[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts. Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts. This will continue from from where yesterday (Mo Explains Half of Everything) left off.]
Saying out loud[1] that she had died to another human being triggered memories in Mo. The first therapist that her mother had taken her to had assigned her a mantra to repeat: "I am alive." Just that. She was to repeat it to herself as often as she could, out loud if she was alone or with her mother. Supposedly, this was from the fake-it-til-you-make-it school of psychiatric treatment. A month later, she had told the therapist that she said the words, but they were not true. She knew that she was dead and that this was not real. When she was asked what was not real, she had replied "Everything."
She had been referred to another therapist who specialized in post traumatic stress. Psychic breaks. Mental schisms. This one, a man where the first had been a woman, had spent time in the military dealing with soldiers who had survived when others in their squads had not. He asked the usual questions:
How are you? Dead.
When did you die? In the crash.
If you are dead, how are we having this conversation? This isn't real.
So what?
That last one had momentarily pulled Mo from her patterned responses. She had looked up at the therapists from where she was, crouched on his couch. He had brown hair cut close in a military flat top. He wore black rimmed glasses. He was not smiling reassuringly at her.
"So what?" she had asked back.
"Yes. So what if you're dead. So what if this conversation isn't real. It's still happening in your imagination. Your dead imagination. You still have to deal with it, right?"
"No," she had said. "I don't." And she had stopped talking. To him. To her mother. To everyone. That was when her mother had committed her to the Institute.
"They call that solipsism," Lisp said after she had told him about these early sessions. "More traditionally, it is the supposition that there is no way to prove that the reality that we perceive is not all in our head. Our sensations are being faked."
"Yeah," Mo replied. "Trust me, I learned about solipsism. That second doctor, the military one, he knew it and tried to jump ahead a few dozen steps. That's what the 'So What?' was about. It doesn't matter whether reality is 'real' or not, we all still have to deal with it as it presented to us. Maybe that had worked on his soldiers with their sense of duty and pride of country or whatever. It did not work on a early-teen suburban girl. All it did was make me see that I was dealing with it by responding and that if I did not want to deal with reality, I needed to stop responding to it on all levels. I stopped talking. I stopped eating. I stopped getting up to use the bathroom, I just went where ever I was. As I said, I didn't give Mom a choice. She had to put me somewhere where they could at least deal with me."
"Didn't you get bored?" Lisp asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Not doing anything. Did you think about things?"
"Sort of. Mostly, I thought about the crash."
And Mo was back in her memories. Sort of. Like most trauma, much of the specifics of the crash were lost to her. Maybe it was her brain shutting things out, maybe she had been thirteen and not paying attention to where her father was driving. Paying attention to something on her phone, probably. She could not remember where they were coming from, but she knew that they were going home. Maybe from one of those robotics competitions that Dad had signed her up for and that she had enjoyed but had not admitted because he had not asked her first.
Her memories of the moments immediately leading up to the crash were impressions: night, two-lane road, trees on one side, not trees on the other. For the crash itself, she knows what she was told happened but cannot remember it clearly. More snapshots: her phone leaving her hand, bright lights filling the interior, her body changing direction quickly like a roller coaster but not fun. The feeling that something is terribly wrong and that she should have been paying attention to help prevent it. Then nothing until she woke up in the hospital.
Her first question had been to ask after Dad. It was late at night and she had to wait for a nurse to respond to the call button. Which she had found once she worked out where she was. For her, it was one second panicked in the car and then next lying in a dimly lit room with beeping machines. When the nurse came in and Mo asked, the nurse told her not to worry about her father, the important thing was that she, Maureen, was doing better. But the nurse's face, lined and worried and smiling that everything-is-all-right smile told Mo what she needed to know. He had no made it. From there, it did not take much mental effort (even with the pain killers making her woozy... maybe because of the pain killers making her woozy) to wonder if, perhaps, she had not made it either.
"But what actually happened?" asked Lisp. "Why did the car crash?"
