The the Therapist by Nial Giacomelli

Author:Nial Giacomelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairlight Books
Published: 2019-06-25T14:56:56+00:00

XXI

‘I think a lot about that poor boy on the highway,’ Simone says during our next session. She’s not alone. I think about it in the twilight before sleep takes me. His skin as thin as parchment. His furious heart. ‘It’s such a terrible way to die,’ she says.

‘Is that what you think is happening?’ the therapist asks.

Simone fumbles with her hands. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Is it death, I wonder, or is it a metamorphosis?’

‘A metamorphosis?’

‘Is it truly outside the realm of possibility that the illness is not destroying the mind at all, but rather transmuting the body?’

‘Is that not a kind of death?’ I ask. ‘The end of one existence in exchange for the beginning of another?’

I try to imagine the act of disappearance as a phase transition. That the dead are transmuting their bodies to become part of some shared, communal consciousness. But it feels like science fiction. I think of metempsychosis. The concept of reincarnation. The seemingly endless redistribution of cosmic energies.

‘Saprotrophic nutrition,’ the therapist says. ‘That’s what they call it in nature. The concept of one life nourished by the death of another.’

‘So you do believe it’s a kind of death?’ Simone asks.

‘I believe it depends on your definition of a person.’

‘My father used to say that people were the sum of the choices they made,’ Simone says.

‘Do you agree?’ the therapist asks.

‘I believe that a person is a house occupied by those they have met and loved. That in order to live a person must parcel themselves up and give parts of themselves away. To be carried by others and to live elsewhere, in other houses,’ Simone says.

I close my eyes and wonder, like so many others, where the dead go.

There was a time when I took solace in the belief that our existence would be perpetuated by Phineas’s memory of us. That we would continue to live long after death in his collective past. But now I feel only a terrible burden. Our intimacies seem inextricable. I alone carry parts of him, just as Simone carries her own remembrances. Pieces of him will be lost with us, just as pieces of us were lost with him.

I think for a moment about the day he lost his first tooth.

He had been young, too young to lose a tooth. He fell up the staircase and it came loose on the hardwood. There was so much blood my knees felt weak. I remember how he held it in his hand. He thought it was bone, some integral part of him, and he pleaded with me to take him to a doctor.

I tried to comfort him.

‘It had to come out eventually, to make room for your adult teeth,’ I told him, and he nodded his head, but I could tell that he was lost in his anxiety. I could see it in his eyes, because they were Simone’s eyes.

Eventually she came home and scooped him into her arms. She kissed his cheeks, still fat from early childhood, and told him all about the tooth fairy.

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