Open Mind: Chapter Fourteen

My eyes darted back and forth anxiously between Annie, stifling tears from the floor, and the doctor, arms folded and stiletto heels tapping. The doctor permitted a few moments for me to process all of the information that had been dumped on my before pressing on like a steamroller.

“Do you want to be a part of this program or not? You’ve got potential, Miss Miller, but you have to want it. No, not just want it. You have to need it.”

“I… I don’t understand what this is,” I muttered in disbelief. “You talk like this is something that I know anything about. All I know is that my dad is dead. He’s been dead for years. I’m supposed to be moving on and making peace with that, right? Hasn’t that been the point of all this?”

“If that’s what you want. If you want to reminisce about playing guitar and eating ice cream or some such nonsense, then we can do that. We can process your grief, build up your emotional tolerance, and all that jazz if that’s what you really want,” she said, her voice dripping with clinical insincerity. “Or, you can reconnect with him directly, with Open Mind therapy.”

“Or you could just pull out a freaking Ouiji board,” Annie grunted listlessly. “That’d be much easier.”

“Oh sure,” Dr. Lau snapped. “And while we’re at it, we can call him up with a couple of tin cans and a string. Maybe send a fax via carrier pigeon, too.”

“She’d be better off. Better to lose a pigeon than-”

“Alright, enough!” I interrupted the insufferable bickering. “Knock it off.” I paced over to the filing cabinet next to the office door. I leaned against it to keep myself from falling over. My legs wobbled but I kept my spine straight to project my strength. Someone had to be the adult in the room. “One of you better tell me what the hell is going on before I walk out the door and take my chances on the run.”

Dr. Lau cleared her throat and adjusted her pencil skirt irritably. “I’m going to pretend I did not just hear you threaten elopement from the facility.” The doctor sighed and turned to face Annie. “Are you going to tutor her on this or not? You know I can’t do it. If she goes in alone, I can’t help her.”

Annie, still a crumpled pile on the floor, turned her torso to face me. She wiped her nose on her crimson, cashmere sleeve and stared into my eyes. Her own dark brown eyes normally had an endless sparkle of life in them, but as she stared, I could sense the dark cloud that had come over them. “I can’t promise that you’ll see your father again, let alone bring him back with you. All I can promise are two things: there is no turning back, and there is a cost.”

There was no hesitation in my mind. “I’d give anything to see my dad one more time.”

“The magic words,” the doctor cheered. She shuffled to her desk and started to fumble through the drawers. “We can finally get to work -- real, honest work. It won’t be easy, mind you, but I think that, based on your background and the intensity you bring, this could be the most successful trial yet!”

I glanced at Annie, who was slowing rising back to her feet. I offered my hand to her, but she swatted it away. Whatever strength she’d found to dance only a handful of minutes ago had leaked from her like a week-old birthday balloon. “What should I do now,” I asked her, my voice weak with uncertainty.

“Just have a seat,” the doctor interjected. Her back was turned to us as she continued to scramble through her paperwork in the cabinets behind her desk.

“You take the leather seat and I’ll sit across from you on the desk.”

“You can have the seat,” I offered. “I’m fine to stand.”

“Don’t treat me like a helpless child,” Annie snapped. “I’m stronger than you give me credit for, and I don’t need you worrying about me.” Annie managed to hop onto the desk with a suppressed grunt. I’d desperately wished I hadn’t said anything at all after seeing the effort she had to put into this expression of strength. “You’ll need to worry about yourself if this whole thing ends up working.”

“She has a point,” Dr. Lau said absentmindedly. She returned to the desk with several manila folders stuffed with papers. “Your physical body is worthless in Open Mind therapy. Nothing more than a fleshy paperweight.”

“It’s all in your head.” Annie grabbed my hands and held them in hers.

“Well, I guess that depends on your particular beliefs,” the doctor muttered. “But sure, let’s say that it is all in your head. The head is a good central point for grounding in Open Mind anyhow.”

“You just said a lot of words and not one of them made sense the way you used them,” I grumbled.

“What you need to know,” Annie interjected, shaking my hands in hers to refocus my attention, “is that whether you call it a soul, a consciousness, a spirit, or whatever else, you’ll need to be intimately familiar with it. If you have a location in your body where you feel most connected and grounded, you want to focus your energy there.”

“How am I supposed to know where I feel … grounded?”

“I don’t know,” muttered Annie, exasperated. “You just either know it or you don’t. And if you don’t know it, then this might not be for you.”

“Oh, cut it out,” Dr. Lau snapped. She strode over to her bookshelf and picked up a small wooden rod from the top shelf. She pointed one slender end of the rod at her niece. “You weren’t exactly Mahatma Gandhi your first time at it, either.”

“Once again you throw Gandhi in my face.” Annie turned her head to face Dr. Lau for the first time since the conversation had begun. “You don’t even know for sure if he was able to access Open Mind.”

“I have a gift for seeking out the hereditary gift, Annalise. And that old man had the gift. As does Ms. Miller, here.” She pointed the rod in my direction, as if to accuse me.

“A gift? I don’t know about any kind of gift,” I muttered. “My family isn’t known for much, and what we are known for I wouldn’t describe as a ‘gift.’”

“You wouldn’t describe it that way because you’ve never been able to properly utilize it. Like the blind man given binoculars for his birthday, you’ve not had the opportunity to truly appreciate the gift that you’ve been given.”

