“It’s not your only talent, Char-”
The doctor broke off, catching Regan’s preemptive flinch.
“But now?” the doctor asked instead, and Regan turned away, grimacing.
She felt, suddenly, entirely detached from everything, including herself.
“Aldo believed I was an artist, so I made it true,” Regan said. “He believed I was an honest person who lied from time to time instead of a liar who sometimes told the truth, so I was. He believed I could love him and so I did, I do.”
He woke me up, she wanted to scream; he woke me, and for that I will always rely on him, I will be to him what he is to math, and can’t you see how fragile that is? Can’t you see how intangibly I exist, and how perilously? Can’t you see that I—the me that I am right now, sitting here with you at this moment— am a figment of his imagination? He dreamt me into being. He can always undream me, unbelieve me. He can unmask me, and then what will be left? Will I always fear him as much as I love him? Will I always be only one half of his whole? What are soulmates, and am I one, or am I simply just a parasite, a leech, a cancer that spreads and takes hold and takes pleasure in choking us both?
The doctor uncrossed her legs, thinking, and crossed them again.
“Tell me,” the doctor said, “why you shouldn’t be on medication. Convince me.”
Regan lifted her gaze warily to the doctor’s.
“How about this,” Regan said. “We’ll have six real conversations. If, at the end of them, you still believe I need to be medicated, then fine, I’ll take my pills. But if not, I won’t ever take them again. You can watch me if you want to, and I’ll still come in every two weeks, but if after six conversations you believe me, then we’re done with the pills.” She stopped, watching for a reaction, but found none. “Okay?”
“Why six conversations?” the doctor asked.
Regan cleared her throat, recognizing that this would be a very long, highly revelatory answer. Surely the cracks would show.
But it had worked once, hadn’t it?
“It has to do with,” Regan began, and paused. “Bees.”
The doctor leaned back in her chair, nodding.
“Alright, then,” she said. “Tell me about the bees.”
part six, turns.
ALDO WASN’T SURE which moment he would to return to in order to fix everything that had gone wrong.
Typically, identifying the nexus of any event was a skill of his. He could plot almost anything once he could identify the sequences, the order in which things went from fine to bad to worse. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he would struggle to piece the night together temporally. Instead, he would experience it as if it were happening all over again, only in bits and fragments all at once.
There was Marc’s voice, saying, “You really don’t see it, do you? And here I thought you were supposed to be some sort of genius. See, she picks people her parents don’t approve of—just your standard run-of-the-mill daddy problems, nothing new or even exciting about it—and then they lose their appeal, and suddenly she gets mysterious. She starts doing fuck-knows-what all the time, something about finding herself or some shit, and oh, so now she’s not happy, but she twists it all, somehow, she twists it so it’s your fault, and you fucking believe her, but here’s the thing: She doesn’t want to be happy. You can’t make her happy, you know why? Because some people know how to fucking coexist and Regan doesn’t, she doesn’t want to, she never will. I don’t know why I came here, honestly, I think I just had to see it for myself. I had to see her stand there and pretend like you’re the new best thing in her life, and you know what? Maybe you’ll last longer than I did, because her parents hate you so much they asked me to be here and I know for a fact they can’t stand me. Fuck,” Marc says in Aldo’s mind with a laugh, “you poor bastard, I don’t even blame you for any of it. You’re just the latest thing she’ll step on to get wherever she goes next.”
From there it’s only lines, colors, textures. A party, and requisite party scenes. Nothing remarkable—until his eye settles on something surprising, that is. A golden hexagon, tiny in the corner of a painting, with the same sort of metallic glint made famous by Klimt, which is an artist he knows she loves. She once told him that she could stare at The Kiss for hours, just looking at the woman’s face and imagining what it was to be her, to be held like that, to be touched like that.