"It is a little unclear. We were on Route 6 above Golden. There are tire tracks where Dad had turned sharply, then broke through the guard rail. One theory is that someone driving up the road had their brights on, came around the corner, startled Dad and he swerved. Another is that there was some animal in the road. A deer or sheep or something. All that they know is that he swerved sharply and we headed over a cliff. Apparently, all of the safety mechanisms worked but were over matched by the impact. I survived because I was smaller and lighter and had less momentum than Dad. Despite that, I broke all four limbs and slipped a disk in my middle back. I had a lot of time in the hospital to think. Too much time as it turned out. Hospital time is too much like Purgatory in the first place."
"Never had the pleasure."
"If you have the opportunity, don't. I don't remember it as boring, but that may have been the pain killers. I was immobilized, what with the casts on both legs and both arms. And the back brace. They fed me through an IV and removed my waste through a tube in my side. There was a TV and they left it on. To keep me company, they said. But that was the era of rabid daytime talk shows[2]. Even at thirteen, I knew better. As I said: Purgatory."
What Mo did not tell Lisp, what she had trouble admitting to herself, was that she had known that she was in Purgatory for a reason. She had died and been put on trail for the death of her father. Had his death been her fault? Not directly. She knew that. But was their an underlying cause? Something that she had done (or not done) that angered a higher power and caused it to go all Old Testament on her? That was a different question and its answer was what occupied her mind for the next five years of her life.
[1] Well, sub-voc'd. Really admitting. But then the cliche still has it as 'admitted out loud'. Hey. Get off my back. I know it's not out loud. I know it's a bit of a tired idiom. Deal with it.
[2] The talk show as a medium for disseminating information about the latest fashions and the movies and such died with the advent of the video chat show. Instead of a single camera on a set, these were conducted over networks like Google Hangouts or Skype. Now everyone was in the in-studio audience, could provide feedback through votes and win prizes. The audience was more involved, not cleaning house with this in the background. It allowed for instant audience metrics and micro-targeted ad overlays. The old model died to be replaced by something slightly more rabid.
Saying out loud[1] that she had died to another human being triggered memories in Mo. The first therapist that her mother had taken her to had assigned her a mantra to repeat: "I am alive." Just that. She was to repeat it to herself as often as she could, out loud if she was alone or with her mother. Supposedly, this was from the fake-it-til-you-make-it school of psychiatric treatment. A month later, she had told the therapist that she said the words, but they were not true. She knew that she was dead and that this was not real. When she was asked what was not real, she had replied "Everything."
She had been referred to another therapist who specialized in post traumatic stress. Psychic breaks. Mental schisms. This one, a man where the first had been a woman, had spent time in the military dealing with soldiers who had survived when others in their squads had not. He asked the usual questions:
How are you? Dead.
When did you die? In the crash.
If you are dead, how are we having this conversation? This isn't real.
So what?
That last one had momentarily pulled Mo from her patterned responses. She had looked up at the therapists from where she was, crouched on his couch. He had brown hair cut close in a military flat top. He wore black rimmed glasses. He was not smiling reassuringly at her.
"So what?" she had asked back.
"Yes. So what if you're dead. So what if this conversation isn't real. It's still happening in your imagination. Your dead imagination. You still have to deal with it, right?"
"No," she had said. "I don't." And she had stopped talking. To him. To her mother. To everyone. That was when her mother had committed her to the Institute.
"They call that solipsism," Lisp said after she had told him about these early sessions. "More traditionally, it is the supposition that there is no way to prove that the reality that we perceive is not all in our head. Our sensations are being faked."
"Yeah," Mo replied. "Trust me, I learned about solipsism. That second doctor, the military one, he knew it and tried to jump ahead a few dozen steps. That's what the 'So What?' was about. It doesn't matter whether reality is 'real' or not, we all still have to deal with it as it presented to us. Maybe that had worked on his soldiers with their sense of duty and pride of country or whatever. It did not work on a early-teen suburban girl. All it did was make me see that I was dealing with it by responding and that if I did not want to deal with reality, I needed to stop responding to it on all levels. I stopped talking. I stopped eating. I stopped getting up to use the bathroom, I just went where ever I was. As I said, I didn't give Mom a choice. She had to put me somewhere where they could at least deal with me."
