what she had said about the white Buddha statuette adorning the eye level shelf of a cedar bookcase. I knew it was behind me. I twisted around and confirmed it peacefully guarding a book on “Consciousness and Reality” I had always been meaning to read.

I noticed in the low evening light that I was not alone. Toward the back of the room, on an extra-large mattress placed conveniently without frame on the wood paneled floor, was a familiar lithe female form. One leg twitching impatiently back and forth.
“The mummy yet lives” Her name now came to me. "Nicky."

Nicky said this resting a thin paperback upon her squeezable firm midsection. She preferred the texture of real paper between her fingers as she read. Sliding up into a sitting position, her black hair snaked over one shoulder.

I felt like I had been staring for hours. Regaining some measure of composure I responded, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you.” I couldn’t discern if I was speaking, or this was only the memory of speaking. “Ted called from the bank. Said he’d call back later.”

She shot me a look of detached concern. “Are you okay, Keatty?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.” Again, did I say that or think it? Still, I responded, “I must be catching something.

She shrugged and got up. Moving to the digital audio box she turned off the audio stream. Somehow, I thought, the name Nicky seemed to fit her sometimes dark and unpredictable sense of humor. She was more than just a friend. Yet less than I would have liked. We shared much that was special, at least to me.

Then in a flash there was that image of the Hispanic man’s face.

Shaking my head I tried to clear my mind. This isn’t real. They or it was making me re-experience events. But things were slightly different. It was unclear to me the accuracy of what was being projected. Naming things helped me to resist. Electropsychic recall. Nicky told me about a documentary about it. The probing of a man's thoughts by reading the neuron clusters in my brain or something. Stimulating nanoparticles injected into a skull with electromagnetic waves or something. I cursed machines. Explicative metaphors flashed through my mind. No doubt memories from my previous sessions. I had tried to regain control before, I believed. Each time I felt the program tried to subvert those memories and failing. Still, I knew me. I had to try. The program had to be completed. It learned. So, did I.

Nicky returned to the unmade bed. Somehow, I was laying there as well. Leaning past my upraised knee, she depressed a small switch on the side of the bed. A faint whiff of Chaisma cologne combined with the pheromone projector encircled our senses, my senses. She wasn’t there. Then a brief pain awoke in my chest. Now she turned on the video screen and sorted through multiple channels. Most had nothing but current events and news.

The imagery was confusing. Jumbled. Sex, hormones and news? Then the imagery on the screen switched to a video of a classic series. First, she was in underwear. Now she flashed a Sergio as she slid up against the light green wall playing with the long gold chain, I had given her still hanging around her neck. Alive.

"Wait. What? There, I had to get out of…," Something felt wrong. Rolling to one side in a spastic manner, I struck out for the kitchen as the room seemed to spin sideways. “You want anything?” I heard myself ask out of habit and faith that my head would clear before I got there.

“No thanks, love,” she said. That hurt and it was strange. She never called me “Love.” I still left the room, and I was glad, for I needed to sort out this extended reality in my mind. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces colored the wrong way. Now I felt fear. Like I was losing something. This process was worse than the punishment I thought. I remembered one thing, it didn’t always work. Many people leave – some don’t.
Was that an echo of my own thoughts or a reminder from someone … outside? In that moment I didn’t want to remember. There had, once, been a time when I would have wished the opposite. A sucker once …
Again.

Images reeled across my tired mind, and I watched. Lips kissing, loving her, killing her. His tongue flicked like a stiletto. Or was it a knife? A familiar ritual, I had seen before a cracked door. I withdrew. It was, and was not, an accident. I saw fire, burning red and yellow magma. My pulse shimmered with the air. Smoke rose and coalesced, forming an image, a face of many men; none of them mine. A tear fell. How could I let her go down that long corridor alone, knowing it was there. A dark skull with her punched ticket clenched between its teeth. Fault was not mine. His! A dark Hispanic. Must end this. End. I must be his end. No!

The image dissolved into a dark milky haze, to be replaced by hard stone walls and a sweaty hand that itched. It was over.

I felt the chaos of anger and betrayal. Anger at the thoughts I now had that were not my own. My hands knotted tightly closed by my sides. Betrayal was there too. But not from those empty soulless cowards that watched. I was responsible. She was the cause. Hate now fed the anger, anger fed by resolve.

“Satisfied?” A detached voice of synthesized compassion inquired.” My restraints were released.

Wiping the accumulated sweat from my neck I replied, “No. Thank God.”

The machine clamored for clarification. I responded in silence. Some demons must not be fed.

I continued to stare into that lifeless mechanical shadow, then and for many nights thereafter as they planned the next session. On some nights the moon didn’t rise and on others only a thin crescent broke the night’s dark hold over my remaining dreams. They had dominion and I would wait. Just like the first. And if one tires of the game, so much the better.

So much, the better.

End