My Therapist is a Giant Psychic Dream Spider, Part 2 [Short Story]

snowmachine (64)in #story • 7 years ago

I arrived at my usual dream appointment, to find the giant telepathic therapist spider gone, and where the web used to be a giant hole with a golden rope extending from the abyss to the floor.

“Well this is just great,” I said. “She better not charge me for this session.”

I tugged on the golden rope until it became taut. Someone in the abyss above, with a deep and echoing voice, a calm, flat kind of voice, called to me.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Why not?” I asked, and tugged on the rope again.
Black ichor spilled down and filled the room. I released the golden rope, sputtering, and began to drown. The voice continued on its same calm down.

“When you dream of a library, you are under the impression that each book has weight to it. That if only you could look at each individual book in the span of the dream, you would find content in each one of them. But does the dream generate writing for each individual book, or does it only need to give you the impression of such?”
Underwater, drowning, I still managed to speak.

“What in god’s name does that have to do with anything that’s going on right now?”

“How about this,” the voice continued. “The gravitational constant is 9.8m/s2. You should find out the rate at which it takes your heart to fall into your chest, and whether or not it’s the same. It’s something I’ve been wondering about for a while”
I climbed up onto my floating mattress, staining it with black. The golden rope became a snake in the water, live-wire, generating an electrical force. The abyss above stretched its mouth, growing wider than the ceiling.
“Still not following you,” I said.

“The best gift you can give a daughter is a knife to cut the umbilical cord from you to her.”
The mattress sunk down into the water. As I resumed drowning, the voice continued.

“I was with you when you travelled up the mountain and found the last living part of you. It was a golden plant, a sharp-edged hardy little thing that managed to break the ice, clinging to tough ground with its roots. It shared its space with the corpses of lesser creatures, those that died in the cold you were forced to grow up in. And when you fell asleep I kissed the permafrost on your lips.”

I stopped drowning long ago. I walked along the bottom of my new underwater apartment, breathing through straws attached to the veins in my wrists.

“I blew my breath through you, and the breath became a cord from your throat to your intestines. If you ever think you’ll fall apart, sink under, be crushed under the ice - I will be there to hold you together.”

I found James Joyce caught in the web of my giant psychic therapist spider.
“Damn, I kind of liked James Joyce,” I said. “Are you going to eat him now?”
“I’m saving him for later,” said the giant psychic therapist spider, arching her back, her limbs shivering.

The spider’s web is a Borromean knot, just like Lacan used to explain the topology of how the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary were created. Each ring makes up part of how a human is constructed. No two rings intersect, but if any of the rings are cut, the entire web falls apart.

Giant psychic therapist spider has tried to explain the concept of the Borromean knot as it’s illustrated by Jacques Lacan to me several times, but I don’t really pay attention and I honestly don’t care.

“Do you know what the sinthome is?” She asked me.

“No,” I said, picking up Joyce’s rocket launcher from the floor.

“Have you keeping your waking journal?” she asked.

“I did one entry, then I kind of got bored of doing it.”

I sat on the bed underneath the spider’s elaborately constructed Borromean knot, and the sleepy, constricted face of James Joyce. And I thought dreaming was difficult before.

“I don’t think therapy is for me. I think I’ll become a stripper.”

“You’re a writer, and you’ll always be a writer. We’ve been telling you that for years. Remember the incident in Oklahoma, with the devil at Lake Elmer?”

“Yeah, I stopped writing for a while so he crushed my ribs.”
“Remember the demon living out of the abandoned warehouse?”

“Yeah, he kidnapped me,” I said. “And made me write on a broken typewriter for weeks.”

“The sinthome,” the giant psychic therapist spider continued, “is a concept that Jacques Lacan created several years after the concept of the Borromean knot. It was to address the person who had endured trauma but instead of letting it dissolve the Borromean knot, accepted it as a part of their being. It is the sinthome that covers-”

The spider grabs my chin, because I was listening to music on my laptop, and knocks my headphones off. She pauses a moment, as if deciding whether or not to eat me alive, mandibles squirming like live wires, before continues.
“It is the sinthome that brings jouissance.”

“Jouissance?”

“We’ve been over this. Jouissance literally translates in french to pleasure or enjoyment, but in Lacan psychology jouissance is separate from pleasure - it is the pleasurable thing thing which relieves anxiety, a release of pressure. It is eating after starvation, the cutting of skin. It is sex like a buck knife. “
“And the sin-what brings jouissance, somehow?”

“Like James Joyce binds the Borromean knot of my web together, so does the sinthome bind the three pieces of our identity - the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. Lacan came to realize that the sinthome, in certain individuals, holds together the rest of their identity. In this way they’ve utilized their trauma, adapted it to their personality. Although the symptom is gone, the sinthome is a step removed from the symptom and its place in the symbolic arrangement of the identity. The symbolic lies in fantasy, but when the individual has removed themselves from the environment of fantasy, the sinthome remains.”
“I’ve got to be honest, you are not making any fucking sense.”

