The Therapist

“The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own, somehow.” He paused.

“Go on,” she prompted. “How was it not your own?” She adjusted a bit in her chair, tilted her head from side to side to relieve some strain, but her blue eyes were always on him, attentive.

“I don’t know. It was just not me. Man, we’ve been through this!” He was tired and really did not want to go through it again.

“I know. Tell me again. Slowly,” she invited. Just a pleasant conversation.

“ Okay.” He closed his eyes and sucked in a big breath and phewed it out. “It’s just dark, like darkness everywhere. I can’t see the floor or anything and then there’s this mirror. It’s just ahead of me and a bit to the right. It’s not on a stand or anything. It’s just there, like a bathroom mirror, and I walk up to it. I can see myself just fine even though there’s no light anywhere. I get closer to it and I can tell something is off. My reflection is behind, just a bit.

“Behind. Yes.” She smiled graciously and jotted a note on her pad.

“Yeah. Like in that mirror game where one person pretends to be the mirror reflection of the other one. It’s like it’s following me, but it’s just a smidge behind, you know? And then I get right up to it and it syncs back in. The movements match just fine but the eyes are wrong. It’s looking right at me, but it’s not looking at me. It’s watching me. And that’s when it happens.” He stopped talking and opened his eyes back up. He smirked and shrugged his shoulders.

“And?”

“And you know the rest. Just like I told you before!”

She looked into him with those disarming blue eyes. They belonged on a much younger woman, he thought, not this seventy-something. They were caring and kind of dreamy. She said, “Adam, you have nothing to be afraid of.”

“I know, “ he replied, as he looked away at anything else but her. Degrees in gilded frames adorned a somehow warm violet wall. One was for Gestalt Therapy and was why he chose her. She waited. He mustered himself together and started the bad part. “I see it notice me notice that it’s watching me.“ He was looking into the memory now, again, his eyes fixed on a blank space in front of him. “That’s when it drops all its pretense of pretending to be my reflection and it doesn’t move at all, no matter what I do. Then it smiles. So creepy. And I wake up.” He stifled the shudder, but goosebumped all the same.

“And you’ve had this same dream every night for the past two weeks? Nothing changes?”

He could look at her now. “Maybe. Nothing important. I don’t remember if I make different movements or whatever, but all the important, creepy bits are sure the same.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Talk about it?”

“Your fear.” She put the pen and pad down on her lap and settled back in her chair and waited again. She was just so fucking patient.

Adam leaned into the plush cushion of leather and touched the toggle of the remote control beside him. The easy chair obliged and tilted him softly backwards and raised his legs on its convenient and likewise comfy shelf. He glared at the ceiling and blinked away the tears.

“This brings emotion for you,” she said. It was a statement.

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“Adam, can you tell me how this might be like your past?”

“It’s not like that, though,” he said. “It’s that it doesn’t feel like a dream.”

“I see. Do you believe you are on an astral plane? Do you notice an umbilicus?”

“No. There's no cord. I don’t have a cord,” he said, shaking his head. He remote-tilted himself more upright and looked directly at her. “Doc, I had the odd recurring nightmare when I was a kid, but they make sense. Halloween stuff, and a few in a row after seeing Lon Chaney in that old Phantom of the Opera movie. This? This has come out of nowhere!”

“I understand. It seems to you that this has come out of the blue, but in my experience, nothing ever does. There is always an underlying reason. Always.” She put her hands together on her lips as if she might pray and she leaned forward, her elbows came to rest on her knees. Her finger-tips slid down and ended at her chin. “May I offer a suggestion?”

“Bloody Hell, yes!”

“Acknowledge this other “not-you” in the mirror if you dream of it again. Say hello. Perhaps even smile back. Go to sleep with this intention.”

“You mean, confront it?” He was a little freaked out.

“I don’t mean a confrontation. Be curious. It’s there for a reason. Find out what that reason is. You may not get any answers, but it certainly can't hurt. In any case, you take control of your scenario and move it in a direction of your choosing.”