“What a metaphor,” Annie snorted.

“It’s the truth. That happened to your uncle, Rocky, in Hangzhou. His mail-order bride didn’t know him at all, it would seem.”

“Okay, I don’t know what this all has to do with the task at hand but –”

“Alright, alright, point taken,” Dr. Lau said, clearing her throat. “The point is that some people have spirits that are stronger and better able to endure the Open Mind process than others. I refer to those people as people who have been given a gift, while my lovely niece over here no longer sees it in the same light.”

Annie rolled her eyes and snorted but offered no words in protest.

“Have you ever had a moment, Skylar, where you felt as though there was another person there with you, but when you looked around, there was no one there?”

“Sure, but hasn’t everyone felt that way at some point?”

“Oh, most definitely. The gift that we talked about is something that everyone has innately inside of them. Our soul is a fickle, unknowable thing, but at times we tap into something greater than ourselves. It is usually attached to some strong memory – a person, a place, a sensation. Something that transcends the physical and accesses –”

“What she’s trying to say is that your soul isn’t just limited to our life and time here in the land of the living,” Annie interjected flatly. “Open Mind allows you to access a state of spiritual existence that is beyond the here and now.”

“Another world, it seems like. But it’s a whole spiritual world that is all around us, at all times. We sometimes get a peek behind the curtain, in certain situations. A look at the world and the spirits beyond ours. Most people will only ever experience those brief peeks of the beyond, mind you.”

“That’s where your ghost hunters come in,” Annie smirked. “Your tarot cards, your Ouija boards, et cetera. They tap into something outside of our spiritual plane, but they have no way of really knowing what they are experiencing.”

“It’s sort of like the Invisible Ships Phenomenon, if you are familiar with that.”

I shook my head. I’d never heard of it, nor did I see the immediate relevance.

“When European explorers first started to come across lands in the Americas and Australia, they would arrive in huge ships with no recognition from the native tribes that they had even arrived. They wouldn’t even lift their heads from their fishing baskets – it was as if they could not see the ships at all. Thus, the Invisible Ships Phenomenon.

The ships were so absolutely foreign and alien to the native people that their brains could not process what was right in front of them. We have no way of knowing what they could hear or feel, but the explorers said that there was no way that the men could have not seen them coming. Their eyes were betrayed by what the brain could not comprehend.”

“The same is true of the spiritual space,” Annie said, picking up the story from her aunt. “We cannot see or comprehend what is all around us. There are times that a particular strong connection is made, and that’s when we see ‘ghosts’ or ‘monsters’ or whatever else. But even I, for all of the time that I’ve spent building up my spirit and making connection, can only see and experience so much at a time.”

“So, you don’t see and experience the ‘spirit world’ or whatever all of the time?”

“God, no,” Annie snorted. “Focusing your brain is hard enough – the spirit is something else entirely.”

“And that brings us to our training today,” Dr. Lau announced. “What I’ve learned is that our spirits learn through connection to one another. The more time that spirits spend bonded, the more they learn about one another.”

“It’s the reason why loved ones are more likely to encounter the spirit of a lost partner or family member over a random spirit,” Annie added.

“So then, I would be more likely to find my father in the spirit world because we share a deeper bond.”

“Exactly,” Dr. Lau said. “Even with our training, Annie and I would be far less likely to see your father than you would be, even now in your inexperienced state.”

“So how do I get there?”

Annie and Dr. Lau exchanged worried glances.

“What,” I asked nervously.

“Getting there is not the hard part,” Annie admitted. “Not with us here, anyways.”

“The hard part,” Dr. Lau interjected, “is getting you back out. As long as you are grounded in your spirit here, or in any spirit here, then you will be fine.”

“I’ll be here to help you,” Annie said, squeezing my wrists tight.

“Annalise will not be accompanying you directly on this session, but she will be here to ground you. Can you sense Skylar’s center?”

“It’s definitely her head,” Annie said clinically. “There’s a lot of disconnect, and it’s faint, but there’s something there.”

I pulled my hands from her. “What are you talking about? What are you doing to me?”

“Calm down, I’m not doing anything to you. I’m just reading your spirit.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that.”

Annie sighed, “if you want to do this, we have to have a sense of where your spirit is connected and how to access it. You do not want us blindly knocking around in there to access your spirit – trust me.”

“It’s much easier if you allow Annie in, rather than trying to push her out. She can do it without your permission and acceptance, but it’s much easier and better in the long run if you work with her to get there, at least at first. We may want to start with the last memory of your father and work our way in from there.”

“I don’t know if I like the sound of this,” I muttered to myself. “I don’t want anyone poking around inside of me, or my spirit, or whatever the hell else.”

“It will be fine, Skylar,” Dr Lau asserted. “It seems overwhelming and invasive at first, and we may uncover some painful memories, but allowing us in and opening yourself up to—”

“Nope, I’m out,” I snapped. I tore my hands away from Annie’s weak grip and shoved the chair back. In an instant, I felt the hard tip of Dr. Lau’s wooden rod smash against my forehead – an in another instant, everything went black.

In my unconscious state, I could hear the faint echo of voices drifting through my mind.

“She’s alone now.”

“I had no choice.”

“She didn’t want this.”

“You’ll have to grab her.”

Then one voice -- dark, sinister, growling:

“You shouldn’t be here, Sky.”