I’m sick of this dream and hoping to rouse myself from it with anger. James Joyce and his rocket launcher are boring me. I’m sick of symbols that come to me like timid animals. I don’t want the fire and the tree with limbs like syringes that somehow represent my childhood, I want the fear. I want my dreams to give me the absolute purity of reality, without being filtered through the fire and the James Joyce and the Sylvia Plath giving me the finger or the stop sign exploding into fragments or whatever. Absolute purity like the abyss-

Like the abyss - so maybe the fucking spider is right - symbols are our only way to interpret the real. And that’s why fiction exists at all.

Fuck.

“Let’s look at it this way, then,” giant psychic therapist says, endlessly patient with me. “You are a writer. Why are you a writer?”

“That’s an easy one. Because nobody loved me as a child.”
“But you are loved now, aren’t you? So why don’t you quit writing? You’ve achieved your goal.”
“I don’t actually know. I’d feel lost without writing.”
The spider nods.

“Like you have no identity?” she asks. “Like the entire compromise of your being rests within this one activity?”
“...I...guess?”

“But you understand that writing will not bring you the satisfaction that you’d hoped? You’ve been published, haven’t you? Did it bring you the fulfillment you wanted?”

“No, but I knew it wouldn’t. We’ve already talked about this, earlier in the book. Remember?”
“In the symptom, a person would dream of fulfillment in such a thing - in being recognized, famous, published. And even though you’re unable to drop this reaction to trauma, you’re no longer attached to the fantasy of it that many have. So many people want to be artists, don’t they?”

“Yeah. Idiots.”

“But your writing is the sinthome - the thing beyond a symptom, beyond fantasy, holding together the core of who you are. It is trauma that constructs the web of the self. It is the sinthome that brings jouissance to your being. Since it’s upheld you from such a young age, taking it away would tear down the fabric of your identity. It would disintegrate your Borromean knot.”
Oh. I get it now. Say no more.”

I go into the restroom, grab a nail file, and return to the bedroom. I reach for the web. I cut James Joyce down from the web. He awakes, gasping, as I tear the spiderweb from the rictus of his mouth. I hand him his rocket launcher.
“Let’s hit the town.”

The giant telepathic therapist spider descended upon the desk while I wrote.
“Great,” I said, realizing this was all a dream, “And I thought I was finally getting some work done.”
I tipped over my monitor. It defied physics and bounced out the window.
“How’s James?” she asked.

“You mean James Joyce?” I said. “Haven’t seen him since the night he jumped into a pool full of vodka jello. Actually, I’m not sure I ever saw him come out of the pool. We were both pretty wasted.”
“Why would Joyce do such a thing?” the spider asked.
“Is this one of those therapist things you do? Ask me innocuous questions so I’ll put my guard down?”
“And then I invite you onto my web for tea and biscuits, right? ‘Walk in to my parlour, said the spider to the fly?’”
I sighed. “Look, I was kind of busy.”

“No,” the giant telepathic therapist spider said. “You were dreaming, and I am the central locus of the dream.”
“Okay,” I said, swiveling around on my chair, “I’m listening.”

Little pieces of the floor fell away. Underneath the floor, was red-veined, throbbing lava.
I leaned down in my chair. No, on closer inspection, jello.

“I’ve been writing a lot more lately,” I said to the spider. “I had kind of stopped, back in Seattle, I mean, there was nothing to hope for anymore. So if there’s nothing to hope for, then why write? I mean, I still did sometimes, I’d go to the coffee shop and stare at my half-eaten sandwich and type out a few words on my netbook, but it was like the motions of a burnt out sleepwalker, reaching for the curtains, pulling back the curtains, there’s no one outside, there’s nothing there-”
“Ahem,” the giant telepathic therapist said, interrupting my monologue.
“I mean, what I’m saying, is I think I’m making progress.”

“And how many times have you said that before?” she asked. “Do you like lying to yourself?”
“Well at least I’m not a… video game tester anymore!” I said.
“No need to yell,” she said.

“No need to yell? Then why are you deriding my progress?”
“Because for people like you,” she said, “the lightning has to strike more than once.”
“You’re antagonizing me! I want out of this dream! You’re no use to me anymore.”
“Obviously I am, because I’m still here.”
“Well, I’m not,” I said.
I knocked on the wall, and it gave away. I fell down into a pool of jello.

I was fished out of the jello by Bukowski, who was fisting a wine bottle in one hand and not letting go of my wrist with the other. Edgar Allan Poe, his face scratched and eyes red, sat by the buffet table with his head between his knees. James Joyce was doing shots with Sylvia Plath, who could barely stand up.

“Vodka is my drink,” she said, barely coherent, her eyes like melting silver. “Vodka is the cold heart.”
I pulled my wrist away from Bukowski, who wiped the wine from his chin.
“Where are you going sweetheart?” he asked.

“I once kicked your book across the parking lot of an Ihop,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Don’t leave so soon. Look up at the sky, isn’t that a special kind of something sky?”
The sky was made of interlocking pieces of paper, undulating like a skein stretched over water.

A piece of paper fell into my outstretched hand.
Tittyfuck James Joyce in the jello pool, kid, you’re going to be here awhile.
I read it quick before crumpling it in my fists and throwing it across my shoul
“Motherfuck,” I whispered. “You people are fucked up.”
Bukowski took me by the shoulder, steering me away from the pool.
“Well, you’re in the right company, sweetheart.”