Written May 2, 2020

Jack Gould yielded to time and space. That was all he could do. Allow himself to be absorbed into insignificance, irrelevance, a void of meaninglessness. He stared at his thumbs. There was nothing spectacular about them. They were attached to his hands, which were intertwined and resting on the table at which he sat, the heat and clamminess creating a thin film of condensation on the cold surface. Why he stared at his thumbs, he did not know. Perhaps he was jealous of them and their undeniable usefulness. 

It seemed as though everything led to a downward spiral of his mentality. Jack wished that he had been born a farmer, with wide stretches of land and dirty boots planted firmly on the earth with confidence and conviction. He could just picture his alter ego—a giant with broad shoulders and beefy arms crossed over an expansive bared chest, eyes sharp and bright beneath wiry brows, face swarthy and weatherbeaten. Instead, he found himself kempt and tidy in an office, wearing an ironed suit and leather shoes. A psychoanalyst. The irony seemed to seep out of his every orifice like a noxious gas.

Jack was too tired to go on living, too sensible to escape into a false ecstasy, and too confused to kill himself. What he was left with was a persistent headache and a reluctant acknowledgment of his existence. Indeed, the best thing for him to do, he decided, was to accept existence until its termination.

He was just about to reach some form of contentment with his decision, when his thoughts were interrupted by someone entering his office. His head, which had been lolling back on his chair, whipped toward the intruder. She was a tall, slender woman, middle-aged, with an aura about her that spoke for itself. The unsettling kind of aura that was misty and hard to read, but could be detected clearly in her eyes and movements. Her hair was pulled back into a silver bun with wisps escaping from it and falling beside her face, which was at once angular and soft, composed of a sharp nose and thin mouth. Jack decided the softness came from the absence of lines around her eyes and between her brows. 

The woman stood long enough at the door that he could notice all of these things. She stood stiffly like a cornered animal, as if Jack had been the one who walked in without invitation instead of her. She stared with her eyes widened and lips parted, chest rising and falling rapidly under her billowy silk blouse. Abruptly, her arms fell to her side and she smiled at Jack while he attempted to make sense of the situation.

“What are you doing here?” He asked.

The woman did not answer.

“I told my receptionist I wasn’t going to be seeing anyone today.”

The woman still smiled in silence.

“Well, you obviously need my diagnosis. Either that or you’re a mute. Whatever the reason for your presence here, I’d like you to leave.”

“Don’t be silly,” the woman said suddenly.

“I wasn’t.”

The woman laughed a musical laugh. It almost seemed too natural to Jack. “What’s your name?” She asked.

“I was about to ask you the same thing, and I think you should answer first, under the circumstances.”

“Alright. I’m Florence.”

“Florence,” Jack repeated. “Like the city. Not a very common name these days. Maybe once upon a time.” He paused for a moment. “My name is Jack.”

“I figured that out,” she said, slowly beginning to walk toward him.

Jack looked at her quizzically. She pointed to the name plate on his desk.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here,” she said, sitting down sideways on the chair that Jack would normally sit on during appointments with patients.

“Yes, I asked you about that, if you recall.”

She smiled thinly again, squinting her eyes slightly as she did. “I’m here to speak with you.”

“I thought so. I already told you—I’m not seeing any patients today. Especially not unscheduled, irregular ones such as yourself. But I would be happy to provide you with a glass of water and see you on your way.”

He was about to get up to pour a beverage for her, when Florence stood from her seat. “No, you don’t understand. I’m a psychoanalyst, too.”

“That’s funny. I’ve never seen you in the building before.”

“I’m not in this building. I run a private practice.”

“I see,” Jack said, stroking his chin. He could feel the prickly stubble on it already growing from the day before. “And what would you like to speak to me about?”

“Well, you. I’d like to talk about you,” Florence said.

“Me? Whatever for?” Jack asked, genuinely bewildered.

“Aren’t you sad?”

“What makes you think I’m sad?”

“You’re not?”

“I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

Florence tilted her head down, keeping a knowing, steady gaze on Jack. He had not seen someone look at him like that since he was a little boy. It was a maternal look, something that a mother in a cartoon could be doing while tapping her foot and pursing her lips.

“Fine. I am sad. Or at least that’s the most rudimentary diagnosis you could give me at this juncture. Do you speak to all your patients like this?”

Florence raised her eyebrows slightly and sighed. “I mold my methods to suit my patients.”

“How interesting.” Jack narrowed his eyes. He paused a moment to watch the dappled light from the window dance in patterns on her face. He followed the beam to the window, looking at the particles of dust suspended there. They looked so peaceful, so indifferent to whether they were in the light or out of it. And all at once Jack realized that this was his desired existence. He wanted to be dispersed in the air like dust, letting the wind do with him what it wished, floating to all corners of the earth over vast grasslands and cities and mountain ranges.

“What are you thinking about?” Florence interrupted his reverie.

“Dust,” Jack answered, keeping his eyes on the beam of light a moment more before looking at Florence, who nodded as if she knew exactly what was going through his mind.

“Sit,” Florence said.

Jack walked to the patient’s couch and sat.

“Where would you like to begin?” Florence asked.

Jack frowned. “Isn’t that usually something you’re supposed to determine?”

“Usually. But not now.” She smiled faintly.

“I don’t know where to start,” Jack said.

“Of all the things in the world that elicit every shade imaginable on the gradient of human emotion, there isn’t one thing you would like to express?” Florence asked. “Come now, Jack. You of all people should know your own feelings.”

Jack scoffed. “You’d be surprised.”

Florence looked at him expectantly. 

He leaned back on the couch and huffed exasperatedly. “People.”