“Okay. That sounds good. I will,” he said. “At least, I’ll try to,” he added.

“Will you come again to let me know how it all went?”

“Yeah, I will. Wow! You know, thanks! I feel like I can actually go to sleep with a little bit of hope tonight. You don’t happen to have a time tomorrow do you?”

She got up and moved to her desk. She flipped open her calendar. “I have a half hour at 4:30.”

“Well, book me in. I’ll come no matter what, but it’s happening every night, so I’m guessing it’ll go again.” Adam thanked her and walked out into the musty, hot August air of Hoboken. He touched his earpiece and his BMW started up. He drove home to the city in silent, air-conditioned luxury.

Adam had been part of a small start-up that created a unique analytic tracking program. Their proprietary software covered sixty-eight percent of the North American market. By the time it hit five percent, he was set for life. He was thirty eight and a man of great wealth and leisure, except he was far from content, let alone happy. He had felt it building in him. It. It was like a pressure of something he could not name. A presence of something.

He cruised out of the Lincoln Tunnel with the rest of the flow and made his way along the Greenway to his place on 81st. He sat in his car in the parking garage for a long time. He had rolled down the windows and listened to nothing in particular. He just sat there, with his hands folded in his lap, staring through his windshield at the stainless steel and grey cement. Perhaps it was his empty apartment or the coming on of night and the inevitable sleep that ensued, who knows? In any case, it took him a full hour to exit. He felt he was being watched as he walked into the elevator, but clearly no one was there.

He avoided all the mirrors in his place. He had not looked in one for three days and had been brushing his teeth in the kitchen, as well. He had shut off all the lights; the cityglow provided a blueish twilight that calmed his nerves. He did his best to relax in a lounger, listening to The Essential Jung, breathing and counting. The familiar, quiet tick tick tick of the old wall clock helped to gentle him as it had since he was a boy.

Adam dreamed himself to sleep that night. Try as he might to calm his frightened mind, his subconscious veered through and found him several times before he finally drifted. He found himself, once again, in the same dark place.

The mirror was there. And the not-Adam waited within it - too large to be a reflection from so far away. Despite his fear, he strode to the mirror and stood before it. They regarded each other. Adam spoke. “Hello,” he ventured.

“Well, hello back,” it replied, bemused.

“I know what you are,” he said, gaining his confidence. “I've been studying.”

“That’s terrific, Adam. Good for you.”

"I’m not afraid of you."

"Really? You haven’t looked in a mirror, any mirror, for a couple days at least. I’ve watched you duck your head, avert your eyes." Adam flushed with guilt. “I’ve been watching you all the while, even in the car." Adam looked back at his not-reflection. "I waved at you today in the garage, " it teased.

“You’re Adam, too."

"If you insist."

“You’re my shadow!” He almost cried it, as he pointed at it, trying his best to be fiercely adamant.

“Oh, I’m so much more than that.” Its hand shot out and clenched around Adam’s wrist like talons. Just before it yanked him through the frame and his whole world changed, they locked eyes and it gave him a little wink. He didn’t even have time to scream.

Her doorbell rang at 4:30 precisely. She had been waiting for him. She hurried to the door and opened it. It wasn't Adam. It was him. She closed the door behind him and they walked hand in hand through another door into the next room. They stood before a picture window mirror and in it, like ghosts, were two spectre versions of themselves but far away, deep within the glass. Anna’s figure seemed as if she were only thirty, if that. And Adam was just Adam, but a tiny, pale reflection.

"I've waited so long," she said.

"We both waited, but this is worth it. He's perfect."

"The others will be able to come now?" She looked up at him.

"Yes," he said. "Now that we're both here, they will all come."

"Oh, my dear," she started. He shushed her with a light squeeze and a soft cluck.

"Call me Adam."

Her mischievous blue eyes looked at him and crinkled just before they both started laughing.