Mind Over Matter (Fiction)

“Maybe I should stop with this whole business,” I said with heat, crossing my right leg over my left.

Dr. Gruff wrinkled his nose with the slow control of a man experienced with emotional outbursts in his office, experienced in remaining, at least in illusion, perpetually cool as a cucumber. He pushed his half-moon spectacles up the bridge of his freshly unwrinkled nose, and asked, “What do you mean, Daniel?”

“Come on, Doctor!” I snapped, his calm irking me. “You know what I mean. This! This whole business. These Thursday talks. You in that chair, me in this one. Maybe I should stop.”

“Why?”

“Well, because it’s not working, that’s why! You can’t honestly say you’ve seen any improvements worth writing home about,” I said. Then added, almost sheepishly, “Can you?”

The doctor did not, of course, reply to this directly. Instead he began tracing the contours of his fountain pen with his thumb and forefinger. “I understand you are feeling frustrated, Daniel. Psycho-therapy is often a long and non-linear process.”

“Right, right,” I said. “And expensive too. A pretty, pretty penny. Funny how expensive all the long, non-linear processes in this world are. Wouldn’t you say it’s kind of funny, Doctor?”

To this the doctor made no reply at all. He sat still, looking at me with such unflappability, such gentle expectancy, such self-assured silence, that I half expected he might just—poof—turn into a human-sized cucumber in his chair right in front of me, little dribblets of post-refrigeration condensation rolling down his sides to prove exactly how cool he was. 

I uncrossed my right leg from over my left. I looked at the red impression the weight of it had left on my thigh, just below the hem of my shorts. I sighed. “I have a question for you,” I said.

“Okay.”

“How am I going to brain my way out of my brain?” I recrossed my legs, but, for a change of pace, put the left over the right. “I’m not trying to be rude, really I’m not. I know this is your profession and all. But I’m stuck in here,” I said, tapping my temple with my fore and middle fingers. “Always in here. That’s the problem, for chrissakes. And every week I come to you and we use my brain to analyze my brain, and if you want to know the truth, it all just leaves me feeling more brainy.” 

Gruff had stopped tracing the contours of his fountain pen, and his look, for the first time that day, had evolved into something beyond neutrality, nearly bordering on curiosity, and so I carried on with haste. “What I’m looking for—I mean what I’m really on the hunt for, if I’m going to be honest with you— is less brain. Do you you follow me here? I mean, if you could just turn it off, make it quiet—make it shut the hell up, in fact—I’d take it. If I could just go to work and be at work or sit on the toilet and be on the toilet, I’d be over the moon. But you know where I am all the time? You know where I am, Doc? I’m up here.” I tapped my temple again. “So I just don’t see how coming here every Thursday for the grand old four o’ clock hour and going with you, however delicately, deeper and deeper into my mind is going to fix a single thing.”

Dr. Gruff looked as if he were turning a great many things over in that head of his, and, I must confess, I felt a growing eagerness for his reply. How would he weasel his way out of this one? Would he at last admit defeat? Or, would he actually have something of use for my mental ailments? But his eyes, god damn them, drifted to the clock that hung on the wall between us, the infamous death knell to psychiatric progress, and I braced myself for the words that I knew would come.

 “We’ve reached time, Daniel,” he said. “Let’s pick back up with this question of yours next week.”

“Righto,” I said, reaching for my rain jacket on the seat back behind me. “I look forward to it, Doctor, I really do. I’m sure it will be a truly clarifying time.”

Ignoring my oozing sarcasm, he lifted himself, with difficulty, from his arm chair to see me out. “Don’t forget to settle up with Nan—”

“Already paid.” I cut him off sharply, clanging through his office door, into the lobby, and making a beeline for the elevator. I could hardly wait to be on the street, to feel the fall wind whipping through the city and know I was really and truly clear of that man and his exorbitant time-wasting for another week. But before I could drop my finger to the round, plastic button and set the down arrow aglow with its soft, yellow back lighting, Nancy, the receptionist, called out to me.

“Daniel.”

“What?” I demanded, whipping around on my heels, “I paid beforehand.”

Nancy, unshaken by my curtness, beckoned me silently, and something about the look on her face dropped my irritation.

At her desk, she handed me a small business card. Banshee’s Hot Yoga, it read in pink font on a fiery red background. 

“I’ve been there before,” she said simply. “It’s nice.”

“Thank you?” I replied, dumbly, blankly, confused.

Walking Broad Street towards the subway, it struck me that the walls of Dr. Gruff’s office must be thin as paper. I could recall, thinking about it now, hearing things filter through them, from the lobby and into our sessions: the postman bringing up the daily mail, Nancy having small coughing spasms, the soft ding of the elevator as it passed to another floor. If sound traveled one way, it certainly traveled the other.

Descending the stairs into the station, I was struck, yet further, with the comforting thought that Nancy—from what I gathered in our limited but numerous interactions— was the kind of professional and mature adult human being that could be trusted in such a delicate situation. I had not a shred of doubt that every word that filtered out from Dr. Gruff’s office and, willingly or not, found her ear in the third floor lobby of 970 Broad Street, was locked away, kept in absolute confidence, her mind and body a secure vault of secrets from me and a hundred other sorry souls.

And then, as the southbound train pulled to the platform with an electric hiss, I was struck with a third and final realization: Nancy, while no doubt an exemplar of professional confidentiality, was also, God bless her, not above using tact, subtlety, and a touch of plausible deniability to use her secret knowledges for good; to make the occasional intervention; to, for instance, offer a client a therapy more healing than that of her employer. 

I looked down at the card in my hand as it took on a new and radiant meaning.

“Hot yoga,” I said with a narrowly suppressed urge to jump in the air and click my heels together, “here I come.”