“What about people?” Florence asked.

“They’re the bane of the earth. They’re like the mold that encrusts moist rot. The putrid air that stings your eyes when you walk near a carcass by the side if the road.” Jack paused. “What am I saying? They’re worse than that. They’ve made the rotten cheese that mold grows on out of sawdust, trying to poison themselves. I don’t blame them. And they ran over the deer that decayed into a carcass with a gas guzzling vehicle that burns a hole in the very thing that makes them safe. They spit acid on the jewels and fruits of paradise, so they feel like the demons they are and scream at each other and beat each other, and then they come to me to repent.”

Florence inhaled slowly. She looked at a small table next to the arm of the chair and picked up the clipboard laying there. Her fingers flipped a pen back and forth as she bit her lip, apparently analyzing Jack’s statement. Finally, she clicked the pen and let its tip hover above the page a moment before scribbling some notes. When she finished, Florence looked up at Jack. “Please continue,” she said.

“There’s nothing more to say,” Jack replied.

“Of course there is. Come on.”

Jack leaned forward and raised his eyebrows at Florence expressively. “When you like someone, you begin to get closer to them. Inevitably, as you learn more and more about them, there are more things that you dislike. The entire ratio of love and hate increases. One would hope that the negative side of that ratio stays as low as possible, but even if a person’s dislikable traits are few, they may be major. When I say major, I don’t mean that you figure out they are psychopaths or something, no. It may be the way they hold a pencil, or the way they brush their teeth, but every time you see them doing those seemingly small aspects of their nature, your teeth grit and sweat seeps out of your pores. If you come across this every time you meet a person, especially when you have a prejudgment of them, eventually your pallet for people sours. You see my point?”

Florence touched the top of the pen to her chin. “I think so. Since you are a psychoanalyst, you are exposed to the most distasteful habits of your patients on a daily basis. You’ve become so extremely bothered by these habits that you have lost all interest in the human race, and have even come to hate it passionately.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Precisely.”

Florence shook her head.

Jack stared at her. “What?”

“There’s always something more with these kind of things.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Hatred is three-dimensional.”

Jack could not pretend that he did not know what she meant. “And it shows itself in strange ways,” he said, allowing his eyes to wander down to his thumbs for the second time that day. In his peripheral vision, Jack could see Florence frowning at the floor. He did not want to interrupt her train of thought, so he remained silent.

“No,” was all she said in response.

Jack felt his neck unwind, vertebrae by vertebrae, until he was able to look at Florence again. “If I wasn’t a psychoanalyst, I would think that your monosyllabic manner of speaking was a way to get me to talk more. But I am a psychoanalyst, and I think no such thing. You are simply a strange person.”

Florence tilted her head back, smiling thinly and gazing at Jack through narrowed eyes, the rogue wisps of her hair floating away from her forehead to rest gently next to her ears. “Hatred does not show itself. It is a parasite. It causes its host to implode.” Abruptly, she leaned forward. There was a wild fire in her eyes, the origin of which was undetectable. The wisps of hair seemed to halo her face like tendrils of fury. “Don’t lie to yourself, Jack.”

Jack found himself leaning further back into the couch, pressing his clammy palms into the upholstery. He tried to relax, tried to forget the sound of her seething words. He began to get up, when suddenly she leapt from her chair and pushed him down by his shoulders. “Anyone who hates their own kind hates themselves. You’re afraid of what you see in your patients. You’re afraid you see yourself. Don’t act high and mighty, Jack. You’re not. None of us are. We’re all specks of dust floating in and out of the sun. In the end, how much do our problems matter? Be happy, Jack. Be happy, because the most successful specks of dust are those that can follow the sun by simply being.”

There was a knock on the door. It was persistent and sharp, not unlike Jack’s heartbeat in that moment. Florence straightened, looked at the door, then looked at Jack. She smiled that strange, initial smile from when they first met, running her thin fingers across the striations of her hair. “That’s my cue,” she said in a tone that deviated immensely from her previous one. It was small and passive.

The knocking continued. Jack tried to speak, but instead emitted a guttural sound from the back of his throat. He tried again, and this time his voice escaped in a feeble wheeze of air. “Come in.”

His receptionist entered with a burly man. Both of them looked flustered. “Doctor Gould,” she said, pointing a finger toward Florence, “That woman is not who you think she is.”

Jack’s eyes widened, turning toward Florence. “To be frank, Stacy, I didn’t know who she was when she came into my office, and I still don’t have the slightest idea. Why? Who is she?”

The burly man stepped forward. “Doctor Gould, I’m David Hunt. I work at Beringer.”

Jack’s voice suddenly became feebler. “The psych ward.”

“That’s right,” the man answered. “Florence is a patient there. She suffers from dissociative identity disorder and decided to escape today. Stacy has been helping me search the entire building for her. Someone saw her walk in. I’m here to take her back.”

Jack was in a daze. “Florence. Florence suffers from multiple personalities. Who doesn’t?” He began to chuckle, his shoulders lifting slightly with each rapid expulsion of sound. Then he laughed a maniacal laugh, tilting his head back and allowing tears to fall freely from his eyes, past his temples and to the floor. 

Jack did not care anymore. He felt the tightness in his chest release. He decided in that moment that he would spread himself across the universe like butter. He would explode into fractals with this laughter, this free laughter. Jack would laugh and laugh until he could laugh no longer. Until he was dust floating in and out of sunlight. He spread his arms wide, his face up. Images reeled through his mind like one million epiphanies. “This life, this life!” Jack sung, and collapsed on the floor with joy.

Psyche © Safira Schiowitz