"Didn't you get bored?" Lisp asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Not doing anything. Did you think about things?"
"Sort of. Mostly, I thought about the crash."
And Mo was back in her memories. Sort of. Like most trauma, much of the specifics of the crash were lost to her. Maybe it was her brain shutting things out, maybe she had been thirteen and not paying attention to where her father was driving. Paying attention to something on her phone, probably. She could not remember where they were coming from, but she knew that they were going home. Maybe from one of those robotics competitions that Dad had signed her up for and that she had enjoyed but had not admitted because he had not asked her first.
Her memories of the moments immediately leading up to the crash were impressions: night, two-lane road, trees on one side, not trees on the other. For the crash itself, she knows what she was told happened but cannot remember it clearly. More snapshots: her phone leaving her hand, bright lights filling the interior, her body changing direction quickly like a roller coaster but not fun. The feeling that something is terribly wrong and that she should have been paying attention to help prevent it. Then nothing until she woke up in the hospital.
Her first question had been to ask after Dad. It was late at night and she had to wait for a nurse to respond to the call button. Which she had found once she worked out where she was. For her, it was one second panicked in the car and then next lying in a dimly lit room with beeping machines. When the nurse came in and Mo asked, the nurse told her not to worry about her father, the important thing was that she, Maureen, was doing better. But the nurse's face, lined and worried and smiling that everything-is-all-right smile told Mo what she needed to know. He had no made it. From there, it did not take much mental effort (even with the pain killers making her woozy... maybe because of the pain killers making her woozy) to wonder if, perhaps, she had not made it either.
"But what actually happened?" asked Lisp. "Why did the car crash?"
"It is a little unclear. We were on Route 6 above Golden. There are tire tracks where Dad had turned sharply, then broke through the guard rail. One theory is that someone driving up the road had their brights on, came around the corner, startled Dad and he swerved. Another is that there was some animal in the road. A deer or sheep or something. All that they know is that he swerved sharply and we headed over a cliff. Apparently, all of the safety mechanisms worked but were over matched by the impact. I survived because I was smaller and lighter and had less momentum than Dad. Despite that, I broke all four limbs and slipped a disk in my middle back. I had a lot of time in the hospital to think. Too much time as it turned out. Hospital time is too much like Purgatory in the first place."
"Never had the pleasure."
"If you have the opportunity, don't. I don't remember it as boring, but that may have been the pain killers. I was immobilized, what with the casts on both legs and both arms. And the back brace. They fed me through an IV and removed my waste through a tube in my side. There was a TV and they left it on. To keep me company, they said. But that was the era of rabid daytime talk shows[2]. Even at thirteen, I knew better. As I said: Purgatory."
What Mo did not tell Lisp, what she had trouble admitting to herself, was that she had known that she was in Purgatory for a reason. She had died and been put on trail for the death of her father. Had his death been her fault? Not directly. She knew that. But was their an underlying cause? Something that she had done (or not done) that angered a higher power and caused it to go all Old Testament on her? That was a different question and its answer was what occupied her mind for the next five years of her life.
[1] Well, sub-voc'd. Really admitting. But then the cliche still has it as 'admitted out loud'. Hey. Get off my back. I know it's not out loud. I know it's a bit of a tired idiom. Deal with it.
[2] The talk show as a medium for disseminating information about the latest fashions and the movies and such died with the advent of the video chat show. Instead of a single camera on a set, these were conducted over networks like Google Hangouts or Skype. Now everyone was in the in-studio audience, could provide feedback through votes and win prizes. The audience was more involved, not cleaning house with this in the background. It allowed for instant audience metrics and micro-targeted ad overlays. The old model died to be replaced by something slightly more rabid.
